prepared to admit such evidence, at the very least they’d have to listen to Max when he told them he’d never met Theo before. It was, he felt, a pretty good point, and it was a real shame he couldn’t go back up there and make it.
You wouldn’t think you could get bored falling to your death, but it all depends on how far you have to go. Usually, it’s just ten or twelve storeys, and you’ve only just got time to do the engulfed-with-terror thing and blurt out a quick blanket repentance of sins before you touch down and lose a dimension. But when it’s a really, really long drop, there’s a definite risk of ennui. Theo watched his past life flash in front of him, which took up maybe a second and was thoroughly depressing. He had his moment of regret about the unmade losing-his-memory argument. He turned his scientist’s brain on to figuring out clever ways of surviving a drop from twenty thousand feet and came to the conclusion there weren’t any. He hated Max – that used up a whole second and a third. And then he simply ran out of things to do. Not good enough, he felt. On a trip this long, the very least they could do was serve a simple meal and screen an in-fall movie.
It was only when he was very nearly there, and the wild blue sea was plainly visible below him, so close that he could see the white beard of froth on each tumultuous wave, that an idea struck him and made him gasp. Even while it was flashing through his brain like electric current across a sparkplug, he couldn’t help howling with rage and fury at the inopportuneness of it all. Ten minutes earlier, and he’d have had the answers to everything, the whole bloody stupid mess, at his fingertips – in time, just possibly, to sort it out and get himself and his worthless brother to safety. As it was –
Theo sat up.
He’d got water in his eyes, his ears and up his nose. He coughed violently and spat out a mouthful of it. On all sides, the waves rippled and heaved.
He was in a bath.
And why not? It was, after all, water, and everything is just a matter of scale…
No! He shuddered with rage, slopping water over the side and on to the floor (carpeted in a sort of neutral beige). It’s not fair, it’s not right, I shouldn’t be sitting in a warm tub engulfed in patchouli-scented suds, I should be dead –
He played that last phrase back and decided he was overdoing the moral indignation just a little bit. Even so, he was genuinely angry. He was a scientist, dammit. Inexplicable phenomena – magic, he glossed scornfully – just wasn’t on, even if it saved him from a watery grave.
He lay back and stared at his little pink toes, which rose up out of the froth like ten bashful mermaids. I was falling. They shoved me off the edge, and I fell. I hit the water and here I am.
Which reminded him. He sat up, and caught sight of something on the white-wood-chipped wall. It was a framed embroidered sampler, which read –
You Are Here.
No map, just the words. Ah well.
He completed the survey, which revealed a heated towel rail, over which was draped a white towelling robe with a YS monogram on the pocket. He did a double-take, then, as the implications sank in, breathed a long sigh of relief. YS could only stand for YouSpace. In which case, this environment was something to do with the program (or, as he preferred to think of it, Pieter’s fault) and he wasn’t dead and in some sort of ghastly, logic-defying, scientifically impossible, Dawkins-baiting afterlife –
– And, now he came to think of it, he was safe, and well, and not in the slightest bit drowned, and Max was nowhere to be seen. He let out a long, long sigh of sheer joy and flopped backwards, shooting a tidal wave of suds over the bath rim and on to the floor. I’m alive, he realised. That’s really quite nice, actually.
The joy didn’t evaporate. It faded very slowly and gradually, roughly at the same rate as the bathwater cooled, from snugly warm to tepid to blood heat, until he decided it was time to (a) get on with the rest of his life, and (b) get out of the bath before he caught his death