Damned if I Do Read Online Free PDF

many pieces. It didn’t matter, though—the full image remained on all the broken pieces, one of the many intriguing aspects of holography.
    Star I might have been, but I was summoned to the office ofProfessor Carver, the head of the department. He was sympathetic but made it clear that there would need to be disciplinary action. I was fined five dollars, to go, the letter said, towards repairing the wilful damage I’d caused to university property. But it was this experiment that probably led to me receiving a first-class honours degree in physics.
    With the first in my pocket, I got a very attractive offer from theBoeing Corporation in Seattle to work on ­acoustic physics and noise abatement, which were areas that ­interested me. I was very tempted. I was twenty and wanted see the world. However, at the Boeing interview I was alarmed to find that someone of my age coming to the US to work wasn’t necessarily exempt from service in the US military. They said they’d secured their employees a lot of exemptions, but they couldn’t guarantee it.
    This was in 1968, and theVietnam War was escalating, my opposition to it growing harder by the day as I spent a few months deciding whether or not to take the job. Boeing even sent me a subscription to the Seattle Times to help me get a feel for life in the city, but the war news kept getting worse. I was offered aPhD scholarship at Flinders University. Boeing wasn’t interested in me obtaining a doctorate, or in holding the job open, so I opted for Flinders.

FOUR
    Aiming higher—direction uncertain
    Scientists love lasers.
    Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad
    M ypostgraduate years were not easy, on both the personal and academic fronts, althoughPhD scholarships were more generous then: if you supplemented your scholarship with a bit of tutoring, you could afford to pay rent and generally have a reasonable standard of living. However, I’d been withJenny for three years and her parents started pressuring us to get married. Her parents were very protective of her, perhaps because she was adopted.
    This was the late 1960s, when single women still had a lot of trouble getting prescriptions for the Pill. Like many at the time, we used pretty unsatisfactory methods of contraception and had quite a few scares. I remember more than one month that seemed to go on forever. I would be throwing up from sheer anxiety until Jenny would finally phone to tell me we were in the clear.
    Worrying about an unwanted pregnancy was ­probably at the heart of her parents’ enthusiasm for their daughter to be married. So we went ahead—booked the cars, arranged the reception; our parents met, and all the rest of it. Then I developed blinding headaches. They went on for weeks, while I was trying to make a start on the research for my PhD. I went to doctor after doctor, had test after test, but no cause was found. Eventually, one of the senior physicians I’d been referred to at Royal Adelaide Hospital, who knew I was about to be ­married, said he thought the wedding could have something to do with it.
    I just looked at him.
    â€˜Have you thought about calling it off?’
    He wrote me a note; I suppose it was something about me having a nervous condition. Armed with this, I went to Jenny and said I couldn’t get married. She took it ­surprisingly well, then added that she had never particularly wanted to get ­married anyway.
    But when we told her parents they were horrified. Her father actually attacked me physically, throwing punches. I had to fist-fight him off. While this was going on, Jenny’s mother fell to the floor.
    She screamed, ‘I’m having a heart attack, Dick. I’m having a heart attack!’
    â€˜Not now, Marj!’ he said, shaping up.
    It ended with Jenny being locked in her room. Not one to accept this, she threw what she needed into a bag and climbed out of the window. I was still scuffling with Dick when