It was, of course, Bud. He pulled back the hood of his suit and grinned at them. “Alex,” he said, “Wendy. Good to see you.”
“We thought you’d forgotten about us,” Wendy told him.
“Well, no, we didn’t,” he said, still grinning. “Do you have any casualties?”
“We’re fine,” she said. “Mr Ortiz needs to get to a hospital as soon as possible.” She looked along the curve of the lane. “I don’t know about anyone else. We haven’t seen anybody since it started.”
Other people were starting to emerge from the helicopter, several of them police officers, including Officer Muñoz. Bud turned to them and said, “Okay, you guys check the other houses. See if anyone needs urgent help.”
“When did it stop?” Alex asked.
“Storm passed over about three hours ago,” said Bud. “The trailing edge is about a hundred miles east of here. West, it’s clear all the way to the Rockies.”
Another figure climbed down from the helicopter, which appeared to be larger on the inside than the outside, judging by the number of people it was carrying. As it approached, Alex saw it was Mickey Olive. He was wearing a ski jacket and a sort of Tibetan knitted hat, and his jeans were tucked into a pair of brown furry boots that looked as if they’d been made by cutting the feet off a Wookiee.
“Hello, Alex,” he said when he reached them. “What happened to your face?”
“I walked into a door,” Alex told him.
Mickey winced. “Ow. You should get that looked at.”
“There’s a bunch of National Guardsmen clearing their way down the road with supplies,” Bud said. “Should be here in two, maybe three hours.”
“They should be careful,” Wendy said. “My car’s parked up on Blackfish Road. It’s probably completely buried; they won’t see it until they run into it.”
“They know what they’re doing, Wendy,” Bud said. “But I’ll let them know.”
“How bad’s it been?” Alex asked.
“Ah, pretty bad.” Alex belatedly realised that behind his grin Bud looked exhausted. “Town’s been without power since the day before yesterday. We lost some folks down by Cooper’s Hollow. County Sheriff’s checking on outlying communities but I expect we’ll find we’ve lost others too.”
“I’m sorry.”
Bud nodded. “We’ll roll with it. We always do.” He blinked at Alex. “Is there anything you need?”
“So long as you get Ralph out of here, we’ll be fine until the National Guard arrives.”
“Okay.” Bud looked along the lane, where his officers were slogging from house to house trying to find unburied doors to knock on. “Well, I guess I’d better help take care of this.” And he set off down the curve of houses.
“You gave us a bit of a scare,” said Mickey. He was looking at both of them, but he was talking to Wendy.
“We were perfectly safe,” Alex said.
“Eventually,” Wendy added.
“There were a couple of moments,” Alex admitted.
Mickey looked from one to the other, then back again. He said, “Excellent. Well, no doubt I’ll hear all about it. Dr McCoy, would you do me the honour of coming back to the Facility with us?”
Alex and Wendy looked at each other. “What, now?” she said.
“Well, as soon as Chief Rosewater’s satisfied himself with the situation here,” he said, watching Bud clambering up a snowdrift to knock on a first-floor window a few doors down. The drifts must be frozen solid almost all the way through, for it to bear his weight like that.
Wendy looked nonplussed. “Sure. I guess. What about Ralph?”
“We’ll drop Mr Ortiz and any other casualties off at County General on the way. Professor Delahaye is quite keen to have a chat with you.”
“Has something happened?”
“I don’t know. And even if I did, I doubt I’d understand it; I’m not a scientist, just passing on a message.”
Alex got a sense of Subtext, of something significant. He said to Wendy, “You might as well; what were you planning to do? Wait till the thaw?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It just feels like I’m abandoning you, flying off like this.”
“You can always come back and visit in the spring.”
“Yeah.” She thought about it. “Yeah.” They turned at the sound of boots crunching in the snow behind them. A paramedic and a police officer had Ralph on a stretcher, wrapped up in what must have been his own bodyweight of blankets. He seemed to be asleep. They carried him carefully down the slope of the lawn and out towards the helicopter. “I hope he’s going to be okay.”
Some of the neighbours had come out of their besieged homes by now and were standing, all wrapped up, and gawking at the helicopter sitting in the middle of their village green. Some of them were chatting to Bud’s officers.
It took another hour or so for the police to complete their sweep of East Walden Lane. Alex and Wendy and Mickey went back to Ralph’s house, where Mickey stood looking around the kitchen and said, “And you’ve been here since the night the storm began?”
When it came time to leave, Alex went outside to watch everyone clamber back into the helicopter. A couple of the neighbours—older folks—went with them, and a few doors along the lane Alex saw that four of Bud’s officers had stayed behind and looked like they were securing one of the properties, and he felt his heart sink.
As the rotors wound up, lifting a new blizzard from the ground, he saw Wendy’s face in one of the windows. She was mouthing something and pointing at Ralph’s house. Alex waved to her, but that just made her gesture more emphatically and mouth whatever it was she was saying even more exaggeratedly. He raised his hands and mimed a big shrug and she glared at him. Then the helicopter lifted itself up out of the snow, rose straight up for about three hundred feet, tipped its nose down, and howled away into the distance.
Alex watched until the helicopter was nothing more than a speck in the great blue vault of the sky, then he turned and trudged back up the lawn. As he came round the side of the house, he saw Homer sitting in Ralph’s doorway, sniffing suspiciously at the snow just outside. Alex scowled.
“Well, shit,” he said.
The Collider
THE SIOUX CROSSING Supercollider was a hollow ring twenty-three miles in circumference, a tunnel buried two hundred feet below the farms and towns and settlements of Rosewater County and a couple of the neighbouring counties. Twin beams of particles, running in opposite directions through a pair of beam pipes along the centre of the tunnel, were accelerated by superconducting magnets up to within a tiny fraction of the speed of light, at which point they were crashed into each other at enormous energies, the collision throwing off increasingly exotic particles, deep building blocks of the universe.
In theory, anyway. In practice, the SCS had suffered years of delays and technical problems. In test runs it had barely achieved half its target energies. It was regularly referred to by commentators—who clearly felt very clever for coming up with it—as ‘Stan Clayton’s Shitshow’.
Which was unfair, Alex thought. A lot of very smart people were working very, very hard to make the SCS work. They were building the most complex piece of machinery ever created, not putting together a kit-car.
He wondered if he was going native. He’d planned to keep a distance, try to be objective, but that had proved difficult. Everyone on the Campus was enormously enthusiastic and committed, and that tended to be infectious. It was disturbing; he’d thought himself more cynical than that. He was even starting to feel comfortable in the town, now that people had stopped staring at him.
One morning, parking his car outside the main Facility building, he saw Lin, Stan’s driver, sitting at one of the picnic tables outside with a go-cup of coffee, thumb-typing on her phone.
She looked up as he approached, and grinned. “Hey, Alex. How’s it going?”
He sat down opposite her. “What brings you here?”
“The boss
wanted to see what all you crazy people are spending his money on.”
Alex doubted anyone was keeping Stan in the dark about that. He said, “Nobody said you were coming.” Although to be fair, that was hardly a surprise. He hadn’t had any direct contact with Stan since before Christmas. He had more meaningful conversations with the dog.
Lin put her phone away and took a sip of coffee. “Some bigwigs wanted a tour, very hush-hush. Mr Clayton decided to host them himself.” She was wearing a black suit, white shirt, and a narrow dark green tie, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses was perched on top of her head. “You’re looking well. The countryside obviously agrees with you.”
“It has its compensations.”
“I heard about the storm you had. That must have been a hell of a thing.”
Alex looked out across the brilliant green lawns and little woodlands of the Campus. It was hard to believe that just a couple of months ago it had been under tens of feet of snow. Like winter, spring had come hard to northern Iowa. The freeze had been followed by an abrupt thaw, widespread flooding, people winched into rescue helicopters from the roofs of their homes. Some of the newspaper op-eds believed they could detect a definite post-apocalyptic flavour to the times. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it was a bit.” He stood and picked up his bag. “I’d better go to work. Are you staying at the New Rose?”
She shook her head. “We’re flying back tonight. Mr Clayton’s off to Paris tomorrow morning.”
“I thought things got quieter when you became a billionaire.”
Lin laughed. “That money doesn’t just make itself.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
Inside, one of the seemingly endless line of eager young interns was at the front desk, BRIAN on his nametag. “I’m late,” Alex told him, putting his ID into the slot in the desk to sign in. “Have I missed them?”
Brian consulted his monitor. “They have a meeting scheduled on the third floor, Mr Dolan,” he said. “That should be ending soon.”
“Thank you, Brian.” Alex hung his ID around his neck on its lanyard and headed for the stairs.
People were just emerging from the third-floor lecture theatre when he got there. He spotted Stan, Mickey Olive, and Professor Delahaye and his senior staff among a group of very expensively suited strangers and a scattering of security men, identifiable because their suits were not terribly expensive, their expressions grim, and they were not speaking to anyone.
“Hi,” Alex said in a loud voice, walking down the corridor towards the group. “Sorry I’m late.” He saw the security men tense up, but Mickey spoke quietly to one of them and they stood down, although at least a third of them at any one time proceeded to stare at him.
“Alex,” said Stan, smiling and shaking his hand. “It’s been too long.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “It really has.”
A cloud crossed Stan’s face, was gone almost as soon as it appeared. “Alex, do you know Brigadier General Bell?” He indicated the man standing beside him.
“I’m afraid not.” Alex put out his hand.
“Brigadier General J Arthur Bell, Alex Dolan,” said Stan. “Alex is writing a history of the project.”
Bell was in his early seventies, wearing an exquisite suit, but his body language was so obviously military he might as well have been wearing full dress uniform. He looked as if he’d been left outside for a very long time in some of the world’s worst places and allowed to petrify, and his handshake had all the human warmth of a small bag of gravel. He didn’t bother quite looking at Alex, and when one of his aides whispered in his ear he turned away without saying anything.
In the meantime, Stan had also managed to get himself into a conversation with Professor Delahaye. Mickey came up soundlessly to Alex’s side, gently grasped his elbow, and steered him away from the group. “There must have been some kind of mistake, old son,” he said conversationally. “You weren’t invited to this one.”
“I could have sworn I got an email about it,” Alex told him. “Sorry I’m late. Car wouldn’t start.”
“You didn’t miss anything. Terribly dull.” They reached the doors at the end of the corridor, pushed through into the stairwell beyond. “I’m glad I’ve seen you, actually. I wanted to have a quiet word about your expenses.”
“Oh yes?” Alex allowed himself to be gently urged down the stairs.
“It’s a little delicate, but really those expenses are to cover your day-to-day outlays in the course of doing your job, not paying vets’ bills.”
Alex, guessing it might have been a while since Homer had had a checkup, had taken the dog to see the vet in town. It had left him with the news that Homer had a heart murmur and the early stages of cataracts, and a bill for a little over a thousand dollars. He’d submitted the bill in his expenses more out of mischief than anything else.
“That sounds like an admin error,” he said. “My bad. I’ll pay you back.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Mickey said, growing more amiable with every step he put between Alex and General Bell’s people. “Mistakes happen. What’s the word on Mr Ortiz?”
“The hospital say he could be coming home next week.” They were back on the ground floor by now, heading across the foyer towards the doors.
“Really? That’s excellent news. He gave us all quite a scare.”
Alex doubted whether Ralph had crossed Mickey’s mind since he flew away from East Walden Lane the morning after the storm. He said, “His hospital bill’s going to be astronomical.”
“He’ll have insurance.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Couldn’t we do something for him? As a gesture of goodwill?”
The doors opened for them and they stepped outside, where Mickey came to a halt, thinking. “Well, I’m sure we can look into that.” He thought some more. “Yes, excellent idea. I’ll put it to Stan.”
“Does it have to go past Stan?”
“Everything,” Mickey said heavily, “has to go past Stan. Anyway, I should be getting back.” He clapped Alex on the arm. “Good to see you again, Alex. Truly. Have a good day.” And he was gone.
Alex sighed and started to walk around to the moke garage when he heard a motor behind him. He stopped and looked round and saw the bright-red Mustang he had seen apparently abandoned on the Campus on his first visit. The car was pulling into the car park, but it didn’t bother parking. The driver just stopped arbitrarily, turned off the engine, and got out. Despite something of a bite still in the air, he was wearing cargo pants and a Hawaiian shirt of spectacular ugliness. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with a spectacular mane of prematurely white hair, and he was carrying a plastic shopping bag stuffed with papers in one hand and what seemed to be a six-pack of Miller Lite in the other. He didn’t bother locking the car, just headed for the main building and went inside. Alex watched him go, tipping his head to one side.
LATER, AFTER DINNER, he took Homer for his walk. The dog didn’t seem to require exercise—he seemed to get all he needed by dreaming about chasing rabbits, judging by the way his legs motored when he was asleep—but the vet had said he was overweight and Alex found it a relaxing routine.
Their usual route went across the green and through the trees on the other side and along the edge of one of the fields beyond. Alex took off Homer’s leash when they got to the field, but the dog seemed content to amble along beside him. Alex had a quick look around in case someone else had had the same idea, then he took out the 007 Phone and dialled Kitson.
It had taken a couple of days, after the storm, for the phone network to come back up, and when he’d phoned to check in Kitson had been in a mood to muse about US deportation procedures, even after being informed that Alex had been in the middle of the worst blizzard to hit the Midwest since records began. Since then, he’d been careful to report every few days, staggering his calls just in case someone noticed a pattern. He never had anything to report, but that didn’t matter to Kitson. Obedience was the important th
ing.
“Were you introduced to anyone else?” he asked when Alex finished telling him about the meeting earlier that day.
“Just the Brigadier General. I was walked out of there fairly quickly.”
“Hm. Well, Brigadier Generals tend to be more decorative than anything else, usually. The important ones will have been the ones you weren’t introduced to.”
“I didn’t get a good look at them.”
“Hm.”
“And to be fair, this is outside my brief. I’m supposed to be telling you if there’s something weird about the hardware. I only mentioned it because I’ve got nothing else to tell you.”
Kitson gave this some thought. He said. “You should keep in mind that the parameters of your ‘brief’, as you rather charmingly call it, are not yours to set.”
Alex looked at Homer. The dog was sitting a few feet away, looking out over the field. He could, he supposed, just quit. Write a letter to Stan and get on a plane. He could be back in Edinburgh in two days. He said, “There’s something else. Larry Day’s here.”
“Who?”
IF ONE HAD taken any interest at all in science over the past fifteen years or so it was impossible not to have heard of Larry, because he seemed to be omnipresent. Trouble was, the majority of people were not remotely interested in science in general, and particularly not the esoterica that attracted Larry’s hungry attention.
Rolling Stone had called him ‘Steven Hawking’s Evil Twin’. A big Atlantic profile of him had been titled ‘Professor Gonzo’, something he played up to. One of the most brilliant physicists of his generation, a giant at the age of 27. Of course, by that time he had been thrown out of MIT for an incident involving a home-made railgun, a frozen chicken, and his supervisor’s vintage Trans Am, 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. 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 womaniser. The smartest man most people had never heard of.
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 12