She found some last gasp of strength. This time she managed to get his head and shoulders to the level of the gap. His shirt ripped on the edge of the ruined door as she felt his weight shifting towards her, and then suddenly he was falling through the gap, on to the concrete ramp. He landed in an undignified sprawl, arms and legs tangled, face squashed against the ground, his mouth open like a drunkard’s.
Carefully rolling him over, she knelt beside him and took his face in her hands, gently smoothing his hair back from his cheeks and forehead.
Floyd groaned and opened his eyes. He took a deep breath and wiped his tongue across his lips. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“Thank God. You’re all right.”
“All right? I’ve got a headache you could park the Hindenburg in.”
“For a moment back there I thought you were dead.”
“No such luck.”
“Don’t say that, Wendell. I really meant it. I was worried sick.”
He touched the back of his head and came away with a wet palm. “I guess I took a hit in there. Was it worth it?”
Still cradling his head, she drew his face towards hers and lowered her own to meet his, and kissed him. He tasted of dust and dirt. But she held the kiss, and when she moved to pull away, Floyd gently stopped her.
“It was worth it,” she said.
“I guess it must have been.”
She pulled away now, suddenly feeling awkward and silly. Floyd hadn’t rejected her, but she felt as if she had made a terrible misjudgement. She looked down and willed the ground to open up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know—”
Floyd raised a hand, tangling his fingers in her hair, and pulled her in again. “Don’t apologise,” he said.
“I’ve made a fool of myself.”
“No,” he said. “You haven’t. I think you’re wonderful. The only thing I can’t understand is what a nice girl like you would ever see in a crumpled old has-been like me.”
“You’re not a has-been, Wendell. Crumpled, maybe. And you could lose a bit of weight. But you’re a good man who believes in finishing a job once you’ve started it. And you care enough about your friends to put your own life in danger trying to help them. This may come as a shock, but there aren’t that many people like you around.”
“OK, but what about my good points?”
“Don’t push your luck, soldier.” She eased back from him. “You think you can stand? We need to leave here before we get into any more trouble. I’m still worried about your head.”
“I’ll survive,” Floyd said. “I’m a private detective. If I don’t get clouted on the head at least once a week, I’m not doing my job properly.”
He got to his feet, wobbling a little, but able to make his way unassisted.
“We’ll still need to get you checked out,” Auger said.
“I’ll last until we’re back in Paris,” Floyd replied. He touched the back of his head again, but the bleeding had slowed. “Verity—there’s one thing I need to say.”
“Go ahead, Wendell.”
“Now that we’ve broken the ice a bit…”
“Yes?”
“From now on I’d really like it if you just called me Floyd.”
“I will,” she said. “On one strict condition.”
“Which is?”
“You call me Auger. Back home, only my ex-husband calls me Verity.”
“You sure about that, Auger?”
“Damn sure, Floyd.” She helped Floyd up the gentle slope of the ramp, towards level ground. “You start seeing double, or feeling nauseous—I want to hear about it, all right?”
“You’ll be the first to get the news. In the meantime, do you want to tell me what it is you figured out down there?”
“I didn’t figure out anything.”
“But when I rang the bell, it… rang a bell for you, didn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought for a minute…”
“Thought what?” he prompted, as her voice trailed off.
“The spheres are designed to ring. I’m pretty sure of that. The shape, and the specified accuracy of the machining, and the way they are meant to be suspended… everything points to the same conclusion. But they’re not intended to be rung like a bell. Nothing strikes them.”
“Then what makes them ring?”
“In my work,” Auger told him, “in the job I did before I got involved in this mess, we worked with a lot of sensitive equipment. I’m actually an archaeologist, for what it’s worth.”
“Aren’t archaeologists supposed to be greying spinsters with half-moon glasses who never get to see daylight?”
“Not the kind I hang out with,” Auger said. “We get our hands dirty.”
“With this sensitive equipment?”
“Thing is, in order to make it sensitive, we have to run a lot of it at very cold temperatures. We cool it down, really cold, so that it can work better.”
“And when Altfeld mentioned cooling requirements—”
“I started wondering if the spheres were part of some kind of detection apparatus, yes.” Auger bit her lip, focusing her thoughts. “And now I think I know what it is.”
“So tell me,” Floyd said.
“The spheres form a single machine, as wide as Europe, one part of it in Paris, one part somewhere in Berlin, another somewhere in Milan. But they’re really all part of the same instrument. It simply has to be that big for it to work.”
“And this instrument is what, exactly?”
“An antenna,” she said, “just like the one on a wireless. Only it isn’t radio waves it’s set up to detect. It’s gravity.”
“And you figured all that out just by looking at that sphere?”
“No. I’m good, but I’m not that good. We use tools for measuring gravity in my work as well. Sophisticated tools for peering through the ground, picking up the density changes caused by buried structures. Needless to say, we had to study the theory of how these things work when we were being schooled up, and that meant going right back to the early history of gravity-wave detection.”
“Maybe I don’t read the right newspapers,” Floyd said, “but I didn’t know there was a history of gravity-wave detection.”
“There’s definitely a history,” Auger said, “but it isn’t your fault that you don’t know about it.”
They had reached ground level. The ramp emerged in a narrow canyon formed by two long rows of partially demolished buildings, still standing to their first or second storeys. Pipes, conveyors, conduits and catwalks threaded the space over their heads.
“Tell me what I need to know.”
“This isn’t going to be easy for you to follow, Floyd.”
“It’ll take my mind off my headache.”
“Then I have to tell you about space-time. You ready for this?”
“Hit me,” he said.
“There’s an old saying amongst students of gravity: matter tells space-time how to bend; space-time tells matter how to move.”
“It’s suddenly a lot clearer.”
“The point is that everything we see is embedded in space-time. You can think of it as a kind of rubbery fluid, like half-set jelly. And since everything has a mass of some kind, everything distorts that fluid to one degree or another, stretching and compressing it. That distortion is what we experience as gravity. The Earth’s mass pulls space-time in around it, and the distortion in space-time around the Earth makes things fall towards the planet, or orbit around it if they have the right speed.”
“Like Newton’s apple?”
“You’re hanging in there, Floyd. That’s good. Now let’s move up a notch. The Sun pulls its own blanket of space-time around it, and that tells the Earth and all the other planets how to move around the Sun.”