Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  The guts next morning were mostly sheep: grey, tubular and pungent. He tried not to look at them, with the result that he missed the trolley with a heaped armful and dumped them on his feet instead. Stooping to pick them up was no fun whatsoever. Something broke loose inside his stomach as he bent over, and he could feel his intestines being eaten from the inside out. A year ago, he told himself, just over a year ago, I was running the simulations for the quantum phase feedback inversion trials. Maybe at some point I swallowed the reactor pile, and I’m only just starting to feel the effects.

  One year; how time flies. How would it be, he thought, as he slopped the last few yards of sheep gut into the skip, if I took this remarkably fine trolley and pushed it down this well-tiled corridor as fast as it can go; really fast, until it’s travelling at the speed of light? Then all I’d have to do is jump in, and – no, no point. I’d go forward in time, not back, and forward in time would probably find me still here, and that’d be too depressing for words. Oh well.

  Eleven trolley-loads later, he looked up and saw his boss waddling towards him down the corridor, his nose buried in the filthiest handkerchief he’d ever seen in his life. The smell, presumably. Odd. Theo hadn’t noticed the smell for weeks.

  “Got something for you,” his boss said.

  “Me?”

  His boss nodded. “Came in this morning’s post, addressed to you.”

  What? A refrigerator? A camel? “A letter?”

  The boss nodded. “Here.” He took an envelope from his pocket. It was white, apart from a big brown thumbprint. “Who’s writing to you, then?”

  The address was printed, not handwritten. “No idea. Thanks,” he added.

  “You going to open it, then?”

  Theo nodded. “Later,” he said. “In my own time.”

  His boss shrugged and walked away. Theo waited till he was gone, then looked down at the letter. He didn’t get mail any more. For one thing, who knew where to reach him? The writer of this letter, obviously. He frowned at it, then stuffed it into his overall pocket. The only place the letter could possibly have come from was the past, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to have anything to do with all that, thanks all the same. The past had been nice to him for thirty-odd years, but they hadn’t parted on the best of terms. If the letter was from his wife’s lawyers, he wasn’t in the mood.

  His iron resolution lasted three minutes. Then he perched on the edge of the guts trolley, wiped his hands on his overalls and carefully prised back the flap of the letter, like an engineer defusing his thousandth unexploded bomb.

  Dear Mr Bernstein

  He glanced up at the letterhead and saw a bunch of names, huddled together like penned-up cattle. Lawyers. But not the bunch of timber wolves retained by his ex-wife. He frowned.

  Dear Mr Bernstein

  This firm acts for the executors of the late Professor Pieter van Goyen. In his will, Professor van Goyen –

  Time inverted, distance collapsed, and just for a moment he was a brilliant, arrogant, twenty-three-year-old research fellow (the youngest ever in the university’s history) unpacking his books in his new rooms in Leiden. A faint knock at the door; vexed at the interruption, he calls out, “Come in, it’s open”; suddenly there’s a man standing in the doorway.

  A tiny man; four feet ten, if that, and almost perfectly circular; two perfect circles, head and body, with no perceptible neck, no hair, and huge, perfectly round spectacles that made his face look like a Venn diagram. An immaculate dark blue suit, with the trousers turned up almost to the knee, tiny fingers poking out of the turned-up cuffs like little pink worms. Carpet slippers. “Hello,” said a soft, impossibly deep voice, “you must be Theo Bernstein.” Not a request for information, not even a statement; more like an order, to be obeyed without question. Pieter van Goyen.

  Professor Pieter van Goyen, the greatest physicist of his age, triple Nobel laureate, the man whose drive and vision transformed the Very Large Hadron Collider into the Very Very Large Hadron Collider; the man whose life work he’d blown up. On the day Theo left Leiden, at 5 a.m., disguised as a nun to avoid the photographers, Pieter had been there to see him off, a magisterial Michelin man in a bespoke camel coat whose unadjusted hems pooled around his feet, silk pyjamas and flip-flops.

  “I’m sorry”, Theo had mumbled.

  A slight shrug. “Stuff happens. What’ll you do now?”

  Theo couldn’t stop his face cracking into a jagged grin. “That,” he’d said, “is a very good question.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll fix everything.” And, for a fraction of a second, he’d believed it. Except nobody could fix it for the man who’d just turned an entire Alp into a cloud of fine dust, currently grounding all air traffic from Istanbul to Reykjavik. “It may take a little time, but I’ll see to it, don’t you worry.”

  Then the taxi had taken him away, and now Pieter was dead. The world’s shortest giant was gone for ever, and that – well, the things that had happened to Theo Bernstein since he left Leiden had been annoying, verging on tiresome, but Pieter’s death was bad.

  He looked down at the letter;

  – left you the sum of five thousand US dollars and the contents of his safe deposit box.

  Theo never remembered his dreams, even the ones with cucumbers; so, when he woke up on the train to Leiden with a crick in his neck and a mouth that tasted slightly worse then the guts trolley smelt, he was amazed to find that there were scenes and images in his head. It was like finding a stranger in his bath.

  The dream, however, was no big deal; in fact, it had been so dull he could remember yawning, stretching, vainly fighting the unbearable heaviness of his eyelids, and waking up. He’d been in the audience at one of those conferences he’d always found an excuse for not going to. Pieter van Goyen was up on the stage, back turned, writing equations on a huge blackboard. The maths didn’t work, but Pieter didn’t seem aware of it; he carried on chalking and scribbling until he reached the end, whereupon he scrawled x = 7 and triple underlined it with a great flourish, and everybody started to applaud. But x didn’t = 7; a ten-year-old could’ve pointed out the flaws in the algebra. Still, the audience were on their feet, a full-blown standing ovation, and Theo realised he was the only one still sitting down. He shifted uncomfortably, and then he was sitting in the same seat in the same auditorium, next to the same thin woman with glasses and the same tall, bald man, and Pieter was up on the stage writing out more equations, but it was a year later. The equations didn’t work this time, either; but everybody seemed so engrossed in the proceedings that he didn’t dare say anything. Instead, he covered his face with his hand, and that was when his eyelids started to droop, and the clacking of Pieter’s chalk blurred into a raindrops-on-roof soothing lullaby, and he’d yawned and stretched, and –

  Woken up on the train, feeling as though he’d been lynched twice by an apprentice hangman. His left foot had gone to sleep, and so had his right hand. He blinked and licked his lips, and noticed that the seat next to him, which had been empty for the last four hours, was now occupied. Furthermore, his right hand (the invisible one) had gone numb because it was wedged between the armrest and the thigh of the new occupant, a pretty girl in her early twenties.

  Oh, he thought.

  It wasn’t easy to think with his head full of sleep, but he had a stab at it. Apologising and explaining – no, probably not. Gently easing his hand away could well cause more problems than it solved. He’d almost decided on standing up as quickly and as sharply as he could and walking very fast to the next compartment, until he realised that he couldn’t do that, not with a left foot he couldn’t feel any sensation in. That just left staying perfectly still and pretending he was still asleep; an unsatisfying plan, but the best he could think of under the circumstances. Unfortunately, before he could close his eyes and do the deep, regular breathing, the girl looked up from her book and smiled at him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  It’s like this, he rehearsed. My right
arm’s invisible, because of an industrial accident, and you got in after I fell asleep, and my right hand – no, not really. “Hi,” he sort of gurgled.

  “You were fast asleep,” she said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

  “What? Oh, no, not at all.” He tried to sit up a bit straighter, but his trapped hand tethered him like an anchor. Any moment now, he thought, she’ll go back to reading her book, and then maybe I can sort of wriggle my back up the seat a bit and get straight.

  She really was very pretty, which didn’t help; straight, shoulder-length black hair, deep brown eyes, and she’d been reading Hawking and Mlodinow on string theory. Under different circumstances this wouldn’t be a bad place to be. As it was –

  “I couldn’t help noticing,” she said. “Your book.”

  “What?” He glanced down. In his lap, where it had fallen, was the copy of Greenidge and Chen’s Macrodimensional Field Inversion Dynamics which had sent him to sleep in the first place. Properly speaking, in fact, this whole mess was their fault. “Oh, that.”

  “You’re a physicist.”

  “Was,” he said. “Not any more.”

  “Wait a minute.” She was looking at him, and he was sure he could see the usual signs. Very occasionally, people recognised him (his face had been all over the TV for a short time, while they were shoring up what was left of the mountain) and their reaction was always the same. Fascinated horror, embarrassment, curiosity. You’re the guy who blew up the VVLHC.

  “You’re Theo Bernstein,” she said.

  Here goes. He sighed. “Yes.”

  “Oh, this is so amazing.”

  It was as if he was a boxer, and his opponent, having just belted him in the solar plexus, had leaned forward and kissed him on the nose. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m such a fan of your work,” she said. “Your paper on the supersymmetry of fermions was just so—” She paused and took a deep breath. “It changed my life,” she said.

  He frowned. “It did?”

  “Oh, yes. It was like I’d been blind since birth, and then suddenly, wham!”

  Then suddenly, wham. Not how he remembered it. His abiding memory of that particular paper had been sitting in front of his laptop at 3 a.m. with a violent coffee headache, trying to figure out where the glaring inconsistency he’d just noticed had crept in from, and how he was going to get round it in time to meet a horribly close deadline. Now, after all this time, he couldn’t remember what he’d actually said. “Um, I’m glad you liked it,” he said. “So, you’re a physicist too.”

  “Well, kind of.” She actually blushed. He’d never met a girl who blushed. Red-faced with fury, yes. “I’m just starting as a postgraduate at MIT, working on Reimann manifolds, though I’m hoping one day I could join the SGBHC project.” She paused and looked shyly down at her hands. “If I’m good enough,” she added. “Which isn’t very likely.”

  It felt like a cue, and he didn’t know his lines. “Well,” he said, “they took me, so they can’t be too picky. Provided you don’t blow anything up, you should be just fine.”

  “That was so awful, wasn’t it?” She gave him a look of deep, sincere compassion, which made him feel like he’d just been hit over the head with a million dollars. “I mean, I can’t imagine how you must’ve felt, all those years of brilliant hard work, and then one little bit of bad luck.”

  Bad luck, he thought. Not really. His only slice of bad luck was being the older child of parents whose eldest son was an idiot. The sort of thing that could happen to anyone, perhaps, but it had happened to him. “Nice of you to say so,” he mumbled.

  “And I definitely think they were all so horrible to you afterwards,” she went on. “I mean, if it hadn’t been for you, there wouldn’t have been a VVLHC to blow up.”

  That’s a way of looking at it, he thought. A bit like saying the Allies owed their victory in the Second World War to Hitler, because they could never have won the war if he hadn’t started it. Time, he decided, to change the subject. “Reimann manifolds,” he said. “That’s a pretty interesting field.”

  Her eyes shone. “Oh yes,” she said, and spent the next five minutes telling him a lot of stuff he already knew about Reimann manifolds, time he spent vainly trying to figure out a way of getting her to move her leg without actually pushing her out of her seat. At the end of the interval, the numbness in his right hand had been replaced by the most violent attack of pins and needles he’d ever experienced.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but you’re sitting on my hand.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “My hand.” Oh well, he thought, and gently pulled it free. For a moment or so, the world was a brilliantly coloured firework display, each scintillating hue a variation on the central theme of pain. “It’s invisible,” he explained. “That’s why you didn’t see it.”

  “Invis—” She stared at him. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s quite all right.” He spread his fingers out on his knee and took a couple of deep breaths. “It was the accident, you see. I was the only person in the building at the time, thank God, and something really, really weird happened, I honestly don’t remember anything about it; and when I came round in the hospital, it was gone. Only it wasn’t. I tried to tell the doctors it was still there, but they didn’t believe me. They just told me about phantom limb syndrome and arranged counselling.” He shrugged. “It can be a real nuisance sometimes, but what the hell?”

  She was looking at the end of his sleeve. “Couldn’t you, like, paint it or something?”

  He grinned. “Anything that touches it disappears too,” he said. “There’s an invisible shirt sleeve covering it right now. When I take the shirt off, it’ll reappear.”

  “Oh wow.” Her eyes were wide. “That’s just so amazing. What makes it do that, do you think?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, I was a physicist. These days, I’m just a one-armed unemployable. I just try not to think about it.”

  “But—” She stopped. “I understand,” she said. “It must be so painful for you. But still, it’s such a waste, I mean, one of the most brilliant minds of the twenty-first century—” She stopped again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll shut up now.”

  He grinned. “Actually, I’ve been called worse,” he said. “But you’re wrong. A brilliant mind doesn’t make all that extra work for the cartographers.”

  She laughed, then immediately resumed her serious face. “If I had a talent like yours, nothing on earth would stop me using it. I’d force them to listen to me, no matter what. I mean, you actually discovered the twelfth dimension. That was so cool.”

  There’s only so much of that kind of thing a man can take. “Tell me more about what you’re doing,” he said. “It sounds really—”

  Fortunately he didn’t have to supply a suitable adjective. She launched into another long and detailed account, allowing him time to give himself a stern talking-to. No more self-belief, because look what that got you into the last time. And positively no more falling in love. Absolutely not.

  “So I was wondering if…” She’d sort of ground to a halt, and was looking hopefully at him, like a dog that can see the biscuit in its owner’s hand. “I know, it’s, like, so presumptuous of me, and if you say no, no way, I’ll quite understand, I really, really will. But if you could see your way to just running your eye over these equations, see if you can find where I’ve gone wrong—”

  Ah. Right. Actually, he was so grateful to her for exhibiting properly normal opportunism that he forgave her completely. It made the whole encounter that bit less surreal. “Sure,” he said. “Let me see what you’ve got.”

  She dived into her bag like a trained seal and emerged with the latest model LoganBerry. “The truth is,” she said, “my maths isn’t good enough for me to tackle a set of equations like this. I mean, I can ask the question, but I’m, like, not equipped to answer it, which is so frustrating, because I’m sure I’m nearly there, only—”


  “Mphm.” He glanced at the complex patterns of numbers and symbols and blinked twice. Hot stuff. Tuning out her voice, he began to trace his way through the maze.

  Halfway down the screen, he stopped. I know this place, he thought.

  Or at least, once upon a time I came quite close. So, let’s see: if x is the interface, the dividing wall between dimensions, and y is the energy required to convert that interface into matter, and z is – He frowned. He could see quite clearly that z in this context was a whole lot more than just the last letter of the alphabet, but what, exactly? Hell, if he didn’t know better, he could almost believe that z was –

  He realised he’d stopped breathing. “Are you OK?” she said.

  “What? Oh, yes, fine.”

  “Only you went this funny colour.”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  If z was what he thought it was, and if he followed it through and actually found z, which was more than likely, given the direction the numbers were flowing.

  He lifted his head a little and looked at the screen. I know what this is, he thought.

  It’s a bomb.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but what’s it for?”

  She frowned, just a little. “What?”

  “The purpose of the exercise. What you’re trying to achieve.”

  She smiled. It was the sort of smile you might come up with if you’d heard smiles described but never actually seen one. “It’s, like, pure research,” she said. “It’s not actually for anything.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s a comfort. Because you do realise, if you were actually to solve these equations, you’d be able to punch a hole clean through the fabric of—”

  With a hideous, ear-splitting screech she lifted both arms into the air, as though grabbing hold of something (but there was nothing there.) In that split second, her face seemed to change. Her eyes turned yellow and sank back into her skull, her nose melted like cheese, some sort of fangs or tusks splayed out of the side of her mouth. Then it was as though a small but intensely concentrated tornado formed around her, twisting her head and body into a thin spiral, like a screw-thread. “So long, loser,” she screamed, and vanished.