Part 12 (1/2)

'I'm going to make sure the arms are exactly the same length. Look at that piece of paper by the telescope.'

'Look for what?'

Grace tweaked one of the arms. 'Can you see dark stripes on it now?'

Matsumoto looked startled. 'Yes.'

'Those are the light fringes I was telling you about. Tell me when they sharpen.'

'How sharp?'

'As if you'd drawn them with a pen.'

'Now,' he said after a moment.

Grace checked. 'Good. Right, now we'll use white light.' She relit her lamp and turned off the sodium lamp.

'What? What the devil difference does it make?'

'White light splits into colours. It's easier to count the lines because the colours will change as they radiate outward. You get lost if you try counting only in grey.'

'Oh, yes,' he said, sounding unsettled.

'Something wrong?'

'No. This is all very bizarre. I feel rather as though G.o.d has put some malicious b.o.o.by traps into everyday objects.'

Grace laughed. 'They're not malicious, they're rainbows. Right, we'll start. We're hoping for little lines to start appearing between these strong ones. It should make them look fuzzy.'

She put the sodium lamp on to the edge of the turnstile so that it glowed towards the central mirror. On the piece of paper, the dark stripes turned coloured, except for one black line in the middle.

'They still look pretty sharp to me,' Matsumoto said. He jumped when a small camera attached to the telescope took a picture of the lines. Grace had rigged the shutter to snap every five seconds after the light was turned on.

'Hm.' She turned the interferometer in the mercury. The lines winked out until the light aligned through the telescope again. They were exactly the same as before. They remained exactly the same through three hundred and sixty degrees, and then again when she tried in the opposite direction. She had expected only faint interference lines, hence photographs that could be accurately examined and measured, but they should have been visible to the naked eye. A nasty weight settled in her stomach.

'I've done something wrong,' she said.

Matsumoto took the lamp off the turnstile. 'Enough for now, the mercury is making me dizzy. Would it be stupid to say that perhaps there is no such thing as ether?'

'It's there, we know it is. All modern mathematical models of the universe predict it.'

'Enough for now,' he repeated, and tugged her away. Once they were at the top of the cellar steps, he patted her arm.

'No, no, I need to try it again, I'll have just misaligned something, or-'

'Fresh eyes. You'll have them in ten minutes. Come along.'

After the gloom of the cellar, the daylight looked too yellow. It was lancing in through the open door in perfectly straight lines. Light travels in straight lines, but is a wave. Not for the first time, her brain b.u.mped against the question of what, exactly, was doing the waving. It was a tired, stale question.

'I don't want to be out for long,' she said. 'I won't have access to a laboratory after tomorrow.'

'Why?'

'Term ends. I'm going home.'

'I thought that horrible aunt of yours left you her house in Kensington? Set up there.'

'It was left as part of my dowry.'

'So marry some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d and then boot him out. Didn't somebody pa.s.s a law recently saying that what's yours is yours, regardless of pa.s.sing menfolk? The Bertha crew were rather jubilant for a while, I recall.'

'Yes, but it's not mine. My aunt didn't settle it on me, she settled it on my father, for me. He thinks anyone related to my mother must be just like her and therefore wouldn't trust me to efficiently manage pencil shavings. It will never be in my name. When I marry it will be my husband's, in the good old-fas.h.i.+oned way. Which would mean I'd have to find a husband who didn't mind ether experiments in the cellar. Which I think is unlikely. Unless you're willing. There's a house in Kensington in it for you.'

He laughed. 'I'd be delighted to, but unfortunately an English bride would cause a horrible scandal. The English are too ugly.'

Grace cleared her throat. 'Charming.'

'Have you seen j.a.panese women? Such delicate creatures. Anyone meeting an Englishwoman in Kyoto could be forgiven for thinking he had run into some sort of troll. Oh, speaking of trolls. Are you going to the Foreign Office ball tomorrow? Your father's friends with the minister, isn't he?'

'Yes. That's why I can't stay here a few days longer. Are you?'

'The amba.s.sador invited me. You'll like him. He's just like me.'

'Well, if you hear I've shot myself beforehand, you'll know why.'

He laughed again.

Grace pushed her hands into her pockets as they began their usual walk around the edge of the lawn. She had to duck an overhanging rose. Everything was left semi-wild here. Even the college looked as though it might have grown. She glanced back the Virginia creeper across the wall had finally turned red, nearly purple at the bottom, where it blended into lavender bushes. It would all be glorious for a fortnight, then become a mess of bare stalks for the autumn.

She had once met a scientist who worked in more or less the same area she did, one Oliver Lodge of the University of Liverpool. He lectured on ether, and on electricity. She had gone up to Liverpool last year to hear him. He had explained how the electrification of particles, including water particles, would make them coalesce; he had even manufactured a fine rain in the lecture theatre. It was fascinating stuff, and if it was developed properly it would have applications in weather control and in the search for ether, which was only extremely rarefied particles. But she had a feeling that Lodge was one of a kind, and he was already married. What was left, down that road, was to find someone willing to make a bargain, house for laboratory, but since she was neither charming nor personable, she couldn't imagine how she would go about anything like that.

What she could imagine were two paths. Down one, she found some stupid mistake in the experiment and mended it, and wrote a decent paper, and secured a teaching position; down the other, there was no mistake, and it was all wrong, and perhaps, if she was lucky, she would be able to teach schoolgirls how to make little magnesium fireworks between their literature lessons and sketching. She didn't much like moments when things split so clearly. It was much better to be able to think that anything could happen, even if it couldn't. Seeing it made her feel claustrophobic, though dark cellars didn't.

'Where will you go once term ends?' she asked.

'j.a.pan. I shall take a leisurely route through Europe, though. No rush.'

Grace frowned. 'So is that it, after London? You're going home from there? You didn't say.'

'You didn't ask.'

'Withholding basic information until someone asks is a bit vain, don't you think?'

He lifted his eyebrow. 'And making a point of not asking is ... ?'

'Whatever I do, you'll construe it as an infatuation,' she said irritably, though it was just his usual teasing. But her temper was ragged from the heat and the experiment, and sometimes, there was an edge to his playfulness.