the magnifying glass and peered at the minuscule letters on the label. It turned out to be the same message translated into a bewildering number of languages, including cuneiform, Klingon, Elvish and one whose alphabet was entirely made up of smiley faces, grouped in strange, cloud-like blocks. Eventually he found English, and read –
INSTRUCTIONS:
1 Obtain access to the bottle
2 Follow the instructions
And that was it. He frowned. Read the label very carefully, and do exactly what it says, Pieter’s letter had urged him; also, You’ll have to work out the maths for getting inside by yourself. He closed his eyes. Obtain access to the bottle, for crying out loud. What was that supposed to mean? Take off the lid?
He did that. Then he put it back on again. Clues, he thought, I need clues; I’m too old, tired and disillusioned to relish challenges. In desperation, he turned the bottle upside down and peered at the bottom through his glass. And saw…
Well, of course, he told himself. Everybody knows that. But what, he couldn’t help wondering, was it doing embossed on the bottom of a bottle, instead of the more usual 33cl please dispose of bottle tidily? And, anyway, strictly speaking, since the bottle was a cylinder topped by a sort of distorted cone, shouldn’t that be…?
But that wasn’t what it said; and Pieter’s letter had been quite categorical, do exactly what it says. In which case –
There was the stub of a pencil in his top pocket. Before he realised it, he had the back of the manila envelope on his knee and was jotting down figures. Of course, it simply didn’t work if you had 4-theta instead of 2. But just suppose for a moment that it did. After all, that was what Pieter had done all those years ago, when he’d marked the all-ballsed-up assignment. Yeah. Right. What if…?
He came to a dead end, and scowled at the gibberish he’d written on the envelope. For a moment there, a brief, fleeting moment, it had seemed as though he was on to something. But now the way ahead was blocked, as if (to take an example entirely at random) some fool had just blown up a mountain, and the whole lot had come tumbling down on to the freeway.
Just a moment, he thought. Not a cylinder topped by a cone; a cylinder topped by a distorted cone. He groped for the bottle, stared at it and lunged for the pencil. There was a slight but definite curve to the neck of the bottle; concave, just a little bit, and why the hell, when it really mattered, could he only remember pi to seventy-four decimal places?
Ten minutes later, he stopped and stared in horror at what he’d just written. He’d seen it before, not so very long ago; on the screen of a latest-model LoganBerry, on a train.
The bomb.
Oh no, he told himself, not again. Blowing up a mountain had been bad enough. He was three, maybe four calculations away from arming an equation whose effects would make his previous boo-boo look like a trivial mishap, like laughing while drinking coffee. If he made the same mistake again, after Fate had gone to the trouble of dropping so many helpful hints (career trashed, wife gone, lost all his money et cetera), they’d be justified in keeping him in after class and making him write out I MUST NOT BLOW UP THE WORLD a hundred times. And yet –
Pieter had said, follow the instructions. If that included what was on the bottom of the bottle, not just the label, then he couldn’t see he had much of a choice. He frowned, trying to remember. Now he came to think of it, it had been Pieter who’d got him the job at the VVLHC. Or at least he’d recommended him highly for it, which was more or less the same thing. Could it possibly be that Pieter wanted him to blow things up? Unlikely. Not unless they needed to be blown up, for some obscure but entirely valid reason.
You are going to have a really amazingly good life, thanks to the bottle. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? Enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. He scratched his head, entirely unable to decide what to do. He thought about the girl on the train; so far he’d managed to blot that memory out of his mind, but that wasn’t possible any more, not now that he had the same bomb