you distress?”
“Er, no.”
The voice slipped out of official neutrality into a near-genuine query. I thought I caught a Yorkshire accent. “Can you tell me what he’s doing, then?”
“He phones me at all hours. He talks to me in the—”
The voice was quick to move back to his default position, the interrogative flowchart. “Is he using obscene or insulting behavior?”
“No. Look, officer. Why don’t you let me explain? He’s a crank. He won’t let me alone.”
“Are you aware of what he actually wants?”
I paused. For the first time I was aware of other voices behind the man’s. Perhaps there were banks of police officers like him with headsets and, all day long, muggings, murders, suicides, knife-point rapes. I was in there with the rest: attempted daylight religious conversion.
I said, “He wants to save me.”
“Save you?”
“You know, convert me. He’s obsessed. He simply won’t leave me alone.”
The voice cut in, impatience taking hold at last. “I’m sorry, caller. This is not a police matter. Unless he harms you or your property or threatens the same, he’s committing no offense. Trying to convert you is not against the law.” Then he terminated our emergency conversation with his own little stricture. “We do have religious freedom in this country.”
I went back to the living room window and looked down at Parry. He was no longer talking to my machine. He stood there with his hands in his pockets facing the building, as stolid as a Stasi agent.
I made a flask of coffee and some sandwiches and retreated into my study, which faces out across another street, and sat there reading, or rather shuffling, my notes. My concentration was ruined. Being hounded by Parry was aggravating an older dissatisfaction. It comes back to me from time to time, usually when I’m unhappy about something else, that all the ideas I deal in are other people’s. I simply collate and digest their research and deliver it up to the general reader. People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, backtrackings, and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs. It’s true, someone has togo between the researcher and the general public, giving the higherorder explanations that the average laboratory worker is too busy, or too cautious, to indulge. It’s also true I’ve made a lot of money swinging spider-monkey-style on the tallest trees of the science fashion jungle—dinosaurs, black holes, quantum magic, chaos, super-strings, neuroscience, Darwin revisited. Beautifully illustrated hardback books, with TV documentary spinoffs and radio discussion panels and conferences in the pleasantest places on the planet.
In my bad moments the thought returns that I’m a parasite and I probably would not feel this way if I did not have a good physics degree and a doctorate in quantum electrodynamics. I should have been out there myself, carrying my own atomic increment to the mountain of human knowledge. But when I left university I was restless after seven years’ disciplined study. I traveled, widely, recklessly, and for far too long. When I finally got back to London, I went into business with a friend. The idea was to market a device, basically a cunningly phased set of circuits, that I had worked on in my spare time during my postgraduate days. This tiny item was supposed to enhance the performance of certain microprocessors, and the way it looked to us then, every computer in the world was going to need one. A German company flew us out to Hanover, first class, and for a couple of years we thought we were going to be billionaires. But the patent application failed. A team from a science park outside Edinburgh was there before us with better electronics. Then the computer industry stormed off in another direction anyway. Our company never even traded, and the Edinburgh people went bust. By the time I got back to quantum electrodynamics, the hole
“Er, no.”
The voice slipped out of official neutrality into a near-genuine query. I thought I caught a Yorkshire accent. “Can you tell me what he’s doing, then?”
“He phones me at all hours. He talks to me in the—”
The voice was quick to move back to his default position, the interrogative flowchart. “Is he using obscene or insulting behavior?”
“No. Look, officer. Why don’t you let me explain? He’s a crank. He won’t let me alone.”
“Are you aware of what he actually wants?”
I paused. For the first time I was aware of other voices behind the man’s. Perhaps there were banks of police officers like him with headsets and, all day long, muggings, murders, suicides, knife-point rapes. I was in there with the rest: attempted daylight religious conversion.
I said, “He wants to save me.”
“Save you?”
“You know, convert me. He’s obsessed. He simply won’t leave me alone.”
The voice cut in, impatience taking hold at last. “I’m sorry, caller. This is not a police matter. Unless he harms you or your property or threatens the same, he’s committing no offense. Trying to convert you is not against the law.” Then he terminated our emergency conversation with his own little stricture. “We do have religious freedom in this country.”
I went back to the living room window and looked down at Parry. He was no longer talking to my machine. He stood there with his hands in his pockets facing the building, as stolid as a Stasi agent.
I made a flask of coffee and some sandwiches and retreated into my study, which faces out across another street, and sat there reading, or rather shuffling, my notes. My concentration was ruined. Being hounded by Parry was aggravating an older dissatisfaction. It comes back to me from time to time, usually when I’m unhappy about something else, that all the ideas I deal in are other people’s. I simply collate and digest their research and deliver it up to the general reader. People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, backtrackings, and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs. It’s true, someone has togo between the researcher and the general public, giving the higherorder explanations that the average laboratory worker is too busy, or too cautious, to indulge. It’s also true I’ve made a lot of money swinging spider-monkey-style on the tallest trees of the science fashion jungle—dinosaurs, black holes, quantum magic, chaos, super-strings, neuroscience, Darwin revisited. Beautifully illustrated hardback books, with TV documentary spinoffs and radio discussion panels and conferences in the pleasantest places on the planet.
In my bad moments the thought returns that I’m a parasite and I probably would not feel this way if I did not have a good physics degree and a doctorate in quantum electrodynamics. I should have been out there myself, carrying my own atomic increment to the mountain of human knowledge. But when I left university I was restless after seven years’ disciplined study. I traveled, widely, recklessly, and for far too long. When I finally got back to London, I went into business with a friend. The idea was to market a device, basically a cunningly phased set of circuits, that I had worked on in my spare time during my postgraduate days. This tiny item was supposed to enhance the performance of certain microprocessors, and the way it looked to us then, every computer in the world was going to need one. A German company flew us out to Hanover, first class, and for a couple of years we thought we were going to be billionaires. But the patent application failed. A team from a science park outside Edinburgh was there before us with better electronics. Then the computer industry stormed off in another direction anyway. Our company never even traded, and the Edinburgh people went bust. By the time I got back to quantum electrodynamics, the hole
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