Ed heard Victor sniff loudly.
“Ugh!” said Victor. “Was that you?”
Now Ed smelled it too. There was a distinct whiff of rotten eggs in the room.
“No, it wasn’t me,” said Ed, somewhat offended.
For the second time in as many minutes, Victor wondered if Ed might be lying.
“Anyway,” said Ed, “it’s my turn. E three.”
“Miss.”
Beep.
“What was that?”
Victor didn’t look up. “I said it was a miss. That’s what it was: a miss.”
“No,” said Ed. “I meant: what was that?”
His right index finger was pointing at the computer screen, which was occupied by a visual representation of all the exciting things happening in the particle accelerator, and which had just beeped. The image on the screen looked like a tornado, albeit one that was the same width throughout instead of resembling a funnel.
“I don’t see anything wrong,” said Victor.
“A bit just whizzed off,” said Ed. “And it went beep.”
“A bit?” said Victor. “It’s not a bicycle. Bits don’t just whiz off.”
“Right then,” said Ed, looking miffed. “A particle of some kind appears to have disengaged itself from the whole and exited the accelerator. Is that better?”
“You mean that a bit just whizzed off?” said Victor, thinking, who said we Germans don’t have a sense of humor?
Ed just looked at him. Victor stared back, then sighed.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “It’s a contained environment. Particles don’t simply leave it to go off, well, somewhere else. It must have been a glitch.” [5]
“It wasn’t a glitch,” said Ed. He abandoned the game and began furiously tapping buttons on a keyboard. On a second screen, he pulled up another version of the visual representation, checked the time, then began running it backward. Twenty seconds into the rewind, a small glowing particle came into view from the left of the screen and appeared to rejoin the whole. Ed paused the image, then allowed it to run forward again at half speed. Together, he and Victor watched as the bit whizzed off.
“That’s not good,” said Victor.
“No,” said Ed. “It shouldn’t even be possible.”
“What do you think it is?”
Ed examined the data. “I don’t know.”
Both men were now working on keyboards. Simultaneously, they pulled up the same string of data on their screens as they tried to pinpoint a reason for the anomaly.
“I’m not seeing anything,” said Ed. “It must be buried deep.”
“Wait,” said Victor. “I’m seeing- No! What’s this? What’s happening?”
As he and Ed watched, the data seemed to rewrite itself. Strings of code changed; zeros became ones and ones became zeros. Frantically, both men tried to arrest the progress of the changes, but to no avail.
“It must be a bug,” said Victor. “It’s covering its own tracks.”
“Someone must have hacked into the system,” said Ed.
“I helped to build this system,” said Victor, “and even I couldn’t hack into it, not like this.”
And then, less than a minute after it began, the changes to the code were completed. Ed tried rerunning the image of the particle separating itself from the accelerator, but this time only the great tunnel of energy appeared upon the screen, filled with protons behaving exactly as they should have been behaving.
“We’ll have to report it,” said Ed.
“I know,” said Victor. “But there’s no evidence. There’s just our word.”
“Won’t that be enough?”
Victor nodded. “Probably, but-” He stared at the screen. “What did it mean? And, more to the point, where did it go?
“And what is that smell…?”
Scientists were not the only ones who had been monitoring the collider.
Down in the dark places where the worst things hid, an ancient Evil had been watching the construction of the collider with great interest. The entity that existed in the darkness had many names: Satan, Beelzebub, the Devil. To the creatures that dwelt with it, he was known as the Great Malevolence. [6]
The Great Malevolence had been squatting in the blackness for a very long time. He was there billions of years before people, or dinosaurs, or small, single-celled organisms that decided one day to become larger, multicelled organisms so they could, at some point in the future, invent literature, painting, and annoying ring tones for cell phones. He had watched from the depths of space and time-for rock and fire and earth, vacuums and stars and planets were no obstacle to him-as life appeared on Earth, as trees sprouted and the oceans teemed, and he hated all that he saw. He wanted to bring it all to an end, but he could not. He was trapped in a place of flame and stone, surrounded by those like him, some of whom he had created from his own flesh, and others who had been banished there because they were foul and evil, although none quite as foul or as evil as the Great Malevolence himself. Few of the legions of demons who dwelt with him in that distant, fiery realm had even laid eyes upon the Great Malevolence, for he existed in the deepest, darkest corner of Hell, brooding and plotting, waiting for his chance to escape.
Now, after so long, he had just made his first move.
IV In Which We Learn About the Inadvisability of Attempting to Summon Up Demons, and of Generally Messing About with the Afterlife
SAMUEL AND BOSWELL SAT on the wall outside the Abernathy house and watched the world go by. As it was a quiet evening, and most people were indoors having their tea, there wasn’t a whole lot of the world to watch, and what there was wasn’t doing very much. Samuel shook his bucket and heard the sound of emptiness, which, as anyone knows, is not the same thing as no sound, since it includes all the noise that someone was expecting to hear, but doesn’t. [7]
Samuel didn’t want to go home. His mother had been preparing to go out for the evening when Samuel left the house. It was the first time that she had dressed up to go out since Samuel’s dad had left, and something about the sight of it had made Samuel sad. He didn’t know who she was going to meet, but she was putting on lipstick and making herself look nice, and she didn’t go to that kind of trouble when she was heading out to play bingo with her friends. She hadn’t questioned why her son was dressed as a ghost and carrying a Halloween bucket when it was not yet Halloween, for she was well used to her son doing things that might be regarded as somewhat odd.
The previous week, Samuel’s teacher, Mr. Hume, had phoned her at home to have what he described as a “serious conversation” about Samuel. Samuel, it emerged, had arrived for show and tell that day carrying only a straight pin. When Mr. Hume had called him to the front of the class, Samuel had proudly held up the pin.
“What’s that?” Mr. Hume had asked.
“It’s a pin,” said Samuel.
“I can see that, Samuel, but it’s hardly the most exciting of show and tells, now is it? I mean, it’s not exactly a rocket ship, like the one that Bobby made, or Helen’s volcano.”
Samuel hadn’t thought much of Bobby Goddard’s rocket ship, which looked to him like a series of toilet paper rolls covered in foil, or for that matter Helen’s volcano, even if it did produce white smoke when water was poured into its crater. Helen’s father was a chemist, and Samuel was pretty sure he’d had a hand in creating that volcano. Helen Kim, Samuel knew, couldn’t even put together a bowl made of lollipop sticks without detailed instructions and a large supply of solvent remover to get the glue, and assorted lollipop sticks, off her fingers afterward.
Samuel had stepped forward and held the pin under Mr. Hume’s nose.
“It’s not just a pin,” he said solemnly. Mr. Hume looked unconvinced, and also slightly nervous at having a pin rather closer to his face than he might have liked. There was no telling what some of these kids might do, given half a chance.
[5] Whenever someone uses the word “glitch,” which means a fault of some kind in a system, you should immediately be suspicious, because it means that they don’t know what it is. A technician who uses the term “glitch” is like a doctor who tells you you’re sufferering from a “thingy,” except the doctor won’t tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again.
[6] Malevolence, for those of you who were off “sick” from school that day, means hatred, but hatred of a very vicious, evil kind. Incidentally, when you put inverted commas around a word in this way, as I just did around the word “sick,” it means that you don’t really believe that the word in question is true. In this case, I know that you weren’t really sick that day; you just felt like having a morning off to watch children’s television in your pajamas. Hence “sick,” instead of, well, sick. If you really want to annoy someone, you can make little inverted commas by holding up two fingers of each hand and twitching them gently, as though you’re tickling an invisible elf under the armpits. For example, when your mother calls you for dinner, and dinner turns out to be boiled fish and broccoli, you can say to her, “Well, I’ll just eat my ‘dinner,’ then,” and do the little fingers sign. She’ll love it. Seriously. I can hear her laughing already.
[7] This is similar to the old problem about whether or not a tree falling in a forest makes any noise if there is nobody there to hear it. This, of course, assumes that the only creatures worth being concerned about when it comes to falling trees are human beings, and ignores the plight of small birds, assorted rodents, and rabbits who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and find a tree landing on their heads.
In the eighteenth century, a man named Bishop Berkeley claimed that objects only exist because people are there to see them. This led a lot of scientists to laugh at Bishop Berkeley and his ideas, because they found them silly. But according to quantum theory, which is the very advanced branch of physics involving atoms, parallel universes, and other such matters, Bishop Berkeley may have had a point. Quantum theory suggests that the tree exists in all possible states at the same time: burned, sawdust, fallen, or in the shape of a small wooden duck that quacks as it’s pulled along. You don’t know what state it’s in until you observe it. In other words, you can’t separate the observer from the thing being observed.