Read Online Us by Nicholls David - Free Book Online Page A

I keep talking, then?’
    â€˜Yes, please. I like listening to your voice. It’s like listening to the Shipping Forecast.’
    â€˜Boring.’
    â€˜Reassuring. Let’s keep walking. Tell me more.’
    â€˜Anyway, these stories were nonsense for the most part, or hugely over-simplified. Most scientific progress is a slog, and more often than not it stems from a dialogue within a community, lots of people thinking along the same lines and inching forward, rather than these great bolts of lightning. Newton did see the apple fall, but he’d been thinking about gravity well before that. The same with Darwin, he didn’t wake up one day and think: natural selection! There’d been years and years of observation, discussion and debate. Good science is slow-moving, methodical, evidence-based. Method. Results. Conclusion. Like my old tutor used to say, “To
assume
makes an
ass
of
u
and
me
!’’’ Here, rather optimistically, I had hoped she might laugh, but she was staring open-mouthed at her wiggling fingertips. ‘Still, I was hooked. It seemed heroic, or at least the kind of heroism I might have access to. Normal boys aspired to be footballers or pop stars or soldiers, and I wanted to be a scientist, because wouldn’t it be incredible to have a moment like that? An entirely original idea. A cure, an insight into space and time, a water engine.’
    â€˜Anything occurred to you?’
    â€˜Not as yet.’
    â€˜Well it’s still early days!’
    â€˜Of course it was all a lot easier in the past. Much easier to make your mark when people still thought the sun revolved around the earth and there were four bodily humours. Not much chance of me making that kind of breakthrough now.’
    â€˜Oh no!’ she said with real feeling. ‘That’s not true!’
    â€˜â€™Fraid so. Science is a race, you’ve got to get there first. There’s no second prize. Look at Darwin – those ideas were in the air, but he was the first to get his paper published. The only way I could really make a mark now is to be transported back to, say, 1820. I’d jot down some pointers on evolutionary theory. I’d explain to the Royal College of Surgeons exactly why washing your hands is a good idea. I’d invent the combustion engine, the light bulb, the aeroplane, photography, penicillin. If I could get back to 1820, I’d be the greatest scientist the world has ever known, greater than Archimedes or Newton or Pasteur or Einstein. The only obstacle is being a hundred and seventy years too late.’
    â€˜Clearly, what you need to do,’ she said, ‘is invent a time machine.’
    â€˜Which is theoretically impossible.’
    â€˜There you go again, being negative. If you can make a battery out of a lemon, how hard can it be? I’m sure you could do it.’
    â€˜You hardly know me.’
    â€˜But I can
tell
. I have a sense. Douglas, some day you are going to do something quite amazing.’
    She was very far from sober, of course, but, if only for a moment, I thought she really did believe this of me. Even that it might be true.
30. tunnels and bridges
    And so we journeyed on, three of us now, in what I chose to take as a companionable silence, sneaking out of London through the back door and surfacing in dreary countryside, all pylons and motorways, a sudden glimpse of a river – the Medway? – crammed with holiday cruisers sulking in the overcast English summer, then more scrappy woodland then the motorway again. Soon enough the guard announced that we were about to enter the Channel Tunnel and the passengers looked obediently to their windows in the hope of seeing – what? Shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming past aquarium glass? A tunnel under the sea is never quite as visually splendid as one hopes, but it is no less an achievement for that. Who designed the Channel Tunnel? No one knows the name. There are