Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [18]
The vocalist commenced singing on the record. She enquired in a voice rich with hip irony whether the listeners had seen pastures groovy. Several couples began to dance. Even the Doctor was swaying. Cosmic Ray had his eyes squeezed shut and was listening in stunned rapture.
With silky, syncopated cynicism the singer belted out in conclusion that Green Pastures was nothing other than the title of a Technicolor movie.
Everybody in the room was dancing now with the exception of a sulking Fuchs, a dour and suspicious Butcher and, curiously, Ray himself. He stood utterly still as he listened. His eyes were shut, his countenance upturned as if the sun was shining down on him. His fat, goateed face was glistening and as Ace bopped across the Oppenheimers’ sun-faded Navajo rug on what had suddenly become the dance floor, the Doctor squiring her with some swinging moves of his own, she realised they were the wet traces of tears.
‘Babies,’ said Cosmic Ray. ‘Little babies, dig this beautiful music. Like a big beautiful bubble blown by everything sweet and hip and groovy in the glowing heart of the cosmos. Dig the way that rainbow bubble shines so beautiful. But know this cats and kittens, if you only knew how fragile that bubble is.’
The Doctor had stopped dancing. He stood staring at Ray like a hound trained for a very special hunt, who had finally spotted his prey.
‘If only you knew, sweet groovers,’ said Ray, ‘how close this music came to not existing at all.’
The big man began to cry.
31
Chapter Three
Cactus Needles
The following day, Ace stood in front of a blackboard in a sunlit block of space, chalk dust rising around her, sunlight falling through it in a luminous veil. The sunlight came from a high window in a classroom in the old riding school.
She didn’t know if the riding school had ever had much use for blackboards in its day, but the jokers using the premises now certainly did. The rooms were assigned to groups of physicists, working in twos or threes, and the blackboards in every classroom were crammed with equations.
This particular room was shared by Ace and a science geek called Abner Apple. The guy was a professor, despite his youth. But that wasn’t so unusual here on the Hill where it seemed everyone had a doctorate – with the possible exception of the Doctor.
In any case, Ace had never thought of the man as anything but Adam’s Apple since she first saw him, due to the scrawny, knobbly jut of his neck. Professor Apple’s big head swayed on top of that knobbly neck, a shining dome covered with just the finest fuzz of colourless hair.
Apple was an egghead. A young one, but just as set in his quirks as the oldest, most irascible professor. He was standing in front of the blackboard with Ace, surrounded by the smell of freshly rising chalk. She hated that smell. The school smell.
The young physicist stood there, his big eyes staring down at her from his big shiny head, like a bird watching a worm. ‘Well?’ he said.
Ace returned her eyes to the blackboard. It was crammed from corner to corner with a complex tangle of scribbled equations. Numbers and abstruse mathematical signs were dotted everywhere. It was a big, complex chunk of a much vaster scientific calculation that was taking place here at Los Alamos, the unholy equation of maths and physics and chemistry that would determine the possibility, the probability, the feasibility of fashioning a doomsday weapon.
It meant nothing to Ace.
She stared up at the dense mess of technical squiggles on the blackboard, the scattered mass of numbers, clumped here and there, some big, some small.
And it meant nothing to her. Adam’s Apple was staring at her as she felt her face get hot. Ace silently cursed herself. Why hadn’t she listened to the 33
Doctor? He was always banging on at her about her remembering to take the damned thing.
Maybe she had deliberately not taken it, out of spite, or out of some sub-conscious spark of rebellion. That’s certainly what Henbest, the psychiatrist on the Hill, would have said. The goatish man had bored