I got the first e-mail on the Saturday evening. It seemed to be from a university student at Yale, despite the Yahoo e-mail address, asking me if I would be willing to enter into e-mail correspondence about The End of Mr. Y. I politely declined. The e-mail was poorly written and my own students take up enough of my time. I thought it was a coincidence that this person had got in touch just as I had obtained the book, but at the time I thought it was genuine. The second e-mail came on the Sunday, at roughly the same time of day.
Please forgive this intrusion. I am the director of Project Starlight, a significant interdisciplinary study into the activities and potentials of the Human mind. We have been recently studying a method outline in the book The End of Mr. Y. Or, I should say my predecessor was doing this? Since I have taken over this study I am interested in pursuing this study but unfortunately all our systems have gone down and I have lost everything.....including the instructions for making the formula. This also explains why I am using a Hotmail account right now! Our systems will not be running again for another week but I do need that formula ASAP. Since you own a copy of the book I hope you will not mind sparing a few minutes to write it up for us.
I called Lura on Monday.
"Project Starlight?" she repeated, after I had explained.
"Yes."
"They're the people who offered to buy the book from me."
"Do you know anything about them?"
She paused. "Well, I did check them out."
"And?"
"Project Starlight closed almost a year ago. There is no Project Starlight anymore."
"What is—or was—it?"
Now she sighed. "It was a highly classified American project. I found out about it through a friend of a friend—a physicist at MIT. He had only heard rumors about the project—that it had started as a simple telepathy study and then mutated into something else. He mentioned a highly secretive desert facility, remote viewing, staring at goats, and the quest for the 'ultimate weapon.' He said he'd heard that something catastrophic had caused the study to close down, and warned me not to get involved in asking any questions about it. It certainly sounded sinister."
"So if the project is closed, why are people going around saying they're a part of it?"
"I don't know. I think I already said that they soon became threatening."
"And how do they know I have the book?" I didn't ask if she'd told them.
"I don't know," she said.
I paused. "Do you think they are actually dangerous?"
"I really have no idea. Do you know why they want the book? I assume you've read it by now?"
"Yes. I've read it."
"And...?"
"I have no idea why they'd want it."
Why was I lying? Of course I knew they wanted the formula, and I also knew why: because it worked. All I could conjecture was that these people were some kind of breakaway group who had been given the formula but never knew what it contained. And I was already familiar with the sensation of needing to go back into the Troposphere. Imagine needing it and not being able to go there? I imagined something of what a drug addict might feel.
"Well," she said.
"Lura, I really think..."
"What?"
"I think I should return the book to you now. I think it should go back in the bank vault where they can't get it."
"But if there's nothing in it that they'd find useful...?"
"I think it should go back," I said.
After our conversation finished, I walked into the conservatory and looked at my own reflection in the glass. It was dark outside and I could only see a couple of stars, hanging in the sky like a halfhearted attempt at decoration. An American classified study. Goat staring. The ultimate weapon. That sounded military to me. I walked back into the house and picked up the book. Of course I would send it back to Lura; I'd do it tomorrow. But I also knew that the men from Project Starlight—or people like them—would get it in the end. And then what would happen? My mind filled with unpleasant thoughts of world domination and thought-control. If a repressive regime—or any regime—got hold of this mixture then ... What? I found I could imagine exactly what such an "ultimate weapon" would look like. I sent back an e-mail to the Hotmail address given my the last correspondent saying that although I had seen the book, it was already on its way back to its owner in Germany. I apologized and assured him that he must be mistaken: There was no recipe in the book. And I put it on the table, ready to go.
But I didn't really want to post it. What if it got lost? Damaged? On the other hand, I had no time to go to London to meet Lura to hand it over in person until the weekend. And would she even want to see it? Perhaps she'd suggest sending it straight to the bank and asking them to put it in the vault. There were too many possibilities and I'd had no more e-mails. I did nothing. I spent the Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings, including Max Truman's annual Health and Safety presentation—compulsory; although Ariel Manto simply didn't go. I've always quite enjoyed Max's eccentric annual presentations. This one was entitled "When Things Go Wrong." It was a tongue-in-cheek history of the old railway tunnel under campus, ending with a dramatic account of its collapse in 1974. Max had obtained lots of PowerPoint slides of gruesome images of the Newton Building crumbling and people running around looking confused. He made various connections between the collapse of the university and the collapse of student-staff relations in the mid-'70s. While the tunnel was collapsing, he said, some demonstrating students had stormed the Registry and were busy drinking the vice chancellor's port. We learned that our own building had been constructed in 1975—right over the newly reinforced tunnel. Max told us that there was still a maintenance route into the tunnel from our building. We needed to know this, he said, so we could take the necessary precautions. At this point Mary asked what the necessary precautions would be.
"Just don't fall into it," said Max.
"How would we fall into it?" she said.
"Well, you can't," he said. "But new Health and Safety advice says I have to warn you about it, anyway."
"But it's been there for almost thirty years," said someone else. "And no one's fallen into it yet..."
"Where is it?" asked Mary.
"Photocopying room," said Max. "Next to the machine."
"You mean that sort of hatch thing that we all stand on every time we do any photocopying?" said Lisa Hobbes.
"Yep."
"So we could actually fall into it?"
"No, don't be daft. This isn't Alice in bloody Wonderland. It's well secured."
"What's it like in the tunnel?" asked Laura, the creative writing tutor.
"Don't even think about it, Laura," said Mary.
"What?" she said. "I think we should go down there and investigate."
Everyone groaned.
"OK, OK. I'm only joking."
Laura had been in trouble the previous year for sending all her students on some kind of psychogeographical project in which they'd had to use maps of Berlin in order to walk around the city center. Three of them had ended up walking along the motorway and were arrested.