issue at the VVLHC, a protractor, an ivory slide rule, two rusty iron keys and a set of log tables. He put them all back where he’d found them and tried playing with the computer, which turned out to consist of a monitor and a CPU but no keyboard. Easy mistake to make, he told himself; maybe they’d got it cheap for that reason.
The envelope, with his unfinished calculations on the back, felt alive inside his jacket, as if he’d got a bird beating its wings in his inside pocket. Absolutely nothing else to do.
Theo was one of those people for whom prolonged inactivity is the worst thing that can possibly happen, with the possible exception of the Earth colliding with a very large asteroid. He knew his limitations. He could stick ten minutes of doing nothing, if he absolutely had to. After twelve minutes, he started scratching his chin or rubbing the palm of his hand with his thumb. Thirteen minutes, and the most luxuriously comfortable chair ever made felt like a medieval torture chamber. Fourteen minutes, and he’d be twitching all over, shuffling his feet, squirming in his chair. Fifteen minutes; unless there was something productive he could do, like count the number of bricks in a wall, he was ready to kill someone.
He held out for twenty minutes. Then he pulled out the envelope, took one of the newly sharpened pencils, and got to work.
He didn’t need the slide rule, the log tables or the calculator. The numbers and symbols just seemed to move gracefully to their allotted places, like actors at a dress rehearsal. When the calculation had arrived at its inevitable conclusion, he leaned back in the chair, as though he was trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the envelope, and stared at it. Here we go, he thought.
Had Pieter, at some point before his death, found himself staring at the same neat, slender line of characters? Presumably he had; the letter implied that he’d known what the bottle did, and had made it do it. The thought made him feel very slightly better. There’s a difference, albeit only one contour line on the gradient of the moral high ground, between being the inventor of a weapon of mass destruction and the man in the warehouse who uncrates the fiftieth completed bomb. Also, consider this: Pieter had done the maths and found the answer, used it to get inside the bottle, and the universe was still here, still reasonably intact and not-blown-up. Therefore, if he were to duplicate what Pieter had done, there couldn’t be any harm in it. Could there?
It’s supposed to be fun.
Slowly, he put the envelope back in his pocket. It occurred to him as he did so that he’d just made a discovery of a Newton-Einstein-Hawking level of magnitude, and if he was back in the university, if he hadn’t accidentally pulverised an Alp and with it any chance he’d had of being taken seriously ever again, he’d be minutes away from being worshipped as a god. Instead, here he was with two phones and a keyboardless computer for company, and nobody to share the glory with but himself.
He frowned. No, he thought, not me. Pieter had got there first – and Pieter hadn’t blown up any mountains, so there’d have been nothing to stop him publishing his results and clearing a space on his mantelpiece for seventy kilos’ weight of awards. But he hadn’t, and it occurred to Theo to wonder why the hell not. Because –
Quite, he thought. There are some things you don’t share, in the same way that a policeman doesn’t drop by the holding cells and ask if anybody fancies having a go with his gun. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? Enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. Was that what Pieter had done? Invented the ultimate Doomsday equation and somehow reverse-engineered it into a game? And, while we’re asking awkward questions, what exactly had Pieter died of?
“You there.” Theo looked up and saw a man standing over him, scowling. “Clerk.”
That was the sort of thing you’d expect this man to say; along with we meet again, Mr Bond, or guards, seize him, or I like a girl with spirit or, quite possibly, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Given time and a huge dose of steroids, Arnold Schwarzenegger might’ve grown into his hand-me-down trousers, and he had a thin black moustache, like a fine line