Voice Off. Certain human societies inculcate in their young a belief in innate human goodness. To police those same societies a belief in universal human culpability has also to be impressed upon their police officers. Such counter expectations create a fluctuating imbalance in both those individuals and those societies.
When the last of the visitors leave, with nothing else to attract his attention, the man once more looks inside himself, mulls over — in light of what he has learnt from the detective — his ignorance of himself. Northampton? Mid-thirties? Criminal?
The other patients exchange the news their visitors brought them, drink their coffee, or watch their small televisions. He listens to the television nearest him, remarks on its familiarity, its filling the airwaves with chatter and jingles. Will the radio be new?
Following the example of another patient he unhooks the headphones from the wall behind the bed. The moment he hears it — a DJ cheerily warbling — he knows that it is what he expected.
Two of the nurses push a wooden-sided drugs trolley around the ward. His buttocks have gone numb from sitting up in bed. He shifts onto his side. The blonde nurse tells him that no medication has been prescribed, but if he can't sleep to let her know and she will ask the duty doctor for something.
The drugs trolley completes its rounds. He pees in his flask. Some of the patients switch on their angled bedlamps to read, some settle to sleep. The nurses switch off the ward televisions, then the ward's ceiling lights. One low bulb remains on in the centre or the ward, above a table. Two patients are still in the television room. The blonde nurse sees him still sitting awkwardly up in bed, rearranges his pillows for him, helps him down the bed. She tells him that he'll probably awake in the morning remembering everything.
Looking up at the dim squared ceiling, the idea of becoming unconscious again frightens him. He listens to the single separate sounds of the ward, a bed creaking, a man's choked cough. Northampton? Every answer begs more questions, his ignorance of himself seeming to endlessly increase. Does he have a family? Disconcerting to think of a group of people he doesn't know intimately concerned for him. He tries to imagine, from what he has seen of the other patients' visitors, what his own family of different-sized strangers will look like. That they should know more about him than he does makes their situation unfair, unnatural, makes him afraid of meeting them.
A nurse's shoes stick and unstick from the polished floor as she passes the end of his bed. A whispered conversation: nurse soothing an anxious patient. He hears a bedside light click off further down the ward. He listens. He sleeps.
Voice Off. Identity depends on the type of human society to which one belongs. In a small structured tribal society identity depends only on whose son or daughter one happens to be, and to which sub-grouping of the tribe one's family belongs. In a loose largely unstructured society identity depends on other peculiarities such as one's given name, one’s income, one's possessions, one’s education, one's accent and one's aspirations within that society. In such a society one's status is mostly self-imagined, is influenced by the other people one has chosen to know and one’s remembered experience of that society. With so much more to remember, amnesia in such a society is far more traumatic.
The observatory is a brick tower. Surrounding the tower, beyond oblong lawns, are squat blocks of brick and glass offices. On the flat top of the tower is the telescope. The scope's protective coverings are hinged open making the tower look like a nestling stretching its stringy neck up out of a cubist nest, gaping beak open to the stars.
Within that tower, below the scope, are rooms full of arcane equipment. Barry Tappell curses that equipment.
Las Palmas being down — a recurrent fault there resulting in a 24 hour shutdown for a complete overhaul — he had a whole free night on the scope here to catch up on and fill in the gaps in his research. A perfect night for dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Even if a short summer's night. An anticyclone stationary over Northern France, no moon, the evening mist blown offshore by a light breeze... and technology has failed him.
And what primitive technology. Computer enhanced images from a 98 inch reflector. Prehistoric! Like mounting a radar on a horse and cart. So dependent on the day/night rotation of the planet Earth; and, of course, the English weather. He can't, though, blame the weather tonight.
His object of study is Sheliak, an eclipsing variable in the Lyre constellation. A constant does not excite the human curiosity. Variables are also more scientifically attractive in that they are amenable to qualification and quantification.
The eclipse is now in the sixth day of its 13 day cycle, its magnitude 5.71. All is an earthbound astronomer's dream. And technology has failed him.
Had Barry Tappell been unquestionably ordinary then Barry Tappell is convinced that he'd now be using satellite reflectors, be a 24 hour a day astronomer, be in the van of apace exploration. But oh no, mediocrity rules the day, no-one is allowed to act that differently. And all he did was to fall worshipfully in love. She fell worriedly pregnant. She didn't want the baby, nor him. He fell into despair.
He had believed in singleminded women like his mother, women prepared to subjugate themselves for another life, for the new life. He had believed in women who fiercely made their children their cause, who believed in themselves. The woman he loved negated her sex and aborted his seed.
Wanting to understand, and be loved again; wanting to do the right thing, and unable to find out what it was, he first questioned the worth of his own existence, then of all existence.
"What worth a human life?" he asked of shoppers passing by. Then he withdrew into a depression so deep that he lost two years of study. Such human fallibility consigned him to this second-rate zoo.
Were Barry to go to even a second-rate American zoo he'd more than treble his wages. But, because he has had to do battle with establishments to prove his suitability to continue with his education, he is effectively barred from any brain drain.
What true scientist, though, has ever placed pecuniary reward high on their list of requirements; the facilities are ultimately what matter. And the Americans, just to rub salt in the career wound, have the facilities as well as the wages.
At times of frustration like these Barry feels as tainted by his youthful idealism as a failed revolutionary; and he is as angered that the establishment won't forgive or forget. The injustice irks him. One youthful aberration and he is marked as unstable for the rest of his tedious life...
For all his reflection and self-justification, the inescapable present is that he is stuck here in a castle in a steaming marsh, like a mad scientist in a gothic nightmare. Except that those marsh-bound and sinister scientists usually had machines that worked.
Barry's doesn't. This zoo's egotistical benefactor's pursuit of posterity is a penny-pinching affair.
The prestige projects which attract the bigger egos and the bigger money now all belong to the Mullard zoo and the Royal Observatory on Mount Ichea, Hawaii. As if Hawaii didn't already have the weather. Here in this Sussex bog Barry has to make do with obsolete leftovers, hand-me-downs, technological crumbs.
Every five minutes this night this particular technological crumb gives a facsimile printout. The first printout came at 10:30, clarified as the night deepened. At 11:25 he noticed a faint line to the right of Sheliak, down through Vega. The line went from top to bottom of the page, almost like an overlap, bringing Vega too close to Sheliak. Neither the printer's ribbon nor the paper feed was at fault.
Checking back he found that the line first appeared at 11:05, its distorting effect increasing with every five minute printout. He enters the fault in the log, loses two printouts clearing the computer, reloading the program and giving it his co-ordinates. At 11:36 the line is darker still. At 11:41 it has centred on Sheliak If it stays there the night's work is ruined.
