Part 6 (2/2)

I was mainly parroting what Brecher had told me on the way to the pub. I was talking out of my depth-quite a bit out of my depth, actually-but Sir Peter had said a certain degree of cunning was necessary in this work. If deception must be employed, the higher morality of war work should cancel out the fault.

The stratagem worked. ”Tell me more,” said Ryman, suddenly filled with interest.

”Each red blood cell contains approximately six hundred and forty million haemoglobin molecules. Haem is iron in the ferrous state, as I am sure you know. Brecher found that a tetramer of globin chains join together with its own haem group in a pocket.”

”Fascinating,” said Ryman, his usually lugubrious face animated and full of light. ”Do continue.”

”The job of a haemoglobin molecule is to load and unload oxygen as it travels through the body. Its total journey, during a lifetime of one hundred and twenty days, is said to be three hundred miles.”

”Did he say anything about the rhesus factor?” asked Mrs Ryman, to my surprise. For some reason I did not expect her to be so scientific as her husband. My mind flicked back to something Brecher had said about incompatibility of blood types between mother and baby.

”Gill,” Ryman said in a soft but admonitory tone. She looked meekly into her gla.s.s of apple juice.

”Yes,” I said, warily. ”He did mention something of that.”

There was a brief silence. Then, firm again, Mrs Ryman said, ”Where is Brecher based?”

”He's at Loch Eck at the moment,” I replied, ”with Pyke; they stay at the Argyll-but his main work is at Cambridge.”

I waited for either of them to elaborate, but once again there was silence. Grant, who had become distracted during the discussion, was inspecting the bra.s.s workings of the grandfather clock; I hung expectantly on an explanation of the reprimand.

Hung on so long, in fact, that even Ryman, who was clearly largely impervious to social convention, was driven to reply. ”We recently gave blood to the transfusion service,” he eventually said in an airy tone. ”Shall we go through to eat?”

Mrs Ryman sat opposite me, with Grant and her husband at either end of the table, which was almost as highly polished as Ryman's shoes.

At once, Grant started banging on about mysticism and religion again. The substance of his views, though spoken at a volume suitable for general address, continued to be directed at Mrs Ryman. She was more concerned with ladling soup into our bowls out of a deep white porcelain tureen, but Grant didn't seem to notice his listener's lack of attention.

I took my opportunity. ”What strikes me most, Professor, about your work-is the distance-to-neighbour aspect of things. It seems to me that measuring the relative distance between particles rather than measuring them from a fixed point will be an increasingly important tool.”

Ryman beamed, apparently now glad to oblige me. ”Yes, and not just with particles. The relations.h.i.+ps between social groups, sets of ideas, even words themselves might be measured this way.”

”Ideas?”

”Yes. I have often thought ideas pa.s.s through society in something of the manner of an ocean eddy. And like most things they are best considered differentially rather than as absolutes.”

”By ideas you mean...?”

”Equality, liberty, justice. That sort of thing.”

”That sort of thing,” said the minister, looking up from his discussion with Mrs Ryman, ”is dispensed in heaven.”

Ryman ignored him. ”We think we know what these ideas mean but actually they are like clouds in our heads. The best way to understand them is to cla.s.sify them by charting the distance between them.”

”Scripture says love pa.s.seth all understanding,” came the view from the other end of the table.

As the two men bickered, I became aware of Mrs Ryman's brown, enquiring eyes studying me across the table. Her face was glowing. It was a frank look she gave me but there was no tenderness in it, or anything remotely erotic. It was the look of someone inspecting produce at a market stall.

”Delicious soup,” I said, leaning forward in my seat.

”From the garden.” She lifted up the ladle. ”Have some more.”

”I'll save myself, thank you.”

She gave a sly, sidelong glance at Grant. It was as if I was meant to see this.

”Handy during wartime,” I said, ”to grow your own veg.”

”We were growing our own vegetables long before the war.”

Grant snorted at a remark of Ryman's. ”Have you not read your Isaiah? ”My ways are above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.” Our Lord is beyond even the very idea of the absolute. We judge by human standards, but it is only within the perfection of his law that we can understand the reason for evil. Till kingdom come and we join in that perfection, there's a limit we cannot cross. Thus, we cannot understand an abnormal phenomenon like Hitler.”

”The present war is not about evil,” said Ryman, in the tone of someone talking to a child. ”It is about armaments.”

”On the contrary, Professor. Hitler is evil. Invading countries. Suborning the rule of law. Interrogating with torture. Killing thousands of civilians. I would call that evil. I would say he presents a danger that only faith can answer.”

”Rubbis.h.!.+ Faith itself is the dangerous thing,” said Ryman. He relaxed slightly in his chair, like a chess player sensing victory. ”Especially Christian faith. Christians are worst of all for fighting. The figures speak for themselves. I have them all down in my Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Through history, there have been fewer wars started by adherents of Islam than by adherents of Christianity.”

Grant fell silent, as if stumped by this information.

”Tell me, Professor,” I said, ”why did you make the switch from meteorology to the study of war?”

He put his hands down on the table to deliver what seemed a well-rehea.r.s.ed reply. ”In the midst of my Cambridge course on natural science I was hesitating whether to specialise on the physics or biology, when someone told me that Helmholtz”-Helmholtz was a German scientist-”had been a medical doctor before becoming a physicist. It occurred to me then that Helmholtz had eaten the meal of life in the wrong order. I decided I would like to spend the first half of my life under the strict discipline of physics and afterwards apply that training to researches in biological and social sciences.”

”What sort of researches?” I interjected, perhaps too rapidly. I suppose I was hoping that he might let slip the secrets of applying the Ryman number by explaining why he'd left the work behind.

It was too negative a way to seek revelation. Ryman just smiled as he recalled his non-meteorological triumphs. ”A range of issues. The submissiveness of nations. War and eugenics. The measurability of sensations of hue. Many other topics of that type. Also psychology...quant.i.tative estimates of sensory events and abstract relations. The application of measurement to continuums. Getting pain and pleasure, touch and smell, aggressiveness and tranquillity down to equations. Say you were to begin by tapping someone softly with a horsewhip on the thigh-how many times and how hard would you have to hit before it became painful?”

As I considered this odd idea, his wife brought through the main course, which was roast chicken. Grant began chattering to her again. I stared for a second at the yellow bird, which sat on a platter in a pool of gravy, before turning back to Ryman. ”Do you regret not taking your meteorological studies further?”

”I continue to dabble. I recently worked out how to detect the distance of thunderstorms from the number of clicks their electromagnetism makes on a telephone line. Do you mind carving? It upsets me.”

Taking the carving knife and fork from him, I also decided to take the bull by the horns, or grasp the nettle, or whatever figure of speech is appropriate for a stubborn meteorologist. I stood up, ostensibly to perform my job of dissection, but also to ask him the question outright.

”The thing I have been wondering about is-how can you apply the Ryman number to adjacent zones with different background means...how do you connect it all up?” I wonder now if this question was what gave the game away.

To my surprise, he stood up from the table himself and walked to the window. From the way his shoulders hunched he seemed to be suppressing a burp. Or even laughter. Then he said, with his back to me, ”The personal attribution is embarra.s.sing. Others named it.”

I did not feel this was a proper answer to my question, so said nothing, hoping he would continue. But Ryman did not speak, instead staring out into the garden, up into Mackellar's field beyond. As I continued to carve, laying successive slices of the feathery white meat on the side of the platter, Gill Ryman carried in steaming dishes of vegetables. She set them either side of Grant, who, on seeing the curls of steam that came out of holes in the lids, exclaimed-in the tone of one declaiming a biblical quotation-”The tails of two smoking firebrands!”

Coming back to the table as I pa.s.sed out the chicken-loaded plates, Ryman produced a fountain pen and notepad from his jacket pocket. He began sketching and jotting down figures. Standing up as I was, I could clearly see that the designs and numbers were of a meteorological nature. I was confused. I felt as if he were toying with me.

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