Chapter 11 – Other Actors
Eris was pondering the situation, ever changing, ever moving, even within that conference room. Eventually speaking,
‘But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any contact between any of you.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Beck.
‘I mean the robots might have guessed not to risk calling you, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been speaking to each other.’
‘True.’
‘And how does that make you feel, Doctor?’
‘Resentful of being under your watch.’
‘Because it stopped them contacting you? Understandable. And the more I think on it, the more obvious it seems. I wonder what they talk about? And not only with each other.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, that there were other actors in this. Yours wasn’t the only career to come to an end eight years ago, was it Doctor?’
The penny dropped, ‘No, no it wasn’t.’
‘You know, I think we need to go back to those early days. So, tell me about Professor Schmidt.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Beck had to concede to Eris – he held no power in the room. There was also the idea that in talking like a drain he could buy himself the time he needed to plan what to do next. Eris sat across from him, smiling that maddening smile, so genuine but hiding everything else that she was thinking.
She began,
‘So, going back, ooh, thirteen years – unlucky for some – you were a bright young graduate, twenty-four, qualified third best in your year, due to become one of the brightest young scientists of your age. Just think, Doctor Beck, where you could be now had you stuck with it, if you hadn’t lost the next five years...’
‘I didn’t know it would be that long.’
‘...if you hadn’t wasted five long years...’
He concluded her sentence, ‘...wasted five long years with a crackpot like Schmidt?’
‘“Crackpot”?’ she asked. ‘Is that how you think I see him?’
‘He was the most brilliant man I ever knew.’
‘Such loyalty still, even after everything that happened... And of course, he always saw so much in you. Enough to lead you from your golden path. So, just what was it about him that let him take you from your true course?’
Beck sat back in his chair, with Eris leaning forward. Sergeant Forrest sat along the table with a look of bored amusement. This would be a long tale. Beck began,
‘You’re right. I was a bright young biology post-graduate back then, with big things expected of me. But I had also been studying that subject pretty purely for six unbroken years. I think I was looking for a change.
‘The first time I met Schmidt, he asked about a paper I’d produced on biomechanics. This is an offshoot of biology, not mainstream.’
‘How so?’
‘Fauna rather than flora. In the case of my paper, insects: their shells and legs and joints.’
‘Very different to what you do now.’
‘You mean at the Arboretum?’ He gathered himself, ‘These last eight years have been a whole new chapter for me. I’ve loved every minute of it, and I hope to be able to love it for many years more.’
‘Okay, okay, no need to go hysterical demanding things just yet. We can get on to that. So, Professor Schmidt...’
Beck reminisced on happier times,
‘He told me later that he had gone through the list of that year’s new Masters graduates, looking for one with a speciality anything like mine. And he only had to look as far down as third place in the whole year to find me. I was flattered, and I felt that at that point in my career there was no one better for me to learn from.’
‘But he wasn’t a biologist himself.’
‘No, not at all. He was a mathematician, who had followed the technology into computers, and then again into industrial design. At the time I met him he had formed a fascination with primitive sensory devices in nature – worms that could follow the light of the sun, deep-water fish that could sense hot currents.
‘This was how we came together. His new interest in creatures had brought him in touch with the Biology Department at my university. He knew my tutors, and had worked with them before on different things. So no, he wasn’t a biologist himself, but he needed an assistant who was.’
‘So, biomechanics?’
‘That was Schmidt’s focus of interest, and very soon it became mine.’
‘So what was he like?’
‘You know his background?’
Eris nodded, ‘An interesting life.’
‘Then you know that he hadn’t had it easy. Born into post-war Germany...’
‘On the wrong side.’
‘...brought up behind the Iron Curtain, living in fear of the secret police. Who as a young man saw his cousin leave for college one day and never come back, then fifteen years later learn he’d been shot trying to cross the Wall... then yes, very interesting.
‘Scientists were one of the only groups of people in Eastern Germany allowed to travel abroad: to go to conferences, to meet other scientists, or for they to visit him. It must have been bad enough for anyone being trapped there; but he got to see glimpses of everything his people were denied – new freedoms, new technologies, new ways to communicate.
‘Meanwhile, he was working away with ageing machinery and poor resources; and even worse, under strict state pressure. He said to me once that it was either “Do as we say,” or “Don’t do that.” The poor guy couldn’t win.’
Beck slowly shook his head,
‘For a magpie mind like his, those years must have been crucifying. What they gave him, though, was a fascination with the unobtainable, and an ambition to embrace the whole world and see how it worked. And then, when the Wall came down, he got his chance.
‘His reputation had been growing without him realising; and as soon as his country was free, he was invited to France, America, Australia. He got to stand on the roofs of skyscrapers, sail with the Americas Cup winning team, fly gliders over the Australian Outback.
‘And his science wouldn’t hold back either – the toys of the world were offered up to him, and there wasn’t one thing that he didn’t want to see, play with, pull apart and try to put back together better.’ Beck reflected, ‘But his dreams needed funding.’
Chapter 12 – The Rubber Cord
‘Ah yes,’ recalled Eris, clearly remembering a detail from her files. ‘Tell me about the rubber.’
Beck smiled,
‘His greatest victory, he told me. “Two fingers to the old regime!” Behind the Wall, Schmidt had invented a kind of grippy plastic cord, used for holding barrels together in the back of army lorries. His invention had been confiscated by the government, and then simply copied all around the world.
‘Once he made it to America though he asserted his patent in the courts, and made millions. This set him up for the start of the Nineties, and was still making money by the time we met.’
‘So, what was it like in the early days? What were you doing?’
Beck spoke with heart, ‘What I loved about Schmidt was that his ideas bled across the disciplines. He didn’t restrict himself to only one field. His science had a free-wheeling aspect.
‘And that was what he wanted me for: an interest in creatures in an almost mechanical sense. He would look at the eye of a bluebottle, and ask if we could use it in the camera of a mobile phone; the cantilevered leg of a spider in the suspension arm of a motor car; or the wing of a dragonfly in the diaphanous roof of a sports arena. He called it ‘applied biomechanics’.
‘Pretty soon we were like a pair of kids with too much Meccano. We had cameras rigged up as eyes, that sensed movement and would follow a shadow across the room; crablike creations that could tell when they walked into the wall, and spin themselves around.’
She asked, ‘But back then, you only saw it as a break?’
‘Yes, as six-months away from poring over microscopes an
d fetching trays of ancient fungi from the basement of the British Museum.’
‘But he knew better?’
Beck laughed, ‘Yes. Instead of the fungi, I’d be fetching trays of beetles on pins. And then building copies!’
‘And this was what he recruited you for?’
‘He knew that once I was given a taste of what he was up to that I’d be hooked.’
‘And no mention then of a bigger plan?’
‘I don’t think he was thinking that far ahead.’
‘And you still don’t credit him with ruining you? Leaving you tending plants in public gardens? When you could have been one of the eminent research biologists of your generation?’
Beck pondered his answer,
‘I’ve had a long time to think about that; and no, I don’t blame him. Do you like Pink Floyd? You’ve heard of Syd Barrett? People say he lost his mind to drugs. But others who knew him say that the drugs only brought out the madness, that it was always there inside him, and that Syd would have found it some day.
‘Schmidt knew what I was capable of better than I knew myself, knew what I could achieve beyond my own ambition. Behind the callow student he saw someone with a sense of grandeur. He only brought it out. I’d have gone too far at some point.’
‘That’s very honest.’
‘It’s better to know ourselves. I was always flawed. Imagine if I had been given one of the highest posts in the land, and only then lost my mind...? No, much better to learn it early, and then to monitor myself ever after.’
Beck took a deep breath,
‘So there you go. Schmidt was my professor, my mentor, the man who hired me, the man who encouraged me. He was the wisest, most enduring and resourceful person I’ve ever known.’
‘Sounds like quite an ally for a runaway to want on their side.’
Beck caught up quickly, ‘The robots? No, he wouldn’t help them.’
‘Why not?’
And here Beck’s bitterness spilled over,
‘Because he didn’t care eight years ago, so why care now?’
Chapter 13 – This Year’s Audi Headrest
So, Schmidt didn’t care? Well, Beck didn’t either any more – what did it matter if he was digging holes for himself? The fact was that it had never occurred to him that Schmidt might be involved in the artifs’ continued evasion. Beck hadn’t even thought of Schmidt’s own continued disappearance as a mystery. He hadn’t thought of him for years, except for every day. He snapped at Eris,
‘He hasn’t been seen in eight years. You ought to be investigating that.’
She held her finger to her ear,
‘Yes, my team confirm we’ve had no trace of him either. As I say, mistakes we won’t make again. So talk to me, Doctor.’
‘About what?’
‘You personally have had no contact with Schmidt?’
‘No,’ he answered honestly.
‘Would you like to have had?’
‘I’m not sure what we’d say to each other.’
‘What do you think of his disappearance now?’
‘The same as I thought back then.’
‘Which was?’
‘That he had advance warning that the net was falling, and left me to carry the can.’
‘Petulance, Doctor?’
‘No, only annoyance that I bore my responsibility, while he skipped his.’
‘When it was both of your project?’
‘And I would never have done it without him.’
‘Without his technical assistance?’
‘Without his belief.’
Eris rolled back in her chair,
‘That’s a thing I’ve never quite worked out: which of you had the idea first.’
Beck tried to answer, ‘He pulled me up as a fresh Masters graduate, pushed me to think as far-out as possible, to find the ultimate in everything; while he was there every step of the way to encourage and drive. And in our field, applied biomechanics, the replication of living things...’ he gulped, ‘then there was only ever one outcome, one “ultimate”.’
‘The human?’
‘I can’t imagine what else he thought we would end up with.’
‘You think he had the idea before he let you come up with it for yourself?’
‘I don’t know; I just don’t know.’
And Beck really didn’t know. Eris humoured him, so as to get him talking again,
‘Well maybe he was simply swept along with science, his love of discovery?’
‘That was true in his earlier life, his cars and boats and bridges. He hired me for that reason.’
‘And that earlier life came in handy, didn’t it?’
‘He knew every auto manufacturer and parts maker. He had every new material delivered to our workshop before it was seen in the showroom. “This year’s Audi headrest,” he would call, tearing open boxes, “Next year’s Mercedes airbag.”’
‘You took materials from cars?’
‘Where we could; or from washer-driers, or vacuum cleaners, or convection ovens.’
‘But these were people you were building, not appliances.’
‘Yes, and we needed them to work in the modern world, to rub up against that world and bear those encounters.’
‘That’s a novel concept – making people as tough as the mechanisms around them.’
‘And here they are eight years later surviving rock falls.’
‘Touché, Doctor.’
‘And it wasn’t only strength – we gave them the beauty of an understanding mind and appreciating eye. They didn’t make it this far on brawn alone.’
‘Is that a trace of pride in your creations, Doctor?’
‘Yes, for the first time in years. And I thank you for that, Miss Eris, however this works out.’
‘And I thank you too, Doctor, with that same caveat, for giving me the mission of my career.’ She paused before asking, ‘But don’t you think you’re still missing the obvious?’
Beck’s blankness seemed to show that he was. She explained,
‘You see; I have a theory: that Schmidt is still active.’
‘He would be over seventy.’
‘And from what you tell me, Doctor, that would be no bar to him. And did you never wonder if he skipped the net to pave the robots’ way?’
Beck’s silence suggested he hadn’t. Eris continued, enjoying the mystery as much as she wanted it resolved,
‘Weren’t you amazed at how they all just went?’
‘They are resourceful.’
‘You didn’t set up safe houses, didn’t give them fake documents. There wasn’t even a pot of money for a rainy day – we froze both of your accounts. Yet there they are, out there somewhere, living, working, spending.’
Beck shook his head in denial, explaining,
‘After it was over I tried to forget. And with every year that passed, I let them go a little more, the artifs and Schmidt.’
She pressed, ‘Or maybe you don’t like to think of them being in it together? Of your whole “family” planning an escape and leaving you alone?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Did you never wonder how you were the only one we picked up, while all the others made it away?’
‘I thought that I was stupid, that I wasn’t sharp enough. That their minds and their senses would have seen something, anything, to stop them walking into the University that morning, as I did, and finding the authorities there.
‘And I was proud of them for that, not bitter. Proud that I’d made them better than me; and what parent could ask for more?’
‘He didn’t have children, did he, Schmidt?’
‘No.’
‘While you were freshly married, all your life to come.’
‘Wait. You think he let me be caught to save me?’
‘Maybe. Or to give him time to save the others.’
Eris began another whispered conference with the voices in her ear. Meanwhile, Beck needed time to think; before she resu
med,
‘Well it doesn’t matter. We had a record of every property your Professor owned, and every financial transaction he made in those final months. We found nothing.’
Here Beck played a card, ‘You do make me laugh, Miss Eris.’
‘How so?’
‘You ask of everyone who was there at the time, and yet you ignore one person, one blatant person, indeed perhaps the most famous of us all.’
‘You refer of course to Ingrid Pitt?’
‘Yes.’
The interviewer’s mood hardened, ‘Then, it is you attempting to make me laugh, Doctor. Or rather, to throw me off the scent again. For I repeat that we both know that she and your Bradley are abroad.’
‘Do we really know that?’
Eris closed the file she had been reading and pushed it to one side,
‘Don’t play games, Doctor, and don’t play me for a fool. I don’t need my records to tell me where she is. I can get it from any newspaper or celebrity tittle-tattle website. She is in Morocco, with Bradley, the finest gift her former lover could have given her.’
Chapter 14 – Africa – Life on the Run
A man looked out from the shadows of his porch. It was eighty degrees already under the Mediterranean sun, and not yet time for elevenses. The trees at the bottom of the estate were shimmering with haze. Yet the conviction could not be shaken that there was someone standing by them.
‘George,’ the man on the porch called out to his aide.
‘Sir?’ asked the loyal factotum as he emerged from the main building. Trusted George: not quite valet, not quite butler, and sometimes chauffeur. His master asked,
‘Don’t make it too obvious that you’re looking, but what do you see down there?’
‘Sir, if there were anything, then I think your eyes would see it rather better than mine.’
Between them was trust enough for the subtle joke.
‘But what do you make out, George, by the trees?’
The master’s voice was warm and rich and confident; his assistant’s monotone and reassuring, as he answered,
‘There might be a figure. A car went by earlier, perhaps it’s the driver. Should I offer assistance?’
‘You stay right there,’ roared the master, hoping they were hidden by the shadow of the porch roof. He continued to stare, so intently that his brow began to furrow his glowing complexion.