Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,106

or was it getting paler? White, pearly white like a light bulb, translucent. “No!” he wailed, but it was no good. He could see the opposite wall through the outline of his metacarpal.

“Radiation,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “You did know that, didn’t you? That’s what happened to it when the hadron collider blew up. I imagine when you heard the blast or saw the flash, you instinctively raised your hand to shield your face. Which, on reflection, was probably just as well, or else your normal blank expression would’ve been blanker still.”

“That’s right, I—” Theo’s head snapped up, and he stared at her. “Radiation?”

She nodded slowly. “Rather a stiff dose, I’m afraid. As far as living on borrowed time is concerned, you’re the oncological equivalent of the Eurozone. However – oh, pull yourself together, for pity’s sake.”

Theo looked at her, but all he could see through the tears was a sort of blurry, splodgy mass. “However?”

“That—” She nodded at his hand, which was now just a cartoon outline sticking out of his shirt cuff. “That is an extremely hopeful sign. You see, every time you translocate to an alternative reality, a portion of the radioactive contamination is leeched out of your system. One or two more trips, and—” She shrugged. “No guarantees,” she said. “This is all practically unexplored territory, medically speaking. But it’s your best chance. After all, why else do you think Pieter left you the YouSpace technology?”

Theo’s head had been doing a lot of swimming lately, enough for it to be in serious contention for the 2016 Olympics. This one, though, had it doing butterfly stroke. “Pieter knew—”

“Of course he did. How do you suppose I know about it? Because Pieter told me. It was his way of making it up to you.”

Dead silence, apart from the strange, otherworldly sound of Lunchbox eating a Jaffa Cake. “Making it up to me for what, exactly?”

“For blowing up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider.”

“Um, no. Other way round, surely. It was me who blew up the VVLHC.”

“No.”

“Yes. It was me. Really it was. I moved the decimal place—”

The rest of the sentence melted away, like snow on a hot flue. What was it, Theo couldn’t help wondering, about this woman, anyhow? She had a knack of making him feel like he was five years old and had just flushed the keys to Daddy’s new Mercedes down the toilet. All she’d done was press her lips a tiny bit closer together and, well, look at him, and he felt a sudden urge to sit down and write out I Must Not Talk In Class five hundred times.

“My mistake,” she said eventually. “I said just now you were a good physicist. Obviously not.”

“That’s right. That’s why I blew up the—”

“You did not blow up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider. Oh, for crying out loud,” she added impatiently, “did it never occur to you to check the figures? Yes, you made a boo-boo with your sums. Yes, you moved the decimal point the wrong way. But if you’d bothered to go back and do the maths again, you’d have realised your mistake wasn’t anything like enough to blow the whole shooting match. The worst that would’ve happened was it’d have tripped a fuse and knocked it out for a day or so. Arthur, you can let go of him now. I think he’s changed his mind about wanting to run away.”

Lunchbox let go of Theo’s arm, which lolled bonelessly from his elbow and dangled, unnoticed. “But that’s not right,” Theo said weakly. “I mean, I—”

She was right, though. Even as he’d been speaking, his mind had been running the calculations, and she was right. There had been three fail-safes and two redundant systems standing between his misplaced dot and total meltdown. He’d been so quick to assume that it had been his fault, he hadn’t even considered them. “Hold on,” he whispered. “If I didn’t—”

She looked at him and didn’t say a word.

“Pieter?”

She nodded.

“No. No, I’m sorry, but that’s just impossible. Pieter may be a bit of a jerk sometimes, and slightly more self-centred than a centrifuge, but he could never make a mistake like—”

“It wasn’t a mistake.”

Lunchbox ate a sausage roll, two Garibaldi biscuits and an apple. Then Theo said, “What?”

“It wasn’t a mistake,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “It was deliberate. He needed to find out the maximum acceleration stress factor for the antigravitic buffers before he could use the same technology for the single-use module project. The wine cellar,” she translated