The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (78 page)

“I need a conclusion,” I said, still looking around the room. “Just a last bit of colour.”

“Well, try not to get in the way will you? There’s a good chap.” Delahaye was a small, agitated Londoner who couldn’t see why a journalist had been foisted on him and his experiment.

“I don’t see Larry,” I said. “Is he coming in today?”

Delahaye looked around him. “Maybe. Who knows? The experiment’s almost over, he doesn’t need to be here. Is it important?”

Is it important?
No, maybe not to
you,
Professor. I said, “I just wanted a quick word, that’s all.”

Delahaye nodded irritably. “All right. But just—”

“Try not to get in the way. Yes, Professor, I know. I’ll just stand over there in the corner.” As if I was going to reach over and press some important big red button, or fall into a piece of machinery. Nothing I did here was going to make the slightest bit of difference to the enormous energies being generated, nanoseconds at a time, far below our feet in the tunnels of the Collider. And even if I did manage to screw something up, it wouldn’t affect the experiment all that much; all the results were in, Delahaye was just using up his allotted time with a last couple of shots.

The professor gave me a last admonitory glare and went back to the little group across the room. There was nothing world-shaking going on here; the Collider was brand new – the offices still smelled of fresh paint. Delahaye was just running warm-up tests, calibrating instruments, the high-energy physics equivalent of running-in a new car. I’d been there two months, working on an article about the new facility for
Time.
I thought the article was shaping up to be interesting and informative. The worst thing about the whole fucking business was that it had brought Larry into my life.

Andy Chen came over and we shook hands. “Been fun having you around, man,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Right.”

“Nah, really,” he insisted. “You piss old man Delahaye off mightily. It’s been beautiful to watch.”

Despite being beyond pissed off myself, I smiled. “You’re welcome. What’s for you now? Back to MIT?”

He shook his head. “Been offered a job at JPL.”

“Hey, excellent, man. Congratulations.”

“Ah, we’ll see. It’s not pure research, but at least it gets me away from that monstrous old fart.” He looked over at Professor Delahaye, who was regaling some students with some tale or other. Andy snorted. “Brits,” he said. “Who knows?” He looked over to where a small commotion had begun around the door. “Well, we can get the party started now.”

I looked towards the door and saw Larry Day’s leonine features over the heads of the others in the room, and I felt my heart thud in my chest. “Andy,” I said, “I need to have a quick word with Larry.” We shook hands again and I launched myself through the crowd. “Great news about JPL, man. Really.”

Larry was drunk again. That much was obvious even before I got to him. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a desert camouflage jacket and he was clutching a tattered sheaf of paper in one hand and a shrink-wrapped six pack of Dr Pepper in the other. His hair looked as if he had been dragged back and forth through a hedge a couple of times, and his eyes were hidden by mirrorshades with lenses the size of silver dollars.

“Larry,” I said as I reached him.

The mirrored lenses turned towards me. “Hey. Alex. Dude.” There was a powerful aura of Wild Turkey and Cuban cigars around him, and when he grinned at me his teeth were yellow and uneven.

Rolling Stone
had called him “Steven Hawking’s Evil Twin.” One of the most brilliant physicists of his generation, a legend at the age of twenty-four. Of course, by that time he had been thrown out of Harvard for an incident involving a homemade railgun, a frozen chicken, and his supervisor’s vintage TransAm, but that was just part of his mystique, and pretty much every other university on Earth had offered him a place. His doctoral thesis was titled
Why All Leptons Look Like Joey Ramone But Smell Like Lady GaGa,
and it was generally agreed that it would have been embarrassing if it
had
won him the Nobel Prize. Bad enough that it was shortlisted. His postdoc research had been a mixture of the mundane and the wildly exotic; he cherry-picked his way through some of the wilder outlands of quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, came up with a brand new theory of stellar evolution, published a paper which not only challenged the Big Bang but made it seem rather dull and simple-minded. Larry Day. Brilliant physicist. Brilliant drunk. Brilliant serial womanizer. He and I had visited all the bars in Sioux Crossing and been thrown out of most of them.

“I spoke with Ellie last night,” I said quietly.

He smiled down at me. “Hey,” he said. “Outstanding.”

I gritted my teeth. “She told me.”

In the background, I could hear Delahaye saying something above the holiday atmosphere in the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. All I could concentrate on was Larry’s mouth, his lying lips as he said, “Ah. Okay.”

“Is that all you can say?” I hissed. “ ‘Ah. Okay’?”

He shrugged expansively and some of the papers in his hand escaped and fell to the floor. “What can I say, man? ‘I’m sorry’?”

Delahaye seemed to be counting in a loud voice, but it was as if I heard him from a great echoing distance. I lunged at Larry, grabbed him by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.

“. . . Three . . . two . . .” said Delahaye.

“You fucking
bastard!
” I screamed into Larry’s face.

“. . . One!” said Delahaye, and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.

I had the Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the Colonel returned from their lunch. In the end I’d told the Marines to go away, and I’d done it myself. Down the years I’ve noticed that Marines tend towards a certain disdain for people who are not themselves Marines. I was a
civilian specialist.
To most of them that was a euphemism for
CIA,
which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of me, but I wasn’t going to play that game.

“How was your lunch, General?” I asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.

Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr. Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.

I looked at my watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” I said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”

Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”

Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and I got into the Hummer. I took the wheel.

I said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Corporal.”

Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues.
“General.”

I put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” I said. “You’re no more a general than I am.” And I drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the Site.

There was a place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an “up” and a “down”. Or maybe it was a “down” and an “up”. I screamed and I screamed and the noises I made were not sounds. I was . . . I was . . .

It took me a long time to get my bearings. Or maybe I never did, maybe it was all an accident. I walked. Travelled, anyway. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, couldn’t be sure that I was seeing it. I wanted to curl up and die, and I did in fact try that a couple of times, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even curl up, in the sense that I understood it. I held my hands up and looked at them. They were . . . they were . . .

At some point, maybe instantly, maybe it took a hundred million years, I came upon a . . . structure. Too small and too large to see, all at once. It looked like . . . there’s no way I can describe what it looked like, but I
touched
it and I
reached down
and I
curled around
it and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at a starry sky and someone nearby was screaming, “Don’t move, you fucker! You stay right where you are!”

I turned my head, astonished that I still remembered how. A soldier was standing a few feet from me, illuminated by moonlight, pointing an automatic weapon at me.

“Who are you?” I asked, and almost choked myself because I was still trying to speak as I might have when I was
there.
I coughed and retched, and at some point I realized I was naked and freezing cold. I said again, “Who are you?”

“Who are
you?”
shouted the soldier.

“Dolan,” I said, and this time I managed to say it without strangling. “Alex Dolan. There’s been some kind of accident.”

There was a squawking noise and the soldier lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Fenwick here, sir,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a civilian here. He claims there’s been an accident.”

At ground level, fifteen years of abandonment were more obvious. There were Green Berets stationed at the gate, and they spent a good half-hour checking our documents and establishing our bona fides before letting us through. As well as animals, the world’s Press were always trying to sneak through the fence. Nobody had made it yet. Nobody we knew about, anyway.

The buildings were weathered and dirty, the grass waist-high, despite regular helicopter inundations of herbicides, and it was starting to encroach on the cracked asphalt of the roadways.

I drove until we were a few hundred feet from the control room building, directly under the slowly-twisting spiral cloud. Unable to hush the cloud up, the government had admitted that there had been an accident at the Collider, explaining it as an electromagnetic effect. Scientists – government-sponsored and otherwise – were still arguing about this.

Fenwick looked up at the white helix and curled his lips. He was a man of many attributes, very few of them admirable, but he was not a coward. He had been told that there was no danger in him coming this close to Point Zero, and he believed that. It had never occurred to him that a significant fraction of the defence budget was devoted to stopping animals getting this close to Point Zero.

There had been much discussion about what to do about him after I appeared out of thin air in front of him. A quick look at his file suggested that appealing to his patriotic instincts would be pointless, and that giving him large amounts of money would be counterproductive and fruitless. A working-group of thirty very very bright men and women had been convened simply to study the problem of What to Do About Corporal Robert E. Lee Fenwick, who one night while out on patrol at Fort Bragg had seen me appear from a direction that no one in the universe had ever seen before.

Their solution was elegant and, I thought, unusually humane. Corporal Fenwick was a simple organism, geared mainly to self-gratification, and his loyalty – and his silence – had been bought by the simple expedient of promoting him to the rank of three-star general. What fascinated me was that Fenwick never showed the slightest gratitude for this. It was as if the alternative never even occurred to him. He seemed totally oblivious to the concept that it would have been simpler, and far more cost-effective, to simply kill him.

“Here we are, then,” Fenwick said.

“Yes,” I said. “Here we are. I cannot argue with that.” I looked at the cloud, looked at the buildings around us. Fenwick had surprised everyone by taking to his new rank like a duck to water. He was still
in
the Army, but he was no longer
of
the Army. He had no duties to speak of, apart from the duties that involved me. His general’s pay had been backdated for a decade, and he had bought his parents a new house in West Virginia and his brother a new car, and he lived with his child bride Roselynne and their half-dozen squalling brats in a magnificent mansion in Alexandria, Virginia. The kids went to the best schools, and in moments of despair I hung onto that. The eldest girl, Bobbi-Sue, was starting at Princeton next year. Because of what had happened to me the Fenwick boys would not work all their lives in the local coal mines; the Fenwick girls would not marry the high-school jock only to see him become a drunken wife-beater. They would be lawyers and doctors and congressmen and senators, and maybe even presidents. In my darkest moments I looked at Former Corporal Fenwick, and I almost thought this was all worth it. Almost.

“How long do we have?” he asked. He always asked that.

I shrugged. “Minutes?” I always said that, too. “Days?” I opened the door and got out of the Hummer. Fenwick got out too, and together we unloaded the transport cases. We carried them into one of the other buildings a little way from the control room, and emptied them of their telephone books. Then we put them back into the Humvee and dumped my gear on the ground beside the vehicle.

Fenwick checked his watch. “Better be getting back,” he said.

I nodded. In a couple of hours there would be an overflight. An unmarked black helicopter without an ID transponder would pass overhead, ignoring local traffic control until the last moment, when it would transmit a brief and curt series of digits that identified it as belonging to the NSA. It would dip down below the radar cover, hover for a few moments, and then lift up and fly off again. And that would be me, leaving. “This is stupid. Someone’s going to work it out one day,” I said.