The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  And that was before you factored the Defense Department in. That probably meant the NSA were involved, and the NSA just loved to listen. Quite how closely they were listening was anyone’s guess. Kitson hadn’t been too concerned about phoning him last night, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He’d just have to assume that unless he used the 007 Phone an algorithm somewhere would be listening in and looking for keywords. He wondered what would happen if he called his dentist back in Boston and started talking about Al-Qaeda.

  For quite some time now, the road had run parallel to a high chain-link fence, through which Alex could see what appeared to be neatly tended parkland, great sweeps of grass dotted with stands of trees. Occasionally, he spotted low white buildings in the distance.

  The car slowed and made a right turn onto a wide, smooth road between two high fences. The road ran dead straight for about a mile before ending in a gate manned by uniformed security guards. One of them came over to the car. The driver lowered his window and showed an ID, which the guard checked off on a tablet. Then the guard came to the rear of the car and knocked on the window. Alex spent a few moments trying to find the button that lowered it.

  “Hi,” he said when he finally got the window down. “Alex Dolan. I’m supposed to be meeting Professor Delahaye.”

  The guard didn’t look impressed. Alex noted that his belt was festooned with tasers, cans of mace, and a sheaf of cable ties. One of those weird foreign-looking pistols was in a holster strapped to his thigh. He typed something on the tablet, looked at the result, looked at Alex, looked at the result again, then stepped away from the car and waved at one of his colleagues in a kiosk beside the gate. A few moments later the gate slid to one side and the car drove through. This time nobody saluted.

  The main road continued straight ahead, but the driver turned off shortly after passing through the gate, onto another road which wound gently through the parkland. Looking out, Alex saw people cycling along wide white cycle paths between the low buildings. He saw a huge ornamental lake with a fountain jetting a horsetail of spray into the air. The place looked like a large and sparsely inhabited university campus.

  Eventually the road brought them to one building that was larger than the others, a five-storey brick cube faced with lines of tinted windows, its roof cluttered with many different kinds of aerial. There wasn’t a soul about.

  Doug got out of the driver’s seat to open Alex’s door, but Alex already had it open. “No welcoming committee, then,” he said as he stepped out. Doug looked at him as if he was unfamiliar with human speech. “Never mind. Thanks for the ride, Doug.”

  Doug closed the door and went back to the driver’s seat.

  Inside, the foyer of the building looked like the waiting room of an upscale graphic design house. Soft furnishings, low tables with carefully arranged magazines, plant displays. Behind a desk, a young man smiled as Alex approached.

  “Hi, sir,” he said.

  “Hi, I’m here to see Professor Delahaye.”

  “Certainly, sir.” The young man was wearing a badge on a lanyard around his neck. The badge had a full-face colour photograph and the name CHARLES in big letters. “Could I have your name, please?”

  “Alex Dolan.”

  Charles consulted a monitor on the desk, scrolling down with his finger. “I’m afraid I don’t seem to have you here, sir.”

  “Mr Olive made the appointment.”

  Charles looked at the monitor again. “I have a Dorman here at ten a.m. Alan Dorman.” He looked up hopefully.

  “Dolan,” Alex said patiently. “Alex Dolan.”

  Charles frowned a little. “Do you have your phone with you, sir?”

  Alex handed over the hotel phone and Charles put it down on a little silver disc set into the top of his desk. He typed briefly, looked at the screen. “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s you, Mr Dolan. I’m sorry about that; I don’t know how it happened.”

  “No worries. Is Professor Delahaye about?”

  “I’ll just page him.” Charles typed again and a little box on the desk beside the monitor made a soft whirring sound and ejected a laminated badge. “In the meantime, could you please wear this at all times while you’re on the campus?” He clipped the badge to a lanyard and held it out.

  “Sure.” The badge was warm from the printer. On it were his passport photo and the name ALAN DORMAN, overprinted with VISITOR in big red letters. He sighed and slipped the lanyard over his head.

  Charles was typing again. “I just paged Professor Delahaye,” he said. “If you’d like to wait?”

  Alex wondered what else Charles was expecting him to do. “Yes, that would be great.”

  “Can I get you a coffee? Juice? Water?”

  “No, thank you, Charles.” Alex wandered over and sat on one of the padded benches near the window. All the magazines on the coffee table in front of it were latest editions, and none of them looked as if they had ever been opened. He picked up a copy of Scientific American and paged through it, trying not to burn down to the ground with jealousy at all the journalists who had articles in it. He’d been trying to pitch pieces to SA for the past year, without success.

  He read the magazine from cover to cover, and there was still no sign of anyone coming to collect him. He looked at his watch, saw Charles watching him. Charles shrugged helplessly. Alex sighed and picked up a copy of Newsweek. People came and went through the foyer, but apart from the occasional curious glance nobody paid him any attention.

  When he’d read the magazine, he put it back on the table, got up, and ambled over to the desk. “Look,” he told Charles. “Maybe there’s been some kind of mistake. Maybe I’m not supposed to be here today.”

  “No,” Charles said, indicating his monitor. “You’re right here. Alan Dorman, ten a.m.”

  “Dolan,” said Alex. “And it’s…” he checked his watch again, “…twenty to twelve.”

  Charles thought about it. “I’ve paged Professor Delahaye,” he said apologetically.

  “Well, perhaps you could page him again?”

  Doubt crossed Charles’s face. “That’s probably not a good idea,” he said. “The Professor doesn’t like to be bothered.”

  That much was obvious. “I can’t sit here all day, Charles. This is ridiculous.”

  Indecision replaced doubt. “I could maybe page someone else…” he mused. “But the Professor doesn’t like me doing that. He likes to be in the loop.”

  “You’ve already told him I’m here,” Alex said. “I don’t know how much more in the loop he could be, unless I go and sit on his lap.”

  This was obviously an alarming image. Charles typed again. “Okay, I paged Dr McCoy.”

  Alex narrowed his eyes.

  “And she’s on her way,” Charles said, reading from the screen. “She’ll be here… ah.” He looked past Alex.

  Alex turned and saw a tall woman with short curly brown hair walking across the lobby towards the desk. She was wearing jeans and sneakers and a long grey cardigan over a faded tee shirt with the face of Frank Zappa on it.

  “Hi,” she said when she reached them. “Wendy McCoy. You must be Mr Dorman.”

  “Dolan,” Alex said, shaking her hand.

  “Oh.” She looked at Alex’s badge. “But it says…”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know.”

  “I paged Professor Delahaye,” Charles put in.

  She pursed her lips. “Yeah, well Professor Delahaye’s an asshole.” Charles looked as if he was about to keel over. She beamed at Alex. “So,” she said. “You’re here for the tour, right?”

  “I’m supposed to be, yes.”

  “Okay, so let’s do that.” She beamed at Charles. “I’ll take it from here, Charles.” The look of relief on Charles’s face was the kind of thing that wound up becoming an internet meme.

  As she led the way back towards the front doors, Alex said, “Thanks for doing this, Dr McCoy.”

  “Wendy,” she said. “And if you have
any Star Trek gags it might be best to get them out of the way now.”

  Alex shook his head. “Never crossed my mind.”

  “Hm. Are you a cyclist?”

  “I haven’t been on a bike since I was sixteen.”

  “We’ll take a moke, then.”

  There was a long, low structure beside the main building. Parked inside were thirty or so small vehicles which looked like the products of the forced marriage of a quad bike and a golf cart, all of them lined up and plugged into charging points in the wall. Wendy went over to the nearest one and unplugged its cable. They climbed in, she touched her phone to a pad on the dashboard, pressed the accelerator, and the moke moved off with a high-pitched whine.

  “The motors are completely silent,” she said as they left the garage. “They had to put in a noise generator so people would hear them coming.”

  “Couldn’t they have come up with a less annoying sound?”

  “The whole point is for people to notice it,” she said, turning the moke onto one of the cycle paths. “They did try having them play ‘Ode to Joy’ but that was really annoying.”

  He looked at her. “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve seen footage of the tests; it’s pretty terrible. I hear you haven’t decided whether to take the job or not yet.”

  Except I don’t have a choice any more. “Yeah. Kind of.”

  Wendy shrugged. She glanced over and saw him looking at her. “What.”

  “I think you’re the first person I’ve met since I got here who hasn’t either tried to talk me into taking the job or warn me off.”

  “You’re over twenty-one,” she said. “You can make up your mind without my help. How much do you know about the Sioux Crossing Supercollider?”

  “Just the broad stuff.”

  “Okay. Well, there’s a lot of technical detail which I guess can wait for another time, if there is another time. I was on the way over to Susan when Charles paged me, so maybe we’ll head over there and I’ll show you some of the Campus on the way. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good. Who’s Susan?”

  She grinned. “You’ll see. Don’t be afraid to ask questions as we go, but I should warn you I don’t have every little nitpicking detail at my fingertips and there may be things I’ll have to get back to you with.”

  “Fair enough.” He looked out over the neat parkland of the Campus. “How long have you been here?”

  “Since the start,” she said. “I was one of the original team who surveyed the site. I was still a grad student back then, of course; I was just carrying gear around for course credits.”

  “That must be quite a thing, watching a project like this come together over… how long has it been? Ten years?”

  “Twelve. Nearly thirteen. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride and no mistake.” He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

  “What do you think about the setup? Clayton buying the county and everything?”

  She glanced at him again. “These are strangely nontechnical questions.”

  “I’m still trying to get a feel of the place, fit it all together in my head.” She didn’t look convinced. “Trust me; I’m a writer.”

  She shrugged and pulled out to pass a couple who were cycling unhurriedly two abreast. “None of my business. I just do the science I’m told to do; I leave the rest of it to Admin. I’m on the Liaison Committee that deals with relations between us and the town. I could probably scare up a couple of the other committee members for you to talk to if you give me an hour or so.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe some other time.” He doubted he’d hear anything from the liaison people except the company line that the project had been good for the county and the locals were all grateful. Everyone smile and nod. “How many people are on the project?”

  She thought about it. “Can’t remember, exactly. About nine thousand, give or take.”

  “That’s a lot of people.”

  “It’s not as many as the LHC, even though it’s a bigger project.” As if anticipating his next question, she added, “About three quarters of them live on-campus; the rest have homes around town, mostly people with families. We’re planning a new housing development south of town, for people who want to move off-campus, but that’s a way in the future.”

  “Do you live in town?”

  She chuckled. “We don’t know each other that well yet, Mr Dolan. Oh, for fuck’s sake.” This last because she’d spotted an obstruction on the cycleway ahead of them.

  When they got closer, Alex saw that it was a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback, the make of car Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt, except this one was sprayed bright tomato red. It was parked diagonally across the cycleway at the end of a long, curving double line of churned up grass that ran away out of sight in the distance.

  Wendy stopped the moke a few feet from the car and got out, taking her phone from one of the pockets of her cardigan. She speed-dialled a number and held the phone to her ear. “Hi,” she said when the call was answered. “He’s done it again.” She listened. “Who do you think?” Another pause. “I’m standing right next to it. Tag my location and get someone to come out and pick it up.” She bent down and peered into the car. “Keys are still in the ignition.” Straightening up, she looked around. “No, I don’t see him anywhere. He’s probably sleeping it off under a tree like last time.” The two cyclists they had passed went by, pulling off onto the grass to go around the obstruction. Neither of them bothered to look at either the car or the moke.

  Wendy came back and climbed into the driver’s seat. Alex said, “What’s that all about?”

  “That, Mr Dolan,” she said, pressing down on the accelerator and driving around the marooned car, “is just one of the crosses we have to bear.”

  THE CAMPUS OF the Sioux Crossing Supercollider was about three miles across. Most of the buildings were clustered over to one side, where the buried ring of the collider itself ran under the facility, but the residences were scattered all over the site, each one named after a famous scientist. Wendy pointed a couple of them out as they went by, each one an identical brick cube. The campus was neat and clean and well kept, but none of it was going to win any architectural awards. Driving by, they saw more mokes and cyclists, but not very many. Alex wondered where the rest of the nine thousand people were hiding.

  Presently, they came to another building not far from the perimeter fence, basically a big cinderblock cube with windows covered in wire mesh. Wendy stopped the moke and led the way to the door. Most of the ground floor of the building was a single open cement-floored space, with a pair of huge sliding doors at the far end. Wendy took a couple of hard hats from a rack on the wall and handed one to Alex. “Better put this on,” she said. “Don’t want you bumping your head.”

  Beside the rack was a set of lift doors. Wendy put her phone against the sensor on the wall beside the doors and they slid open. Inside, she pressed a button and Alex felt the lift floor sink beneath his feet.

  It felt as if they descended quite a distance, but there was no way to tell because there was no indicator beside the panel of buttons. Eventually the lift bumped softly to a halt and the doors opened onto what could have been an office corridor anywhere in the world. Hard-wearing carpet underfoot, rows of office doors on either side, walls painted beige. Through windows beside the doors, Alex could see into the offices as they passed. People were sitting in cubicles, intent on monitor screens. So that was where everyone was.

  At the end of the corridor was a short flight of steps leading down to another corridor, this one floored with vinyl and walled with white-painted cinderblock. This led to a large vestibule with boxes and bits of electronic equipment stacked against the walls. There was a solid-looking metal door with an alphanumeric keypad and an emergency pull-handle in a glass-fronted box. Wendy tapped in a code and the door swung open. It was about four inches thick and edged with rubber gaskets. Beyond, Alex could see a big room and another met
al door. He had a sudden image of moving through the interior of a submarine.

  Inside, Wendy pushed the door shut and typed on another keypad, and for a moment nothing seemed to happen, then Alex felt his ears pop. A little green light on the keypad turned red.

  At the other door, there was a green light on the keypad. Wendy typed again and the door swung open and she indicated he should step through.

  “Oh,” he said.

  The door opened onto a cavern the size of a cathedral, almost filled by the most complex-looking device Alex had ever seen.

  “Oh,” he said again.

  “Alex Dolan, meet SUSAN,” said Wendy, closing the airlock door behind them. “SUSAN, meet Alex Dolan.”

  They were standing on a metal catwalk about halfway up the wall of the cavern, and still the great metal device towered over them. Parts of it had been opened up and people wearing hard hats were clambering all over it. Alex went to the railing of the catwalk and looked over. The floor of the cavern was full of equipment and scaffolding.

  “We’ve got four detectors,” Wendy said, stepping up beside him. “SUSAN, HELEN, ROSE, and WENDY. Not me,” she added. “The detectors are all named after Delahaye’s nieces.”

  “That’s quite something,” he said, staring at the device. There had been a photograph of one of the detectors in Stan’s brochure, but it hadn’t done it justice.

  Wendy smiled at him. “I do believe you have the sensawunda, Mr Dolan.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Alex said, unwilling to look away from the scene.

  “Okay, so I have to go down there and have a word with a couple of people. You’re not cleared to go any closer yet so you’ll have to stay here. Can I trust you not to drop stuff over the railing or go around pushing big red buttons?”

  He laughed. “I’ll be a good boy. Promise.”

  She grinned again. “I’ll bet. See you in a few minutes.” And she walked along the catwalk to a set of steps leading down to the floor of the cavern.

  Alex stayed where he was, looking at the detector, a camera aimed at the most fiercely hidden secrets of the universe. Despite himself, despite everything that had happened to him over the past few days, he felt the beginnings of a thrill of excitement.