The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(114)
Down by the quantum mirror there were nearly thirty scientists bundled into the observation gallery, looking down to the great beast itself. It had grown, a great dangling, misshapen rocket of bits added and bits taken away, of rolling cables and flashing interior surfaces, of heat and steam and pressure and a thousand monitoring devices tapped into computers fifty years ahead of their time. I was the only non-scientist in the room, but as the floor around the quantum mirror itself was cleared, Vincent dragged me to the front, exclaiming, “These idiots wouldn’t be able to number-crunch if you didn’t feed them and help them wipe their bloody bottoms. Come on! You deserve to see this.”
I supposed I did, considering that it was my subtle adjustment of the paperwork which would almost certainly lead to the catastrophic failure of the approaching test.
A warning siren was sounded three times, telling all personnel to vacate the immediate area of the machine itself. Then the most straight-faced scientist they could find began a countdown, as generators roared into life and a dozen faces stared at rolling banks of increasingly excited data. Vincent was almost hopping up and down beside me, his hand briefly squeezing mine before a sense of masculine decorum snatched his arm away again and he chewed instead on his fingertips. I watched, arms folded, an unimpressed expression firmly on my face as the power in the device swelled to its maximum, and inside its depths hideously fine and fiendishly clever pieces of equipment stolen from a hundred years from now turned, turned, turned, aligned, opened up, drew energy in and spat energy out and…
“Sir?”
The voice was a question, raised by a technician at a computer screen. The question was emotional, not objective. Objectively the questioner could read perfectly well the data on their screen, but emotionally they felt the need for support. Vincent sensed it at once, turning on the spot to stare at the unfortunate enquirer even as someone else stood up sharply and barked, “Shut it down!”
They didn’t need to say anything more than that, didn’t want to say anything more than that, and immediately a hand was slammed down on the emergency cut-out button and the chamber with the quantum mirror in it went dark. So did the observation gallery, a sudden stifling blackness lit only by the grey glow of the screens and the soft blues of the emergency lights set into the floor. I looked round and saw Vincent, skin ghostly, the veins on the side of his neck throbbing far too fast to be healthy, eyes wide and lips slightly apart, staring first at the men and women in the room and then slowly, inexorably, back at the quantum mirror.
The quantum mirror, like the rest of the cavern, should have been in darkness, but we could all see the orange glow rising from its core, a cheerful reddish pinkness spreading down its thinner metal joins, eclipsed only by the black smoke starting to belch from its interior. I could hear a hissing of tiny metal parts under pressure, rising to a screaming, rising to a shriek, and, glancing down at my radioactivity badge, I was probably the only person in the room to see the thin film start to turn black.
“Stop it,” whispered Vincent, his voice the only thing in the room apart from the growing grumble of the machine. “Stop it,” he whispered again to no one in particular, as if there was anything anyone could do. “Stop it.”
The light rising from the machine, a light of burning, a light of parts starting to melt, was rapidly becoming stronger than the glow of the emergency blues. I looked around at a room of frozen rabbits, of collective terror, and with the level-headed attitude of a man who spends his day calculating how much toilet paper a facility might need, I barked, “Radiation! Everybody out!”
“Radiation” was a good enough word, and people scrambled for the door. There was no screaming–screaming would have required an energy which now had to be entirely focused on getting as far away as possible from the rising flood of gamma waves spilling into the observation gallery in deathly silence. I looked at Vincent, and saw that the badge on his shirt was also turning black, oil-black, deathly black, so I grabbed him by the sleeve and hissed, “We have to go!”
He didn’t move.
His eyes were fixed on the quantum mirror, reflecting the spreading heat now bursting out of its surface. I could hear the metal singing and knew what was coming next. “Vincent!” I roared. “We have to get out of here!”
He still didn’t move, so I swung one arm across his throat and dragged him backwards, like a swimmer saving a drowning man, towards the door. We two were the last in the room, the light in the chamber beyond now too bright to look at, the heat rising, suffocating, pushing its way through the glass. I looked up and saw the paint begin to blister on the metalwork around the room, heard the computers fry, giving up any attempt at staying intact in the face of the rising everything blasting through the room and our bodies like a gale through a cobweb. I heard the glass of the viewing gallery crack and knew with an absolute certainty that the explosion which was about to take place would kill us both, that we were already dead. I shoved Vincent out of the door of the gallery; he landed on his hands and knees, groggy, half-turning to look back at me. The light was unbearable now, blinding, more than just the visible spectrum eating through to my retinas. I fumbled for the emergency handle on the door, felt the metal burn through the skin on my hand with an ironing-board hiss, pulled it down and, as the door began to descend, dived beneath it.
“Run!” I screamed at Vincent, and he, bewildered and staggering, a mere shadow in the tortured static of my vision, ran. I crawled down beneath the bulkhead door as it slammed into place, scrambling out into the darkness of the corridor beyond, got three paces away, and felt the world behind me explode.