Intangible Read online

  Peter left the headmaster’s office and made his way through the corridor lined with locker bays painted an atrocious shade of orange. The bell rang for next period, and chatting and laughing students crowded the corridor. Some walked to their next classes, but most loitered about, flirting with each other or gossiping about their adventures the previous weekend.

  Peter watched the familiar faces that passed by, none of whom bothered to acknowledge his presence, and felt conflicted. On one hand, Peter had dreamt of being a real scientist ever since he was four years old, when his dad explained how gravity worked using salt and pepper shakers to represent celestial bodies. Every night over dinner (which Peter had prepared for as long as he could remember, since outside of a laboratory, Bruce could not be trusted with an open flame), he listened eagerly as his dad described in harrowing, colorful detail the abstract intellectual battles fought between his peers with multi-colored dry wipe pens.

  But then he tried to picture himself as a university student at fourteen years old. If he thought he appeared scrawny next to the football players at King’s, he could only imagine what a shrimp he would look like compared to university boys. There wouldn’t be any girls his age, either. Why would anybody bother talking to him if they were all so much older than he was?

  King’s Secondary School was familiar, and familiar was comforting. However, even though Peter had grown up with the same classmates since primary school, he did not fit in, no matter how hard he tried. There were several reasons for this: Peter had just finished his last growth spurt the previous summer, and now stood an awkward five foot ten, with shoulder blades protruding where the flesh and muscle had yet to catch up with the rest of him. His hair was the color of sand, his blue eyes were oddly bright, and his skin was so pale that it appeared translucent, betraying his every emotion – a feature that only added to his awkwardness. While other boys (cool boys, he thought bitterly, like Brock Jefferson) could play off any situation with a cavalier, devil-may-care attitude, everybody knew exactly how Peter felt, and there was no point in trying to hide it. It was a social vulnerability Brock, and the rest of the football team, exploited to its fullest potential.

  Usually Peter’s classmates made fun of him just for being a freak, like when he was in English Literature and it was his turn to read from “Macbeth.” He had been so engrossed in a textbook on Differential Equations (which he’d hidden inside his copy of the play) that he missed his cue, requiring Mrs. Ferguson to actually walk across the room and rap his desk with her pointer before he realized they were waiting for him. He turned a humiliating shade of scarlet and mumbled his way through the piece, provoking Brock and his sidekicks (Richard and Harry) to refer to him for weeks afterward as “the talking tomato.” (Not very original, Peter thought, but at least it had the alliteration thing going for it.)

  Then there was the immense social liability of his intellect. He would have traded being smart for being cool in a heartbeat. He winced as he remembered the first day of science class, when Mr. Collins had asked everybody to introduce themselves, and tell their favorite joke. Peter didn’t really tell jokes, but just the day before, his dad had told him one he’d heard in the lab about “three particles that walked into a bar.” He thought it was hilarious, and was already cracking up when he got to the punch line… but nobody laughed. He could literally hear a pin drop somewhere in the back of the room.

  So, King’s might be familiar, but familiar was not necessarily a good thing.

  “Pete!”

  Cole’s voice interrupted Peter’s thoughts. Peter turned around to see Cole’s blond buzz cut and broad face bouncing toward him energetically and he smiled, grateful to see a friendly face.

  “Hey, glad I caught you! I have a free period. Want to go to the LCR and get a coffee?” The LCR stood for Large Common Room; it was the slang the students used to refer to their cafeteria.

  “Can’t,” said Peter. “I have maths right now.”

  “Aww, come on. It’s not like you ever pay attention anyway.” Cole bumped shoulders with him on purpose. “Just for a few minutes? I have news…” He said it in the significant tone of voice that could only mean one thing: Celeste.

  Peter bit his lip and tried to pretend he wasn’t interested, but Cole triumphantly shoved him towards the door. “Ha!” he gloated.

  Dying grass lined the concrete path from the concrete main hall to the concrete LCR, and the leaves of the few trees were beginning to fall. King’s was a decidedly drab campus, but it had character. The students either loved it or they hated it.

  Peter deliberately walked close enough to Cole that their words could not be overheard. “Fine, talk,” he said grudgingly, his heart beating faster.

  “Brock and Celeste broke up.”

  Peter looked up sharply.

  “Watch out!” said Cole, and just in time: Peter narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a concrete column. He ducked his head down as he redirected his path and pushed through the revolving glass doors that led into the LCR, hiding his face until the flush of color subsided.

  “When?” he finally managed to ask Cole.

  “This weekend, I guess. I overheard Brock telling Richard last night.” As Brock’s younger brother, Cole was not above eavesdropping during Brock’s phone conversations. “So… maybe you should make a move, huh?”

  “Ha!” Peter laughed bitterly. “Not likely.” Involuntarily he looked around the LCR, like he always did whenever he entered a large common space, scanning for Celeste’s heart-shaped face and her long dark hair. He didn’t see her, but if he had, he would have looked away quickly before she noticed… like he had for the last three years.

  Girls like Celeste dated guys like Brock. They most certainly did not date guys like Peter Stewart.

  Cole retrieved his drink from the vending machine: a black coffee. Peter got the same thing, even though he didn’t like black coffee. He had been so engrossed in the conversation that he hadn’t been paying attention. He went to the bar to add some milk after they paid the cashier, lost in thought. He felt perplexed, but he wasn’t sure why. In fact, he suddenly felt more inclined, not less, to transfer to the university.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall and added, “I really should go to maths. I don’t like to bunk Mr. Richards’ class.”

  Cole shrugged. “Catch up to you later, then.”

  Peter wondered as he trudged to Mr. Richards’ class why he felt so dejected. This ought to be good news. The girl of his dreams had just broken up with his archenemy. Yet somehow, the fact that she was theoretically now available only highlighted the fact that under no circumstances that he could envision would she ever, ever choose him.

  Peter suddenly realized she was walking towards him on the path. She wore a blue sweater that made her cheeks look rosy, and she was deep in conversation with her best friend Katie. If he didn’t speak up soon, they’d pass him by without acknowledgement. He blurted out before he could stop himself, “Hi Celeste.”

  She looked away from Katie mid-sentence, surprised, and distracted. “Oh. Hi, Peter.”

  “How was your first class?” he asked. It was the only thing he could think of to say. He looked down at his coffee, hoping for inspiration, and saw that he had forgotten to stir it after adding the milk. It had mostly blended in while he walked, but a few tentacles of white still laced their way through the blackness like the arms of a squid.

  “Uh, fine,” she said, and Katie giggled wickedly. “Why are you staring at your coffee?” Celeste asked. “Is there a bug in it or something?”

  “Oh – no. I’m just watching the convection,” Peter blurted, and then added very quickly, “You see, the cold milk molecules are moving a lot slower than the hot coffee molecules, so the milk cuts right through the coffee until both liquids reach a temperature equilibrium—”

  “That’s…great, Peter,” Celeste interrupted, and Katie covered her mouth with her mitten to stifle a derisive giggle. “We’ll see you later, okay?”
r />   “Okay,” Peter mumbled miserably, his face burning as he watched her go. Once she was out of earshot, he muttered to himself, “I am such a moron…”

  Chapter 2

  “So Mr. Stone wants to get rid of you,” Bruce said as he shoved a piece of steamed broccoli in his mouth and made a face. Peter cooked lots of broccoli because boiling was his primary culinary skill.

  “That’s nothing new,” Peter muttered.

  “No, but this time he actually enlisted my help.” Bruce put on his best stern voice. “Peter, that experiment was totally inappropriate and completely irresponsible!” Then he added too casually, “Did it work?”

  “Yeah. Nobody noticed, though, did they? As usual,” Peter said morosely. He hated getting yelled at, even though he knew his dad didn’t really mean it and only scolded him because other adults told him that was the parental thing to do. Peter stood up to get a second helping of chicken and dumplings, mostly to break eye contact with his dad, and almost tripped over the cat, who laid sprawled out luxuriously, basking in the heat of the stove. “Newton!” Peter scolded, and nudged him with his foot. Newton gave him a reproachful look and did not budge.

  “Although I have to say,” Bruce added thoughtfully, “the idea’s not half bad – transferring, I mean. At King’s, the best you can do is try to make your own superconducting magnet in the boys’ locker room using liquid nitrogen and a copper wire.” Bruce sounded stern at first, but the corners of his mouth twitched. Finally, he added reluctantly, “That was brilliant, by the way.”

  Peter grinned in spite of himself. He hadn’t known whether his dad had heard about that one yet, but he was pretty proud of the idea, and wanted his dad to appreciate it. “Thanks. That one didn’t work, though.”

  Bruce continued, “Just think... at uni, you’d be able to rub elbows with researchers involved in fusion and fission experiments with quantum energy! That’s a step up, wouldn’t you say? Maybe after a few semesters they’d even let you assist, eh?”

  “Fusion and fission of what?” Peter asked, sitting back down again.

  Bruce’s voice came garbled through the mouthful of food. “Helium to hydrogen and back again.”

  “So you’re making hydrogen bombs in your lab. Fantastic,” Peter joked.

  “No, technically, Ralph is,” Bruce winked. “Of course, they won’t let us do it until we prove that we can control the chain reaction. Silly technicality, in my opinion.”

  “Oh, yeah. Completely mental,” said Peter.

  “Well,” said Bruce, ignoring the sarcasm, “it’s really not that hard to fuse four hydrogen atoms and stabilize the rest of them, as long as I stay focused.”

  Peter gave him an incredulous look and said, deadpan, “Sure. Because all you have to do is basically just… tell them to chill out.”

  “Of course. Using the Ancient Tongue, I grant you, but that’s the general idea, yes.”

  Peter shook his head, not sure whether Bruce was kidding or not. On one hand, his dad looked like a physicist, with the double-tiered bridge piece of his eye glasses held together with sellotape to keep them from sliding further down his nose, and several permanent cowlicks sticking up in the back of his brown hair defiantly. Peter adored his father, and thought he was brilliant, but he had the strangest ideas of any scientist Peter had ever even heard of. He always wore trousers that didn’t cover his ankles, with red and white striped socks that Peter knew went up to his knees, making him look like an oversized elf. Bruce called them his “lucky socks,” and he had four identical pairs so that he never had to leave home without them. Peter used to get made fun of because of his dad’s appearance when he was younger, but by now everyone was used to his quirks. On several occasions, Peter heard him refer to the gremlins that snuck in on cold winter nights and closed the flue in their chimney (explaining why the living room was covered in ash the next morning), or the mischievous poltergeists who amused themselves by consistently winding every clock in their house a full ten minutes backwards, accounting for the fact that he was never on time for anything. He was never totally serious, of course, but then he was never totally kidding either.

  Aloud, Peter said with a dry smile, “I can’t imagine why you’re having trouble getting a research grant.”

  Newton rubbed up against Peter’s leg and then leapt into his lap when he sat down again, depositing long strands of white fur on his jeans.

  “I don’t think it’ll be hard, actually, once we publish the light bulb data,” said Bruce, nonplussed. When Peter shook his head incredulously, Bruce demanded, “What?”

  “I thought you were kidding about that,” Peter said in amazement.

  “Why would I be kidding?”

  “Because… Dad, you can’t seriously think that there’s such a thing as an Ancient Tongue that can control the elements. You’re a scientist! You’re willing to try and get an experiment like that through the research board?”

  “I don’t think there is an Ancient Tongue, Peter. I know there is. I can speak it,” Bruce said matter-of-factly, taking a swig of milk. “It’s just like I always told you when you were little. I’m not the only one, either. Every single person on this planet has an affinity for a particular element, in the ancient sense of course, not from the periodic table –”

  “I know, I know,” Peter said, hoping to change the subject quickly. “Yours is light.”

  “Why is that so incredible?” Bruce persisted. “We know that there are random fluctuations of energy in space that generate quantum particles and antiparticles all the time. Typically, they annihilate one other almost immediately so that the net effect is zero. But why is it so hard to believe that I might be able to control that fluctuation of quantum energy and use it to speak photons of light into existence?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard to believe, if you had some sort of machine to harness the energy. But you’re saying you can do it with a magic language,” said Peter.

  “With the Ancient Tongue,” Bruce interrupted, as if this distinction made a material difference in his argument.

  Peter continued stubbornly, “It’s a complete departure from the scientific method. That’s the problem.”

  “Noooo,” said Bruce in a patronizing tone, “the scientific method involves experimental observation of the effects of changing a single variable in a controlled environment. In this case, I will be alone in a sealed chamber of absolute darkness with nothing but an unplugged light bulb, a photon detector, and my own voice. How much more scientific can you get?”

  Peter had no idea what to say to that. “Was this Isdemus’s idea?” he finally asked. Bruce often referred to Isdemus as his “boss,” although Peter knew that nobody by that name worked for the university at all, let alone in the physics department. Whenever Bruce had some new outlandish experiment in mind, though, Isdemus’s name always seemed to come up.

  “No,” Bruce said, and swallowed a dumpling with a loud gulp. “Isdemus says he wants me to steer clear of noetics as much as possible, actually. He thinks that since it’s not a very well-respected branch of science, even if the experiments work, the rest of the scientific community will just write me off as a quack and won’t even read the paper… which would put us right back to where we started from.”

  Noetics, the study of the effects of the mind on the physical world, had long since proven to be something of a metaphysical idea (which, Peter thought stubbornly, was code for complete bunk. Deep down, he knows it too).

  After a long pause, Peter put his fork down and looked his dad in the eye. “Dad,” he began. “Here’s the thing. You are so brilliant…”

  “Why, thank you,” Bruce said, wagging his eyebrows teasingly.

  “But I don’t understand why you believe in stuff like that,” Peter continued. “I feel like I’m missing something here.”

  Bruce put his fork down too. “Peter,” he said at last, but then hesitated, rubbing his head and looking up. Finally, he said, “Remember the legends I told you about when you were gro
wing up?”

  Peter shoved his chair back from the table. “Oh, no. Not this again.”

  “Well, if you want to know, then that’s where I’ve got to start,” Bruce said in frustration. “You haven’t even allowed me to broach the subject since you were seven years old!”

  “Dad,” Peter said firmly. “The definition of the word legend is that it’s fiction. There’s absolutely no evidence that King Arthur or the Knights of the Round Table ever existed. When I was little, I wanted to believe more than anything, but it’s just not scientific –”

  “That is because history is subjective. It’s based on a lot of agreement,” Bruce argued.

  “No, it’s based on evidence,” Peter said, exasperated. “If there’s no evidence that King Arthur existed, then there’s definitely none that establishes the existence of a magical Ancient Tongue, or a race of invisible fairy tale creatures –”

  “But don’t you think it’s strange that there are so many stories about them?” Bruce persisted. “Why do you think there are so many cultures that have stories of Arthur and Camelot if no such person ever lived? Why do you suppose fantasy creatures of the exact same description appear in almost every story down through the ages, with very little variation? Why do you think the concept of magic has always been such an enduring theme?”

  Peter felt a flush of frustration creep up his neck and into his cheeks. His dad could be so stubborn sometimes. “How Mum put up with you for so long, I’ll never know,” he muttered spitefully under his breath, but loudly enough that his dad could hear.