The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 47

Vincent, walking by my side through a Russian military research base.

Mr Hulne, if only you could see me now.

He let me keep the gun as we walked through the belly of his facility. What was it to him? Killing him would gain me nothing, and killing myself at this precipitous time would also gain me nothing but the irritation of going through puberty again. People moved out of his way, their eyes flickering to me in doubt, but no one questioned him. In his shabby jacket and rolled-up socks, this young man was clearly in charge, clearly a source of reverence, and a wave of his hand opened every sealed door, cleared every armed patrol.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he remarked as we headed deeper down, until the air grew cold and heavy with moisture. “When I realised that a piece of my technology had made it on to the open market before its time, I rather hoped the Cronus Club would be too busy drinking to pay the matter any attention. I was surprised anyone even noticed–but pleased that of all the people to notice, it was you, Harry. Is it Harry at the moment?”

I shrugged. “Harry’s as good as anything else. What about you? How did you end up Vitali?”

A dismissive shrug. “I tried working through the American industrial complex for a few lives,” he grumbled, “but keeping any sort of technological innovation private in that environment is almost impossible. If it wasn’t businessmen or greedy scientists, it was army generals or State Department officials demanding to know how many I could produce, and how fast. Terribly crude nation, America. At least with the Soviets the culture is bred to secrecy.”

The further we went, the colder it grew, and the thickness of the trunking and cables in the corridor increased until the walls were almost entirely lost behind pipes and wires fatter than my arm. “How have you been since I saw you last?” he added airily. “Did you get your professorship?”

“What? Yes, eventually. Only after Fred Hoyle threatened to punch me though.”

“Dear me, what a violent academic career you had.”

“In fairness, you and Hoyle were the only two individuals in that entire life who came close to physical violence.”

“I’m glad to think I was keeping good company. Here, you’d better take one of these.”

He handed me a thin, clear badge. I examined it–a simple radiation token, crude in that it could only tell you if you’d been exposed, rather than how bad your condition was.

“Vincent, you seem far too sophisticated to be building nukes for the Soviets,” I tutted. “What is your arrangement, precisely?”

“Oh, I build nukes,” he said, airily pulling back a lock on a metal door the size of a small castle. “But I’m very careful to ensure that clever men don’t reach their full potential, and minor errors of manufacturing are introduced into the final process so, when the device goes up, it can do so on a historical schedule. I’m sure even the Cronus Club would notice a shift in the global arms race.”

“And no one asks any questions?”

“As I said,” he replied brightly, “remarkable system the Soviets have.”

The door, during all this, had been sliding back with glacial sluggishness. Now it stood open, and Vincent stepped into a cavern of iron and electricity. All the trunking in the building seemed to converge here, and the air was notably warmer than in the gloomy corridors which had led down to this depth. Fans greater than the propellors on the Titanic whirred and hummed, and at the centre of all this stood a monolith of a machine. Where the Americans might have attempted to dress up their creation, Vincent and his team had gone for pure, practical functionality, parts welded together by brute force, the innards hanging exposed, cables labelled with white tape and pen, the only lights flashing those which actually, desperately, urgently needed to flash. It looked like the DIY class of a technological god who had run out of heat shrink tubing even before he’d begun. Men and women in little white badges scurried beneath the hulking shadow of this creature, dragging ladders across the floor to climb up to some unseen access port high above its warping pyramid base.

“What do you think?” asked Vincent brightly.

I felt the weight of the gun in my pocket and replied as calmly as I could, “That rather depends on what I’m looking at.”

“Harry,” he chided, “you disappoint me.”

His disappointment was an invitation for deduction. Reluctantly, I deduced. “All right.” I sighed. “You’re clearly operating solid-state computing of a kind that won’t be invented for a good fifteen years; over there I can see liquid cooling units which again I doubt will come into use for another seventeen years. The radiation badges combined with the lead-lined walls everywhere imply a radiation source, but you’re clearly not running reactors as there’s not enough water nearby for you to cool the system–unless, that is, your reactor technology is more than fifty years ahead of the time?”

“No reactors,” he agreed. “But you’re correct as to the radioactive source.”

“Criticality is a concern,” I went on, “but not a big enough one for you to have men in hazard suits running around. The large amount of networking coming off the machine suggests you’re feeding data out as well as energy in; that implies experiments which are being monitored rather than a fully fledged manufacturing process. In conclusion… you’re studying something, probably sub-atomic, using technology decades ahead of its time, in a secret base in the middle of the USSR, and–this is what continues to baffle me–you seem pleased at this precise situation.”

Indeed, he was beaming proudly at his machine. “Of course I’m pleased, Harry,” he said. “With the insights we glean from this machine, we can change everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything,” he repeated, and by the look in his eye I actually thought he might mean it. “Would you like to help?”

“Help?”

“Help,” he parroted, “being a deed that is the opposite of hinder?”

“Even were this entire enterprise not in violation of everything the Club stands for–” a rolling raspberry noise was made at this suggestion “–I really don’t know what it is I’d be helping with.”

He put his arm over my shoulder, hugged me to his side like a long-lost friend. Was this the man who, so many centuries ago, had kissed Frances by the lawns and punched me to the floor for being kalachakra? “Harry,” he said firmly, “what would you say to building a quantum mirror?”