Then they brought up the jump leads from the garage downstairs and he pressed his face close to mine and said, “Harry, don’t make me do it. Come on, we can do this. We can make things better, you and me. We can make this world a better place!”
When I didn’t answer, they pumped me full of antipsychotics and stuck the leads into a socket on the wall. But one of the guys got it wrong and touched the wrong bit, and shocked himself, yowling like a cartoon character and jumping a foot in the air. They had to take him downstairs to put ice on his hand and didn’t try anything else electric that night.
“Come on, Harry,” whispered Phearson. “Do the right thing. Make a difference, damn it! Make a difference!”
I laughed and rode on the warmth of the temazepam wave.
Chapter 17
Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.
This was ever the mantra of the Cronus Club, and I say it to you now. It is not noble, it is not bold, it is not righteous, it is not ambitious, but when you are dabbling with the sweep of history, with time itself, it is a sacred vow which should be pinned above every Cronus Clubhouse door. I had said as much to Phearson, and he could not understand.
I have said before of the passage of our lives, that there are three stages. Rejection of what we are, I think I had fairly well covered by the time Phearson came to pump me full of psychotropic hallucinogens. My situation held me a long way from acceptance, but I believe I was, in my own way, attempting to explore my nature to the best of my abilities. In my third life I tried God; in my fourth biology. My fifth we shall return to, but in my sixth life I attempted to explore the mysteries of what we are, albeit rather late in the day, through physics.
You have to understand that I was a boy in the 1930s. Not merely a boy, but a child growing up the bastard son of a man who had about as much interest in scientific development as I could muster in the pedigree of his favourite horses. I had no notion of the revolution that was overtaking scientific thought, of relativity and nuclear physics, of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Hubble and Heisenberg. I had some loose concept of the notion that the world was round and an apple that falls from the tree will descend towards the mass below, but for many centuries of my early lives time itself was a concept as linear and uninteresting as a metal ruler in a builder’s yard. It took me to the 1990s to begin to understand the concepts of the 1930s, and how they impacted not merely on the world around me, but possibly the very question of who and what I was.
In my sixth life I had my first doctorate by the age of twenty-three–not because I was especially talented in the realms of science, but because I was able to skip so much of the tedious general knowledge phase of my education and jump straight into the areas that interested me. I was invited to work on the Manhattan Project, the youngest member of the team, and agonised for many long nights about whether to accept. Ethics were of no concern–the bomb would be built and the bomb would be dropped, regardless of my personal feelings. Rather the project offered an exciting opportunity to meet some of the greatest minds of the day, locked together in the same room. In the end, the idea of being locked, and of my background being explored too deeply, combined with a reluctance to expose myself to unnecessary danger in those days when radiation was poorly controlled and criticality not yet understood, held me back, and I worked the most part of the war developing surprisingly plausible hypotheses on Nazi technology, ranging from bomb mechanisms and rocket engines, through to heavy water and their own nuclear reactor plant.
I met Vincent in late 1945. The war was won, but rationing still cast its pall over my dinner table. It is petty, I know, to still find oneself frustrated by how bland the food is for so much of my early life, or how long it takes for central heating to become ubiquitous. I was a lecturer at Cambridge, and was in bitter competition for a professorship that I was far too young to take and which I deserved to a far higher degree than my fifty-three-year-old rival, P. L. George, a man distinguished mainly for the complexities of his mathematical errors. I would not get the professorship in the end; my unfashionable dedication to the notion of the Big Bang over steady state and my unreasonable insistences on the nature of wave-particle duality, combined with my highly unfashionable youth, made me less than popular at the high table. Indeed, I was justly rebuked for my views on both, since to a large degree they were formed on the basis of evidence which hadn’t yet been uncovered, and required technology which had not yet been invented to justify.
It was, in fact, this very same fallacy that brought Vincent to my door.