Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  “You liked that?”

  “Amazing. You made it seem so obvious. I was convinced.”

  “You were.”

  “Absolutely.” She paused, and George made a mental note that if ever the opportunity arose, it would be to his advantage to play poker with this woman, for money. “Only—”

  “It’s wrong,” George said.

  Her eyes opened wide. “Excuse me?”

  “Garbage,” George said. “The whole thing’s a load of drivel.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “You know it is. So do I,” he added cheerfully. “I knew it when I wrote it.”

  Pause. Then Lucy said, “So you think there really are …”

  “People on other planets? You betcha. I know there are.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. “They stole my dog,” he said.

  He played that last exchange back in his head, and added quickly, “Also, the maths doesn’t work. In the article, I mean. I’m amazed nobody ever spotted it.”

  From nowhere that he could see, Lucy produced a snow-white pad. Its screen glowed green when she pressed a white button. “Show me,” she said.

  He scrolled down and found the place. “Here,” he said, and hesitated. Then he remembered who he was talking to. “See, right here.”

  His fingernail against the white plastic was probably the most revolting thing he’d ever seen. But Lucy wriggled across the floor so she could see.

  “You mean this sequence here?”

  He nodded. “Try it for yourself,” he said.

  She prodded keys for a moment, then looked up at him. “Oh,” she said.

  “It doesn’t work,” George said. “And if you knock out that bit, the whole thing falls to bits.”

  She was frowning. “But you published it all the same.”

  “Yup.” George closed his eyes for a moment. “The fact is, I was trying to convince myself. That’s what it was all about. I thought, if I could prove it, scientifically, then maybe what I saw when I was a kid never happened after all. But I couldn’t prove it. So, being me, I cheated.”

  She looked up at him. Her eyes said “Does not compute,” but she nodded slowly. “You wanted to believe it, so you bent the figures.”

  He sighed. “And then I tried to kid myself I hadn’t. The way I argued it, if everybody else thought it was OK, all those doctors and professors, then who was I to argue? And nobody ever saw it. And that’s guys with whole alphabets after their names. So, maybe I was right after all and just too dumb to realise.”

  She smiled at him. “It’s garbage,” she said.

  He sighed, a long exhalation of breath that was both sad and deeply relieved. “It’s the base shift,” he said. “Human nature. We’re a base-ten species, we find it so hard to get our heads around base four. And the eye sees what it wants to.” He stopped for a moment, and when he said, “You’re good,” it didn’t come out sounding unreservedly complimentary.

  “I only saw it because you pointed it out,” she said. “But anyway, you’ve answered my question. No, in spite of what you wrote, there isn’t any conclusive proof that aliens don’t exist.”

  He studied her for a moment. “That was why you wanted to see me.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “You see, I rather think they do. And then I read your paper.” She put her head slightly on one side. “Did they really steal your dog?”

  Oh well, he thought. It was nice while it lasted. “Be honest,” he said. “If I said yes, would you believe me?”

  “Depends.”

  “Excuse me. Depends on what?”

  “On whether you’re telling the truth or not.”

  Picky, he thought. He took a deep breath and told her all about it. When he’d finished, he looked at her. “Well?”

  She had this way of frowning when she was thinking. It was part Michelangelo, part Botticelli and part sweetcorn-husk-lodged-between-front-teeth. “You think someone stole your dog.”

  He didn’t sigh, but he wanted to. “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t actually sound like that to me,” she said, far away in some higher realm. “More like, your dog just left.”

  He hadn’t been expecting that. Polite disbelief, maybe, the glazed look. Or a short flight through the air, ending in a forced landing on the drive. But not that. “Excuse me?”

  “Of its own accord,” she said. “Have you considered that?”

  “It went flying through the air.” He hadn’t intended to raise his voice, but the idea was so — well, offensive. “Dogs don’t fly.”

  “Yours did.”

  “Pardon me, but it didn’t. It was the stick doing the flying. He just held on.”

  “Or hitched a ride.”

  “On a conveniently passing flying stick.”

  She shrugged. “That’s how it sounds to me,” she said. “But of course, I wasn’t there.”

  “No, you weren’t.” Abruptly, he remembered who he was talking to. More accurately, he remembered what, and how much of it, he was talking to. It had been remarkably easy to forget, just for a moment or so. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—” He couldn’t think of the right words for what he hadn’t meant to do. He waited for her to summon the giant and have him thrown out, but remarkably, that didn’t happen. Instead, she said, “Anyway, it’s not important, I guess. What matters is, you saw it, so it must be true. And since sticks don’t fly — not on Earth, at any rate — it does sound like—” Suddenly she smiled, and it was like drowning in a milkshake. “Aliens,” she said.

  He nodded. “That’s how I figured it.”

  She breathed out slowly, like someone doing yoga. “And I suppose that’s why you gave up science and became an alcoholic,” she said. “That’s really sad.”

  “Sad” was indeed a word he’d used to describe himself many times, but not in the sense she was using it. “You believe me,” he heard himself say.

  “Well, of course. I don’t suppose you’d make a thing like that up. And it must’ve been something of the sort, because look what it’s done to you.”

  He felt as though he’d just passed an exam and been released from Death Row. “So you believe in aliens,” he said.

  “Yes. Now, my turn. Do you believe in unicorns?”

  The laugh was in his throat and well on its way to his mouth before he managed to catch up with it. “Well, no,” he said.

  “Neither did I. But I saw one.”

  “Ah.”

  “Quite. I thought that, too. But I saw it, so it must be true. That or I’m going crazy. Also, I woke up early this morning and I found out I’d had a message while I was asleep. In a language I don’t know, but I think I could understand it. Oh, and I think someone’s trying to poison me with aposiderium.”

  There was a three-second pause. Then George said, “Well, thanks for the coffee and the ride. I think I’ll be going now.”

  She gave him a sort of schoolteacher look. “Now come on,” she said. “I believed you. Be fair.”

  “Yes, but—” She had a point. She might be a frothing-at-the-mouth kook, but he’d just been fired for burbling drunken drivel at his boss. Let’s all be nuts together (although it had to be borne in mind that too many kooks spoil the broth). “Amplify,” he said.

  She smiled at him. “That’s what I like,” she said. “An open mind.”

  “Wide open. Like Wyoming. Go on.”

  So she had her turn at explaining, and George was just thinking, This woman is seriously disturbed, what planet is she from?, when she got to the bit about aposiderium, and suddenly she had his complete and undivided attention.

  “Just a moment,” he said. “You do know that’s the stuff they use in banknotes.”

  “For the security strip, yes.”

  His turn again. He explained his theory: about how the aposiderium was somehow extracted, and the waste plastic was added to the remaining notes. He noticed that her mouth had fallen open, and her lower jaw was wobbling feebly, as
though she was trying to say something but lacked the strength.

  “Yes,” he said. “Or it could just be a coincidence.”

  She shook her head so furiously that you could’ve used her hair as a strimmer. “Not a coincidence,” she said, as though with her mouth full of toffee. “No way.”

  “A bit far-fetched,” he agreed. “No, I think we may have stumbled on the answer to Why. Which only leaves How and Who. And I reckon that if we can figure out one of those, the other won’t be hard to crack. What do you think?”

  She was staring at him; then she must’ve realised that, because she pulled herself together so briskly he was sure he heard a click. “Teleportation,” she said. “You could do it with a teleport, if you were really, really clever.”

  He smiled. “But nobody on Earth knows how to do it,” he said. The smile widened into a grin that threatened to unzip his scalp. “And if nobody on Earth . . .”

  She nodded triumphantly. “Quite,” she said.

  19

  Paris

  The two men who weren’t werewolves sat outside a pavement café on the edge of Montmartre. One of them was reading the international edition of the Herald Tribune. The other was using a small pumice stone to sharpen his teeth.

  “It says here,” said the reader, “that archaeologists in Africa—”

  “Mmm?”

  “The big hot one that looks like a pear. Archaeologists in Africa have found the oldest human remains so far discovered.”

  “Is that right?”

  The reader nodded. “Fragment of a jawbone.” The B-word made him wince. “Found in the fossilised faeces of a hyena. Scientists have pinpointed the age of the remains using carbon dating.”

  “Carbon what?”

  “Dating.”

  The amateur dentist frowned. “I heard a bit about that on the broadcast network,” he said. “Apparently, it’s where a lot of beta males in search of mating partners sit at tables and interview females for no more than three minutes.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure how that’d work.”

  The reader shrugged. “Well, they’ve got to talk about something, presumably. If you got a bunch of male archaeologists and another bunch of female archaeologists, and they all discussed how old the bones were for three minutes, I guess you’d probably make some sort of progress. And when you think how long seminars drag on for back home—”

  “Yes, but three minutes. That’s not very long.”

  “Short attention span,” the reader explained. “Definitely a defining characteristic of the species.”

  “Maybe.” The amateur dentist twiddled his pumice thoughtfully. “Seems an odd way to choose a life partner, though.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I can see how mating with a female who can tell if a bone’s stale just by looking at it would be really useful.” He read the paragraph again. “Two hundred thousand years,” he said thoughtfully. “Does that change anything, do you reckon?”

  His colleague shook his head. “Don’t see why,” he said. “Basically, it just means they’re even dumber than we thought. Two hundred thousand years, and they’re still powering their transport with controlled explosions.”

  “I guess. But maybe we should report it.”

  “No.” The amateur dentist shook his head. “One, I don’t see how it makes any difference. Two, how do we know that figure’s accurate? If their idea of scientific method is high-intensity group flirtation, I doubt the Institute back home’s going to set much store by their findings.” He tested the points of his back teeth with the pad of his forefinger and nodded his satisfaction. “Forget about it, and let’s get on with the job, right? Sooner we finish, sooner we’re out of here.”

  He’d chosen the right line of argument. The reader folded the newspaper and laid it on the table. “Agreed,” he said. “Right, where is he now?”

  “With the Pavlov female,” his colleague said, glancing at a hand-sized portable screen. “If this thing’s working properly, they’re about due to jump to their first conclusion round about …” He counted under his breath, three, two, one. “Now,” he said.

  The reader drained the last of his coffee, shivered and stood up. “We’d better make a move,” he said. “Signal the ship.”

  Two seconds later, they dissolved into the faintest and quickest of blurs. Because of a freak electric storm over New Guinea and a slight malfunction on a broadcast satellite, viewers in Holland watching an afternoon soap caught a fleeting glimpse of what appeared to be two Alsatian dogs drifting in space, and a dozen Swiss motorists relying on their GPS guidance systems found themselves diverted down service roads and cart tracks. A nuclear submarine ran aground in the Cayman Islands, and a weather station in Mexico confidently forecast a light shower of frogs.

  Fortuitously, at the precise moment when two shimmering whirlpools of light spun into two men in business suits in the middle of Novosibirsk’s busiest shopping mall, nobody was looking that way; they were all too busy watching a pyramid of one thousand cans of prime Italian plum tomatoes slowly collapsing in the window of a prestigious delicatessen. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

  The non-werewolf who’d been reading the newspaper checked his miniscreen. “Two degrees out,” he said irritably. “Soon as we’ve got a moment, we’re going to have to recalibrate the whole system.” He looked round. “What is this place?”

  “Some sort of covered market,” his colleague said.

  “What, the whole thing? Just — shops?”

  “I suppose they must like shops.”

  “Obviously.” The reader put his miniscreen away and scanned for an exit. “According to the beacon, Stetchkin and Pavlov are 2.71 clicks that way,” he said. “Try and act—” His colleague had vanished. The reader found him a few minutes later, staring into a shop window as though it was a sneak preview of a particularly nasty version of the afterlife.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We came here to help these people, but…”

  The shop called itself Pawz Jawz ‘in’ Clawz, and the centrepiece of its display was a life-size Airedale terrier modelling the latest in doggy jupons, boiled-prawn pink with a white faux-fur collar. The reader swallowed hard. “So what?” he said. “We do the same thing back home. We have little coats and hoods for humans, and dear little shoes with brass buckles, and—”

  “That’s different,” his colleague growled. “You know it is. This is—

  “They’re a primitive species. They don’t know any better.”

  “They’ve had two hundred thousand years to learn. I think they’re like this because they want to be. In which case,” he added grimly, “I say, let ‘em fry.”

  “It’s not about them, and you know it.”

  His colleague nodded slowly. “You’re right, I guess,” he said. “Still, I wish I hadn’t seen that. It makes it hard to do the job, you know?”

  The reader shook his head. “Let’s get it done and get the hell out of here,” he said.

  20

  New York

  Mark Twain sat in his suite on the forty-second floor of the Waldorf Astoria. On his knees lay a partially dismantled laptop, into which he was plumbing a dead octopus. Remarkable, he thought, that the Dirters could be so unobservant. Their oceans had produced perhaps the most sophisticated and versatile organic computer processor in the galaxy, capable of performing as many calculations per second as the latest generation of Ostar super-processors, and what did they do with it? They ate it. You could buy one of the things for a few coins in the open-air fish market ten minutes walk from where he was sitting; back home, only the government and the really big corporations could afford access to this level of hardware. The only downside he could see was that in forty-eight hours or so it’d start to smell fairly bad, and soon after that it’d have to be replaced. Big deal. Very carefully he looped a tiny noose of beryllium wire round the tip of a cold tentacle and hit the laptop’s ESC key. The screen lit up and immediately swarmed with Ostar numerals.


  That made him feel a lot better. There was a whole load of difference between communicating with the bomb vehicle in orbit by direct neural interface and being able to see things actually displayed on a screen. In theory, of course, there shouldn’t be; but there was. It was a side-effect of being in an organic body for so long. When he got home, he’d prepare a report for the— But he wasn’t going home. He frowned, as a minor power surge made the octopus wriggle. Any day now, as soon as he’d figured out what he needed to know, he was going to blow himself up, and the planet with him. The octopods, with their incredible organic circuitry, would be extinct, along with thirty million species of mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, plants, lesser eukaryotics and micro-organisms. Arguably a high price to pay for getting rid of irritating tunes in the head.

  Not that he had that problem any more. A few skilful tweaks to his cognitive subroutines had produced a filter that recognised repetitive beats and musical intervals and edited them out before they reached the relevant centres of his brain; now he could stand in the hotel lobby, where they played piped background music all the time, and never hear a thing.

  Easy, of course, for a machine like him. It would probably be much harder to build and install such filters for flesh-and-blood Ostar back home; much simpler and cheaper to blow up the planet, much more cost-effective. Or maybe not. He thought about that. If he could take a breeding pair of octopuses back to Ostar and sell them to one of the big hardware corporations, would a 2 per cent royalty pay for hot-wiring filters into the brains of every Ostar on the planet? It took him three whole seconds to do the maths. Yes, it would, with enough left over for a cup of r’uuytf and a spnf cake.

  A dead tentacle, galvanised by a spike in the current, stood up and waggled feebly before flopping back into the nest of coiled wires. There was, of course, an absolute and inviolable rule: weapons don’t make policy decisions. Quite apart from the obvious dangers, such as bombs changing sides or getting better offers in mid-trajectory, there was an important ethical issue — important, that is, for the weapons themselves. A choice, a say in how it was used, would mean responsibility, blame, guilt, not to mention the vast and murky multiverse of legal liability. You’d get shells refusing to burst and landmines declining to explode because they were afraid of getting sued. It’d be a nightmare.