The Atrocity Archives (34 page)

As I finish reading the typescript of Captain
Younghusband's report, my headset buzzes nastily and crackles. "Coming
up on Milton Keynes in a couple minutes, Mr. Howard. Any idea where you
want to be put down? If you don't have anywhere specific in mind we'll
ask for a slot at the police pad."

Somewhere specific
 … 
? I shove the unaccountably top-secret papers down into one side of my
bag and rummage around for one of the gadgets I took from the armoury.
"The concrete cows," I say. "I need to take a look at them as soon
as
possible. They're in Bancroft Park, according to this map. Just off
Monk's Way, follow the A422 in until it turns into the H3 near the city
centre. Any chance we can fly over them?"

"Hold on a moment."

The helicopter banks alarmingly and the
landscape tilts around us. We're shooting over a dark landscape, trees
and neat, orderly fields, and the occasional
clump of suburban paradise whisking past beneath us—then we're over a
dual carriageway, almost empty at this time of night, and we bank again
and turn to follow it. From an altitude of about a thousand feet it
looks like an incredibly detailed toy, right down to the finger-sized
trucks crawling along it.

"Right, that's it," says the copilot. "Anything
else we can do for you?"

"Yeah," I say. "You've got infrared gear,
haven't you? I'm looking for an extra cow. A hot one. I mean, hot like
it's been cooked, not hot as in body temperature."

"Gotcha, we're looking for a barbecue." He leans
sideways and fiddles with the controls below a fun-looking monitor.
"Here. Ever used one of these before?"

"What is it, FLIR?"

"Got it in one. That joystick's the pan, this
knob is zoom, you use this one to control the gain, it's on a
stabilised platform; give us a yell if you see anything. Clear?"

"I think so." The joystick works as promised and
I zoom in on a trail of ghostly hot spots, pan behind them to pick up
the brilliant glare of a predawn jogger, lit up like a light bulb—the
dots are fading footprints on the cold ground. "Yeah." We're making
about forty miles per hour along the road, sneaking in like a thief in
the night, and I zoom out to take in as much of the side view as
possible. After a minute or so I see the park ahead, off the side of a
roundabout. "Eyes up, front: Can you hover over that roundabout?"

"Sure. Hold on." The engine note changes and my
stomach lurches, but the FLIR pod stays locked on target. I can see the
cows now, grey shapes against the cold ground—a herd of concrete
animals created in 1978 by a visiting artist. There should be eight of
them, life-sized Friesians peacefully grazing in a field attached to
the park. But something's wrong, and it's not hard to see what.

"Barbecue at six o'clock low," says the copilot. "You want to go
down and bring us back a
take-away, or what?"

"Stay up," I say edgily, slewing the camera pod
around. "I want to make sure it's safe first … "

REPORT 2: Wednesday March 4th, 1914

CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET, Imperial
War Ministry, September 11th, 1914

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME
ANDES, Ministry of War, July 2nd, 1940

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT,
Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

Dear Albert,

Today we performed Young's double-slit
experiment upon Subject C, our medusa. The results are unequivocal; the
Medusa effect is both a particle
and
a wave. If de Broglie is
right … 

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Ernest has been pushing for results
with characteristic vim and vigor and Mathiesson, our analytical
chemist, has been driven to his wits' end by the New Zealander's
questions. He nearly came to blows with Dr. Jamieson who insisted that
the welfare of his patient—as he calls Subject C—comes before any
question of getting to the bottom of this infuriating and perplexing
anomaly.

Subject C is an unmarried woman, aged
27, of medium height with brown hair and blue eyes. Until four months
ago, she was healthy and engaged as household maid to an eminent KC
whose name you would probably recognize. Four months ago she underwent
a series of seizures; her employers being generous, she was taken to
the Royal Free Infirmary where she described having a series of
blinding headaches going back eighteen months or so. Dr. Willard
examined her using one of the latest Roentgen machines, and determined
that she appeared to have the makings of a tumour upon her brain.
Naturally this placed her under Notification,
subject to the Monster Control Act (1864); she was taken to the
isolation ward at St. Bartholomew's in London where, three weeks, six
migraines, and two seizures later, she experienced her first Grand
Morte fit. Upon receiving confirmation that she was suffering from
acute gorgonism, Dr. Rutherford asked me to proceed as agreed upon; and
so I arranged for the Home Office to be contacted by way of the Dean.

While Mr. McKenna was at first
unenthusiastic about the prospect of a gorgon running about the streets
of Manchester, our reassurances ultimately proved acceptable and he
directed that Subject C be released into our custody on her own
cognizance. She was in a state of entirely understandable distress when
she arrived, but once the situation was explained she agreed to
cooperate fully in return for a settlement which will be made upon her
next of kin. As she is young and healthy, she may survive for several
months, if not a year, in her current condition: this offers an
unparallelled research opportunity. We are currently keeping her in the
old Leprosarium, the windows of which have been bricked up. A security
labyrinth has been installed, the garden wall raised by five feet so
that she can take in the air without endangering passers-by, and we
have arranged a set of signals whereby she can don occlusive blindfolds
before receiving visitors. Experiments upon patients with acute
gorgonism always carry an element of danger, but in this case I believe
our precautions will suffice until her final deterioration begins.

Lest you ask why we don't employ a
common basilisk or cockatrice instead, I hasten to explain that we do;
the pathology is identical in whichever species, but a human source is
far more amenable to control than any wild animal. Using Subject C we
can perform repeatable experiments at will, and obtain verbal
confirmation that she has performed our requests. I hardly need to
remind you that the historical use of gorgonism, for example by
Danton's Committee for Public Safety during the
French revolution, was hardly conducted as a scientific study of the
phenomenon. This time, we will make progress!

Once Subject C was comfortable, Dr.
Rutherford arranged a series of seminars. The New Zealander is of the
opinion that the effect is probably mediated by some electromagnetic
phenomenon, of a type unknown to other areas of science. He is
consequently soliciting new designs for experiments intended to
demonstrate the scope and nature of the gorgon effect. We know from the
history of Mademoiselle Marianne's grisly collaboration with
Robespierre that the victim must be visible to the gorgon, but need not
be directly perceived; reflection works, as does trivial refraction,
and the effect is transmitted through glass thin enough to see through,
but the gorgon cannot work in darkness or thick smoke. Nobody has
demonstrated a physical mechanism for gorgonism that doesn't involve an
unfortunate creature afflicted with the characteristic tumours.
Blinding a gorgon appears to control the effect, as does a sufficient
visual distortion. So why does Ernest insist on treating a clearly
biological phenomenon as one of the greatest mysteries in physics today?

"My dear fellow," he explained to me
the first time I asked, "how did Madame Curie infer the existence of
radioactivity in radium-bearing ores? How did Wilhelm Roentgen
recognize X-rays for what they were? Neither of those forms of
radiation arose within our current understanding of magnetism,
electricity, or light. They had to be something else. Now, our children
of Medusa apparently need to behold a victim in order to injure
them—but how is the effect transmitted? We know, unlike the ancient
Greeks, that our eyes work by focussing ambient light on a membrane at
their rear. They used to think that the gorgons shone forth beams of
balefire, as if to set in stone whatever they alighted on. But we know
that cannot be true. What we face is nothing less than a wholly new
phenomenon. Granted, the gorgon effect
only changes whatever the medusoid can see directly, but we know the
light reflected from those bodies isn't responsible. And Lavoisier's
calorimetric experiments—before he met his unfortunate end before the
looking glass of l'Executrice—proved that actual atomic transmutation
is going on! So what on earth mediates the effect? How can the act of
observation, performed by an unfortunate afflicted with gorgonism,
transform the nuclear structure?"

(By nuclear structure he is of course
referring to the core of the atom, as deduced by our experiments last
year.)

Then he explained how he was going to
seat a gorgon on one side of a very large device he calls a cloud
chamber, with big magnetic coils positioned above and below it, to see
if there is some other physical phenomenon at work.

I can now reveal the effects of our
team's experimentation. Subject C is cooperating in a most professional
manner, but despite Ernest's greatest efforts the cloud chamber bore no
fruit—she can sit with her face pressed up against the glass window on
one side, and blow a chicken's egg to flinders of red-hot pumice on the
target stand, but no ionization trail appears in the saturated vapour
of the chamber. Or rather, I should say no direct trail appears. We had
more success when we attempted to replicate other basic experiments. It
seems that the gorgon effect is a continuously variable function of the
illumination of the target, with a sharply defined lower cut-off and an
upper limit! By interposing smoked glass filters we have calibrated the
efficiency with which Subject C transmutes the carbon nuclei of a
target into silicon, quite accurately. Some of the new electrostatic
counters I've been working on have proven fruitful: secondary
radiation, including gamma rays and possibly an elusive neutral
particle, are given off by the target, and indeed our cloud chamber has
produced an excellent picture of radiation given off by the target.

Having confirmed the calorimetric and
optical properties of the effect, we next performed the double-slit
experiment upon a row of targets (in this case, using wooden combs). A
wall with two thin slits is interposed between the targets and our
subject, whose gaze was split in two using a binocular arrangement of
prisms. A lamp positioned between the two slits, on the far side of the
wall from our subject, illuminates the targets: as the level of
illumination increases, a pattern of alternating gorgonism was
produced! This exactly follows the constructive reinforcement and
destruction of waves Professor Young demonstrated with his examination
of light corpuscules, as we are now supposed to call them. We conclude
that gorgonism is a wave effect of some sort—and the act of
observation
is intimately involved, although on first acquaintance this is such a
strange conclusion that some of us were inclined to reject it out of
hand.

We will of course be publishing our
full findings in due course; I take pleasure in attaching a draft of
our paper for your interest. In any case, you must be wondering by now
just what the central finding is. This is not in our paper yet, because
Dr. Rutherford is inclined to seek a possible explanation before
publishing; but I regret to say that our most precise calorimetric
analyses suggest that your theory of mass/energy conservation is being
violated—not on the order of ounces of weight, but by enough to
detect.
Carbon atoms are being transformed into silicon ions with an
astoundingly high electropositivity, which can be accounted for if we
assume that the effect is creating nuclear mass from somewhere. Perhaps
you, or your new colleagues at the Prussian Academy, can shed some
light on the issue? We are most perplexed, because if we accept this
result we are forced to accept the creation of new mass
ab initio
,
or treat it as an experimental invalidation of your general theory of
relativity.

Your good friend,
Hans Geiger

A portrait of the agent as a (confused) young man:

Picture me, standing in the predawn chill in a
badly mown field, yellowing parched grass up to the ankles. There's a
wooden fence behind me, a road on the other side of it with the usual
traffic cams and streetlights, and a helicopter in police markings
parked like a gigantic cyborg beetle in the middle of the roundabout,
bulging with muscular-looking sensors and nitesun floodlights and
making a racket like an explosion in a noise factory. Before me there's
a field full of concrete cows, grazing safely and placidly in the
shadow of some low trees which are barely visible in the overspill from
the streetlights. Long shadows stretch out from the fence, darkness
exploding toward the ominous lump at the far end of the paddock. It's
autumn, and dawn isn't due for another thirty minutes. I lift my
modified camcorder and zoom in on it, thumbing the record button.

The lump looks a little like a cow that's lying
down. I glance over my shoulder at the chopper, which is beginning to
spool up for takeoff; I'm pretty sure I'm safe here but I can't quite
suppress a cold shudder. On the other side of the field—

"Datum point: Bob Howard, Bancroft Park, Milton
Keynes, time is zero seven fourteen on the morning of Tuesday the
eighteenth. I have counted the cows and there are nine of them. One is
prone, far end of paddock, GPS coordinates to follow. Preliminary
surveillance indicated no human presence within a quarter kilometre and
residual thermal yield is below two hundred Celsius, so I infer that it
is safe to approach the target."