The Light of Other Days. Stephen Baxter
into the shining air.
There was a sucking sensation at her eyes and ears. Light, noise, the mundane stink of hot dogs flooded over her.
Bobby was kneeling before her. She could see the marks the Glasses had made around his eyes. ‘He got to you, didn't he?’
‘Billybob does have a way of punching his message home,’ she gasped, still disoriented.
On row after row of the old sports stadium's battered seats, people were rocking and moaning, tears leaking from the black eye seals of the Glasses. In one area paramedics were working on unconscious people – perhaps victims of faints, epilepsy, even heart attacks, Kate speculated; she had had to sign various release forms when applying for their tickets, and she didn't imagine the safety of his parishioners was a high priority for Billybob Meeks.
Curiously she studied Bobby, who seemed unperturbed. ‘But what about you?’
He shrugged. ‘I've played more interesting adventure games.’ He looked up at the muddy December sky. ‘Kate – I know you're just using me as a way to get to my father. But I like you even so. And maybe tweaking Hiram's nose would be good for my soul. What do you think?’
She held her breath. She said, ‘I think that's about the most human thing I've ever heard you say.’
‘Then let's do it.’
She forced a smile. She'd got what she wanted.
But the world around her still seemed unreal, compared to the vividness of those final moments inside Billybob's mind.
She had no doubt that – if the rumours about the capability Hiram was constructing were remotely accurate, and if she could get access to it – she would be able to destroy Billybob Meeks. It would be a great scoop, a personal triumph.
But she knew that some part of her, no matter how far down she buried it, would always regret doing so. Some part of her would always long to be allowed to return to that glowing city of gold, with walls that stretched halfway to the Moon, where shining, smiling people were waiting to welcome her.
Billybob had broken through, his shock tactics had gotten even to her. And that, of course, was the whole point. Why Billybob must be stopped.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let's do it.’
CHAPTER 6 The Billion Dollar Pearl
David, with Hiram and Bobby, sat before a giant SoftScreen spread across the Wormworks counting house wall. The ‘Screen image – returned by a fibre-optic camera that had been snaked into the heart of the Wormworks’ superconducting-magnet nest – was nothing but darkness, marred by an occasional stray pixel, a prickle of colour and light.
A digital counter in a corner display worked its way down towards zero.
Hiram paced impatiently around the cramped, cluttered counting house; David's assistant technicians cowered from him, avoiding his eyes. Hiram snapped, ‘How do you know the bloody wormhole is even open?’
David suppressed a smile. ‘You don't need to whisper.’ He pointed to the corner display. Beside the countdown clock was a small numerical caption, a sequence of prime numbers scrolling upward from two to thirty-one, over and over. ‘That's the test signal, sent through the wormhole by the Brisbane crew at the normal gamma-ray wavelengths. So we know we managed to find and stabilize a wormhole mouth – without a remote anchor – and the Australians have been able to locate it.’ During his three months’ work here, David had quickly discovered a way to use modulations of exotic matter pulses to battle the wormholes’ inherent instability. Turning that into practical and repeatable engineering, of course, had been immensely difficult – but in the end successful. ‘Our placement of the remote mouth isn't so precise yet. I'm afraid our Australian colleagues have to chase our wormhole mouths through the dust out there. Chasing fizzers over the gibbers, as they put it…But still, now we can open up a wormhole to anywhere. What we don't know yet is whether we're going to be able to expand the holes up to visible-light dimensions.’
Bobby was leaning easily against a table, legs crossed, looking fit and relaxed, as if he'd just come off a tennis court – as perhaps he had, mused David. ‘I think we ought to give David a lot of credit, dad. After all he has solved half the problem already.’
‘Yes,’ Hiram said, ‘but I don't see anything but gamma rays squirted in by some broken-nosed Aussie. Unless we can find a way to expand these bloody things, we're wasting my money. And I can't stomach all this waiting! Why just one test run a day?’
‘Because,’ said David evenly, ‘we have to analyse the results from each test, strip down the Casimir gear, reset the control equipment and detectors. We have to understand each failure before we can go ahead towards success.’ That is, he added silently, before I can extricate myself from this complex family entanglement and return to the comparative calm of Oxford, funding battles, ferocious academic rivalry and all.
Bobby asked, ‘What exactly is it we're looking for? What will a wormhole mouth look like?’
‘I can answer that one,’ Hiram said, still pacing. ‘I grew up with enough bad pop science shows. A wormhole is a short-cut through a fourth dimension. You have to cut a chunk out of our three-dimensional space and join it onto another such chunk, over in Brisbane.’
Bobby raised an eyebrow at David.
David said carefully, ‘It's a little more complicated. But he's more right than wrong. A wormhole mouth is a sphere, floating freely in space. A three-dimensional excision. If we succeed with the expansion, for the first time we'll be able to see our wormhole mouth – with a hand lens, anyhow…’ The countdown clock was down to a single digit. David said, ‘Heads up, everybody. Here we go.’
The ripples of conversation in the room died away, and everyone turned to the digital clock.
The count reached zero.
And nothing happened.
There were events, of course. The track counter racked up a respectable score, showing heavy and energetic particles passing through the detector array, the debris of an exploded wormhole. The array's pixel elements, each firing individually as a particle passed through them, could later be used to trace the paths of debris fragments in three dimensions – paths which could then be reconstructed and analysed.
Lots of data, lots of good science. But the big wall SoftScreen remained blank. No signal.
David suppressed a sigh. He opened up the logbook and entered details of the run in his round, neat hand; around him his technicians began equipment diagnostics.
Hiram looked into David's face, at the empty ‘Screen, at the technicians. ‘Is that it? Did it work?’
Bobby touched his father's shoulder. ‘Even I can tell it didn't, dad.’ He pointed to the prime number test sequence. It had frozen on 13. ‘Unlucky 13,’ murmured Bobby.
‘Is he right? David, did you screw up again?’
‘This wasn't a failure. Just another test. You don't understand science, father. Now, when we run the analysis and learn from this –’
‘Jesus Christ on a bike! I should have left you rotting in bloody Oxford. Call me when you have something.’ Hiram, shaking his head, stalked from the room.
When he left, the feeling of relief in the room was palpable. The technicians – silver-haired particle physicists all, many of them older than Hiram, some of them with distinguished careers beyond OurWorld – started to file out.
When they'd gone, David sat before a SoftScreen to begin his own follow-up work.
He brought up his favoured desktop metaphor. It was like a window into a cluttered study, with books and documents piled in untidy heaps on the floor and shelves and tables, and