“All right, he doesn’t look three hundred. It can’t have been him.”
“Look at the picture,” the old man said angrily, brandishing the clipping under the sceptic’s nose. “It’s him, it’s the same man.”
“And he’s admitted it,” someone else called out. “Quit fooling around and chuck the bastard, before he blows all of us up as well.”
This suggestion met with considerable popular support, but the old man hadn’t finished yet. “Just to make sure,” he said, and turned to Theo once again. “You freely and sincerely admit that it was you who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider?”
“Yes. Well, if you’d asked me that this time yesterday I’d have said yes, no question, but since then I have reason to believe that—” He looked round and decided not to try explaining about what Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz had told him Pieter might’ve done. They didn’t seem to be in the mood. “Yup,” he said. “It was me.”
This time the old man didn’t have to impose silence. Everybody seemed too stunned to speak.
“You blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider,” the old man repeated solemnly, “thereby causing the ecological catastrophe that made our world uninhabitable and forcing the survivors of our race to forsake the surface and adopt this wretched, primitive existence among the clouds.”
“Yes – I mean, what? I didn’t—”
A deafening chorus of booing and jeers, which the old man had some difficulty in damping down. In the end he had to stamp his little foot. “You didn’t realise,” the old man said scornfully. “Well, perhaps you didn’t. I’m inclined to doubt that, though. After all, there’s the evidence of the note.”
“Note? What note?”
“The note you left,” the old man said grimly, “on your desk at the Institute, written in your own distinctive, very untidy handwriting.” From his pocket he produced another piece of yellow, crumbling paper. “Would you like me to read it to you? It says—” The old man cleared his throat. “I did it to rescue my brother Max. Mr Bernstein,” the old man went on, folding the paper and putting it away. “That sounds very much like a confession to me.”
Uproar. The girl, in floods of tears, was yelling, “Chuck him! Push him off the edge!” Then the man who’d been there when they arrived roared for quiet, and everybody stopped shouting.
“That other man,” he said. “When they met, just now. That one called him Max.”
Suddenly, every eye in the room shifted to the far corner, where Max was trying unsuccessfully to hide behind a very small chair. “That’s what he said. He said, hello, Max. I heard him.”
The old man’s eyes were bulging out of his head. “Is it true?” he demanded breathlessly. “Is this Max?”
“Um.”
“Well?”
Theo took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “No, it isn’t. I thought it was, but it’s definitely not. I never saw this man before in my life.”
The old man gripped his shirt front with both hands. “You’re sure about that, are you?”
“Oh, absolutely. Don’t know why I ever thought it was him. For a start, my brother Max was quite good looking.”
Theo glanced at his brother, who was clearly torn between wanting to be good looking and fear of death. It was touch and go for a moment. Then Max said, “He’s right. I never met him before. He’s definitely not my brother.”
The old man squinted at him. “How would you know?” he said quietly. “You’ve lost your memory.”
That seemed to settle the issue. They hauled Max out of his corner and frogmarched him and Theo out of the hut on to the invisible walkway. They were chanting, “Horrible! Horrible!” Theo had no idea how many of them there were, but it was considerably more than six.
They pushed them forward until their feet were right on the edge. The wind sawed at Theo’s face, sharp as a blade.
Oh well, Max said inside his head. You tried.
He turned and looked at his brother. It was a little late to forgive him now, but –
Just not hard enough. Typical. You always were a useless bastard.
Then something nudged the small of his back, and he toppled and fell.
It occurred to Theo, as he fell and fell and fell and fell, that if he’d had his wits about him he’d have pointed out that, since he’d lost his memory too, nothing he’d said by way of admission or confession could be taken as reliable evidence, and all of it should therefore be disregarded. Or, if they were suddenly