The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  Alex was rescued from having to respond to this by a voice behind him saying, “Mr Dolan? Alex Dolan?”

  He looked round and saw a skinny black kid in jeans and a hoodie standing there. “Yes?”

  She grinned. “I’m Lin, your driver. I’m late; I’m sorry.”

  They shook hands. “Hi.”

  She looked past him and nodded at the other driver. “Rick. How’s it going.”

  Rick grunted and turned his gaze to the middle distance, scanning the crowds for signs of the Dolan Family. Lin looked at Alex, then at his overnight bag. “This all your luggage?”

  “Should I have brought more?”

  She grinned again. “Man travels light. I like that. So, shall we…?”

  “Yes, of course.” He turned to Rick and said, “Nice to meet you,” but the driver didn’t answer.

  “Rick’s cool,” Lin said as she led the way across Arrivals towards an exit, “but he lives in his own head a lot.”

  “It seems a… disturbing place to live.”

  “Rick’s cool,” she said again. “You just have to get to know him.” She took a card from a pocket of her hoodie and held it out. “Mr Clayton said you’d want this.”

  On the card, Clayton had written Hi, Alex. This is Lin. She’ll be late, because she always is. But she’s a great driver and she’ll get you here safely. See you soon. Stan.

  “I’m not, by the way,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Late. Not always, anyway.”

  “Right.” Alex put the card in his pocket. “Is he always like this?”

  “Mr Clayton? Best boss I ever worked for. You just have to get used to things, that’s all.”

  “Things?”

  “You’ll see. Just don’t let it faze you and you’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” He was already fazed. He didn’t think it could get any worse.

  They walked for what seemed miles, along corridors and across concourses, and at one point even briefly went outside, before winding up in a parking garage packed with high-end vehicles. Rich people’s parking. Alex thought he spotted, far down at the end of one row, what seemed to be a Bugatti Veyron, but that was impossible. You didn’t own a Veyron and park it at an airport. Lin held up a zapper and pressed the button, and there was an answering blink of indicators on a silver-grey SUV a couple of rows away.

  The SUV looked as if it had been driven here straight from the showroom. Even its tyres seemed to have been waxed. Inside, it was all leather upholstery and new car smell and a dashboard that looked as if it had been designed by a Hollywood CGI house. When Lin started it up a heads-up display appeared on the windscreen. Alex was surprised it was equipped with something as primitive as a steering wheel.

  It took them about fifteen minutes to drive out of the airport and get onto the freeway, and a few minutes after that they drove into a wall of mist that rapidly thickened into fog and the world shrank to a ghostly procession of half-glimpsed vehicles and tail lights.

  “I thought the Bay Area was lovely at this time of year,” Alex said, looking out of the passenger-side window.

  Lin chuckled. “Who told you that?”

  “Someone I was talking to yesterday.”

  “The Bay Area is lovely at all times of the year,” she said. “I love this town. Even in the fog.”

  “Hm.”

  “Is this your first time here?”

  “No, I was here… a long time ago.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “I didn’t. I was on my way to Santa Monica.” She glanced at him and he shrugged. “Long story. Anyway, I was only passing through. I was only here about eight hours. I didn’t even get a chance to ride on a tram.”

  “Cable car.”

  “Right. Well, I wasn’t here long, anyway.”

  She grinned. “You seem to make a habit of flying visits.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking out of the window again. “In and out, that’s me.”

  The journey ended in yet another garage, this one under a towering slab of glass and steel that rose into the fog. Alex had no idea where he was. For all he knew, he was no longer even in San Francisco.

  “Okay,” Lin said, turning off the engine. “This is where we part ways for a while. The elevator’s over there. You’ll need this to operate it.” She handed him a keycard. “You want the penthouse. That’s button ‘P’.” She ignored his raised eyebrow. “I’ll wait and take you to your hotel when you’re done.”

  He looked out at the low-ceilinged Brutalist space of the garage. It was brightly lit, but there still seemed to be too many shadows in the far corners. “You’re just going to sit here?”

  She held up a Kindle. “I have something to read. Okay, so go. Don’t keep him waiting.”

  “Right. Thanks for the ride.”

  She grinned again. “You’re welcome. See you in a while.”

  At the lift, there was no call button, just a blank panel by the door. He touched the panel, and nothing happened. He put his hand flat on it, and nothing happened. He looked back across the garage and saw Lin sitting in the car, her face faintly lit by the screen of her Kindle. It would, he considered, be frankly embarrassing to have to go back and ask her how the lift worked. He looked at the panel again, and something occurred to him. He held the keycard against the panel, and the door slid smoothly aside. Score one for the Science Journalist.

  Inside, there was another panel beside the floor buttons. Alex swiped the card against it, pressed button ‘P’, and the door closed and the lift took off fast enough to make his knees flex.

  Forty-two floors up, he stepped out into bright sunshine. The penthouse level was above the fog, and looking out through the big windows of the lift foyer was like looking across a pale grey sea, from which the tops of a few other buildings rose. He thought he recognised the pyramidal cap of the TransAmerica building. In the distance, a range of hills lifted out of the mist like a far-off shoreline, and a few miles away he could see the suspension towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “It’s quite a view, isn’t it?” said a voice.

  “Yes.” Alex turned from the window. “I don’t know how you manage to get anything done.”

  “Oh, this place isn’t mine,” said Stan. “I just rented it for a couple of days.”

  In Alex’s admittedly limited experience, the very famous—people you saw on the news or in films all the time—never seemed quite real in person. He’d done his share of showbiz stuff, back in his Fleet Street days, and it didn’t matter how down-to-earth or ‘normal’ the subject seemed in private, there was always that sense of not-quite-normality.

  Stanisław Clayton was different. He looked like someone you’d see shopping in the local supermarket, neatly upper-middle-class in chinos and an open-necked shirt and a plain grey jacket. He was going bald, and he wore John Lennon spectacles. There was no impression, Alex thought, that he was shaking hands with the fifth wealthiest person on the planet. You’d walk past Stan in the street and not notice him.

  He led the way into the penthouse’s main room, an enormous wood-floored space with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the sea of fog and its island high-rises. In the centre of the room was a big coffee table flanked by what appeared to be two pieces of chrome and black leather BDSM equipment. Stan lowered himself into one; Alex perched on the edge of the other.

  “So,” said Stan. “How was the flight?”

  “It was good, thanks,” Alex said, looking about him. The ceiling of the room was so high that it wouldn’t have surprised him to see clouds gathered against it.

  Stan saw him looking and grinned. “I’d have been happy to meet you in a coffee shop, but I had another meeting earlier and those are not guys you take to Starbucks.” He nodded at a cafetière, cups, and assorted milk jugs and sugar bowls on the table. “You look like you could use a cup, yourself.”

  Alex blinked at him. “Yes. Thank you.”

  Stan hunched forward so he could reach the cof
fee things. “I think we got off on the wrong foot yesterday,” he said, pouring.

  “One of us did, anyway.”

  Stan glanced at him. “Well,” he went on. “Let’s start again.” He handed Alex one of the cups. “I want to offer you a job. It’ll be long-term. At least a year, possibly longer. You’ll be well-paid for it and when you’re done I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t continue to work for us.” He sat back with his own cup and smiled. “How about it?”

  Alex dropped a couple of sugar cubes into his coffee. He said, “You said in your letter that you want me to write a book.”

  “That’s right. And some newspaper and magazine articles.”

  “Why me? I’ve never written a book before.”

  Stan shrugged. “How hard can it be? I like your work. That piece about the biohacker guy in Portland was pretty good.”

  It had also been six years ago and it didn’t dispel the feeling Alex had of being caught up in some profound and uncontrollable natural event, like a tornado or an avalanche.

  Stan reached into an old-fashioned briefcase beside his chair—Alex was fairly sure now that it was a chair—and took out what looked like a printed brochure. “Take a look.”

  Alex opened the brochure, saw photographs of neat midwestern Americana. Clapboard houses, flagpoles, an Arby’s. Cornfields. Soy fields. A huge blue sky dissected by contrails.

  “It’s called Sioux Crossing,” said Stan. “Up by the Minnesota state line.”

  “It’s pretty,” Alex said, turning a page. A road running off into the vanishing point between fields. White silos in the distance off to one side.

  Stan grunted. “It was dying on its feet,” he said. “Half the farms went to the wall in the last decade, and the other half were barely surviving. We bought the town. Actually, we bought the county. And parts of the neighbouring ones.”

  He said it so casually that Alex glanced up, but there was no sense of boastfulness. If anything, sitting there on the other side of the coffee table, he seemed rather wistful, as if he’d been telling someone that his refrigerator had broken down and he’d had to go out and buy another one. We needed to buy northern Iowa, so we did.

  “Bit like buying your own country,” said Alex.

  Stan tipped his head to one side and regarded him amiably. “You know,” he said, “you have a pretty smart mouth, for someone at a job interview. I find that interesting. Not a lot of guys would talk back to a potential employer like that.”

  “Yes, well, it’s been that kind of year.” Alex strongly suspected that Stan knew exactly what kind of year he was having, but there was no harm in mentioning it.

  “A disinterested observer might think you were almost trying not to get the job.”

  “How am I doing?”

  Stan smiled. “I’ll let you know,” he said. “But it would make me feel bad if I didn’t mention that it’s a piss-poor negotiating strategy.”

  “Hm.” He looked down and turned another page. These days, press and corporate materials came to you via a download link, full streaming video, all the bells and whistles. Some companies aimed at ironic retro and sent you memory sticks branded with kitsch logos and a knowing wink. It was rare—pretty much unknown, in Alex’s experience—to receive anything on paper, but again there was no sense of boastfulness about the brochure. It was competently presented, well-written, printed on good, although not expensive, stock. Humble, unflashy. It could, of course, have been a one-off, printed just for him, which meant that it was not humble at all.

  “What do you think?”

  Another page. There were several photos of what appeared to be a small university campus, low brick buildings set in wooded parkland. There was a lake, wide white paths with people cycling along them. One of the buildings was three or four stories taller than the others. The following page was a single aerial shot of the same buildings, taken from a considerable altitude, set in a patchwork of fields arranged within a neat grid of roads. A huge circle had been superimposed on the photo. The campus, the town and several farms were all contained within the circle. Alex knew what it was, but to anyone else it would have been a bit of a mystery. What was this huge circle? The blast radius of a nuclear weapon? The spread of a pestilence?

  “How did you talk them into it?” he asked. “Selling you all that land?”

  “I told you.” Stan shuffled forward until he was sitting on the edge of the armchair and he could reach out and put his hand against the cafetière on the coffee table. He seemed to take a moment to consider whether it was still warm enough, then he picked it up and topped up his cup. “The place was virtually bankrupt. Foreclosures everywhere, kids moving out of the area. Rural flight. It’s the Twilight of the Gods for farmers up there.”

  It crossed Alex’s mind to say something insubordinate, but he decided against it. He tried to remember who had done that line about the rich not being like you and me. Hemingway? Fitzgerald? Back in the nineteenth century the megarich—your Rockefellers and your Carnegies—used to endow public libraries or build whole towns for their workers. In the middle of the twentieth century they withdrew from view, Hughes-like, became shadowy, mythical. These days, they were all over social media. They gave TED talks, set up their own space programmes or railway companies. They fired convertibles into orbit. Stanisław Clayton had developed a taste for high-energy physics, and because he was the fifth wealthiest human being on Earth he was able to indulge his tastes and do Good Works along the way. Or, in his case, to buy an enormous tract of North America and bury a supercollider in it.

  He didn’t live anywhere. Or rather, he lived in a lot of places. He had an apartment in Berlin and a house in London and a small manor house in Normandy and a dozen or so properties scattered around North America, and he was in constant motion between them. As far as he was concerned, buying an entire county in northern Iowa wasn’t much different to buying a brownstone in midtown Manhattan; it was just a matter of scale.

  He said, “You don’t have to give me an answer right now. Take some time. A week, let’s say. Think about it.”

  “I don’t do PR,” Alex told him.

  “Well, great. I already have more PR people than is probably good for me, and to be honest I’d prefer you to stay out of their way. You’d have complete autonomy, reporting only to me.”

  “So, not complete autonomy, then.”

  Stan shook his head wonderingly. “Good Christ, Dolan, are you allergic to money?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to do it,” said Alex. “It’s more that I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with this book. There are better science writers than me.”

  “I told you. I like the way you write.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand why you’re so… resistant to the idea, Alex. How long is it since you had regular work?”

  “You know how long.”

  Stan looked rueful. “Yeah, okay. Point taken. I handled that all wrong, and I apologise.” He got up and walked to the window that formed one wall of the suite. “Have you noticed there’s no sense of adventure any more?” he said to the view. “No sense of wonder?”

  “I can’t say I have.”

  He sighed. “When I was a kid I read all those popular science magazines, all those predictions of the future. We were going to have cities on the moon and habitats in orbit and we were going to irrigate the Sahara and farm the oceans and everything was going to be wonderful.”

  “Flying cars. Jet packs.”

  Stan turned and smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “You’re too young to remember all that.”

  “I’ve seen the memes.”

  Stan looked sourly around the room. “The future has been a disappointment, Alex. We still haven’t managed to get a manned mission beyond the orbit of the moon, let alone build cities there. And as for all that other stuff…” He snorted and waved a hand. “It’s within our capabilities to understand and harness the fundamental forces of the universe, and instead of being bold about
it we just tick along.”

  “I think there are scientists who would disagree with you,” Alex mused. “The people at CERN, for instance.”

  “We are going to make the Large Hadron Collider look like a valve radio,” Stan said solemnly. It was a good line, but he’d used it before, in press releases and speeches, and Alex was a little disappointed to hear him repeat it.

  “Some of those old valve radios are pretty good.”

  “Bit of advice? Don’t insult your prospective employer and his multibillion dollar vanity project. It’s not a strong look.”

  “Duly noted.” Alex looked down at the brochure and read through a bullet-pointed page of statistics. “Some of these numbers are pretty impressive.”

  “They are.” Stan came back and sat down.

  “But they’re just aspirations right now, aren’t they? You can’t possibly know what sort of yield you’ll get out of this thing until you fire it up.”

  Stan picked up his cup and saucer and took a sip of coffee. “You’re interested.”

  Yes, well, who wouldn’t be? He’d been too young for the LHC and there’d been nothing on that scale since, until now. But when all was said and done, he could still just read the results in Scientific American.

  “You do it your way, warts and all,” Stan told him. “But I want something that inspires, something that makes people believe. I want sensawunda.”

  “That’s a word I haven’t heard for a while.”

  “My point exactly.” Stan nodded at the brochure. “We’re setting out on a great adventure, a journey into the fundamental processes of the universe. I want people to be excited about it.”

  He wanted, Alex thought, people to be properly grateful, which wasn’t happening at the moment. The project was drowning in bad press; its social media was a trainwreck. Last week there had been a rather cruel sketch on Saturday Night Live.

  “Look,” said Stan, “why don’t you go out there? Take a few days, have a look around, see what you think before you decide.” When Alex looked dubious, he went on, “My jet’s out at SFO; you can be there by the evening.”

  “Today?”