The Adjacent (24 page)

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘I want you to look at what I have had built above this garden.’ He pointed upwards. I saw now that a small metal contrivance, not in any way streamlined or given the sheen of professional manufacture, hung directly above the lawn. It was held up by three strong wires, which ran from narrow metal poles, two placed in the far corners of the garden, and the third close to the house. The object suspended at the centre had various metal and plastic components, but the centrepiece was a dull grey sphere, rather like the side of an old aluminium kettle. It was about half a metre in diameter.

‘Now let me ask you if you know what a tetrahedron is?’

I said, ‘It’s a geometric form of some kind, isn’t it?’

He brandished the piece of card he had picked up. It was in the shape of a parallelogram, and had three creases scored though it. It had obviously been folded and unfolded many times.

‘This is called a net,’ he said, meaning the card. He quickly folded it to form a solid triangle. ‘You see, a tetrahedron is a triangular shape with four sides and four vertices. It is physically very stable, very strong – it always takes the same form, no matter which side is down. This is similar to what some physicists call an interaction, in this case a strong interaction. We can only break it down by a process of theoretical annihilation, using what we call a bosonic field annihilation operator. Am I explaining too much?’

I was scribbling as much as I could into my notebook, from which I am now transcribing what the professor told me that summer’s day, but in fact he was, as he said, explaining too much and too quickly.

‘This card model is just a symbol, a way to explain,’ he said. He unfolded it and slipped it into his pocket. ‘The quantum adjacency we created can be considered as a tetrahedron of particles.’ He pointed up to the globe above our heads. ‘Think of that as the apex, the strong constant point. Beneath it is a virtual tetrahedron, so where we are standing is in the centre of a triangle imprinted on the ground.’

I could not help glancing down. Beneath me was a lawn in need of mowing.

Professor Rietveld said, ‘I need you to understand what I say, because I want you to write about it in your article. What you see here is not a weapon. This is an experimental piece, one I adjust and calibrate for scientific purposes. But a portable adjacency weapon, much cruder than anything ever worked on in laboratory conditions, operates from above, just as this experimental model does. It has to be directly above whatever the target is. In practice, in anger, it may be dropped from a plane, fired from a mortar or a large gun, fired in
a missile. It may even be thrown from a high building. In fact, one already has been used in that way: the disaster in Godhra two years ago – you will remember that?’

I did: a mysterious explosion had destroyed a part of that Indian city. The attack had eventually been blamed on Islamic separatists, but there was no certainty about that and many of the details about what really happened were still obscure.

‘When adjacency is used as a weapon it creates a tetrahedron of quantum annihilation: a three-sided pyramid of equilateral triangles, with a fourth triangle as its base. Anything beneath it, anything within that triangle, is vulnerable.’ He was speaking breathlessly, and he was resting his hand on my arm for support. ‘That is all, Mrs Flockhart. The technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and if it is ever used it will become a most terrible threat to peace. I am largely responsible for it.’

THAT NIGHT, WHEN I WAS AT HOME WITH MY FAMILY, THE
children in bed, my husband working in his study on the top floor of the house, the news of Thijs Rietveld’s death was announced on television news. At first there was no information about the cause of his death, and in the shock of my sudden grief I assumed that the life of the man with whom I had spent much of the day had simply come to a natural end. He had certainly looked tired at the end of my interview. The old man I said farewell to as I left his house barely resembled the sprightly and energetic octogenarian who had greeted me on arrival.

When I went into the newspaper office the next morning the truth was coming in from the police in East Sussex. Professor Rietveld had injected himself with a huge overdose of a prescribed painkiller, then drunk at least one glass of scotch whisky. His body had been found in his garden, lying in the centre of the lawn.

The house and garden were cordoned off, apparently by the police, although confidential sources in the newspaper office suggested that security forces had actually ordered the closure of his house.

In the afternoon, Tibor Tarent, the young American photographer, came into the office as planned. He had of course heard the news. He brought with him several large prints of the photographs he had taken the day before.

All my plans to write a profile of the professor were put on hold,
permanently as it turned out. The paper ran a long obituary written by one of his former colleagues, published several private tributes from friends and other colleagues, and within a few days the death of one of the greatest physicists of our era had passed into history.

But on that awful day of grief, Tibor Tarent gave me a large photographic print, based on shots he had taken during the last afternoon of Thijs Rietveld’s life. It consisted of four separate frames, placed in a rectangle together.

He said, ‘You were there, Jane. You saw me taking these photographs. You could see what he and I were doing from where you were standing, couldn’t you?’

‘I could.’

‘And you saw him take that conch, hold it out in his right hand, and stand calmly there on the lawn while I took these shots?’

‘That’s right.’

We were both staring at the print as it lay on my desk.

‘He never put down the conch? You agree?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see him pass it from hand to hand?’

‘No.’

‘I took these frames one after the other, just a few seconds apart. What the hell happened?’

I said I didn’t know. We talked about it for a while, but afterwards Tarent and I went downstairs to a local bar and split a bottle of red wine between us. We drank to the memory of the intriguing old man we had met so briefly. We did not stay long – Tibor had another assignment to go to, and I had work to do back in the office.

I still have the print of the photographs he took that day, of Professor Rietveld standing in the centre of his lawn, holding the beautiful conch. I have the print framed behind glass, and it hangs on the wall above my desk. I am dimly visible in all four of the separate photographs: slightly out of focus beyond the clump of bee-heavy buddleia, but clearly standing inside the house, watching from the window that overlooked the lawn.

The four shots form a rectangle. In the frame at the top left, he is holding the pink-and-amber shell in his right hand. In the picture next to it, he is standing in an almost identical pose, but now the conch has moved to his left hand. Below the first frame, Professor Rietveld is shown holding two identical conch shells, one in each outstretched hand. In the fourth picture, both his hands are empty.

Only in the fourth picture is the old man smiling at the camera.

FOR MIKE TORRANCE, AIRCRAFTMAN FIRST CLASS, KNOWN TO
the others in his crew as ‘Floody’ Torrance, the sight of a Lancaster flying low in daylight was always a moment of beauty. He and the other members of the ground crew had little time for looking around, but whenever a Lanc landed they almost always raised their heads from what they were doing. The engines would be heard before the plane itself came into sight, which would then pass low in the near distance across the Lincolnshire farmland. When it turned in for its approach to the airfield, the dark green and brown upper camouflage was briefly visible as it banked. As it headed down towards the runway, nose raised slightly for the landing, the aircraft appeared all black, painted to blend with the night sky in which it flew. At night over Germany it would become invisible, or at least difficult to see, from below.

The beauty of the machine lay in its rough, purposeful and utilitarian shape. Every part of a heavy bomber was there to function as it should, without streamlining or any other flourishes of style. The gun turrets, in the nose and between the tail fins and in the upper part of the main fuselage, were made of bulbous perspex, there were observation bubbles at the sides of the cockpit and long bombing doors in the base, the engines were huge Merlins, their cowlings painted as black as the rest of the aircraft, the wings, with a span of more than a hundred feet, were thick and round-tipped, holding tanks that would carry enough fuel for up to twelve hours at cruising speed.

Inside there were no comforts for the aircrew, nor for Mike Torrance and the others when they went aboard to service the plane. The seats were barely padded, the interior was only intermittently heated, the long fuselage was narrow and jammed with equipment. Jagged edges and unshielded metal corners protruded from several places. The aircrew in their bulky flying suits, worn over layer after layer of woollen clothing, could barely move about inside. Things were much worse if they had to put on their parachutes. The mental image of the desperate scramble for the escape hatch inside a stricken Lanc tumbling towards the ground, perhaps engulfed in flames, was something on which none of the ground crew could dwell.

There was no sound insulation, so the roar of the unsilenced Merlins was constant and deafening. In flight, thin cold air jetted in through a dozen cracks and apertures. The airframe itself was barbed on the outside with sensors, aerials, ports, access hatches. There was nothing about a Lancaster that did not have to be there, and there was no attempt to conceal what did.

It was nonetheless a thing of beauty for Torrance, because he considered it the best plane in the world to make the long flight across the North Sea, and then to bomb the German cities to hell. It was winter in early 1943. That was what they had to do, then.

148 SQUADRON, BOMBER COMMAND NO. 5 GROUP, BASED AT RAF
Tealby Moor, was still new to Lancs, having been operational with the two-engined, obsolescent Wellingtons until just before Christmas. Mike Torrance had joined the squadron at about the same time, after training on the Lancaster instrumentation. A few operations had already been launched: they were known as ‘gardening’, mine-laying in the Danish narrows against the movements of the German U-boats into and out of the Baltic. It was hazardous work – 148 Squadron had already lost two of their Lancasters and their aircrews.

The new and replacement Lancasters came in from the factories, ferried by the pilots of the ATA, the Air Transport Auxiliary. They arrived one by one, two or three aircraft a week. Few of the ground crews had ever been close to a Lancaster before the first ones were delivered, although all were trained in their particular area of speciality.

Mike Torrance was an instrument mechanic, invariably known to the other aircraftmen as an instrument basher. His domain was
the Lancasters’ oxygen supply, bomb sight, gun sights, the DR compass, altimeter, artificial horizon – the instruments that were used to operate any part of the machine that was not the main airframe, engines or undercarriage. There were other teams for those. They were called the airframe bods, the engine wallahs. And the armourers who loaded the bombs and ammunition. The bowser operators, the refuellers. Maintenance was constant as soon as the aircraft arrived – repairs were necessary almost from the moment the planes started ops.

Before he was posted to Bomber Command, Torrance had been attached to Coastal Command, servicing the instruments on seaplanes. Seasickness, and tools dropped irrecoverably into the sea, were the daily hazards of his life. After retraining for the Lanc he was relieved to be transferred to a land-based squadron.

In charge of the Instrument Section of the squadron was Flight-Sergeant Jack Winslow, an RAF regular who had joined up in 1935, and who seemed to the new recruits almost omniscient about the aircraft they serviced. Two corporals, ‘Steve’ Stevenson and Al Harrison, worked under him. They knew what they were doing but the rest of the erks were a motley crowd, doing their bit in the air war, secretly never as confident of their skills as they tried to make out.

Mike Torrance, who felt himself typical of the young crewmen around him, had joined the RAF because he wanted to fly. He was a gangly six foot three, so he discovered he was too tall to fit usefully into any operational aircraft. He never proceeded beyond the first medical for the aircrew volunteers, for that reason. In civilian life he had been training as an architect after leaving school, but at eighteen he was already restless. He was good at drawing, but he loved books and music, had tried writing stories and poems. When the architecture firm moved over to war work he was out of a job, and he went immediately to join up. Months later he was a trained mechanic.

The first Lanc that arrived at Tealby Moor was for one of the squadron’s most experienced pilots, Squadron Leader ‘JL’ Sawyer and his crew. The captain was already the veteran of one completed tour of operations and was a third of the way through a second. He and his crew took the new plane up for a flight test the day it arrived, and afterwards Torrance and many of the others watched with ill-concealed envy as the ground crew assigned to that flight went to work, checking it out after it landed.

WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF THE FIRST LANCASTER DELIVERY, 148
Squadron was fully equipped and after a few days of gunnery testing, familiarization flights and general preparations it became operational. The war was showing no sign of coming to an end. Most of the ground fighting was in Russia, following the end of the siege of Stalingrad. Stalin was demanding that Britain and the USA should open a second front to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, but few people thought that was possible. The best the Allies could come up with was an unrelenting bombing campaign against the German homeland. The American Eighth Air Force was now based in Britain and had started daylight raids, but the Yanks were suffering terrible losses of aircraft and men.