The Skull (17 page)

‘Our universe is made up of a thin skin of order covering an ocean of chaos,' stated the computer. It paused, before adding, ‘Probably.'

‘And the accelerator experiments?' asked John.

‘The accelerator experiments are designed to break through the skin,' it said.

‘Just tell me what the risks are!' John was losing patience with the computer's vague answers.

‘I cannot,' it said. ‘If the result of an experiment is already known, it is not an experiment. Science is not a search for answers, it is a search for better questions.'

In the heart of the accelerator, power drawn from the sun charged great batteries, designed to focus impossible amounts of energy on the tiniest of things. Charged and drawn, particles hurtled forwards faster and faster in magnetically propelled arcs. Eventually, when they were moving so fast that their experience of time itself virtually froze, they were smashed into each other, shattering into sub-atomic shards. Particles that could only exist for a fraction of a second, particles that could be everywhere at once and particles that could defy time all flew from the impact and were captured and held, then collided again. They split into other particles, other combinations, divided, combined, fused and divided again into more and more exotic and impossible forms. And so it went on…

On the shuttle, John had no other choices.

‘OK, just do it. Increase speed. Get me there as
fast as you can.' There was a brief pause, and the shuttle's engines roared into life. John could feel the ship starting to accelerate. ‘Will this be enough?' he asked.

‘It is very unlikely that you will complete the journey alive,' replied the machine. John fought the urge to smash his fist into the control desk.

‘Well, at least make it warm!' he shouted. There was a whirring sound and warm air began to blow into the cockpit. ‘Warm in a way that won't kill me,' he added guardedly. The computer kept quiet, but John thought he heard the whirring drop to a lower pitch.

He took a slow, deep breath and turned away from the tiny dot of the Earth, the blue neon arrow still pointing mockingly at it on the window display. He started to assess the cargo bay as his new home.

It was small. The floor was made up of a flat metal grating peppered with tiny holes. The ceiling was lined with lights and the walls were crowded and cramped with panels, wires and tanks. None of it looked edible.

The three beds, his own, and those of his parents were lined up at the end closest to the cockpit. He could see them both, still as death. Their faces were
calm and pale. No sign now of the argument they'd had when he'd seen them last.

John walked past them down to the far end of the room. The skull sat staring out at him from the deep shadows. It had been strapped in to a secure crate that covered it on every side except for the front. He tapped on the case. It was made of a special new material that was designed to protect its contents from virtually anything it might encounter.

John patted the crate and wished as much care had been taken of him. But as he looked into the stone face, it seemed more fragile than ever.

‘Well, I can't eat you,' he said out loud.

He noticed the three other crates stacked beside the skull. He knew what these were. Science stuff, mainly. He flipped the catch and opened one. Neat rows of Perspex boxes separated each object from the next. Most of the boxes contained rock samples. Each was packaged, carefully labelled and protected.

For John, they were like a catalogue of his life. Each different band of rock was a memory of his old life, and he remembered his parents' reaction to every one.

He picked up a box that held the first chip of gold found on the planet. Another contained a pebble of
opal, worn smooth by an ocean that had dried up two billion years ago.

At the top of the crate was the latest addition to the catalogue – the rock he'd found on his last dig. He turned it over in his hands. The tiny burrow snaked through the stone, twisting and looping. Whatever had drawn the line billions of years ago, it couldn't be gravity or a rising bubble – it just couldn't.

Will it change anything?
he wondered. Life on Mars, if that was what it was. Why should it? It was only the past, after all. He looked up at the huge skull in front of him. It didn't just look ancient. It looked old. Old, the way a person looks old. Somehow close to death.

‘Did you change anything?' he asked aloud. ‘If you'd stayed in the ground, would I still be here?' The skull stared blankly back.

His find would change one thing, he realised. John might not be the first Martian after all. He felt oddly sad. ‘If this is a fossil,' he said to the skull, ‘then your time's up. Nobody's going to be interested in you any more.'

He closed the lid and placed the small box back into its crate.

As he did so, he noticed one of the boxes underneath
it. This crate didn't just contain rocks. He pulled out the box. It was divided into a dozen compartments, and each held a sprinkling of tiny objects sorted into varying colours and sizes. Seeds.

Of course. The crops they grew at the base had been imported from Earth years ago. For decades they'd been cross-bred and refined for better yields under the base's unique conditions. Now scientists back on Earth wanted to study the results.

John couldn't believe his luck. If there was one thing that living on Mars taught you, it was how to farm. John was naturally good at it. He could grow just about anything, just about anywhere. He knew every species from its seed and every requirement to grow it. For every plant grown on Mars he knew exactly how much water it required, how much light, and what needed to be in the soil.

Quickly, he flipped open the box, and examined its contents. Carrots: they'd take sixty days to grow, no good. Lettuce: too big to grow enough to live on and not rich enough in vitamins. He riffled through the box, rejecting fruit trees, mushrooms and herbs.

Finally, he found what he was looking for. He took a handful of seeds and examined them closely. Bean sprouts would be ready to eat in a week. True,
they wouldn't be much of a meal, but it would be something at least. Just enough to keep him going until the more substantial crops kicked in. He had time to grow small root vegetables. And there they were in the bottom of the tray like tiny fragments of bone – beetroot seeds. That would do. Beetroot and beans. Not much, but enough to keep him alive.

Life on the shuttle was lonely, hungry and slow.

His two companions, the computer and the skull, slowly fused in his mind. He spent long hours standing staring into the empty eye sockets and talking to the computer. When it spoke, its voice seemed to come from the skull's jaws.

The machine was eccentric, but over time he slowly began to respect it. Its job was to navigate the vast distances of space. In its world, the tiniest shift in the parameters of its calculations – a difference in weight in the cargo bay, the feather-light fluctuations in the solar wind – could multiply over time to throw out its projections of speed and direction. The computer couldn't be certain about anything because nothing was certain. Everything was subject to chaos and change, every law just a best guess.

John found himself obsessed with the skull. It had been around him for his entire life, watching him, but as the days wore on, he started to feel as though it had been following him for much longer. As if it had been with him for millennia. As though they were connected.

Every so often, he would open the crate to examine the rock he'd found on that last day, back on Mars, and trace his finger along the long, curved trail that ran across its surface. As he did so, he felt his link to the skull somehow fracturing. As if something was ending. Dying.

Around him, the vegetables sprouted, but they were not enough, and slowly John grew weaker and hungrier. Every day, he tended to the plants, his hands stained red by beetroot. Every night, he slept fitfully and dreamed of Jurassic forests and the blood-red tang of fresh meat.

And slowly, day by day, week by week, month by month, the tiny dot of the Earth grew larger and bluer in the cockpit window.

‘It's time,' said the computer. John woke instantly and sat upright. The hunger in his stomach was intense, and it was all he could do to climb to his feet. He struggled into the cockpit. The Earth seemed huge in the window. He could make out the continents, clouds, and the soft blue glow of the atmosphere.

‘We have slowed for our approach to Earth,' said the computer.

Today, it would be over one way or another. If all went well, they would land and he would walk out of the hatch to start his new life. First, however, they had to pass the accelerator and its mysterious experiment.

‘Where is the accelerator?' asked John. A neon arrow highlighted an area of the window. John could
just make out a dark grey ring against the black sky. It looked quiet enough. ‘Is it finished?' he asked.

‘No,' said the computer. ‘The final collision phase is due to begin imminently.'

‘What does that mean? Should we wait?'

‘The final phase of the experiment will be triggered automatically when enough particles have been collected,' it said. ‘It could be a few seconds or several weeks.'

‘We'll go now', said John. He knew he wouldn't last a couple more weeks, let alone several. This was not the time for the computer's philosophical dithering. Besides, he had been practising manoeuvring the shuttle for months. He grabbed the controls and pushed them forward. The engines growled as they started to accelerate towards the planet.

Inside the experiment, something triggered. Ranks of tiny cells, each holding its own subatomic prisoner in magnetic isolation, clicked open. Released from captivity, each particle, an exotic refugee from an unimaginable realm, claimed its freedom. They flooded into the chamber at the heart of the ring, spinning, spiralling and arcing with alien energies.

The shuttle was within a few hundred miles of the accelerator when it blew. A sudden flash of blue
light blinded John, and as his vision cleared, he saw the enormous ring start to fall in on itself. Around it, light bubbled and fizzed. A fury of chaos seethed and folded. Tendrils reached out from the centre and flicked into space. John fought to keep the shuttle steady as it shook and rattled as though flying through a storm.

A spark of blue foaming fire swept out in front of them and the shuttle tumbled over and over, spinning out of control. John pulled back, hauling the controls against the spin with all his strength.

Slowly, the ship steadied.

He looked back. The explosion was fading. Its fury was gone, and the void of space was once again darkening to a sooty black.

‘Is it over?' he asked the computer.

‘No.'

John looked again. At the centre of where the ring had been, bubbles were forming. They seemed even darker than space itself. As he watched, they floated outwards. Most burst in seconds, but a few of them drifted out into space towards them.

‘Wormholes appear to have been successfully synthesised,' the computer continued. ‘They are extremely unstable and must be avoided.'

John steered the ship sharply away, yet the bubbles seemed to follow, as though the shuttle had a kind of gravity, pulling them in. He weaved left and right trying desperately to shake them off, and one by one, the bubbles burst.

Finally, just one wormhole remained. It was following his every movement. John looked into the monitor showing the rear of the shuttle.

The dark bubble filled the screen.

‘What will happen if it catches us?' he yelled.

‘We will either be crushed to a single point,' said the computer calmly, ‘or transported to the other end of the wormhole.'

Neither option sounded good to John. ‘What can we do?' he cried, flinging the shuttle to the left and then to the right to try to shake the bubble off.

‘I don't know.' The bubble was still closing in.

‘Can we close it?'

The computer thought for a moment. ‘A large mass dropped into it might close it.'

John leapt up from the cockpit. ‘Take control,' he yelled.

He looked around the cargo bay. In one corner, a mechanised space suit stood, its magnetic feet clamped firmly to the floor. John fumbled desperately
with the catches as the ship weaved from side to side, up and down. Finally, he was in. The helmet hissed as it filled with air and the suit clanged into life.

‘Open the airlock doors,' John shouted above the sound of the engines.

‘Opening the inner and outer doors simultaneously will cause complete depressurisation of the vessel,' replied the computer. ‘Do you wish to continue?'

‘There's no time,' cried John. ‘Just do it. Now!'

The inner and outer airlock doors started to swing slowly open. Instantly, the cargo bay was in chaos. The plants that had kept him just alive were torn out from their roots as the air was sucked out of the shuttle. Everything loose was being dragged towards the doors. Only the transport crates and his parents' beds remained bolted in place. Everything else was flying out into the void.

Slowly, one step at a time, he clanked the suit across the metal floor. Outside was an emptiness so huge, it made John's head swim. The bubble was so close he felt he could almost touch it. He forced himself to look away.

There was only one thing on board large enough to stand a chance of closing the wormhole. He raised the suit's metal arms and grasped the edges of the
crate containing the skull. He pushed as hard as he could. The bolts securing the crate to the floor finally gave way and the skull began to slide towards the open door.

Outside, the wormhole was almost touching the ship. Its surface reflected the light from the engines. The ship bucked and strained, as if against an immense gravitational field.

As he pushed, John stared into the skull's huge dark eyes.
I'm sorry
, he thought, as he shoved it across the metal floor.
I have no choice.