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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.
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