trapped hand tethered him like an anchor. Any moment now, he thought, she’ll go back to reading her book, and then maybe I can sort of wriggle my back up the seat a bit and get straight.
She really was very pretty, which didn’t help; straight, shoulder-length black hair, deep brown eyes, and she’d been reading Hawking and Mlodinow on string theory. Under different circumstances this wouldn’t be a bad place to be. As it was –
“I couldn’t help noticing,” she said. “Your book.”
“What?” He glanced down. In his lap, where it had fallen, was the copy of Greenidge and Chen’s Macrodimensional Field Inversion Dynamics which had sent him to sleep in the first place. Properly speaking, in fact, this whole mess was their fault. “Oh, that.”
“You’re a physicist.”
“Was,” he said. “Not any more.”
“Wait a minute.” She was looking at him, and he was sure he could see the usual signs. Very occasionally, people recognised him (his face had been all over the TV for a short time, while they were shoring up what was left of the mountain) and their reaction was always the same. Fascinated horror, embarrassment, curiosity. You’re the guy who blew up the VVLHC.
“You’re Theo Bernstein,” she said.
Here goes. He sighed. “Yes.”
“Oh, this is so amazing.”
It was as if he was a boxer, and his opponent, having just belted him in the solar plexus, had leaned forward and kissed him on the nose. “Excuse me?”
“I’m such a fan of your work,” she said. “Your paper on the supersymmetry of fermions was just so—” She paused and took a deep breath. “It changed my life,” she said.
He frowned. “It did?”
“Oh, yes. It was like I’d been blind since birth, and then suddenly, wham!”
Then suddenly, wham. Not how he remembered it. His abiding memory of that particular paper had been sitting in front of his laptop at 3 a.m. with a violent coffee headache, trying to figure out where the glaring inconsistency he’d just noticed had crept in from, and how he was going to get round it in time to meet a horribly close deadline. Now, after all this time, he couldn’t remember what he’d actually said. “Um, I’m glad you liked it,” he said. “So, you’re a physicist too.”
“Well, kind of.” She actually blushed. He’d never met a girl who blushed. Red-faced with fury, yes. “I’m just starting as a postgraduate at MIT, working on Reimann manifolds, though I’m hoping one day I could join the SGBHC project.” She paused and looked shyly down at her hands. “If I’m good enough,” she added. “Which isn’t very likely.”
It felt like a cue, and he didn’t know his lines. “Well,” he said, “they took me, so they can’t be too picky. Provided you don’t blow anything up, you should be just fine.”
“That was so awful, wasn’t it?” She gave him a look of deep, sincere compassion, which made him feel like he’d just been hit over the head with a million dollars. “I mean, I can’t imagine how you must’ve felt, all those years of brilliant hard work, and then one little bit of bad luck.”
Bad luck, he thought. Not really. His only slice of bad luck was being the older child of parents whose eldest son was an idiot. The sort of thing that could happen to anyone, perhaps, but it had happened to him. “Nice of you to say so,” he mumbled.
“And I definitely think they were all so horrible to you afterwards,” she went on. “I mean, if it hadn’t been for you, there wouldn’t have been a VVLHC to blow up.”
That’s a way of looking at it, he thought. A bit like saying the Allies owed their victory in the Second World War to Hitler, because they could never have won the war if he hadn’t started it. Time, he decided, to change the subject. “Reimann manifolds,” he said. “That’s a pretty interesting field.”
Her eyes shone. “Oh yes,” she said, and spent the next five minutes telling him a lot of stuff he already knew about Reimann manifolds, time he spent vainly trying to figure out a way of getting her to move her leg without actually pushing her out of her seat. At the end of the interval, the numbness in his right hand had been replaced by the most violent attack of pins and needles he’d ever experienced.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but you’re sitting on my hand.”
“Sorry, what?”
“My hand.” Oh well, he thought, and gently pulled it free. For a moment or so,