Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  “I could’ve had a heart attack,” Call-me-Bill said helplessly. “I could’ve died.”

  “Ah well, omelettes and eggs.” He smiled. “If it’s the hoax element that’s bothering you, I could really set fire to the hotel, it’d be no trouble. I’m good at destroying buildings, you see. Especially,” he added cheerfully, “large hadron colliders. Hell, with all the kit you’ve got downstairs, I could fix this place so good, they’d have to cordon it off for ninety years.”

  Call-me-Bill tried to back away, but the desk was in the way. “You’re nuts,” he said.

  “Nuts,” Theo replied calmly, “not fired. Well? Do I still have a job or don’t I?”

  “Um.” Call-me-Bill was breathing hard, and it made his throat wobble, like a bullfrog. “Obviously you’re upset about something. Is it the room? You can move back to your old room if you’d rather, I just thought—”

  “Oh come on,” Theo said, and he felt a strange calm sweep over him, like the hole in the middle of a cyclone. “I just threatened to blow up the hotel.”

  “I promised Pieter van Goyen—”

  “About Pieter.” There had been many questions jostling about in his mind, fighting to jump the queue, but now that the name had been spoken out loud, he knew exactly what he wanted to ask. “How did he die?”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead, right? So, what happened to him?”

  Call-me-Bill wriggled backwards on the desk. “You mustn’t fool around with the fire alarm, you know. It’s a serious breach of health and safety. We could get closed down.”

  “This isn’t a hotel,” Theo said firmly. “What happened to Pieter van Goyen?”

  Call-me-Bill sagged, like a tyre with a slow puncture. “There was an accident,” he said, “at the lab. It was very quick, he wouldn’t have suffered.”

  “That’s nice. What sort of accident?”

  “They were testing some new piece of apparatus.” Call-me-Bill was sort of stroking the side of the desk. “I don’t really know what it was, something to do with teleportation, I think, or it might’ve been antimatter. Anyhow, two people saw him go into this acceleration chamber thing, and then there must’ve been a freak electrical surge or something, because the power suddenly came on, and there was this blinding white light, and when we managed to switch it off and get inside, he wasn’t there.”

  Theo pursed his lips. One stray pronoun. “And?”

  “Well,” Call-me-Bill went on, “it was a sealed chamber, lined with thirty centimetres of lead. They did tests, of course, and there were a few residual traces of DNA. And a sock,” Call-me-Bill added, “with his monogram, PVG. Trouble is, only Pieter really knew exactly how the machine worked, so—”

  “The lab,” Theo said. “At the university, presumably.”

  “Not as such, no.”

  “Here. In the basement.”

  Call-me-Bill nodded slowly. “Once the police and the government people had finished investigating, we cleared it all out, naturally, and closed the project down. That’s when we decided to turn the place into a hotel. Well, you know, great big building in its own grounds, handily situated for road and rail links, it seemed like a good idea.”

  Theo shook his head. “You didn’t close it down,” he said. “You and her – is she really your niece, by the way? Not that it matters.”

  Call-me-Bill nodded. “My sister Morgaine’s daughter,” he said.

  “And the police. Are they really looking for me?”

  “No,” Call-me-Bill said, looking away. “Sorry, that was Mattie’s idea. She thought you might walk out, you see. She’s got a bit of a ruthless streak, she gets it from her mother.”

  Theo took a deep breath. “Pieter’s not dead, is he?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s gone somewhere, but he’s not dead. You or your weird niece accidentally sent him somewhere. Well?”

  “He’s dead all right,” Call-me-Bill said, and the sweat on his forehead sparkled like dew in long grass. “I told you, he went into the chamber and he didn’t—”

  “You sent him somewhere,” Theo repeated, “and you need me to get him back.”

  Call-me-Bill’s head lifted, stayed still for a moment, then dropped back; up-down, up-down twice, as if someone was controlling it with strings. “Mattie told you.”

  “No, I figured it out for myself. You see, I—” He stopped, trying to think of the right words. “I had reason to believe Pieter was still alive.”

  Now the unseen puppeteer swivelled Call-me-Bill’s head sharply round to the right; a bit too sharply. Any more, and it could easily have come off. “What? What do you mean?”

  “I talked to him.”

  Call-me-Bill was breathing deeply in and out through his nose. “When?”

  “Today.”

  “Where?”

  “Ah. Long story.” He tossed a mental coin, which came down and balanced delicately on its rim. So he had to make a conscious decision. “The term YouSpace mean anything to you?”

  There was a long silence. Then Call-me-Bill actually grinned. “We weren’t going to call it that,” he said. “In fact, I thought we’d decided, but Pieter always was a stubborn bastard. He’d thought up the name, you see, and once he’d set his heart on it—Yes,” he went on. “You could say that.”

  “Your niece doesn’t know about it.”

  “Not under that name,” Call-me-Bill replied. “But she knows about it all right. Question is, how do you—”

  “Another long story,” Theo cut him off. “But I saw Pieter van Goyen in YouSpace earlier today. Very much alive.”

  Call-me-Bill leaned forward to sink his face into his hands, lost his balance and sort of toppled-come-slid off the desk. He stood up, looked down at the desk as though he was more hurt than angry, and sat down again. “There you are, then.”

  “He’s dead,” Theo said. “I watched him die.”

  Call-me-Bill’s mouth dropped open, and the colour drained from his face, as though someone had turned a stopcock and Essence of Pink had come squirting out of the overflow. “Are you serious? You saw—”

  Theo nodded. “He was disintegrated by bug-eyed monsters with ray guns,” he said. He paused, then added, “Do you believe me?”

  “Oh yes,” Call-me-Bill said, his mouth moving awkwardly, as if he’d just had an injection at the dentist’s. “Default setting 3, Alien Planet.” He lifted his head, and Theo could see he was close to tears. “What happened?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. I’d met Pieter and we’d just started to talk when these aliens burst in and shot him. They were just about to shoot me when I did the doughnut thing and escaped.”

  “Doughnut thing?”

  The dropping penny sounded like a brass cannon falling down a mineshaft. “You know, the way you get out in a hurry. You don’t know, do you?”

  “Never been in there,” Call-me-Bill replied. “I don’t know how.”

  “Ah.” Theo smiled at him, just to be annoying. “Well, it was pretty unambiguous. He just sort of—”

  He broke off, as if fingers were tightening around his throat. It had just occurred to him; Pieter had been alive, and the man he’d seen disintegrated had been the real thing. They looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” Call-me-Bill said at last. “I know you two were close.”

  “Yes. You too?”

  Call-me-Bill sighed. “He taught me when I was an undergraduate,” he said. “Amazing man. Of course, I wasn’t what you’d call his prize pupil. I only got in because my dad built them a new library. But Pieter – I don’t know, we just sort of hit it off. And then, after I got chucked out for being useless, we sort of stayed in touch. He used to send me postcards.”

  “Postcards.”

  Call-me-Bill grinned. “Picture postcards,” he said. “Niagara Falls. I think he must’ve bought a big box of them, because they were always the same one. I don’t think he ever went there, though. Anyhow, he’d write dear Bill and then best wishes from
Pieter, and leave the rest blank.”

  Theo could imagine Pieter doing that; wanted to stay in touch but didn’t have anything in particular to say. He tried not to remember the look on Pieter’s face when the plasma hit him.

  “Anyhow,” Call-me-Bill said with an effort, “about five years ago I got a call from him. It was basically, hi Bill, how are you, and can you let me have a billion dollars? I said I haven’t got a billion dollars and he said well, how much have you got, and that’s how it started.”

  “What started?”

  Call-me-Bill sighed. “Now that,” he said, “is a very good question. I asked him, of course. Well, you would, if you’re investing an eight-figure sum. He grinned at me and said not to fuss about that. I told him I was just an old worrywart and I’d quite like to know. He said it’d make us all rich. I said, Pieter, I am rich and I’d quite like to stay that way. Then he laughed and changed the subject.”

  “But eventually—”

  “Eventually.” Call-me-Bill sat up a little straighter. “He explained it, and I could just about follow; a way of accessing alternative realities, at will. A hundred bespoke Disneylands in your coat pocket, and all of them actually real. By then we’d built the accelerator and most of the machinery, so it was a relief when he told me it was – well, a toy. About the only sure-fire money-spinners these days are toys and bombs, and I was starting to think, with him being so damn coy all the time, it had to be a bomb. But a toy was fine. It was like being in on the ground floor for PlayStation.”

  The toy that had killed Pieter. Still, on balance, better than a bomb. Nearly everything is.

  “Anyway.” Call-me-Bill was stroking the desk again. “We carried on with the construction work, while Pieter did the maths. Then, just when we thought we were getting there, Pieter said he’d run into a snag. Well, more like a brick wall.” Call-me-Bill scowled, then went on: “He came swanning in, sat down where you’re sitting right now, and told us that the whole thing was impossible.”

  “Ah.”

  “ ‘Ah’ is putting it mildly. I’d just sold nine major TV networks and an airline to pay for all the junk in the cellar, and Pieter blithely announces that the laws of physics wouldn’t let us go any further. I was just weighing up different ways of killing him when he said, of course, that’s not an insuperable problem.”

  Theo frowned. “But you just said—”

  “Yes. And I forgot to mention, I made him put the maths up on that screen there, and we went through it together. He was quite right. The quantum phase realignment shift matrix we needed was quite simply impossible, in a Newton-Einstein-Hawking universe. Anything we projected outside our universe would be untraceable, and therefore to all intents and purposes lost for ever. It’d be like dropping a grain of sand out of an aeroplane and then landing and trying to find it again. You could go, but no way in hell could you ever come back.”

  Not an insuperable problem, huh? “Go on.”

  “Well, I’d more or less narrowed the choice down to strangling him or bashing his head in with a brick when he did that sort of wise-frog grin of his and said, well, it’s obvious what we’ve got to do now; and that’s the point, I’m afraid, where I started whimpering, and it was quite some time before he could persuade me to stop.

  “The key proviso, he said, was in a Newton-Einstein-Hawking universe; which was a nuisance, he said, because that was precisely the sort of universe we live in, so achieving anything here was pretty much out of the question. But, he went on, as we all know, other universes are available. Somewhere, in the infinite diversity of the multiverse as hypothesised by Tegmark, Vanchurin and Wheeler, there must be one where what we want to do is not only possible but as easy as switching channels on your TV. So, all we needed to do was relocate the base of operations to this other, more amenable universe, and we’d be home and dry. This one where we are now would then be just another parallel reality, readily accessible from our new HQ. He said it’d be no different from moving a corporation when you don’t like the local tax laws or business regulations. You shift the office overseas, and carry on trading just like you used to, but without having to pay stupid amounts of tax or obey a bunch of fatuous local laws. And once he’d found a nice user-friendly universe, getting there wouldn’t be a problem; the bugger would be getting back again, except that it wouldn’t be an issue because of the YouSpace technology, which would deal with all that, because in a non-Newton, non-Einstein, non-Hawking universe you could do that sort of thing, no trouble at all. He made it sound like getting round the no-smoking rule by stepping outside into the street.”

  Call-me-Bill paused for a moment, allowing Theo to catch up with his breathing, which he’d neglected for longer than he’d realised. For a moment there, it had been like listening to Pieter, when he was in one of his brainstorming moods, the same sensation of travelling faster than light straight into the Sun; we can do this temporarily overriding do we actually want to do this, or will it get us all killed. Gradually, though, the enchantment faded, and common sense came plodding breathlessly in its wake, like an overweight amateur running a marathon. “He actually did it,” he asked helplessly, and Call-me-Bill nodded.

  “We’d built a prototype of the quantum phase realignment shift matrix acceleration chamber,” he said. “In the room out back of the laundry.”

  “The one that glows in the—”

  “Yes, that one. Anyhow, he set the controls, so all I had to do was push a button when he gave me the signal. He told me exactly what’d happen. There’d be this blinding blue glow, he’d sort of flicker at the edges, like he was made of sand and the wind started blowing, and then he’d vanish, at which point my job was to switch everything off pretty damn quick and get the hell out of there before my face melted and ran down my shirt front. And it all went just like he said it would, and that was the last I saw of him.”

  “And?”

  Call-me-Bill sighed and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “That was Phase One,” he said. “Phase Two would be Pieter arriving in the non-Newton-et cetera universe, setting up the YouSpace generators and using them to get back here. That was two months ago.” He paused and frowned at his hands. “As you know, linear time doesn’t pass in YouSpace. He should’ve been back here a split second after he left.”

  A subtle blend of nausea and terror rinsed out Theo’s mind, leaving it empty for a moment. Then he said: “But YouSpace is working.”

  “Oh, we know that,” Call-me-Bill replied with an unhappy grin. “So obviously he got there, and he set up the machine. Which sort of begs the question, why didn’t he come back? And now,” he added, with a catch in his voice, “you tell me you saw him get blasted by aliens with death rays.” He shook his head slowly, three times. “That was the whole point about YouSpace. It’s not a simulation, it’s not virtual reality, it’s real. Which is a great selling point, the total authenticity of the experience and so forth, but if you saw Pieter get killed, then he’s dead. And that’s—”

  Theo didn’t need to be told what that was. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You’re sorry.” Call-me-Bill pursed his lips. “Flow, my fucking tears. You see, not only have I lost my dear friend and mentor, I can also kiss goodbye to three-point-three-six-five billion dollars. You know why?”

  “Um.”

  “Because,” Call-me-Bill went on, “and you may just have noticed this when you tried out the useless bloody thing, there is no users’ goddamn manual. Which makes it,” he carried on with rising anger, “not just useless but horribly, horribly dangerous. You noticed?”

  Theo shivered. “I noticed.”

  “Well, there you are. You see, Pieter was going to do a manual, but he got carried away with the jump to the other universe thing and he never got round to writing it. He knew how it all works, but we don’t. Accordingly, we’re shafted. We’ve got this amazing product we can’t do anything with. It’s like you’re sitting in the cockpit of a jet, fifty thousand feet up, and you don’t know if the
green button on the dash is the landing gear or the ejector seat.”

  It was a while before Theo trusted himself to speak. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do?”

  A hungry look spread across Call-me-Bill’s face. “We,” he said, “meaning Mattie and me, we aren’t going to do anything. You, on the other hand, are going to be busy.”

  “Me?”

  “Oh yes. Pieter always said, there’s only one man alive who could understand all this shit; meaning you. What you’re going to do is, you’re going to figure it all out from first principles, and then you’re going to write the manual.”

  “Me?”

  “You and no other,” Call-me-Bill said grimly. “Originally, the idea was to send you in there to find Pieter and bring him back, but that’s not going to happen now, apparently. So; Plan B. If I were you, I’d sharpen my pencil and put fresh batteries in my calculator, because you, my friend, are about to reinvent the goddamn wheel.”

  On the positive side, he wasn’t having to pretend he was working in a hotel any more. This meant he didn’t have to waste hours and hours sitting behind a desk in a deserted lobby. As far as the positive side went, though, that was more or less it.

  The negative side, now; there was a lot of that. There was being cooped up in the room provided for him to work in – tiny, windowless and furnished with a chair, a table, a calculator, a moderate amount of air for breathing purposes and nothing else, so he couldn’t possibly be distracted – with nothing to disturb him apart from Call-me-Bill barging in every fifteen minutes bleating, “Have you done it yet?” There was the problem of the work itself. Call-me-Bill had handed him a printout of the calculations he’d found on Pieter’s laptop after his disappearance. It had taken both of them, and an improvised stretcher and a car jack, to get the printout on to the table. Plenty of material to work on, therefore; the only problem was that it made no sense whatsoever. He sprained his brain for a week trying to find a way in before he realised what the problem was –

  “Variable base mathematics,” Call-me-Bill repeated. “What—?”