The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

THE INCREDIBLE EXPLODING MAN by Dave Hutchinson

From a distance, the first thing you saw was the cloud.

It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.

The young lieutenant sitting across from me looked tired and ill. They burned out quickly here on the Perimeter—the constant stress of keeping things from getting through the fence, the constant terror of what they would have to do if something did. A typical tour out here lasted less than six months, then they were rotated back to their units and replacements were brought in. I sometimes wondered why we were bothering to keep it secret; if we waited long enough the entire US Marine Corps would have spent time here.

I leaned forward and raised my voice over the sound of the engines and said to the lieutenant, “How old are you, son?”

The lieutenant just looked blankly at me. Beside him, I saw Former Corporal Fenwick roll his eyes.

“Just trying to make conversation,” I said, sitting back. The lieutenant didn’t respond. He didn’t know who I was—or rather, he had been told I was a specialist, come to perform routine maintenance on the sensors installed all over the Site. There was no way to tell whether he believed that or not, or if he even cared. He was trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but when he thought nobody was looking he kept glancing at the windows. He wanted to look out, to check on his responsibilities on the ground. Was the Site still there? Was there a panic? Had a coyote got through?

It had been a coyote last time. At least, that was the general consensus of opinion—it was hard to be certain from the remains. The Board of Inquiry had found that the breach was due to gross negligence on the part of the officer in command. The officer in command, a colonel I had met a couple of times and rather liked, had saved Uncle Sam the cost of a court martial by dying, along with seventeen of his men, bringing down the thing the coyote had become. You could tell, just by looking at the Lieutenant, that he had terrible nightmares.

The Black Hawk made another wide looping turn over Sioux Crossing, waiting for permission to land. Looking out, I thought I could see my old house. The city had been evacuated shortly after the Accident. It had taken weeks to clear the place out; even after dire stories of death and disaster, even with the cloud hanging over the Site, there were people who refused to leave. The fact that the skies by then were full of military helicopters, some of them black, hadn’t helped. The government had handled the whole thing poorly, and there had been a couple of armed standoffs between householders and the military. Then a bunch of asshole militiamen had turned up from the wilds of Montana, vowing to oppose the Zionist World Government or the Bilderberg Group or whoever the hell they believed was running the world. I was glad I’d missed the whole thing.

Further out, I could see the buildings of the Collider in the distance. From here, all looked peaceful. Apart from the cloud, towering over everything, it was as if nothing had ever happened here.

The pilot eventually got permission to make final approach and we landed in a park on the edge of Sioux Crossing. The park was ringed by prefabricated buildings stacked four high, offices and barracks and mess halls and control rooms and armouries and garages surrounding a big white “H” sprayed on the ground. The lieutenant jumped down as soon as the door was opened, and the last I saw of him was his back as he strode away from us towards the control centre.

“Talkative fucker,” Former Corporal Fenwick commented, hopping down from the helicopter beside me.

I sighed. A figure in fatigues was coming towards us from the control centre. The figure passed the lieutenant, and they snapped salutes at each other without breaking step.

“Welcoming committee,” said Fenwick. “Nice. I approve.”

“Shut up, Fenwick,” I muttered.

The figure was the base commander, Colonel Newton J. Kettering. He marched up to us and saluted. Fenwick returned the salute sloppily, as usual. I didn’t bother.

“Sir,” Kettering said smartly. “Welcome to Camp Batavia.”

“Well thank you kindly, Colonel,” Fenwick said. “Looks like you’re running a tight ship here.”

“Sir. Thank you, sir.” Unlike the lieutenant, Kettering didn’t look tired and ill. He looked alert and bright-eyed. He looked alert and bright-eyed to the point of madness. He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and he’d done three tours here, and I didn’t want to spend a minute longer in his company than I had to.

I said to Fenwick, “I’d better supervise the unloading.”

Fenwick gave me his big shit-eating grin. “I think that sounds like a fine idea, Mr. Dolan.” I wanted to punch him. “Perhaps Colonel Kettering could give me the guided tour while you’re doing that thing.”

“Sir, I was hoping you could join me in the Officers’ Club,” Kettering said. “We have a luncheon prepared.”

Fenwick’s grin widened. “Colonel, I would love to.”

“We need to get onto the Site as soon as possible,” I said to them both, but mainly to Fenwick. Kettering regarded me with a keen look of hostility. Fenwick pouted; he hated to miss a free meal. I said, “Colonel, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to unload my gear—”

“Hell,” Fenwick put in amiably. “That’s plenty of time for luncheon. Right, Colonel?”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Kettering gave me that hostile look again. I had already ruined his carefully-groomed routine; he wasn’t about to let me ruin lunch too. Neither was Fenwick.

I looked at them both. “Half an hour,” I said. “No longer.”

Fenwick and Kettering exchanged a knowing glance. Civilians. Then Fenwick clapped Kettering on the back and said, “Lead the way, Colonel,” and they walked off. A few yards away, Fenwick looked over his shoulder and called, “Would you like us to send a plate out for you, Mr. Dolan?”

I shook my head. “No thank you, General, I’ll be fine,” I called back. Fenwick flipped me the bird surreptitiously and turned back to Kettering. The two of them, deep in conversation, walked towards the wall of prefabs.

I watched them go for a few moments, then went back to the helicopter, where, in the style of bored baggage handlers and cargo men the world over, half a dozen Marines were throwing my metal transport cases out onto the grass.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Careful with those things! They’re delicate scientific instruments!”

Actually, the cases were full of old telephone directories, for weight, but I had to keep up the charade.

I had been in a foul mood when I arrived for work that morning. I drove the short distance from home to the facility, stopped briefly at the gate to show my ID, then drove to the building housing the small control room Professor Delahaye and his team were using.

Most of them were already there ahead of me. Delahaye was over to one side of the room, conferring with half a dozen of his colleagues and grad students. Others were busily typing at consoles and peering at monitors. Nowhere, though, could I see the shock of white hair that I was looking for.

Delahaye spotted me and walked over. “What are you doing here, Dolan?” he asked. “Surely you’ve got enough material by now?”

“I need a conclusion,” I said, still looking around the room. “Just a last bit of colour.”

“Well, try not to get in the way will you? There’s a good chap.” Delahaye was a small, agitated Londoner who couldn’t see why a journalist had been foisted on him and his experiment.

“I don’t see Larry,” I said. “Is he coming in today?”

Delahaye looked around him. “Maybe. Who knows? The experiment’s almost over, he doesn’t need to be here. Is it important?”

Is it important? No, maybe not to you, Professor. I said, “I just wanted a quick word, that’s all.”

Delahaye nodded irritably. “All right. But just—”

“Try not to get in the way. Yes, Professor, I know. I’ll just stand over there in the corner.” As if I was going to reach over and press some important big red button, or fall into a piece of machinery. Nothing I did here was going to make the slightest bit of difference to the enormous energies being generated, nanoseconds at a time, far below our feet in the tunnels of the Collider. And even if I did manage to screw something up, it wouldn’t affect the experiment all that much; all the results were in, Delahaye was just using up his allotted time with a last couple of shots.

The professor gave me a last admonitory glare and went back to the little group across the room. There was nothing world-shaking going on here; the Collider was brand new—the offices still smelled of fresh paint. Delahaye was just running warm-up tests, calibrating instruments, the high-energy physics equivalent of running-in a new car. I’d been there two months, working on an article about the new facility for Time. I thought the article was shaping up to be interesting and informative. The worst thing about the whole fucking business was that it had brought Larry into my life.

Andy Chen came over and we shook hands. “Been fun having you around, man,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Right.”

“Nah, really,” he insisted. “You piss old man Delahaye off mightily. It’s been beautiful to watch.”

Despite being beyond pissed off myself, I smiled. “You’re welcome. What’s for you now? Back to MIT?”

He shook his head. “Been offered a job at JPL.”

“Hey, excellent, man. Congratulations.”

“Ah, we’ll see. It’s not pure research, but at least it gets me away from that monstrous old fart.” He looked over at Professor Delahaye, who was regaling some students with some tale or other. Andy snorted. “Brits,” he said. “Who knows?” He looked over to where a small commotion had begun around the door. “Well, we can get the party started now.”

I looked towards the door and saw Larry Day’s leonine features over the heads of the others in the room, and I felt my heart thud in my chest. “Andy,” I said, “I need to have a quick word with Larry.” We shook hands again and I launched myself through the crowd. “Great news about JPL, man. Really.”

Larry was drunk again. That much was obvious even before I got to him. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a desert camouflage jacket and he was clutching a tattered sheaf of paper in one hand and a shrink-wrapped six pack of Dr Pepper in the other. His hair looked as if he had been dragged back and forth through a hedge a couple of times, and his eyes were hidden by mirrorshades with lenses the size of silver dollars.

“Larry,” I said as I reached him.

The mirrored lenses turned towards me. “Hey. Alex. Dude.” There was a powerful aura of Wild Turkey and Cuban cigars around him, and when he grinned at me his teeth were yellow and uneven.

Rolling Stone had called him “Steven Hawking’s Evil Twin.” One of the most brilliant physicists of his generation, a legend at the age of twenty-four. Of course, by that time he had been thrown out of Harvard for an incident involving a homemade railgun, a frozen chicken, and his supervisor’s vintage TransAm, but that was just part of his mystique, and pretty much every other university on Earth had offered him a place. His doctoral thesis was titled Why All Leptons Look Like Joey Ramone But Smell Like Lady GaGa, and it was generally agreed that it would have been embarrassing if it had won him the Nobel Prize. Bad enough that it was shortlisted. His postdoc research had been a mixture of the mundane and the wildly exotic; he cherry-picked his way through some of the wilder outlands of quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, came up with a brand new theory of stellar evolution, published a paper which not only challenged the Big Bang but made it seem rather dull and simple-minded. Larry Day. Brilliant physicist. Brilliant drunk. Brilliant serial womanizer. He and I had visited all the bars in Sioux Crossing and been thrown out of most of them.

“I spoke with Ellie last night,” I said quietly.

He smiled down at me. “Hey,” he said. “Outstanding.”

I gritted my teeth. “She told me.”

In the background, I could hear Delahaye saying something above the holiday atmosphere in the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. All I could concentrate on was Larry’s mouth, his lying lips as he said, “Ah. Okay.”

“Is that all you can say?” I hissed. “‘Ah. Okay’?”

He shrugged expansively and some of the papers in his hand escaped and fell to the floor. “What can I say, man? ‘I’m sorry’?”

Delahaye seemed to be counting in a loud voice, but it was as if I heard him from a great echoing distance. I lunged at Larry, grabbed him by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.

“…Three… two…” said Delahaye.

“You fucking bastard!” I screamed into Larry’s face.

“…One!” said Delahaye, and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.

I had the Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the colonel returned from their lunch. In the end I’d told the Marines to go away, and I’d done it myself. Down the years I’ve noticed that Marines tend towards a certain disdain for people who are not themselves Marines. I was a civilian specialist. To most of them that was a euphemism for CIA, which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of me, but I wasn’t going to play that game.

“How was your lunch, General?” I asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.

Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr. Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.

I looked at my watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” I said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”

Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”

Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and I got into the Hummer. I took the wheel.

I said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Corporal.”

Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues. “General.”

I put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” I said. “You’re no more a general than I am.” And I drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the Site.

There was a place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an “up” and a “down.” Or maybe it was a “down” and an “up.” I screamed and I screamed and the noises I made were not sounds. I was… I was…

It took me a long time to get my bearings. Or maybe I never did, maybe it was all an accident. I walked. Travelled, anyway. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, couldn’t be sure that I was seeing it. I wanted to curl up and die, and I did in fact try that a couple of times, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even curl up, in the sense that I understood it. I held my hands up and looked at them. They were… they were…

At some point, maybe instantly, maybe it took a hundred million years, I came upon a… structure. Too small and too large to see, all at once. It looked like… there’s no way I can describe what it looked like, but I touched it and I reached down and I curled around it and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at a starry sky and someone nearby was screaming, “Don’t move, you fucker! You stay right where you are!”

I turned my head, astonished that I still remembered how. A soldier was standing a few feet from me, illuminated by moonlight, pointing an automatic weapon at me.

“Who are you?” I asked, and almost choked myself because I was still trying to speak as I might have when I was there. I coughed and retched, and at some point I realised I was naked and freezing cold. I said again, “Who are you?”

“Who are you?” shouted the soldier.

“Dolan,” I said, and this time I managed to say it without strangling. “Alex Dolan. There’s been some kind of accident.”

There was a squawking noise and the soldier lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Fenwick here, sir,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a civilian here. He claims there’s been an accident.”

At ground level, fifteen years of abandonment were more obvious. There were Green Berets stationed at the gate, and they spent a good half-hour checking our documents and establishing our bona fides before letting us through. As well as animals, the world’s Press were always trying to sneak through the fence. Nobody had made it yet. Nobody we knew about, anyway.

The buildings were weathered and dirty, the grass waist-high, despite regular helicopter inundations of herbicides, and it was starting to encroach on the cracked asphalt of the roadways.

I drove until we were a few hundred feet from the control room building, directly under the slowly-twisting spiral cloud. Unable to hush the cloud up, the government had admitted that there had been an accident at the Collider, explaining it as an electromagnetic effect. Scientists—government-sponsored and otherwise—were still arguing about this.

Fenwick looked up at the white helix and curled his lips. He was a man of many attributes, very few of them admirable, but he was not a coward. He had been told that there was no danger in him coming this close to Point Zero, and he believed that. It had never occurred to him that a significant fraction of the defence budget was devoted to stopping animals getting this close to Point Zero.

There had been much discussion about what to do about him after I appeared out of thin air in front of him. A quick look at his file suggested that appealing to his patriotic instincts would be pointless, and that giving him large amounts of money would be counterproductive and fruitless. A working-group of thirty very very bright men and women had been convened simply to study the problem of What to Do About Corporal Robert E. Lee Fenwick, who one night while out on patrol at Fort Bragg had seen me appear from a direction that no one in the universe had ever seen before.

Their solution was elegant and, I thought, unusually humane. Corporal Fenwick was a simple organism, geared mainly to self-gratification, and his loyalty—and his silence—had been bought by the simple expedient of promoting him to the rank of three-star general. What fascinated me was that Fenwick never showed the slightest gratitude for this. It was as if the alternative never even occurred to him. He seemed totally oblivious to the concept that it would have been simpler, and far more cost-effective, to simply kill him.

“Here we are, then,” Fenwick said.

“Yes,” I said. “Here we are. I cannot argue with that.” I looked at the cloud, looked at the buildings around us. Fenwick had surprised everyone by taking to his new rank like a duck to water. He was still in the Army, but he was no longer of the Army. He had no duties to speak of, apart from the duties that involved me. His general’s pay had been backdated for a decade, and he had bought his parents a new house in West Virginia and his brother a new car, and he lived with his child bride Roselynne and their half-dozen squalling brats in a magnificent mansion in Alexandria, Virginia. The kids went to the best schools, and in moments of despair I hung onto that. The eldest girl, Bobbi-Sue, was starting at Princeton next year. Because of what had happened to me the Fenwick boys would not work all their lives in the local coal mines; the Fenwick girls would not marry the high school jock only to see him become a drunken wife-beater. They would be lawyers and doctors and congressmen and senators, and maybe even presidents. In my darkest moments I looked at Former Corporal Fenwick, and I almost thought this was all worth it. Almost.

“How long do we have?” he asked. He always asked that.

I shrugged. “Minutes?” I always said that, too. “Days?” I opened the door and got out of the Hummer. Fenwick got out too, and together we unloaded the transport cases. We carried them into one of the other buildings a little way from the control room, and emptied them of their telephone books. Then we put them back into the Humvee and dumped my gear on the ground beside the vehicle.

Fenwick checked his watch. “Better be getting back,” he said.

I nodded. In a couple of hours there would be an overflight. An unmarked black helicopter without an ID transponder would pass overhead, ignoring local traffic control until the last moment, when it would transmit a brief and curt series of digits that identified it as belonging to the NSA. It would dip down below the radar cover, hover for a few moments, and then lift up and fly off again. And that would be me, leaving. “This is stupid. Someone’s going to work it out one day,” I said.

Fenwick shrugged. “Not my problem.” He put out his hand and I shook it. When I first met him he had been rangy and fidgety. Now he was calm and plump and sleek, and in my heart I couldn’t grudge him that. “Happy trails, Alex,” he said.

“You too, Bobby Lee. See you soon.”

“Let’s fucking hope, right?”

I smiled. “Yes. Let’s.”

Fenwick got back into the Hummer, gave me a wave, and drove off back towards the gate, where he would tell the Green Berets that the civilian specialist had arranged a separate means of departure. Which would, in its own way, be true.

I watched the Humvee disappear into the distance. When it was gone, I picked up my stuff and carried it into one of the nearby buildings. I dumped it in an empty office, unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor, wheeled a chair over to the window, and sat down.

The room was small and windowless and the only furniture in it was a table and a single folding plastic chair. The captain was using the chair. I was standing on the other side of the table from him, flanked by two armed soldiers.

“Now, all I need to know, son, is your name and how you managed to get onto this base bare-ass naked without anybody seeing you,” the captain said. He’d said it a number of times.

“My name is Alexander Dolan,” I said. “I’m a journalist. I was in the control room with Professor Delahaye’s group. I think there’s been an accident.” I’d said this a number of times, too.

The captain smiled and shook his head. He was base security, or maybe Intelligence, I didn’t know. He was the image of reasonableness. We could, he seemed to be saying, keep doing this all day and all night until I told him what he wanted to know.

“Go and find Professor Delahaye,” I said. “He’ll vouch for me.” I couldn’t understand what the military were doing at the Collider; maybe the accident had been much worse than I thought. Which would make it truly world-shaking.

“I don’t know any Professor Delahaye, son,” the captain said. “Did he help you break in here?”

I sighed and shook my head. “No. He’s supervising the startup experiments. Look, if he was hurt, maybe one of the others can come here. Doctor Chen or Doctor Morley, maybe. Everyone knows me.”

“I don’t know any of these people, Mr. Dolan,” said the captain. “What I want to know is who you are, and how in the name of blue blazes you managed to break into Fort Bragg without a stitch of clothing.”

“Fort Bragg?”

The captain gave me a wry, long-suffering, don’t-bullshit-me-son sort of look.

I looked around the room. There was only one door. It looked solid and it had big locks on it. But looking around the room again, I noticed that if I looked at it a certain way, it was not a locked room at all. It was just planes of mass that didn’t even butt up against each other. It was actually wide open.

“I thought this was the Sioux Crossing Collider,” I told the captain.

He blinked. “The what?”

I said, “I don’t like it here,” and I stepped outside the room, went back there.

I had brought with me a gallon jug of water, a little solid-fuel camping stove, some basic camping cookware, and half a dozen MREs. I took the first package and opened it. Meals Ready to Eat. But only if you were desperate or not particularly fussy. The package contained beef ravioli in meat sauce, chipotle snack bread, a cookie, cheese spread, beef snacks, caffeine mints, candy, coffee, sugar, salt, gum, some dried fruit and some other bits and pieces. I’d heard that the French Army’s MREs came with a pouch of red wine. If only The Accident had happened at CERN…

I became aware of… something. If a solid object could have the equivalent of a negative image, this was it. A kind of negative tornado, turned inside-out. I stepped towards it…

And found myself standing at the SCC, outside the building where I had last seen Professor Delahaye and his team and Larry Day.

Above me towered a colossal sculptured pillar of cloud, rotating slowly in the sky. I tilted my head back and looked up at it, my mouth dropping open.

And all of a sudden I was writhing on the ground in agony, my muscles cramping and spasming. I tried to step away, but I was in too much pain to be able to focus.

And that was how they caught me the second time, lying in wait because they half-expected me to return to the Collider, and then tasering me half to death. Someone walked up to me and thumped his fist down on my thigh. When he took his hand away there was a thin plastic tube sticking out of my leg and then there was a wild roaring in my head and a wave of blackness broke over me and washed me away.

They tried the same trick on the captain and the two guards as they had on Former Corporal Fenwick. I was beginning to think that I was travelling across the world leaving generals in my wake. They showered them with money and promotions, and for some reason it didn’t work with them the way it had worked with Fenwick. They blabbed their stories, and eventually the government had to make them all disappear. The officers were in solitary confinement in Leavenworth and the people they blabbed to were sequestered somewhere.

I finished my dinner and sat by the window drinking coffee and smoking a small cigar. The cigar was from a tin I’d found in my rucksack; a little gift from Fenwick. I’d heard the helicopter fly over while I was eating; it had dipped down momentarily a few hundred metres from Point Zero—which was actually an act of insane bravery on the part of its pilot in order to maintain what I considered the fatuous and transparent fiction of my “departure”—and then lifted away again to the West. Now everything was quiet and night was falling.

I remembered when this whole place had been busy and bustling. All abandoned now, the surviving staff scattered to other facilities. I thought about Delahaye and Andy Chen and Caitlin Morley and all the others who had been in that room with me on the day of The Accident. Delahaye had been an uptight asshole and Larry had been having an affair with my wife, but I’d liked the others; they were good, calm, professional people and it had been good to know them.

I was resting my arm on the windowsill. As I looked at it, the hairs on my forearm began to stir slowly and stand up.

This time, it was a general opposite me, and I was sitting down. To one side of the general were two middle-aged men in suits; on the other side was a youngish man with thinning hair and an eager expression.

“You tasered me and drugged me,” I told them. “That wasn’t very friendly.”

“We apologize for that, Mr. Dolan,” said one of the middle-aged men. “We couldn’t risk you… leaving again. Put yourself in our position.”

I held up my hands. I was wearing manacles. The manacles were connected to a generator behind my chair; if I looked as if I was going to do something outrageous—or if I even sneezed a bit forcefully—the manacles would deliver a shock strong enough to stun me. I knew this because they’d demonstrated the process to me when I came round from the sedative.

“I would love to put myself in your position,” I said. “So long as you could put yourself in mine.”

“It’s only a precaution, Mr. Dolan,” said the other middle-aged man. “Until we can be sure you won’t leave us again.”

I looked at the manacles. From a certain point of view, they didn’t go round my wrists at all. I lowered my hands and folded them in my lap. “Professor Delahaye,” I said.

“We don’t know,” said the youngish man. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s… something there, but no bodies, nothing alive.”

“Something?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember what happened?”

I was busy attacking Larry Day for having an affair with my wife. “They were doing the last shot of the series,” I said. “Delahaye counted down and then there was…” I looked at them. “Sorry. I won’t image it.”

“Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day was having an affair with my wife. “No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”

“Where do you… go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere.”

The four men exchanged glances. One of the middle-aged men said, “We think there may be another survivor.”

I leaned forward.

“A day after your first, um, appearance there was an incident in Cairo,” he went on. “Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a djinn walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”

A terrible thought occurred to me. “That might have been me.”

The other middle-aged man shook his head. “We don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened again yesterday in Nevada. While you were unconscious here. A small town called Spicerville was totally destroyed. Eight hundred people dead.”

“We’re calling it an explosion in a railcar full of chemicals,” the general said. “The Egyptians say theirs was a meteorite strike. But we think it’s… someone like you.”

“Whatever happened at the SCC, it changed you,” said the younger man with what I thought was admirable understatement. “We think it changed this other person too, whoever they are. But where you seem to have found a way to… cope with your… situation, the other person has not.”

“I haven’t found a way to cope at all,” I told them. I looked at the table between us. It was a rather cheap looking conference table, the kind of thing the government bought in huge amounts from cut-rate office supply stores. It seemed that I had never looked at things properly before; now I could see how the table was constructed, from the subatomic level upward.

“Obviously this… person is dangerous,” one of the middle-aged men said. “Any help you could give us would be very much appreciated.”

I sighed. I took the table to pieces and put it back together in a shape that I found rather pleasing. Nobody else in the room found it pleasing at all, though, judging by the way they all jumped up and ran screaming for the door. I slipped away from the manacles and went back there.

I went outside and stood in front of the building with my hands in my pockets. About seven hours ago I had been sitting in a briefing room in a White House basement with the President and about a dozen NSA and CIA staffers, watching a video.

The video had been taken by a Predator drone flying over Afghanistan. It was the spearpoint of a long-running operation to kill a Taliban warlord codenamed WATERSHED, who had been tracked down to a compound in Helmand. It was the usual combat video, not black and white but that weird mixture of shades of grey. The landscape tipped and dipped as the Predator’s operator, thousands of miles away in the continental United States, steered the drone in on its target. Then a scatter of buildings popped up over a hill and the drone launched its missile, and as it did a human figure came walking around the corner of one of the buildings. The crosshairs of the drone’s camera danced around the centre of the screen for a few moments, then the building puffed smoke in all directions and disappeared.

And moments later, unaffected, seemingly not even having noticed the explosion, the figure calmly walked out of the smoke and carried on its way.

“Well,” said the President when the video was over, “either the war in Afghanistan just took a very strange turn, or we’re going to need your services, Mr. Dolan.”

I looked into the sky. The moon was low down on the horizon and everything was bathed in a strange directionless silvery light that cast strange shadows from the buildings. There was an electrical expectancy in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt sugar, a breeze that blew from nowhere, and then he was there, standing a few yards from me, looking about him and making strange noises. I sighed.

“Larry,” I called.

Larry looked round, saw me, and said, “Jesus, Alex. What the hell happened?”

Larry didn’t remember The Accident, which was good. And he didn’t remember what came after, which was even better. But he was surprisingly adaptable, and I couldn’t afford to relax, even for a moment.

I walked over and stood looking at him. He looked like part of a comic strip illustration of a man blowing up. Here he was in frame one, a solid, whole human being. Here he was, at the end of the strip, nothing more than a widely-distributed scattering of bone and meat and other tissue. And here he was, three or four frames in, the explosion just getting going, his body flying apart. And that was Larry, a man impossibly caught in the middle of detonating. His body looked repugnant and absurd all at the same time, an animated human-shaped cloud of meat and blood, about twice normal size.

“There was an accident,” I said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

Larry’s voice issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It seemed to be coming from a long distance away, like a radio tuned to a distant galaxy. He said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

I ran a hand over my head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

“How long?” asked that eerie voice.

“Nearly twenty-five years.”

Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye…”

“All dead,” I said. “Delahaye, Warren, Chen, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex.” He looked at me. “You seem to be doing all right, though.”

I shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened.”

Larry emitted that awful laugh again. “My god,” he said, “it’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think maybe I’ve become a superhero, Alex?”

“That’s an… unusual way of looking at it,” I allowed warily.

Larry sighed. “You’d think I’d get X-ray vision or something. Not…” he waved his not-quite-hands at me, “… this.”

“Larry,” I said, “you need help.”

Larry laughed. “Oh? You think? Jesus, Alex.” He started to pace back and forth. Then he stopped. “Where was I? Before?”

“Afghanistan. We think you were just trying to find your way back here.”

Larry shook his head, which was an awful thing to watch. “No. Before that. There was… everything was the wrong… shape…”

I took a step forward and said, “Larry…”

“And before that… I was here, and we were having this conversation…”

“It’s just déjà vu,” I told him. “It’s hardly the worst of your worries.”

Larry straightened up and his body seemed to gain coherence. “Alex,” he said, “how many times have we done this before?”

I shook my head. “Too fucking many,” I said, and I plunged my hands into the seething exploding mass of Larry Day’s body and pulled us both back into Hell.

I still wasn’t sure why I went back after escaping the second time. Maybe I just wanted to know what had happened to me and there was no way to find out on my own. Maybe I was afraid that if I spent too long there I would forget what it was like to be human.

The general and his three friends were unavailable. I later discovered that they had been in hospital ever since they saw what I turned the table into; one of them never recovered. In their place, I was assigned two more generals—one from the Air Force and one from the Army—and an admiral, and a team of eager young scientists, all looked after by quiet, efficient people from the CIA and the NSA.

I was questioned, over and over and over again, and the answers I was able to give them wouldn’t have covered the back of a postage stamp. One of the scientists asked me, “What’s it like there? How many dimensions does it have?” and all I could tell him was, “Not enough. Too many. I don’t know.”

We were unprepared. We knew too little, and that was why he nearly got me that first time. I knew that Point Zero was like a beacon there, a great solid negative tornado, and one of the few useful pieces of advice I was able to contribute was to keep a watch on the SCC for any manifestations. I went back to our old house in Sioux Crossing to wait, because I knew. I knew he was looking for a landmark, a reference point, because that was what I had done. When the manifestations began, I was bustled in great secrecy to the Site, and I saw him appear for the first time. Heard him speak for the first time. Thought, not for the last time, Of course. It had to be Larry.

He was confused, frightened, angry, but he recovered quickly. I told him what had happened—what we understood, anyway—and he seemed to pull his exploding form together a little. He looked about him and said, This must be what God feels like, and my blood ran cold. And then I felt him try to take me apart and remake me, the way I had remade the table.

I did the first thing that crossed my mind. I grabbed him and went back there with him, and I let him go and came back here.

The second time he came back, it was the same thing. A few random manifestations, some baffling but relatively minor destruction. Then he found his way to Point Zero, confused, amnesiac. But he came to the same conclusion. This must be what God feels like. And I had to take him back there.

And again. And again. And again.

I walked an unimaginable distance. It took me an impossible length of time. Nothing here meant anything or made any sense, but there were structures, colossal things that were almost too small to see: the remains of Professor Delahaye and the other victims of The Accident. There were also the remains of a specially-trained SEAL team, sent in here by the President—not the present one but her predecessor—when he thought he could create a group of all-American superheroes. I, and pretty much every scientist involved in investigating The Accident, argued against that, but when the President says jump you just ask what altitude he wants, so the SEALs remain. There is no life or death there, only existence, so Professor Delahaye and the others exist in a Schroedinger not-quite-state, trying to make sense of what and where they are. If they ever succeed, I’m going to be busy.

The scientists call this “Calabi-Yau space,” or, if they’re trying to be particularly mysterious, “The Manifold.” Which it may or may not be, nobody knows. The String Theorists, overwhelmed with joy at having eyewitness evidence of another space, named it, even though I could give them little in the way of confirmatory testimony. Calabi-Yau space exists a tiny fraction of a nanometre away from what I used to think of as “normal” space, but it would take more than the total energy output of the entire universe to force a single photon between them.

Travel between dimensions appears to be, however, more like judo than karate, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, Delahaye’s final shot manipulated those forces in just the wrong way, pitching everything within a radius of five metres into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that won’t be imaged. Someone once told me that the odds of The Accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But here’s the thing about odds and probability. You can talk about them as much as you want, do all the fancy math, but in the end there’s only either/or. That’s all that matters. Either you win all the jackpots on The Strip, or you don’t. Either it will happen, or it won’t. It did, and here I am. And here, somewhere, is Larry Day.

Existing in Calabi-Yau space, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use the insight this gives you to manipulate the “real” world, really is like being a god. Unfortunately, it’s like being one of the gods H.P. Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the human race is lucky that Larry seems unable to quite get the knack of godhood. None of us can work out why I acclimatized to it so easily, or why it’s still so difficult for Larry, why returning him there screws him up all over again while I can cross back-and-forth at will, without harm. Larry was one of the biggest brains humanity ever produced, and he can’t get the hang of The Manifold, while I, the world’s most prosaic man, as my ex-wife liked to remind me, took it more or less in my stride. All I can tell them is that every time we meet—and we’ve done this particular little pantomime fifty-two times so far—he seems to recover more quickly. One day he’s going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I won’t be able to take him back there. I’ll have to fight him here, and it’ll be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/or. Either the world will survive, or it won’t.

Larry is not a nice man. He was a great man, before The Accident, and I liked him a lot, until I found out about him and my wife. But he’s not a nice man. Of all the people in the world you’d want to get bitten by the radioactive spider, he’d probably come close to the bottom of the list.

And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it is that Larry is not even the nightmare scenario. The nightmare scenario is that Delahaye and Chen and Morley and the SEAL team and all the animals who got onto the Site despite the billion-dollar-per-annum containment operation somehow drop into a rest state at once, and find their way here. If that happens, it’ll make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. I plan to be somewhere else on that day. I’m happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but I don’t owe these people anything.

Eventually, I came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone here would recognize. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. I stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting me, of course, and I had learned long ago how to clothe myself before I came here. People hate it when naked men appear out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought me coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.

“Mr. Dolan,” said the President.

“Madam President,” I said. I sipped my coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”

“We noticed,” said one of the scientists, a man named Sierpinski. “The others?”

“I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I’m not sure I should be checking them out; won’t observing them collapse them into one state or the other?”

Sierpinski shrugged. We don’t know. Maybe we should make that our company song.

“You look tired,” said the President.

“I look how I want to look,” I snapped, and regretted it. She was not an unkind person, and I was tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby balding middle-aged man? If I wanted, I could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey, Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what I really want is to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, I cannot do.

I looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how I had saved the world again.

“Do you think I could have a sandwich?” I asked.