For a moment she searched Purdue’s face for a reaction, but his stunned expression at her confession was too much to bear, and Lydia burst out laughing like some uncouth whore. Purdue did not realize that her seemingly normal behavior was just the shaky shell to the severe damage inside her cranium, that she was in fact this far gone after all.
“You are kidding me!” he played along, clapping his palms together in faux-amusement. “How the hell did you achieve that?”
Lydia suddenly scowled, as if his believing her spoiled her fun. “Wait, you actually think I could do such a thing?” Her glass was shaking in her hand and Purdue took note of the clinking of cutlery in the dining room, wishing that Healy would just show up to distract her.
“Abso—….absolutely. Of course I believe it. You, of all people, would be capable of designing something that could facilitate time-space manipulation,” he explained, keeping up his charade under a ruse of nonchalance. “Besides, I would not put anything short of the Big Bang past you hand, dear Lydia.”
She stared at him, her sunken cheeks drawing attention to the way in which she was grinding her teeth. A moment of uncomfortable silence passed before her frown vanished, but she was still not smiling. Instead she took on a more concerned persona.
“Dave, I need you to do something for me. I hate to admit this, but I did not invite you here to catch up on our lives before my body fails me for the last time,” she said softly, cradling her tumbler and looking deep into the liquid. “I needed someone who was as bat shit crazy as I am…” she said, looking up at him, “…in the sense of scientific ruthlessness, of course. Someone like you would be insane enough to believe me, because you were always the one bloke who would never see obstacles, rather challenges; who would never tolerate perturbation of a theory or plan. Purdue, I need someone like you to finish my thesis and put it to practice as I could not.”
Purdue was dumbfounded. She was actually serious about employing his loyalty to prove some ludicrous theory her illness allowed he to believe could be achieved in practice. His eyes blinked rapidly behind his small framed glasses and where his chin rested on his palm, his little finger probed his lips in thought.
“Please?” she whispered, marginally sane in her desperate beseeching. “Purdue, please. If it’s the last thing you do for me.”
Purdue had to concede that the small hint at what he thought she was onto enticed him no end, and knowing her boundless genius dampened only by her reputation as a dark horse in the academic community, the thought of what she had in mind was too good to rebuke.
“What do you need from me?” he asked seriously, his eyes narrow with warmth and amity. “Will it cost me my life this time?”
His jest fell lightly on her will. “If it did, Dave, your legacy would boast a feat no other man in history would ever have achieved.” Her hoarse voice was filled with promise, gradually swallowing the madness inside it.
“Madam, do you wish to have a light meal with Mr. Purdue or shall we wait until formal dinner time?” Healy asked.
“Are you hungry, Purdue?” she asked abruptly. “It all depends on you. I don’t get hungry anymore, it seems. Besides, I have to drink my food these days.” Again came her wild cackling, harboring a furious admittance of defeat. “I’m like a fly, you see. I vomit. I consume liquid full of proteins and God knows what else they fill it with, only to grow uglier and deader by the day.”
“Can’t say that leaves me with much of an appetite, Lydia,” Purdue cringed.
“Oh come on, Dave, don’t be such a girl’s blouse. Have some bloody food while you still can. Imagine I am eating with you. Healy is a hell of a cook,” she insisted, swigging up the rest of her alcohol.
“Madam.”
“Yes, Healy, my dear nurse maid. I know I am not allowed to drink. But if you don’t tell, I won’t… kill you!” she grinned, and flung the glass at her butler. It shattered against the wall just west of his cheek and he sank to his haunches to avoid the shrapnel of shards cleaving his face.
Chapter 5
Sam unpacked his bag with savage indifference as the television behind him reported on the investigation lodged into the incident at CERN which derailed construction of the Alice detector. The latter was said to be part of the Large Hadron Collider, to record data from the mimicking of the Big Bang, taking pictures of the smashing of particles, so said the reporter. Yet, they still had no idea how the fire started and it still looked like an electrical short that could have been the cause.
Exhaustion was taking its toll on Sam, but he had to suck it up and pull himself together. To his annoyance as a freelancer, the esteemed nitpicker Penny Richards went ahead and made an appointment with a CERN engineer, Albert Tägtgren, to be interviewed by Sam.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she told Sam. “I just thought you would get on faster if I located you the right people to speak to so that you won’t waste your time trudging through the place looking for someone who could shed some light on the fire.”
“That’s fine, Penny, thank you. But how do you know which people happen to know about the incident?” he asked her, aiming that cynical journalistic radar straight at her. But she was prepared for his astute nature.
“I don’t reckon he would know who started the fire, Mr. Cleave, however as an engineer who specifically works on the Alice detector’s structural resilience and construction, he would be best versed in what kind of structure the detector is build. Therefore, he might know better than anyone else where a fault could have arisen, had it not been arson,” she rambled off, while Sam could not find one suspicious loophole in her explanation and ultimately had to respond with a simple, “Oh, alright then, Penny. I am heading out to CERN soon. I will Skype you this evening.”
“Thank you so much, Sam,” she replied cheerfully. “Have a lovely day.”
He put the phone down. “Aye, I hope your day blossoms into a fervent frenzy of misery, you little gnat.”
Sam had been imagining Penny as a gnat, specifically, since he made her acquaintance. Mentally he likened her to something seemingly insignificant and small that had an uncanny tendency to fly up one’s air passages and wreak havoc. Not a deadly kind of havoc, just enough to spoil you day and make you extremely uncomfortable.
It was morning in Geneva. Breakfast was served and consumed without any enthusiasm from the Scottish journalist, and he shed all manner of cheer to prepare him for a boring day he just wanted to get behind him so that he could get Penny off his back and dive into the bottle of Scotch he had just purchased.
“Looking awfully downtrodden there, son,” a familiar old voice came from behind Sam while he was having his last coffee after emptying most of his plate in the dining hall of his hotel. The distinct Dutch accent was unmistakable. Sam turned around.
“Professor Westdijk! What a pleasant surprise,” he smiled for the first time that morning. The old man gestured for permission to join Sam at his table, his hands full of things — a mug of hot chocolate, a newspaper and a small plate with two slices of dry toast sliding about on the clean porcelain.
“I thought I would find you here, young Sam, but not this soon. I suppose you are here to probe that fire problem?” he asked as he drew his chair closer until his belly cushioned the table.
“Aye.”
“I don’t want to dissuade you, Sam, but I think you are fighting a losing battle. There are over two thousand scientists, engineers and electricians working on the construction of Alice, mostly British. There is not much chance you will get to speak to the right people before the trail goes cold,” the old man remarked while he tried in vain to get the little rock hard block of butter onto his toast.