‘You found her,’ she answered in English. Her accent was American. She stood up. ‘Please, call me Roberta.’ They shook hands.
She watched him for a reaction, waiting for the inevitable raised eyebrow and mock-surprise ‘oh–a woman!’ or ‘my, scientists are becoming prettier these days’ kind of comment that virtually every man she met came out with, to her great annoyance. It had almost become her standard test for gauging men she met. It was just the same infuriating knee-jerk response she got when she told guys about her black belt in Shotokan karate: ‘oh, I’d better watch my step‘. Assholes.
But as she invited Ben to sit down, she didn’t notice a flicker of anything cross his face. Interesting. He wasn’t the typical sort of Englishman she’d come to know–no pink jowls, beer belly, awful taste in clothes or combed-over bald patch here. The man opposite her was tallish, something under six feet, with an easy grace in jeans and a light jacket over a black polo-neck that hung on a slender but muscular frame. He was maybe five, six years older than she was. He had the deep tan of someone who’d been spending time in a hot country, and his thick blond hair was bleached by the sun. He was the kind of man she could go for. But there was a hardness in the set of his jaw, and something in those blue eyes that was cold and detached.
‘Thanks for agreeing to see me,’ he said.
‘My assistant Michel said you were from the Sunday Times’
‘That’s right. I’m working on a feature for our magazine supplement.’
‘Uh-huh? And how can I help you, Mr. Hope?’
‘Ben.’
‘OK, what can I do for you, Ben? Oh, by the way, this is Michel Zardi, my friend and helper.’ She waved a hand at Michel, who had come into the lab to look for a file. ‘Listen, I was just going to make a coffee,’ she said. ‘Want one?’
‘Coffee would be good,’ Ben said. ‘Black, no sugar. I need to make a quick call. Do you mind?’
‘Sure, go right ahead,’ she said. She turned to Michel. ‘You want a coffee?’ she asked him. Her French was perfect.
‘Non, merci. I’m going out in a minute to get some fish for Lutin.’
She laughed. ‘That damn cat of yours eats better than I do.’
Michel grinned and left the room. Roberta made the coffee while Ben took out his phone. He called the number for Loriot, the book publisher Rose had mentioned. No reply. Ben left him a message and his number.
‘Your French is pretty good for an English journalist,’ she said.
‘I’ve travelled around. Yours is pretty good too. How long have you lived here?’
‘Nearly six years now.’ She sipped the hot coffee. ‘So let’s get down to business, Ben. You want to talk to me about alchemy? How did you hear about me?’
‘Professor Jon Rose at Oxford University put me on to you. He’d heard about your work and thought you might be able to help me. Naturally,’ he lied, ‘you’ll be fully credited for any information used in the article.’
‘You can leave my name out of it.’ She laughed grimly. ‘Probably best not to mention me at all. I’m officially the untouchable of the scientific world these days. But if I can help you, I will. What d’you want to know?’
He leaned forward in his seat. ‘I’m looking to find out more about the work of alchemists such as…Fulcanelli, for instance,’ he said, sounding deliberately casual. ‘Who they were, what they did, what they might have discovered, that kind of thing.’
‘Right. Fulcanelli.’ She paused, looking at him levelly. ‘How much do you know about alchemy, Ben?’
‘Very little,’ he said truthfully.
She nodded. ‘OK. Well, first off, let me get one thing straight. Alchemy is not just about turning base metals into gold, all right?’
‘You mind if I take notes here?’ He drew a small notepad from his pocket.
‘Go ahead. I mean, in theory it’s not impossible to create gold. The difference between one chemical element and another is only a question of manipulating tiny energy particles. Strip off an electron here, add one on there, and you can theoretically change any molecule into any other. But for me, that’s not what alchemy is really about. I see the base metals into gold thing as more of a metaphor.’
‘A metaphor for what?’
‘You think about it, Ben. Gold is the most stable and incorruptible metal. It never corrodes, never tarnishes. Objects of pure gold stay perfect for thousands of years. Compare that to something like iron, which rusts away to nothing in no time. Now, imagine if you could find a technology that could stabilize corruptible matter, prevent deterioration?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of anything, in principle. Everything in our universe is fundamentally made of the same stuff. I think that what the alchemists were ultimately looking for was a universal element within nature that could be extracted, or harnessed, and used to maintain or restore perfection to matter–any kind of matter, not just metals.’
‘I get you,’ he said, making a note in his pad.
‘OK? Now, if you could find a technology like that, and get it to work, its potential would be boundless. It would be like the atomic bomb in reverse–using nature’s energy to create instead of destroy. For me personally, as a biologist, I’m interested in the potential effects on living organisms, especially humans. What if we could slow down the deterioration of living tissues, perhaps even restore healthy functioning to diseased ones?’
He didn’t have to think about it for long. ‘You’d have the ultimate medical technology.’
She nodded. ‘You certainly would. It would be incredible.’
‘You really think they were on the right track? I mean, is it possible they could have created something like that?’
She smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking. It’s true, most alchemists probably were nutty, shot-away old guys with a lot of crazy ideas about magic–maybe some even thought of it as witchcraft, just like the Internet or even a telephone would seem like the dark arts to someone teleported here from a couple of centuries ago. But there were also alchemists who were serious scientists.’
‘Examples?’
‘Isaac Newton? The father of classical physics was also a closet alchemist–some of his major discoveries, that scientists still use today, might have been based on his alchemical research.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Absolutely. And another guy heavily involved in alchemy you might have heard of was Leonardo da Vinci.’
‘The artist?’
Also the brilliant engineer, designer and inventor,’ she replied. And then there was the mathematician Giordano Bruno–that is, until the Catholic Inquisition burned him at the stake in 1600.’ She grimaced. ‘Those were the kind of alchemists I’m interested in, the ones who were laying the foundation for a whole new modern science that’s going to change everything. That’s what I believe, and that’s basically what my work is about.’ She paused. ‘Tell you what, instead of me just talking at you, why don’t I show you something? How d’you feel about bugs?’
‘Bugs?’
‘Insects. Some people are freaked out by them.’
‘No, I’m OK.’
Roberta opened a double door leading to what must originally have been a walk-in cupboard or wardrobe. It had been adapted, with fitted wooden shelving, to hold glass tanks. Not full of fish. Full of flies. Thousands of them. Black, hairy swarms massing on the surface of