Haflatoun and Victoria Vectra jump on a space plane to
Geneva and drop in on CERN, the European particle physics lab, to learn of a
sabotage plot and keep the dream of Vectra’s cryogenically frozen grandfather
alive.
Haflata
Talking drivel
Aflatoun
Plato
Haflatoun
Drivelling Plato
Time to zero hour: 17.47 hours
Place: Siwa Oasis
Once Victoria Vectra’s face faded off the
screen, Umm Uref reclaimed her laptop, while giving me a significant glance and
taking a long and ponderous drag on her peace-of-mind pipe. “I sense you are
tense, can you not handle the suspense?” the oracle queried.
“My brain is overloaded contemplating what lies
ahead,” I admitted. “I need to meditate.”
“I can help your brain enlarge its domain.” Umm
Uref deftly retrieved two small blocks of sticky black hashish from a secret pouch
and crumbled them into an incense burner. Then, as if blessed with a third
invisible eye, the blind oracle circled around me in a ritualised rite without
once bumping into me – or any of the passing donkeys and mules.
Wrapping me up in a cloak of relaxing and
mind-expanding hashish smoke, she warned me: “Blessed and doomed are the hashasheen
(hashish smokers). First their mind grows and later it slows.”
I inhaled deeply, sucking hungrily on the
smoke. As if drawn in by my breath, a Land Cruiser pulled up in a cloud of
choking dust. Luckily, Umm Uref’s failed vision didn’t fail her this time, and
she managed to hop out of the automobile’s path. My visionary oracle landed
heavily on the kerb, where she coughed, sputtered and cursed the new arrivals –
invoking mysterious and ancient incantations.
As the dust settled, I got my first glimpse of
the athletic body connected to Vectra’s talking head as it emerged from the
4x4. “Enchante,” she greeted me as she stretched out her hand to shake
mine. “In this high-tech day and age, it’s always so much better to meet in the
flesh, wouldn’t you say, ’aflatoun?”
Remembering to exhale the herb, I felt my brain
floating somewhere in the X zone. “In my philosophical framework that’s what’s
called ‘fleshing out an acquaintance’,” I agreed. “But I won’t bore you with
abstract philosophical conceptions.”
“We physicists are not just concerned with the
inanimate, you know,” she countered with a touch of flirtation in her voice.
“We’re not the geeks and freaks portrayed in
pop culture. Ours, like yours, is essentially a philosophical quest. We want to
find answers to all those age-old existential questions.”
“Oh, absolutely, in the days of my Grecian
forefathers, there was no distinction between Ancient Greeks and Ancient Geeks,
I can assure you – there was a seamless melding of science, philosophy and
religion. They were all regarded as hanging together in a complementary whole.”
“And whatever were they doing ’anging in a
’ole? You puzzle me, ’aflatoun,” she admitted.
Another figure emerged from the jeep. Dressed
in a blazer and sporting a US Ivy League college-boy haircut, he reminded me of
a face I had seen before – or is that the marijuana-induced paranoia kicking
in.
Not
another best-selling novelist, I said to myself as his identity dawned on
me. Why is Siwa overrun with writers these days, I wondered?
Daniel Black (I think that’s what his name is)
gazed into my bloodshot eyes and my hashanoia began to stir. Why is
he looking at me like that, the voice in my head demanded? Does he think I
am an angel or a demon? Perhaps he was trying to crack my Da Vinci code.
“Don’t believe him, Victoria,” he urged her.
“Science and religion have always been diametrically opposed. They are the
ultimate and original adversaries, logos versus
mythos.”
“Science, religion, philosophy have at times been
intimate bedfellows and at others been intimate enemies. It is only since the
Enlightenment that science considered separation and only since the 20th
century that it has seriously talked of divorce,” I countered.
Black examined my bloodshot eyes again.
“Victoria, behold, we are in the company of an ancient assassin. I’m pleased
we’ve found one in the flesh. It will give my next novel a more authentic
ring,” he boasted to Vectra, obviously trying to impress her with his
knowledge.
“Well, I’m glad,” she confessed, “Because your
last attempt fell flat on its face. One critic called your hassassin character ‘an old-school orientalist’s wet dream’ because
of your portrayal of him as little more than a perverted and obscene killing
machine.”
“What is a hassassin,
by the way?” I asked, unfamiliar with the term.
“Dude, are you kidding? A hassassin is a member of your brotherhood,” the novelist chuckled.
“You better not be dissing the brothers in my
’hood,” I cautioned him.
“You know Hassan i-Sabah, the Old Man of the
Mountain whose men raided crusader convoys in a hashish-induced stupor. That’s where we get our English word,
assassin.”
“The Arabic word is hashasheen. How ever did you come up with that grating ‘hassassin’? Anyway, the cult doesn’t exist
any more. Only the Ismaili sect that spawned it exists in some parts of the
Indian subcontinent and Iran.”
“Ohh, but I suspect they are still around.
Where do you think the suicide bomber movement began? You know that the Old Man
built an earthly paradise for his followers in the mountains to give them a
taste of what the after-life ought to be like so that they would die gladly in
his service.”
“Here we go again with the virgin stuff,” I
said, rolling my eyes. “You’d think that superstitious Christendom, now the
rational West, would’ve tired of that erotic fantasy after all these centuries.
As far as any one can ascertain, Hassan’s paradise existed only in the minds of
the crusaders. Some scholars even suggest that the hashish is a myth and that the old man ran a very puritanical show.
Precision killing is a sober business. They were hit men, not hit-and-miss
men.”
“Okay, that’s enough, stop it boys,” Vectra
said like an irate older sister. “You stand around here arguing and our time is
running out.”
We grudgingly apologised and jumped into the
jeep.
Time to zero hour: 15.59 hours
Place: The Western Desert
Somewhere between Siwa oasis and the sand sea
with its shifting dunes, I started seeing a mirage. However, rather than the regular
illusion of shimmering lakes and turquoise seas, it looked like there was a
titanium pyramid lying on its side up ahead. I saw what looked like an oddly
shaped aeroplane in the haze. If a thirsty man sees water in the desert haze,
does a man in a hurry see an aircraft?
“Is that a plane?” I asked Vectra.
“Well, it’s ‘highly irregular’, the CERN
accountant told me. But to reflect the urgency of our mission, he allowed me to
charter this X-Files plane, since CERN doesn’t own one.”
“You can charter that?” I asked incredulously
as I eyed the aerodynamic wings, arched back like a steel eagle’s.
“You’d be surprised what you can get on the Web
– which we invented at CERN, by the way.”
“You must tell me which search engine you use,”
I said as I eyed up the space-age bird shimmering in the desert sun.
Inside, the aircraft was a more Spartan affair.
We stood in a big open space with not a seat in sight. Instead, around the
walls were safety harnesses not unlike those used on amusement park rides.
“Where are we supposed to sit?” I asked.
“On short haul flights, there’s no time for
sitting in this machine,” she explained. “The executive lounge is only
accessible during flights to the Far East and Australia.”
“It’s just my throat feels as dry as King Tut’s
tomb and I’ve got a chronic case of the munchies after Umm Uref’s hash treat,”
I admitted as visions of my favourite dishes floated weightlessly past as if
we’d somehow gone into orbit without taking off.
Despairing at my apparent lack of appreciation
for the gravity of the situation in Geneva, she strapped me in with a little
too much vigour.
After less than 15 minutes of gut-churning
acceleration, the plane began its rapid descent, leaving my empty gut floating
in a near-space orbit for a few uncomfortable seconds. We hung in the sky over
what I presumed to be Geneva, which lay thousands of metres below. Waiting for
another rapid descent, I distracted myself with speculations over when people
would holiday on the moon and how long it would be before millionaire lovers
went on truly lunar honeymoons. Before thoughts of my old flame Luna, whose
ghost had been exorcised by Pandora, my finely chiselled Greek shrink, had a
chance to consider flickering, Victoria Vectra unbuckled my strap and signalled
that I should follow her.
Handing me a parachute, she led me into an
antechamber, shutting the pressurised doors behind us and, after bolting us to
a bar attached to the ceiling, opened an escape hatch. “Since we don’t have a
moment to lose, we’ll take the fastest route to CERN,” the young physicist
explained as the freezing wind blew through her dark hair which flapped around
her pale countenance.
I felt an almost unbearable lightness sweep over
me as we hovered in the sky. My head felt lighter than it had when I was
floating in Umm Uref’s herbal clouds. In fact, my elation was such that I
feared it might slow my descent. I reached such an elevated mental state that I
sensed myself gaining altitude. So, was this how gurus felt when levitating?
Was I slowly rising towards Nirvana and, if so, which of Buddha’s poses should
I strike? All of a sudden, I felt a vigorous tug and looked above me to see not
wings growing out of my shoulders – which would’ve been incredibly disturbing –
but the taut sac of my parachute.
Using the navigating cords, I tried to follow
Vectra’s course. Below my feet, I could see miles of countryside dotted with
tiny bovine shadows. Gradually, a large complex of buildings came into view. As
they grew in size, I realised I was heading straight for what looked like a
sub-power station. Desperately tugging on my parachute to avoid the
high-voltage cables, I found myself on course to crash into a gushing waterfall
streaming off a cooling tower. Seconds before the inevitable splash, I managed
to change direction again. Below me, a massive hole in the ground conveniently
opened up and I descended into an enormous chamber some 100m-deep. “In short,
the LHC is all about superlatives. It is the world’s largest machine. This cool
customer operates at 300°C below room temperature,” I heard a tinny echo
vibrate through the massive chamber.
Just before I collided which the Nobel laureate
showing a group of prominent awed visitors around, breaking my fall, he uttered
his famous last words prior to my rude interruption. “The heat generated by the
collisions will be greater than that at the heart of the sun.”
Once I extracted myself from the tangle of
canvass and mess of limbs, I began to offer a stuttering apology to Professor
Pfizi, whereupon I lost consciousness.
Professor Pfizi’s face swam across my blurred
vision. “I think he’s about to rejoin us,” he said without any apparent lip
motion.
I finished the apology I had started before
oblivion quieted my tongue. “Don’t worry about it,” the world-renowned
physicist reassured me in his famous modesty as he leaned against his cane,
looking far too youthful for such an implement and such an intellectual
stature. “I’m just glad you dropped in. As I’m sure Dr Vectra has explained to
you, we haven’t a moment to lose.”
On cue, Victoria Vectra said: “Follow me, the
head of security is waiting.”
Victoria led us around a warren of sad-looking
and slightly dilapidated 1950s buildings that some may describe as ‘retro’,
others as ‘shabby’. As we flitted from building 31 to 69 to 87, I wondered why
the numbering was so apparently random. Was it because the complex had
developed gradually and the numbering was chronological rather than physical?
Was it simply random? Or was there some complex logarithm or differential
equation which new recruits were expected to crack as part of their initiation?
We entered a long, dimly lit corridor. Disappointed
that it lacked the Kubrickesque ethereal minimalism I had expected, I consoled
myself by glancing into the gloomy interiors of the offices we passed. I
stopped outside one small lab where a scientist was scraping tiny flakes of
lead off a pencil onto a slide.
“Here at CERN, we have the world’s largest
particle accelerator but we also have the world’s smallest,” she explained
cryptically.
“He’s just sharpening his pencil onto a lab
slide,” I objected.
“Inside every pencil, there is a neutron star waiting
to get out[1].
You can conduct all kinds of quantum experiments with the graphite in a
pencil.”
“Does it make all those billions put into
building the one beneath our feet obsolete?”
“Of course, not,” Prof Pfizi voice snapped, his
bushy eyebrows crackled and his leather tie almost hissed at me like an
irritated Cobra, despite his famously calm demeanour. I could see the faintest
trace of a tear welling up in Victoria’s dark eyes. “My grandfather was
cryogenically frozen so that he could be revived when a particle smasher big
enough to answer the really big questions could be built. If we do not do
something, he may have to wait for my grandchildren to reawaken him.”
In a room further down the corridor, I saw a
thin and frugal-looking balding man of indeterminate age sitting in a lotus
position in the only empty space on his desk in his incredibly cluttered and
chaotic office. “Is he doing yoga?”
“It is less meditation and more
incapacitation,” Prof Pfizi explained, his voice cracking with sadness and
melancholy. “Dr Downer was one of the most brilliant scientists that has ever
passed through here, but now he is little more than an inanimate object.”
Dr Pfizi recounted the unfortunate quantum
physicist’s tale. His parents had been Jehovah’s Witnesses who took him, and
his four brothers and sister, along on their visits to people’s homes – like
Avon reps trying to sell the sweet scents of the Lord. People looked in
bewilderment at this small clan which cut an exotic spectacle in Birmingham:
his Dutch Indonesian father, his Scottish mother, with their mixed-race
offspring in tow.
Unlike the gates to paradise, most doors they
knocked on were summarily slammed in their face. The future Dr Downer realised
that most people did not share his parent’s burning faith, as they stood on the
front door step in the pouring rain, dressed in their identical grey raincoats,
preaching to the non-converted, particularly the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
From an early age, he was embarrassed by the identical suits – complete with
identical centre-partings – he and his brethren were made to wear. But most of
all, he was mortified by his parents’ constant preaching and their
unquestioning piety.
Before he’d even started school, he knew most
of the Biblical stories – which caused him a great deal of embarrassment with
his schoolmates. At first, he did badly in class, due to the teasing and his
lack of drive. He had decided to follow his parents’ advice and invest his
trust in the Lord whose invisible hand would guide him through all life’s
trials and tests – including, he presumed, arithmetic tests, spelling bees and
homework.
When they started teaching him evolution at
school, his parents sent him to intelligent design classes at a reformist
church – but not before exposing the school to their righteous rage. At this
point, Dr Downer lost the last tattered shreds of his religion. As he delved
into Darwinism and quantum physics, the randomness of existence both excited
and troubled him.
But, as he grew older and his research into
quantum mechanics deepened, he realised that their might be an underlying – if
still elusive – order to the apparent chaos, after all. This shook his faith in
his lack of faith and he began to wonder if there was perhaps some sort of
supreme deity, or deities. After all, if we, as humans, are evolving beyond the
confines of evolution than what is to say that other beings have not been there
before and over the eternities risen to become masters of the universe – or, at
least, one of the multiverses that might be out there. If ’t Hooft’s ideas of
an underlying state holding together quantum phenomenon in a predictable
fashion turns out to be true, then the idea of free will ultimately becomes a
mirage.
Despondent at the philosophical rollercoaster
he had ridden his entire life, Dr Downer, rather than conclude that one had
free will within certain physical limits, concluded that everything was
predetermined. “What’s the point,” he decided in a fit of angst, “if the plot
has already been written!” At which point, he retired from the world and took
up permanent residence on his desk, except when he moved to fetch his meagre
daily meal.
Round the next bend, a connecting corridor
brought us to a modern office block with hissing doors and glass-fronted
zoological cages where the domesticated staff wore dour expressions like those
displayed by animals in captivity. I assumed this was the admin section.
A chubby blonde greeted us outside Sam Colt’s
office and informed us that CERN’s head of security would be with us shortly
but he was detained by an unforeseen emergency.
Time to zero hour: 12.00 hours
Place: Colt’s
office
“We have just 12
hours to foil their plans,” Dr Colt informed us dramatically as he led us into
his office.
“We would’ve had more
than 13 hours had you not kept us waiting for so long,” noted an agitated
Victoria whose previously absolute-zero cool grey eyes were now firing
off-white mushroom clouds.
…….
During our wait,
Victoria had speculated that Colt was probably not attending to an emergency at
all, but was waiting for the right moment for the maximum dramatic timing.
“Surely, as everyone keeps reminding me, we don’t have a moment to lose,” I
exclaimed.
“Precisement,” she’d
agreed in a radiant rage. To while away the tense hour till he arrived, she
told me about Colt’s obsession with numerology and how he might well have been
with his numerologist just then, and how his compulsive superstitions had
ruined his career as a researcher at CERN.
“Is there anyone who
works in this place who is not a physicist?” I asked, incredulous.
“Non! Even Miss Piggy
there is a physicist,” she whispered, indicating Colt’s personal assistant.
…….
He took off his parka
coat to reveal a sweatshirt dangling off his skeletal frame. It bore an image
of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man and a legend reading ‘The perfect bod’!’ In the
seconds since he’d removed his coat, Colt’s hennaed hair had already deposited
a fine layer of dandruff on his shoulders. He walked towards the bank of
security monitors with his arms pushed outwards by a phantom wall of muscles.
While gazing
wistfully at the security image of one of the labs, as if he were fondly
recalling his favourite experiment, he said: “We have been receiving
intelligence that a previously unknown group calling itself the Ark of
Salvation is planning to sabotage the LHC.”
“Is it a religious
group?” asked Victoria.
“No, we think they
are eco-warriors,” Colt said, adopting an inexplicably smug tone.
“Do you mean they are
worried about the economy?” I asked.
“No, they are
ecological crusaders,” he explained irritably.
“Haflatoun, we must
find out what they are up to,” Victoria implored. “The accelerator hasn’t even
run its first experiments yet.”
“We believe that they
have set up a camp somewhere in the French Alps,” Colt briefed us. “You need to
find out where they are and what they plan to do.”
_______
Next time, Haflatoun and Victoria Vectra
uncover intrigue at the Geneva Music Festival and plans to steal the show at an
international gathering in Davos. Disappointed that they didn’t get the big
bang they expected on 31 December 1999, a secret new-age sect have reason to
believe that the world will come to an end with the ‘actual’ new
millennium (11 September 2007, according to the Ethiopian calendar).
Time to zero hour: 17.47 hours
