The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(108)
And so, while my old unit fought and died in the forests of France, I played secretary once again to Vincent Rankis and his rapidly growing private empire of brilliant minds. It was clear–politely yet obviously clear–that Vincent was already very rich, though the source of his wealth was not known among the men. However, as my role as administrative assistant grew, so did my access to information, including, eventually, the details of the account into which Vincent’s pay was regularly deposited. Armed with this, and an immaculate forgery of Vincent’s signature, it was a simple enough matter to head down to the bank and request a complete history of Vincent’s transactions–for the tax men, you know how it is. I was lucky. In my last life my exhaustive research into Vincent’s finances had revealed only a tangled web of offshore accounts and intricate security procedures which had sent even the finest forensic accountants wheeling off around the world as they traced this piece of income to a sauna in Bangkok, or that to an Indian restaurant in Paris, or thought perhaps they’d found something in a line of credit which ended in the grocery department of Harrods.
This time, with Vincent barely nineteen years old (but doing a passable impression of twenty-five), he hadn’t had either the time or the opportunity to spread his finances far and wide, and a few bank details were enough for me to trace his finances back to the 1920s themselves. I had to fight to keep both my excitement and my activities secret. Living in such close proximity to Vincent, I knew I dared not keep any physical record of my activity in the base so spent my time on leave in a small bed and breakfast in Hastings, poring over every line by light turned down low against the blackout curtain, before burning every document I’d found and washing the ashes away. The pattern of his behaviour was in many ways predictable. Whenever he fell short, he gambled, and like all good kalachakra knew the victors of certain key races and bet heavily enough to ensure a good return but widely enough to raise no questions in any one particular location as to how this boy could do so well. However, one detail did catch my eye: during the earliest years in which I could trace his movements, they seemed focused around the south-west of London, and leaving aside the supplementary income provided by the races, he appeared to receive a regular income of sixteen pounds a month up to the start of the war. While there were plenty of innocent explanations for this, I could not help but suspect, could not but begin to believe, that what I was seeing was an allowance from a relative. Perhaps a very close relative indeed.
It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start looking, quietly–so quietly.
When VE Day came, I, in my capacity as the only one in Vincent’s unit capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery, did exactly that, perhaps as a petty reminder to my peers that, for all they were brilliant, bright, intelligent and quite possibly the future of scientific development, they were nevertheless incapable of running their own day-to-day lives without having someone to organise it for them. Two weeks later Vincent stuck his head round the door of my office. “Harry,” he exclaimed, “I’m off out to meet a bird. Could you pop these in the post?”
A great fistful of envelopes was given to me. I glanced at the addresses briefly: MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne. “No problem, sir.”
“For God’s sake, Harry, surely we can stop using ‘sir’ now?”
When he was gone, I steamed open one of the letters. Inside, written on thick yellow paper with no watermark, was a very detailed, very well drawn diagram illustrating the uses, functionality and specifications of a microwave magnetron.
I thought long and hard that night about what to do with these documents. They were dangerous, deadly and postal distribution was precisely the same method as Vincent had deployed in his last life for kick-starting technological growth across the globe, only this time–this time he wasn’t limiting himself to ideas from twenty or thirty years in the future; within those envelopes were ideas that wouldn’t be expounded for at least sixty years.
In the end, I went to Charity for advice.
We met in Sheringham, a small town on the north Norfolk coast, where the fish was always fresh and you half imagined the catch had been blasted in across the shingle by the sheer force of the waves which pounded its shore–a salt-sprayed thundering that chafed the lips, dried the eyes and crystallised every hair within a few minutes of exposure to its roar. She was getting old, my ally, and would soon be looking at death. I was on the verge of being discharged from the army, still stuck in my uniform for a few more days, holding tightly on to my hat between my gloved fists as the wind howled in from a thick grey sky.
“Well?” she demanded, as we strode first one way, then the other, along the few yards of beach that weren’t foaming white. “What do you have for me now?”
“Letters,” I replied. “He’s sending out letters again, to all the universities and engineering institutions of the world. Not just America this time–Europe, Russia, China–anywhere with resources and good minds. There’s diagrams for Scud missiles, illustrations of wave-particle duality, analysis of heat-resistant orbital shields, analysis of weight-to-thrust ratios for orbital escape…”
She waved me to silence with one white-gloved hand. “I think I see the problem, Harry.”
“He’s told me to post them.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to see you.”