The captain smiled and shook his head. He was base security, or maybe Intelligence, I didn’t know. He was the image of reasonableness. We could, he seemed to be saying, keep doing this all day and all night until I told him what he wanted to know.
“Go and find Professor Delahaye,” I said. “He’ll vouch for me.” I couldn’t understand what the military were doing at the Collider; maybe the accident had been much worse than I thought. Which would make it truly world-shaking.
“I don’t know any Professor Delahaye, son,” the captain said. “Did he help you break in here?”
I sighed and shook my head. “No. He’s supervising the startup experiments. Look, if he was hurt, maybe one of the others can come here. Doctor Chen or Doctor Morley, maybe. Everyone knows me.”
“I don’t know any of these people, Mr Dolan,” said the captain. “What I want to know is who you are, and how in the name of blue blazes you managed to break into Fort Bragg without a stitch of clothing.”
“Fort Bragg?”
The captain gave me a wry, long-suffering, don’t-bullshit-me-son sort of look.
I looked around the room. There was only one door. It looked solid and it had big locks on it. But looking around the room again, I noticed that if I looked at it a certain way, it was not a locked room at all. It was just planes of mass that didn’t even butt up against each other. It was actually wide open.
“I thought this was the Sioux Crossing Collider,” I told the captain.
He blinked. “The what?”
I said, “I don’t like it here,” and I stepped outside the room, went back there.
I had brought with me a gallon jug of water, a little solid-fuel camping stove, some basic camping cookware, and half a dozen MREs. I took the first package and opened it. Meals Ready to Eat. But only if you were desperate or not particularly fussy. The package contained beef ravioli in meat sauce, chipotle snack bread, a cookie, cheese spread, beef snacks, caffeine mints, candy, coffee, sugar, salt, gum, some dried fruit and some other bits and pieces. I’d heard that the French Army’s MREs came with a pouch of red wine. If only The Accident had happened at CERN…
I became aware of… something. If a solid object could have the equivalent of a negative image, this was it. A kind of negative tornado, turned inside-out. I stepped towards it…
And found myself standing at the SCC, outside the building where I had last seen Professor Delahaye and his team and Larry Day.
Above me towered a colossal sculptured pillar of cloud, rotating slowly in the sky. I tilted my head back and looked up at it, my mouth dropping open.
And all of a sudden I was writhing on the ground in agony, my muscles cramping and spasming. I tried to step away, but I was in too much pain to be able to focus.
And that was how they caught me the second time, lying in wait because they half-expected me to return to the Collider, and then tasering me half to death. Someone walked up to me and thumped his fist down on my thigh. When he took his hand away there was a thin plastic tube sticking out of my leg and then there was a wild roaring in my head and a wave of blackness broke over me and washed me away.
They tried the same trick on the captain and the two guards as they had on Former Corporal Fenwick. I was beginning to think that I was travelling across the world leaving generals in my wake. They showered them with money and promotions, and for some reason it didn’t work with them the way it had worked with Fenwick. They blabbed their stories, and eventually the government had to make them all disappear. The officers were in solitary confinement in Leavenworth and the people they blabbed to were sequestered somewhere.
I finished my dinner and sat by the window drinking coffee and smoking a small cigar. The cigar was from a tin I’d found in my rucksack; a little gift from Fenwick. I’d heard the helicopter fly over while I was eating; it had dipped down momentarily a few hundred metres from Point Zero — which was actually an act of insane bravery on the part of its pilot in order to maintain what I considered the fatuous and transparent fiction of my ‘departure’ — and then lifted away again to the West. Now everything was quiet and night was falling.
I remembered when this whole place had been busy and bustling. All abandoned now, the surviving staff scattered to other facilities. I thought about Delahaye and Andy Chen and Caitlin Morley and all the others who had been in that room with me on the day of The Accident. Delahaye had been an uptight asshole and Larry had been having an affair with my wife, but I’d liked the others; they were good, calm, professional people and it had been good to know them.
I was resting my arm on the windowsill. As I looked at it, the hairs on my forearm began to stir slowly and stand up.
This time, it was a general opposite me, and I was sitting down. To one side of the general were two middle-aged men in suits; on the other side was a youngish man with thinning hair and an eager expression.
“You tasered me and drugged me,” I told them. “That wasn’t very friendly.”
“We apologise for that, Mr Dolan,” said one of the middle-aged men. “We couldn’t risk you… leaving again. Put yourself in our position.”
I held up my hands. I was wearing manacles. The manacles were connected to a generator behind my chair; if I looked as if I was going to do something outrageous — or if I even sneezed a bit forcefully — the manacles would deliver a shock strong enough to stun me. I knew this because they’d demonstrated the process to me when I came round from the sedative.
“I would love to put myself in your position,” I said. “So long as you could put yourself in mine.”
“It’s only a precaution, Mr Dolan,” said the other middle-aged man. “Until we can be sure you won’t leave us again.”
I looked at the manacles. From a certain point of view, they didn’t go round my wrists at all. I lowered my hands and folded them in my lap. “Professor Delahaye,” I said.
“We don’t know,” said the youngish man. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s… something there, but no bodies, nothing alive.”
“Something?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember what happened?”
I was busy attacking Larry Day for having an affair with my wife. “They were doing the last shot of the series,” I said. “Delahaye counted down and then there was…” I looked at them. “Sorry. I won’t image it.”
“Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”
Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day was having an affair with my wife. “No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”
“Where do you… go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere.”
The four men exchanged glances. One of the middle-aged men said, “We think there may be another survivor.”
I leaned forward.
“A day after your first, um, appearance there was an incident in Cairo,” he went on. “Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a djinn walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”