“Yeah, plausible. Except Eleanor and I watched you go back to your room after you hid the knife and burnt the apron.”
“Oh.”
“I want to ask you some more questions. Do you want to get Lisa Collier to sit in?”
“No. I don’t think I can dig myself any deeper in, can I?”
“There is that. OK, first: did Kitchener ever mention an incident that happened a few years ago?”
“What incident?”
“That’s my problem. I remember seeing some news item about Launde maybe ten or so years back, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“No, nothing comes to mind. Kitchener always had so many complaints about the past, people he knew, politicians he’d argued with, the other professors back at Cambridge, that kind of thing. His entire life was one giant collection of incidents, really.”
“Yeah, I suppose it was. Well keep thinking about it; if anything does spring to mind get Lisa Collier to contact me at once. OK?”
“Yes.”
“Right, now you’re sponsored by the Randon company, aren’t you?”
“Yes, they pay me an allowance, more like a salary actually, eight thousand New Sterling a year for the whole time I’m at Launde. Can you believe that much money? I sent two thousand back to Mum and Dad; they really struggled to help when I was at Cambridge, and I don’t spend much at the Abbey, you see. Then there’s a fund for any equipment I need for projects. Within reason, of course. But I never used any of that, most of my research was data simulations, the Abbey’s lightware cruncher was enough.”
“Did Randon ever ask you what Kitchener was working on?”
“No.”
“So they didn’t know about the wormhole research he was performing for Event Horizon?”
“No.”
“What about anyone else? You obviously knew about it.”
“Not very much, just that he was looking into it. Wormholes would plug very neatly into his cosmos theory.”
“What is that?”
“He called it the Godslayer.”
“The what?”
“Well, religion killer. Kitchener was hoping to put together a structural theory that went beyond Grand Unification. It would explain every phenomenon in the universe from psi to gravity. He said he could use it to prove that there was no such thing as God, that the universe was completely natural, and therefore explainable. Provided you had the maths to understand it.”
Greg tried to imagine what Goldfinch, the Trinities’ fundamentalist preacher, would make of that, and failed. It would have been interesting to watch a meeting between the priest and the physicist, though-from a distance. “Kitchener genuinely didn’t care about other people’s sensibilities, did he?”
“Yes, he did,” Nicholas said, a shade defensively. “You never met him, he was kind to me, really encouraging. But he hated religion. He said we’d all be better off without it, that it caused too much trouble, and too many wars. He said people called him the Newton of the age, but he’d rather be the Galileo.”
“And you didn’t mind all this talk?” He observed the boy’s thought currents boil with surprise.
“No. Why should I?”
“I take it that means you’re not religious.”
“Never really thought about it. Mum and Dad sometimes go to the Harvest Festival service, if they’re not too busy. And I can remember going to the Christmas carol service a couple of times when I was young. But that’s it.”
“What about the other students? Did any of them consider this Godslayer concept to be sacrilegious?”
“Nobody ever said anything, no.”
“OK. Was Kitchener working on any kind of energy generating system; like microfusion, or proton boron fusion, something new, something radical?”
Nicholas screwed his face up. “Nothing like that. He gave me a magnetosphere induction problem to solve, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it’s hardly new, but if you place a length of wire in orbit, its motion as it moves through the Earth’s magnetosphere will generate an electric current. It’s a simple induction principle, like a generator.”
“How big a current?”
“That depends on the size of the cable, obviously.”
“Yeah, right.” Maybe the boy wasn’t so different after all. “What I need to know, Nicholas, is are you talking about something that can power an AV player, or a city?”
“Oh. A city, definitely, or maybe a medium-sized town. Kitchener was very insistent about that. He said that we had to learn to concentrate on the practical applications of physics, abstract theory was all very well but it doesn’t pay the bills. He was right, of course, he was always right. He called it his ninety-ten law. He let us study abstract theories for ninety per cent of the time, but we had to spend at least ten per cent of each week working on practical ideas. He used to set us two projects simultaneously, one of each.”
“How far had you got with this magnetosphere project?”
“I hadn’t done much work on it at all, I was spending most of my time on the dark-mass project. But I did confirm its basic validity. I designed a cobweb array, about two hundred and fifty kilometres across. The beauty of that is, if you give it a slight spin it will retain its shape without any additional structural material, you only need the cables themselves. I was going to work on strength of materials limits next. But…”
“I thought beaming power down from space was ecologically unsound.”
Nicholas smiled vacantly. “I was going to use a superconductor cable, tethered between the Equator and geostationary orbit. That’s a perfectly practical solution; the orbital tower is an idea even older than magnetosphere induction. It was originally suggested that you build it with magnetic rails and run lift capsules up and down, that way you’d never need any sort of spaceplane to get into orbit. My version was a lot simpler and cheaper, just a single strand fixed to a station that could receive power beamed to it from the induction webs, a bigger version of the communication platforms that are up there now. The superconductor would have to be held up by a monolattice filament, of course, it couldn’t possibly support its own weight. It was Kitchener who suggested it as an alternative method of bringing the power down. He joked about it, he said he’d be as rich as Julia Evans if it was ever built. He gets a royalty from monolattice filament, you see. It’s only a fraction of a per cent, but for a cable thirty-six thousand kilometres long, it would be a hell of a lot of money. He was really keen to see how the figures came out.”
“Nicholas, how advanced is this project? I mean, could it actually be built with today’s technology?”
“I don’t know. It was really just a thought experiment, Kitchener tailored them to match our fields of expertise. The equations were interesting, I had to juggle so many factors, but it did look like it would come out pretty expensive. That’s why I was excited about Event Horizon’s new spaceplane, the way it’s going to bring launch costs down. I was going to include those figures in my analysis.”
“But you never got round to it?”
“No.”
“Was the project stored in the Abbey’s Bendix?”
“Yes, but I kept a back-up file in my terminal. It should still be there.”
“Did you ever tell Randon that you were working on this idea?”
“Oh, no, I never discussed it with anybody else apart from the other students.”
“So the company never really showed much interest in what you were doing at Launde?”
“They offered me the sponsorship money and a guaranteed research position, that’s all. Kitchener’s students have this reputation, you see. It’s a bit snobby, but a lot of them have turned out to be real high-achievers.”
“Yeah.” Greg couldn’t help thinking about Ranasfari. You couldn’t get any further apart than him and Kitchener, the cold aesthetic and the glorious old debaucher. The chemistry must have been there, though; Ranasfari clearly revered his mentor. And Kitchener had spotted the potential, just like he had with Nicholas.