written, ‘wrong – do it again’ at the bottom in capital letters. You did it again, and I gave you full marks. I can still see the sad expression on your face the first time. You apologised.
Well, now I’m dead, so I can tell you the truth. Yes, the answers were all wrong. According to the rules of mathematics everybody uses, your equations didn’t work. I remember marking your paper, putting it down, going into the kitchen to make myself a coffee. Then I stopped dead, turned round, went back and sat down again, and I looked at the figures on the paper, and I thought: yes, but—
Damn, I wish, I really wish I’d asked you, back then, what in God’s name you were thinking about. Those calculations of yours couldn’t work in our universe. But maybe I was missing the point. I went back and read it through from the start; not looking for what I was expecting to see, but actually reading what you’d written.
What the hell. If Columbus, aged twelve, had been set a geography test – the world is (a) flat (b) round – he’d have got zero marks. But the world is round. It was that sort of a moment for me.
I spent the next seven years trying to figure out what mathematics would be like on a round world. The result is in the bottle you’ve just looked at. Take very good care of that bottle. It’s one of only five in existence. Read the label very carefully, and do exactly what it says. You’ll have to work out the maths for getting inside by yourself; I don’t want to leave instructions lying around where anyone could get hold of them, even in a safe in the Credit Mayonnais. But you shouldn’t have any trouble. You always were a bright boy.
The letter you’ll find in this envelope is addressed to a very good friend of mine who runs a small hotel on the edge of town. When he’s read the letter, he’ll give you a job. I expect you need one. The world is an unfair place. Blow up just one multi-billion-dollar research facility, and suddenly nobody wants to be your friend.
Except me, and I’m dead. You, on the other hand, are going to have a really amazingly good life, thanks to the bottle. Enjoy it, that’s the main thing. At times it may get scary, dangerous, harrowing, agonisingly painful, even life-threatening. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? But whatever happens, always remember. It’s supposed to be fun.
Cordially,
Your friend & colleague
Pieter van Goyen.
Crazy, he thought. But, on the other hand, consider the source. If Pieter van Goyen were to give you an enormous grin and tell you he’d just found out he was a teapot, your first reaction would be to look round for a tea cosy to keep him from catching a chill. He finished off the apple, looked round for a bin or something to dump the core in, found none and put it in his pocket. A job in a hotel; well, better than the guts trolley, but he couldn’t really see what a hotelier would need a quantum mechanic for, even a disgraced one. Maybe his job would be to prove the hotel still existed each morning, before Pieter’s friend went to all the trouble of cooking breakfast. No, properly speaking you’d need a philosopher for that, not a physicist.
He caught sight of the clock on the wall; two minutes to closing time. He stuffed the bottle and the powder compact in his pocket and picked up the papers, just as the door opened and the guard came in. He shifted the papers from his right hand to his left just in time.
There was something about the hotel he found off-putting. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe it was the burnt-out cars blocking access to the gates, or the thick tangle of brambles that made it so hard to fight his way up the drive. Just possibly it was the faded cardboard sign fixed to the front door with peeling yellow Sellotape: NO ROOMS GO AWAY. Or maybe he was still feeling a bit jumpy after his encounter with the vanishing girl on the train, and it was making him ever so slightly paranoid. Yes, he decided, on balance that’s probably it.
He glanced down at the envelope in his hand. It was in Pieter’s handwriting, so of course it was practically illegible; he could make