by John McNally
“Where is it?” Cooper-Hastings yelled into the blackness, fear filling his lungs. “What have you done?”
SIX
“On day one the Scarlatti lays its eggs,” said King. “On day two the nymphs hatch and grow. On day three the nymphs develop distinct body sections and the wings separate – shedding their skin several times. By the start of day four – after their final moult – they can swarm.”
The danger was spelt out in a fan graph that showed a range of possible development outcomes if the Scarlatti had located a ‘host protein’ overnight. The blood-red line of development started tight on day one and by day four spread to cover the entire graph.
“Four days. We’re already halfway through day one and we daren’t risk day four,” said King.
He turned away from the graph and back to his guests.
“So far, so bad. What matters is what we do now,” he said.
There was an air of stunned disbelief in the control gallery and around the world.
Seated beside the US President, General Jackman – the grizzly bear Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the world’s most powerful soldier – punctured the silence:
“Create hell. Flood the area with chemicals. Go nuclear.”
“Thank you, General Jackman. The problem is – scale,” explained King.
On a projected map he drew a rough semicircle east of the village of Hazelbrook.
“Last night’s turbulent air could have taken it twenty miles north and east, which means an area that covers roughly a third of London.”
“Nuke London…?” said someone, appalled.
“Or,” King said before a hubbub could break out, “following on from discussions with the scientists this morning, there may be another way.”
With a quick glance at Al, King turned to the corner of the gallery.
“Entomologists, would you oblige us?”
Channing beckoned a pair of entomologists from Porton Down into camera view, part of the group that had been there since early morning. A grey, middle-aged man with a much younger, sharper colleague.
“Professor Lomax and Dr Spiro were colleagues of Dr Cooper-Hastings at Porton Down.”
Lomax wore a suit under his lab coat, Spiro a T-shirt and jeans.
“Professor Channing? The hypothesis, please.”
Finn remembered his mum explaining that hypothesis was a term scientists used to describe an idea so they didn’t sound common.
“Pheromones,” Channing began, pushing back his glasses as if addressing a learned symposium, “are tiny distinct chemical signals that all living things emit.”
“‘Phero’ from the Greek for ‘to carry’,” Professor Lomax helpfully explained, “‘mone’ from ‘hormone’ or—”
Dr Spiro cut across them with the urgency the occasion demanded.
“If we can trace the Scarlatti’s pheromones then we can catch it before its first swarm. We could locate it, find its nest and destroy a much, much smaller area.”
“Possibly,” interjected Lomax, glaring. But Spiro continued.
“The ’83 data is categorical. Scarlatti pheromones are very distinct – the result of atomic mutation almost certainly – and emitted in very large quantities, with receptor sensitivity heightened by a super-developed swarm instinct. These insects will do anything to be with their own kind. Anything.”
“Thank you, Dr Spiro, I did produce much of that data…” muttered Lomax.
But how? How would you trace the pheromones? Finn wanted to yell, wriggling in his hidey-hole and finding it difficult to keep his mouth shut. King sensed it and shot an eyebrow his way.
“How?” asked Al obligingly. “How would you begin to define and then detect the appropriate molecules, let alone—”
“With another member of the same species!” Professor Channing announced, striking a blow for the over-fifties by jumping in before young Dr Spiro.
Al looked across at Finn. He raised his eyebrows at him: “Plausible?”
Finn shrugged back a Why not?
“Non!” said the French Conseiller Scientifique. “You would have to replicate Scarlatti. If Scarlatti is a random atomic mutation, you could never replicate it exactement. Never. C’est impossible!”
“Unless, of course, there is still a second sample left in existence?” mused Commander King, letting the cynical words hang in the air.
“Ach, the American one?” said the German Chancellor. “Destroyed, nein?”
“Like we destroyed ours?” said the British Prime Minister.
All eyes turned to the US President.
“Retained for ‘Reasons of National Security’ you mean?” said Commander King, enjoying the moment. “Where would it be, I wonder? The Fort Detrick facility outside Washington? One might look in warehouse nine, aisle eight, section two S.”
“Find out,” the President snapped at someone off-screen, furious that King should so easily reel off a US state secret. General Jackman bristled.
“Forget it. Even if it is there,” said the US Chief Scientist, a silver-haired woman on the President’s other side, “you’d never be able to get a viable tracking device on to something that small.”
King smiled. Inside.
“Any thoughts? Dr Allenby?”
Al pushed himself out of his seat and walked over to the giant image of the Scarlatti, deep in thought. He turned back to Spiro. “You’re sure they’ll read each other’s pheromones over great distances?”
“Over miles, definitely,” said Spiro.
“More than ten?”
“Reasonable probability,” said Spiro.
“Really…” Lomax sighed. “More than ‘reasonable’ at ten, unlikely beyond twenty.”
“Can we anchor a tracking device on to that thorax?”
Spiro and Lomax looked puzzled.
Al changed tack.
“Theoretically, if we could drill into it, or glue it on to, say, this cross member here?” He pointed out a girder-like section of the armoured thorax that flattened at the centre.
“Theoretically? Yes,” said Spiro. “This is cellulose material without nerve endings.”
“You would have to ‘theoretically’ be extremely careful then,” said Lomax, attempting sarcasm. “The thorax plates move against each other to allow greater flexibility than in other wasp species. It’s a weak point so the joints between the plates are packed with nerve endings.”
Al checked his watch, a Rolex adapted to his own design to incorporate a Geiger counter, pressure gauge and half a dozen other tiny instruments (the secret gift from a grateful nation), and turned things over in his mind. Tick tick tick tick tick.
“Well, Allenby? Will you revisit Project Boldklub?” said the Prime Minister.
Most people in the meeting didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The name Boldklub was obscure, being short for Akademisk Boldklub, the football club that Niels Bohr, the father of subatomic physics, once played for.
Al looked at King, suspicious. King studied his nails.
“We’ve faced down one chemical and two nuclear Armageddons in the recent past. I don’t see why we can’t pull together as a team to deal with this.”
King looked back up at Al.
The world waited. Al looked over at Finn.
And from his hiding place Finn studied the Scarlatti. The colours, the grotesque armour, the clutch of stings, the distorted feelers and proboscis… everything about it gave off a sense of anger and suffering. In a perverse way Finn felt sorry for it. Yet within a few months this thing could wipe out six billion people. Everyone he knew, as well as the four he loved (Grandma, Al, Yo-yo and sometimes Christabel), plus everyone that filled his day, from everyone he watched on telly to everyone he travelled to school with. All gone. Like his mum.
Finn was fascinated, locked on.
“Oh… go on then,” said Al at last.
“What? Go on what?” barked General Jackman from the US.
Al seemed to snap awake.
“We haven’t got much time. I suppose I’d better explain.”
He picked up an iPad linked to an interactive whiteboard and started to draw.
SEVEN
Al looked up, as if to a classroom of kids.
“Anyone know what this is?”
“It’s an atom,” said General Mount, irritated by Al’s playful tone.
“Is this a physics class?” asked the American President.
“Yep. Everyone needs to get a handle on this. It is indeed an atom,” said Al. “Which one?”
Hydrogen! Finn wanted to say, itching to put his hand up.
“Hydrogen,” muttered the US Chief Scientist.
“Good, a hydrogen atom, nice and simple: a nucleus in the centre and one electron spinning around, with a constant spatial relationship between the nucleus and the electron – this distance, this distance right here.” Al drew a dotted red line between the dot at the centre and the dot on the outside.
He then tapped the two spots again, the nucleus and the electron. “Now these two dots are something, matter, stuff,” he explained, “but this –” he waved around inside the circle all over the place – “is absolutely nothing.”
“Me, you, everything around us is more than 99.9 per cent nothing, because every single one of the atoms we’re constructed from is more than 99.9 per cent nothing, with only a tiny bit of actual atomic stuff. Everyone got that?”
Al looked up at the world leaders, then glanced across at Finn, to make sure they were all still with him; with furrowed brows and a big grin respectively, they were.
“I will never understand this,” said the British Prime Minister.
“There’s a whole quantum dark energy/dark matter thing we could go into, but it’s better to think of it as a beautiful mystery. Think of atoms as being balloons rather than building blocks, balloons filled with nothingness and a tiny nucleus.”
“Bravo,” said the French President. “But this not catch flies.”
“Not yet, no. But my Big Idea, known to a select few as Boldklub, was –” he pointed again to the red dotted line denoting the distance between the nucleus and the electron – “to see if we could create a magnetic field that could reduce this distance and—”
And before Al could say the next word a neural synapse fired at the speed of light in Finn’s brain and a conclusion so fantastic occurred it smashed any last compunction to stay quiet.
“You’re going to SHRINK stuff?”
Everyone turned. Finn’s eyes were as wide as wonder.
Lit from below by the iPad, and looking 99.9 per cent mad scientist, Al pointed straight at him. “Ta-da!”
“WHAT?”
“What did he say?”
“Shrink stuff?”
“C’est impossible!”
“Mein Gott, was that a child?”
Commander King let his eyelids drop in momentary exasperation. This really was all he needed.
“That’s my nephew,” said Al proudly.
“Young Infinity is here contingent upon Dr Allenby’s cooperation,” King declared. “We really must move on…”
Heads were shaking, voices rising, English, American, French, German – all demanding answers, all offended by such an absurd suggestion, at being caught out by a child.
Finn didn’t give a damn. He was staring at Al in open-mouthed wonder.
“Shrink? Is that really what the boy said?”
“This is flat out impossible,” the US Chief Scientist advised her President.
Al overheard. “No! Possible –” he insisted, adding a much smaller atom to his diagram – “by exploiting a chain reaction at the quantum level, you can create a new type of magnetic field, a ‘hot area’ within which all matter can be reduced, sucking the electron right up tight against the nucleus.”
“That is totally absurd!” the US Chief Scientist responded.
Voices immediately started to rise again.
The entomologists were stunned.
Finn’s mind was spinning. He wanted to ask a million questions. He wanted to understand every impossible detail. He wanted to know about the who and the why and the how. He wanted to know it all and yet somehow, right now, it was all so much to try and take in and he was just thinking: I Want A Go.
He walked straight up to his uncle through the babble, looked into his eyes and asked in wonder and for a second time, just to make sure, “You’re going to shrink stuff. You’re going to shrink some soldiers and get this thing?”
“Yes I am,” said Al, delighted with Finn, who then all but burst with questions.
“Won’t you still be the same weight when you’re tiny as when you’re full size?”
“No, because there’s a proportionate shrinking of dark matter…”
“Will you be really dense and super tough?”
“Theoretically, no, though of course power-to-mass ratios are different and gravity won’t break you so easily…”
“Will bacteria and diseases be able to eat you, like, really easily, like flesh-eating bugs chewing off your face and arms and ears and nose and— Hey! Will you be able to smell?”
“The rule of thumb for nano-to-normal interaction at the molecular level is that complex compounds don’t interact, though atoms and simple molecules do, so you can relax about contracting the Ebola virus…”
They were having to raise their voices as the meeting was all but out of control, until the chilling opening bars of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ emerged from Al’s jacket.
It was the ringtone he had assigned to one very special caller. For the first time, Al looked scared. He checked the time again – nearly two o’clock – and began to panic.
“Shush! Shut uuuuuup! SHUT UP!” he shouted at the room.
The room gradually fell silent as everyone looked at Al, frozen in terror. Once again Finn got there before everyone else.
“Grandma!”
“Is his Grossmutti there too?” the German Chancellor asked.
“Nobody say a word!” insisted Al.
The leaders of the free world, along with their best and brightest, followed orders and “shut up” as Al interrupted The Phantom and took the call.
“Hey! Mum! How’s Oslo? I know I promised, I’m sorry, I lost track of time… No, don’t call the police, we’re fine! That’s ridiculous… Have you transferred to the ship?”
With his outstretched arm, he indicated that everyone could relax a little; he had the situation under control.
“He’s fine, he’s right here, he can tell you himself… oh, school? School’s clo— canteen! No! School canteen’s closed, they were sent home for lunch – no food. Wasp infestation. Astonishing… No, he’s fine! Here…” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and handed it to Finn, whispering, “Speak! Just tell her everything’s fine.”
“I can’t lie to Grandma,” Finn tried to insist. “I promised Mum I’d…”
“I order you to lie to your grandmother!” snapped the Prime Minister in a loud whisper.
Al looked at the Prime Minister like he had no idea what he was getting into.
Finn took the phone and accidentally pressed the ‘speaker’ button on the touchscreen so that everybody got the benefit of – “Grandma?”
“Do you need me to come back? I’ve unpacked but we’re still in port…” came her voice.
“No, no, I’m fine, everything’s fine.”
“What a lot of nonsense about the canteen! Tell him to take you straight back right now!”
“We’re going! We’re just getting in the car.”
“He will starve you to death! Neglect… Did he do any vegetables?”
“What…? Yes.”
The watching experts and world leaders – who had grandmothers of their own – were nodding him along.
“Exactly which vegetables?”
Finn’s mind went blank. There was a terrible, panicked silence.
“Broccoli?” mouthed the US President.
“Broccoli! And… just broc
coli. What’s your food like? What’s the ship like?”
“Food is tepid, the cabin is cramped and I have to share a bathroom, but there’s a lovely woman from Godalming on our corridor who, would you believe it, went to the same boarding school as Jennifer – second cousin Jennifer not Jennifer from the Hartford Pottery who I don’t think you know her grandson wants to be a solicitor it’s good to have ambitions but as I told her not a solicitor Jennifer not at twelve… anyway I—”
“Grandma, I think we’d better go or we’ll be late.”
“Oh… all right, dear. Please don’t trust Al, he’s already missed one call.”
“OK, Grandma, love you, bye!”
“And keep safe!”
Finn killed the call and everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The Prime Minister gave an order to someone off-screen. “Get on to the Norwegians. Upgrade Mrs Allenby’s cabin and get her, and the woman from Godalming who knows Jennifer, on to the Captain’s table. Now.”
“Would someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?” said the US President.
* * *
DAY ONE 14:13 (BST). Siberia
Deep in the Siberian permafrost, 2,546 miles away, east by northeast, Kaparis watched the scene via his agent’s spectacles.
Everything was going according to plan. They were falling into his trap.
The beast was at large.
The ‘pheromone hypothesis’ had been successfully introduced by his agent at the meeting.
Boldklub had been established as the only viable response.
Kaparis was where he liked to be: in control. And yet… he was overwhelmed.
The boy.
Kaparis stared.
“My goodness, he looks like his father.”
The lung breathed in. The lung breathed out. And for a moment his heart swelled with nostalgia as he was transported back nearly twenty years to a Cambridge University of scarves and bicycles, lectures and tutorials, girls to fall in love with and limitless early promise… before, inevitably, his mind went to his moment of glory.