“The purpose of the exercise. What you’re trying to achieve.”
She smiled. It was the sort of smile you might come up with if you’d heard smiles described but never actually seen one. “It’s, like, pure research,” she said. “It’s not actually for anything.”
“Ah,” he said. “That’s a comfort. Because you do realise, if you were actually to solve these equations, you’d be able to punch a hole clean through the fabric of—”
With a hideous, ear-splitting screech she lifted both arms into the air, as though grabbing hold of something (but there was nothing there.) In that split second, her face seemed to change. Her eyes turned yellow and sank back into her skull, her nose melted like cheese, some sort of fangs or tusks splayed out of the side of her mouth. Then it was as though a small but intensely concentrated tornado formed around her, twisting her head and body into a thin spiral, like a screw-thread. “So long, loser,” she screamed, and vanished.
He reached the Leiden branch of the Credit Mayonnais an hour before closing time, and was shown into a huge steel box whose sides were lined with small steel boxes. A sour-faced man spent a hundred years checking through the paperwork, and then they performed the holy ceremony of the twin keys. Then he withdrew, leaving Theo alone with a grey stove-enamelled shoebox.
He didn’t open it straight away, even though time was running short and they’d be along any minute to throw him out. Instead, he sat in the wobbly plastic chair and looked at it. A tin box. A container, an enclosure of space. A quotation whose origin escaped him floated into his mind and got stuck there, like sweet corn skin in the gaps between the teeth; one little room an everywhere. Well, quite. The box only seemed small because he was six feet one inch tall. If he was a trifle shorter – say one inch from head to toe – he could live in it quite happily, raise a family there, maybe even rent out the bit he didn’t use to bring in some extra cash. Thanks to science and technology, the days when human achievement was limited by what a man could lift or pull were long since gone. A race of one-inch-tall life forms would have no difficulty conquering the galaxy if their technology was sufficiently advanced. And a box could hold an entire world.
Thanks, Pieter, he thought, as he reached out and turned the little key. True, he had no idea what he was going to find in there. Knowing Pieter it could be anything, from a kilo bag of uncut diamonds to a small pile of pencil sharpenings; but how many people would give you an entire world? On the small side, maybe, but one thing was for sure. It had to be an improvement on the one he was living in right now.
He opened the box, and found in it –
A small bottle
A brown manila envelope
A pink powder compact
An apple
Ah, he thought. He picked up the bottle and shook it: empty. The label was starting to peel off. There was a picture of a planet and some stars, and several columns of tiny lettering too small to read. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed; it smelt vaguely of spring flowers, stagnant water and horse dung. He put the cap back on and rested the bottle gently on the table.
There was, of course, the envelope; another container, infinite in its possibilities until he opened it. He ripped open the flap and teased out a folded sheet of paper and a smaller white envelope addressed to someone whose name he didn’t recognise. The sheet of paper was a letter, starting off Dear Theo. He leaned back in the chair, reached for the apple, sank his teeth into it and started to read.
Dear Theo,
About the only good thing I can think of about being dead is being able to give you something I was too selfish to share with anybody while I was alive. Enjoy it.
You’ll have forgotten, but I clearly remember when you were a second-year undergraduate and I was your tutor, and I set you a pretty routine assignment (I forget what it was about). You handed in your answer, and when you got it back I’d crossed out the whole thing in red and