Coldbrook (Hammer)(9)

He’d left Wales the year his dear Wendy had passed away, taken from this world by a cruel cancer that none of his love or anger could counter. He had raged and railed against such unfairness when he was alone, maintaining his composure when he read aloud from the newspaper as Wendy drifted in and out of a morphine-fuelled sleep. And when she was gone he had continued to rage on his own, except this time there had been no one to compose himself for. Three months later he was living in the USA, and three months after that he met Bill Coldbrook.

Coldbrook had already received approval for his project by then, and while politicians politicised and funding bodies negotiated funding, Bill was already setting up temporary base in a trailer high in the Appalachians, collecting together his books and documents, planning the project scheme by scheme, and contacting people who he wanted to poach from other projects to help him. Jonah came to meet Bill through a mutual friend of theirs at the Harvard-Smithsonian, and the thought of retiring to the mountains – immersing himself in such radical physics that many regarded it as science fiction – had appealed to a grieving Jonah.

From the day when he and Bill met, their relationship had felt like that of two brothers. They’d bickered and argued, brought out the best in each other, drank and raged, and sometimes Jonah had believed they were two elements of the same mind. Yet, ironically, the catharsis that Jonah had believed he might find in such a project was not forthcoming.

His disbelief in an afterlife had never pained him until he’d met Bill. The American had seen a like mind in Jonah, not only a brilliant scientist but a man with passion in his heart and disaffection simmering just below the surface that he presented as a public front. And Bill’s talk of the multiverse and all it might be – world upon world, a perpetual variation of quantum universes echoing with each and every decision taken or moment passed – had fuelled a frustration in Jonah’s heart. His religious friends were content in their beliefs, and Jonah slowly found himself seeking his own. This was no deity that lured him, or teased him, or subjugated him with promises of pain and pronouncements of sin. It was a faint hope – vain, though he knew; naive, so Bill told him – that, in one of those endless worlds, Wendy might live still.

It’s not like that, Bill would say, and Jonah would nod because he knew his new friend was right. But at night, lying alone in bed in a nearby hotel and nursing the early insomnia that would grow to haunt him, he couldn’t convince himself that possibilities were not endless.

Jonah was no romantic. He was no crazed Ahab, seeking the impossible in an ocean of infinities. But his long-dead wife was still with him in a way that his atheistic heart had never dreamed possible.

He sighed and sat up. If he couldn’t sleep, he might as well have another drink. He picked up the bottle and poured, and it took a few seconds for him to register that the soft chiming came from his bedside phone, not the glass.

‘What?’ he snapped, snatching up the receiver. He fumbled and dropped it, having to lean over and retrieve it from the floor. His vision swam. Damn it, he was more drunk that he thought. ‘Yes?’ he asked again, holding it to his ear.

‘—coming through, and it’s the biggest yet. I wasn’t going to call you, didn’t want to cry wolf, but . . .’

‘Holly?’

‘Jonah, did I wake you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to focus. He placed his tumbler on the table and stood, leaning against his bookcase. ‘What’s coming through?’

‘Sorry. I wanted you to sleep . . .’ Holly trailed off, but in the background Jonah heard activity in Control. Someone shouted something – Melinda, he thought – her voice excited and loud. Someone else spoke in the distance, his voice calmer and more troubled.

‘Holly, what’s going on?’

‘—eradicator is fine, fully charged,’ Holly said, though it wasn’t to him.

‘But it should have fried it a couple of seconds ago,’ a male voice said. It sounded like Alex, the guards’ captain.

‘Holly?’ Jonah said.

‘It doesn’t fry things,’ Holly said, and Jonah smiled because she was so defensive of her work. ‘Melinda, can you see—?’

‘Biped,’ Melinda said, her voice high and shrill.

Biped, Jonah thought. Jesus Christ, a human might be coming through, and she’d held back calling him because she wanted him to bastard sleep?

‘Holly!’ he shouted, and he heard fumbling as she brought the phone to her ear again.