Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [28]
‘Not working at all.’ Brett strolled to the window and looked out at the comfortable view. Field and forest. Very Wind in the Willows, very Merrie Old England. Burn it all. Burn this house – he ran his eyes over the seventeenth-century oak panelling and the tapestries and stained glass, and Unwin slouched in a leather club chair. This decaying, shameful country, lost with its empire.
Destroy and replace it. Let Jerusalem be builded here. ‘You’re supposed to be the genius.’
‘I am the genius!’ Unwin’s consonants were a little muddy, but he wasn’t really drunk. He wished he were. He wanted badly to be drunk. ‘The computations are. . . You can’t imagine. You can’t imagine the complexity. You think you’ve had a good day if you balance your chequebook.’
‘My business manager does that for me,’ Brett said languidly. ‘Our friends on the other side seem displeased. I can’t say I blame them.’
‘To hell with them.’
‘We’re letting down our side.’
‘It’s not my fault!’ Unwin banged his glass down on the table. ‘It’s not my fault if the equations are so bloody. . . Unnatural. That’s what they are.’
‘Well, what do you expect?’
Unwin put his face in his hands and began to weep hysterically. Brett grimaced. Histrionics annoyed him. But he had to comfort this spineless bastard, get him back on his feet. He gave Unwin a reassuring, manly pat on the shoulder and sat down opposite him. ‘Now, my lad,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, ‘you mustn’t let it get to you. Naturally it’s frustrating. Nothing like this has ever been done. I don’t mean something equivalent has never been done, I mean nothing. Ever. Since this little speck was spawned.’
‘Exactly,’ Unwin sniffled. ‘Why not give me credit for the extraordinarily difficult things I’ve accomplished? All this nagging.’
Chapter Seven
61
‘You feel unappreciated.’
‘I am bloody unappreciated.’ Unwin rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. The drinks had suddenly made themselves felt. ‘And I’m drunk. Oh God I’m drunk.
I didn’t know I was drunk.’
‘Cognac sneaks up on you,’ said Brett, although he knew this wasn’t exactly true. Four Cognacs bolted down couldn’t be said, in any sense of the word, to sneak.
‘I’m not getting enough help.’
‘It’s your help that’s needed,’ Brett said supportively. ‘It can’t be done without you. Where would I be without you, old man. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when I’m nasty it’s out of envy. I barely scraped a third, you know. I’m dependent on you. Makes me feel useless, say things I shouldn’t.’
Unwin took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘How did you get your position then, with only a third?’ He sounded somewhat appeased.
‘Family connections, obviously. Really, Unwin, you know how the system works. But you got your position,’ he continued admiringly, ‘on brains.’
‘My family is not exactly unimportant.’
‘No, no, certainly not. Not what I meant at all.’
‘I may not have your lineage, but through my mother’s second cousin we go back to the Plantagenets.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Brett, wondering how long he was going to have to keep this up.
‘That damned circle. Who made it?’
‘I’d like to know that,’ Brett said slowly. ‘I’d like to know that very much.
However, even without that interference, I don’t believe they’d have made it through. The pattern breaks off like it did before.’
‘How did you get those papers that let us onto the site?’
‘I have my sources. I have my little ways.’
Unwin slid down in the chair, his head back. Brett presumed he’d passed out and was about to shake him and get him to bed when Unwin said, ‘Some of the computations they want don’t make any sense.’
‘I thought none of it made any sense.’
‘This is different. They don’t match the others. It’s as if I’m working on two different problems. Prime numbers. I explained primes to you.’
‘Many times.’
‘But this second problem, these primes equations, are similar to code-breaking.’
‘Well, you’re good at that, aren’t you?’
62
The Algebra of Ice
‘But why two problems? They’re quite different sets of equations.’
Brett sensed an abstruse lecture coming. He