The Strange Attractor (6 page)

The plane took off on time, anyway.

Driving back, Dobie slipped one of his favourite tapes into the cassette-player. The C major string quintet, K.515. But not even the lilt of the opening theme did much to soothe his sense of unease. At the roundabout he turned left, heading not back home but for Culverhouse Cross and Cardiff. He didn’t want to go back to the flat. Not just yet.

He stopped some way short of the castle and got out the street map. Ludlow Road was off the City Road and appeared to be a cul-de-sac. There was, as he soon discovered, nothing very prepossessing about it; the usual drab late-Victorian houses ran to either side of it, alleviated here and there by glass shop frontages. About halfway down on the left-hand side, however, someone had plonked down a modern supermarket of modest size, its windows filled with posters announcing various cut-price offers and bearing the pine-tree logo of a well-known supermarket chain. Dobie, parking opposite, wondered if there was anything he wanted to buy but couldn’t think of anything; Jenny would certainly have left the pantry shelves and the fridge well stocked. Number 12, almost directly opposite, was a solidly-built (as Kate had said) two-storey construction conforming pretty much to the general and depressing pattern of the other houses in the street; it bore, however, an inscribed plaque which said:

DR CAITLIN COYLE

Consulting Hours

1000 - 1230

1700 - 1900

Three worn stone steps led up to the front door. Dobie climbed them.

Cantwell’s rooms were decidedly a cut above the usual student digs. Luxurious, no. But spacious and comfortable. Two armchairs, adequately cushioned, had been placed to either side of a three-bar electric fire with two small tables conveniently adjacent; the bed, on the far side of the room, was plumply mattressed and an electric radio-cum-alarm-clock stood on the night table, its large digital figures greenly glowing. Nearby was an enormous wardrobe, Edwardian in its majesty, and an almost equally capacious chest of drawers. Along the far wall were shelves that held a couple of dozen textbooks, a rather swish Sony cassette-player and a few cassette boxes, while right-angled to it was a work-desk, much less impressively dimensioned than the monstrosity in Dickie Bird’s office but sizeable, none the less, offering adequate space for an IBM computer and monitor, a Smith Corona word processor and several loose-leaf notebooks. “Is all this stuff valuable?” Kate asked. “It looks as though it might be.”

“I wouldn’t throw any of it away. IBM computers aren’t cheap.”

“I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Pack it up,” Dobie suggested, “until the next of kin claims it. There was an uncle or something, wasn’t there? I don’t know what the legal position is otherwise. Did he leave a will?”

“I don’t think so. Anyway I’ve no idea how you… disassemble the thing.”

“I can do that for you, if you like. I’ll find some boxes. Of course you don’t know the guy’s address.”

“The uncle? No. I doubt if he’s even been notified.”

“Didn’t he have an address book?” Dobie had opened one of the notebooks and was glancing through it.

“If he did, nobody’s found it.”

“He may have got it on database.”

“On what?”

“On the computer. Did the police check on it? Probably not, if the one I spoke to’s anything to go by. He didn’t hold with computers and all that modern
rubbish.”

“Who was that?”

“Superintendent Pontin.”

“Oh, Pontin, yes. He’s a right berk. Crowd control at football matches, that’s what he likes best. Reckons he could improve on Hillsborough if they gave him a chance and I bet he bloody well would.”

“He certainly wasn’t very informative,” Dobie admitted. He swivelled the desk chair around and seated himself at the computer. “We may get more cooperation out of this. Let’s see.”

Kate watched him as his fingers first stroked, then tapped the keyboard, his gaze focused the while on the monitor screen. “You’re one of those clever buggers, are you?”

“You don’t have to be very clever. Just persistent.”

“Professor of Mathematics and all.”

The fingers didn’t pause. “Yes. But
I
didn’t tell you that.”

“I checked you out,” Kate said.

She saw that an elliptical figure had appeared on the monitor screen. Another then walked across to superimpose itself on the first. Then another. The fingers stopped tapping. Instead they reached across for the notebook, flipped through its pages. Paused again.

“Ah,” Dobie said.

Tap. Tap. Tap. The figure on the screen began to spin round on itself, fluctuating wildly. Kate’s head had now moved close to Dobie’s as they stared at it together. “
That’s
what he was doing,” Dobie said.

“What?”

“He was looking for a strange attractor.”

“A
what
?”

“There it is. See?”

“All I can see is a circle thing spinning round.”

Dobie tapped another key and the shape disappeared. Just like that.

“No addresses. No database. Just some work he brought home.”

“Oh well. You tried.”

Dobie was turning the pages of the notebook again. “He was using a fairly simple Lorenz equation. But some of the others here are a bit more complex. Anyway, it all has to do with what’s called the butterfly effect.”

“And what’s that?”

“It’s the effect on global climate which is brought about by a single beat of a butterfly’s wings. It’s sort of a hypothetical… Ah. I can see you think I’m joking.”

“Mathematicians don’t joke, do they?”

“Don’t they just?” Dobie leaned back in his chair, a little tiredly. “The whole of advanced mathematics these days is just one huge practical joke. Because that’s what the universe appears to be. Beyond a certain point there’s no rhyme or reason to it. So what you do is, you try to locate that point. The point at which the scientifically predictable ceases to be so. In wave mechanics, things like that.”

“You mean the butterfly is the fly in the ointment.”

“In so far as you’d
like
things to be predictable, yes. And physicists certainly do. But mathematics isn’t like that. If everything’s predictable, life’s bound to get a bit damned dull. And mathematics
can’t
be dull, by definition. There’s always got to be something to find out or there’s no point in doing it at all.”

“Funny,” Kate said. “Most people think just the opposite.”

“That’s because they know it can’t happen. Maybe for a while things can go round and round in a nice smooth orbit, like you saw on the screen there. But then some unknown factor, like the butterfly, interferes and attracts the particles – pulls them out of the pattern. And it all goes haywire. We call that factor a strange attractor. It’s
strange
in the sense of
alien
, something that can’t be included in the original equation. It’s quite a frivolous little object otherwise.”

“Is that how you spend your time? Chasing frivolous little objects?”

“For months on end,” Dobie said. “They’re elusive. They take a lot of catching. And when you’ve caught one, as like as not you don’t know what to do with it. I suspect that’s what happened to Sammy. In the end he left it where it was. Trapped inside the computer.”

“Poor little thing,” Kate said. “I know how it feels.”

“Yes,” Dobie said. “So do I.”

He got up and went to sit down in one of the armchairs instead. Yes. Very comfy. It wasn’t a bad little room at all. He liked it here.

“… I’ve just seen my wife off at the airport. She’s gone to Paris.”

Kate sat down opposite him, not properly but perching herself on the upholstered arm. “Gone for long?”

“No,” Dobie said. “Not for long.”

“Is that another dismantling job you have to do?”

“I don’t know,” Dobie said.

“Better dismantled than broken into pieces, don’t you think?”

“That seems logical, Captain. But then we’re not all Mister Spocks. People
aren’t
logical.”

“Women even less so than men?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“More subject to their emotions, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. Or to strange attractors.”

“How long have you been married, anyway?”

“Not quite a year.”

“Oh well, shit, you have to give it a bit more of a chance than
that
.”

“That’s what I can’t help feeling,” Dobie admitted.

The noise of an aircraft, passing high overhead, came to them both as a distant whisper.

Friday morning. End of term. Everybody frantically trying to finish marking exam papers, except for Dobie. He’d finished his already. But there was a packet of stuff just arrived from George Campbell at MIT, six mini-discs loaded with computations, and to judge from George’s accompanying letter some of the new sets were exciting. “That should keep you busy through the summer,” Mary Mayfield said. Mary Mayfield was the departmental secretary. She was very nice.

“What about your own plans? Spain again this year?”

“Yes, I got an early booking. I’m off Monday. Six nice long weeks on the Costa del Concrete, should be fun.”

“I’m sure it will be,” Dobie said. “I expect my wife’s got something up her sleeve for me. But I don’t know what it is.”

“She’s in the business, isn’t she? So she ought to… Oh, by the way. Telephone call for you. Earlier this morning.”

“What, from Jenny?”

“No. A Mrs Corder.” Mary was checking the indecipherable scrawl on her notepad. “Eight o’clock tonight, was that right?”

“Yes, you needn’t have bothered. I hadn’t forgotten.”

“Well, she says can you make it at her place instead of yours?”

The Corders’ house was the far side of Porthkerry Park, twenty miles distant at least with some nasty bumpy stretches. Dobie sighed. “I suppose so.”

“That’s good because I said you could.”

At five o’clock, to make matters worse, it started to rain and by half-past seven it was pelting. Doubtless, Dobie thought as he peered astigmatically through the blurred windscreen, Jane that morning had had a peremptory word with a passing butterfly and her resultant accurate assessment of the forthcoming global climate had decided her to conduct such interviews as she had arranged for that evening cosily at home. It was, after all, a very palatial home. Dobie had only visited it two or three times before, but he had been impressed. You were
meant
to be impressed. It was placed on a narrow promontory thrusting out across the Bristol Channel, so close to the sea that in rough weather the waves sloshed right across the portholes, and its trendy-architect bungalow design included all manner of refinements and creature comforts, which (or so Dobie hoped) might well include a little something to warm the cockles, after a drive like this one. The house was called Pantmawr. Nobody knew why. Though of course you had to call it something.

There was a large gravelled space outside where Dobie halted his steed, punctiliously leaving a clear space through to the front gate from the double garage in the corner (which anyway was closed). He checked the time before getting out. Three minutes to eight. Very punctual. The rain was still fairly whizzing down and he felt in no great hurry to leave his agreeably bottom-warmed car seat. To the south the horizon was dark with scudding clouds, black as a kookaburra’s khyber and obscuring what on a less inhospitable evening would have been a spectacular sunset. He could just make out a few vague lights twinkling half-heartedly on the Somerset coast. The prospect of a little something continued to beckon him and he got out of the car and squelched purposefully over to the front door, loose gravel crunching under his feet.

Tie straight? Flies zipped up?

Yes.

About to press the doorbell, he saw that a sheet of paper had been folded and tucked neatly under the brass knocker that provided an alternative, if unseemly, method of announcing one’s arrival. He took it and unfolded it. It said:

BACK SOON PLEASE GO IN

MAKE  YOURSELF AT HOME

This message had been typed in red, for some unfathomable reason, and Jane’s squiggly signature appended in purple ink. Dobie tried the door. It was open all right. And of course all this was typical. He went through into the hallway, left his raincoat on a convenient hook and walked on into the sitting-room, which seemed to be rather more than comfortably warm. Central heating on, in midsummer. Probably no one had bothered to turn it off.

He glanced at the note again before dropping it on to one of the side tables. He wondered what SOON meant. Probably anything from five to forty-five minutes. At least it was clear what MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME meant, and he saw that a whisky decanter and tumbler had been placed on a table beside the cocktail bar, in a shaded alcove on the far side of the room. Jane was an irritating woman, but she had her points. It was five past eight now and the sun well over the yardarm, time for a stengah, what?… Dobie giggled foolishly to himself as he listened to the pleasant trickle of Glenlivet Double Malt tilting into the waiting tumbler; there was something a bit memsahib-ish about old Jane, with her ruthless concern for the welfare of the natives and other lesser breeds without the law, such as men in general. Give ’em whisky and make ’em wait; in university circles she’d end up a Vice-Chancellor, nothing was more certain. Whereas Jenny…