Today’s theory involved the structures Alex had reported seeing while in the Manifold. “We think—we hypothesise—that some of them at least are the people who were in the control room with Alex when Point Zero was formed,” Professor Sierpińska said.
Everybody—Dom, Professor Sierpińska, Wendy, a couple of the other scientists—looked at Alex, who said, “I don’t know.” He was thinking of having the phrase printed on a little flag that he could hold up when circumstances demanded.
One of the other scientists rubbed his eyes—they were all tired—and said, “Did we rule out gravitational shear? I can’t remember.” There had been a theory that Point Zero had produced a short-lived but steep gravitational gradient, a kind of subcritical black hole—the irony was not lost on Alex, remembering what he had told Ralph—which had torn everyone else present in the control room into microscopic pieces but somehow left Alex unharmed.
“There’s no evidence of it,” said Professor Sierpińska. “Not on the footage, anyway.”
Everyone looked again at Alex, who was still putting off a visit to the SCS, and he just scowled and waved it away.
“So we can’t rule it out yet,” the scientist, whose name was Greene, went on. Greene was very big on gravitation, Alex remembered. He believed Point Zero was some kind of event horizon.
“No, Chris,” Professor Sierpińska said patiently. “We cannot rule it out yet. There are many things we cannot rule out yet. Too many things.”
“So if they’re in there and they’ve been changed, the way Alex says, are they dead?” asked Dom.
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Wendy.
Everyone looked at Alex again. He sighed. Maybe not a little flag. Maybe a tee shirt. “They’re not moving,” he said. “They’re just there.”
“You know, Alex,” said Professor Sierpińska, “it’s really time you went back to Sioux Crossing.” She pronounced it ‘Susie Crossing’, which Alex found rather charming.
“I’m not ready yet,” he said. Nobody mentioned that he had not been ready for several months now, and didn’t seem inclined to give anyone an idea when he would be ready. Sometimes he thought they treated him like a very expensive and delicate piece of lab equipment. Other times, they behaved as if he was just a camera on legs. Taking an actual camera, or any other kind of recording equipment, into the Manifold was impossible. They simply disappeared. It was left to Alex to try and describe or draw what he saw, which was beyond him. And so they struggled on. He’d already done two trips today and it was hard not to see the gaps between the walls.
The Professor sighed. She was not, he thought, an unkind person, but he knew she was becoming frustrated by a lack of on-site work. Nobody else dared go anywhere near Point Zero. The Army had put a fence around the main building, at quite a distance.
“The time is coming,” she said gently, “when you will have to be ready, Alex.”
He nodded. “I know.” He looked at Dom, who just shrugged. No help there. “Where’s Arthur?” He hadn’t seen Flynn for several days.
“Out in the field.” Which was Dom-speak for stuff which someone had decided Alex didn’t need to know about.
The meeting stalled. They drank coffee and ate stale pastries. Alex turned a croissant into an apple, and back again.
“Dude,” said Greene.
Alex sat back. “Sorry. Mind wandering.” It was surprising how quickly a miracle could become prosaic and then simply annoying.
“We’re all tired,” Dom said. “Let’s pick it up again tomorrow, yeah?”
This was received with grunts of relief from almost everyone else at the table. The Professor sat looking at Alex, lips pursed.
“You know,” she said when everyone else but Wendy and Dom had left, “I’m maybe not so good at man management, so I apologise if it seems that I’m hassling you, but we need you in there. Because of the other one.”
‘The other one’ was Flynn’s djinn, the presumed second survivor, who had so far not manifested again. Alex said, “How’s an on-site survey going to help with that?”
“That’s just my point,” said Professor Sierpińska. “We don’t know. It could be of vital importance, it could be utterly useless. Until we actually do it we don’t know.”
Alex closed his eyes and rubbed his face. “I’ll think about it.”
Professor Sierpińska looked mildly annoyed. Dom, who Alex had noticed was good at man management, said nothing.
“I DON’T KNOW whether to thank you for getting me mixed up in this or punch you,” Wendy said.
“At least you had a choice,” said Alex.
“Don’t be snarky, there’s a dear.”
“You were just threatening to punch me; I think I’m allowed to be snarky.”
They were sitting in a Chinese restaurant in a town about an hour’s drive from the base, Alex didn’t know exactly where. The food was indifferent but at least he was away from Quantico for a few hours.
“You think I have to go back,” he said.
“I don’t see any alternative,” Wendy told him, poking at her beef in black bean sauce with her chopsticks. “We’ve sent in pretty much every recording device known to man and they all say there’s nothing there, but we know something’s there. We need someone to have a physical look-see.”
He scowled and looked around the restaurant. It was packed with diners; the waiter had found them a table tucked away in a corner away from the door. “It might be as dangerous for me as for anyone else.”
She sat back and looked at him. “What we can say with some confidence is that there’s no radiation in there,” she said. “Air samples have come back clean.” She nodded around the dining room. “This is probably a more hostile environment.”
“Point Zero isn’t here,” he said.
“Scaredy-cat.” She wrinkled her nose and went back to her food. “Kasia’s right,” she said, meaning Professor Sierpińska, with whom she had bonded within about a second of being introduced. “There’s no other way.”
They ate for a while in silence. He said, “Well.”
She sighed. “Look,” she said, “I’m still more pissed off with you than you can imagine. Okay, so maybe you couldn’t let me know any earlier that you were alive, but did you have to come to my apartment and lie to me like that?”
“It was Flynn’s idea.”
She gave him a hard stare. “Don’t you dare blame Art,” she said. “You didn’t have to go along with it.”
“I did if I wanted to see you.”
She snorted. “Like anyone can make you do anything.”
“Not that it stops them trying,” he pointed out.
She pointed a chopstick at him. “You’re in a bad situation, Alex, and you need all the friends you can get. You can’t afford to alienate people.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” This entire conversation was, of course, classified. Fortunately the people at the tables nearest them were cleared for anything they might overhear—scientists and techs from Quantico. Further out into the restaurant were more researchers, and a scattering of Security staff with high clearances. And beyond them, out of earshot, a semicircle of Marines, dressed in casual clothes but still recognisably military. Flynn had packed the place with his people, quietly booking up the entire restaurant for this one evening. The only civilians in the building were the restaurant staff. Alex looked around the room again, and saw his future, a place where he couldn’t go anywhere without bodyguards—not to protect him, but to stop him letting the secret slip. It was not a future he liked very much.
Wendy was eating again. “What about Ralph?” she asked, lowering her voice so that no one, security-cleared or otherwise, could hear her.
“I’m still thinking about that,” he said.
“Don’t think for too long,” she told him. “Last time I saw him, he looked sick.”
FLYNN MAY HAVE been ex-CIA but he had fought long and hard to have Alex brought to Quantico. “Always handy to have the Corps on your doorstep
,” he told Alex. Quite apart from several thousand Marines, Quantico also had both Marine Corps and FBI R&D facilities, which other possible destinations for Alex—Langley, for instance—did not. It also had the DEA training school, Dom’s alma mater.
They had set up an outdoor firing range for him, tucked away in a newly built compound in the woods surrounding the Academy. It was basically just a big windowless two-roomed cinderblock building, which had acquired windows shortly after Alex, during an early exercise, had burned out the lights.
Other early triumphs included the infamous and never-repeated Levitation Experiment, when he had done something very bad but thankfully temporary to gravity inside the range, and the time he had taken apart an office chair and reassembled it, from the atoms up, into what he had thought was a more pleasing shape. The shape had not been remotely pleasing to the two observers on duty that day, and both of them were now on indefinite medical leave. Flynn had given him a hard stare while he—only just—accepted Alex’s apology that he hadn’t realised what he was doing. “Try not to break any more scientists, Alex,” he said. “They’re expensive to train.”
The smaller of the range’s two rooms housed the researchers and their recording equipment. The larger was a big echoing space with a cement floor and scorch marks on the walls. The new windows were high up near the roof and sometimes let in shafts of sunlight in the late afternoons.
Down at one end of the room was a row of targets. These had originally been shop-window mannequins, but Alex hadn’t liked that so now they used big circular archery targets, which he blew to bits when he got bored.
The exploration of his abilities was something of an adventure for everyone, even if it sometimes seemed to Alex that the researchers were using a stack of superhero comics as a reference. Does he have x-ray vision? Yes, as it turned out. Kind of. Can he leap tall buildings in a single bound? Don’t be so stupid. The thing that struck him most, as the weeks and months went by, was how matter-of-fact everyone was about the whole thing. It was as if generations of comic books and movies had made them view superpowers as something to be taken for granted. He waited for someone to suggest, casually, in a meeting that he should have some kind of uniform, but that never quite happened. Perhaps they realised he wouldn’t suit spandex.
At one point, someone somewhere had become interested in whether he could raise the dead. This more or less confirmed to him that he was in the hands of mad people, because one morning he was presented with a dead frog in a Tupperware container and invited to return it to life. He failed, but failure was no reason, in and of itself, to abandon an experiment, so in the following days the corpses of two white mice, a cat, and a small monkey were delivered, and there he called a stop. “If you bring me one more dead thing,” he told the researcher who had come in with the monkey, “I’ll turn you into a fucking wardrobe.”
“Stop frightening the researchers,” Flynn told him in passing a couple of days later. “If they sue you, you’re on your own.”
He was conscious that, in parallel with the scientists trying to work out what had happened to him, there was another programme which was seeking to weaponise that knowledge, but there was nothing he could do about that. Well, there was; he could leave and never come back, but then he would never know if he hadn’t walked away from a chance to be normal again. He thought the chances were slim, but they were there.
So what was he? A superhero? A wizard? A god? What he mostly was, he felt, was a long way from home. Flynn’s people had made him as comfortable as they could, bearing in mind the circumstances. He had a nice apartment on the Academy campus—once the home, he thought, of some senior administrator or instructor. He had the very best medical care, good food, and in the unlikely event that Larry Day was still out there somewhere bearing his incomprehensible grudge, he was surrounded by an unusual concentration of some of the most capable and heavily armed people on the planet.
And yet, he was dead, and that hurt. His mother, and everyone he knew, had been told that he had died in an explosion at the SCS. Flynn had told him there had been a rather nice little memorial service for him back home in Leith. He’d considered, several times, popping home to tell his mother he was still alive, but he didn’t quite know how he’d approach that. Hi, Ma, there’s been a bit of a mistake, and oh, by the way, I can kill people with my brain now.
So he sat in his nice room at Quantico and ate his nice meals and submitted to scans and samplings and exercises to see if he could turn himself into a gigantic invulnerable green rage monster (yes, he could, and then they asked him not to do that again) and late at night he lay in bed staring at the ceiling wondering how the fuck he was being so calm about it all.
The Exploding Man
IN THE END, it was a little like a school outing. Alex, Flynn, Dom, Wendy, Professor Sierpińska and half a dozen researchers flew in to Sioux Crossing’s airport one morning. Looking out of the window as they taxied to a halt, Alex couldn’t see a single civilian aircraft.
From the airport, they were helicoptered to Rosewater High, where a forward base had been established on the sports field, a ring of modular housing and office units stacked five high and dubbed Camp Batavia, for reasons which were never explained to any of them.
They loaded themselves and their gear onto a convoy of Humvees and Marine drivers took them to the Facility. The countryside looked wilder and more overgrown than Alex remembered, but there was no sense that a disaster had happened here. Was still happening.
He’d seen the cloud from miles away, as they began their descent into Sioux Crossing airport, a great slowly rotating spiral of vapour that rose all the way into the stratosphere. Flynn had told him that a tornado had tracked across this part of Iowa earlier in the year, and it had disturbed the cloud not at all. It was huge and intimidating and Alex thought its rotation should be accompanied by a great low rumbling sound instead of eerie silence.
“Jesus Christ,” Wendy murmured as the convoy passed through the front gate of the Facility. The cloud hadn’t formed immediately; it had gathered in the days and weeks following the accident, and she hadn’t seen it this close up before.
“At least there’s no trouble finding the place,” Dom said.
Of course, the cloud also made it impossible to pretend that something big and weird wasn’t happening in Sioux Crossing. There was an official explanation—something about the edge effect of intense magnetic fields being created by the collider—but Alex gathered this was being regarded with a certain amount of cynicism by most of the population of the United States, and he couldn’t blame them.
A new, inner fence had been constructed within the campus, with the main building at its centre. A patrol of special forces soldiers met them when they pulled up at the fence, and helped unload their gear and carry it to a little cluster of tents a few yards away. Alex stood where he was, hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, looking through the fence at the cloud and the main building in the distance.
“Quite a thing, isn’t it,” Dom said, standing beside him.
“Yes,” Alex said. “Whatever it is.”
Dom glanced at him. “Having second thoughts? We can scrub it, come back another day.”
It seemed unlikely that this would please anyone, considering how long it had taken them to get him to agree. He shook his head. “Let’s get it over with.”
THEY DRESSED HIM in black coveralls like the special forces soldiers, although they looked better in them. Over this was a webbing harness weighed down with sensors and tools and bits of kit nobody thought worth explaining to him, and a heavy backpack with more recording gear. The whole outfit was topped off with a cycling helmet with cameras mounted on either side and an LED flashlight on top.
“Absolutely badass.” Dom grinned, looking him up and down.
“Fuck off, Dom,” he said.
“We’ll be recording everything here, and there are separate recorders in your rucksack,” Professor Sierpińska told him, “but I want you to g
ive us a running commentary as well. Everything you see and do, please. If you believe you’re in danger, I want you to leave immediately.”
“Can I leave now, then?”
She smiled and patted him on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Alex,” she said.
The leader of the special forces patrol, a warrant officer named Stetson, walked him around to the gate. “You might see things in there,” she told him.
“What sort of things?” Nobody had mentioned things to him.
“We don’t know for sure, we’ve never been able to get a good look at them. Coyotes, probably. Raccoons.”
“Okay.” That didn’t sound so bad.
“They mostly avoid us, but they move fast and they might startle you. You’re not carrying a weapon.”
“Do you think I need one?”
Stetson shrugged. “I know I wouldn’t go in there unarmed,” she said. “There’s some spooky shit going on here.”
You have no idea. “It’s just edge effects from magnetic fields,” he told her. “It’s perfectly safe.”
Stetson grunted. “Yeah. That’s why we put a fence round the whole thing and stationed half the US military outside.”
Stetson let him through the gate and he paused just inside the fence to run a final comms check, then he set out towards the building. The grass was almost knee-high, and surprisingly hard to walk through. He found himself having to lift his feet high and put them back down carefully. He kept the building in front of him and concentrated on walking in a straight line.
He was about halfway across the space between the fence and the building when he heard something moving in the grass to his left and a little ahead of him. He stopped and said, “There’s something in the grass.”
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 25