Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  Matasuntha was waiting for him when he got there, with a jacket and trousers over her arm. “Your uniform,” she said.

  He’d forgotten all about that. “Thanks,” he said. “That’s great. I’ll, um, try them on in a minute.”

  She nodded. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Theo Bernstein.”

  “The Theo Bernstein?”

  Oh God, he thought. “Yes,” he said. “It was me who—”

  “Theo Bernstein who used to do the morning weather on KPXE Kansas City? Oh wow.”

  “Um.” He frowned. “No.”

  “Oh.” She pulled a sad face. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you were him.” She laughed. “Stupid of me. I mean, if you were someone famous, what’d you be doing working here?” She leaned past him and looked at the bed. “What’s that bottle?”

  It was lying on the pillow. When he’d left the room, it had been under the bed. “That? Nothing. Just an empty bottle.”

  She moved forward. “I’ll put it in the trash for you on my way down.”

  “No, really.”

  “It’s no bother.”

  “I recycle.”

  A look of deep suspicion settled on her face, like rooks on a cornfield. “That’s really public spirited of you.”

  “Green to the core, me.” He moved slightly, so that she’d have to make a serious detour to get past him to the bed. “Do you have any idea what volume of non-biodegradable material gets dumped in landfill every year? It’s enough to keep you awake at night.”

  “Quite.” She was trying to peer round his shoulder. “Well, in that case I’ll leave you in peace. Bill will let you know when you’re due for your first shift.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  “Meanwhile.” One last peek, which he blocked with a slight repositioning of his shoulder. “Settle in, make yourself at home. Welcome to the team.”

  “It’s great to be on board. Do we get baseball caps?”

  “What?”

  “To help foster a shared-goals mentality and a sense of common purpose, going forward?”

  “No.”

  “Shucks. Well, thanks again. Bye.”

  There hadn’t been many occasions in his life, he reflected as he closed the door behind her, when he’d put so much effort into persuading a beautiful girl to leave his hotel room. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t be in this particular hotel room right now; no way of telling, of course, because the sea-anemone strands of causality wave and sway in the currents of the timestream, and any damn thing could happen. The main thing was, she’d gone, and he was alone with his bottle. He grabbed it and held it up to the light. Still empty. Well.

  He sat down on the bed, took out the magnifying glass and peered at the minuscule letters on the label. It turned out to be the same message translated into a bewildering number of languages, including cuneiform, Klingon, Elvish and one whose alphabet was entirely made up of smiley faces, grouped in strange, cloud-like blocks. Eventually he found English, and read –

  INSTRUCTIONS:

  1 Obtain access to the bottle

  2 Follow the instructions

  And that was it. He frowned. Read the label very carefully, and do exactly what it says, Pieter’s letter had urged him; also, You’ll have to work out the maths for getting inside by yourself. He closed his eyes. Obtain access to the bottle, for crying out loud. What was that supposed to mean? Take off the lid?

  He did that. Then he put it back on again. Clues, he thought, I need clues; I’m too old, tired and disillusioned to relish challenges. In desperation, he turned the bottle upside down and peered at the bottom through his glass. And saw…

  Well, of course, he told himself. Everybody knows that. But what, he couldn’t help wondering, was it doing embossed on the bottom of a bottle, instead of the more usual 33cl please dispose of bottle tidily? And, anyway, strictly speaking, since the bottle was a cylinder topped by a sort of distorted cone, shouldn’t that be…?

  But that wasn’t what it said; and Pieter’s letter had been quite categorical, do exactly what it says. In which case –

  There was the stub of a pencil in his top pocket. Before he realised it, he had the back of the manila envelope on his knee and was jotting down figures. Of course, it simply didn’t work if you had 4-theta instead of 2. But just suppose for a moment that it did. After all, that was what Pieter had done all those years ago, when he’d marked the all-ballsed-up assignment. Yeah. Right. What if…?

  He came to a dead end, and scowled at the gibberish he’d written on the envelope. For a moment there, a brief, fleeting moment, it had seemed as though he was on to something. But now the way ahead was blocked, as if (to take an example entirely at random) some fool had just blown up a mountain, and the whole lot had come tumbling down on to the freeway.

  Just a moment, he thought. Not a cylinder topped by a cone; a cylinder topped by a distorted cone. He groped for the bottle, stared at it and lunged for the pencil. There was a slight but definite curve to the neck of the bottle; concave, just a little bit, and why the hell, when it really mattered, could he only remember pi to seventy-four decimal places?

  Ten minutes later, he stopped and stared in horror at what he’d just written. He’d seen it before, not so very long ago; on the screen of a latest-model LoganBerry, on a train.

  The bomb.

  Oh no, he told himself, not again. Blowing up a mountain had been bad enough. He was three, maybe four calculations away from arming an equation whose effects would make his previous boo-boo look like a trivial mishap, like laughing while drinking coffee. If he made the same mistake again, after Fate had gone to the trouble of dropping so many helpful hints (career trashed, wife gone, lost all his money et cetera), they’d be justified in keeping him in after class and making him write out I MUST NOT BLOW UP THE WORLD a hundred times. And yet –

  Pieter had said, follow the instructions. If that included what was on the bottom of the bottle, not just the label, then he couldn’t see he had much of a choice. He frowned, trying to remember. Now he came to think of it, it had been Pieter who’d got him the job at the VVLHC. Or at least he’d recommended him highly for it, which was more or less the same thing. Could it possibly be that Pieter wanted him to blow things up? Unlikely. Not unless they needed to be blown up, for some obscure but entirely valid reason.

  You are going to have a really amazingly good life, thanks to the bottle. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? Enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. He scratched his head, entirely unable to decide what to do. He thought about the girl on the train; so far he’d managed to blot that memory out of his mind, but that wasn’t possible any more, not now that he had the same bomb resting on his knee, recreated from scratch by himself. Was it possible, he wondered, that Pieter had more than one favourite student? One of only five in existence. That left four of the things unaccounted for. Oh boy.

  The pencil was still in his hand. Anyone walking into the room right now would see it hovering in the air, like a wingless dragonfly. I could finish the maths, he told himself, that wouldn’t hurt. Just because I arm the bomb doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got to set it off. And maybe –

  Maybe just one small, teeny-tiny controlled explosion, to get into this stupid bottle and find out just exactly what’s going on. Besides, he rationalised, the weird girl on the train suggested that he wasn’t the only one facing this dilemma; and the impression he’d got from her was that she wasn’t bothered at all about the possible risks to the fabric of the multiverse. So; if he didn’t do it, then she, or someone like her, would almost certainly get there first, and then where would we all be? Good question.

  It’s a lot of bother to go to, though, just to get inside a bottle. Ah, but you don’t know what’s in there. Fair enough. Let’s find out.

  There was a knock at the door. Moving faster than he’d have thought possible, he pocketed the pencil and the envelope, stuffed the bottle under his pillow and said, “Yes?”

  T
he door opened and Call-me-Bill’s head craned round the side of it. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. “Settling in all right?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Room OK?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Splendid.” There was a pause, as if he was searching his mind for more small talk to make. “Got the uniform?”

  “Right here.” Theo pointed to the jacket and trousers lying on the bed. “I was just about to try them on.”

  “Ah, fine.” Another hiatus. “Well, soon as you’re ready, why not wander down to the lobby and I’ll show you what to do? No rush,” he added quickly. “Take your time.”

  “No, that’s fine, now would suit me perfectly.” He got the impression that he hadn’t given the response Call-me-Bill had wanted to hear. “If that’s all right with you.”

  “Absolutely. Unless you’d rather have a snack or a shower or something.”

  “No.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll just get changed.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The uniform.”

  “Ah.” Call-me-Bill looked a bit like a chess Grand Master who’s just lost in six moves to a nine-year-old. “Of course. See you downstairs in, what, ten minutes?”

  “Fine.”

  The bottle, he was pleased to discover, sat quite happily in the pocket of the uniform jacket without bulging visibly. The pink powder compact (he’d forgotten all about that) went in the inside pocket, along with Pieter’s letter and the magnifying glass. That was that. He set off down the stairs, thinking hard.

  Call-me-Bill had been Pieter’s friend; cling on to that thought, because otherwise he was profoundly creepy. There was no doubt at all in Theo’s mind that his room would be meticulously searched while he was downstairs – by Matasuntha, presumably, since she was the only other living creature he’d seen in the place, and she’d definitely been interested in the bottle. But Call-me-Bill had seemed reluctant for him to leave the room, implying that he knew the search would take place and didn’t want it to happen, but was powerless to prevent it. Crazy. But no problem. They could search all they liked, since there was nothing to find. He thought about the vanishing girl on the train, and the equations on her LoganBerry that were practically identical to the ones he’d come up with working through from the formula on the bottom of the bottle. More bottles like it out there somewhere. But the bottle contained nothing but stale air.

  “Here are the telephones,” Call-me-Bill said, and he pointed at them helpfully. “If someone calls up, answer them.”

  “Right.” Theo nodded. “Um, what shall I say?”

  A slight pause. “Sorry, but we’re fully booked till further notice. And after that, we’ll be closed for redecoration.”

  “Got that.” Theo tried not to ask the next question, but failed. “Is that right, though? Matasuntha said we only had two guests.”

  Call-me-Bill shuddered slightly. “That’s right.”

  “And we’re fully booked.”

  “Oh yes.”

  And then he was alone again, sitting in a very comfortable chair in the deserted lobby. He moved the phones so that they were exactly square to the corners of the desk. He opened the drawers and found two pencils and a pencil sharpener. He sharpened the pencils. He also found a state-of-the-art Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits XZP6000 calculator, the kind they’d wished they’d been able to afford for standard issue at the VVLHC, a protractor, an ivory slide rule, two rusty iron keys and a set of log tables. He put them all back where he’d found them and tried playing with the computer, which turned out to consist of a monitor and a CPU but no keyboard. Easy mistake to make, he told himself; maybe they’d got it cheap for that reason.

  The envelope, with his unfinished calculations on the back, felt alive inside his jacket, as if he’d got a bird beating its wings in his inside pocket. Absolutely nothing else to do.

  Theo was one of those people for whom prolonged inactivity is the worst thing that can possibly happen, with the possible exception of the Earth colliding with a very large asteroid. He knew his limitations. He could stick ten minutes of doing nothing, if he absolutely had to. After twelve minutes, he started scratching his chin or rubbing the palm of his hand with his thumb. Thirteen minutes, and the most luxuriously comfortable chair ever made felt like a medieval torture chamber. Fourteen minutes, and he’d be twitching all over, shuffling his feet, squirming in his chair. Fifteen minutes; unless there was something productive he could do, like count the number of bricks in a wall, he was ready to kill someone.

  He held out for twenty minutes. Then he pulled out the envelope, took one of the newly sharpened pencils, and got to work.

  He didn’t need the slide rule, the log tables or the calculator. The numbers and symbols just seemed to move gracefully to their allotted places, like actors at a dress rehearsal. When the calculation had arrived at its inevitable conclusion, he leaned back in the chair, as though he was trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the envelope, and stared at it. Here we go, he thought.

  Had Pieter, at some point before his death, found himself staring at the same neat, slender line of characters? Presumably he had; the letter implied that he’d known what the bottle did, and had made it do it. The thought made him feel very slightly better. There’s a difference, albeit only one contour line on the gradient of the moral high ground, between being the inventor of a weapon of mass destruction and the man in the warehouse who uncrates the fiftieth completed bomb. Also, consider this: Pieter had done the maths and found the answer, used it to get inside the bottle, and the universe was still here, still reasonably intact and not-blown-up. Therefore, if he were to duplicate what Pieter had done, there couldn’t be any harm in it. Could there?

  It’s supposed to be fun.

  Slowly, he put the envelope back in his pocket. It occurred to him as he did so that he’d just made a discovery of a Newton-Einstein-Hawking level of magnitude, and if he was back in the university, if he hadn’t accidentally pulverised an Alp and with it any chance he’d had of being taken seriously ever again, he’d be minutes away from being worshipped as a god. Instead, here he was with two phones and a keyboardless computer for company, and nobody to share the glory with but himself.

  He frowned. No, he thought, not me. Pieter had got there first – and Pieter hadn’t blown up any mountains, so there’d have been nothing to stop him publishing his results and clearing a space on his mantelpiece for seventy kilos’ weight of awards. But he hadn’t, and it occurred to Theo to wonder why the hell not. Because –

  Quite, he thought. There are some things you don’t share, in the same way that a policeman doesn’t drop by the holding cells and ask if anybody fancies having a go with his gun. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? Enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. Was that what Pieter had done? Invented the ultimate Doomsday equation and somehow reverse-engineered it into a game? And, while we’re asking awkward questions, what exactly had Pieter died of?

  “You there.” Theo looked up and saw a man standing over him, scowling. “Clerk.”

  That was the sort of thing you’d expect this man to say; along with we meet again, Mr Bond, or guards, seize him, or I like a girl with spirit or, quite possibly, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Given time and a huge dose of steroids, Arnold Schwarzenegger might’ve grown into his hand-me-down trousers, and he had a thin black moustache, like a fine line of eyebrow pencil drawn on his upper lip with a steady hand, and a perfectly bald head. He was wearing a light grey suit and one of those bootlace ties you occasionally see on senators from Texas.

  “Um,” Theo said.

  “My key.”

  It made no sense; until, quite suddenly, Theo remembered that this was a hotel. In which case, Grendel’s big brother here was a guest. Which made him –

  “Mr Nordstrom.”

  The monster grunted. “Key,” he repeated. “Now.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know—” Then he remembered the two
rusty iron keys he’d found in the desk drawer. He yanked it open and chose one at random. “There you are, Mr Nordstrom,” he said, with a degree of composure he found quite remarkable in the circumstances. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Mr Nordstrom nodded. “Get me a bottle of Château d’Yquem 1932. Now.”

  “Certainly, Mr Nordstrom,” Theo said politely, and ran.

  Through the door that led to the stairs; instead of up, towards his room, he went down. The down staircase was improbably long, straight and pitch dark; he could feel it getting steadily colder as he descended, and when he put his hand out to steady himself against the wall, the surface he touched was damp and rather sticky. He could smell mould, saltpetre and something else he couldn’t quite identify. Eventually, though, the stairs ended in a door, which he discovered by walking into it. He turned the handle, took a step forward and groped until he found a light switch.

  He’d found the wine cellar, no doubt about it. He also understood at once why there had been so many stairs. It was like being in an underground cathedral. The ceiling, supported by a forest of fluted marble pillars topped with Corinthian capitals, was so high he hurt his neck looking for it. He didn’t want to guess how big the room was. If you were into model railways, you could probably have fitted in a 1:1 scale replica of the Gare du Nord, but you’d have had to move an awful lot of stuff out of the way first. The room was crammed to bursting with wine racks, whose top layers reached almost to the roof. And all the racks were full; not an empty slot to be seen.

  His first impression of Mr Nordstrom was that he probably wasn’t the most patient man ever to see the light of day. Tough. Unless there was a catalogue of some sort, and there was no sign of one, he was going to have to wait a while – years, possibly – while Theo searched for a 1932 Château d’Yquem in all this lot.