The Apothecary Page 0,57

them. But I thought I knew something about people and their weapons. They want to use them.”

“Course they do,” Pip said, listening with his legs crossed under him, his chin in his hand, like a child listening to a storybook.

“I wanted to develop a way to make a whole city safe,” the apothecary said. “But this is difficult to do. I thought first of creating a kind of shield—an area in which it would be impossible for an atom to split. A small shield was possible, but a large one, big enough for a city, was very difficult.

“Then I thought of a kind of containment, something that could be done after the bomb was dropped, as long as it was done very quickly. I knew from being an Air Raid Warden that there would be some warning when an aeroplane was spotted. So perhaps, if I couldn’t maintain a shield to protect a city, I could at least contain the damage and the radiation from the bomb.

“I started writing to the people in other countries who were doing this kind of work. And I began to correspond with Jin Lo.” He looked to the young woman, with her long dark braid. “Whom I imagined rather differently, as an eminent, grey-haired man.”

Jin Lo shrugged. “This is not important.”

“You have developed the most elegant net,” he said. “Would you like to describe it?”

“You tell them everything?” she asked.

“Just the broad strokes.”

She shrugged. “It makes a polymer.”

The apothecary waited for her to go on, but she wasn’t going to.

“The idea is brilliant in its simplicity,” he explained. “She puts particles into the air that react with radiation to create, as she says, an extremely strong polymer, which then contracts as it solidifies. The contraction pulls the explosion tightly back in on itself. If it works, it will be a thing of great beauty.”

“And if not, we die,” Jin Lo said.

The apothecary ignored that. “My role was to absorb the radiation that would be released, even if the net contained the explosion,” he said. “I was convinced that the solution was botanical. Just as plants mop up our carbon dioxide for us, I was sure I could find one to absorb radiation. I tried various methods and finally settled on the flower of the jaival tree, which is a white lotus brought by traders from India in the last century. The air around the jaival’s blossom is particularly rich with the Quintessence.” He waited, as if we were supposed to understand what he meant and respond with awe.

“And—what’s the Quintessence?” I asked.

“The fifth element!” he said, amazed at my ignorance. “The source of all life. A life force to combat a killing force, you see. But the jaival in this garden, here, is the only one in England, and it has a very long, slow life cycle. It blooms only once every seven years. It isn’t due to bloom again until 1955, which is three years from now. I thought that shouldn’t matter, as I believed we had time. But then Russia began to test its own bombs, and England started developing atomic capabilities. I had no choice but to try to force the bloom— which turned out to be very difficult.”

The apothecary sank into silence, apparently preoccupied with all the complications of the jaival tree’s life cycle.

“And then?” Benjamin prompted.

“Yes, then,” he said. “Leonid Shiskin, our contact within the Soviet embassy, brought news that the Soviet Union would be testing a new bomb in the north, on an archipelago called Nova Zembla. So we had to accelerate our plan. Jin Lo and our Hungarian physicist, Count Vilmos, who had been living in Luxembourg, would come to London.”

Benjamin and I looked at each other—a Hungarian count! The man in the hotel!

“But then Jin Lo was captured on arrival,” the apothecary went on. “And I was nearly so. The British authorities must have intercepted our letters and broken our code. We underestimated them. If Count Vili is safe, then the boat may still be a secret. It was never mentioned in the letters. But we have no way of knowing if he is safe.”

“Is he a bit fat, and dandyish?” Benjamin asked.

The apothecary brightened. “That’s him! Have you seen him?”

“We saw Shiskin pass a message to him in a newspaper,” I said. “The day before he passed one to you. We followed him to a hotel but couldn’t find out his name.”

The apothecary frowned. “Why were you spying on me?”

“We weren’t, we were spying on