of my face, so I dragged myself all the way back to the cave. As soon as the sun rose, I looked though the hole in the doughnut, just like you told me to, and guess what happened? Nothing.” He gave Theo a furious scowl, then went on, “Absolutely nothing at all.”
“Max—”
“So I asked myself,” Max went on, “is my dear brother playing funny games with me, or is it just he’s so stupid he can’t even—?”
“Doughnuts don’t work like that,” Theo said wretchedly. “It’d have worked for me, because the bottle was user-specific, but I’d have had to take you with me. And anyhow, the bottle’s broken now, so it wouldn’t work at all.”
“Theo.” Max blinked twice. “I know drivelling’s what you do best, but there’s a time and a place for everything, so please stop. Thanks,” he went on, before Theo could explain his explanation, “but I’d sort of gathered the doughnuts weren’t working. So I had to think of something else.”
“What?”
Max’s face suddenly changed. For Theo, who’d known him for so very long, it was quite an extraordinary moment; almost as if Max had cut himself, to reveal blinking coloured lights and circuitry under his skin. “I’m not sure, really,” he said. “To be absolutely honest, it wasn’t anything to do with me. I was sitting on the floor of the cave, wondering what I’d done to deserve being shafted and abandoned by my own brother—”
“Max.”
“When suddenly,” Max went on, “there was the most amazing bang, dust started coming down from the roof, and a huge great hole appeared in the floor. It must’ve caught me off balance, because the next thing I knew was, I’d fallen through the hole and landed on one of those ghastly see-through sidewalks they’ve got around here. And I’ve been here ever since,” he concluded, “settling in and becoming really rather popular, though I say so myself. Mind you, wherever I go, people just seem to like me. It’s a gift.”
Theo opened his mouth, but no words seemed to want to come out and play.
“Oh, and there’s one other thing,” Max went on. “Doesn’t actually seem to matter particularly much, but it’s still as weird as a dozen ferrets in a blender. Take a look at this.”
He took his left hand out of his pocket and extended it, fingers splayed. The centre of his palm was translucent.
At last, Theo found a word. It was, “Um.”
“Theo?” Max narrowed his eyes. “I can tell from your face you’re not quite as surprised as you ought to be. Does it mean something? What?”
Before Theo could find a way of not answering, the door flew open. Theo swung round and saw the man he’d first encountered when he arrived. He was scowling at them, either through barely controlled rage or because of the strain of holding a powerful-looking catapult at full draw.
“That’s him,” the man said. “Get him.”
Half a dozen men in green smocks, also wielding catapults, pushed past him, grabbed Theo and shoved him up against the wall. The room was filling with people. Max tried to make a discreet exit, but they grabbed him too, although rather more politely. In the squash, Theo could just see the girl who’d found him. She looked furiously angry.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” someone said.
The crowd parted to let through a very old man, leaning on a stick. He tottered forward and examined Theo’s face through a lens on a piece of string round his neck. Then he glanced down at the ancient scrap of paper he held in his left hand. It was a newspaper clipping.
“Yes,” the old man said eventually, “that’s him all right. That’s Theo Bernstein.”
There was a deafening roar of angry voices, abruptly cut short when the old man raised his hand. “Well?” the old man said.
Theo nodded. “Yes, I’m Theo Bernstein,” he said. “But how did you—?”
The rest of the sentence was washed away by the surge of horrified gasps. “You admit it.”
“Well, yes.”
The girl burst into tears. Several catapults creaked ominously. “You’re the Theo Bernstein who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider?”
Sigh. “Yes, that’s me.”
“He admits it,” someone yelled. “What’re we waiting for? Chuck him off the edge, quick.”
But the old man shook his head, and the crowd calmed down a little. Then someone said, “This can’t be right, you know. All that stuff happened a thousand years ago. He doesn’t look a thousand years old.”
The old man gave the speaker a withering stare. “In fact, the explosion took place