Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  Demus shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to say, Nick. You’re me. It would be weird for me to worry too much about your feelings. And we both know hugging’s out.’

  ‘Not for me.’ Eva moved in while my attention was on Demus and gave me a quick tight hug. ‘Stay safe. Dad. Thanks for everything. And say hi to Mum for me.’ She picked up her bags and set off for the van.

  Demus shrugged and followed her, hefting two bags of his own.

  I watched them go. I guess from Eva’s perspective, Demus was a much more relatable father figure than some kid younger than her – even if he definitely wasn’t her father, whereas I kind of was.

  I felt a strange sort of separation as they left. Not emotional, or not just emotional, but as if the world were shifting out of phase again, rather like it had when all three of us were in contact back in the hospital. For a moment my vision went sideways and I started to see the van across the carpark as if I were approaching it. I shook my head to clear my eyes, took a deep breath and began to stagger off towards the town centre, hoping that the place was bigger than it looked and might actually have a taxi rank.

  Demus’s intuition about taxi drivers proved correct, once I finally found one. The money meant nothing to me, so I offered a ridiculous sum in cash just to cut through any haggling. And for an additional five hundred pounds up front, my driver, sporting the unlikely name Maximillian, agreed to ignore as many speed limits as I liked.

  For my part, I lay on the back seat and did my best not to die. A fever had me, a reaction to the chemo maybe, or my organs shutting down, or just opportunistic flu. Whatever the cause, my breath came in short fast gasps, all strength left my limbs and my skin looked deathly pale, save for a mottling of bruises starting to form where I’d banged myself escaping the van and on the sides of my hands from trying to break the windscreen.

  Somewhere around Saffron Walden the delirium took me and I began to hallucinate. I saw scenes sliding one way across the curve of the taxi’s upholstery while the lights of the cars we passed slid in the opposite direction. If I closed my eyes I saw the images projected on the back of my eyelids, as if I were looking out from someone else’s face. I began to hear voices. Eva’s voice. The voices of men I didn’t know. My limbs twitched with sensations I didn’t own.

  And suddenly I was there, free of pain and sickness, looking down at Eva, a long white corridor stretching off in both directions. I’d slid into Demus’s head again, but this time I decided to stay. The view was more interesting that the one offered from the taxi, and leaving my sick body behind was a definite benefit too.

  ‘Reyas and Arnold should have secured the control room by now,’ I said. Or rather Demus said, but it felt like me doing it. ‘They won’t stay past the half-hour mark. I paid them a lot of money and they plan on getting away to spend it. Smith-one and Smith-two should have set the equipment up in the testing lab. Remember, they’re techies and apt to panic if there’s a problem. Check their work, if you have time, after you’ve arranged things in the control room.’

  ‘Got it. We’ve been through this.’

  ‘And going through it again makes it less likely it’ll slip your mind when the pressure’s on.’ Demus sounded like my father, with the same voice and mannerisms my father had used when instructing me on taking the Maylerts entrance exam the year before he died.

  ‘Yessir!’ Eva saluted.

  A moment’s silence hung between them.

  ‘Well, this is it then, I guess.’ Demus rubbed his neck. ‘If this works, I don’t know if either of us will even remember the other existed.’

  ‘Well, the quantum spin effects in memory storage are—’

  Demus stopped Eva with a raised hand. ‘I hope we do, Eva. Meeting you has been a privilege. The me that married Helen would have been very proud of you indeed.’

  They hugged then, and I could tell from the way Eva shook that she was sobbing, though no sound escaped her. Demus let her go and walked away while he could still hold on to his own feelings. Once through the door at the end of the corridor he leaned back against it and with finger and thumb squeezed the wetness from his own eyes. I understood his emotion, but didn’t share the depth of it. Another lesson I guessed that twenty-five more years had in store for me.

  Demus hurried on down a staircase, across some office space, along another corridor, down another staircase. He appeared to be wearing some kind of white overalls and to have a radiation badge and official identification card pinned to his chest. A white hardhat bounced from the tie at his hip. Twice he passed other workers and once a young woman in a business suit. None of them gave him a second glance.

  The place began to look more industrial as Demus progressed. The stairways changed from concrete to steel, the corridors became wider and crowded with thick pipes, some swaddled in silvered insulation. The distant thrum of turbines made itself known through the soles of his feet. A door marked ‘Reactor Chamber, No Unauthorised Admittance’ yielded to his touch, though surely it should have been guarded and locked. Cameras watched his progress now, a red light blinking above each of their dark and singular eyes. He clattered down a metal staircase into a brightly lit room full of computer monitors and control machinery. Two large men in white surgical masks were waiting for him. Three other men sat sullenly in the far corner, their wrists, ankles and mouths bound with black tape.

  Demus nodded to the two heavies and glanced through the wall of windows to their left. The view was of a large chamber where a mix of steel walkways and gantries surrounded a deep concrete pool whose waters glowed with a curious blue light. The glow was the tell-tale signature of Cherenkov radiation, indicating that the nuclear reactor beneath the pool was busy spitting out its normal deadly mixture of charged particles and overexcited photons.

  ‘OK, let’s crank this thing up into high gear.’ Demus picked up a telephone set into the central control panels and dialled double one. It rang twice.

  ‘Hello?’ Eva’s voice.

  ‘Ready to start?’

  ‘We are.’

  I watched from Demus’s eyes as he moved around the control room changing settings, tapping dials, and throwing levers. The look on the faces of the taped men turned from a mixture of terror and resignation to astonishment. The two heavies checked their watches periodically.

  After about ten minutes Demus returned to the phone. ‘How’s it looking?’

  ‘At fifty per cent of max. I’ve killed the alarms.’

  ‘It should be ninety by now at least.’ Demus sounded concerned.

  ‘You’ve withdrawn the control rods?’

  ‘As far as they’ll go. The reactor core should be buzzing away like mad.’

  I was no expert, but I knew Bradwell was a Magnox reactor, its graphite control rods cooled by carbon dioxide gas, fuel rods clad in a magnesium-aluminium alloy that would start to melt if those control rods were withdrawn too far. And when the cladding melted the uranium-235 inside them would start to melt too, and if it all ran together that would be a meltdown. A critical mass would form, an explosion would rip the chamber apart and radioactive debris would decorate the countryside. If this went wrong, Chernobyl would be forgotten and Bradwell would live in infamy in its place.

  ‘Someone has instigated undocumented safety protocols,’ Demus said. ‘It’s the only explanation. I’ll have to go into the reactor chamber and manually override so we can withdraw those control rods further and really get some juice out of this baby.’

  For the first time since Demus had entered the room, the three captives began to struggle. Behind their tape all of them were trying to shout out.

  ‘It doesn’t sound exactly safe . . .’ Eva said, her voice tinny and distant through the red phone.

  ‘It should be fine. Besides, we don’t exactly have a choice. Timing is pretty critical on this. Just see if you can disable any subroutines that are going to try to kick in and stop me.’ Demus set the phone back down. He turned to his two men. ‘When it gets to quarter past,
leave the way you came. Change clothes in warehouse six. The balance of your payment will be in your accounts come morning.’

  Without waiting for an answer, Demus took an odd triangular key from the small heap on the control panel beside the phone and left the room through the door opposite the one we’d entered by. He made his way down a short corridor ending in the kind of door you expect to see on a submarine. It had something of a bank vault door about it as well.

  ‘We’re nearly there.’

  ‘Uh . . . What?’

  ‘Trinity College. We’re nearly there.’

  It was Maximillian. I was still lying on the back seat of his taxi. All of me hurt. I tried to sit up, wheezing. I almost didn’t manage it. Outside, the light had faded and the sky was shading through the deeper blues towards purple. I wiped my mouth and my hand came away bloody. The next corner nearly slung me into the footwell.

  ‘There’s another three hundred in it if you ram the college main door and drive me across the lawn to the far corner.’

  Maximillian laughed. ‘Twenty thousand and you’re talking.’

  ‘OK, the front door will do, but three hundred more if you help me to my room. And by help I might mean carry.’ It was only money.

  ‘Done.’

  Getting to my room was agony. I guess Maximillian was trying to help, but he seemed to be all sharp angles and pincer hands, and the cigarette and Brylcreem stink of him set me retching. Thankfully he didn’t have to haul me up the stairs because John and the others had seen me approach from the window of my room, and came hurrying down. I’d given John the key back in the hospital and now here they were, three penguins and a bird of paradise.

  John and Sam took over supporting me.

  ‘Easy now.’ Sam seemed a little unsteady himself and smelled of Bacardi.

  Together they got me to a bench while Simon, also in dinner jacket and bow tie, dug the roll of tenners from my pocket and, on my instruction, gave the whole lot to the cabbie. That last bit was more to save time than any great act of generosity.

  ‘You’re not well enough for this,’ Mia said. She looked gorgeous in an evening dress of deepest blues, purples and black, all in crushed velvet, and her hair pushed up, coiled in dark rings, short at the sides in a punkish style. I half-expected her to be wearing DM boots under all the folds of her skirts, but didn’t check. She looked around at the others. ‘We need to get him to a hospital.’

  ‘I’m not well enough for this,’ I agreed. ‘But I’m damned well doing it. Eva and Demus are risking their lives as we speak, and none of it will mean anything unless I’m at the ball.’

  ‘Can you at least tell us why we’re here?’ John asked. ‘How does someone undo a paradox? We can’t help if we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing.’

  ‘I can’t.’ I shook my head and the world spun. ‘Events have to unfold naturally. We can’t just act this out to a script. Just do whatever you would normally do.’ The truth was that I had no idea what would happen when the time hammer hit, and I didn’t think that even Eva really knew. I couldn’t even imagine a sequence of events that would lead to the critical moment, especially with me better suited to intensive care than to partying, but sometimes you just have to have faith. Against the odds I had them all here, and myself. The dice were rolling. We just had to wait and see how they fell.

  We arrived late, missing the champagne on the lawns, the barber-shop quartets and the fine dining in the vast tent set out in the quad like a MASH station made of clear plastic. Still, we had the fireworks, circus rides, midnight punting, open air disco and bands to look forward to. Most ball-goers would last until dawn showed its face. I wasn’t sure I’d last another hour but I was very pleased to have missed the meal.

  I found myself a seat down on the lawns leading to the river and collapsed into it. Hundreds of students crowded the green acres, milling gently in the warmth of a summer night, the hubbub of their voices underwritten by the base thud from the disco pavilion further down the bank.

  ‘Go on,’ I said to the others. ‘Mingle!’

  ‘You’re not fit to be left,’ Mia said, brow wrinkling in concern.

  ‘Whatever needs to happen here tonight isn’t going to happen if you guys hang round me like a unit of bodyguards,’ I said. ‘Go on. Have some fun. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.’

  ‘It happens every year,’ Simon said.

  ‘Trust me.’ I fixed him with a stern stare. ‘This year’s going to be a one-off.’

  John put an arm across Simon’s rounded shoulders. ‘Come on. I’ll show you how it’s done.’

  Mia watched them go. ‘I think Sam and I should stay.’

  ‘I think Sam and you should go.’ I waved them off. ‘Quit cramping my style.’

  Sam downed his champagne then quirked his mouth into a half-smile. His hair rivalled Mia’s, pushed up into a high quiff of oiled curls. He had almost as much eyeliner on, too. He set his glass beside me, made a formal bow to Mia and offered her his arm. ‘If I may have the pleasure, miss?’

  Mia sighed, manufactured a bright smile, and took the offered arm. ‘We’ll be back to check on you soon.’

  I watched them go, soon lost among the swirl of ball gowns and black-clad men. They looked good together. I tried and failed to make myself comfortable in my chair and wondered if I were doing what I was supposed to be doing. The crowd flowed around me and I sat apart, observing. Young faces – animated, happy, beautiful girls, handsome young men, privileged simply by virtue of being here even if you discounted their family wealth; full of potential, dreams, and ambition. I’d seen myself carrying another quarter century. I wondered what the next twenty-five years held for this class of ’86. A quarter century on, would that girl with the long red hair be on benefits, a divorced mother of three, owner of her own business, reading the news at ten? Would that boy with the wild laugh be decades dead – killed in a car crash two years from now, CEO of a major bank, drinking Special Brew under a bridge to quiet the voices in his head?

  ‘Nick! You made it!’ Helen spun into my view in a swirl of gold and scarlet. A forest fire of a dress. Like Mia, she looked gorgeous. Too perfect, too alive to be in the same world as me, let alone to be in my arms. She settled into the chair beside me. ‘Jesus Christ, Nick, you look fucking terrible.’

  ‘Been better.’ I got the words past gritted teeth.

  ‘She’s right, old chap.’ Piers Winthrop, aka Adonis, leaned down from his imposing height to inspect. ‘Can I get something for you?’ He looked big enough to pick me up in one hand and cart me off to hospital by himself.

  ‘Some paracetamol would be good,’ I said. ‘About twenty.’

  ‘Ha ha!’ Piers straightened and scanned the crowd. ‘Give me a minute. I know just the man.’ And off he went.

  ‘He could at least have the decency to be a dick and make it easy for me to hate him,’ I said.

  Helen smiled and leaned in. ‘Why would you want to hate him?’

  ‘I’m jealous, of course.’

  ‘Of his money, looks, charm and athletic prowess?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, those things as well.’ I met her eyes.

  She laughed. ‘Well, don’t be. Sometimes he’s too perfect for his own good.’ She sipped at her champagne flute. ‘We’re saving ourselves. You know, for marriage.’ She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Marriage?’ I was shocked. ‘Has he asked you?’

  ‘Well, no. I mean . . . he’s very Christian about all this stuff, though . . . you know . . .’

  ‘Uh . . .’ I wasn’t sure I did know, but I found Helen’s directness refreshing. She had that northern openness. Just told you what she thought, no messing. ‘He wants a church marriage?’

  ‘I mean as in “no sex before”.’ She laughed. ‘I told him it’s a lot too late for all that. At least on my side . . . But no, he wants to play it by the good book. It’s driving me crazy, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Ah.’ I felt myself colouring. Very open and perhaps somewhat
drunk, too. I wasn’t sure what to do with the rather too much information she’d just dropped in my lap. ‘So . . . did you find anything about magnetism and memory for me?’

  Helen put back her head and laughed from the chest. ‘See, that’s something else I miss. Nerd conversation. Piers is reading English. Probably going to get a double first, but he doesn’t know the first thing about anything technical. He thought if you boil water for longer it stays hot longer . . .’

  We sat for a while, chatting easily. Piers returned with four tiny white tablets that were almost lost in the broad expanse of his palm. ‘Codeine. Great painkillers. Doc prescribed them for Gideon’s knee after the game.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’ I took them and swallowed all four with the last of Helen’s champagne. ‘You guys go have fun. I’ll catch up later when these have had a chance to kick in.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Helen took my hands in hers, warm and full of some kind of magic that sent tingles down my arms.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  They left, and I slumped back in my chair as if she’d taken the last dregs of my strength with her. I knew myself to be retreating into the shell of my being, no more able to stand than to fly. I knew how bad I looked. I looked like the girl I watched die back in January. Little Eva, eaten by her cancer, death rattling in her chest with every slow breath in and slow breath out.

  My mind drifted, and in the next moment I was with Demus again, watching the world through his eyes. I welcomed the escape. Perhaps I’d even been looking for it.

  ‘Move, damn you!’ Demus hauled on a large iron wheel set into the wall. The heavy engineering and requirement for physical strength seemed more nineteenth-century steel mill than late twentieth-century nuclear facility. The wheel lurched around a few degrees and Demus stumbled to an array of red buttons on a nearby control panel, cursing. He was in the reactor chamber directly below the window to the room where the engineers lay bound and watched over by his hirelings, if they were still at their posts. The blue glow from the pool beside the reactor had intensified into a glare, and a high-pitched whine tormented the air.