Part 21 (1/2)

”I'm sorry, but I still don't get it,” said Stagg beside me, his feet crunching on the gravel.

”The Ryman number tells you how turbulent a parcel of atmosphere is. The reason Sir Peter sent me to Scotland was to find how wide or tall is that parcel of atmosphere-the range of a given number, as it were. The importance of the WANTAC s.h.i.+p is that its readings may show evidence of the small high pressure interval Eisenhower needs. If it is, end of story.”

”I should get some sleep, if I were you; we're not yet at the end of any story,” Stagg said curtly.

We were at the edge of the lawn. I kicked the turf with the toe of my shoe.

”Which reminds me,” Stagg continued. ”There's something I have forgotten to tell you. Air Marshal Tedder came up to me after the meeting and said we-I mean the British-ought to put some meteorologists in with the invasion force to take measurements and check how close our forecasts are to the reality on the ground. Apparently the Yanks have two whole squadrons of battlefield weathermen. We've run plain out. Tedder spoke to Sir Peter and he rang me, wondering, since you are young and fit and know what we have been up against here, whether you'd like to go in with them? He said he thought it might be a way for you to make amends for that business with Ryman.”

”Did he now?” I instinctively wanted to say no, but instead asked for some time to think it over. In some ways it was an honour to be asked-but I had no military training whatsoever. Feeling exhausted, and overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation, I stared up into the night sky. The stars seemed to shudder, as if feeling the same apprehension.

”I am not a soldier,” I said, as we turned to go back to the house, whose serried windows showed tiny lines of light-not visible from above-at the edges of the blackout blinds.

”That is a drawback,” said Stagg. ”But it would be tremendously helpful if someone who was actually involved could compare theoretical forecasts with actuality. Think about it, anyway, as even if we postpone today we are going to have to go in the next three weeks, come what may.”

He gave a bitter laugh. ”Come what June! Come on, we'd better get back.”

On our way back to the main house-as we approached that great Victorian lump-we heard heavy running footsteps on the gravel and soon met an out-of-breath General Bull, who said he had been looking for us.

”Don't disappear like that! I've come to tell you, Monday may well be put off. If so, we are back at D minus three again as of today.”

This meant the a.s.sault would be on Tuesday, but it wasn't quite as simple as that. ”Because of your forecasts, General Eisenhower is thinking of holding up D-Day on a provisional, hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis,” Bull continued. ”We'll meet at four fifteen tomorrow morning and, depending on what you have to say, the supreme commander will confirm the postponement or not. If appropriate, he will then, or later in the day, decide definitely whether Tuesday will be D-Day.”

It appeared provisional, from the way Bull was talking, but really that was it. Between us, Stagg and I, Krick, Petterssen, Douglas and the Admiralty, in conjunction with thousands of other Allied meteorological staff, had finally caused a decision to be made. It seemed like Ryman's forecast factory had come true-but for all that we still weren't sure whether the decision to postpone would be the right one. The sky was practically clear; there was no rain.

”Maybe it is madness to send you on a wild goose chase into France under these circ.u.mstances,” said Stagg, once Bull had gone.

”No,” I said. ”I'll go.”

A strange feeling had come over me in the general's presence. Shaking off my anxiety and tiredness, I suddenly desperately wanted a shot of the action. I wanted to be among the ranks of men whose fates our forecast would determine. I had spent too long among figures of the mathematical type.

But I still had one last set of calculations to make. It was time that everything I had worked for was met directly. This meant facing up to the forecast problems with a new purpose-fulness-acting on what I had learned from Ryman and from the experiment I had conducted at Saunders-Roe, and gaining new meaning and new strength from the conviction that Gill's gift of the sh.e.l.l cases had supplied.

So I went, that Sat.u.r.day night, back up to the Nissen hut and began applying the Ryman number to adjacent parcels of atmosphere, all the way from WANTAC near Iceland down to the Channel, using the simulation method Gill had suggested. I was not entirely confident, but I had to try. It seemed to make sense: because it allowed a measure of uncertainty into the calculation, this method was the best way to future-proof the forecast.

I needed to inoculate against my dizziness, uncertainty in general as it effectively was, but were the sh.e.l.l cases and their contents really the medicine? They seemed in one light like another type of dizziness in themselves, but maybe that was the point. What the Africans did, in Zomba after the slide, was allow themselves to be bitten by whirligig beetles. The beetles were collected from mountain rivers and pools and held to the breast near the nipple where they bit in a defensive reaction, releasing a powerful steroid.

So the kizunguzungu kizunguzungu epidemic ended. epidemic ended.

Four.

In the early hours of Sunday 4 June, with the 3 AM AM conference over, I was working bleary-eyed on my equations in the hut on the bluff. Outside, the sentry stirred and the Channel fretted against the boundary sh.o.r.e. The far-called navy was melting towards the battle line, pus.h.i.+ng forth tentatively, like the shy anemone, unlocked at on its ocean bed. In France, on the moon-blanched land, waves turned, foam fell, whiting more the sepulchre. Meanwhile on each page, as I was writing, the figures seemed to move. These are the images that return. conference over, I was working bleary-eyed on my equations in the hut on the bluff. Outside, the sentry stirred and the Channel fretted against the boundary sh.o.r.e. The far-called navy was melting towards the battle line, pus.h.i.+ng forth tentatively, like the shy anemone, unlocked at on its ocean bed. In France, on the moon-blanched land, waves turned, foam fell, whiting more the sepulchre. Meanwhile on each page, as I was writing, the figures seemed to move. These are the images that return.

An hour or so later Stagg would attend the first of what turned out to be two crucial commanders' conferences in the library at Southwick. At the first meeting, even though the weather was still fine, Stagg told them he thought it could go bad on Monday, with wind and cloud appearing in four or five hours' time. Eisenhower confirmed the previous evening's tentative decision to postpone.

Everything was in the balance, we were indeed not yet at the end of the story. We seemed to be stuck in the middle of the end, waiting for the variables to come into alignment.

I tried not to become frozen in the terrible immobility that this provisionality can entail. Smoking heavily, I continued with my calculations, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other, sh.e.l.l cases and numbers on the table in front of me. I knew I needed to have patience-as every silent sheet could be the one that bore fruit. But first a tree had to grow, hurrying its rivulets of roots and fibres, each one a boundary for the next, across the waiting page. An equation tree, glowing and strong.

It wasn't easy. At one point I knocked one of the sh.e.l.l cases off the table and had to scrabble around on the floor picking up the precious numbers. This meant I had to start all over again, just in case I had lost one of the numbers. Extremely tense, feeling as if iron hooks were being inserted into my shoulders, I decided the best thing would be to go for a walk. Stiff from sitting for so long, I hobbled down the hill into the woods, until I came to the pond.

The rowing boat which Stagg had kicked was still moored to its jetty. Dispersed through the branches and leaves of surrounding trees the moonlight was s.h.i.+ning, honeycombing the wine-dark water and the ribbed sh.e.l.l of the boat's interior. It was still a gloomy place, hooded with melancholy, but now it was a beautiful gloom.

From among the trees' black bars an owl hooted, making the air tremor. On an impulse I climbed into the boat. Having released the painter, I picked up the oars and began to row round that moon-dappled pond. With each stroke, as I leaned into the resisting water, the tension went out of my shoulders, and the mental exhaustion-like muscle pain in the brain-started to lift.

With each circuit of the pond, it was as if I was making a tour d'horizon tour d'horizon of the workmans.h.i.+p of turbulence, not just in the zones of air and water, where vapour is lifted by the sun from oceans, lakes and rivers and diversely distributed by the wind, but the uncertain edges, where curls of mixing gas give meaning to the idea of s.p.a.ce. of the workmans.h.i.+p of turbulence, not just in the zones of air and water, where vapour is lifted by the sun from oceans, lakes and rivers and diversely distributed by the wind, but the uncertain edges, where curls of mixing gas give meaning to the idea of s.p.a.ce.

The boat s.h.i.+vered. I became undecided again. Once you leap the limits and start on further considerations you begin wondering-since the earth is just a little p.r.i.c.k in s.p.a.ce compared with the galaxy, never mind the whole-where it is all going to end.

I righted the skew.

The sound of the blades dipping in and out of the water together with the rattle of the rowlocks was like music accompanying the slow song of my thoughts. Even though I was conscious that I was sitting on the cross-plank of a rowing boat, pulling myself from eddy to eddy, it was as if I were elsewhere, seeing myself from above as I made my circuits. As I might appear to the tree-perched owl. Or from below, among the myriad mansions of submerged bacterial life. Or from the side, where a moorhen anxiously called each time I pa.s.sed. Or that distant rift on Venus, from within whose folds a quite alien species might watch.

I listened. Gradually, like the appearance of a new sh.o.r.eline, the realisation came upon me that to see the pond I was circ.u.mnavigating as a gloomy place, or even as a beautiful gloomy place, was to impose on it as Europeans had imposed upon Africa. As my family had imposed on Africa. As I had myself. Trying to make the world speak in human terms alone was akin to making Cecilia and Gideon speak the kitchen-Kaffir English we foisted upon them.

Somehow or other I had to learn to see the limit-rich, frame-filled world as one without without limits, limits, without without frames-see it, feel it, speak it in that other language of turbulence which was itself differential from the start. Promiscuous of perspective, it was less liable to the drag of bias and error. Could this programme have any place in the canon of the physical sciences? Surely that was a vain ambition. frames-see it, feel it, speak it in that other language of turbulence which was itself differential from the start. Promiscuous of perspective, it was less liable to the drag of bias and error. Could this programme have any place in the canon of the physical sciences? Surely that was a vain ambition.

Science is not about 'feelings'. But nor, at least at the highest level, is it the reductionist activity it is commonly supposed to be. Great scientists use their imagination, they feel their way towards a theory, then seek to prove it. With turbulence, exactly because of its intermittency and mutability, I realised that night that this 'feeling towards' was actually key. Extrapolating from immediate immediate connections, we have to keep an idea of connections, we have to keep an idea of all all connections hovering before us, as an ideal insight into the whole. Because the whole cannot be reached, we can grasp it only by intuition-by chasing not the specifics but the beautiful ghost of an idea. connections hovering before us, as an ideal insight into the whole. Because the whole cannot be reached, we can grasp it only by intuition-by chasing not the specifics but the beautiful ghost of an idea.

Once this thought had rushed in on me, others came, relating directly to the modal variety I ought to employ in calculating the forecast. I would have to keep s.h.i.+fting between Ryman's, Krick's, Douglas's and Petterssen's methods to get the required promiscuity of perspective. Effectively this was what we had been doing, but no one had tried to turn the to-and-fro of the conferences into an active programme.

Exhilarated, I returned to the hut with new vigour. My hand moved quickly under the desk lamp, covering the blank sheets. I solved calculation after calculation, working methodically forward through the charts, through tomorrow to expected conditions on Tuesday.

Sitting south of Iceland, on the eastern flank of a major deepening low south of Greenland, was a small parcel of warm air thrown up by the motion of the main surface low. It was this parcel that WANTAC had been reporting. By about 8.30 AM AM tomorrow, I calculated, the Atlantic parcel would develop into a higher-pressure ridge at 300 mb. Within an hour and a half the ridge would intensify at 500 mb. It was heading east, at a rate fast enough to cause, from early on Tuesday morning, a small temporary block in the Channel from the prevailing bad weather. There would be rough seas, heavy rain and gale-force winds later on Monday, but after that (I was as sure of it as I have ever been of anything) would come an invasion-friendly haven: a brief time of immunity from storms. tomorrow, I calculated, the Atlantic parcel would develop into a higher-pressure ridge at 300 mb. Within an hour and a half the ridge would intensify at 500 mb. It was heading east, at a rate fast enough to cause, from early on Tuesday morning, a small temporary block in the Channel from the prevailing bad weather. There would be rough seas, heavy rain and gale-force winds later on Monday, but after that (I was as sure of it as I have ever been of anything) would come an invasion-friendly haven: a brief time of immunity from storms.

Perhaps only a mathematician can understand how suddenly the treasure can come. It is as if a key has been deftly turned and a casket sprung open, revealing contents within more precious than could be thought possible.

I stared at the lamp. At the paper. At the lamp. The filament of the electric light burned in its bulb, like the sun filling an arch of sky. The filigree of black figures grew, rising against the white sheet. It was as if they were the rigging of a s.h.i.+p setting forth on a voyage of validation, a voyage in which vessel and sail carried on into the future, somehow leaving the spars of mast and yards behind.

My tree.

That was what was left onsh.o.r.e.

My equation tree.

Night decayed, morning came, the sentries changed their station. A beam of dawn light descended through the hut window, beating rose-red on the page. Did the tree promise forgiveness? For killing Ryman, hanged from his balloon, arms collapsed? For damaging Gill, stranded widowed and childless in Seaview? For making myself a monomaniac, subject to an idea of change and flux that actually fixed me like a b.u.t.terfly on a pin?

I could not say 'yes' to any of these. But in that moment, which seemed to win to my side both chaos and and order, I think I came close to an ideal of life. Recognising its mutability, I experienced a moment of freedom. order, I think I came close to an ideal of life. Recognising its mutability, I experienced a moment of freedom.

As for the final calculation, it's hard to explain: you just know know it is right. Ryman was a big reason why. What he had taught me, I realised then, was the importance of intermittency. Not just scientific intermittency, but mental and emotional intermittency, too. How, in a world of disintegration and endless renewal-a continuum, a world of flow-one must find one's own rhythm exactly by recognising the incompleteness of the melody. it is right. Ryman was a big reason why. What he had taught me, I realised then, was the importance of intermittency. Not just scientific intermittency, but mental and emotional intermittency, too. How, in a world of disintegration and endless renewal-a continuum, a world of flow-one must find one's own rhythm exactly by recognising the incompleteness of the melody.

It was a great gift, because incompleteness is what points to that ideal of the whole. It shows the way to whatever is emergent at the limits of any system, from an ant-lion's nest in Nyasaland to the ever-expanding edges of the universe.

I sat for some time with the full calculation of the Ryman numbers for all the adjoining areas of weather between Iceland and the Channel in front of me-along with the lamp, the piles of bra.s.s numbers relating to each quadrant, and the sh.e.l.l cases standing like statues on the table. Looking behind at every step was like peering into a dream of becoming-watching something inspire, move, breathe, awaken...