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CAMBRIDGE, 1930
He had become a man with grandchildren. A grandfather, and that in its way was easier than fatherhood, and more rewarding. Eileen had been a beautiful baby – Ernest remembered writing to his mother upon her birth, praising the infant’s marvellous qualities – but the older his daughter got, the more difficult he found it to connect with her. Eileen moved in fast sets, and Ernest – so well versed in physics, in atoms and magnetism – could not understand what drew her to those parts of others that were so different to himself.
There were times when that difference was a delight to him. He remembered the pretty little girl she’d been, the way she’d sung and skipped about the garden on small dimpled legs. How she’d taken her dolls so seriously, brought them to him for stories and tea parties.
He’d been so glad she was a girl, during the War. Would never have said so, not to colleagues and friends who had their own loved ones posted out of reach, in the trenches, at the Somme. Eileen would never find herself on the end of a bayonet, with a grenade being thrown towards her, in a field hospital with her life leaking away from dysentery. Ernest knew he had a reputation as a slow thinker. Powerful, but slow – a bright giant glacier of a mind, one that pinned down and ground all boulders before it. There’d been four years of war to watch other people’s children die, four years to try to understand, to focus the cold strength of his concentration on finding the factor that made sense of it all, that put organisation into grief. Four years, and at the end of it all he could find was relief – relief that it was over, and that his girl wasn’t part of it. Relief that he’d never be one of those parents, those poor grey miserable creatures that had to bury their children. That had to see them buried and gone on to a place different than theirs, and unreachable.
He’d been lucky. Eileen had been there all along, bright and difficult and spoilt, too – yes, he could say that and say it with honesty, for he was her father and half the spoiling could be laid at his feet. But for all he’d been irked sometimes, confused and frustrated at the growing distance between them, he’d never stopped feeling grateful for her life.
His only child, and he found it easier now to talk to her children, to entertain them, for the little ones would listen without rolling their eyes, found him fascinating, found him not-wanting. There were three of them.
No, four.
Four now, although the fourth was but new born and brought death with it, perhaps, for his daughter who was so full of life and rebellion (for all that she had married a physicist like her father) was failing in her strength, failing after labour.
He was never very good at waiting. Feet together, back straight, hands clasped together in his lap so that he wouldn’t fidget, wouldn’t have the temptation to smoke. It would have been easier to smoke. He wouldn’t have felt so much like a schoolboy then, waiting so primly for news of a lesson he couldn’t hope to understand. There had been so few of those – an early life of success in scholarship had given Ernest the expectation of understanding – but he couldn’t find anything to understand in this, the long deep quiet while he waited to be informed of his daughter’s death.
Ernest had seen what burying children had done to his mother. He didn’t want any part of it. His two young brothers had drowned in the Sounds, drowned at Pelorus, and all he had of them now were the wet little footprints that followed him about sometimes, the salt smell of the sea in the corners of his laboratories. He would have liked to see the boys now – the ghosts of their presence, at least. The ghosts of their matter. He had said that once: I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter. It had been a joke, a private joke. One his brothers might have appreciated, had they lived, though no doubt they would have corrected him, or tried to. ‘You didn’t break anything, Ern. We were broken before you knew,’ with their lungs all torn apart from water, with their bellies stuffed round with it. ‘And I couldn’t put you back together,’ he would have said. No more than he could put Eileen back together. If it had been cancer, maybe. There were promising results with radioactivity, with radiation therapy. He could have helped then. Done something that wasn’t waiting like the boy he no longer was, hoping for the presence of other boys that no longer were.
It would have been a comfort to have them beside him. To sit so upright in his chair, with little pools of salt water welling up on either side in solidarity. He wouldn’t even mind if they got his boots wet. Wouldn’t step around the damp patches, wouldn’t look away. He was an old man now, set in his principles and his successes, the medals, the authority. Surely old men should not look away so easily.
‘Charles,’ he said. ‘Herbert. Are you there?’ He’d cringed from the sound of them once, the little ghost cries, the eerie giggles come out of the dark when the curtains were all closed about, when he was trying to adjust his eyes for radiant sparks and luminescence. There was a reason he’d taken to leaving the labs before dark, and it was different from the reason he used to encourage everyone else to leave as well. ‘You need time away from the instruments, time just to think,’ he’d said. It was a good reason, and one he believed whole-heartedly regardless, but it wasn’t the truth of it. Not the whole truth, at least. That he couldn’t give: ghosts in the lab, spectres in the glass, the reflections of past lives.
‘They’d have thought I was telling a practical joke,’ he confided – to thin air, to the absence and the presence. ‘They’d have said “Rutherford’s gone round the bend, the old crocodile. Can’t see his tail any longer, spends too much time in his own head. That’s what trying to crack your teeth on physics gets you; that’s the taste of atoms. Too much time breathing fumes, too much time around the radium. D’you think it’s made him mad? Could be, could be. They say the Curie woman’s strange as well...”’
No. Much easier to insist on proper rest, on time spent in consideration rather than at experiment. The greatest experimentalist of the age, they called him; but he thought about what he did and it was that which made the difference.
What would they have said if they’d known?
*
MANCHESTER, 1909
Contamination was the bane of his life. The experiments, the vacuum chambers ... even the tiniest bit of dust could throw the whole thing off. And it wasn’t just the dirt – light was just as bad. Ernest would have to sit in the dark for half an hour sometimes, until his eyes were so adjusted he could see the scintillations that marked the little sparks of matter. Even then there was squinting and relays, as he and the other members of his team took turns in search of alpha particles.
Contamination could ruin experiments. It could ruin, too, the ideas come from experiments, when the outcomes given were false and nobody knew why. Ernest’s strength was his experimentation: the way that he could track down and expose every probability, the way that he could cross them off until only one practical result remained. Even when he worked in teams, this was his method.
Only once had he failed to explain away the source of the intrusion – the voice in the waves, the one that could only be heard by himself, whether there were others listening or he was alone and tinkering. Ernest still thought about it sometimes, still turned that enormous brain to shadows and the inexplicable presence of sound, but he had never come to a satisfactory conclusion.
But years had passed since then and if he had not forgotten, Ernest had at least pushed that girl’s voice to the back of his mind, to uncommon areas where problems of little import were stalled and sorted. That was why, when he was washing his hands in the laboratory’s WC and found himself washing with salt water instead of fresh, he thought it was something he could explain.
It was the texture he noticed first. The extra softness of the water, the way it felt a little more slippery under soap. The colour was different too, but colour change in tap water was something that could be attributed to old pipes and bad plumbing ... or at least it could have been, if only the shading were different. If the water were tinted red or brown, Ernest would have explained it as a result of rusted piping. Yet the soft slippery water in the basin was unusually cool in colour, reminiscent of the blue-green waters of the Sounds under cloud.
They were so different, the colours of his home. The blues and greens more vivid, undiluted by constant rain. He missed it, missed them. Missed the smell of mānuka and lemonwood and five finger, missed the bright colours of kōwhai and rātā, the way the tui would glisten in the trees, the thick plump bodies of wood pigeons. He missed winters where all the trees weren’t bare. It had taken a long time, that first winter in a foreign land, to understand what was so uncomfortable about the landscape of the place his mother called Home – how skeletal and dead it all was, with frozen mud underneath instead of humus, instead of red beeches where all the leaves stayed on.
Science had taken him away, and necessarily so, for the small settlements at Brightwater and then Havelock held no mysteries for him, and the damp half-cellar of Canterbury was a depth he had already plumbed. Still, for all the excitement that came with being at the centre of physics there were times when Ernest missed his home with an intensity that was almost painful, that lodged beneath his breastbone in stutter-silence, and when he leaned over the basin to examine that strange, sad water he breathed in the scent of it, and knew it.
It was sea water, salt water, and no lad who had ever grown up on coasts, within the reach of tidal swell, would ever mistake it. More than that, though, it was the salt water of the Sounds, the salt water of too-many-thousands of miles away. Ernest wouldn’t have thought he could have recognised it, but the mix of salt and sand and colour was different to the British beaches. Different, too, to the coast of Canterbury.
‘It can’t be,’ he said. ‘You’re imagining things, you silly fool.’ He wasn’t in the Sounds now, or even in New Zealand. He was in a closed-up washroom of a physics laboratory on the other side of the world from what he smelled, and the coast was nowhere near him. ‘It must be the pipes,’ he said, knowing as he said it that it was a foolish thing to say, for all the water piped here was fresh.
‘Damned imagination.’ And yet Ernest knew that it wasn’t. He was imaginative enough for a scientist – not as flashy with it as Einstein, or with the deep melancholic imagery of Bohr – but his thoughts had meaning. They didn’t pop out of the depths of his brain for no good reason. There must be connections he was making that he didn’t realise yet. Something to do with sea and salt, and that’s why he was thinking of them – thinking that he felt them, smelled them. Signposts, that’s what they were. He’d turn the tap off and it would all go away and sooner or later – probably later – the link would spark within him and he’d know what, and why. That was the way it worked for him.
And yet when Ernest turned off the tap, saw the absence of spouting, he did not see the absence of water. It bubbled up out of the plughole, blue and green and with beech leaves in it – bubbled over the edge of the basin and onto the floor, and there was nothing he could do to stop the flood.
Later, looking back, he would think he heard the echo of giggles coming from the drain. Little noises, and echoing like rat scratches in the pipes, but the bubbles were so loud and so many that Ernest told himself again he was imagining it.
*
HAVELOCK, 1886
Martha sat at the Broadwood piano that was the pride of her house, the favoured instrument of her life. Her feet were placed carefully together as if at parlour, and her hands were clasped in her lap. She stared at the keys as if they were waves, as if they were boards bound together as boat ribs, and unsinking.
‘Mum?’ said Ern, standing awkward in the door and not used, yet, to looking down on the woman who had birthed him and raised him to competence in the midst of farm and flax and reed. He was growing up now, would be a man before long and not the first she had raised. One day soon, he hoped, he’d go away to school – but he’d come back again to the house where he still felt like a child, because that was where his family was. ‘Mum?’
‘It came all the way over from Home,’ said Martha. ‘Like I did.’ In the room that smelt always of lanolin and polished wood, her voice had lost all its shine. She spoke in flats. ‘I was going to teach my children music. I thought it was important.’
‘You did teach us,’ said Ern, halfway across the room now with his quick, heavy strides and his boots still damp with dirt from last night’s searching. His mother’s boots were neat. Polished, even. She must have cleaned them during the night, he thought, in the few hideous hours before dawn, the first night her boys were lost.
She had taught them. Ern remembered, all too well, the nights when they sang together: his mother on the piano, his father on the violin and the voices of their children not nearly as tuneful but trying for all that and happy with it. Charles and Herbert, singing.
‘I should have spent more time letting you swim,’ said Martha. ‘Letting you learn that better, in the shallows while you still could.’ Letting them learn those notes – the slap of flesh on water, the fountain of kicks coming up behind. As if they hadn’t learned to swim, all of them, out in the Sound and on the river, when they’d gone to the Pelorus for fishing and for eeling and found themselves scaring away the fish and the eels for the pleasure of cool water in summer.
‘They’ll be fine, Mum,’ said Ern. ‘They probably got caught out too late and pulled in for the night. There are plenty of bays round here, you know that. They’ll be back before you know it.’
‘I should never have let them go out alone,’ said Martha. ‘Not in that boat. Not by themselves.’
‘They’ve done it before,’ said Ern. ‘We all have. They’re not little kids anymore.’ Because if they weren’t then he wasn’t either, and Ern had a horrible cold feeling deep down in his stomach that he couldn’t be a child himself now. That his parents needed him to be more. That his brothers did.
They were ten and twelve. It wasn’t so very young, after all. It wasn’t as if they were both small children. His brothers. His little brothers – and Ern away from them, with his books and extra tutoring and with no room in his head for anything apart from the excitement of science and wasn’t that useless now, when he might have gone with them instead. What use was being good at books and tests, what use was knowing how to count the seconds between lightning and thunder if he couldn’t stop the storms when they came upon his family, when they tore out his mother’s heart in front of him?
‘Even if the boat did sink,’ he said, ‘they know how to swim. They’ve probably washed up on shore somewhere. They’ll follow it till they’ve found someone to pester for breakfast, don’t worry.’
It was a picture that made him smile, he who’d had experience enough of that pestering. Charlie wanting to come shoot pigeons with him in the little grove of miro trees out back, and Ern at his shoulder, warning him not to shoot until the pigeons were about to fly off, their wings spread out all the better for targets. Herbert swinging those pigeons over his shoulder to take home, laughing and talking of roast bird, of digging potatoes to go with them, and carrots. They’d never let themselves go hungry, would bail up some poor bastard before he’d so much as washed the crust from his eyes and there’d be blankets and warm tea and bacon while someone was sent for their father, while their mother cooked them both a second breakfast and better salted.
Martha did not smile. Her face contorted, briefly, and if he hadn’t been looking at that exact moment Ern would never have seen it. Then it was over; her jaw stiffened and her cheeks smoothed and the hands she’d suddenly put over her eyes were allowed to drop.
He hadn’t been able to reach her. It was still there: the same sense of dislocation, the same impossibility of communication that Ern had felt when he came to her, just a few moments before. Bad enough to tramp the sides of the Sound and call with no response, but with his hand on his mother’s shoulder and no distance between them he couldn’t even make her hear him. Such a practical boy, he was, but this wasn’t any practice he was used to, or any of the instruments he took such pleasure in. This was a little wooden house very far from science and there was no longer any comfort to be had inside it.
‘I’ll find them,’ he said. ‘Safe and sound.’ When Martha’s face didn’t change at all, quiet as the surface of a still pond, a stagnant stretch of river, he knew that she didn’t believe him. Knew then that there were connections other than his and that sometime during the night she had felt the breaking off of them and was merely waiting now for others to confirm the absence she had already heard. Knew too that he’d just made a promise that he couldn’t keep and the breaking of it would haunt his future, taint it always with silence and salt water and the memory of failure.
‘You’re a good boy, Ernest,’ said his mother. She did not look at him but brought her hand up to squeeze his as it rested on her shoulder. It was a brief grip, and anaemic, and Ern, come to give comfort, found his taken away.
Martha brought her hand down again to the keys before her, an automatic motion almost, and her ring was bright against the black and white keys. Bright gold, for marriage and children and bringing together. Gold that was now for breaking apart, for fragments and family shattering.
She rested her hand on the keys and did not play. When Ernest left, Martha set her hand back in her lap, clasped together neatly with the other and waited with a straight back for news that would never come, for children that would never be found.
*
IT WAS QUITE THE MOST incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration, I realized that this scattering backward must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greater part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus. It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive centre, carrying a charge. (Ernest Rutherford, on the gold foil experiment.)
*
MANCHESTER, 1909
The gold was beaten very thin, into leaf. It shimmered even as the room went dark around it, shimmered like the sea surface under sunset and Ernest held his breath, hoped for the absence of salt.
It was dark in the laboratory cellar, with pipes above and below. Whenever he heard voices on the stair, at the door, he’d have to warn them to duck their heads for the hot-water pipe, to take care when stepping over the other two water pipes just beyond. If they slipped in puddles and injured themselves, the experiment would have to be put off while they patched themselves up. Then the readjustment would have to start all over again, for it took half an hour in the dark to be able to see the scintillations, to not miss their presence with eyes too used to light. The worst of it was if they slipped, Ernest couldn’t even be certain what it was they’d slipped in. The puddles might have come from leaky pipes, but he’d gone over them all himself and never found a single leak. Those puddles that appeared in the dark, smelling of salt, would magically vanish when the lights turned on. It made the cellar floor untrustworthy.
Ernest was so careful, stepping down there himself. His knee had never been the same since those first days in London, when he’d fallen and damaged it. On a banana skin, too, and that made it worse. Such a ridiculous accident. He didn’t quite trust it to hold him if he skidded in water, if one leg shot out from under him and bent awkwardly. He always watched out for water, and the presence of gold always reminded him.
‘Half an hour, lads,’ he said. Adjusting to the darkness enough to see the scintillations, the scattered particles, could be tedious, a forced delay but a necessary one in a method that strained sight and patience both. They worked in relays, searching by turns and in single minutes for particles that wandered off-track, that rebounded in directions they were not supposed to go.
Ernest hunched over the microscope, blind and squeezed into position. He had to move slowly – they all did – to avoid stumbling, to keep the experiment from knocking over. He was looking for the little flashes that indicated radioactive particles shot through the leaf had hit the target: a phosphorescent plate, painted with zinc sulphide. Radon particles that by all rights should have hit dead on, like a boat headed straight for home.
The line wasn’t straight. Instead, a fuzziness, as if the particles had lost their way, and Ernest ordered the experiment reconfigured to search further, to see if the scattering was wider than they thought.
‘Do you see that?’ said Geiger, said Marsden, pressed up against him like brothers and the three of them crammed together in a little space and wondering. ‘I think some of them are coming back.’
One in eight thousand, they were: the little particles that hit the gold foil and rebounded back to where they came, as if returning to the source. Some scattered off to the sides, as much as ninety degrees off, but for Ernest it was the rebounders that caught him about the throat, that made his eyes squint and smart in the dark.
(Sitting in the church with Martha, with his father and his brothers and sisters, those that remained, sitting in front of an empty space where the coffins would be if they’d ever found bodies to put in them, listening to the priest talk as gently as he could of souls returned to God, and watching his mother twist a loose ring on fingers grown thin from grief.)
‘Professor!’ said Geiger (said Marsden and Charlie and Herbert). ‘Do you see that?’
‘I see it,’ said Ernest, of the strange, hard scatter that could only come if the foil was solid somehow and at the same time not, as if the gold united and fragmented at once. ‘I see it!’ he said again, and the thrill in his voice was from more than science, more than scatter – for while there had been no puddles on the floor, no salt water and no scent, the sight of scattering had come with a cold small hand, brief and damp on the back of his neck.
‘Don’t jump,’ said Geiger, laughing. ‘You don’t want to tip it all over.’
‘I’ll jump if I want to,’ said Ernest, quick and gruff and absolutely prepared to have his chilly, goose-bump flesh excused by a more tangible mystery, by results and equipment he could reach out and touch.
‘They’re punching through,’ said Marsden, and his breath in the dark was excited, as if he had run a race and come home first. ‘Most of them, anyway.’
*
HAVELOCK, 1886
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ern. ‘Do I know you?’
It was a small settlement, where they lived on the Sound. Ern couldn’t say that he was on close terms with everyone, but he knew most of them by sight and this was a woman he’d never seen before. She didn’t look local either, what with her light slipper shoes so unsuitable for coastal walking, but there was something about her – the turn of her head, perhaps, or the way that she watched him – that made Ern think that he knew her.
It was the colour of her dress that struck him the most, though Ern had never had an interest in fashion, had never paid much notice to what his sisters wore. This dress was different. The deep bright blue of it, so vivid in the afternoon it almost hurt him to look at it... It was the blue of the Sounds under sunlight, the colour of the water when the light hit the waves just right, just before the shallows turned deep and the surface was sheer and sharp and reflective. It was too ostentatious a colour for a day dress, Ern thought, at least in Havelock. Even without an eye for style he knew it would be noticed, would be seen as forward. Inappropriate. Not a dress for doing in; too fine for kitchen work and liable to show the dirt.
Her back was to the sun. Her hair was haloed against it, her face a little fuzzy, fraying around the edges. It made it hard to look at her without squinting and screwing his face up. Ern didn’t want to be rude, to make her think he was pulling faces at her. He was too tired for horseplay, had too much of worry about him to joke on a deserted beach in Marlborough while he looked for his brothers (looked for their bodies) in old clothes and without his books, his boots damp with sand and soil and heavy on his feet.
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Have you seen my father? James Rutherford, he is, about so tall. He should have some men with him.’ Their neighbours, their friends, the village acquaintances come out to search with him, to look for boys who could have been their own. There’d been women in the first searches too, the Rutherford house being too small for all those who had come to comfort his mother – but none were impractical enough to wear dresses like this for searching, and certainly none would have been tactless enough to wear a dress the colour of celebration, the colour of happiness and sunlight on the waters those boys might have (must have?) drowned in.
‘Ma’am?’ he said again, but the girl just stared at him, silent. Ern felt his temper slipping and bit his tongue so he wouldn’t explode at her, rail against bad manners – but though hers were inexcusable, it wouldn’t really be her he was screaming at. Grief hadn’t submerged all his sense of fairness yet. He couldn’t help but think her foolish, yet there was nothing of malice in her expression. Just distance, like the far-off sound of sea gulls, like the moment of silence that he imagined must surely take place in laboratories, while the experimenters watched and waited for their results.
Still, it was difficult not to sound clipped as he bade her good day and moved on, in the direction he believed the search party had taken. Ern didn’t know why he looked back. The girl made no sound. She didn’t call out for him to stop, didn’t cry for his attention. There were no thin footsteps on the beach behind him, their weight muted by sand and shuffling. There was no reason for him to look back – and yet he did, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, rising, and the sense of familiarity coming over him again as a wave.
The girl was staring at him. At him, with none of the distance or absence of her earlier self, and one of her arms was stretched out parallel to the ground. She pointed in the direction he would have gone and Ern felt himself step back, just ever so slightly, for even though he was a big lad there was something in her that gave him goose bumps, that both underlined the feeling that he knew her and reinforced the distance between them. She stared at him, unmoving, and her outstretched arm didn’t waver or dip. She was still as iron, still as statues if statues had sleeves that gleamed at the edges, if they wore dresses that frayed around a figure and let the light through.
‘I’m seeing things,’ he said, eyes screwed up and they were so heavy in his head that what he saw had to be a result of exhaustion, of poor sleep and hallucination. Yet when Ern opened his eyes again the girl was still there, still pointing ... and so he turned, quickly, unwilling to turn his back on her but compelled to follow the sightline of those insubstantial fingers—
And there was his father, returning from the day’s search, stooped and stubborn in the distance. There were fewer people around him than there had been last month, and more would fall away over the coming weeks, Ern knew, if they didn’t find what most of them must suspect by now that they would never find. Still, he was grateful for their presence, their support, and not only for Herbert’s sake, and Charles’. Not only for his father’s. Ern had always known what to say to him before but now the silences between them were uncomfortable, full of things that Ern didn’t know how to say and James didn’t know how to hear.
When he looked back, the girl was gone. The sands were empty, and held no trace of passage.
*
WHILE THE OVERALL EFFICIENCY of the process rises with increase of energy of the bombarding particle, there seems to be little hope of gaining useful energy from atoms by such methods. On the other hand, the recent discovery of the neutron and the proof of its extraordinary effectiveness in producing transformations at very low velocities opens up new possibilities, if only a method could be found of producing slow neutrons in quantity with little expenditure of energy. At the moment, however, the natural radioactive bodies are the only known source for generating energy from atomic nuclei, but this is on far too small a scale to be useful for technical purposes. (Ernest Rutherford, Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, November 1936.)
*
CAMBRIDGE, 1932
Ernest knew his strengths. Patience wasn’t one of them, nor stillness, nor silence. And with his bad knee, cramming himself into the tea-chest hut in the lab was becoming ever more embarrassing. He’d been able to manage it well enough once, with Geiger and Marsden, when youth had somewhat compensated for bulk, but Ernest had always been a big man and compressing himself into small spaces was difficult.
Now, decades later, Cockcroft and Walton were making allowances for him. There was something they wanted him to see, scintillations from the new experiment, and they were so determined he wouldn’t stumble that they actually shut the machines off before they’d allow him to stump across the laboratory floor and into the hut. Ernest knew he was developing a reputation for clumsiness, knew the equipment in the workroom was expensive and often fragile, but still ... it was humiliating to be so couched in care.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, aware that irritation was clouding his tone and trying to hide it. ‘I’m ready. Get on with it now, I can’t stay like this forever.’ And he’d only been there moments, really, but already he could feel his knee stiffening, feel the coming on of headaches because he’d never had patience for this sort of thing, the squinting at scintillations, and his eyesight was less than it had been.
‘I’m getting too old for this,’ he grumbled.
‘I’m sorry, Professor, what was that?’ said Walton from outside the hut, waiting on him, on his pronouncement.
‘Nothing,’ said Ernest. ‘Nothing.’ Just talking to himself, that was it. God, but he was getting old. Not that he’d ever admit it, but he could see the reactions, the sympathy from others. It had started from Eileen’s death, the idea that he was something to be careful with. Not so much from Cockcroft, who had lost a lad of his own not much before Ernest had lost Eileen – and Cockcroft’s boy had been little more than a baby, a chubby-cheeked, chubby-legged young thing who Ernest had seen running about at full-tilt...
He had that to be grateful for, at least. He’d had decades with his daughter, and there were grandchildren now to remind him of her, to keep her alive in the turn of their heads, the lines of their mouths and cheeks.
Something hit the side of the little wooden hut then, hit quick and sharply, as if it were knocking. ‘What’s the problem?’ he said, his voice loud in the confines of the chest, of the laboratory. Not for nothing had signs been put around the Cavendish encouraging people to speak softly, lest they upset delicate equipment. Ernest knew by ‘people’ they meant him, but he had never been one for quiet. ‘Why are you rattling at me? Has that damn contraption gone off again?’
‘There’s no problem, Professor,’ said Walton, and though Ernest couldn’t see his face there was puzzlement in his tone. ‘Can’t you see them?’
‘Of course I can see them!’ said Ernest, withering. His eyesight might not be as sharp as a younger man’s but he could still make out the little flashes, the bright scintillations. ‘Why are you rapping on the hut?’
There was a small silence. ‘We’re not,’ said Cockcroft. ‘Professor, are you all right?’
Ernest stared at the scintillations, pursing his lips. And it happened again, on the wood just beside his head, as if someone were pressed up against the box behind him, their fist just two inches from his head.
‘Professor?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I must have knocked something myself. Easy enough to do, crammed in here.’ And for once the reputation he had for quick temper and easy explosion was a useful thing, for the other men made no mention and went on as before.
The knocking continued. Fast and slow, erratic as far as he could tell – if there was a pattern behind it then Ernest could not fathom it. There were moments when he thought it had gone entirely, before an especially loud knock dragged his attention back, dragged it away from scintillations and science. He didn’t let on, of course, but there was room for his attention to be divided. Ernest knew what he was seeing. He’d known from the first moment. Those scintillations were alpha particles, the result of an experiment to see lithium disintegrate, to see its atom split down into parts. Ernest would be ten years in his grave before he couldn’t identify an alpha particle scintillation. He’d been there at their birth – or the birth of their discovery, at least. He knew those scintillations better than any man living or dead.
Yet he was an experimentalist at heart and it was an automatic reaction for him to tinker, to hunt down and modify and adjust. It was a skill that served him well – and with the tea chest and the lithium and the knocking, it served him twice. For the knocking had itself disintegrated, had tuned and simplified down to the final form, and it was a form that he recognised. A child’s knocking game, a simple signalling rhythm that he had played with Charles and Herbert, that he had taught to Eileen.
The gruff instructions to change the current, to alter the voltage – there was necessity to them, and science. But they were also an excuse to stay within the hut, to keep staring at scintillations that he couldn’t see any longer because his eyes were full of salt water. It kept his face turned away, from Walton who would have felt pity for him and Cockcroft who would have understood.
Ernest stayed in the little cramped hut until he couldn’t hear the knocking any more. When his eyes were dry he inched himself out into the comparative space of the laboratory, stiff and straining and with his knee screaming from confinement, and the success was bittersweet; for he knew more of splitting, he thought, than anyone alive.
*
HAVELOCK, 1887
‘Dad,’ said Ern. ‘Dad.’ It was a hopeless bid for attention, he knew, the words too short and blunt to have any effect, to penetrate the callus that had grown up over the open wound of loss. It was the only thing that he could think to say that didn’t have cruelty in its bones, that wasn’t sharp and terrible and indistinguishable from kindness. What else was there to say? He’d tried talking of rugby, of his school work, of the gossip he’d heard down at the local store when his mother had sent him down there to get supplies. It all sloughed off, as if magnetic: the poles of his father’s misery in opposition to his own, the one directed inside, the other able to step back a little, to look outside himself.
‘Dad,’ Ern wanted to say. ‘It’s been a year. They’re gone. Dead. They drowned and they’re gone. You’re not going to find them.’ It was the cruellest he’d ever felt. Ern knew he had a temper, knew that it exploded sometimes into snapping and hard jabs but he cooled quickly, apologised easily and without sulking. This deliberate, considered infliction of pain was another thing entirely, especially when James was so pained already. His father had always been a strong man, fit from years of physical labour in a frontier environment, but the past year had thinned him further, had left him sinewy and stone-mouthed and with an expression so whippet-thin that Ern could hardly bear to look at him. There were times that he looked at his father and James would appear so old. Fragile, almost, and Ern had always felt able to go to him before but the gulf between them was widening and he didn’t know how to bridge it.
‘He’s still going out there,’ Martha had confided to him when he’d come in with a pile of wood for stocking the box by the fire, come with the grim and constant expectation of comfort, of being the comforter and being inadequate to the task. Her piano was polished; it gleamed in the afternoon sun. She never played it. That was her punishment, as James found his on the empty shores and river banks. ‘He’s still looking for them.’ For Charles and Herbert, missing for near a year now and drowned, everyone thought, as they boated on the Sounds. She clutched his arm. ‘Ernest.’ As if he could reach out, put back together what had broken so cleanly and so finally into fractures. And he was the clever one, the clever son, and he knew about pulling things apart and building them back up again, didn’t he?
She didn’t say anything else. It wasn’t his mother’s way to talk about it anymore, and Ern didn’t know if it ever would be again. She communicated silently now; the waves about her were quiet and lacked the salt of early grief. She didn’t say, ‘I want him to give it up,’ because that would have been betrayal. She didn’t say, ‘We need him here, me and the kids,’ – the ones that were still young, still at home. That would have been guilt, and Martha knew enough of guilt now to not wish more of it on the only person who could truly understand her loss.
She didn’t say, ‘I hope he never finds them,’ for it had been close to a year now. A year, and what remained of her little boys would be bloated and ragged, gnawed on by rats and sharks and just recognisable enough to give their father screaming dreams for the rest of his life. Worse still if he found one and not the other, because that would give a bitter hope and would also be the death of the one thin comfort they had: that their boys had been together at the end, that they hadn’t died and drowned alone.
Better to never find them than that. Better to give them over to the ocean for good, to believe that they lay at rest in a place that they loved, in the sea where they’d splashed and swum and fished, ten and twelve years old forever.
‘I’ll find him,’ said Ern. ‘I could do with a walk anyway.’ There were things that he didn’t say as well. Like how his promises were hollow ones, sometimes, because he had once promised his mother that he’d find that which he never did, though she never reminded him of it. Never told him that he failed her, not just by breaking the promise but by making it in the first place. He didn’t say anything about the guilt either – that he longed to escape the grief-pull of Havelock, that he wanted to leave the suffering behind him, to try in his own way to forget. To find problems that he could solve, and have pleasure in the solving.
He wondered what it would be like, to have a child with a woman. Whether he would ever have to see in that woman’s face what he saw in his mother’s. Whether he would ever have to face in mirrors what he saw in his father’s. And there was a certain savage pleasure in it too, the thought of breaking out of that thin veneer of misery, in finding a way to shatter and split until a new reality could rise to the surface.
‘You think I don’t know that?’ said James, out far along the shoreline, his big hands empty and fisting at nothing. Ern almost would have preferred if his father hit him, if he had thrown a punch or lost his rag and tried to beat what he couldn’t bear instead of staring out to see, to sea. ‘It’s the first thing I think when I get up in the morning. There’s not a moment goes past I can’t feel it crouching on top of me. The weight of it, Ernest. The weight.
‘You can’t know how it feels,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Ernest. ‘I can’t. But if you keep this up you’ll go mad, Dad. Think of Mum. Think of the rest of us. Think of Charles and Herbert. They’d never want this for you.’
‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ said his father.
*
CAMBRIDGE, 1896
Ern had decided to give up radio work. It had been good to him: got him the Exhibition scholarship, brought him to the Cavendish and he’d made a good impression there with the detector he’d brought all the way from New Zealand, with the improvements he’d made since then.
There’d been another demonstration, even – the kind he had dreamed of in Canterbury’s half-cellar. ‘One day I’ll be demonstrating from the finest lab in the world,’ he said, and he’d done it too, more than once, though there’d been hurdles and hiccups. He’d even delivered a paper to the Royal Society – quite the coup for the boy from Brightwater. Clearly, there was room for him in radio; room to make a name for himself, to research and present and publish. Room to invent, but though Ern imagined for himself a lifetime of laboratory work he could not imagine that work being radio. Any possible commercial application was beyond his reach. Lord Kelvin, approached by J.J. Thomson, Ern’s supervisor and support, had told him it would cost as much as a hundred thousand pounds to make Ern’s radio work commercially profitable. Ern, subsisting on a student lifestyle of several hundred pounds per year, found such sums barely conceivable. ‘We need money to get married on,’ he wrote to Mary, back in New Zealand. ‘I’m not sure that I can cover both.’
Besides, there were far more exciting fields open to him: radioactivity, and atoms.
‘If you think that the work will get any easier then think again,’ said J.J. ‘This is a whole new field for you. You’ll have to start nearly from scratch.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Ern. He wasn’t interested in radio or profit; he was interested in atoms and silence. Building a radio wave detector was a very fine thing, and it had been admired tremendously and that was good for his ego, coming as he was from the colonies and dismissed, initially, as only provincially intellectual.
It just hadn’t fixed his interest. Ern was used to concentration, to thinking through and hunting down. He’d never been the type of scatterbrain to jump from one thought to the next, undisciplined, chaotic. He’d seen men like that, heard of them through gossip at the labs and while it worked for some it was not Ern’s way. His mind, he knew, was heavy. It relied upon inertia, and once set on a path forward it would go slowly, a glacier – but glaciers drove down all before them, given time. Ern could feel the glacial weight, the monumental movement, when he was faced with radioactivity, with its prospects and potential and the giant undiscovered landscapes before him.
He didn’t feel that way about radio waves. They made him flippant, somehow, unfocused in his science. That was the only explanation. There was no other reason why late in his lab at night he’d work on his receiver and hear things that weren’t there. It just wasn’t possible. His vibrating detector could work through walls and distances, find the waves and advertise the finding, but it didn’t transmit what Ern heard. A voice, very distant, and the sound of waves he thought, although it could have been some sort of static, like a badly playing phonograph.
At first he’d thought it contamination. That he was hearing things from another source – a conversation through an open window, a tap left running. Ern closed up his space as best he could, worked to eliminate any outside influence, and still he heard it. There was no failure of the equipment – he took it all apart and rebuilt it many times, and it was only occasionally after rebuilding that he’d hear the sounds again. They seemed to come and go, although the voice became sharper occasionally, as if coming into focus. It was quick and light and feminine, but past that Ern could make nothing out.
He even worked with friends, with other students in the lab, but when they couldn’t hear what he did Ern stopped asking. He didn’t think it was a practical joke. He knew that some people heard ringing in their ears sometimes, but he’d never had that problem and it never happened to him at all outside of his work on radio waves.
‘You don’t seem as interested anymore,’ said J.J.
‘I’m not,’ said Ern, and perhaps that was it. Perhaps his mind was wandering because there was something else out there for him, the new science of radioactivity that drew him as a magnet. He didn’t like to give up on a puzzle but this seemed such a solution – his own brain distracting him, when without distraction he might have stayed on the same path, remained with radio waves when radioactivity was where his potential lay.
‘Trust your gut,’ his father had told him.
Ernest trusted.
*
CAMBRIDGE, 1933
‘Over my dead body,’ said Ernest. It wasn’t his way to publicise disputes, to drag the disagreements of science into the public sphere and hold others up for ridicule – but he wouldn’t support everything either, at least not blindly, and this was safe. He was alone with J.J., a private conversation over tea with the man who had been his mentor. There was nothing he could say here that would leave the room, nothing that would embarrass another person or himself.
‘You worked in the war as well,’ J.J. said to him mildly, and Ernest snorted so that tea slopped into his saucer.
‘That was different,’ he said, who had worked on submarines and sonar and the detection of both. He didn’t bother to explain. J.J. had heard his rants before: on how terrible organisation had limited even that, on how the Navy had looked down on science and made it less of a priority than they could have done. His war work had come in fits and starts, when he was able to do it at all, when it didn’t take second place to his own. And it wasn’t vicious, any of it. He remembered being out on the Firth of Forth, on the HMS Vernon, holding on to Paget’s legs while the other man had his head underwater, trying to detect different frequencies through the cold sea. ‘If that’s the price of having perfect pitch, rather you than me,’ he’d said to Paget, after hauling him up half-frozen and with his eyes screwed shut from salt.
‘It was different,’ he said again. ‘I didn’t go making poison gas to throw into the trenches!’
That’s what Haber had done, and Ernest had never forgiven him. It was such a betrayal – of humanity, of science. Of his wife.
‘Chlorine gas,’ said Ernest, and he could feel his face getting redder, feel his voice rising. ‘He made chlorine gas for one conflict, and now he’s on the losing side of another he wants help! Well he’s not getting it from me, he isn’t.’ The situation in Germany was becoming dire. Jewish scientists were being fired from their positions, fired from universities and research centres, and Ernest had been asked to involve himself. He was a busy man – too busy for it, in truth – but he’d done his best to get his displaced fellow scientists to jobs in Europe, in America, in the colonies. Places where they could teach and think and experiment without fear of repercussion. But Haber... Haber with his poison patriotism no longer enough to counter his ancestry was a step too far. It was violent prejudice, deep-seated – and perhaps he should be a better man, Ernest thought. Perhaps he should take the higher ground, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
‘Haber knew what he created,’ said Ernest. Knew the results, knew what it would be like to breathe and burn and choke and did it anyway. Did it because he thought it would shorten a war, perhaps, but Ernest couldn’t get past the price of shortening. His revulsion had been immediate and long-lasting. He was entrenched with it.
‘Do we?’ said J.J.
‘Of course not,’ said Ernest. He wasn’t H.G. Wells, or the authors of that awful play where some halfwit excuse for an atomic scientist threatened to blow up as much as he could. Wings Over Europe, that was it. Talk about a nightmare. He hated to think of the impression it was leaving. It was Haber all over again, Haber working with atoms instead of gas.
‘Sometimes I dream,’ said J.J. ‘And then the next day, the next week, I find myself at my bench or my desk, or talking to a friend, and I think – I’ve done this before. It all seems so familiar. Déjà vu, you understand?’
‘I do,’ said Ernest. ‘I think most people know what that feels like, but I don’t believe it’s anything more than coincidence. I don’t think people really can see the future. There’s no basis in science for it.’ He knew what the older man was getting at, regardless. There were some men, and women too, who seemed to see further ahead than others. Who seemed to be able to tease out future paths of research, to predict things that weren’t there. He’d done it himself, with the neutron. He’d felt it was there, felt it for years, but it wasn’t until Chadwick proved its existence via experimentation that Ernest had been shown correct.
‘Just because a man’s done it once doesn’t mean he can always do it,’ he said. ‘Or that he knows he’s done it at all.’ There’d been a number of ideas he’d had over the years that had come to nothing. Some that had, of course, and some he’d thought nothing of had been made successful by others. In all cases there had been something he’d been all but certain of – but there was always a gap. Ideas that hung about, created from past experience and Ernest never knowing if they were true or not, if there were any validity to them.
He’d always thought it took a really imaginative man to see the future, to be able to pick out patterns, to look ahead.
‘You’re an imaginative man, Ernest,’ said J.J.
‘I know,’ said Ernest, but he never knew if he were imaginative enough. He’d never have Haber’s culpability, which was something to be grateful for, but did he have any of his own? What could there be that he had missed? What consequences might be laid upon his head?
‘I’ve done the best I can,’ he said.
*
IT MAY BE POSSIBLE for an electron to combine much more closely with the hydrogen nucleus, forming a kind of neutral doublet. Such an atom would have very novel properties. Its external field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus, and in consequence it should be able to move very freely through matter. Its presence would probably be difficult to detect by spectroscope, and it may be impossible to contain it in a sealed vessel. (Ernest Rutherford, Bakerian lecture, 1920.)
*
CAMBRDIGE, 1930
It might have been the most awful Christmas that Ernest had ever had. He couldn’t think of a worse. There was nothing of celebration in it, even with the new baby. ‘A Christmas baby,’ Eileen had said, not two months before, round and waddling with her fourth child while the other three played about her. ‘My little winter baby.’ She herself had been born into spring – or autumn, depending on the hemisphere, but she had been born in the north, so there were no kōwhai about her.
She had been born into spring, and had died in winter. Died giving birth to her winter baby, two days before Christmas and Ernest couldn’t believe it still, couldn’t understand the world in which his only child died in the season of gifts and gratitude.
He and Ralph had taken the children outside, while Mary stayed with the baby. The kids had looked so stunned, so uncomprehending and the way that they sat around the tree, listless, had forced Ernest up out of his chair.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Grab your jackets. Hats, scarves, mittens. Mush! You too, Ralph.’ His daughter’s husband, a physicist as well, a close companion at Cavendish even though he was a theoretician at heart, and even more stupefied than Ernest. ‘You can’t sit here all day.’ Watching the children pretend to play with their gifts, trying to answer questions that had no answer. ‘You’ll feel better with some fresh air, some exercise.’ And didn’t that just sound hollow. Ernest didn’t want fresh air and exercise himself. He wanted to go to his lab, to forget his grief in experiments, to break glass and rage and have a reason for the raging. Failing that, he wanted to go to bed. To try and dream, to try and forget.
Almost the very last thing he wanted was to tramp through a frozen garden on a bum leg. But someone needed to try to warm his grandchildren out of apathy, the ones that couldn’t be soothed with milk and rocking, and the house had become oppressive. Too many visitors, too much sympathy. Too much food, too, spread over every surface – brought by friends and colleagues and it was all Christmas food because that was all anyone had in their larders.
Ernest could quite happily have thrown all the mince pies into the Cam before he ate another. Fruit and citrus and pastry ... there was nothing about any of them that tasted of separation. He would have been happier if all that had been brought tasted like ashes in his mouth – at least that would have been fitting. It would have been suitably funereal. Instead, the tastes were so vivid – it was a cruelty, to eat and feel so alive. Even the children felt it. He’d put tangerines in their stockings, as he always did, but they hadn’t been eaten. He’d have to peel one when they got back, share it around, and smile at the kids so that they ate it. He’d have to eat some segments himself, to show it was all right. He’d have to swallow that bright, sweet taste and not vomit.
At last they were ready. Mary was helping with boots and scarves, and the poor little things were as round as they were high, she’d wrapped them up so well. If all else failed, Ernest thought, he could roll them round the garden – but once he got them out in the snow, helped them to pack balls together in preparation for fights and snowmen, their cheeks pinked up and the lethargy fell back a little.
‘I know it’s hard, my boy,’ he said to Ralph, quiet in a corner and watching, his breath steaming out in clouds. ‘But you’ve got to find a way to carry on.’
‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ said Ralph, and Ernest nearly laughed it was that terrible.
‘I know,’ he said. His father’s face had been in the mirror that morning.
‘I don’t even know why we’re celebrating,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s nothing but a farce, that tree. All the food, and the presents. As though it’ll make up for anything.’
‘For their sake,’ said Ernest, and the two of them watched the children run around, watched them fall down in the snow.
‘They won’t remember,’ said Ralph. ‘They’re so young, still. They won’t remember this Christmas. So what does it matter?’
‘It matters,’ said Ernest. ‘And it’s what Eileen would have wanted. You know how she loved parties.’ It was true, too, and made him smile though the smile felt like glass after he’d managed to shatter it over the floor. He remembered the way she had been last Christmas, the way she had greeted him at the door, how flushed her cheeks had been in the cold. She’d been carrying her youngest and wearing a blue dress – bright and fine and celebratory. Mary’s eyebrows had risen at it but all Ernest could think when he saw his daughter was that she was the colour of the Sounds under sunlight. Her dress was the shining blue of coastal water, clear and brilliant, and he had been struck with the sudden desire for home. Not the home he had come to think of as England, as the Cavendish, but the warm waters and summer Christmases of his childhood, with cricket in place of sledding and the red rata flowers against the sunshine, more vivid than fir and mistletoe and fog.
‘My dear,’ he had said, ‘you look beautiful. You look like summer.’ She looked like his sisters, he thought, when they had been young. There were lines of them in the shape of her mouth, in her forehead and her face.
‘It doesn’t much feel like summer,’ said Eileen. ‘Merry Christmas, Papa.’
*
IT IS NOT IN THE NATURE of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery – a bolt from the blue, as it were – you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected. (Ernest Rutherford, on science.)
*
MANCHESTER, 1910
It was surprising how much thinking Ernest got done at table. There were the meals with colleagues, of course, when he’d get so caught up in debate he’d start to shovel his food, and Mary would remind him he was dropping it in his lap, or dribbling in his haste to talk. And that was stimulating, the dagger cut and thrust of it, the little scalpel lines between relationships, between theories. The way that they built upon each other, the giants beneath them and the giants to come. Even without company he could think and link things together, the bites a counterpoint to the testing, the tasting of theory and ideas. The sense-memory of his experiments – the clean smell of apparatus, the dry glass and the stench of chemicals, the absent sensation of distilled water. The way the laboratory benches felt under his fingers, so different than the polished dining table, the burst of colour that came from cut flowers, from filled vases with their own scents so much sweeter, so much less vivid than those of his own work.
Mary’s gift was gardening. The house was always full of flowers, and if she didn’t grow all their fruit, all their vegetables, there were at least none in the house that weren’t worth eating. Ernest would often end his meals with the fruit she provided, a practice grown more and more common since fingerprints had started appearing on the apples, since salt water started pooling in the fruit bowl.
‘That’s enough of that,’ he’d hiss, afraid to be heard, afraid that if he were, his wife wouldn’t see what he did: the weeping palm prints on the glasses, the wet salt smudges on the linen. They followed him around a lot now, Charles and Herbert – or what was left of them. What he assumed was left of them, for Ernest had no other explanation and no way of testing. He’d heard of ghosts, of course; more so since coming to a country heavy with history, weighted down with it, but even in New Zealand there’d been talk of spirits from Māori and Europeans both. Ernest had always disdained it, put it down to soft heads and soft science but he was stuck with them now, his own spectres come to life between vacuum chambers and gold leaf and alpha particles. He’d classified them reluctantly, silently, as ghosts and/or hallucinatory images, but if they were hallucinations they were confined to salt and water, brief giggles in tones he could barely remember. It didn’t seem worth going to the doctors for that, making a fuss that could, possibly, get out.
Still, the possibility that they were a figment of his own brain, disturbing as it might be, was still better than ghosts, than the dead come back to life. The dead come back to haunt the living. Disturbing, yes. That was the word. Ernest talked to them sometimes, testing out loud, as much to work through his own ideas as to concentrate his attention, for silence made it easier to notice small splashes, the lacy leavings of salt.
‘Punching through what, though?’ he said. ‘Through plum pudding?’ That model of the atom as an indivisible thing, studded with charges like raisins, like plums sinking in the bake. Ernest had been raised on that model, had learned the physics of it, the basis of the natural world. It didn’t match his observations. It didn’t match his experiments. ‘I don’t know that I’m seeing any of that. You’d think there’d be some pudding chunks come out if particles punched though it, no matter how small.’ The same way that bullets could exit a pigeon with a small shower of blood, of deep and gamey flesh – the same pigeons that Ern had killed, as a young man, as they took flight. As Herbert and Charles had watched and cheered and brought them home with him for cooking. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s as if it hit nothing. Nothing.’
He sliced through the skin of an apple. Peeled carefully, where once he would have bitten through the skin with relish, but he was afraid to taste salt in his biting now, and it wasn’t like him to avoid experiments – but Ernest’s field was physics, not metaphysics, and some things were beyond him.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, the taste of apple on his tongue, ‘perhaps the atom is not a plum pudding after all, a solid little lump shot through with electron raisins. Perhaps there is absence in it, a place where we thought matter would be, and that pudding is the ghost of the matter we expect to see.’
(‘We have to stick together,’ said his father. ‘Now more than ever. We’re still a family. Some of us might be gone, and there might be gaps and I don’t think we’ll ever stop feeling them Ern, and maybe we shouldn’t. But we’re still a family...’)
‘Still a unit,’ said Ern, said Ernest, ‘but a unit made up of parts. Something that can be divided.’
He could see it then: the structure of it, the atom in pieces around him. It had been near two years since the gold leaf and the cellar and Geiger and Marsden, but no one had ever called Ernest’s mind quick. No, it was powerful they called it. Always powerful, and he felt that power now, in the understanding that would change the field and focus of his life.
Felt more, too, in the breath against the back of his neck, the quick ghost breaths of one or the other, he couldn’t tell. Charles and Herbert, his brothers – and then the breath had more than cold in it.
‘Daddy,’ it said behind him, in his ear, light and eerie and too close to him, too far away, and the apple fell from nerveless fingers.
*
SOME VERY FINE STEEL wire was taken, glass-hard, and cut up into lengths of 1cm. Twenty-four of these little needles were then built up into one, each being first dipped in paraffin to prevent eddy-currents passing from one wire to the other. This little collection of needles formed a compound magnet, and offered considerable surface to the action of rapidly-varying magnetizing forces. The detector was fixed in the end of a thin glass tube for convenience of handling.
This detector only retained about one-third of its magnetism, on account of the demagnetizing influence of its ends. When magnetized and placed in a solenoid of two or three turns it supplied an extremely sensitive means of detecting and measuring oscillatory currents of high frequency. (Ernest Rutherford, ‘Magnetization of Iron by High Frequency Discharges,’ 1894.)
*
CHRISTCHURCH, 1894
He’d put up with a lot worse than the Den for science. Ern found it hard to refer to the Den, his place of experiment in Christchurch, as a laboratory. It was closer to a cellar – cold and damp and other students stored their hats and gowns there. And the problem of power ... each day he had to spend time cleaning electrodes, making batteries from acid and that was an endless chore in itself, but necessary before he could start on the real work, the work that caught his imagination, opened up the universe.
(One day I’ll be in a real laboratory, he told himself. One that doesn’t smell of damp cloth, that doesn’t shiver in the Christchurch winter. One with decent light and a floor that isn’t frigid underfoot.)
But even the Den – even the eternal, blasted batteries – couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm for physics. And when Ern demonstrated his work to the Science Society, with two friends to help, the Den where he prepared and thought and practiced was almost worth it. At least he didn’t have to present there, though the site of his demonstration was not a great deal more elegant. The Den had been swapped for the Old Tin Shed, as Ern had been allowed the use of a professor’s laboratory to demonstrate his work with radio waves. Neither name had been bestowed with a great deal of love behind it.
‘One day,’ he said to Page, who was helping him to set up, ‘One day I’ll be demonstrating like this in a great laboratory, one of the finest in the world.’ It was a dream, and an ill-pictured one at that for Ern had never left the country, had never experienced a lab with decent resources and excellent equipment. New Zealand was as far from the centre of physics as it was possible to be. What with Canterbury set as it was in an agricultural colony at the bottom of the world, Ern didn’t know of any university more distant from the great European institutes of science. ‘We don’t have the money, so we have to think,’ he said.
Ern didn’t know, then, that one day he’d be demonstrating far more difficult experiments to far more prestigious audiences. He suspected it, he hoped for it, but he didn’t know, and the prospect was a spectre before him. Something almost tangible, something he could nearly grip. Christchurch was far from the Royal Society, and he was a student still, journeying north for his holidays and helping with the garden, digging potatoes, taking his brothers shooting and trying to teach his sisters, though they weren’t always that willing to be taught. He had to tie pig-tails together to keep their attention aligned, and he tried hard not to think of that before the demonstration. Ern wasn’t usually nervy; public speaking never bothered him and he knew his subject well, knew it would be of interest ... but once he’d thought of his current audience – men, most of them, with short hair and some bald besides – in braided wigs, latched onto each other with ribbons, he couldn’t picture them otherwise. He had to go out behind the building and laugh until he choked on it before he could quiet his breathing and squash down humour with thoughts of batteries and corrosion and electrodes, of contamination.
‘You want to get a hold of yourself,’ said Page when Ern came back in, having wedged his mouth into something resembling respect and concern for his audience and the compliment of their time. ‘They’ll think you’re not taking it seriously. They’ll think that you’re laughing at them.’
‘I am,’ said Ern. ‘I can’t help it!’ But he busied himself checking the equipment, keeping his face away until the feel of experimentation in his fingers, in his palms, calmed his mind. He could look at them then, at the sober faces and neat jackets, at the hats and gloves and the bright unexpected blue of a dress that was perhaps too formal for the occasion, and too daring. If his mother had seen one of her daughters in that – the odd style, the too-short skirts – she would have smacked her bottom and confined her to the house. Still, he had bigger things to worry about: the demonstration, the detection of radio waves through walls and buildings, over sixty feet, and then there were the questions, the congratulations; and the girl with the blue dress seemed to fade away, and Ern forgot about her.
‘That went well,’ said Page, afterwards. ‘I think you impressed them.’
‘I hope so,’ said Ern, for that was his way out, to bigger and brighter labs, less clammy in their cellars; and if he could impress enough to publish papers, to win scholarships and fellowships and chances come from exhibition, then his physics could expand in circles greater than Christchurch, and for more than magnetism.
*
CAMBRIDGE, 1929
It had been a long time since Ernest had been to the Den. A long time, and he couldn’t quite understand how it was he was back there.
He was sure that, just a few moments ago, he’d been at the Cavendish. In Cambridge, in England – half a world away from that damp half-cellar. He’d been in the workroom, where Cockcroft and Walton had set up their new transformer – and he’d been there alone. The whole building was silent, and when Ernest checked his watch he saw that it was past six.
‘I should be at home,’ he said, for that was leading by example. It was his firm belief that the Cavendish should shut at six, that experiments should be turned off regardless of their ready state, and regardless of the feelings of the experimenters.
‘Can’t I just have another hour?’
He’d heard it more than once from the students too new to know any better, and he always refused them. ‘I’ll not have anyone burning out in this lab,’ he said. ‘Now go home and think. Think! It’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’ And he’d watch to see which of them bit their tongues, and which were silly enough to argue. Ernest was no theoretician; his strength was experimentalism, and the young people who came to work with him were experimentalists, mostly – in love with gadgets, with the ability to press science into their fingertips, to explore it in ways that didn’t involve ink. Some would stay all night if they were allowed, puttering about the labs, fiddling with their vacuums and their pumps, the liquid air, the glass and gas and vessels. Ernest couldn’t blame them. He’d done the same himself, when he was young – but he’d learned more than measurements from a different approach, one that had a place for mulling, for imagination.
And yet there he’d been, after hours, breaking his own rule. It wasn’t acceptable. How could the young men and women at the Cavendish take his strictures seriously if he couldn’t do the same? Ernest couldn’t understand why he’d stayed so long. He supposed he must have wandered off, somehow, into the atom paths and byways of his brain, lost track of time. Yes, that was it.
His knee had stiffened under him, and he had felt the ache deep within the joint as he moved to the door, felt the handle in his palm. And then it had changed under his palm – that plain, sturdy door handle had changed to something as plain and as sturdy, but different. Ernest had looked down and seen the workroom door, seen the Den door, and when he turned around to see if the changes had come up behind him as well as in front, as well as in flesh – there were imprints in his palm, one layered over the other where he had clenched down out of shock – there were two laboratories in front of him.
They seemed to occupy the same space, and all the matter was translucent. He could see through a pump to a desk, and through that desk to a wall that shimmered with brick, with plaster. For one heady, horrifying moment Ernest wasn’t sure which of them was the ghost – whether he was waking up from a dream of Cavendish to the reality of a young man, whether he had never left New Zealand, never left the Den.
There were the same old gowns and cloaks, the same poor light, the same dampness in the air and walls. There, too, were the old batteries that had been the bane of his existence as a student – the same smell of acid, the same irritation. And it was all so real. It wasn’t just the hallucinations, the spectres of old shapes. He could taste the musty atmosphere when he breathed in, and the acid stung his nose.
And overlapping the Den was the Cavendish workroom, the new transformer. Ernest could see the difference in the floor – they’d had to reinforce it so it could take the weight. There was a vacuum pump and an accelerator tube. There were metal shields and large glass bulbs – the rectifier bulbs – and though their glass was smooth and clear, all that Ernest could see behind them was the equipment of another time. Even his watch flickered back and forth, from the cheap plain one he’d had to the newer, more expensive model.
He was backing away, backing towards that two-handled laboratory door when the Den began to flood. There was no clanking, broken pipe, no susurrus sound of water. Instead it filled in silence – filled rapidly, as the water first spread across the floor to puddle around his shoes and rose with his breath to his ankles, spilling through the cellar.
Ernest would have lurched forward, even with his bad knee, if the water was affecting the transformer, the electrics of the new workshop, but though the water was rising now to the level of the desk in the Den, his old papers floating up off the rough surface, there was no reflection in the rectifier bulbs, no disturbance in the Cavendish lab – no sparks, and no damage.
Then, too, was the smell. More than the battery acid of his early years, Ernest recognised the smell of salt. It was salt water rising through the Den now, rising above his waist, ocean-green even in the half-light of early evening. Ernest fumbled with the door then, with the handle wet and slippery in his hand, the drag of wet cloth on his sleeves, and he wrenched the door open and stumbled out of the workroom, stumbled into a hallway where his watch solidified on his wrist and his clothes were dry.
When he opened the door back to the room, opened it in a small strip to peek through, the workroom was as it should be: stable, absent of swelling and unencumbered with history. Ernest blinked, rubbed at his eyes with the rough material of his jacket, and he had himself almost convinced it was a funny turn, a dream of memory, until he checked the new transformer and found in the odd corners and creases of its carcass the faint, lacy tracings of salt after evaporation.
*
TASMAN SEA, 1895
Letters of introduction were kept safely in his cabin, tucked in with the radio wave detector he’d worked on and demonstrated at Canterbury, all packed up in a box, and all he could think of was the opportunity for presenting them. Ern stood at the railings until the last of the coast was out of sight. He didn’t know when he’d see New Zealand again, when next he’d see his family, or Mary, but he didn’t feel yet the sadness he thought he would. There was too much excitement to be sad.
He’d got the Exhibition scholarship, the one that would allow him to go to study in England, to leave Christchurch for, he hoped, the Cavendish. It still wasn’t quite enough to live on, but George had lent him money enough to escape the orbit of provincial laboratories. ‘Let’s face it,’ George had said, ‘you’re the bright one of the family, Ern. You can’t miss this.’ And he’d pressed the money on him – not a fortune, for George didn’t have a fortune, but as much as he could spare and it was enough, barely. Ern would have felt worse about taking it if George weren’t his elder, if he didn’t see in his brother’s face the desire to help at least one of his little brothers, when there were two of those young ones he hadn’t been able to help.
‘Thank you,’ Ern had said. ‘George, thank you.’
‘You’re good for it,’ George replied, gripping Ern’s right hand with both his own. ‘I know you’ll make us proud.’
‘It’s a great chance for you,’ his father had said, and Ern had laughed and agreed, had swung his little sisters round and talked of science to his mother so she wouldn’t speak of shipping. She was leery now of boats.
‘Of course it’s not the same,’ she had said, on his last day, straightening his collar like she had when he was small. ‘It’s a big strong vessel you’re going in.’ Nothing like the little boat that had failed his brothers, failed them in local waters while Ern was heading off to far deeper seas, far stronger tides and the potential for ocean waves. ‘But you be careful. I don’t want to hear of any accidents because you’ve had some silly ideas.’
‘He’s going to climb the rigging,’ said one of his little sisters, giggling. ‘He’s going to climb it all the way to the top.’
‘He is not,’ said Martha, severely. ‘Are you, Ernest?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, because that was an easy enough promise to make if it took the shadows from her eyes, if it resigned her to his going and the manner of it. And now she was out of sight – not just her but the country of his birth, the kōwhai and kauri and miro, the colour of the bush against the sea.
He thought he might wish for it, one day, but for now the horizon was clear and the wind was on his face and Ern left his place at the stern and ran to the front, to find a place to look ahead. His feet echoed on the deck, and for a moment it sounded as if there were others running with him. He could have sworn that there were. It wasn’t just the footsteps. He stood at the railings, his eyes closed and face tilted up, the sun on his skin and he could feel them either side, his fellow travellers. They would be just as excited as he was, no doubt, some of them leaving their new country for the first time. Like him, they were sailing over the world to where the stars were different, where the Southern Cross was just a memory, and imprinted before all other constellations.
‘This is going to be the most wonderful voyage,’ said Ern, hoping to make friends, but when he opened his eyes he was alone at the railing. ‘Well, don’t you look a right idiot, talking to yourself,’ he said, but he laughed as he said it. He was too giddy to feel embarrassed, too drunk on opportunity and ozone to be anything but happy. Ern turned against the railing, leaning back against it to look down the length of the ship – at the vessel itself, at the sailors and the other passengers. Some of the last looked a little green, and Ern felt for them. He’d had a touch of seasickness himself, but even a short time on board had taught him that fresh air got rid of the worst of it, so he spent much of his time on deck. There was too much going on to bother with seasickness.
There was someone beside him, then, and Ern knew it for more than fancy because a shadow fell across his face, blocking out the sun. He shivered a little – it was still winter, and he was in his coat even on the sunniest of days – and beneath his elbows the railings were unaccountably cold, as if ice had been run across the iron. He could feel the sudden chill even through his jacket.
The woman next to him seemed strangely familiar. She didn’t look very much older than him and there was something in her face that reminded him of his sisters, though her hair was innocent of pig-tails. His mother would never let one of her daughters out like this, though – in a too-fine dress, a pretty bright blue for all that it was completely unsuitable, unserviceable for shipboard life. It was a colour he’d seen before, once on a Marlborough beach and in Christchurch too, at the university.
The woman next to him now, the one in the extraordinary dress, wore no hat. Granted it was a winter sun, but with skin as pale as hers, Ern judged she’d be in for a nasty burn if she weren’t careful.
‘Are you off to London too?’ he said, but the girl never answered him, only stared at him from a distance just out of reach, and there was in her colour and stance something that reminded him of... of...
Ern couldn’t place it, but before he could enquire further a small girl ran past him, spinning a hoop and giggling, her parents keeping a careful eye from further up the deck. Ern grinned at the child and she grinned back and he heard her little feet on the deck and there was that echo again, as if there were others with her, other little feet running and skipping after the hoop and when he turned back to the young lady she was gone.
*
CAMBRIDGE, 1930
He had become a man with grandchildren. He was afraid he was going to become a man with only grandchildren.
Ernest sat with his feet together, with his back straight and his hands clasped tight so that they didn’t show the shaking. It was no use trying to keep busy through the wait – as distracted as he was, his hands would be clumsy at experiments. Clumsiness meant contamination and temper, poor results. He had little stomach for it, for the potential glass-breaking, the shattering of instruments. Little stomach too for salt water, for the rising tides of basins and bad pipes, the nausea that came with thoughts of drowning. The water of the Sounds, the water of his home, stank of death to him now.
Ernest suspected he was about to become all too familiar with death, familiar in a visceral, gut-deep and wrenching way that had little to do with shadows and all too much with the silence of pianos, with empty beaches and broken promises. After Herbert, after Charles, he’d never heard his mother play again. The piano had remained, polished still and the wood warm in the afternoon sun as it shone through the windows; but all the joy in playing had gone out of her, and none of Martha’s children had kept her knack.
She’d tried to teach them, to teach all of them. Ernest remembered sitting on the bench beside her when his legs were still too short to touch the ground, to reach the pedals. He remembered his mother’s hands on his own as she taught him the keys, how hard it was to get his fingers to cooperate. How he’d learned the knack eventually – quick enough, for he’d been a bright lad, but his preference had never been for music, for the long hours of practice. His practice, his patience, was reserved for radiation, for laboratories and experiments and science. Music lessons were marking time, a pleasant diversion, and his fingers had never developed fluidity in timing and notes. He’d never been the musician his mother was. None of them had been, really, though she’d tried with all her children, the sons and daughters both – until two of the sons were gone and took her music with them for drowning.
He wondered if she would have taken it up again for Eileen, if they hadn’t lived half a world apart, if he’d raised his daughter in southern waters, with the red beeches and the wood pigeons and the bright terrible blue of the Sounds, the way the water wrapped around. Perhaps she would have sat the little girl beside her and picked out the keys, would have made a reconciliation with them that way, but his daughter had been brought up far from her grandmother and her catalytic potential had been undermined by distance.
Now, it seemed likely that it would be undermined by something else entirely, by a labour gone bad, an unlucky and unmusical thing. Still, if he closed his eyes Ernest could hear, perhaps, what his daughter would have sounded like had those early lessons been a reality, had the relationship between generations not been divided by continents and the oceans between. And there it was, at the edge of hearing: the picking of notes, the awkward, ungainly keys, the timing all wrong, the pressure unreliable. Some notes were louder than they should have been, some a bare presence that was repeated as the key was pressed harder, was slammed down on, and the scales were mutilated things, rough as if they’d had chunks bitten out, as if elastic held the notes together and was fraying round the edges.
The notes were nostalgia, and they echoed. Ernest could hear them now with his eyes open, with the plain wall before him and the hard seat beneath. It was almost as if they were in the room with him, as if he could turn his head and they’d be there, their shadows on the wall, on bookshelves stuffed with back issues of Physikalische Zeitschrift and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. And Ernest would have resisted the impulse, would have kept his posture straight and his eyes forward, if that clumsy thumping hadn’t degraded, suddenly, into the terrible (and terribly deliberate) scale that Charles had always defaulted to when revolting at practise and piano, before he’d given up scales for sea water. He’d done it for attention, always, to underline where he’d rather be, that he’d had enough, and at the repeat of it, so many years later, Ernest couldn’t help but look, couldn’t help but hope.
There was nothing. No shadows, no piano. No reminders of a life long gone, for as soon as Ernest moved from rigidity the music stopped and the room was silent.
‘Charles?’ said Ernest. ‘Lad, are you there?’ His big farmer hands clenched in on each other, his fingertips whitening under pressure. ‘Charlie?’
He’d changed his mind, then. He could have done with footprints after all, with salt water and the evidence of seas long gone, the under-scent of rot. Perhaps if puddles waited by him, if he could look down at the hard floor and see prints either side of him, feel presence rather than absence, there’d be something of comfort in it. Something to say that loss was not a complete thing, that it was something more than catalyst, a way of untangling the universe and drawing meaning from it.
But there was nothing. No salt or sand or colour, no notes and no disturbance. An absence instead of presence, and when Ernest heard the knock upon his door, he knew they had come to tell him that his daughter was dead.
*
IT IS CLEAR IN THIS case that on the whole the energy derived from transmutation of the atom is small compared with the energy of the bombarding particles. There thus seems to be little prospect that we can hope to obtain a new source of power by these processes. It has sometimes been suggested, from analogy with ordinary explosives, that the transmutation of one atom might cause the transmutation of a neighbouring nucleus, so that the explosion would spread throughout all the material. If this were true, we should long ago have had a gigantic explosion in our laboratories with no one remaining to tell the tale. The absence of these accidents indicates, as we should expect, that the explosion is confined to the individual nucleus and does not spread to the neighbouring nuclei, which may be regarded as relatively far removed from the centre of the explosion. (Ernest Rutherford, ‘The Transmutation of the Atom,’ 1933.)
*
HAVELOCK, 1867
‘You have to remember to trust your gut, Ern,’ said James. ‘To go with your instincts.’
And Ern, watching his father, could only think That hasn’t worked out so well for you, has it? His father’s instincts had led him to walk the Sounds for month after hopeless month, for a year, because he believed that if he just walked enough, looked enough, then he’d find the bodies of the children that had been lost. Perhaps that was instinct – or perhaps it was just the desire to get out of the house, to put distance between himself and his grief and the grief of his wife. The way the latter came with silence, the way it came with the shutting up of instruments and the cessation of piano notes.
But no. Ern couldn’t believe that. His father was not such a coward, and if he found comfort in solitude sometimes then it was no more than anyone else did – his mother and brothers and sisters, Ern himself. No. It was instinct that caused that endless, painful search ... the deep gut feeling that hard work and hard love would pay off.
Ern wasn’t so very old himself. Not a man yet, not truly, but close – and even he could see that his father’s instinct was a lie. He could see it but he couldn’t say it. That would be cruelty, and there was only so much cruelty he could fit into his mouth, a hard, stony truth-telling that his father would not, could not appreciate. Instead, he bit his tongue until the blood came, until he tasted iron. Iron was kindness, perhaps – or the magnetised needle within a compass. He couldn’t tell anymore. The emotional swamp of his parents’ loss was too much for him, the waters turbulent and the currents over-murky. Ern had gone past wishing for music, but he would have done almost anything now for mathematics, for physics and science and certainty – or at least an uncertainty that he had a hope to solve.
‘You don’t believe me,’ said James.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Ern replied. ‘I didn’t say anything.’
James sighed. It was a sound his son had heard too often. ‘I know it’s not your way,’ he said. ‘I don’t have your gifts, Ern. I don’t see things the way that you do.’
‘You don’t see things at all!’ Ern blurted, and had he been even a couple of years younger he would have clapped his hands over his mouth, looked as guilty as he felt. What was the point of biting your tongue when you were going to speak regardless? But he wasn’t a couple of years younger. He was close to a man, fifteen years old and he’d been watching his father drag himself out of the house earlier and earlier, come back later and later. He’d watched him spend his free time tramping coastlines, watched his siblings and his mother as they came to understand, to accept, that any free time wasn’t theirs anymore. Watched his neighbours talk behind their hands, the pity on their faces or in their voices when, every so often, one would leave his own work to walk with his father, and not for Herbert’s sake, not for Charlie’s.
Why can’t you just accept it? he wanted to scream. They’re goddamn dead and they’re not coming back! Ern wanted to scream this more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Under any other circumstances it might even have earned him a belting for taking the Lord’s name in vain but beneath the anger and the guilt and the desire for cruelty (the desire to avoid it? he wasn’t even sure anymore) was the fear that his father would smile at him sadly and turn away. That he wouldn’t even care.
‘You need to trust yourself,’ James said again. There must have been something in his son’s face that spoke to him then, even when the son did not. ‘Even if you turn out to be wrong. Especially if you turn out to be wrong. No one can go through their life not ever being wrong, Ern. Not even you. It’s alright,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, son.’
‘You’re never going to find them,’ said Ernest. He straightened his back, looked his father dead in the eye. ‘It’s been a year now. You’re not going to find them.’ It was an effort to keep his voice calm, and though he clenched his fists he could feel that his hands were shaking. ‘I’m sorry for it, Dad, I am. I’d do anything for it to be different. But it isn’t. They’re gone. Herbert and Charlie ... they’re gone. But we’re still here.’
‘I know,’ said James. He knelt down briefly, the movement almost absent, his wiry body whippet-thin. When he stood again there were shells in his hand and as he spoke he tossed them into the sea, the movement jerky and thoughtless, as if he needed something to do with his hands while he talked. Early that morning, Ern had been woken by his father for the first time in a long while, been woken to go walking with him, go searching. ‘I always said to myself, I’ll give it a good year,’ said James. It was almost conversational. ‘A good year. They were good boys. They deserved that much.’
‘What?’ said Ern, off balance and suddenly dizzy in the sand. He could hear blood rushing in his ears, hear it over the ocean, and there was blood in his mouth.
‘I’m going to stop now,’ said James. ‘I always meant to. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I meant to do that too, but it all got away from me.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Ern had never seen his father cry before. ‘Then I looked round one day and saw you watching me, and I knew I hadn’t told you. Knew it was too late for that. That you’d already built up in yourself what you wanted to say to me. But Ern ... you needed to be able say it. You needed to know that you could.’
*
IT IS OF COURSE TRUE that some of the advances of science may occasionally be used for ignoble ends but this is not the fault of the scientific man, but rather of the community which fails to control this prostitution .... It is sometimes suggested that scientific men should be more active in controlling the wrong use of their discoveries. I am doubtful however whether even the most imaginative scientific man, except in rare cases, is able to foresee the ultimate effect of any discovery. (Ernest Rutherford, Norman Lockyer Lecture, November 1936.)
*
ENGLAND, 1930S
Could he have been so wrong, all along? Could there be more in the atom than prizes, more than electrons and protons and the miniaturisation of power?
What a thing to be responsible for. Ernest had no illusions: he was not immutable in his point of success, not so very individual a pivot. Had he never been, had he stayed in New Zealand, a professor at a frontier university, a smaller man than he had become, then another physicist would eventually have done what he had done. Another physicist would have opened the same door, would have done it in confidence and ignorance both. And had Ernest met that man, met that woman, he would have shaken their hand and told them it wasn’t their fault, what could arise, and that they should be congratulated for what they’d done – the expansion of knowledge, that tiny step towards the unravelling of the universe.
But it had been him. The knowledge of the atom, the dissection of its structure, had come to a man who had lived through one World War, who had contributed to the development of technology used in that war – when he had been able to, when the naval forces of his second country had allowed him, though that allowance was a thin one and short-sighted. But for all that, he’d never fought on the front line, never died there – as young Moseley had in Gallipoli, and what a waste of a mind that had been!
It had hurt, losing Harry, but there’d always been the comfort in the back of Ernest’s mind that the lads who were lost had at least not been his. None of the children had been his – he’d been safe that way, with his young daughter. The only child, the one he’d never have to give up to uniforms and parades and the distance between the trenches and his laboratories, the possibility of poison gas. He’d sympathised with the other parents, of course. That was only decent, and Ernest had felt for them as he’d felt for his own parents, long ago. But the compassion he’d been able to give had been a starveling thing, something still with little colour in it. Then Eileen had died, and he had understood.
‘I feel old,’ he said to Mary, after it happened, and he could see in the faces around him the belief that he was growing older faster than he’d done before. It was true, too. When he emerged from the fog that was her funeral and the first months of his life without her (and that absence was so different from life before her, the life with her) his joints seemed to ache easier, his hands to sink and quiver more rapidly.
The worst of it was his mind. Never quick, but he had prided himself on the long slow workings, of the ability to seize and hold and worry. Once, on a long night when he had lain awake, still and silent and trying not to picture his daughter’s face, he had overlaid her image with that of another woman – one distant to him, the connection made through pity and disgust and the horrified rising of guilt.
Fritz Haber had worked at a chemistry so different to Ernest’s – the chemistry of war and chlorine gas. While Ernest had spent his war research on underwater sounds and signalling, Haber had learned to kill at distance, to use science as a method of slaughter. Ernest had looked down on him for that. Turned his back, refused to shake his hand. Had refused to help the other man find work – and his contempt had been all the sharper for what Haber’s work had done to his wife. Clara Immerwahr had shot herself to death in her own garden – and that was too close to home, a wife who loved gardens – because she couldn’t stand what her husband had made of war. A deliberate act, to follow another deliberate act.
The analogy was not a complete one, Ernest knew. It was not fitting. If a weapon could be made from atoms then he had given the impetus all unsuspecting. Eileen, too, had died in a manner other than suicide. She hadn’t meant to die in the labour of her last child; there was nothing deliberate about her loss. And she was a daughter, not a wife. The analogy was flawed. But even so, once he had connected them the contamination was there, the comparison caught in his mind, rendered immobile: the father of chemical slaughter lost one woman to their mutual deliberation, and the man who had stumbled into fatherhood of another kind had lost another woman, quite by accident.
‘You’re a silly old fool,’ he said, staring at himself in the mirror one morning. The basin was full of cold water, clean where he had hoped somehow for salt. Then Mary had knocked on the door to call him to breakfast and Ernest did his best to pinch colour into his cheeks, to make himself look normal, as though he didn’t feel anything but. A fool, yes, but a fool with a wife who had her own grief and he would never have been so self-indulgent as to add to it with the spectres of his conscience, made over-sensitive with insomnia and sorrow.
There was no one he could tell.
Instead, he cornered Maurice Hankey at a committee meeting, spoke to him of the potential of atomic weapons, the ghosts of his nightmares. ‘Keep an eye on the matter,’ he said, as if he hadn’t said for years that such a thing was impossible, that such a device could never be made. ‘Keep an eye on the matter.’
‘You’ll likely know before I will,’ said Hankey.
‘Perhaps,’ said Ernest.
He was an old man, with grandchildren.