“What? Oh.” Uncle Bill frowned, looked down and tried to stand up. The carpet swelled up round his leg like a blister, but he stayed on his knees. “Maybe if we tried duct tape—”
Theo sighed. “Believe it or not,” he said, “there are some eventualities where even duct tape won’t cut it. Sorry, but this won’t work.”
Matasuntha made an impatient gesture, emphasised by the large sliver of bottle glued to her wrist. “All right then,” she said. “If you’re so goddamn smart, what do you suggest?”
“Give up,” Theo said sweetly. “Forget it. Find something else to do. I know,” he went on, “how about turning this place into a hotel?”
“The hell with that,” Matasuntha snapped. “We’re so close. You actually went there, and we’ve got the user’s manual—”
“Hold it,” Uncle Bill said urgently. “That’s it, the user’s manual. Look and see what it says. Under broken bottle.”
Theo shrugged, took the powder compact from his pocket, opened it and traced his finger down the mirror. “Hey,” he said, “there’s an entry for that. If the bottle gets smashed.”
Uncle Bill surged up to look over his shoulder, but the carpet held him fast; he toppled and landed on his hands. “Well? What does it say?”
“Just a second.” Theo was scrolling down. “Here, yes. Buy a new one. Right.” he snapped the compact shut and pocketed it.
“The answer’s obvious,” Matasuntha said. “He’ll have to make one from scratch.”
An overwhelming urge to laugh hit Theo like a fist in the midriff. “You’re kidding,” he gasped. “Oh, please tell me you meant that as a joke.”
“You’ve got Pieter’s notes,” Uncle Bull said. “You were his student. I don’t see why you shouldn’t give it a try.”
“You’re crazy. Tell him he’s crazy,” he snapped at Matasuntha, who gave him a cold stare in return. “Go on, tell him.”
But Matasuntha was studying him, as if he was half a worm she’d found in an apple. “Of course he can do it,” she said. “He’s smart. They wouldn’t have put him in charge of the hadron collider if he wasn’t pretty damn smart.”
“I blew it up.”
“Because you’re careless,” Matasuntha replied. “You can be careless and smart at the same time. No, what you’re thinking of doing is going off somewhere and making a YouSpace thing all for yourself, cutting us right out of the deal.
“She’s nuts,” Theo yelled. “Tell her, she’s nuts. I have no interest whatsoever in your stupid, lethally dangerous—”
“You wouldn’t.” Uncle Bill was looking at him with the sort of expression Mother Teresa might have worn if she’d caught one of the novices raiding the petty cash. “That’s so low.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Theo sat down on the floor and buried his head in his hands. “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you think, I’ll try it. Doomed to failure,” he added, “a complete and utter waste of time, but so what? Anything so long as you stop looking at me.”
For three days and most of three nights, Theo stared at Pieter van Goyen’s notes. He might as well have been gazing at the sun, because the experience left him dazzled and blind. No doubt about it, Pieter’s work was utterly brilliant – the equations danced and sparkled on the screen, sometimes surging forward like a tidal wave, sometimes shearing off at an angle like a shoal of tiny, transparent fish – but, after seventy-two hours in their company, he was forced to the conclusion that he now knew considerably less about quantum mechanics than he had when he started. All he could say for certain was that Pieter had succeeded, and that what has been done once can be done again. The notes, however, were to all intents and purposes useless.
Fine.
At dawn on the fourth day, he switched off the screen, put the notebooks carefully away in a drawer, grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and decided to figure it all out for himself, from first principles. It was a fine and noble moment, which lasted for about three seconds. Then he looked down at the paper and saw that it was still blank. So he drew a small blue dot, and wrote above it, You Are Here.
That didn’t help at all, so he drew a bottle round the dot, and then some wavy lines to represent the sea on which the bottle was floating; it was now a ship, in a bottle, on the sea, the ship being the message. He turned the paper