Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,99
be bothered to read it—”
“Pieter.”
“Fine, right. As you should’ve figured out for yourself, the YouSpace acceleration effect subjects organic matter to extreme prototachyonic inversion stress. That’s fine so long as you’re inside the bottle’s ambient baryon field, and returning to your reality of origin purges all the prototachyons out of your system, so it’s no bother at all once you’re home. But if you leave the baryon field, which happens if, to take an example purely at random, you’re stranded because the bottle’s got busted, the build-up of antiprototachyonic radiation in your body tissue quickly leads to cellular degradation resulting in nucleotide dysfunction and catastrophic failure of protein cohesion.” He paused, took in Theo’s blank stare and translated, “You go all runny, then you fall to bits. Or at least,” he added with a slight shudder, “that’s what’s in store for me. You’re probably OK. As far as we know, the bottle that brought you here is intact.”
Theo stared at him. “You’re going to—”
“Yup. In about a hundred and forty hours. They’ll have to bury me in an ice-cream carton. Same goes for Max, of course. Hence,” he added, blowing out a dense blue cloud, “my apparently flippant and devil-may-care demeanour, imperfectly concealing a very real sense of shit-scaredness and existential terror.”
“Pieter,” Theo whimpered, “we’ve got to do something.”
Pieter smiled. “I am doing something,” he said. “I’m sitting on the Throne of St Peter smoking a good cigar. It won’t help any, but neither would anything else, so why the hell not?”
“Janine—”
“Is not going to call,” Pieter said firmly. “Stop torturing yourself with false hopes and accept the situation. Prepare yourself for the inevitable. And you might start looking round for a bucket or something. I’d hate for my mortal remains to soak away into the carpet.”
The phone rang.
“It’s her,” Pieter screamed. “Out of the way!” He launched himself out of the throne, shouldered past Theo, grabbed the phone and yelled, “Yes?”
Theo tried to take the phone from him, and got a hand in his face. “What?” Pieter was saying. “What? No. Who is this? No, sorry, but – no. Get off the fucking line, Your Majesty, we’re expecting an important call. Yeah, and yours too.” Slam.
“That wasn’t Janine, then,” Theo said.
“No.” Pieter hobbled back to the throne and sat down heavily. “Just the Tsar, about some idiotic treaty. I told you, didn’t I? She’s not going to come through for us. So stop deluding yourself and… ”
Ring. Ring.
This time, Theo beat him to it by a clear thousandth of a second. “Hello? Janine?”
“Hi. This is a free message. Right across the country, thousands of people just like you are paying too much for their personal loans. Call us now for a really great deal on—”
Dimly, Theo was aware of movement, and a hand gripping his wrist. “Don’t throw the phone,” Pieter was shouting at him. “We may still need it. Don’t throw the phone.”
“What?” The red mist that had covered his eyes started to dissipate, and he let Pieter take the phone away from him. “That wasn’t Janine,” he said.
“I’d kind of gathered.”
“She’s not going to call, is she?”
“No.”
“And now we can’t call her back, because she’s not the most recent caller any more.” Suddenly he felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders; he’d been let off having to hope, and now he could relax into despair. “We’re screwed. You’re going to die. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Mister Tactful,” Pieter said. “I wonder, though.”
Hope is a bit like bindweed, or Russian vine. Just when you think you’ve killed off the last root, there it is, back again. “What?”
“Do you think they’ve got any booze around here? They must have. I wonder how we go about getting hold of some.”
“Pieter.”
“Well, why the hell not? What can a person do in a hundred and forty hours? He can watch the whole of Star Trek Voyager on DVD, or he can get really, really, really stonked.”
“Pieter—”
“True, both options would leave you regarding death as a merciful release, but—”
“Pieter!” He hadn’t meant to shout. “Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. Think of something. You’re a Nobel Laureate, aren’t you? You invented this horrible thing. You can’t just crawl away and get drunk. It’s—”
“What?”
“It’s what Max would do.”
“Ah.” Pieter grinned. “Great minds.” He picked up the little silver bell and shook it ferociously. A moment later, Nev appeared. “We want a drink,” Pieter thundered at him. “For medicinal purposes. Now.”
Nev looked at Theo, who hesitated, then nodded. “Right,”