Delahaye spotted me and walked over. “What are you doing here, Dolan?” he asked. “Surely you’ve got enough material by now?”
“I need a conclusion,” I said, still looking around the room. “Just a last bit of colour.”
“Well, try not to get in the way will you? There’s a good chap.” Delahaye was a small, agitated Londoner who couldn’t see why a journalist had been foisted on him and his experiment.
“I don’t see Larry,” I said. “Is he coming in today?”
Delahaye looked around him. “Maybe. Who knows? The experiment’s almost over, he doesn’t need to be here. Is it important?”
Is it important? No, maybe not to you, Professor. I said, “I just wanted a quick word, that’s all.”
Delahaye nodded irritably. “All right. But just —“
“Try not to get in the way. Yes, Professor, I know. I’ll just stand over there in the corner.” As if I was going to reach over and press some important big red button, or fall into a piece of machinery. Nothing I did here was going to make the slightest bit of difference to the enormous energies being generated, nanoseconds at a time, far below our feet in the tunnels of the Collider. And even if I did manage to screw something up, it wouldn’t affect the experiment all that much; all the results were in, Delahaye was just using up his allotted time with a last couple of shots.
The Professor gave me a last admonitory glare and went back to the little group across the room. There was nothing world-shaking going on here; the Collider was brand new — the offices still smelled of fresh paint. Delahaye was just running warm-up tests, calibrating instruments, the high-energy physics equivalent of running-in a new car. I’d been there two months, working on an article about the new facility for Time. I thought the article was shaping up to be interesting and informative. The worst thing about the whole fucking business was that it had brought Larry into my life.
Andy Chen came over and we shook hands. “Been fun having you around, man,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Right.”
“Nah, really,” he insisted. “You piss old man Delahaye off mightily. It’s been beautiful to watch.”
Despite being beyond pissed off myself, I smiled. “You’re welcome. What’s for you now? Back to MIT?”
He shook his head. “Been offered a job at JPL.”
“Hey, excellent, man. Congratulations.”
“Ah, we’ll see. It’s not pure research, but at least it gets me away from that monstrous old fart.” He looked over at Professor Delahaye, who was regaling some students with some tale or other. Andy snorted. “Brits,” he said. “Who knows?” He looked over to where a small commotion had begun around the door. “Well, we can get the party started now.”
I looked towards the door and saw Larry Day’s leonine features over the heads of the others in the room, and I felt my heart thud in my chest. “Andy,” I said, “I need to have a quick word with Larry.” We shook hands again and I launched myself through the crowd. “Great news about JPL, man. Really.”
Larry was drunk again. That much was obvious even before I got to him. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a desert camouflage jacket and he was clutching a tattered sheaf of paper in one hand and a shrink-wrapped six pack of Dr Pepper in the other. His hair looked as if he had been dragged back and forth through a hedge a couple of times, and his eyes were hidden by mirrorshades with lenses the size of silver dollars.
“Larry,” I said as I reached him.
The mirrored lenses turned towards me. “Hey. Alex. Dude.” There was a powerful aura of Wild Turkey and Cuban cigars around him, and when he grinned at me his teeth were yellow and uneven.
Rolling Stone had called him ‘Steven Hawking’s Evil Twin.’ One of the most brilliant physicists of his generation, a legend at the age of 24. Of course, by that time he had been thrown out of Harvard for an incident involving a home-made railgun, a frozen chicken, and his supervisor’s vintage TransAm, but that was just part of his mystique, and pretty much every other university on Earth had offered him a place. His doctoral thesis was titled Why All Leptons Look Like Joey Ramone But Smell Like Lady Gaga, and it was generally agreed that it would have been embarrassing if it had won him the Nobel Prize. Bad enough that it was shortlisted. His postdoc research had been a mixture of the mundane and the wildly exotic; he cherry-picked his way through some of the wilder outlands of quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, came up with a brand new theory of stellar evolution, published a paper which not only challenged the Big Bang but made it seem rather dull and simple-minded. Larry Day. Brilliant physicist. Brilliant drunk. Brilliant serial womaniser. He and I had visited all the bars in Sioux Crossing, and been thrown out of most of them.
“I spoke with Ellie last night,” I said quietly.
He smiled down at me. “Hey,” he said. “Outstanding.”
I gritted my teeth. “She told me.”
In the background, I could hear Delahaye saying something above the holiday atmosphere in the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. All I could concentrate on was Larry’s mouth, his lying lips as he said, “Ah. Okay.”
“Is that all you can say?” I hissed. “’Ah. Okay’?”
He shrugged expansively and some of the papers in his hand escaped and fell to the floor. “What can I say, man? ‘I’m sorry’?”
Delahaye seemed to be counting in a loud voice, but it was as if I heard him from a great echoing distance. I lunged at Larry, grabbed him by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.
“… Three… two…” said Delahaye.
“You fucking bastard!” I screamed into Larry’s face.
“… One!” said Delahaye, and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.
I had the Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the Colonel returned from their lunch. In the end I’d told the Marines to go away, and I’d done it myself. Down the years I’ve noticed that Marines tend towards a certain disdain for people who are not themselves Marines. I was a civilian specialist. To most of them that was a euphemism for CIA, which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of me, but I wasn’t going to play that game.
“How was your lunch, General?” I asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.
Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.
I looked at my watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” I said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”
Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”
Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and I got into the Hummer. I took the wheel.
I said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Corporal.”
Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues. “General.”
I put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” I said. “You’re no more a General than I am.” And I drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the Site.
There was a place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an ‘up’ and a ‘down.’ Or maybe it was a ‘down’ and an ‘up.’ I screamed and I screamed and the noises I made were not sounds. I was… I was…