The Theory That Got Us Cancelled Might Win Us the Nobel Prize

The Theory That Got Us Cancelled Might Win Us the Nobel Prize

Thomas Dunn

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The Idols by Thomas Dunn

Just before the end, when we talked about those first text messages, we found that we’d all imagined the same—that the Ministry had been discussing the findings for weeks before they contacted us. In fact (as Tomas later told me) when all our phones pinged that Saturday morning it was a little less than two hours after they had confirmed them.

The messages came in a stream of three very long SMSs, our names written in capital letters so they looked a lot like the automatic texts I used to get from my daughters’ school.

With the exception of Tomas, it had been twenty-five years since we’d been allowed to work in our doctoral fields. As we realized what the messages were, we all had the same sense of bewilderment that the Ministry knew our numbers. When we met the next morning at Terminal 2, we were full of theories why—if the texts were to be believed—they had contacted us, of all people: the discredited members of the King’s Ecography Institute class of 2002.

Were our ideas about to be re-evaluated? H shook his head, his eyes even bluer now with his hair grey. During the years of his distinguished career in the army and subsequent work as a security consultant, I had accomplished pretty much nothing. Yes, he said, the sightings were in the outer rings of the Arctic Circle as we’d imagined, but the text messages had described the objects as having “arrived”—our theses had used the word “exposed.”

Honestly I remembered hardly anything of my thesis. After packing, I’d spent that Saturday evening hunting the old floppy disks and our noisy disk drive. And even then David needed to download something that would open such an old document. About midnight he called out that he’d got it working.

It’s brilliant, he said when I came in, You were so clever.

Maybe he was right, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

And the next day, hearing H make such small distinctions, it was strange to recall I’d also once been so definite a person. It seemed almost a betrayal of my younger myself, but now I feel knowing things is less like a decisive seizing and more like a lapping motion. Maybe it’s having found a way to bring up kids, but I’m not so sure I believe in information anymore—it feels much more something like faith.

Back then, I think we were simply bound together by the force of Mikel’s will power—even in the middle of our loudest arguments, when he leant forward, his jet black hair arching down, we would fall quiet. There’d been seven of us; although, without poor Ulla now, Joanna and I were the only women.

We didn’t talk much in Heathrow. We didn’t know if the trip would go ahead and, if so, how long for. It was too late to book leave from the library so I’d planned to call in sick the next day.

I can’t see this going ahead, I’d told David in bed the previous night, Tomas is supposed to have planned it but I’ve never seen him arrange so much as a train ticket.

Mm, said David half-asleep, think of it as a nice break.

Look, said H.

Peeling off from within the crowds in Departures, my eyes were drawn to the long, slightly asymmetrical stride of Tomas as he approached and vaguely, soberly shook all our hands. Amazing to think of him as the same person as before, now team leader and liaison with the Ministry, after everything. He had grown, very strangely, quite handsome—all of his old quirks now oddly becoming, a blend of the celebrated professor we saw in newspapers and on TV and the awkward, wide-eyed nuisance we had helped to his doctorate. He had been something like our group’s ongoing pet project, something like an in-joke—at Tomas’ expense, we imagined.

Mikel had once described Tomas setting up the theodolite so reluctantly, he said, it had appeared like a child he’d been asked to adopt. With all the instruments, in fact, he harboured a suspicion that verged on mistrust; the measurements he recorded often had more decimal places than it was possible to read, and sometimes, with the electronic instruments, more decimal places than they showed. We all used to do the same impersonation of Tomas, half-shutting our eyes and retracting our chins in the manner of his lugubrious guppy mouth, talking in that strained monotone as if forever suppressing a yawn.

On every one of those expeditions he would have his responsibilities taken off him one by one. He seemed simply out of his depth. But, watching his rise over the years from a distance, I think his brazen disregard for the work was his way of wanting to be in on the joke.

We kept him with us because of his talent for negotiating the hierarchy. While we imagined it wouldn’t be long before the Academy exposed him, instead, every funding application, Expedition Assessment, CPD document, in fact everything he wrote in the short history of the Ecography department, was approved without question. In a way that should have proved a warning for us, Tomas’ success with the board sometimes made even us question our sense of superiority.

And when, on publication of our collective thesis, our group was accused of being “unsound,” his name was never mentioned. During the months of the tribunal he was on a dig in China and wasn’t called to the hearing. For many years, he was silent on it all: while he was making professor; in the early years of his unavoidably public marriage to Carmen Fernandoa; during his tenure at Boston. It was only in the year after his even more public divorce that he wrote the book about our group, Dawn of the Idols, which renewed our moment of infamy that whole autumn, a constant stream of reviews, opinion pieces, TV appearances and general hand-wringing from everyone our group had ever offended. Dawn of the Idols was probably the main reason none of us said much to him at Heathrow.

Although, personally, any hatred or incredulity that I’d once felt towards him had become, with distance, more like incredulity and then, with the turning of more—twenty two?—years, something almost a bit like wonder.

And, in fact, as I look back now, his book was only the finale to a near-constant series of resentments and bitternesses amongst us; they had accompanied our work so closely we thought them a side-effect of our astonishing progress. And, probably proportionately, now we knew our work counted for nothing, all of our old rivalries were something more like wearied solidarity.

Looking back, it seemed so important that we felt every development; more concerned with the idea of “bouncing off each other”—whether that be throwing glasses or fucking each other, in both of which I was foremost among sinners.

Just as everyone said, maybe we had been too young. There’d certainly been a suspicion of us being straight out of our MScs and suddenly leading a new field of research—a suspicion now that I would completely share.

To this day, when I wake in the dead of night filled with shame, I wonder what would have happened if, as Tomas wrote in Dawn of the Idols, we’d “just done more science.”

Instead of reading my thesis that Saturday night, I got down my copy of Dawn of the Idols and watched the pages unfold and fall open to the page on my work: “In a largely impressionistic account of the Displacement and its initial Migration phase, she seemed to attend less to scientific causality than making her conclusions accord to the poetic possibilities of her wording.”

Looked at by different metrics, our youth seems at once many lifetimes ago and, also, just yesterday. At the time of our last field trip more than two decades ago, David and I had only just met and we missed each other terribly. This time, both girls were at university and he was so busy running down the last year of an ill-conceived professorship that I do not think we exchanged more than a handful of WhatsApps during those first few days. Though I was hardly ever busy, there was never a message I felt was honest enough to send him.

My old Arctic jacket was in the loft but—I don’t know why—I did not get it out and so met everyone wearing the thin puffer I wear to walk the dog.

We were only in Oslo an hour before taking our second flight on to S—, a city on the northern coast, within the Arctic circle. Descending over the fjords and islands, the pilot said that taking photos was forbidden because the Norwegian Airforce had a station here. 

At the airport we were introduced to Tomas’ assistant, Martha: tall, glasses, young, as brusque and impersonal as Tomas. Martha came out last night, Tomas said.

She’d hired a minivan. Always the pilot, H drove. We left the airport and turned east past a small, brand new city, bound for L— , a port town on the north coast of a neighbouring peninsula. Among the backseats, Martha and Tomas sat next to each other and talked in low voices. Like sitting behind my parents on the long drives of my childhood, I could make out the fricatives and sibilance of their conversation but no words. Because she seemed so unemotional, I wondered what Martha had heard or thought about us.

Since we’d last seen each other we had lived the same length of life again. Time doubled. I imagined the years would accrue like rings in a tree trunk, but instead they’ve come to feel like a series of more and more windows, each one a further silencing, a further distancing from the person I hoped I would become, until without any moment of ceremony or anyone to blame, I am suddenly forty-eight and half-deaf in loud places, constantly steeled against anything new, wondering, when I meet people in their twenties or even thirties how they manage to be so young.

The poetic possibilities of her wording—I remember a feverish conversation with H about the similarity between our predictions and versions of a local myth.

“Like a cloud, so fled all the birds in the sky.”

“A new god, stood to its middle in the sea, the world around filling with gold.”

On the drive, the lakes and valleys and mountains were initially breathtaking but quickly grew so constant as to feel merely repetitions of each other, so much so that moving between the familiar fjords gnawed away at my sense of purpose. It took four hours almost exactly—over bridges, through tunnels and along the veering coastline—although, H called back from the driver’s seat, the distance we’d covered was less than ten miles as the crow flies.

After an hour or so Mikel said that we’d not passed a single car since leaving S—, after which I began to notice the complete absence of people. There were no telegraph poles, no planes, the only town on the signposts was our destination of L—. And through the prehistoric terrain, the yellow markings on the black road were each so flawless that it came to feel like we might be the first ones on it, to feel as if all the effort and expense of making the road—the metre-by-metre planning and excavations to make a 200 kilometre thoroughfare—was so mysterious that it seemed there purely to carry us along. The sense of isolation grew so deep that I was surprised when, passing lakes, we’d see the odd boat at the water’s edges.

Other than that, I caught myself watching H’s blue eyes in the rear-view mirror.

It was all so . . . strangely fine. Sat amongst ghosts I’d dreamed of longer than I’d known my kids, heading out of the habitable world towards something unthinkable I’d probably invented in my youth, I experienced nothing like the despair I get when David and I take weekend breaks to English market towns.

We drew into L— that evening. After the nothingness all afternoon it was strange to see a conurbation approaching. Rising above the houses and the long suspension bridge were a number of church spires and the vastness of three great boat hangars. Fishing communities have the greatest density of churches per household, said Mikel. Had he always been so prosaically factual?

I found myself oddly affected by the daylit floodlights and the way they made the space around the boat hangars a uniform white. Now on the other side of all that nothingness, here was humanity again, with all its anxieties about man-hours and quota fulfilment and—the only thing that ever saves an island town from atrocity—incessant trade. Under the arc lights, the spidery shadows of the workers on the hangar walls gave me a familiar feeling of guilt and remoteness and unasked-for privilege, so that my experience of L— was that it mocked the idleness of my every-day life.

H parked up in a back street—we got out noisily and stretched. Joanna did the old skit: When will it get dark? 

Let’s see, said H, checking his watch, savouring all our delight, In ooh . . . about a fortnight.

I could have kissed him.

We stood around for a while until I realized Martha was talking to me.

Oh, I’m so sorry, I said.

I said I read your paper. 

Oh God, I said, It must seem like such nonsense.

If I’d read it any other week, I would have thought you were crazy, she replied. But now I think I was terrified how accurate you were. If we find what I think we will, you will probably get the Nobel.

Probably just lucky guesses, I said, delighted. 

You’re being modest. This must be a strange time for you.

Maybe, I said, I think the strangest thing is how normal it all feels. Have you ever gone back to anything after twenty years away? 

I don’t know, said Martha, Twenty years ago I was three.

They’d arranged an AirBnB for the night, after which we’d set out next morning. The project was meant to be top secret (What a childish expression, Joanna said) and Tomas worried we would be conspicuous in a small town like this. But L— was full of tourists and we were only one of a great many similar-looking expeditions.

Beneath the bright sun of early night time, there was a drip of déjà vu, a memory so vague that if it had occurred in my normal life would not have seemed like mine but, stood there at just that moment, solidified then, to feel like I was waking after a long and tedious dream.

While the restaurants were full, we decided to draw the van as close as we could to the harbour and carry the equipment onboard.

God, that boat, said Ronnie, rubbing his head, It’s even older than us. 

Martha had chartered an old tourist boat, a sixty-footer with coffin berths in the stern; my ability to parse boats, it seemed, had not faded. It might long ago have been adequate for a voyage like ours, though now it was hired only for sightseeing trips around the local coastline. If it had been anything other than the height of summer I don’t know if we’d have survived more than a few days on it. 

We left our things below the for’ard deck. In the gloom, H’s old army kitbag lay like a corpse beside our wheelie suitcases. Crammed into the inside of the prow lay the dark machinery of the satellite system, which was—unknown to us at the time—the real reason Martha had had no option but charter this boat. 

Tomas commandeered the cabin at the rear of the ship. Setting up HQ here, he said distractedly to no one. Martha following him in, two laptop bags crisscrossed over her chest like a bandido.

I’d stuffed my puffer in a bin in the toilet at Oslo airport and bought a very expensive jacket in Duty-Free. Martha was to stay in the town for the six days we were away, which was (typically for Tomas) the first time we’d heard how long the trip was to be. 

We checked through the inventory, H holding the huge wrench like a tommy gun. Stick ‘em up, he said with a levity that surprised me.

That was the first time I really understood: we might be only a few days away from finally, a lifetime later, being proved right. I laughed and hugged him, leant all my weight on him. The Ministry’s text messages had said: Of all the paradigms used to understand the findings, they appear nearest to the object your team once predicted would arrive at the same approximate longitude.

Then, as if we’d summoned it, Martha’s phone went off.

The Ministry, she mouthed at me and passed it to Tomas. 

Hello, he said, Yes, it’s in my pocket. He frowned. No, he said indignantly, no, I don’t care for its stealing of one’s focus.

We all smiled at Tomas’ great importance in the world.

He listened for a long time, nodding into the phone; then afterwards, he handed the phone back to Martha and looked round, seemingly surprised we were waiting for him. Almost begrudgingly, he said: In a nutshell, there’s been intercepted traffic. The upshot of which is we have been prioritised and, among other operational factors, we have to leave immediately, as in the next half an hour. If the traffic is credible, we are neck and neck. We now know there are other forces responding to news of the sightings.

Other Forces, Joanna said later, doing his face. Mikel said it was Tomas’ instinct for melodrama that made him such a fitting lackey for the governing class.

Martha would now have to travel on board with us. She shrugged, got her bag from the minivan and put it below-deck with ours. As we made ready to leave, H revved the engine loudly. From the rearward plastic chairs put out for the tourists I watched a thick white wake churning behind us. I gave up then worrying about arranging my leave from the library—whatever happened, I thought, I wasn’t going back there. 

At 20:13 local time, we set out. Imagining we were a tourist boat like any other, the seagulls took it in turns to hover abreast of us as if suspended from a thread. 

As we passed the many speedboats and passenger boats we bumped and tipped over their wakes, setting off a bell—that I never found but must have been somewhere below decks—ringing loudly over the water, making the tourists all look over at us and wave. 

The novelty of being on water passed quickly. The landscape was similar to that which we’d seen all day, and after two planes and a long car-ride, I was tired and disoriented enough to be able to imagine myself anywhere. After being on deck for an hour or so, I found it more settling to sit inside, next to H at the helm. 

He had a can of lager in his hand and two others crumpled by his feet. 

You’re drinking? I said. He’d once nearly died of hypothermia in a meteorological station off Iceland. 

Lucy’s a doctor, he said, So I’ll be fine.

What? I said.

Lucy’s my wife. She’s a doctor so I’ll be—it’s a joke I say sometimes.

Oh ok, I said, Congratulations.

With the beer on his breath, feeling again the old sense of being next to him, I watched the red dot on the screen plod along the fjords like an old video game.

Do you have kids? I asked. 

He shook his head. I was amazed you did, he said.

I was hurt for a moment but then remembered how well we knew each other.

Yeah, it was strange, I said. Putting their tiny shoes on I sometimes had a desperate urge to throttle myself.

That’s what Lucy said it’d be like. How’s Peter?

David, you mean. When I’m bored I plan his eulogy. 

He smiled. You love him? 

I looked out at the rocky shore going past the window and back at the red dot.

You know, I said, this GPS is a minute old. 

Completely forgetfully, I left my hand on his leg and he put his hand in mine.

Though night drew on, the sky stayed mostly cloudless and very bright, its blue so light it became yellow around the horizon. The brightness seemed full of a great intent, defiant almost—showing all the veins and colors in the rocky escarpments. The trees, though distant, were each so vibrant it was as if they pulsated.

The only islands we passed now were short precipitous mountains that reached far above us, and I lost my sense of land as something to walk and build and shop on top of.

We had not yet got into the open sea and, despite its impending collapse, the air over the Gulf Stream felt almost warm.

On old field trips, we would strip down to t-shirts in the first hours to condition our blood for the upcoming arctic front. But now we sat around inside in jumpers and coats; Joanna was so well hidden in the intricate hood she’d drawn tight over her face we could not tell if she was asleep. I was regretting how insulated my expensive jacket was but didn’t think about taking it off.

Midnight came and went and nothing seemed to change. Usually the team leader would set up a rota to make sure there were crew awake and everyone got sleep, but Tomas hadn’t left the cabin since we’d set off. 

In my mind, shards of our old ideas dislodged themselves. The exact tonnage of ancient water, still “repressive” in its molecular structure after half a million years; its transgressive effect on the region as a habitat.

I did not know where to be and so found myself going in and out of the cabin every half hour or so. There were a few wispy clouds but otherwise it was still bright sunlight. At some point we’d left the peninsula behind and were moving through a hinterland between Gulf Stream and arctic waters. Every ten minutes or so another island would come into view beside us. Outside, Ronnie and Mikel were sitting opposite each other with a half-full whiskey bottle. There was a strange air about them; as if they’d been arguing and reconciling so many times they looked almost afraid of each other. I watched as they sat in silence, occasionally a hand reaching out to take the bottle from the other.

At some point in the early morning, Martha came out on deck with binoculars around her neck.

Did you sleep, I asked her.

I tried to, she said, training her binoculars on the sea behind us, but Tomas is always wanting to fuck.

I had forgotten until then how many secrets I had had to keep. I used to worry they saw something in me that made me a mere confessor—the anti-chronicler—of the group; although years later, listening to a friend I made at the school gates sitting in my kitchen talk about her plans, I missed it all so much I went and sat in the bathroom and cried until she let herself out.

Martha and I stood next to each other for a while.

Are you looking for the other forces? I asked her.

She put down her binoculars and smiled. 

There are three other expeditions following ours, all from countries we’re in intelligence-sharing relationships with, she said, so it is easy for them to follow our satellite signal. 

And their boats are as slow as ours?

No, they’re waiting. It is Tomas only who has the location. My fear is they will simply overtake when they see it.

She brought up the binoculars again.

Sorry, she said, My English is not so good now.

I went over and lifted Mikel’s binoculars by the strap off from around his shoulders. Through them I saw we were still passing small islands; one, shaped like a horse shoe, had a wooden fishing boat tied up. Something bobbed and vanished quicker than I could see; a seal I imagined.

I went to the bow and trained the binoculars ahead. I don’t think I knew what I was looking for. I remembered the phrase “a vast coalescence” and a glimpse of that ridiculous model I’d made, a shape I’d carved out of some compound that would simulate the suppressive effect on the water. 

I studied the air, picturing my diagrams of every arctic bird in flight. Sea eagles first, then guillemots, terns, kittiwakes . . . I could remember only a little. And, despite—or maybe in the place of—our unwavering certainty, I realized at that moment I had never truly believed any of it would really happen.

I am sort of regretting this boat, said Martha, just beside me.

Tomas appeared later. Eight bells, he said quietly, and all the breath left my body. It had been something Ulla used to say; I remember her telling us how she’d read her dad’s old maritime novels. Quietly, thoughtfully, she had been our most determined: I could hear her still—head on one side, voice slightly nasal—always so thoughtful and consciously finding her way in life that she seemed the last person to imagine dead.

I wanted to hit Tomas in the mouth but just stopped myself, my anger clouded by the sense of some possible future regret, and instead I went below deck and sat on the toilet and slept a bit, sobbed a bit. On the way up, I looked in the cabin at the front, at all our luggage and the satellite components.

Up in the bridge, I watched our red dot move on H’s screen, wondering who else was looking at it.

Surely you don’t need that on anymore, I said to H.

I don’t need to know depths anymore but it would be nice to know the way back, he replied.

I didn’t say anything—I would have done anything other than go back.

Outside, it was definitely colder now. Asleep now in their plastic chairs, I watched H and Mikel cross and recross their arms, their lips curled and trembling.

I couldn’t see anyone following us but had the sense of the urgency of the other boats; I could feel them bodily like something pushing into my side.

Of all the islands we passed that morning, I counted three with houses on them.

There’s nowhere on Earth, H said, humans don’t feel the need to domesticate.

But I was thinking instead of the enormity of it all. If this was what we’d predicted all those years ago and we could somehow get there unseen by the other boats then, it started to occur to me, I might get myself free. 

By lunchtime on the second day there were no longer any houses. And by dinner time, no longer any land visible from our boat. The only man-made things were the occasional IABP buoys, all long since deactivated, though they still reoccurred, bobbing beside our boat every hour or so.

At meal times everyone sat together on the rear deck, though it seemed more like an old memory I was reliving somehow, rather than us truly all back together again.

With everyone sat there, I got up, went inside and found H’s toolbox, the wrench so heavy I had to carry it in both hands down the steep steps; not waiting for my eyes to adjust, I stumbled over everyone’s bags and was for a moment unable to get up, and crawled the rest of the way to the metal body of the satellite system.

I would only get one or maybe two swings at it before everyone got here so I put down the wrench and felt the different sections of its machinery under my hands, its nodes and tubes, imagining it something like the cross section of a rabbit warren. One small box had the make and model number on it, so I picked up the wrench again and aimed for this. The box was underneath a larger one which meant that to get a clean hit at it I would have to swing sideways, though the wrench was almost unbearably heavy held like this. And in fact, I was unable to move it then, found it almost glued to my shoulder before I realized that H was beside me holding it by the end.

In the dark there he appeared amused and I wondered if he might still allow me to break it, though a moment later, pulling me up on deck I was shocked at the disproportion of his fury. Even in my children I had never aroused any emotion like this. I don’t think anyone spoke—Tomas looked around at the horizon, panicked. Tall, unemotional Martha, whose admiration I’d wanted so much and who’d been so dismissive, even she looked hurt. Joanna’s face was messy and red from sleeping in her hood.

Oh grow up, I think I said to Martha.

They didn’t want to lock me in the cabin so agreed instead that I was to sit by myself on the front deck.

Absolutely nothing happened for the longest time; I looked through the binoculars as we trespassed further and further north, so unfathomably far that, though once a scientist, I sat in my new jacket gripped by the unshakeable sense that the sea would just tip away beneath us.

I remembered measuring the relative speeds of all the fish and cetacea, estimating the lessened resistance to their collective prow wave, the rushing of new water behind them. But even I knew that, if the longitude was correct and the event really two days old, we should have met the migration by now.

Although, later—I don’t know how much—I began to notice the daylight was lit up by something even brighter, making the air around us blush a deep pink in contrast. Up ahead, the rim of the world grew brighter and brighter with a white haze, like an approaching sun so vast it would fill the whole sky. 

And when this light began to dawn, it came as an unending twinkling brilliance spread out as far as could be seen in each direction. It grew brighter and nearer and I realized it was a series of many lights moving swiftly towards us, faster than we were approaching them. I felt they were trained just on me, burning so brightly that I couldn’t see anything when I looked away. The rest of our old team were below deck—it was just me, forced to sit there. It hurt to look at the lights now, the pain in my head that throbbed and swam, growing louder as they came nearer, until almost as the lights were upon us, I saw they were hundreds and hundreds of boats, from the smallest trawlers up to grand icebreakers—all of them with searchlights and horns blaring—travelling so tightly their sides nearly touched and I couldn’t see how we’d avoid a collision on their way, down the world’s face. But though they hooted and roared, they began to part for us, so that in a few moments we would be able to pass them, on our way beyond where they’d come from, and our boat would roll and list in their combined wake so that on the other side all their lights and horns there’d just be the sound of the bell ringing constantly.