allowing Theo to catch up with his breathing, which he’d neglected for longer than he’d realised. For a moment there, it had been like listening to Pieter, when he was in one of his brainstorming moods, the same sensation of travelling faster than light straight into the Sun; we can do this temporarily overriding do we actually want to do this, or will it get us all killed. Gradually, though, the enchantment faded, and common sense came plodding breathlessly in its wake, like an overweight amateur running a marathon. “He actually did it,” he asked helplessly, and Call-me-Bill nodded.
“We’d built a prototype of the quantum phase realignment shift matrix acceleration chamber,” he said. “In the room out back of the laundry.”
“The one that glows in the—”
“Yes, that one. Anyhow, he set the controls, so all I had to do was push a button when he gave me the signal. He told me exactly what’d happen. There’d be this blinding blue glow, he’d sort of flicker at the edges, like he was made of sand and the wind started blowing, and then he’d vanish, at which point my job was to switch everything off pretty damn quick and get the hell out of there before my face melted and ran down my shirt front. And it all went just like he said it would, and that was the last I saw of him.”
“And?”
Call-me-Bill sighed and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “That was Phase One,” he said. “Phase Two would be Pieter arriving in the non-Newton-et cetera universe, setting up the YouSpace generators and using them to get back here. That was two months ago.” He paused and frowned at his hands. “As you know, linear time doesn’t pass in YouSpace. He should’ve been back here a split second after he left.”
A subtle blend of nausea and terror rinsed out Theo’s mind, leaving it empty for a moment. Then he said: “But YouSpace is working.”
“Oh, we know that,” Call-me-Bill replied with an unhappy grin. “So obviously he got there, and he set up the machine. Which sort of begs the question, why didn’t he come back? And now,” he added, with a catch in his voice, “you tell me you saw him get blasted by aliens with death rays.” He shook his head slowly, three times. “That was the whole point about YouSpace. It’s not a simulation, it’s not virtual reality, it’s real. Which is a great selling point, the total authenticity of the experience and so forth, but if you saw Pieter get killed, then he’s dead. And that’s—”
Theo didn’t need to be told what that was. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry.” Call-me-Bill pursed his lips. “Flow, my fucking tears. You see, not only have I lost my dear friend and mentor, I can also kiss goodbye to three-point-three-six-five billion dollars. You know why?”
“Um.”
“Because,” Call-me-Bill went on, “and you may just have noticed this when you tried out the useless bloody thing, there is no users’ goddamn manual. Which makes it,” he carried on with rising anger, “not just useless but horribly, horribly dangerous. You noticed?”
Theo shivered. “I noticed.”
“Well, there you are. You see, Pieter was going to do a manual, but he got carried away with the jump to the other universe thing and he never got round to writing it. He knew how it all works, but we don’t. Accordingly, we’re shafted. We’ve got this amazing product we can’t do anything with. It’s like you’re sitting in the cockpit of a jet, fifty thousand feet up, and you don’t know if the green button on the dash is the landing gear or the ejector seat.”
It was a while before Theo trusted himself to speak. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do?”
A hungry look spread across Call-me-Bill’s face. “We,” he said, “meaning Mattie and me, we aren’t going to do anything. You, on the other hand, are going to be busy.”
“Me?”
“Oh yes. Pieter always said, there’s only one man alive who could understand all this shit; meaning you. What you’re going to do is, you’re going to figure it all out from first principles, and then you’re going to write the manual.”
“Me?”
“You and no other,” Call-me-Bill said grimly. “Originally, the idea was to send you in there to find Pieter and bring him back, but that’s not going to happen now, apparently. So; Plan B. If I were you, I’d sharpen my pencil and put fresh batteries in my calculator, because you, my friend, are about