The Good, the Bad and the Smug

by Tom Holt

  “Grorg.”

  “Yes, Boss?”

  “If you mention the Academy one more time before we get home, or my award or awards in general or anything like that, I’m going to rip your ears off. All right?”

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No worries, Boss.” Pause. “Boss?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are we nearly there yet?”

  Ten more days. “We’re getting there, Grorg. We’re getting there.”

  The South Cudworth and District Particle Physics Club had started off, sixteen years ago, with three men and four-fifths of a 1968 Norton Commando. The idea was that George and Mike, two retired engineers, and Norman, a retired college lecturer, would restore the bike in the shed behind Norman’s bungalow as a way of passing the long, long days of summer. The bike was still in bits in Norman’s shed, because for all their skill and ingenuity, not to mention that of Norman’s friends and the friends of their friends, from the Helsingfors Institute of Technology to University of Zhangzhou, some things simply aren’t meant to be.

  Along the way, however, as they tried more and more ingenious ways to solve the problem of the tappet adjuster lock nuts and the main crankshaft lower shell bearings, they found they’d stumbled upon other lines of enquiry, mostly involving the fabric of the universe and the nature of space/time, that might not be directly relevant to the job in hand but which were at least marginally easier to solve. The South Cudworth group discovered dark matter at least eighteen months before the boys at the Lux project–there was a great big gob of it gumming up the air intake, which was why the bike tended to tick over for twenty seconds and then cut out–and it was in the process of finding out where the crank case oil leak came from that Norman first encountered the elusive Higgs boson. Naturally, the shed behind the bungalow soon became a bit on the cosy side for work of this nature, so it was fortunate, to say the least, that Norman happened to win the Euromillions jackpot six weeks running, making it possible for the Club to buy the disused quarry five miles down the road and fit it out with all the latest gear.

  The Club’s latest experiment was arguably its most ambitious yet. It was also uncharacteristically low-tech.

  “With a floured rolling-pin,” Norman read out, peering at the laptop screen through his thumb-thick lenses, “roll the dough out thinly until about one centimetre thick.” He blinked. “What’s a floured rolling-pin?” he asked.

  The others looked at him. “A rolling-pin with flour on it?” someone suggested.

  Norman’s eyes were starting to glaze over. “Why would anybody put flour on a rolling-pin?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  There was a long silence. Then Maurice, until about ten years ago the assistant director of MIT, said, “Do you think it could possibly be some kind of rudimentary parting agent?” Derek slapped his knees with the palms of his hands. “You know what, I think he’s right. So the pastry sticks to the flour and not the pin—”

  “That’s actually rather clever,” said Clive, who’d been something rather grand in the European Space Program. “I think they did something quite similar with the Teflon coating on the thrust intake manifolds on the GX-760.”

  “Splendid,” Norman said. Then he stopped and looked round. “Have we got any flour?” he said.

  It was mostly Derek’s fault that the Club had branched out into multiverse theory in the first place. Derek (recently retired Skelmersdale professor of semiconductor physics at Imperial College, London) had approached the bike problem from a radically different angle. In an infinite multiverse, he argued, new alternate realities are created with every bifurcation of the sequence of events. Thus, when the bike picked up its first little niggling rattle back in ’71, there was, so to speak, a fork in the road; in one reality, the bike started making pinkle-pinkle noises when the engine manifold exceeded a certain temperature, in the other it carried on working perfectly. And so on; each new deterioration giving rise to a further delta of alternative universes, until the number of realities that were identical in every way except for the health of the Norton’s gearbox exceeded the calculating capacity of conventional mathematics. But in one alternative, one single solitary universe among the teeming billions of offshoots, the bike had never gone wrong at all. In that continuum, it was still as good as it had been the day it rolled through the factory gates at Andover. Now then (said Derek), if only there was a way in which they could access that universe, go there, find that pristinely unbuggered bike and bring it back across the interdimensional void to this reality; well, there we’d be, job done. A bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, admittedly; however, bearing in mind how much effort and resources the Club had put in to doing it the more orthodox way, and how little progress they had to show for it, maybe it was worth a shot, at that.

  “Preheat a deep-fat fryer filled with sunflower oil to 180 degrees,” Norman recited, provoking a sharp intake of breath from the back of the lab. “Well? What?”

  Clive had that look on his face. “We’re not going to try using that thing again, are we? Not after the last time.”

  “Nonsense.” In his professional life, Norman had set opposing proton beams to collide at energy levels of 1.12 microjoules per nucleon. Even so, he looked a little thoughtful.

  “This time, I’ve read the instructions,” he pointed out. “It’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “We ought to get someone in to do all this,” said George, nervously fingering his calorimeter. “There’s a woman in the village who does cakes for special occasions, you know, weddings and funerals and things. I’m sure if we asked her—”

  Norman didn’t seem to have heard him; but then, he had only been ten miles away when the Very Very Large Hadron Collider went sky-high, so that was only to be expected. “When golden brown,” he went on, “remove doughnuts from oil with a slotted spoon.” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “A spoon, presumably, with slots in.”

  Clive sighed. “Why’s it all got to be so complicated?”

  “I think it’s amazing,” said Maurice. “To think that there’s stuff like this going on every day in houses all over the country. Mostly, as I understand,” he added, “performed by women.”

  “Miracle we’re all still here, really,” muttered Derek. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. “Yes, all right, but we had this woman lab assistant once, and you know what she did? She only tried to calibrate the electrostatic collimator with a Schmidt-Nagant reverse parallax oscilloscope. Honestly, we didn’t know where to look.”

  “For the icing—” Norman shook his head. “Well, we don’t need to bother with any of that, thank goodness.” He turned away from the screen and beamed at the others. “I believe we can manage it, don’t you?”

  They knew him well enough to recognise a rhetorical question when they heard one. “I think I missed a bit,” said George. “What came after take twenty-five grams of caster sugar?”

  After a while, the Club’s initial apprehensions gradually wore off and they began to work together as a team, particularly after Derek took over from Clive as Principal Stirring Officer. There was an understandably anxious moment as the partly formed doughnut modules were lowered into the hot oil–Maurice, who was doing the countdown, turned away and couldn’t bear to look–but Norman’s cool head and steady hand with the fire extinguisher saw them through, and once the alarms had been switched off and the extractor fans had whisked away the worst of the smoke—

  It had all been Derek’s idea; but if Norman hadn’t worked with Pieter van Goyen and Theo Bernstein on the Very Very Large Hadron Collider (before it blew up) he’d never have come across van Goyen’s theory of the Induced Causality Loop, which the great man was developing shortly before he mysteriously disappeared. When Bernstein subsequently moved a decimal point the wrong way and reduced half a minor Alp to gravel by accidentally blowing up the VVLHC, Norman remembered some of his late-night conference-bar conversations with van
Goyen and started thinking deeply about accidents, coincidences and the reckless deviousness of truly brilliant physicists; before long he was convinced that van Goyen had been behind the VVLHC disaster, and that it was somehow a part of his secret and presumably incomplete research. Reconstructing that research, with only the conversations to go on, wouldn’t be easy. The same went for putting back together the contents of the shoe-box that contained the component parts of the bike’s carburettor, and of the two tasks, Norman opted for the one that might just possibly prove feasible. The result–in his cups, van Goyen had babbled about something he called the YouSpace device; Norman didn’t care for the name particularly, but he couldn’t be bothered to think of anything else, so the YouSpace device it became. The transdimensional portal activation unit was vast, and the third biggest computer ever assembled was only one of its many systems. The portal itself, the actual thing you used as a gateway to get from one alternate universe to another, just by looking into it and making a wish–well, he’d trusted van Goyen this far and he hadn’t been disappointed, and he distinctly remembered the old fool saying, the portal itself is nothing more complex than an ordinary, everyday—

  “It’s ready,” Clive said.

  With shaking hands and a pair of white plastic tongs, Norman lifted a single shining doughnut out of the roiling fat and gazed at it for a moment, rather as Columbus must have done when he first set eyes on the New World and wondered how he was going to break it to King Ferdinand that he’d been completely wrong about a short-cut to India. It was such a small and simple thing, nothing more than a circle of fried batter surrounding an empty space. Was it really possible that—?

  “Look out, boys,” Maurice said. “Norman’s having a Boromir moment.”

  Norman didn’t actually get the reference, but the tone of voice was eloquent enough. “I was just looking,” he said.

  “Well, don’t,” Derek said firmly. “Remember how it’s supposed to work. You could end up anywhere.”

  Or everywhere, Norman thought. The doughnut was definitely looking at him. Hello, sailor, it seemed to be saying. “Rubbish,” Norman said. “The machine isn’t turned on.” He looked up. “Is it?”

  Clive swivelled round to look. “Oops,” he said, and reached for a switch. “No,” he said.

  For a split second, Norman’s blood turned to ice. Slowly and carefully, as though defusing a bomb, he laid the doughnut down on the workbench and took a long step back.

  There was an awkward silence. Over the last six months they’d discussed every conceivable aspect of the YouSpace project except one; namely, who was going to try it out. For some reason, they’d never got around to talking about that.

  “Well,” Clive said, nudging Norman in the small of his back. “Go on, then.”

  Norman scowled horribly at him. “I’m not—”

  “Yes, you are. You’re our leader, isn’t that right, lads?”

  A resounding declaration of loyalty confirmed that he was. Norman had gone a funny colour. “Now come on,” he said reasonably. “Where’s your scientific method? We can’t just run bull-headed into a manned test programme, we’ve got to work up to it gradually, in controlled phases. Scientifically,” he added hopefully.

  “Scientifically?” Derek queried.

  “Mphm.” Norman nodded firmly. “I was thinking, to start with—”

  “Yes?”

  “Mice?”

  They thought about that, and while they were doing so Norman’s heart rate subsided to a modest 120. “We haven’t got any—”

  “Then let’s get some.”

  An hour or so later, Norman whisked a cloth off a small wire cage to reveal three white mice. Derek frowned. “I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s cruel.”

  “No it’s not,” Norman said, “it’s a giant leap for mousekind. Clive, get the doughnut.”

  Norman opened the cage door, and eventually a mouse hopped out and scampered a few paces along the workbench. Maurice threw the switch, and Clive used the tongs to hold the doughnut directly in front of the mouse’s nose. It sniffed a couple of times and started to nibble it.

  “It doesn’t work,” George said.

  “We don’t know that,” Derek replied fiercely. “In fact, it couldn’t have worked with a mouse anyway. The user’s got to make a conscious choice, or the transponder array’s got nothing to go on.” He shrugged. “Probably he’s quite happy where he is.”

  The mouse made another determined effort to get at the doughnut. Clive lifted it out of its reach. “Fine,” he said. “So it’s got to be one of us, then.”

  It was at this point that Norman felt the heavy hand of destiny on his shoulder. Jumbled quotations about boldly going and far, far better things bounced around inside his head, making it hard for him to think straight; there was also a vague mental image of a statue, in bronze, outside the entrance to the science block at his old university–someone had put a traffic cone on top of its head, so presumably it was Rag Week, but that didn’t seem to matter. “All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good lad,” Clive said briskly. “Um, what is it he’s actually got to do, anybody?”

  “Just look through the hole in the middle,” Derek said. “And make a wish.”

  Norman closed his eyes and tried to clear his head. The bike, he told himself, focus on the bike. A perfect, concourse-ready ’68 Commando, its chrome gleaming, its engine softly purring until a quick flick of the wrist sets the tiger roaring. Then he shifted his mental camera angle to take in the number plate. “I’m ready,” he announced, eyes still screwed tight shut. “I’m going now. I may be gone for some—”

  “Norman.”

  Clive’s voice, a bit edgy. “What?”

  “I think you’d better look at this.”

  “Yes, in a minute, I’m not quite—”

  “Norman.”

  Norman opened his eyes and made a soft, faint whimpering noise. Standing on the workbench, looking round with wild, hunted eyes at the startled faces surrounding it, was a—

  Thing. Bipedal, vaguely humanoid, with a huge head, long arms, short bow legs, possibly four feet six but hard to tell because of the way it crouched; tusks like a pig, claws like a big cat, little round red eyes, snout like a pig, bristles. In one hand it held a small round oxhide shield, in the other a sort of overgrown machete. It didn’t smell very nice, either.

  “Norman,” Derek whispered, “you plonker. What the hell were you thinking about?”

  Ever since she was a little girl, growing up under the tall canopy of the forest glades of Snorien, Efluviel had known she was going to be a journalist. Partly it was because she’d always loved writing; partly because she knew that the Realms were teeming with stories waiting to be told, great truths buried under leaf-drifts of obscurity or stuffed away in the hollow trees of convenience and lies. Mostly, though, it was because eighty-seven per cent of the Elvish nation were employed full-time in the newspaper business, and nearly all the remainder dashed off the occasional freelance feature, essay or book review. Her father was the literary editor of Elitism Today, her mother the chief political correspondent of Supercilious! The idea that their little girl might grow up to be something else–a local government officer, say, or a lobbyist or a tax inspector–simply hadn’t occurred to them.

  But that was all right, because Efluviel loved her work, and she was very good at it. Within three months of joining the Beautiful Golden Face as a cub reporter, covering the usual uninspiring round of planning appeals and literary lunches, Efluviel had broken her first major story, a gripping account of plagiarism, backbiting and corrupt reviewing practices that implicated some of the biggest names in the Elvish Third Estate. Immediately promoted to the rank of junior assistant drama critic (the youngest ever, by a margin of some seventy years), she used her unique brand of elegantly allusive snideness to establish herself as one of the leading voices of her generation, and she was already being spoken of as a serious contender for the assista
nt deputy editorship of Superior on Sunday when the blow fell, and all her hopes and dreams came crashing down around her delicately pointed ears like the rafters of a burning house. Mordak the goblin bought the Beautiful Golden Face.

  To this day, the Elves are at a loss to know how it could possibly have happened. There were, after all, laws about that sort of thing; nobody was quite sure why they weren’t applied in Mordak’s case, though a series of exposés in Supercilious! and Private Ear suggested that the acquisition and certain contributions Mordak made to Academician Grorflindel’s reelection campaign war-chest might not have been a coincidence. Whatever the truth behind it, the acquisition went through as swiftly and efficiently as an arrow through flesh, and all the Elves could do about it was complain, eloquently and at length, in the pages of their various publications. But not for long. Mordak, it seemed, didn’t appreciate having unkind things said about him in his own newspapers. Sudden and unexpected as lightning out of a blue sky, the sequence of events the Elves call the Terror began to unfold.

  Editors started to get threatening memos. Stories were deliberately killed. Beautifully written copy was sent back with People aren’t interested in this stuff, write about something else scrawled across the top in Mordak’s distinctively illiterate hand. Respected journalists, particularly those who’d been critical about Mordak or goblins in general, suddenly found themselves arbitrarily reassigned to the gardening pages or Obituaries. On the morning of what was for ever after called the Day of Weeping, a hundred and twenty-seven arts columnists were herded into a small conference room and viciously sacked. Loviel, the Face’s long-serving editor, retaliated in the only way he could and went to the union, who immediately sent Mordak an ultimatum; reinstate the One Hundred and Twenty-Seven and sign an undertaking not to interfere with editorial decisions ever again, or the entire staff of the Face would come out on strike. Mordak’s reply was swift and brutal. Go ahead, he said. If you don’t want to work for me, there’s plenty of goblins who do.