high, brittle voice. “Because where does it actually say they’ve got to be bottles? They could be jars. Well, couldn’t they?”
“You’re doing it again, Theo. It’s not kind, you know. Do please make an effort not to talk drivel.”
Theo wasn’t listening. “It’s a glass container, open at one end. That’s all it is.”
“Full of walnuts,” Max pointed out. “Does that make a difference?”
“The wine bottles were full of wine.”
“So I should hope.”
“So it shouldn’t matter.” Theo’s fingers closed around the lid, but he couldn’t seem to find the strength to twist it off. “Here,” he said. “You do it.”
“Me? Why me?”
“I don’t know.” Theo gazed at him blankly. “I guess it’s the thought of maybe just possibly getting out of here, after six years. I can’t actually bring myself to do it.”
“You’re scared.”
“Yes, maybe I am. So are you.”
“Ah,” Max said sagely, “but in my case, fear is an essential function of my finely honed survival instinct. You’re just chicken.”
“I’m afraid it might not work.”
Max looked at him for quite some time. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If I open it, and it’s not what you think it is, I get to eat all the walnuts. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Slowly, Theo passed the jar over to Max, who snatched it, took a lingering look of pure desire at the walnuts, and tightened his hands around the lid like a finalist in the World Strangling Championships. “Doesn’t want to budge,” he muttered, “how about we just break it?”
“No!”
“Yes, but – hang on, I’m there.” There was a faint pop as the seal broke, and Max lifted off the lid. “It’s open.”
“Good. Give it to me.”
“No chance,” Max said. “Not until I’ve—”
And then he vanished.
Theo sat for a while, staring at the place where his brother had been, now occupied by an empty jar.
Empty. The walnuts had vanished at the same moment as Max. Did that mean something?
Maybe. Maybe it meant that, wherever Max was now, he was just starting to feel the first pangs of indigestion that inevitably follow if you scoff a whole jar of pickles. Or maybe it was the crucial point which made all the –
Stop, he ordered himself. Think. Before we go any further, it’s time for a Universal Theory of Everything. That’s what a scientist would do. Besides, the easiest way of finding a path through a minefield is not necessarily the safest. Think.
He thought.
A tune he’d heard recently was playing in a loop in his head, over and over. If everybody had an ocean; that was as far as it went, nine notes. He shut it out and tried to assemble the data from which he was to draw his inferences.
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz – well, more about her later, but she’d said it was Pieter who’d blown up the VVLHC, just so as to test a component.
He’d been thinking about the maths; also, the eternal question, why me? The two were kind of linked:
– The maths didn’t work; that was the little something about them that had been nagging away at him all along. He, Theo Bernstein, could make them work, but maybe that was the point.
He thought back to his days as Pieter’s student, the set of problems he’d been given which had first caught Pieter’s attention. According to Pieter, the way he’d set about solving them had been unique, revolutionary, totally original. It had also, of course, been wrong. The answers, as written down on a sheet of paper, had been incorrect. And yet Pieter had been astonished, riveted, captivated when he’d read them. Now, then. What exactly was it that Pieter had seen in those answers?
If everybody had an ocean
He ran a finger round the rim of the empty jar. What Pieter had seen – it came to him slowly and opaquely, as if viewed through frosted glass – was a different sort of mathematics; maths from another reality. One in which two plus two really does make six.
Pieter was looking for a way into other realities. Suddenly, in a routine dollop of homework, he recognises the mark of someone who’s been there – like Columbus, roaming the streets of Madrid dreaming of a new world, bumping into a stranger wearing an I Love New York baseball cap.
But, Pieter reasoned, this man, this kid, can’t have been there, because as yet no bridge exists.
But, Pieter reasoned, he must’ve been there, because he’s wearing the baseball cap.
Therefore, Pieter reasoned, it’s simply a matter of time. He will go there, he will acquire the baseball cap, and then