All he knew for certain was that he was now committed to building the antibomb machine.
CHAPTER 3
While Hutchman was listening to the breakfast-time news Vicky switched the radio off twice, complaining that she had a headache. He got up from the table each time and switched the set on again, but at reduced volume. There was news of sporadic fighting on Syria’s borders with Turkey and Iraq, apparently triggered off by sheer frustration on the part of the Syrians, plus multilayered reports of UN meetings and diplomatic activities in a dozen capitals, statements by obscure liberation fronts, hints at vast fleet movements in the Mediterranean. Hutchman, his senses drowning in the morning sunlight and the welter of domestic immediacy, was able to absorb little of the world situation beyond the fact that as yet no aggressor had been identified. He performed a number of rituals — tying David’s shoelaces, taking fresh yoghurt out of the culture box, setting a halibut liver-oil capsule beside each plate — while his mind made the first tentative assessment of what could be involved in actually building the machine.
Producing the maths for a neutron resonator had been one thing, but translating it into functioning hardware was a daunting prospect for a theoretician, especially one depending on private means. The machine was going to cost money. Real money — perhaps enough to necessitate mortgaging the house which, ever-present thought, had been given to them by Vicky’s father. To start with, all Hutchman had was a frequency corresponding to a fractional-Angstrom wavelength, and the only conceivable way to produce energy at that precise frequency was with a cestron laser.
Problem number one: there were, as far as he knew, no cestron lasers in existence. Cestron was a recently discovered gas, a short-lived product of the praseodymium isotope, and without the guiding star of Hutchman’s maths there had been no reason to use it as the basis of a laser. He would have to build one from scratch.
Staring at his son’s daydreaming face across the breakfast table, Hutchman felt himself slide into a depressed unease as he considered the practical difficulties. His first requirement was for enough unstable praseodymium to produce, say, fifty milliliters of cestron. He would also need a crystal of praseodymium for use in the laser’s exciting circuitry, and the circuits themselves were going to be difficult to build. Hutchman had a little practical experience in electronics, but a machine to handle frequencies in the 6 x 10^18 Hertz bracket would employ tubular waveguides in place of wires. It’s going to look more like a piece of plumbing than…
“Lucas!” Vicky tapped his plate with her fork. “Are you just going to just sit around brooding?”
“I’m not brooding” …and the radiation’s going to be hot stuff. More dangerous than X-rays — I’ll need shielding — and it’ll have to be coupled in to the laser optically. That means buying gold plates and using one of those spinning concave mirror arrangements to…
“Lucas!” Vicky tugged angrily at his sleeve. “At least answer David when he speaks to you.”
“I’m sorry.” Hutchman focused his eyes on David who now had his school blazer on and was about to leave. “Have a good day, son. Did you finish your spellings last night?”
“Nope.” David tightened his lips obstinately, and the face of the man he would one day become momentarily overlaid his features.
“What will you say to the teacher?”
“I’ll tell her…” David paused for inspiration “…to stick her head down the lavatory.” He strode out of the kitchen and a few seconds later they heard him slam the front door as he left for school.
“He tries to sound tough at home, but Miss Lambert tells me he’s the quietest boy in his class,” Vicky said.
“That’s what worries me. I wonder if he’s all that well adjusted to school.”
“David is perfectly adjusted.” Vicky sat down at the table and poured a second cup of coffee, not enquiring if he would like one — a sign that she was annoyed with him. “You could give him more help with his homework.”
Hutchman shook his head. “Telling a kid the answers to his homework problems doesn’t help him. What I’m doing is teaching him a system of thought which will enable him to solve any kind of problem regardless of…”
“What does David know about systems of thought?” Vicky’s voice was scornful.
“Nothing,” Hutchman said reasonably. “That’s why I’m teaching him.” He felt a flicker of malicious pleasure as Vicky compressed her lips and half-turned away from him to increase the volume on the radio. On an average of once a week he cut her short in an argument by the simple, though logically irrelevant, expedient of answering a rhetorical question as though it had been posed seriously. Vicky never rephrased the question. He suspected this was merely because she had an instinctive contempt for formalism, but its effect was roughly equivalent to a conclusive victory on his part. Now that Vicky had chosen to listen to the radio she seemed to be shutting him out, addressing all her being to it. The morning sun reflected upward from the floor, permeating her dressing gown with light, making the flesh of exposed breast and thigh creamy and powdery and translucent. A good morning for going back to bed for an hour, Hutchman thought, but there was a sensation of guilt. The vision of Vicky and himself on the lush, soundless divan was bleached into the mural of broken bodies which flared behind his eyes. How many indomitable seven-year-olds had died in Damascus? And how many…?
“Oh, Christ!” Vicky switched the radio off with a violent flourish. “Did you hear that?”
“No.”
“Some pop singer has burned down his house in Virginia Water — as a protest.”
“A protest?” Hutchman spoke absent-mindedly. It had just occurred to him that he was going to need a gas centrifuge to purify the cestron sufficiently for use in a laser.
“With full press and television coverage, of course. How much do you think the publicity will be worth to him?”
“Perhaps he wasn’t looking at it that way.”
“Perhaps my ass,” she said with uninspired coarseness. “You don’t understand the whole ‘Be a millionaire for peace’ philosophy, Lucas. The thing, is to do exactly what you want to do, gratify every dirty or selfish little desire you have, but proclaim loudly that you’re doing it for peace. That way you can have a hell of a good time and still feel morally superior.”
“There’s no point getting into a state about it.” Hutchman was suddenly impatient to get into the office and start going through Westfield’s catalogue library. He should also be able to get advice from someone in the purchasing department.
“I can’t stand hypocrisy,” Vicky snapped.
“There’s hypocrisy about hypocrisy,” Hutchman said incautiously, his thoughts now wholly centered on the antibomb machine.
“What do you mean?”
Hutchman saw the danger of suggesting that his wife was jealous rather than indignant. “Nothing. Just playing with words.” He swallowed the cold remainder of his coffee, not because he wanted it, but to indicate that he was in a hurry to go to work.
Walking through the Westfield research building toward his office, he saw the first indications that the annihilation of a crowded city had made some kind of mark on everyday life. A few of the smaller offices and cubicles were empty, and others were unusually populated as staff got together to discuss the newscasts. There was an atmosphere of tension, heightened rather than relieved by occasional bursts of defiant laughter. Hutchman was strangely reassured. He knew perfectly well that Vicky was capable of concern for other human beings — more than once she had fled from the room in tears when surprised by the face of a murdered child on the television screen — but her determined, pragmatical insularity of the previous evening had frightened him. That, perhaps, was what the dream had been about. A woman, a womb-carrier, a life-source, looking at death with coolly disinterested eyes.