The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “And it’s infested by rats,” I said.

  “Apparently.” Ms Breslin’s nervousness was overwhelming her now. “I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble.”

  I smiled at her. “Don’t be. Stuff happens. You should try running elderly solicitors. And thanks for bringing me out so quickly.”

  She seemed surprised to be thanked. Her eyes widened, those eyes I remembered, seawater green.

  Schoolkids, teachers, white-coated lab workers and a couple of management suits gathered by an entrance. I recognized Penny, slim and small in her school uniform. Penny was actually cradling the two baby rats that were the cause of all the trouble, pink slivers of flesh. She smiled at me in the wry, almost adult way she had. “Hello, Dad. Look what I found.”

  It was where she had found the animals that was the problem. An apologetic site manager showed me a ball of glass and steel a couple of metres across, sealed save for vents to either side. “When the Pevatron is operational the particle beams will run through this sphere.” The manager was about fifty, greying, a scientist turned administrator. He used his fists to mime particles colliding. “Electrons and positrons will slam into each other at a whisker below the speed of light. Because they’re elementary particles, you see, unlike the protons they use in the LHC in Switzerland, we can control the energies of collision very precisely . . . Well. The point is this chamber will be evacuated when the facility is in use.”

  “A vacuum.”

  “And so it’s entirely sealed off, save for the valves to either side.”

  “There must be air in it today, or these baby rats wouldn’t have survived.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the rats, Dad,” Penny said brightly. “In fact they were nice and warm when I picked them up, warm little bellies.”

  “But,” said the manager, “there’s no way the rats could have got in there in the first place . . .”

  I inspected the cage for myself. A hermetically sealed sphere, two baby rats, no sign of a mother or nest. It was a locked-room mystery, with rats. When Penny found the rats the junior technician who had been hosting the school party immediately got suspicious.

  “Which is why we called you,” said the site manager apologetically. “Ben’s guess that Penny had planted the rats did make sense. Occam’s razor, you know. The simplest hypothesis is likely to be correct. We have to take such allegations seriously – terrorism and all that. But in this case Occam let us down. We looked over the sphere; there’s simply no way the brightest child, and I’m sure Penny is bright as a button, could have set this up. Well, we got into the sphere and saved the baby rats. Didn’t want a gaggle of traumatized school-children on our hands.” He sighed. “Of all the issues I’ve had to wrestle with over this project – academic rivalries, funding cuts, anti-science protestors – I never expected to have to deal with vermin! Well. I do apologise for your trouble. Of course we’ll take care of those two beasts for you.” He reached out for the baby rats.

  Penny clutched them to her chest. “What will you do, destroy them?”

  “Well – ”

  “Oh, Dad, can’t we keep them? They’ve already been locked up in a particle accelerator. And they’re only babies.”

  “Penny, be serious.”

  “Lots of people have rats for pets,” Penny said, more in hope than belief.

  Ms Breslin said, “Actually that’s true. We keep a few at the school. I could help you get set up if you like. They’re so young they might need mother’s milk for a while . . . Oh.” She glanced at me. “I’m not helping, am I?”

  What she had said had made no difference; I had already seen there was only one positive outcome from what might have been a very difficult day. I said to Penny, “OK, you can keep them. But you’re responsible for cleaning them out. Clear?”

  Ms Breslin asked, “What will you call them?”

  Penny, beaming, held up the rats. “Rutherford and Appleton – ow! Rutherford just bit me.”

  “Let me hold them for you – I’ve gloves.”

  So Ms Breslin held them carefully in her gloved hands as the party walked out of RAL, all the way back to the gate. And as we passed back out through security, that Geiger gate bleeped. Ms Breslin held up the little animals and inspected them curiously.

  We saw a lot of Ms Breslin in the weeks after that – although we became “Amanda” and “Joe” when she started to visit us at home. The house I had bought with Mary, Penny’s mother, was too big for the two of us, but neither of us had wanted to move away from the memories. I could see Amanda working some of this out as she glanced around the place.

  She found a big old parrot’s cage for our rats, and she and Penny worked on making runs and providing toys and litter. Amanda helped us “rat-proof” our home, as she put it. I had to lift my piles of books off the floor and up onto shelves, and we put covers over the soft furnishings as a guard against territory-marking urine spurts, and I slit lengths of old hosepipe to cover electric flex. We kept the rats in a corner of our dining room, close by a window. I didn’t mind the little beasts save for a lingering stink of urine. And I enjoyed Amanda’s visits.

  After a few weeks the rats were very active, with jet black hair and bright, glittering little eyes. Amanda said they were growing unusually fast. She was also curious about the way they’d triggered the RAL Geigers. She asked if she could bring some instruments home from the school’s physics lab to test them.

  She showed up on a rainy May day, about four weeks after we had acquired the rats, with instruments that turned out to be advanced forms of radiation detectors. My own physics GCSE was in the dim past. “In my day we didn’t have this kind of stuff – just crackling Geiger counters.”

  “Fantastic, isn’t it? Instrumentation has gotten so cheap. Now schoolkids can detect cosmic rays . . .” Penny and Amanda manipulated the rats, holding them up before the detectors, while Amanda inspected them. “They are growing fast,” she said. “I mean, they can’t have been more than a few days old when Penny found them, but their eyes were already open.” And though they should have been dependent on their mother’s milk until they were four weeks old, from the beginning they’d been able to take solid food – high-protein puppy food, recommended by Amanda.

  Appleton, it turned out, was a female – a doe, as Amanda put it. “And she’s pregnant,” Amanda said now, feeling the rat’s tiny belly.

  Penny stared. “By her brother? Eughh.”

  “She’s young to be fertile but it’s not impossible . . . You generally try to separate siblings, always assuming Rutherford is her sibling.” One of her sensor boxes bleeped.

  I asked, “And she’s giving off cosmic rays?”

  “Dad,” Penny said, “cosmic rays come from supernovas and stuff. Rats do not give off cosmic rays.”

  “OK, so why is Amanda’s box bleeping?”

  Amanda was downloading a record onto a laptop. “There is some kind of high-energy radiation. Just a trace.” She passed a plastic wand over Appleton’s stomach. “A source, around here.”

  “Inside her?” Penny asked.

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked immediately. “For us, I mean.”

  “Oh, no, it’s the merest trace – you have more energetic particles lacing through your body all the time, from all sorts of natural sources. This would make no difference. Odd, though.”

  Penny said, “Maybe the rats ate some plutonium in that atomic lab. They were just babies. They must have been hungry. They’d have eaten anything.”

  But there is no plutonium in a particle accelerator. “Another mystery,” I said.

  “Ow!” Penny pulled her hands back and dropped Rutherford, who scampered off behind a radiator. “That little bugger nipped me again!”

  “Language,” I said. This time the rat had made her hand bleed. “That one’s getting vicious.”

  “Some do,” Amanda said. “He’s probably just being macho. Like a teenage boy.” She put Appleton back in her cage. “Joe, I’ll fetch some
TCP if you round up Rutherford.”

  “OK. You sit still, Penny, and try not to bleed on anything.”

  I picked up a hearth brush and fish net and went after Rutherford. After a month we were working out a routine. I was confident the beast couldn’t get out of the room; the trick was to shepherd him with the brush, and then swipe him gently with the net. I soon backed him into a corner of the room. He stood on his haunches looking back at me, and I thought I saw traces of Penny’s blood around his mouth. I dropped the brush to block his exit to my left, and when he made a run for it I dropped the net in his path to my right.

  And missed him. He ended up running between my legs as if I was a nutmegged goalkeeper, following a course a good thirty degrees away from the one I’d thought he’d chosen. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to miss him so badly.

  I tried again. I chased him down to a corner of the room’s blocked-off fireplace, and tried the same routine: brush in one hand, net in the other. But again he ran off on a course very different from the one I saw him choose.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Amanda said. She’d returned and was dabbing at Penny’s bitten hand. “Joe – do you mind if I webcam you?”

  “What for? To give your buddies in the staff room a laugh?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.” She swivelled her laptop so it faced me. “There’s something funny going on, I think. Try catching him again.”

  It took me three more goes to trap him. Each time he fooled me, as if sending me chasing a ghost. I got him in the end by using a rucked-up bit of carpet to create a channel he couldn’t escape from.

  With both rats safely back in the cage Amanda ran over her webcam footage. “Well, that’s very odd. Look. Your second attempt is the clearest . . .”

  Rutherford looked as if he had been heading towards my right. That was the way I dropped the net, and as Penny’s shoulder happened to be in the frame, I could see from her reaction she thought he was heading that way too. But he headed left, and darted off the screen.

  “I’m sure I reacted after he made his move.”

  “You did, every time I watched you.” Amanda said carefully, “Each time it’s as if he got another chance. As if, knowing what you would do, he went back and made a second choice.”

  “‘Went back’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Amanda might have been careful in her choice of words, but Penny wasn’t. “We did fish them out of an atomic lab, Dad. What did you expect? Time-travelling mutant radioactive rats! Brilliant,” she said gleefully.

  We continued to see a good deal of Ms Amanda Breslin as the rats grew into two big, heavy, hungry, snappy animals. Amanda devised tests to try to establish the truth of the mysterious “time-hopping”. She and Penny built elaborate mazes of cardboard and plastic, baited with cheese and timed locks, but their results were inconclusive. Penny, designing experiments and keeping notes, loved all this. Amanda must be a hell of a teacher, I thought.

  And every so often I was reminded of that doctorate in physics.

  “I mean, think what an evolutionary advantage it would be,” she said. “When you’re chasing your lunch, or trying to keep from being somebody else’s lunch – if you make a mistake you can go back, even just a few seconds, and choose the option that keeps you safe, or fed. Once such a facility rose in a population you’d expect it to propagate fast.”

  “If they’re changing the past,” Penny said, “why would we remember? Our memories should be changed too.”

  “Good question,” Amanda said respectfully. “Maybe any changes to the time stream are localized – the effects travelling no wider than the rats need them to be. After all time travel must be energy-consuming. In general it ought to be a last resort. Maybe the time-travel reflex cuts in only as an emergency option when the rat is cornered. We might be able to use that to test them . . .”

  But Penny absolutely vetoed doing any kind of experiment that would put her rats under stress.

  I couldn’t really have cared less about rats, even time-travelling rats. But it was a pleasure to come home after another dull day with dusty solicitors, to help Penny with the rats’ feed or with cleaning them out, and to talk over their latest exploits. “Who would have thought,” as Penny said, “that a pair of glow-in-the-dark rodents would bring us together?”

  And then there was Amanda. At first it was odd to have a woman of my age around the house again. Even after weeks she was awkward, oddly shy, but with that sharp brain and a healthy dose of empathy she was always good company.

  I did try to find out more about her. “You said you did a PhD. Wouldn’t you rather be working in a place like RAL, than with rats and schoolkids?”

  “Not me.” She pushed back her hair. “Academia is a pretty brutal world, you know. Petty bullying when you’re junior, and lifelong rivalries when you’re older.”

  “Like a rat pack,” Penny said.

  “Oh, academics make rats look civilized.”

  “All that conflict wasn’t for you,” I suggested. “And I’m guessing you don’t enjoy stress.”

  “Well, that’s true. We evolved as hunter-gatherers, which is generally a low-stress lifestyle. Children and animals around all the time too. Maybe I’m a throwback.” She smiled.

  She seemed to enjoy our company, as long as we had the rats as neutral ground between us. She evidently had nobody at home, no partner or kids. Penny clearly hoped that some kind of relationship was going to bloom between us, that her mother would be replaced in her life’s hierarchy of security by a favourite teacher. It wasn’t impossible. I was drawn into those seawater eyes. But I could see nothing but complications, and held back, taking it slowly.

  Too slowly, in the event. In the brief time we had left, I learned little more about Amanda’s past and her private life, and nothing about her few sad, failed love affairs. For in the end, of course, the rats got in the way.

  On the day Appleton gave birth Amanda stayed with us late into the evening, as the rat suckled her babies, a dozen of them. Then it was about seven weeks since we’d brought the rats home from RAL. It was early June now, and the evening was long, the air through the open window fresh and full of the scent of cut grass. Didcot’s not an exciting place, but on a warm summer evening, with the birds singing and the lawns green, middle England is as pretty a place as you’ll find anywhere. The baby rats had made Penny happy. It was a good day, and by about eleven p.m., hours after the rat had given birth, I felt pretty mellow, and was vaguely wondering how I could arrange for some time alone with Amanda.

  Then Penny broke the mood with a sudden scream. Amanda and I rushed to see what was wrong. Of the dozen babies, only two remained in the cage with Appleton, who seemed to be sleeping soundly.

  Penny was distressed. She thought the babies must have been eaten by their mother, a gruesome thought, and I hugged her.

  But Amanda calmly pointed out there was no evidence of such cannibalism. “If Appleton had eaten all those babies,” she said reasonably, “we’d have heard, and we’d see the by-products. The mess.”

  “Then where are the little beggars?” I snapped. “We’ve been sitting by this damn cage all day. Baby rats don’t just disappear – ”

  “Baby rats just appeared,” Penny pointed out. “Inside the accelerator, remember? Maybe they time-travelled out.”

  Now, given what had gone before, that was a reasonable suggestion. But with my mood shattered I’d had enough of mutant rats. I snorted, and as Amanda and Penny exchanged glances, I turned up the lights and started a more conventional search around the room. I soon found a hole, gnawed through the skirting board. When I dug into the hole with a probing finger, I found bits of paper, stinking of urine. A rat nest.

  I sat back on my heels, looking at the hole, and Penny and Amanda joined me.

  “Baby rats can’t gnaw holes that size,” Penny said.

  “Adults can,” said Amanda. She ran a finger around the rim of the hole. “The nest looks weeks old to me. Three or four?�
�

  “The thing is,” I said reluctantly, “I checked this board this morning. I checked the whole room. I usually do. There was no hole here. I’m sure of it. And certainly not a three-week-old nest.”

  Penny grasped the situation immediately. “The babies travelled back in time, three or four weeks. They went back in time, and built a nest here and grew up.”

  Amanda nodded. “They changed the past. So a nest exists here now where it didn’t before.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “How about Occam’s razor? Isn’t it simpler to suppose that we’ve just got another bunch of rats, that just happened to show up now – or were drawn by the scent of Rutherford and Appleton?”

  Penny shook her head. “Won’t wash, Dad. That doesn’t explain the way the hole just magically appeared.”

  Amanda, kneeling down, was still inspecting the hole. “I wish I had a torch . . . I can’t see evidence of more than a couple of animals here. Three at the most? But we lost maybe ten of our dozen babies. So where are the rest?”

  Penny ran to her laptop and immediately began scanning news sites, blogs, police and health resources, for unusual sightings of rats. That night there were four sightings in the Didcot area – four encounters with rats where no rats had been seen before, big, aggressive animals that were hard to catch. One report claimed a rat had attacked an infant in her cot. Penny looked at us, her eyes shining in the screen’s silver light. “Oops,” she said.

  Amanda stood up. “I think it’s time we took this a bit more seriously. Penny, do you mind if I take one of these babies into RAL for some tests? I have contacts there . . .”

  That was week seven, as we started to count it later: the seventh week since Penny first spotted those baby rats in their sealed-up sphere at RAL.

  The sightings of the rats continued through spring and summer, spreading out through Oxfordshire and Berkshire, the range increasing by roughly a couple of kilometres every three weeks. Penny and I set up an Ordnance Survey map on the wall of the dining room, and tracked the sightings with sticky coloured dots. By the beginning of September – week twenty – our dots had got as far as Abingdon, about eight kilometres away. The attacks on food stores, pets, livestock and, unfortunately, people, were getting more serious, and there were reports of the creatures causing other problems by gnawing through power lines, telephone optic-fibre cables and plastic water pipes. The rats were ferociously difficult to kill or contain, baffling the vermin controllers. The health authorities and the police were considering quarantining off an infected zone to try to stop the spread of the tabloids’ “super-rats”.