Back under his bush, he found himself recalling the dream. He had never seeded clouds from a plane — that was why they had built the cloud chamber. Plane trials and tests were too erratic, too easily disproved — that was why Marshall McVay himself had funded the building of the Yuma Cloud Chamber. They made their clouds, cooled them to the required temperature, then seeded them with dry ice or frozen silver iodide or salt or water droplets and measured the precipitation down below. All very straightforward and controlled.
He forced his thoughts to change — he had to stop thinking about his past, his old job, it was making him even more depressed — concentrating instead on the events of the previous night. He remembered the Mhouse-person bringing him clothes. He was still wearing her beige-grey, camouflage, mid-shin cargo pants and he could see the flip-flops a couple of yards away where he had kicked them off. And then the journey from the Shaftesbury Estate to Chelsea became patchy, something of a vague, troubled dream: buildings passing, car headlights and tail lights glaring, talking to Mhouse, her small cat face staring back at him, her body twisted round over the front passenger seat…Who was driving? He remembered her showing him her name, tattooed on the inside of her right forearm: ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’. What kind of name was that? ‘Mhouse’ pronounced ‘Mouse’, clearly. And then he had helped her over the fence of the triangle — a skinny little thing, with a pretty, snub-nosed, thin-eyed face. Yes…And then she had attacked him.
Why had she attacked him with such sudden violence? She had punched him and then kneed him in the balls — he winced at the pain-memory — then she laid about him with the entrenching tool. Why, for Christ’s sake? Christ — John Christ, of course, the unlikely answer came to him. Go to the Church of John Christ in Southwark, she had said, his fiendish Samaritan, they’ll help you.
Somehow he managed a laugh — it sounded cracked and strange to his ears — and he slipped out of his sleeping bag for the third time that morning to see what he had left in his campsite. The inventory did not take him long: she had stolen his raincoat and briefcase. The muggers had taken everything else, leaving him with worldly goods of three tins of baked beans, a gas stove, a saucepan, a knife-fork-and-spoon set, an entrenching tool and half a bottle of mineral water — non-sparkling. He sensed self-pity invade him and his eyes warm with tears. Yes, he felt sorry for himself — this was no sin, surely, under the circumstances? He had a dirty, torn shirt, underwear, a pair of socks, some tight, cropped camouflage cargo pants and flip-flops for his feet. Meagre assets. He thought of his new three-bedroom house in Phoenix, Arizona (now the property of his ex-wife, of course) — he could see its watered green lawns, the neat laurel hedge, the twin-car garage…It seemed like a parallel universe, or something that had existed aeons ago. Moreover, he had money in bank accounts in Arizona and in London — thousands upon thousands of dollars and pounds — and yet here he was crouched, hiding, battered, stinking, a fugitive hiding amongst the bushes and trees of a patch of waste ground by London’s river.
Thinking of Arizona and his Arizonan life brought the cloud chamber back into his mind. Only days ago he had been showing the interview panel at Imperial College the abstract for his half-completed monograph: ‘Hail suppression in multi-cell thunderstorms’. One of the panel (the woman) had been at the glaciation conference in Austin, Texas, and had heard him read his paper on ‘Silver iodide seeding and the production of biogenic secondary ice nuclei’. He had described to them his last experiment in the Yuma cloud chamber (before he resigned his post) that had been a highly successful reduction of hail swath from a beautifully formed cumulonimbus cloud, its anvil head just brushing the plexiglass roof of the chamber, nine storeys high. He had stood there on the viewing gantry watching the icy dust of the seeding crystals disperse and witnessed the near magical generation of a billowing warm updraft. Hardly any hail had fallen into the vast collecting trays below. His colleagues had broken into spontaneous applause.
Adam could taste the bitterness of frustration and disappointment in his mouth as he lit his camping-gas stove to heat a tin of baked beans. The smell of the gas and the odour rising from the cold beans as he tipped them into the saucepan made his gorge rise — but he knew he had to eat something.
Stop! he told himself abruptly, as he felt a scream of rage and anger building in him. Those days were gone, the cloud chamber was no more. All that was history, now. Adam Kindred, cloud-seeder, hail-suppressor, rain-maker was as real and tangible as a strip-cartoon superhero. He crouched on his haunches and concentrated on the here-and-now, spooning warm baked beans into his mouth and trying not to think about the life he had once led.
Two days later, Adam wondered if he was actually beginning to starve: he felt light-headed and, when he stood up, dizzy and unsure on his feet. It was twenty-four hours since he had finished his last tin of beans and he was now filling his plastic bottle with water from the Thames itself — brownish water with some sediment but the taste was acceptable and he needed to put something in his empty stomach. He felt oddly fearful since his attack — since he’d been jumped — frightened about venturing out from the security of the triangle — his small, known realm — into the pitiless, vast world of the city beyond. He had no money, for a start, not a brass penny, and unkempt hair and beard and his clothes — his torn shirt, stupid trousers and flip-flops — would draw curious glances, he was sure, and the last thing he wanted was people staring at him. He felt safe in the triangle: the near-constant traffic noise reassured him; the tide on the river rose and fell; boats and barges passed. No one came to the triangle and at night the strings of glowing bulbs on Chelsea Bridge seemed festive, almost Christmassy, and cheered him up.
The next morning, at the first glimmerings of dawn, he climbed down to the small beach to fill his water bottle. There ‘was another rubber tyre half buried in the mud, numerous broken plastic bottles, some driftwood and a tangled coil of blue nylon string. He picked up the string — thinking vaguely that this was the sort of useful jetsam that a castaway might use — and estimated that it must be at least twenty foot long. What a waste and what irresponsible bargee or seaman had tossed this over the side? — sea birds could become tangled up in it, propellers snagged. He looked around him; the light was beautiful, peachy-grey, and the air was cool. Already the river birds were flying and soaring about: gulls, crows, ducks, cormorants. He saw a heron flap inelegantly by, heading for Battersea Park and its tall trees. There were Canada geese on the river as well, he knew, and, all of a sudden, the phrase ‘cooked his goose’ came into his head. He looked at the beach — the tide was on the turn — maybe he had half an hour before it would be too light and he’d be spotted. He clambered back up the chains to the triangle.
It didn’t take him long — scouring his abandoned tins produced half a handful of cold beans. Grabbing his wooden box, he was down on the beach again in seconds. The trap he constructed was rudimentary in the extreme but he had faith that it would work: one end of the box was propped up on a driftwood stick to which his new acquisition of blue nylon string had been attached. He shaped a small cone of cold baked beans on a flat pebble and placed it under the propped-up box. Then he climbed back up the chains, holding the end of the string between his teeth and settled down out of sight behind a bush to wait. He wasn’t seriously expecting a goose to take his bait but he was hoping for a duck — a small, plump duck would do nicely — though he’d happily settle for a mangy London pigeon. He waited, telling himself to be patient, to muster a hunter’s calm and steadfast patience, if he could. He waited, and waited. Cormorants drifted downstream with the ebb tide, then dived under the water. A couple of crows flapped on to the beach and pecked around the pebbles at the water’s edge showing no interest in his beans at all. Then he heard a dry whirr of wings, like an angel overhead, and a big white-and-grey gull swished past above him, banked steeply, stalled, and touched down, immaculately, delicately, with almost ostentatious care. The crows ignored it, methodically turning over their pebbles, pecking at bits of weed. The gull made straight for the baked beans, stooping under the propped end of the box…Adam tugged his string, the prop clattered away and the box fell.