The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(98)

“No inconvenience. Just doing my job.”

“At least let me pay you for your time! Expenses? Expenses at the very least?”

I remembered how easy it was to bribe a good man. Was this Harry August, the Harry I was playing, a good man? I decided he was, he had to be, and like all good men in the presence of Vincent Rankis, he would have to take a fall.

“You buy the dinner,” I replied, “and we’ll call it even.”

In the end I also let him pay for travel too.


The company was everything I should have expected it to be. In the ordinary way of things, it should have been working on developing the next generation of TVs, refining the oscillations in the cathode-ray tube, studying interference and induction through electromagnetic effect. But it, like so many other institutions across the US, had received five pieces of yellow paper on which were laid out in careful detail specs, diagrams and figures relating to technologies some twenty years ahead of their time, and now the company was…

“Doing really exciting work, Mr August, really exciting, into single-particle beam resonance.”

And what did that mean? For my article, of course, for the readers to understand.

“Well, Mr August, if we take, say, a beam of light–a high-intensity beam of light, such as a laser…”

Of course, lasers in the 1960s, that well-known household tool.

“… and we fire it at an electron…”

Naturally, but naturally we spend the 1960s firing lasers at sole electrons–where had I been for the last eight hundred and eighty years?

“… we can see a transfer of energy occurring and–are you familiar with the notion of wave particle duality?”

Let’s imagine that I am.

“F… antastic! So you must know that what we consider light is now understood to be both a particle–photons–and a wave, and it is through harmonic resonance between these waves, which are also particles, that we can begin to see… Are you sure you understand this, Mr August? You look deeply concerned.”

Do I? Bad lunch. Let’s call it a bad lunch.

“I am so sorry, Mr August. I hadn’t realised! Would you like to sit down?”


Afterwards, I wrote my report for Vincent. I could see the application at once, and more importantly why Vincent would be looking to use the company in question, as its research could be more than useful for his dream device, the quantum mirror, which would look at a single particle and from that derive the answers to everything. Simple, Harry, so simple–if you have the courage to do it.

He was still building it, I knew, somewhere deep in the heart of America–that was the purpose of this whole exercise. I, however, could show no knowledge of the same so wrote up my analysis based largely on the personalities of the people I’d met and whether they seemed to have a viable financial plan, rather than on the science.

We met over dinner–he paid–and he hummed and ah’d and gasped like an expert as he flicked through my pages, finally throwing the whole thing on to the table with a clap of his hands and exclaiming, “This is perfect, Harry, just perfect! Waiter–more sake!”

It was 1969 and sushi was the new fashion in America. The polar ice caps were melting, the skies were turning orange-yellow with the smear of industry, the Soviet bloc was collapsing and there were rumours of a pill for black people fighting for civil rights in the US which would turn their skin baby-white. This, proclaimed Nixon, was the true path to equality. The only reason the world hadn’t been nuked, I concluded, was that no one could really see the point of trying.

“Tell me about yourself, Harry. You’re British, right?” Here we are, the point-of-origin question, slipped in so subtly, so gently between courses that I almost didn’t notice it appear. “You got much family?”

“No,” I replied, honestly enough. “My parents are both dead, a few years back now. I never had any brothers or sisters.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. They must have been very proud of you, though?”

“I think so. I hope so. They were good people, but with me working over here, and them living over there… You know how it is.”

“Can’t say I do, Harry, but I guess I can understand. You from London?”

A good, American question. If in doubt, assume the Brit is a Londoner. “No, further north. Leeds.”

“Can’t say I know it.”

God, but he lied beautifully; it was a masterclass. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on my own deceit, I would have stood up and applauded. I shrugged, the half-shrug of the restrained Englishman in no great hurry to talk about difficult things, and he recognised the signal and had the good sense to move swiftly on.


I worked several more jobs for Vincent, on the side.

Trips to odd companies, interviews with potential “investors”. The pattern was clear to see, and with each new venture I allowed myself to sink just a little deeper into his pocket. In many ways the techniques he used to corrupt me were the mirrors of techniques I had used in my previous life to corrupt others: a dinner became a weekend away, a weekend away became a regular meeting at his local health club. We dressed in not-quite-matching white shorts and T-shirts and played squash like the rapidly middle-ageing men society expected us to be, and had coffee with other members of the club after, and talked about news, and politics, and whether cold fusion would be the way forward. The day a group of Lebanese radicals finally unleashed a chemical bomb on Beirut, I sat with Vincent in the recreation room of the health club and watched journalists in gas masks hiding behind their armoured trucks as the living and the dying crawled out of the smoke-stained killing ground of the city, and I knew we had done this, we had unleashed this technology on the world, and felt the cold hand of inevitability on my back. In 1975 I bought my first mobile phone, and by 1977 was writing articles on telephone scams, computer hacking, fraudulent emails and the corruption of the modern media. The world was moving forward too fast. My time with Vincent offered an idyllic retreat from it all, as he invited me to attend parties at his grand mansion in the heart of Maine, away from the chaos and the rapidly rising body count. He never mentioned his research, his work, and I never enquired.