Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,129
said. “What’s today’s date?”
Max looked at his watch. “18 August 2007. Why?”
“Just checking. A few other salient facts. Max, you’ve just been declared officially dead. Pieter, you’ve just proposed my name for the shortlist to run the proposed Very Very Large Hadron Collider project. Yes?”
Pieter nodded. “You’re not supposed to know that,” he said. “But, yes, I’ve recommended you. I think you deserve it.”
Theo gave him a horrible look. “I’ll pretend you never said that,” he said. “Also, Pieter, you’re looking for financial backers for a really weird, far-out new product that’ll revolutionise the entertainment industry.”
Pieter nodded slowly.
“Not that it matters a lot,” Theo went on, “but your principal backers are your sister, who married a billionaire—”
“Otto Duchene-Wilamowicz,” Pieter said. “He was ninety-one, she was twenty-seven. They warned him, marrying a girl that age might prove fatal. You know what he said? If she dies, she dies.”
“Whatever. Also, someone called Bill, with a daughter called Matasuntha.”
Pieter’s eyebrows shot up. “How did you—?”
“Coming to that. The trouble is,” he continued, snuggling into his chair as far back as he could go, “you’ve done all the maths, and realised it won’t work. What you have in mind isn’t possible.”
Pieter hesitated, then nodded.
“And then you remembered me.”
Pieter closed his eyes. “Yes.”
Max was obviously dying of repressed curiosity, but, before he could say anything, Theo went on, “I can’t be bothered to tell you a whole lot of stuff you already know, so here’s the bottom line. It worked. I’m back. I did it.” He paused for effect. “I created YouSpace.”
“You what?”
“YouSpace. That’s what it’s called.”
Pieter frowned, then shook his head. “Don’t like it. We’ll need a snappier name than that if we want it to really take off.”
“Tough,” Theo said firmly, “because that’s what I’ve called it. I created the YouSpace device. Not you. Me.”
Max said timidly. “What’s YouSpace?”
“Ah.” Theo smiled and turned to him. “Here’s where you’re just about to get involved. On 15 August ’07, Pieter’s only just got the germ of the idea. Suddenly, out of the blue, who should turn up on his doorstep but his prodigal pupil Max Bernstein. Help me, pleads Max, they’re after me, I need a place to hide, you’re the only one I can really trust. Odd you should say that, Pieter replies, because it so happens I’ve got a really ace hiding place, I just need someone to try it out for me. Oh, and some poor fool to take the blame, of course.”
Pieter looked away. Max just looked terminally vague.
Theo held up his two visible hands. “YouSpace,” he said. “Really good idea, shame it won’t work. You know why? Because, in order to access all the possibilities of all the alternate realities in the multiverse, you’d have to go back to the one point in time when all those possibilities were still gathered up together in one place, in one primordial glob of protomatter, right at the Beginning, before the Big Bang. It’d be like going to the central bus station; from there, you can get a bus direct to anywhere. Well? Am I right?”
“Theo—”
“Not now, Pieter, I’m on a roll.” Theo smiled joyfully, and reached across the table to pick up a newspaper. He flicked through and found the page he wanted. “Top Scientists Warn VVLHC Project Could End Universe,” he read out. “Of course, there’s bound to be scaremongers, flat-earthers, fruitcakes with sandwich boards saying the end is nigh. But there’s always a tiny grain of truth in the pearl of tabloid lunacy. If the VVLHC did go wrong and blow up, in a certain very specific and improbable way, it could do really weird stuff. It could rip a hole right through the fabric of space and time. Couldn’t it, Pieter?”
“I guess.”
“And so it did.” Theo dipped his head in a respectful salute. “Really great bit of science, by the way, figuring out exactly how to sabotage it so it’d make a hole you could navigate through. But like I said, I’ll come back to that in just a moment.” He turned to Max. “Well, we all know what you’ve been up to. Want to hear about what I’ve been doing?”
Max shrugged. “Not particularly.”
“What the hell. Here goes, anyway.” This time, he drank the sherry. When the burning feeling had passed, he gave them a brief summary of his career, from the explosion at the VVLHC up to the point where he’d watched Max open the walnut jar and vanish—
“You’re crazy,” Max said. “Nuts.”
Theo nodded slowly. “Look at my