‘Charlee.’ Shtyrkov’s face was grim. ‘That is not all.’
Charlie waited.
‘The hits,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘They are arriving at regular intervals.’
‘Regular intervals?’ Charlie’s tone was one of utter disbelief.
‘Every one hour and twenty-four minutes.’
There was a long silence while Charlie assimilated this. Then: ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just lunacy.’
‘Charlee. The particles are arriving at regular intervals.’
Charlie’s voice was flat. ‘Don’t be absurd, Vashislav. That can’t happen. It’s impossible.’
‘It has to be a bug. Some equipment failure,’ Svetlana said.
Vashislav shook his head. ‘It’s your equipment, Svetlana, and you know it can’t be that. The photodetectors work independently of each other. Each particle is being picked up by hundreds of them.’
‘Vashislav, what’s the alternative?’
Shtyrkov’s eyes were staring. ‘That it’s real?’
‘Don’t be crazy. It has to be a bug.’
Shtyrkov shook his head like a stubborn child.
‘When’s the next one due?’ Svetlana asked.
‘The next particle will come in … forty-five seconds. It will arrive at seven twenty forty on the UT clock.’
‘Are the speakers on?’ Charlie asked nobody.
Svetlana was shivering. ‘This is weird.’
‘Weird?’ Shtyrkov raised his voice. ‘Svetlana, it is supernatural.’ He looked at the wall clocks. ‘You are just in time. We have thirty seconds.’
‘It won’t come.’
‘It will come, Charlee, it will come. Ten seconds.’ The Russian’s eyes were fixed on the clock showing Universal Time.
‘Time’s up—’
A click! loud and clear, from all three speakers. Three streaks of light showed briefly on the panels, one red, one green, one blue.
‘Yes!’ the Russian shouted.
Charlie said, ‘My God.’
A second click! Another trio of streaks.
They fell silent.
A third click!
And then the speakers roared.
Light blazed from the panels and Shtyrkov shouted something in Russian, his voice barely heard over the roar, and Svetlana shrank back in fear. Charlie ran to switches on the wall and they were momentarily in blackness. But then an electric motor slowly raised the big blind, gradually revealing another cavern, this one filled with a lake. The lake was a kilometre across and it was glowing, its rocky bottom visible in detail as if lit up by searchlights. The walls of the cavern were like a cloudy sky, reflecting the milky-white light from the water.
How long it went on Svetlana didn’t know. She became aware of Charlie shouting, ‘Come back, you idiot!’ and then through the big window she saw the black silhouette of a man running towards the lake, arms spread wide. At first she thought Shtyrkov was about to jump into the water but then he was running on to a catwalk, jumping and pirouetting above the water, arms spread wide like a boy playing at Spitfires.
Then, suddenly, silence.
Blackness.
Svetlana praying quietly in the dark.
Charlie hyperventilating.
Shtyrkov singing, some Russian ballad, his voice echoing around the huge cavern, the song giving way to an outburst of insane laughter.
2
The Sign
Gibson was leaning over Shtyrkov’s shoulder, a wild expression on his face. The Russian was typing at such a speed that the individual clicks were almost lost and there was just a steady machine-gun rattle from the keyboard. Occasionally the fat scientist would mutter excitedly to himself in Russian.
Svetlana was trembling. A solitary question kept pounding in her head: What was that? What? But she was too excited to think. Vashislav will figure it out.
And then a less noble thought intruded: And he’ll grab all the credit if I’m not careful. I’ll be a glorified sparks.
She saw the paper in the prestigious pages of Nature or Science: Detection of a Swarm of Dark Matter Particles by Vashislav Shtyrkov. And, buried amongst the footnotes: With acknowledgements to Svetlana, faithful Tonto to my Lone Ranger.
And she saw Shtyrkov and Gibson in Stockholm, bowing to let the King of Sweden drape the coveted Nobel medal around their necks, while she dutifully applauded in the audience.
She tried to put the ugly vision aside, but it kept gnawing. And she thought: This will never happen to me again. Don’t let them grab all the credit. Don’t!
For something to do she moved to a shelf and pressed buttons on a DVD recorder. The security camera played back the sequence of Shtyrkov running up and down at the edge of the lake, arms waving and singing like a drunk man. Then it showed him lumbering around on a catwalk, lying down and splashing water. Then he was running back to land, and for some seconds the camera showed only the white-glowing lake, and the iron catwalks and the cavern walls. Then a rowing boat appeared on screen, the Russian heaving at the oar as he headed for the centre of the luminous water. And then, suddenly, there was darkness, with only the digital clock in the corner of the picture to show that the camera was still running.
Shtyrkov’s voice brought her back to the present. The Russian was looking at Gibson triumphantly. ‘Done. It filled the DVD.’
‘The whole disk? All ninety gigabytes?’
‘There was more, much much more. But the SCSI interface can only absorb forty megabytes a second. We’ve lost a mountain of stuff.’
Svetlana turned from the DVD recorder and her dark thoughts. ‘But you got something? You’re sure?’
Gibson’s eyes were shining and there was a light sweat on his brow. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘One stuffed disk and a Nobel Prize. No question.’
Shtyrkov clicked his tongue in irritation. ‘No doubt, but what was it, Charlee? What was it?’
Gibson looked as if the question hadn’t occurred to him. ‘Whatever it was, it’s not in the book.’
Svetlana appraised her colleagues: ‘Security. Until we’ve had a chance to look at this and make some sense of it, none of us breathes a word of this to anyone. Are we all agreed?’
‘Absolutely.’ Shtyrkov was still breathless from his lakeside exertions. ‘This stays under wraps, as the Americans say, until we have understood it. Then we announce it to the world, whatever it is.’
Svetlana said, ‘We analyse the data together and make a joint announcement. Nobody tries to steal a march on anyone else.’
Shtyrkov was still doing things at the computer. He swivelled to face them. ‘It’s no good down here. We don’t have the computing power and the Net access. We need some office where we can work in secret. We should disperse to our institutes, keep our mouths shut and agree to meet up at some location, when something has been set up.’
Svetlana stared at the fat Russian. ‘Disperse? Are you mad? One of us would let it slip. And who would hold the disk?’
Gibson bristled. ‘As principal investigator here I’d have thought that’s obvious.’
Shtyrkov managed to convey both surprise and injured innocence. ‘We can surely trust each other.’
Svetlana’s expression was bordering on the ferocious. She could hardly contain herself. She stabbed a finger at Shtyrkov as she spoke. ‘Vashislav, I’ve spent twelve years of my life down this hole gambling that one day we’ll pick up a dark matter particle. Well, we’ve done it. I’ve missed out on everything else including children to do it. This is our child — my child — and if you think I’m going to risk having it taken from me…’
‘That’s crazy talk. I don’t want to take a child from its mother,’ Shtyrkov complained.