Obelisk Page 23

  Another shot. This one slammed into the weapon’s concrete base; he felt chips fly up and dig into his heel, through his sock. The petty pain seemed absurd. Surely they could see him, even if he couldn’t see them. It occurred to him that they were playing with him.

  Another shot screamed past his head.

  He cried out, and found himself stumbling forward against the laser’s open barrel. He held onto its rim, and as the cannon tilted back he was lifted up bodily. He heard a hum, felt in his gut the huge energies gathering. His fingers strained to hold his weight. Another shot cracked past his head.

  The laser grumbled, as if waking.

  His eyes registered the light for the briefest of instants before his retinas were seared.

  And he cast a shadow kilometres long as the beam punched through the air, seeking Altair.

  OTHER TODAYS

  THE PEVATRON RATS

  ‘Mr Hathaway, it’s Amanda Breslin. Ms Breslin from the high school?’

  A call from Penny’s teacher wasn’t particularly welcome in the middle of the working day. I kicked closed the office door. ‘Yes, Ms Breslin. Is something wrong?’

  ‘Not exactly …’

  That hesitation triggered memories of meeting her at the last parent–teacher night: a slim woman, intense, shy, eyes that drew you in. Penny, twelve years old, was on a school field trip to Harwell today, the nuclear lab. I had lurid imaginings of what might have gone wrong. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Penny found some rats.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two rats, to be precise. Babies. The problem is, the rats shouldn’t have been where they were. Couldn’t have been, in fact. The lab authorities suspect this is some kind of hoax played by the kids. And since it was Penny who found them …’

  Ever since the cancer that had taken her mother three years before, I had fretted continually about Penny’s welfare. Now Ms Breslin’s prevaricating about what seemed a trivial matter irritated me. ‘What’s this all about? Where exactly did she find these damn rats?’

  I heard Ms Breslin take a breath. ‘In a particle accelerator.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’ And I hung up, rudely. I made some excuses to old Harrison, the senior partner, and went to get my car.

  That was the start of it for me. Soon, of course, the whole county was going to be getting calls and mails about rats turning up where they shouldn’t be. I suppose it’s my peculiar distinction to have been the very first.

  Harwell is only a couple of miles west of Didcot, where we lived. It didn’t take me long to drive over.

  Penny was doing fine at school, as far as I could tell. That was the trouble – I was increasingly unsure that I could tell. The school itself was very alien to a twentieth-century relic like me, with more tablets than teachers, who all had job titles like ‘motivational counsellor’. Penny and I had muddled through the first couple of years after we lost her mother, when she was still essentially a child. Now, at twelve, I knew she was moving into a more complex phase of her life – still fascinated by horses, but increasingly distracted by bad-boy soccer players with sculpted hair.

  I was an office manager for a firm of solicitors. I can handle people reasonably well, I think – crusty old lawyers and their clients, anyhow. How well I could handle the moods and dilemmas of a teenage daughter I was much less sure. Maybe today was going to be a test.

  On the way in I looked up Harwell on my phone. The place had been founded after the Second World War as a nuclear laboratory, on an old RAF airfield close to Oxford University. Some good work was done there, in fission reactor designs and fusion experiments. But as the decades wore away the slowdown of government science and the reduced threat of nuclear war saw the place go through complicated sell-offs. RAL, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, still operates within what is now known, almost inevitably, as the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. A few months back RAL had briefly made the headlines when the public were first allowed to see the revolutionary new Pevatron, a new breed of particle accelerator, which was due to come online in a couple more years. And that was why Penny’s school party had gone there that day.

  As I approached the gate I had to drive through a sullen picket line of protestors. They were calm and sane-looking, and their placards, leaning against the outer fence, were wordy warnings about the dangers of doing high-energy physics in the middle of the English countryside: black holes might be created, or wormholes, or ‘vacuum collapses’ might be triggered, none of which meant very much to me.

  Ms Breslin met me at the security gate, as I signed bits of paper and submitted to retinal and DNA scans. I even had to pass through a Geiger-counter trap, as if I might try to smuggle radioactive materials into a nuclear laboratory. Then we walked across the laboratory campus, side by side, her pace rapid, edgy. ‘Harwell’s a major local employer, of course,’ she said, talking too fast, ‘and for the kids to be able to see a world-class science facility in development right on their doorstep is a great opportunity – it helps that I know a couple of the scientists on staff here personally …’

  It was a bright spring day, late April, with a bit of wind that blew Ms Breslin’s hair around her face. She was a slim woman, tall, in her late thirties, a bit younger than me, with hints of grey in her tied-back brown hair. She struck me as wistful, a woman at the end of her youth and, I guessed, alone; she wore no rings.

  The lab buildings were blocky and old-fashioned, laid out in a rough grid pattern, like a military base. But every so often I glimpsed a dome, silent and sinister, rising beyond the tiled rooftops, and much of the site was sealed off by fences plastered with warning signs and radiation symbols.

  The facility we were approaching was a kilometre across, but unprepossessing, like a ring of garden sheds set out across the scarred runway of the old airfield.

  ‘That’s the Pevatron,’ I prompted her.

  ‘It is a fantastic development,’ she said. ‘Called the Pevatron because it can reach energies of peta-electron volts – that’s ten to power fifteen, a million billion. Orders of magnitude more even than the big new International Linear Collider in Japan, and at a fraction of the cost and scale thanks to the new methods they’ve developed here. It’s all to do with room-temperature superconductors controlled at the femtosecond scale by a new quantum computer – I have a physics PhD myself and I barely understand it …’

  Given that qualification I wondered how she had ended up teaching high school kids. ‘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. You should try running elderly solicitors. Stuff happens. And thanks for getting me out here 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 saw 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, which are bags of quarks, we can control the energies of collision very precisely … Well. The point is this chamber will be evacuated when the facil
ity 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. ‘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 traumatised schoolchildren 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 their 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 ended up being 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 in a charity shop 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 tablet. ‘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.’

  So I picked up a hearth brush and fish net and went after Rutherford.

  After a month we were working out a protocol for such incidents. 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 to my right, in his path.

  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. This time 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 film you?’

  ‘
What for? To give your buddies in the staffroom a laugh?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ She swivelled her tablet 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 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 that 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 their 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 have been 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.’