‘Is that my pen?’ said Sé. It was as if last night hadn’t happened; he was completely back to his normal self.
‘What is this?’ said Arnold quietly. Evelyn had already stepped forward and was examining one of the boards intently.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. Then she said it again. ‘Oh my God.’
‘What is this?’ said Arnold again.
He stepped closer.
The normally unshakeable Evelyn had sat down. She kept looking at the whiteboards then looking at the floor again as if when she looked back up, something would have changed.
‘Only, it was quite a new pen,’ Sé was saying.
‘Because, these are just, like, random wave flows,’ said Arnold. ‘We’ve been through this.’
Each of the whiteboards was covered in undulations. Some had peaks; some of the lines curved over themselves. Some were big; some were small. It looked completely random, line after line after line of it, none of it consistent in shape or height.
It looked like the ocean.
‘I ran sine, cosine, blah blah, the whole business,’ said Ranjit. ‘Which by the way is VERY HARD TO DO without a computer. Nothing, just random. Like this, in fact. Connie, have you gone completely crazy maybe? Cool. You do look a bit sticky.’
‘Shut UP, you idiots,’ said Evelyn, sounding as if she were having difficulty breathing. ‘Connie? CONNIE?’
Connie couldn’t stop, couldn’t even hear them or focus. She was miles away, tossed on a far distant sea, where the waves were all around her, higher and higher, the spray blowing in the wind, the great pull beneath her of a great and legendary ocean, its mighty power pulling her down, pulling her…
‘Look to her!’
Suddenly, Luke was in the doorway from nowhere: now, he was tearing across the classroom floor, incredibly fast, just as an exhausted Connie misstepped abruptly from the high desk she was tiptoeing on to reach the very last corner of clear whiteboard, and slipped off altogether.
Just in time he darted over as she slumped down, and he caught her easily.
‘Whoa,’ said Evelyn, getting up as the others moved forward and turned round.
‘She’s not very good at holding her drink,’ said Sé, voice of experience.
Connie was profoundly agitated and unbelievably embarrassed to find herself in Luke’s arms. He set her down gently on the sole large chair in the room, gazing at her intently. For the first time that morning, Connie realised she hadn’t had a shower or washed her face. She wished she had. Then she blinked and looked round and round the room again, at the waves the numbers had brought.
‘It’s real,’ she said. her heart pounding.
Luke didn’t say anything, but gazed at her fixedly.
‘It’s real, isn’t it?’ she persisted. ‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew it was real. You’ve known all along.’
‘I… I have to go,’ said Luke. ‘Are you all right?’
Connie found herself nodding, although in fact her stomach was doing somersaults and her brain appeared to be cracking.
‘Um… yeah. Fine.’
And he was gone.
‘Right,’ Arnold was saying. ‘Now, I have to tell you right, I got into Caltech when I was fifteen, yeah? And, like, I came to England on like a Google Genius grant, okay? Right? And you know I’m an Epic Secundus but I don’t like to mention that.
‘Anyway, seriously, girl dudes. What the fuck is going on?’
Evelyn brought Connie over some water, which she swallowed gratefully.
‘Can you really not see?’
Connie had filled the whiteboards so fully it was as if they were all on a boat and each of them was a window, showing the waves beyond.
‘I see… a load of wave shapes, some peaked, mostly barely related to one another,’ said Arnold. ‘So it’s a Fourier sequence… wave shapes, some decaying in amplitude, some staying stable: just your common or garden set of boring periodic functions. They even all look smooth. So when you superimpose the figures like you have… where does this get us?’
‘Yeah, also I totally waved it out before,’ said Ranjit. ‘So I knew it didn’t work. And I did it by hand. Did I mention that?’
Everyone ignored him.
‘Christ, you guys are THICK. What are you looking at?’
‘Unrelated waves,’ said Arnold.
‘That’s right,’ said Evelyn. ‘Or, as most people would call them, waves.’
There was a silence.
‘It’s brilliant,’ said Evelyn crossly. ‘She interpreted the data as ideals of rings, and plotted the corresponding algebraic curves – making this.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’ said Arnold eventually.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Arnold. What is mathematics?’
‘It’s a way of using abstract rules to describe the world.’
‘The exact world?’
‘No, an approximation of the world, using only necessary factors to…
‘Oh,’ said Arnold.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Evelyn.’
‘This isn’t mathematics.’
‘No,’ said Evelyn.
Connie weakly put her cup down.
‘It’s art,’ she said, as the others goggled at her.
‘What, like drawing and stuff?’ said Ranjit sceptically.
‘But if it’s art…’ said Arnold.
Connie looked at him, her face weary, blue shadows smudged beneath her eyes.
‘There’s an artist,’ she said.
Chapter Six
They sat in silence. Ranjit was wriggling. Every so often he would say, ‘But!’ and then trail off, or ‘So!’, then start playing with his fingers again. Evelyn was swearing under her breath. Arnold marched around the room, holding up sheafs of paper against the results, shaking his head then scribbling.
‘You can do it as often as you like,’ said Connie in a hollow tone, staring listlessly into space. ‘They’ve sent us a picture of the sea.’
‘No fucking way, man,’ said Arnold. ‘This is totally randomised…’
He got to the final board.
‘Fuck me,’ he said.
Every single line of converted numbers ended in a crest, a crescendo, with the final coordinates in the sequence coming down to land… on a beautifully executed, smooth curve, which perfectly resembled an inclining shore.
‘I’ll go and get Professor Hirati,’ said Sé, standing up, brushing down his immaculate shirt, and swallowing loudly.
‘I’ll do it! I’ll do it!’ said Ranjit, sticking his hand in the air. ‘I’ll tell him.’
‘What precisely are you going to tell him?’ said Arnold promptly.
‘That there are aliens who do swimming!’ said Ranjit.
The room stared at him. Evelyn, who had started ripping up pieces of the printout paper, smiled wryly.
‘Maybe you should just go,’ said Arnold to Sé. Sé nodded and made his way to the door. There, he paused and turned back.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘The second I step through this door… the very second… the entire world will change.’
‘We could be wrong.’
‘That won’t even matter once it gets out,’ said Sé.
They were silent as that sank in.
‘I’m going to be famous!’ said Ranjit. ‘This is brilliant.’
‘No, you won’t,’ said Evelyn shortly. ‘That’s why they made us sign all that shit. You breathe a word of it to anyone and you’ll find yourself in a blacked-out plane in about ten minutes flat.’
‘True dat,’ said Arnold.
Sé put his hand on the door again.
‘I’ll just get the professor,’ he said. It was at that precise instant that they heard the sirens.
Nobody spoke while Sé was out of the room. Arnold carried on trying to follow Connie’s workings, occasionally letting out great sighs. Evelyn smoked a cigarillo, which nobody even commented on. Ranjit took out his phone, then put it away again at a fierce look from Evelyn and Arnold mutter
ing, ‘Orange jumpsuits, Ranjit, orange jumpsuits.’’
Connie just stared straight ahead, her conviction so fierce it was overwhelming: she was right, she knew. But Luke had already known. And where the hell was he now?
‘Where the hell did Luke go?’ said Arnold, echoing her thoughts exactly. ‘Some people just cannot bear being proved wrong. Sore loser.’
After forty-five minutes – although it felt like much, much longer as they sat like condemned criminals in a cell – there was a commotion outside and a crashing through the door. As they were the only team that used the bunker they looked at each other in consternation. It sounded like Sé shouting, but he was not someone who ever raised his voice.
Evelyn crushed out her cigarillo and stood up just as Sé banged open the door, his normally implacable face contorted, his eyes wide.
‘Ben Hirati… Professor Hirati. He’s dead.’
‘He’s what?!’ Arnold stood up
‘Before I got the chance… he wasn’t in his office, apparently he was up at the Mullard SCIF…’
‘The what?’ said Connie.
‘The SCIF… oh, I’ll explain later. But… he’s… dead. And… I mean, not just dead.’
Ranjit perked up.
‘No, I mean… I mean, he’s… it’s gruesome, man. I heard.’
There was a long pause.
‘Whoa,’ said Arnold.
Connie felt her heart suddenly pound rapidly in her chest like she couldn’t breathe.
‘What, like somebody did it?’
‘They don’t know.’
‘I don’t like today any more,’ said Ranjit, his mouth a wavy line.
Connie stood up. She tried to keep her voice calm.
‘Did you see Luke?’ she asked. Sé looked at her as if completely confused by the question.
‘No. But…’
Three men in suits walked into the room. They had obviously been there the entire time.
‘I think these men want to talk to us all together.’
‘Who the hell are you?’ said Arnold rudely.
‘We don’t have to answer that,’ said one of the men.
‘Uh, yes you do. In, like a democracy, yeah?’
The man sighed and glanced at his partner, who had picked up a whiteboard eraser and was cleaning Connie’s drawings off the whiteboards round the room. The third man was picking up the boxes and boxes of papers.
‘Well, you can come with us or you can wait for the police,’ said the man. ‘I promise you’ll probably find it easier to explain to us.’
‘Why would we need the police?’
‘Your boss is dead,’ said the man. ‘Or didn’t you get that? Bit of a coincidence, timing-wise, wouldn’t you say?’
Sé looked stricken as the ramifications of what the man had implied sunk in.
‘You’ve been spying on us.’
The man rolled his eyes.
‘Look, we’re the goodies.’
‘Also, that fat one picks his nose a lot when you aren’t here,’ said the second man. The first man silenced him with a look.
Now they were truly frightened.
‘Honestly, we are the good guys.’
Arnold started humming something Connie later recognised as ‘Cloudbusting’ by Kate Bush. More sirens started up outside, and the man raised his eyebrows.
Sé stepped forward.
‘We need to go and sort this out,’ he said.
‘We do,’ said the man. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll need your phones.’
They were escorted out of the bunker one at a time, into the back of a van like criminals. Connie thought people would notice them, but nobody batted an eyelid; around them, the bustling, self-absorbed life of an academic town continued unnoticed. It was the most stunning spring day as they sat, looking at each other in the back of the van – Connie wanted a shower more than just about anything in the entire world – as it drove them back up the hill, towards the astronomical facility, Mullard, where Professor Hirati had had his office.
Built in the nineteenth century, the observatory had spread since then thanks to the highly popular physics and astronomy departments. There were several exquisite, historical telescopes that had been gifted to the university, as well as the state-of-the-art Cambridge Low Frequency Synthesis Telescope, and the great satellite domes which collected signals from deepest space. Connie glanced round the van. Everyone was lost in thought. Ranjit was jiggling up and down, bouncing on his hands. Arnold looked like he wanted to kick him.
The gates of the facility were, they were surprised to see, locked, with what looked like soldiers manning the guardhouse and a large, heavily barred gate with barbed wire in front of their way. This was new.
A man alighted from the van as they stopped, opened the back and, with a torch, shone a light alarmingly into all of their faces. Connie felt her heart race like never before. He ticked them off on his sheet.
‘Is that the last of them?’ said the guard.
‘Not quite,’ said the man who was travelling upfront. ‘There’s one more we need to talk to.’
The large barred gates opened, and the van drove slowly forward.
Chapter Seven
The facility was absolutely full of people, bustling past here and there. Nearly all of them, Connie noticed, were men. The van drove to a low building and then stopped, and they followed the men carefully, like a crocodile of school children. They stopped in front of a low door, in a brand-new, all-white building Connie hadn’t seen before on her one trip to visit the observatory four or five years ago as part of a summer course.
Once they’d been checked over yet again, the door opened and they were admitted into the astonishing building.
Everything inside it gleamed, a stark contrast to the mathematics department. The tiles on the floor, the walls, the bright lights set into the ceiling, all glowed white. It felt like being inside a television set.
‘This is the SCIF,’ announced the man.
‘Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,’ said Arnold instantly. The man nodded.
‘Secret Crap In Fact’ said Arnold again. The man ignored him.
‘This is a sterile facility,’ he went on. ‘It is completely isolated from the outside world. No noise, no internet, no unauthorised entry, no comms except an internal camera loop which records everything that goes on in here. It is bombproof and infiltration-proof. And, er… be careful using the loos. It has infiltration-proof sewerage. So don’t flush anything but paper.’
Everywhere, lights and sirens were going off. Nobody was walking.
Connie and Evelyn swapped looks.
‘Once you all get changed and scrub down, there’s something I want to show you.’
‘No way, dude.’
Arnold could only just squeeze his wide American bulk into the white suits provided.
‘You look like a snowman,’ said Connie.
‘You look like a lit match,’ retorted Arnold sharply, and she smiled at him.
‘What are these for?’ said Ranjit, who was still beside himself. ‘Do you think it’s like, totally an alien autopsy?’
‘Yeah, that’s right, Ranjit. It’s an alien autopsy and all the biologists and coroners and veterinary surgeons and speciologists and chemists on Earth are busy tonight,’ said Arnold.
‘I think they’ll want to stop us contaminating the area,’ said Sé.
‘Well, in that case, you need a bigger suit too,’ said Arnold. It was true: the ridiculous baggy shoes that went over their shoes and the white scrubs they’d been given to wear didn’t come anywhere near covering Sé’s long legs, and he had ten centimetres of golden-brown ankle sticking out the bottom.
Evelyn sniffed.
‘And nobody,’ she added, ‘nobody has asked us about the work. Nobody at all.’
‘Maybe they’ve got more pressing matters,’ pointed out Sé. Evelyn shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, they must have had an inkling before they even let us on to
this shit. So, what time did you get up?’
Connie felt weary and powerless, shepherded about when all she wanted was to sit somewhere dark and quiet, and process her discovery.
Resistance is Futile Page 7