The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “Dolan,” I said, and this time I managed to say it without strangling. “Alex Dolan. There’s been some kind of accident.”

  There was a squawking noise and the soldier lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Fenwick here, sir,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a civilian here. He claims there’s been an accident.”

  At ground level, fifteen years of abandonment were more obvious. There were Green Berets stationed at the gate, and they spent a good half-hour checking our documents and establishing our bona fides before letting us through. As well as animals, the world’s Press were always trying to sneak through the fence. Nobody had made it yet. Nobody we knew about, anyway.

  The buildings were weathered and dirty, the grass waist-high, despite regular helicopter inundations of herbicides, and it was starting to encroach on the cracked asphalt of the roadways.

  I drove until we were a few hundred feet from the control room building, directly under the slowly-twisting spiral cloud. Unable to hush the cloud up, the government had admitted that there had been an accident at the Collider, explaining it as an electromagnetic effect. Scientists – government-sponsored and otherwise – were still arguing about this.

  Fenwick looked up at the white helix and curled his lips. He was a man of many attributes, very few of them admirable, but he was not a coward. He had been told that there was no danger in him coming this close to Point Zero, and he believed that. It had never occurred to him that a significant fraction of the defence budget was devoted to stopping animals getting this close to Point Zero.

  There had been much discussion about what to do about him after I appeared out of thin air in front of him. A quick look at his file suggested that appealing to his patriotic instincts would be pointless, and that giving him large amounts of money would be counterproductive and fruitless. A working-group of thirty very very bright men and women had been convened simply to study the problem of What to Do About Corporal Robert E. Lee Fenwick, who one night while out on patrol at Fort Bragg had seen me appear from a direction that no one in the universe had ever seen before.

  Their solution was elegant and, I thought, unusually humane. Corporal Fenwick was a simple organism, geared mainly to self-gratification, and his loyalty – and his silence – had been bought by the simple expedient of promoting him to the rank of three-star general. What fascinated me was that Fenwick never showed the slightest gratitude for this. It was as if the alternative never even occurred to him. He seemed totally oblivious to the concept that it would have been simpler, and far more cost-effective, to simply kill him.

  “Here we are, then,” Fenwick said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Here we are. I cannot argue with that.” I looked at the cloud, looked at the buildings around us. Fenwick had surprised everyone by taking to his new rank like a duck to water. He was still in the Army, but he was no longer of the Army. He had no duties to speak of, apart from the duties that involved me. His general’s pay had been backdated for a decade, and he had bought his parents a new house in West Virginia and his brother a new car, and he lived with his child bride Roselynne and their half-dozen squalling brats in a magnificent mansion in Alexandria, Virginia. The kids went to the best schools, and in moments of despair I hung onto that. The eldest girl, Bobbi-Sue, was starting at Princeton next year. Because of what had happened to me the Fenwick boys would not work all their lives in the local coal mines; the Fenwick girls would not marry the high-school jock only to see him become a drunken wife-beater. They would be lawyers and doctors and congressmen and senators, and maybe even presidents. In my darkest moments I looked at Former Corporal Fenwick, and I almost thought this was all worth it. Almost.

  “How long do we have?” he asked. He always asked that.

  I shrugged. “Minutes?” I always said that, too. “Days?” I opened the door and got out of the Hummer. Fenwick got out too, and together we unloaded the transport cases. We carried them into one of the other buildings a little way from the control room, and emptied them of their telephone books. Then we put them back into the Humvee and dumped my gear on the ground beside the vehicle.

  Fenwick checked his watch. “Better be getting back,” he said.

  I nodded. In a couple of hours there would be an overflight. An unmarked black helicopter without an ID transponder would pass overhead, ignoring local traffic control until the last moment, when it would transmit a brief and curt series of digits that identified it as belonging to the NSA. It would dip down below the radar cover, hover for a few moments, and then lift up and fly off again. And that would be me, leaving. “This is stupid. Someone’s going to work it out one day,” I said.

  Fenwick shrugged. “Not my problem.” He put out his hand and I shook it. When I first met him he had been rangy and fidgety. Now he was calm and plump and sleek, and in my heart I couldn’t grudge him that. “Happy trails, Alex,” he said.

  “You too, Bobby Lee. See you soon.”

  “Let’s fucking hope, right?”

  I smiled. “Yes. Let’s.”

  Fenwick got back into the Hummer, gave me a wave, and drove off back towards the gate, where he would tell the Green Berets that the civilian specialist had arranged a separate means of departure. Which would, in its own way, be true.

  I watched the Humvee disappear into the distance. When it was gone, I picked up my stuff and carried it into one of the nearby buildings. I dumped it in an empty office, unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor, wheeled a chair over to the window, and sat down.

  The room was small and windowless and the only furniture in it was a table and a single folding plastic chair. The captain was using the chair. I was standing on the other side of the table from him, flanked by two armed soldiers.

  “Now, all I need to know, son, is your name and how you managed to get onto this base bare-ass naked without anybody seeing you,” the captain said. He’d said it a number of times.

  “My name is Alexander Dolan,” I said. “I’m a journalist. I was in the control room with Professor Delahaye’s group. I think there’s been an accident.” I’d said this a number of times, too.

  The captain smiled and shook his head. He was base security, or maybe Intelligence, I didn’t know. He was the image of reasonableness. We could, he seemed to be saying, keep doing this all day and all night until I told him what he wanted to know.

  “Go and find Professor Delahaye,” I said. “He’ll vouch for me.” I couldn’t understand what the military were doing at the Collider; maybe the accident had been much worse than I thought. Which would make it truly world-shaking.

  “I don’t know any Professor Delahaye, son,” the captain said. “Did he help you break in here?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “No. He’s supervising the start-up experiments. Look, if he was hurt, maybe one of the others can come here. Doctor Chen or Doctor Morley, maybe. Everyone knows me.”

  “I don’t know any of these people, Mr. Dolan,” said the captain. “What I want to know is who you are, and how in the name of blue blazes you managed to break into Fort Bragg without a stitch of clothing.”

  “Fort Bragg?”

  The captain gave me a wry, long-suffering, don’t-bullshit-me-son sort of look.

  I looked around the room. There was only one door. It looked solid and it had big locks on it. But looking around the room again, I noticed that if I looked at it a certain way, it was not a locked room at all. It was just planes of mass that didn’t even butt up against each other. It was actually wide open.

  “I thought this was the Sioux Crossing Collider,” I told the captain.

  He blinked. “The what?”

  I said, “I don’t like it here,” and I stepped outside the room, went back there.

  I had brought with me a gallon jug of water, a little solid-fuel camping stove, some basic camping cookware, and half a dozen MREs. I took the first package and opened it. Meals Ready to Eat. But only if you were desperate or not particularly fussy. The package contained beef ravioli in meat
sauce, chipotle snack bread, a cookie, cheese spread, beef snacks, caffeine mints, candy, coffee, sugar, salt, gum, some dried fruit and some other bits and pieces. I’d heard that the French Army’s MREs came with a pouch of red wine. If only The Accident had happened at CERN . . .

  I became aware of . . . something. If a solid object could have the equivalent of a negative image, this was it. A kind of negative tornado, turned inside out. I stepped towards it . . .

  And found myself standing at the SCC, outside the building where I had last seen Professor Delahaye and his team and Larry Day.

  Above me towered a colossal sculptured pillar of cloud, rotating slowly in the sky. I tilted my head back and looked up at it, my mouth dropping open.

  And all of a sudden I was writhing on the ground in agony, my muscles cramping and spasming. I tried to step away, but I was in too much pain to be able to focus.

  And that was how they caught me the second time, lying in wait because they half expected me to return to the Collider, and then tasering me half to death. Someone walked up to me and thumped his fist down on my thigh. When he took his hand away there was a thin plastic tube sticking out of my leg and then there was a wild roaring in my head and a wave of blackness broke over me and washed me away.

  They tried the same trick on the captain and the two guards as they had on Former Corporal Fenwick. I was beginning to think that I was travelling across the world leaving generals in my wake. They showered them with money and promotions, and for some reason it didn’t work with them the way it had worked with Fenwick. They blabbed their stories, and eventually the government had to make them all disappear. The officers were in solitary confinement in Leavenworth and the people they blabbed to were sequestered somewhere.

  I finished my dinner and sat by the window drinking coffee and smoking a small cigar. The cigar was from a tin I’d found in my rucksack; a little gift from Fenwick. I’d heard the helicopter fly over while I was eating; it had dipped down momentarily a few hundred metres from Point Zero – which was actually an act of insane bravery on the part of its pilot in order to maintain what I considered the fatuous and transparent fiction of my “departure” – and then lifted away again to the West. Now everything was quiet and night was falling.

  I remembered when this whole place had been busy and bustling. All abandoned now, the surviving staff scattered to other facilities. I thought about Delahaye and Andy Chen and Caitlin Morley and all the others who had been in that room with me on the day of The Accident. Delahaye had been an uptight asshole and Larry had been having an affair with my wife, but I’d liked the others; they were good, calm, professional people and it had been good to know them.

  I was resting my arm on the windowsill. As I looked at it, the hairs on my forearm began to stir slowly and stand up.

  This time, it was a general opposite me, and I was sitting down. To one side of the general were two middle-aged men in suits; on the other side was a youngish man with thinning hair and an eager expression.

  “You tasered me and drugged me,” I told them. “That wasn’t very friendly.”

  “We apologize for that, Mr. Dolan,” said one of the middle-aged men. “We couldn’t risk you . . . leaving again. Put yourself in our position.”

  I held up my hands. I was wearing manacles. The manacles were connected to a generator behind my chair; if I looked as if I was going to do something outrageous – or if I even sneezed a bit forcefully – the manacles would deliver a shock strong enough to stun me. I knew this because they’d demonstrated the process to me when I came round from the sedative.

  “I would love to put myself in your position,” I said. “So long as you could put yourself in mine.”

  “It’s only a precaution, Mr. Dolan,” said the other middle-aged man. “Until we can be sure you won’t leave us again.”

  I looked at the manacles. From a certain point of view, they didn’t go round my wrists at all. I lowered my hands and folded them in my lap. “Professor Delahaye,” I said.

  “We don’t know,” said the youngish man. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s . . . something there, but no bodies, nothing alive.”

  “Something?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember what happened?”

  I was busy attacking Larry Day for having an affair with my wife. “They were doing the last shot of the series,” I said. “Delahaye counted down and then there was . . .” I looked at them. “Sorry. I won’t image it.”

  “Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

  Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day was having an affair with my wife. “No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”

  “Where do you . . . go?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere.”

  The four men exchanged glances. One of the middle-aged men said, “We think there may be another survivor.”

  I leaned forward.

  “A day after your first, um, appearance there was an incident in Cairo,” he went on. “Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a djinn walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”

  A terrible thought occurred to me. “That might have been me.”

  The other middle-aged man shook his head. “We don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it happened again yesterday in Nevada. While you were unconscious here. A small town called Spicerville was totally destroyed. Eight hundred people dead.”

  “We’re calling it an explosion in a railcar full of chemicals,” the general said. “The Egyptians say theirs was a meteorite strike. But we think it’s . . . someone like you.”

  “Whatever happened at the SCC, it changed you,” said the younger man with what I thought was admirable understatement. “We think it changed this other person too, whoever they are. But where you seem to have found a way to . . . cope with your . . . situation, the other person has not.”

  “I haven’t found a way to cope at all,” I told them. I looked at the table between us. It was a rather cheap-looking conference table, the kind of thing the government bought in huge amounts from cut-rate office supply stores. It seemed that I had never looked at things properly before; now I could see how the table was constructed, from the subatomic level upward.

  “Obviously this . . . person is dangerous,” one of the middle-aged men said. “Any help you could give us would be very much appreciated.”

  I sighed. I took the table to pieces and put it back together in a shape that I found rather pleasing. Nobody else in the room found it pleasing at all, though, judging by the way they all jumped up and ran screaming for the door. I slipped away from the manacles and went back there.

  I went outside and stood in front of the building with my hands in my pockets. About seven hours ago I had been sitting in a briefing room in a White House basement with the President and about a dozen NSA and CIA staffers, watching a video.

  The video had been taken by a Predator drone flying over Afghanistan. It was the spearpoint of a long-running operation to kill a Taliban warlord codenamed WATERSHED, who had been tracked down to a compound in Helmand. It was the usual combat video, not black and white but that weird mixture of shades of grey. The landscape tipped and dipped as the Predator’s operator, thousands of miles away in the continental United States, steered the drone in on its target. Then a scatter of buildings popped up over a hill and the drone launched its missile, and as it did a human figure came walking around the corner of one of the buildings. The crosshairs of the drone’s camera danced around the centre of the screen for a few moments, then the building puffed smoke in all directions and disappeared.

  And moments later, unaffected, seemingly not even
having noticed the explosion, the figure calmly walked out of the smoke and carried on its way.

  “Well,” said the President when the video was over, “either the war in Afghanistan just took a very strange turn, or we’re going to need your services, Mr. Dolan.”

  I looked into the sky. The moon was low down on the horizon and everything was bathed in a strange directionless silvery light that cast strange shadows from the buildings. There was an electrical expectancy in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt sugar, a breeze that blew from nowhere, and then he was there, standing a few yards from me, looking about him and making strange noises. I sighed.

  “Larry,” I called.

  Larry looked round, saw me, and said, “Jesus, Alex. What the hell happened?”

  Larry didn’t remember The Accident, which was good. And he didn’t remember what came after, which was even better. But he was surprisingly adaptable, and I couldn’t afford to relax, even for a moment.

  I walked over and stood looking at him. He looked like part of a comic-strip illustration of a man blowing up. Here he was in frame one, a solid, whole human being. Here he was, at the end of the strip, nothing more than a widely-distributed scattering of bone and meat and other tissue. And here he was, three or four frames in, the explosion just getting going, his body flying apart. And that was Larry, a man impossibly caught in the middle of detonating. His body looked repugnant and absurd all at the same time, an animated human-shaped cloud of meat and blood, about twice normal size.

  “There was an accident,” I said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

  Larry’s voice issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It seemed to be coming from a long distance away, like a radio tuned to a distant galaxy. He said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

  I ran a hand over my head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

  “How long?” asked that eerie voice.