Christopher Brookmyre (36 page)

He walked across to the dummy and briefly examined it, checking its support and making slight adjustments to its posture.

'Any last requests?' he asked it, his voice relayed by intercom from somewhere inside the observation room. It sounded quiet and oddly dampened. The chamber looked like it ought to generate echo and reverberation, but instead it had the muffling, still-air quality of a recording studio. Someone laughed, close to the microphone.

Ross made his way to the table and stood behind it. He lifted the pistol and slapped a magazine into the handle.

'Okay,' he shouted. 'Fire her up.'

A hand moved into shot and reached for the big lever, pushing it slowly forward against no little resistance until it had arced through about one hundred and fifty degrees. When it reached the other end, a keening sound began growing, somehow high and whiny but deep and shuddering at the same time. It seemed to come from all around rather than any discernible direction, its note getting very slowly and gradually higher over the next few seconds until it plateaued, which coincided with a sudden jarring of the image. The picture shuddered and then gently righted itself, like when Lex degaussed a monitor. Serious electromagnetic activity.

'Good to go,' said the voice in the control room.

'Roger that,' Ross acknowledged.

He pulled the slider to ready the gun, took position to fire, with his feet apart, both hands gripping the butt, the pistol held about eighteen inches in front of his face.

Around the table, every breath but Lex's was held, Som staring up openmouthed from his documents. Even Bett's emotionless demeanour was briefly interrupted by a narrowing of the eyes normally only seen when he was in sight of an enemy.

Ross fired the pistol, the report dull and muted, the slider automatically chambering the next round as the spent cartridge was spat from the ejection port. The shell appeared as a brief flash of metal next to Ross's hands, then vanished from sight. By that time he had fired again. He fired repeatedly and steadily at one-second intervals until he had discharged twelve rounds. Used to her own habits, Lex had expected him to eject the mag and let it fall from the butt, but he simply placed the gun down on the wooden table. Everyone looked to the dummy. It had sustained no visible damage whatsoever.

'What's the invention, a gun that doesn't shoot straight?' asked Armand.

'How could he miss every round? From that distance?'

Bett's face failed to revert to its familiar impassivity, his gaze held utterly by the screen.

Ross picked up the shotgun and loaded half a dozen shells into its side-entry port. He pumped it, levelled it and fired. Nothing hit the dummy. He pumped and fired again, three times, four times, five, six. Still the dummy remained intact.

'Your son isn't blind, is he?' Armand asked Mrs Fleming.

'No. He's a dead shot. When we took him to the fairground we always came home with half a dozen goldfish and a bagful of gonks.'

Flashing a wickedly knowing grin up towards the observation screen, he dropped the shotgun and lifted the rifle. He clipped in a mag, slid the bolt, flipped off the safety, hefted it against his right shoulder and let rip. He sustained fire on fully automatic for several seconds; quite a volley but, Lex estimated, not enough to empty the mag. Everyone else's eyes continued to focus on the dummy, but hers, this second time around, were watching the spent shells and, more specifically, what happened to them as they poured from the ejection port.

'I don't get it,' Armand confessed, shaking his head.

Som giggled nervously.

'Look at the disc,' Bett said quietly, unable to keep a note of awe from his near-whispering voice.

'The disc?'

'On the floor.'

'What about it? I can't see, it's too far.'

'Okay, kill it,' Ross shouted, up on the screen.

The assistant's hand returned to the mad-scientist lever and hauled it back to its original position. The image shuddered again and the keening noise died away to nothing.

Ross walked around the table and proceeded to the silver circle in the centre of the chamber. He crouched down, bending his knees, and put a hand into the wide salver, grasping something in a balled fist. Then he lifted his hand and opened his fingers, letting bullets, shot and cartridges cascade from his palm like seashells on a beach.

'
Mon Dieu.
'

'Fuck me.'

'No way.'

'
Madre mia.
'

'Bloody hell.'

Bett said nothing, just continued to stare with unbroken concentration.

'Uh-uh,' said Rebekah, into the growing, breathless silence. 'Not possible. An illusion. Blanks. Gotta be blanks.'

Lex smiled grimly to herself, knowing what was next.

On the screen, Ross Fleming took position behind the table once more, picked up the rifle, unlatched the safety again and emptied the rest of the magazine. The dummy jerked and exploded in a storm of splinters, ripped to pieces by the bullets. Limbs came off, its head blew apart, and what was left was thrown back against the wall by the force of impact. Another assortment of expletives and ejaculations ensued.

'Okay, that's clip one,' Lex told them.

'There's more?' Som asked eagerly.

'Just the one. Here it comes. That one was tagged "Normalpolarityvid". This one is "Reversepolarityvid".'

'What does that mean?'

'You'll see.'

The second clip showed the same chamber, a new, intact dummy in position, but this time no table. When Ross entered the arena he was carrying what looked like a shrink-wrapped clear-plastic parcel, which he placed on the floor at roughly the spot where the table had stood. This time he appeared to be working alone as there was a pause after he withdrew, and, a few seconds later, footsteps could be heard in the observation room. The camera then zoomed in on the parcel, which revealed itself to be a bomb: a nailbomb, to be precise. Plastic explosive, detonators, a receiver and several pounds of the local ironmonger's finest, all tightly wrapped in thick transparent film for purposes of demonstration.

Ross's hand pushed the big lever. Again, the keening noise grew, and again the picture shuddered as it reached its plateau. Meanwhile, Ross dollied out on the camera to show as wide a shot as the observation window allowed. A few more seconds passed, then his voice sounded out a countdown from five.

He went right on zero. There was a dampened bang and a flash, followed by surprisingly little smoke - certainly not enough to obscure the view of the dummy, which remained upright and undamaged. The sight of it was less surprising in light of what they had already witnessed, and certainly less visually impressive than the picture painted by the nails. There were thousands of them, gathered against the walls and spread around the floor. However, there were none - absolutely none - inside a three-metre radius of the disc, the thousands of little black sticks denoting a shape like a keyhole on the floor. It was a perfect circle of exclusion, with a further corridor of safety extending from it, through where the dummy stood, to the rear wall behind it. The clip ended, reverting the image on the wall to a projection of Lex's desktop. She switched the data-projector off, the absence of its hum accentuating the silence around the table.

Bett's response, when at last it came, was prefaced by a long sigh, after which he stated simply: 'Oh dear.'

He then turned to Som. 'Not a fair question, I appreciate, given the time you've had, but your thoughts anyway.'

'My first thought is wow. You know, not like wow, as in wow, check out the new Ferrari, but wow as in, like, WOW! Somebody just invented time travel or Wow!--'

'Som? Coherent thoughts, please: relevant, concise, minus the wigging?'

'Shit, sorry. Yeah. But we are talking serious--'

'
Som!
' Bett warned.

'Yes, sir. Okay, there's a lot of literature here, most of it informal, memos, lots of notes to self kinda stuff. This thing's in early Alpha, still barely off the drawing board, really. He calls it a Gravity Well. Lots of extremely heavy physics and electromagnetics stuff in here, equations, proofs, theoretical models - way, way over my head, man.'

'So it's essentially like some giant, super-duper magnet?' asked Mrs Fleming.

'No,' said Rebekah, before Som could respond, clearly thinking out loud.

'That would be impossible.'

'Why?'

Bett's features broke into a tiny, proud little smile as he looked to Rebekah for her answer, one which Lex suspected he already knew.

'Because lead is not magnetically susceptible,' Rebekah explained. 'Well, it's not zero per cent, but it's close. Bullets are made of lead,' she added, to further clarify. Lex knew this latter part, but would have to confess ignorance to the first, and had made the same assumption as Mrs Fleming about the nature of the device.

'So how the hell does it work?' Lex was therefore moved to enquire.

'As far as I can understand,' responded Som, 'it does generate electromagnetic forces - huge electromagnetic forces - but after that it gets, well, complicated, if not to say weird. The documents talk about creating a field of hyper-gravity that . . . hang on until I find this here, oh yeah, got it: "exerts correspondingly greater forces upon objects with greater velocity". And again, here: "The Gravity Well harnesses and diverts the kinetic energy of subjects entering its field of influence . . . "'

'Which means what, in English?' Lex asked.

'It means the faster something is going when it enters the Gravity Well, the more it'll be affected. The docs say the ideal is that you'd be able to walk right across the thing carrying a steel tray, but if you tried throwing it . . . That's a long way off, however. Right now, in Fleming's words, "if you stood too close wearing a wristwatch, you'd end up minus a hand".'

'Which is why the shells are being drawn in too,' Lex suggested. 'They leave the ejection port at speed.'

'So it is still magnetic,' Rebekah observed. 'Why isn't lead immune?'

'Let's see, I read something about this back a page or so. Yeah. "Forces can only be exerted upon metals and certain ferr magnetic minerals, though in extreme low-temperature tests . . . " yadda yadda yadda, nah, that's a blind alley. No, here it is: "Resistance Paradox Effect". This phrase comes up a lot. My particle physics isn't really up to speed for this shit, so I'm only getting a broad-brush impression, which is that it's kind of similar to the earlier principle of greater kinetic energy being turned back upon itself. He's found a way to exert magnetic forces that make lead respond in a certain way
because
of its insusceptibility.'

'How?' Rebekah demanded.

'Fuck, man, don't ask me. You take a look at this shit. He's got correspondence and consultation papers from superbrains in electromagnetism here, these guys got more letters after their names than in them. But I don't think anything in this file would constitute a blueprint, or anything close. Not surprising. If I had something as big as this, I wouldn't keep copies of the secret formula on a PC in my apartment.'

Nor indeed, Lex thought, on his PC at Marledoq either.

'All this stuff,' Som went on, 'is kinda like the separate sheet of paper you do your working on. The exam answer must be written down elsewhere.'

'If it's written down at all,' mused Bett. 'If the key, the secret, is in the mind of the inventor, then that would explain why there is so much interest in acquiring him personally, rather than merely the data.'

'You certainly wouldn't be able to follow his work from this stuff,' Som observed. 'It's a scrapbook. Notes, theories, ideas, a lot of projections, too. Scale, for one thing. He talks about the ratio of energy to influence, size to effect. You notice both those tests we saw were filmed after midnight? That's because it took all the juice in Marledoq to operate it. He had to do it late at night while nobody else in the building needed any power. In developing any technology, the size-to-effect proportions always start at one extreme but, given enough time, they'll balance out and eventually invert. Thirty years ago, to generate the computing power in Lex's laptop would have taken enough hardware to fill this entire room. If the Gravity Well followed the same curve

. . . ' Som tailed off, letting their imaginations finish the thought individually. Dad got up and walked to the wall, gazing out through the square porthole at blackness. There was nothing to see, but he needed somewhere to look. He was dazed, reeling.

'Bit of an ice-cream headache, isn't it?' Ross said.

'Bloody hell, you're not kiddin'. It's . . . amazing. It's astonishing. It could change the world, son. It's, it's . . . '

'It's early, Dad. Very early. We'd be talking decades of development. You've heard the phrase "Standing on the shoulders of giants"? Well, I'm no giant. I'm just . . . I'm just a wee guy who's waiting to give the first giant a leg-up, if and when he comes along.'

'Don't sell yourself short, Ross. What you've achieved . . . and on your own.'

His eyes were beginning to well up. 'I'm so proud of you.'

Ross swallowed. He couldn't afford to succumb to the same.

'The Gravity Well,' his dad repeated. 'The Fleming Gravity Well. I like the sound of that.'

'I never thought of my name being on it, I just tend to think of it as Project F.'

'F for Fleming.'

'F for Fuckwit.'

'What, is that supposed to keep you modest or something?'

'No, it was a personal code, so that it wasn't so on-the-nose. Project Gravity Well became Project Fuckwit.'

'How?'

'The initials. GW.'

'The ini . . . ' Dad smiled, then they both laughed, a moment of blessed relief from the pressure of burgeoning emotion in the cabin. But, when the moment was over, Ross knew he had to crank it back up a few atmospheres.

'I haven't told you everything,' he said. 'I've left one small technical detail out.'

'What?'

'I can't tell you. That's why I left it out. This really is for your protection, and for mine, and for the project's.'

'So why are you mentioning it?'