“There was a fourth bear in the house the morning of Goldilocks’s death,” Jack told him. “Any ideas?”
“Nope,” came the reply after a short pause. “There’s not a single bear in Reading that would knowingly harm a hair on her head. All that work she did on the right to arm bears and the illegal bile tappers. Goldilocks was a bear icon.”
“I see. Have you got Bartholomew with you?”
“Yes.”
“Put him on.”
“What’s going on, Jack?” asked Sherman in a worried tone.
“You said twelve hours and you’d have found out who killed Goldy—I trusted you about my life being in danger, and now I’ve made things ten times worse for myself!”
“It’s taking longer than I thought,” replied Jack. “Trust me. What’s the deal over this surrender?”
Jack heard an audible sigh at the other end of the phone.
“I don’t know anything about it. If there was an offer of surrender it didn’t come from anyone in here. Bears are trustworthy and honest, and I have Friend to Bears status. They’d all fight to the death to protect me. But that won’t happen. I’ll give myself up before a single bear is harmed.”
“Keep that to yourself for the moment, sir. Are you sure there’s no one there who would give you up?”
“Positive.”
“You could be mistaken. There was a fourth bear at the Bruins’ house that morning. A bear not like other bears. A bear who is willing to kill—his own kind, if necessary. Keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll call you as soon as I have any information.”
He put the phone back in his pocket and threaded his way toward where Mary was waiting for him. She had been joined by Ashley, who was showing her some photographs of hideously crushed vehicles.
“Jack, we’ve traced all the previous owners of Dorian Gray’s car sales—”
“Mary, I hardly think that’s important right now.”
“No, but I really think you should listen—every single one of them has died in a horrific traffic accident.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
She showed him the pictures. Every car was a crumpled heap of scrap on the road.
“All of these were sold by Gray, and each was totaled shortly after the sale—and there was never any other vehicle involved.”
“What are you saying?”
“I did some research on Dorian Gray,” said Ashley, “and I could only find one person with this name, born in 1878.”
“You told me this already. It can’t be the same person—it would make him one hundred and twenty-six. The Dorian I met was barely thirty.”
“I thought it couldn’t be the same person either,” replied Ashley. “There wasn’t a death certificate. I did some more research and found a photograph from 1911. It’s… well, see for yourself.”
He handed over the picture, and Jack felt the hairs rise on his neck. The reason was clear: The Gray in the picture was the same one who had sold him the car. The smile was the same, even the mole on his left cheek.
“And from 1935,” said Ashley, passing him another, “and here, in 1953.”
They were all of the same man. Jack handed back the pictures and stared at the Allegro suspiciously. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem quite so pristine. The rubber windshield surround looked a bit faded, and there was a small discoloration on the front bumper.
“Every recipient of a Gray-‘guaranteed’ car died in it, you say?”
Ash nodded, and Jack looked between the two of them. If what Ashley was saying was true, this was bad—worse, it was evil.
“Forget face creams and all that ‘laboratoire’ crap you see on the telly,” he said slowly. “There’s only one tried and tested way to stay young, and that’s a pact with the Dark One. Damn. I knew there was a reason he had me sign the buyer’s agreement with red ink.” He shook his head sadly. “He must have been using some kind of suspended automotive decrepitude to channel a few luckless souls to Mephistopheles—and all for a few more years of his own miserable youth. What a louse.”
“It explains the reverse-running odometer,” said Mary.
“Just goes to show that if a deal looks too good to be true, it generally is. Thanks, Ash. I think this car is going to stay right where it is….”
His voice trailed off as he caught sight of someone familiar in the sea of heads.
“Isn’t that Dr. Parks?”
He called Parks over, and the lecturer moved through the crowd that was rapidly forming for no other reason than that there was a crowd forming.
“Hullo, Inspector,” said Parks, panting slightly. “I got here like you asked.”
“I didn’t ask you,” replied Jack with a frown, “but no matter—got something for us?”
“And how!” He looked around curiously at the milling crowd.
“What’s the ruckus?”
“Bartholomew’s holed up in there with a sloth of bears.”
“Ah! Well, check this out,” Parks said excitedly, handing them several photomicrographs from the scanning electron microscope.
“We had to search around, but we finally got there,” he said triumphantly, tapping the image. “How did you know?”
“Call it a hunch. I’d like you to get this on the Conspiracy Theorist Web site as soon as you can; spread it around so everyone knows. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“I see it,” said Mary, still staring at the pictures, “but what does it mean?”
“It means Bisky-Batt lied to us—I thought all that smarmy ‘In what way can I assist you, Officer?’ rubbish was too good to be true.”
There was a loud siren from close by, and an armored car drove up, parked and disgorged a dozen more troops, all heavily armed. It was turning into an all-out siege.
“There’s something else,” said Parks.
“Yes?”
“I was thinking again about the Nullarbor blast, and something stirred in my memory. I had a look through some back issues of Conspiracy Theorist and discovered that there is a theory that might explain the sort of damage we saw at Obscurity and on the Nullarbor. It was first postulated in the 1950s but was so far-fetched that even the hard-core pseudoscience elite dismissed it as nonsense. It was called Cold Ignition Fusion and was a way of building a small thermonuclear device using a deuterium/tritium fuel that could be self-extracting from the heavy hydrogen found in groundwater, and then a mass-induced organic trigger to set it off. It’s on a par with the moon being made of green cheese and the existence of a Mayan temple under Cleethorpes, but the result would be pretty much what we saw at Obscurity and all the others. A small thermonuclear blast in the region of a half to one kiloton.”
“Cold Ignition Fusion?” queried Jack. “Just how impossible is it?”
“In the current climate of scientific thought, it’s in frilly bonkers la-la land, but great minds have been wrong before. In 1933, Ernest Rutherford declared that the vast energies in the atomic nucleus could never be unlocked and that anyone who said otherwise was talking utter moonshine. An undisputed genius, Inspector, yet quite wrong on this occasion. Cold Ignition Fusion is perhaps not impossible but highly, highly improbable—and believe me, my mind is broad.”
“But if it could be done?” asked Mary.
“Hypothetically?” asked Parks.
“Hypothetically.”
“If it could be done,” he said with a smile, “can you imagine the value of such a discovery? Unlimited safe and cheap power from water. Truly, lightning in a bottle.”
“But on the other side of the coin,” said Mary, “bargain-basement nuclear weapons.”
A cold shiver ran down Jack’s spine as events suddenly popped into sharp focus.
“Shit,” he said, “I’ve been an idiot. Quickly: Using Cold Ignition, how much mass would a device have to reach before self-ignition would begin?”
“Almost exactly fifty kilos. The theory is suspect, but quite precise.”
“110001 point 1010111.”
“That’s 49.87 kilos—Katzenberg’s?
“110001 point 1100000.”
“Okay, 49.96. What about Prong’s?”
“110001 point 1011001.”
“Still mighty close—49.89.”
“You’re right,” said Ashley. “There is a connection. Fuchsia’s was 110001 point 1001010; there’s barely one percent difference between them all.”
Jack thumped his fist into his palm. “All a few grams under the magic fifty kilos. I’ve been looking at this ass-about-face. People didn’t blow up those cucumbers. Those cucumbers blew up the people. The champions reach fifty kilos, hit critical mass and—boom.”
“What?” exclaimed Parks, who despite being a leading light in the pseudoscience movement was having serious trouble over this. “Come on, doesn’t that seem a bit improbable?”
“Improbable is standard working procedure within the NCD,” replied Jack grimly. “Cripps, Katzenberg, Prong and Fuchsia just thought they were growing heavy cucumbers, but McGuffin, flitting around with his Men in Green in the background, was changing, crossbreeding, bioengineering and reseeding until he had created a devastatingly destructive power that could be created in a grow bag with nothing more complex than a dibbler and a watering can.”
“You mean…?”
“Right,” growled Jack. “Cuclear energy.”
They all fell silent, pondering on the geopolitical ramifications of such a discovery.
“Hold on a sec,” added Jack in a worried tone. “Fuchsia’s champion was almost at fifty kilos, and he had six others nearly as large that were stolen this morning—where the hell are they now?”
“There were seven thermocuclear devices?” queried Parks, who had latched on to Jack’s outlandish explanation without too much difficulty, as should you. “This is very worrying. The destructive power of a group of devices wouldn’t be arithmetic but exponential—we’re talking a total yield of perhaps fifty kilotons—enough to flatten everything for a half mile in all directions.”
“Jack,” said Mary in a nervous whisper, “we were all requested to be present at the Bob Southey at seven o’clock, but no one knows who asked us.”
The implication wasn’t lost on him. He turned to look at the Bob Southey, then at all the crowds milling about. Everyone was here: himself, Ash, Mary, Parks, Briggs, Bartholomew, Vinnie, even the Bruins, who were being treated in the Southey Medical Center. Everyone, in fact, but NS-4 who’d legged it off to QuangTech. It wasn’t a siege. It was a trap.
“Mary, tell Briggs to evacuate the area immediately and then look for McGuffin. This is going to be one hell of a bang, and he wouldn’t miss it for anything. I’d start checking out distant ridges or any other good viewing points.”
Jack didn’t wait for a reply and ran toward the entrance ramp of the underground garage where he had busted Tarquin Majors—and straight into a cordon of police officers.
“You’re going to have to let me through,” he barked to the Sergeant in command. “There’s a thermocuclear device in there which could destroy half of Reading.”
“Briggs warned us about your little tricks,” retorted Chapman with a faint smile. “No one goes in, no one comes out.”
“I’m head of the NCD, Sergeant. In matters concerning my jurisdiction, I have unlimited access—you know the rules.”
“You’re right about that,” returned the Sergeant, “but you’re not head of the NCD, now, are you?”
“I’m here under DS Mary’s orders—she’s head of the NCD in my stead.”
“Think I don’t read the papers?” replied Chapman with a smirk. “She’s been suspended, too.”
“I don’t have time to argue!” yelled Jack, and he tried to push his way through, but there were four of them, and they held him tight.
“For God’s sake—”
“I’m head of the NCD,” said a voice behind them, “and you can release my associate and let us both pass.”
“You?” said Chapman, staring at the small alien who was glaring up at him. “An alien constable who no one else will work with?”
“I’m NCD and have a badge to prove it. In the event of a superior officer being incapacitated or suspended, authority devolves to the next-ranking officer. In this case, me.”
Chapman looked at Ashley, then at Jack, then nodded to the other officers, who released him. Ashley didn’t wait a second, darting through the cordon with Jack close behind.
“Thanks,” muttered Jack as they hurried into the gloom of the underground car park.
“Never mind that,” replied Ashley. “What are we looking for?”
“Seven cucumbers, each one the size of a small torpedo. They’ll be in a red van.”
They found it on the lower level. Jack looked in the driver’s window. There were several green coveralls dumped on the passenger seat. The key wasn’t in the ignition. He cursed, went round to the back and was just about to open the rear doors when he realized that the van was radiating heat. He touched the door handle with a saliva-tipped fingertip, and it hissed malevolently at him.
“Shit,” he said. “It’s begun.”
He wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and threw open the doors, ducking to avoid the hot waft of air that rolled out. The interior of the van was filled with the giant cucumbers Jack had last seen in Hardy Fuchsia’s greenhouse, with the uppermost cucumber resting on a digital scale. A tube from a bottle was leading into the giant vegetable, with a time switch metering the weight-gaining contents. The digital scale read 49.997 kilos, and already the cucumber’s smooth skin was turning from green to a dark orange and giving out large quantities of heat—the paint on the van’s sides was starting to blister.
They both stared at it blankly for a few seconds.
“I don’t know the first thing about disarming thermocuclear devices,” admitted Jack, the fear rising in his voice. Bomb disposal was usually a case of cutting the blue wire, but there weren’t any wires in sight—and the reaction had already started.
“Well, don’t look at me,” retorted Ashley, going a deeper shade of blue.
“I thought you were meant to be an advanced alien race or something?”
“We are,” replied Ashley indignantly. “I’m just not that good on low-tech stuff. How are you on steam engines and windmills?”
“Okay, okay—let’s not argue about this.”
Jack moved closer and winced with the heat. The cucumber was starting to glow from within, and lighter patches the size of small coins were appearing on its skin.
“We need a moderator,” said Ashley, having just worked out the principles of nuclear-fusion theory from scratch. “The light hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium are combining to form a heavy helium atom and a spare neutron. It’s the spare neutron that continues the reaction—soak up that and this cucumber is just a large and very hot vegetable.”
“So what do we need?” asked Jack, not having understood a word.
“Half a ton of graphite.”
“Graphite? Where the hell are we going to get that from? A million pencils?”
“Or just plain water.”
Jack looked around desperately for a few fire buckets or something and then took an involuntary step back as the reaction grew even hotter. The light patches on the cucumber’s skin formed into dimples and then collapsed inward into holes, which projected shafts of pure white light from the rapidly overheating core. The same effect was beginning to start on the other cucumbers. Even though they were under the necessary fifty kilos, the single critical cucumber was bringing them all up to ignition.
“I’ll find some,” said Jack, making a step to go. But Ashley stopped him.
“It’s already full of holes,” he said. “There’s no time. Do you have your penknife?”
&
nbsp; Jack rummaged in his pocket and drew it out, his hands shaking as he snapped open the large blade.
“I have a liquid core that will do just as well—only take care. As well as being an excellent moderator, it’s also a powerful molecular acid—don’t get it on yourself.”
Ashley closed his eyes and pulled open his jacket to reveal his taut, transparent skin.
“I need a breach in my membrane, sir. You’ve got to stab me.”
Jack stared at him. They took another step back as the heat intensified. The paint had caught fire on the outside of the van.
“I can’t, Ash.”
“Jack,” said Ashley as he placed a single sucker digit on Jack’s forehead, “you must do this.”
“Of course,” replied Jack as the power of Ashley’s infinitely superior intellect pushed aside the barriers of illogical emotional reasoning. “It’s all so very clear.”
And he plunged the knife into the alien’s abdomen without delay. Ashley had tensed himself, and Jack pulled out the knife.
“Stand back, sir.”
The cucumber had started to break down further, and the light and heat were now so intense that Jack had to shield his eyes. Then an arc of soft blue liquid shot from the wound on Ashley’s chest, and with a rapid flickering and a tearing noise, the light in the cucumber began to flash and dance as Ashley’s liquid insides reacted with the subatomic tumult within the cucumber’s core. The light faltered, brightened, flashed, then went out, and all the cucumbers rapidly began to melt under the destructive power of Ashley’s aqueous innards. But it didn’t stop there. The neutron-absorbing cascade of rambosia vitae dissolved not only the cucumbers but the chassis of the van containing them and the concrete floor beneath, making a strange hissing and bubbling noise and giving off a smell like toffee apples.
Ashley had squeezed every last drop from himself and finally fell back empty like a deflated balloon, his once-snug uniform falling off him. Jack cradled Ashley’s now-flattened head in his arms, but he wasn’t yet dead. His eyes flickered open.
“My mind is going,” he said in a soft voice. “I can feel it. All that I am. Tell… tell… What was her name again?”
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