The Gates (Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil #1)(20)

“Whatever,” said Samuel. “Are you going to leave?”

“Not much else I can do, really,” said the demon, “not if you’re going to be difficult about it.”

“Off you go, then,” said Samuel.

“Right. Bye.”

There was a great deal of squelching, then silence.

“You’re still under there, aren’t you?” said Samuel.

“No,” said a small voice, slightly ashamedly.

“Fibber.”

“Fine, I’ll go. Don’t know what I’m supposed to tell her, though.”

“Don’t tell her anything. Just keep a low profile until dawn, then say that I didn’t get up during the night.”

“Might work,” said the demon. “Might work. You promise not to get up to use the bathroom or anything?”

“Cross my heart,” said Samuel.

“Can’t ask for more than that,” said the demon. “Well, pleasure doing business with you. Nothing personal about all this, you know. Just following orders.”

“You’re not going to come back, are you?”

“Oh no, I shouldn’t think so. Took a lot of power for her to summon me up. Can’t imagine she’ll try that one again. She has a lot on her mind, what with keeping the portal open and all. Very unstable, that portal. Someone could do themselves an injury in there if they’re not careful. She might look for another way to get at you, though. Then again she might not. Soon, it won’t matter much either way.”

“Why not?” said Samuel.

“End of the world,” said the demon. “Won’t be any beds left to hide under.”

And with a squish and a pop, it was gone.





XI

In Which We Encounter the Scientists Again

NO GOOD EVER COMES of someone sticking his head round his boss’s door, a worried expression on his face and a piece of paper in one hand that, if it could talk, would shout, very loudly, “Bad! This is bad! Run away now!”

But thus it was that when Professor Stefan, CERN’s head of particle physics, saw Professor Hilbert hovering on his doorstep, with both a) a worried expression; and b) a piece of paper that, despite being white and bearing only a series of numbers and a small diagram, also managed to look worried, he began to feel worried too.

“What is it, Hilbert?” said Professor Stefan in the tone of one who would rather not know what “it” is at all, thank you very much.

“It’s the portal,” said Professor Hilbert. He had always liked the sound of that word, which fit in with his theories of the universe. Anyway, since they still didn’t know for certain what it was, he could call it anything he liked.

“So you’ve found out what it is?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Do you know if it’s ongoing?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Have you even found out if that’s actually what opened?”

“Oh, we know it opened,” said Professor Hilbert. “That part’s easy.”

“So you’ve proved that it exists.”

Professor Stefan liked things to be proved before he accepted the fact of their existence. This made him a good scientist, if not a very imaginative one.

“Er, no. But we strongly suspect that it exists. A portal has been opened, and it hasn’t closed, not entirely.”

“How do you know, if you can’t find it?”

A smile of immense satisfaction appeared on Professor Hilbert’s face.

“Because we can hear it speak,” he said.

? ? ?

If you listen hard enough, there’s almost no such thing as silence: there’s just noise that isn’t very loud yet. Oh yes, in space no one can hear you scream, or blow up a big spaceship, because space is a vacuum, and sound can’t travel in a vacuum (although think how dull most science fiction films would be if there were no explosions, so pay no attention to grumps who criticize Star Wars because you can hear the Death Star explode at the end—spoilsports) but otherwise there is noise all around us, even if we can’t hear it terribly well. But noises aren’t the same as sounds: noises are random and disorganized, but sounds are made.

Deep in the LHC’s command center, a group of scientists was clustered around a screen. The screen displayed a visual representation of what had occurred on the night that the collider had apparently malfunctioned. The scientists had painstakingly re-created the circumstances of that evening, restoring lost and rewritten code, and had attempted to trace, without success, the trajectory of the unknown energy particle, which now expressed itself as a slowly revolving spiral.

“So this is what you think happened to our collider,” said Stefan.

“It’s still happening,” said Hilbert.

“What? But we’ve shut down the collider.”

“I know, but I suppose you could say that the damage, if that’s what it is, has been done. I think—and I stress ‘think’—that, somehow, enough energy was harnessed from the collider to blow a hole between our world and, for want of a better term, somewhere else. When we shut down the collider, we took away that energy source. The portal collapsed, but not entirely. There’s a pinhole where there used to be a tunnel, but it’s there nonetheless. Listen.”