Somewhere, far away down the beach, a radio was playing. The tune was familiar, but the words were slightly different:
Now everybody’s got an ocean
Across the USA
Because of global warming,
The floods are here to stay.
They went and melted both the ice caps;
Stupid USA.
Oh, Theo thought. Not promising.
For some reason, Pieter seemed to have got there earlier; he was sitting in a striped blue and white canvas chair under a huge red umbrella, sipping a margarita. He was tanned, with blobs of white zinc cream on his nose and chin, and his feet were bare. He looked up, scowled and shouted, “Theo? Where the hell did you get to?”
“I just got here. Where is this?”
Pieter’s wrath evaporated instantly. “Minneapolis,” he replied. “Merry Christmas, by the way.”
“Huh?”
“It’s 25 December,” Pieter said. “You’re just in time for the hog roast.”
“Minneapolis?”
Pieter nodded. Above his head, the sun was a white disc in a kingfisher-blue sky. Theo felt a drop of sweat roll down his nose, and wiped his forehead. “Ah,” he said.
“Exactly. Christmas Day in Minneapolis, and it’s ninety-two in the shade on the beach. Give you three guesses what’s different about this reality.”
“You sure it’s not just the future?”
Pieter shook his head. “Time travel is impossible,” he said confidently. “Trust me, I’m a physicist. Not here, though. Here, I’m Honest Pete Tomasek, joint owner of the Minneapolis Yacht Marina and Country Club.” He frowned again. “You’re my business partner. Which reminds me: there’s a raft of cheques and stuff for you to sign. You’d better see to it ASAP.”
“What the hell,” Theo demanded, “are we doing in Minneapolis?”
Pieter yawned, twiddled the little wooden stick in his drink, drew it out and licked it. “You were right about the bottles in the Vatican cellar being single-use spatio-temporal dislocation modules. God only knows how you knew, but you knew. Where you went wrong was your choice of vintage. Still, on balance, this is better than where we just came from.”
Little wheels were turning in Theo’s head. “How long have you been here?”
“Three weeks,” Pieter replied. “Just long enough to settle in and learn the ropes. I like it here.”
“Three weeks. Shouldn’t you be cream-of-physicist soup by now?”
Pieter beamed at him. “Yes. And I’m not. Which suggests there’s something about this place that counteracts the degradation effect. Personally, I’m guessing it’s to do with the damage to the ozone layer. Massive exposure to unfiltered UV light.” He shrugged. “It’d probably be a good idea if I steered clear of Kryptonite while I’m here, but otherwise I can’t really see a problem. Hence,” he added, “the cheerful outlook and jovial demeanour. Have a drink. They mix the sneakiest margarita.”
“Pieter,” Theo glanced up at the sky. “We can’t stay here. It’s a dying planet.”
For that he got a don’t-be-a-fusspot gesture. “It’s not that bad. They’ve got at least ninety years before the ambient radiation quotient reaches lethal. Also,” he added cheerfully, “they’ve got me. If I invent some brilliant fix for the climate change thing, I can save the planet and really clean up financially. Or I could just sit here and veg out in peace. Don’t you love it when you’ve got options?”
Theo looked at him. I’m not the only one who’s changed, he thought. Or maybe it’s just that rose-tinted spectacles don’t work properly in an atmosphere saturated with the wrong kind of light. “Pieter.”
“Hmm?”
“When I was your student,” he said, “I looked up to you. I admired what you’d achieved. I respected you as a scientist and a human being. And now you’re saying you don’t give a damn, not unless you can make a lot of money out of global catastrophe.”
Pieter gave him a sour look. “Blow it out your ear, Grasshopper,” he said. “Don’t you get it? We’re stuck here. We tried your million-to-one long shot, and, guess what, it didn’t work. No wine cellar, I checked. And there’s no way your lunatic sister can call us, because that’s impossible. We’re stranded on, as you so rightly point out, a dying planet. The moral high ground’s a bit different when there’s self-induced floodwater lapping round the foot of it. There’s nothing left to do here, Theo, it’s too late. So.” He sipped his drink and smiled. “The hell with it. Eat, drink and be insufferably self-righteous about other people’s mistakes, for tomorrow they fry. Isn’t that what being a scientist’s all about?”
“Pieter—”
“Besides,” Pieter went on, slamming his glass down on the table, “I’m beginning to have serious doubts about science in general. I mean, look at this place. Look what they’ve done to it. And who made it possible? Well?”
“Pieter—”
“People like me, is who. People with vision and imagination combined with knowledge, determination, passion and an infinite capacity for taking pains. Geniuses did this, Theo. Not fools, not people who count on their fingers and move their lips when they read. Idiots could never have figured out how to turn oozing black sludge into cheap energy, or designed the internal combustion engine. No, that took the finest minds the human race has ever produced. If we’d left it to the dumb-as-dogshit farmers, all this would be a golden ocean of frigging grain.”
“Pieter—”
“Don’t,” Pieter snapped furiously. “Don’t you dare say I’m wrong, because—”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Theo said meekly. “I just wanted to tell you, I know that woman.”
Pieter blinked at him. “Uh?”
“That woman over there. Tall, smartly dressed, about fifty. She’s something to do with Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill.”
“It’s possible, I guess,” Pieter said. “I mean, this friend of yours could have an exact equivalent in this universe. But the odds against running into the mirror-reality double of someone you know are so vast I never even bothered to consider it.”
“She’s waving at us.”
“No, that’s impossible,” Pieter said firmly. “The odds against knowing the mirror-reality double of someone you know are—”
“She’s heading this way.”
“What?”
“She’s coming to see us. She’s got a wine bottle.”
Pieter’s head slowly turned. “Does she know about—?”
“Oh yes.”
Pieter sat bolt upright so fast he poked himself in the eye with one of the spokes of the umbrella. “That’s crazy,” he said. “Why would anyone in their right mind want to come here?”
“What?”
“The bottles,” Pieter said. “They were sort of like the Mark One version of YouSpace. Each bottle is a one-off return trip to a pre-selected alternate reality.”
“I know. So?”
“So,” Pieter said, “when I chose them, I picked nice places. The sort of place you’d want to go to. Vacation spots. The sort of place, in other words, that this isn’t. So how in hell has one of my bottles brought her here?”
“Hold on,” Theo said. “You’ve been here before?”
“God, no,” Pieter replied. “It was all strictly theoretical. What I mean is, I calculated the probability needed to access a given alternate reality, and programmed the bottle’s guidance parameters accordingly. I didn’t test-drive the things.”
“Think about it,” Theo said. “One of your bottles brought us from the Vatican to here.”
Pieter looked blank. “I suppose it did, at that. Except that those bottles were in an alternate reality, so – oh, the hell with it, I give up. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”
Coming from Pieter, that was a bit like George W. Bush saying, Why don’t people check their facts before plunging into things? Even so, Theo couldn’t be bothered to comment. The woman, who was quite definitely Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz, in an elegant navy-blue suit with matching navy court shoes and shoulder bag, was bearing down on them with a look on her face that would’ve stopped a runaway train. Theo was about to call out to her when he noticed that Pieter had wriggled ninety degrees in his chair and was trying to hide his face behind his hands; curious behaviour, even by his standards –
“Mr Bernstein.”
– but so what? He turned and gave his rescuer a huge smile. “Mrs Duchene—”
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
Ah, he thought. Hostility. Not to worry, though. He’d been in deep trouble so long he was thinking of making it his domicile for tax purposes. “Am I glad to see you,” he went on. “How did you…?”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz sat down and put the wine bottle on the table. “Guesswork,” she said. “An extremely speculative long shot. Honestly, we’ve been worried sick about you. What were you thinking of, going off like that without telling anyone? Oh for pity’s sake, Pieter,” she added, “get a grip.”
Pieter winced and edged round, but avoided eye contact. “Hi, Dolly,” he said sheepishly.
Theo had to ask. “You know him?”
Pieter was about to say something, but he got a direct hit from a stare that would’ve done wonders for the planet’s icecaps, and subsided into meek silence. “It was Matasuntha’s idea,” she said. “He’s an idealist, she said. Try the global-warming planet. Don’t be ridiculous, I told her, nobody would be that stupid. But she insisted, and here you are.”
“Global…?”
“Yes. The planet where they reversed global warming. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Um.”
She frowned. “We assumed you might come here so you could find out how they did it. Just the sort of quixotic stunt you’d be capable of, she said. “Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz raised an eyebrow. “That’s not why you’re here. Oh well, not that it matters. Come on, I’ll take you back. And then you can go and fetch Max.”
Theo didn’t mean to make a loud whimpering noise. It just slipped out. “Max?”
“Yes, Max. Your brother. Your brother, who you abandoned in a cave surrounded by dangerous animals.”
“It wasn’t his—”
“Quiet, Pieter.” A click of the tongue, like a bone snapping. “I suppose you’ll want to come back too. Really, you’re not safe let loose on your own.”
Pieter mumbled something. The word sorry was in there somewhere. Meanwhile, three words had just percolated through into Theo’s brain. “Reversed global warming?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Theo looked out across the bay, where gulls circled over the Minnesota Sea. “Um,” he said, “I don’t think so. Otherwise, this lot wouldn’t be quite so under water.”
“That’s what it’s supposed to be,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said briskly. “There was supposed to have been a catastrophic disaster caused by the malfunction of a large-scale scientific experiment, which raised the ambient temperature by twelve degrees. Oh well.” She shrugged. “Pieter must’ve made a mess of his arithmetic. Wouldn’t be the first time. Come on, then, if you’re coming.”
She probably owns dogs, Theo thought; she’s used to that level of obedience. “Just a moment, though,” he said. “Why are you so concerned about my stupid brother? Why is everybody—?”
“Later,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said firmly. “We don’t want to be stranded here, do we?”
Theo nodded his head so vigorously he nearly became the first man to hang himself, standing up, without a rope. “Absolutely,” he said. “How do we do that, exactly?”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz opened her bag and took out a pair of reading glasses and a cork. “It’s written on here,” she said. “Different every time, which is annoying.”
“It’s all to do with the parallel vector index,” Pieter said defensively. “It’s one of the things that made me decide the one-off modules were a dead end.”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz made a very soft grunting noise, presumably signifying scepticism. “Right,” she said, putting the cork and her glasses back in her bag and snapping the clasp shut. “We need a waiter.”
“Of course we do,” Theo said. “What the hell for?”
“To take our order, of course.” She lifted her head, and instantly a young man in dark trousers and waistcoat came racing up to the table, holding a small notebook, thereby confirming Theo’s initial impression of Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz. He’d already decided that she was one of those quiet, forceful women. Now he knew she was a waiter-whisperer as well. It all fitted.
“Right,” she said. “To start, we’ll have prosciutto, olives, roasted garlic, peperoncini, artichoke hearts, rocket pesto, Milanese salami and thinly sliced mozzarella, with a very light dressing of virgin olive oil.”
“Si, signora. And to follow?”
“Lasagna verde, vermicelli, capellini, fusilli lunghi, tagliatelli and stuffed manicotti. But,” she added, skewering the waiter with a look that would’ve pierced tank armour, “we want all that at the same time as the first course. That’s very important. Do you understand?”
“Si, signora.”
“And on separate trays,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz went on. “That’s very important too.”
“Si, signora.”
“Both courses simultaneously, but separate.”
“Si. And wine?”
“No.” She nodded, releasing him, and he scuttled away. Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz breathed a little sigh, and folded her arms tightly. “I do hope he’s got that straight,” she said. “You never can tell with waiters.”
“Um, have we got time for lunch?” Theo asked warily. “Only, I thought we were in a hurry to get back.”
“We are. Pieter,” she snapped suddenly, “what are you doing?”
Pieter was writing frantically on the only surface available – the back of his left hand. “Not now, Dolly,” he said. “I think I’m on to something.”
“Pieter.”
Yes, a remarkable woman, able to materialise waiters and quite possibly calm thunderstorms and raise the dead. But was she powerful enough to command Pieter van Goyen? Apparently she was. “What?”
“You’re up to something. What are you doing?”
Pieter scowled, then put down his pen. “Actually, it was something you said.”
“I rather doubt that. What did I say?”
“The planet where they reversed global warming,” Pieter replied. “As it happens, I remember programming that particular bottle, purely as an intellectual exercise. I never imagined it’d be anything like this.”
“And, clearly, you got it wrong,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz replied. “Hence, as Mr Bernstein pointed out, all the water.”
Pieter smiled and shook his head. “No, it came out just right,” he said. “This is the planet where they found out how to put right the damage. It must be. I found it.”
“Hm.”
“But,” Pieter went on, “like you say, it hasn’t happened yet. Therefore, it’s going to happen, at some point, most likely in the very near future.”
“I’m sure that’s a great comfort, Pieter. Meanwhile—”
“My program,” Pieter went on, somehow managing to override her command protocols, “was designed to put a visitor down at the most interesting place and time for any given venue. Therefore, we’ve arrived at the point where they make the great discovery. Stands to reason. Inevitable.”
“If you say so, Pieter, dear.” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz made a show of looking round. “I have to say, though, it’s not looking particularly likely.”
“You think so?”
“Oh come on,” she said. “This is hardly the sort of place where you’d expect to find a scientific genius doing epoch-making work.”
Pieter lifted his head and gave her a beautiful smile. “Well,” he said. “Not if you will insist on interrupting me.”
The effect was as though she’d just found a dead frog in her terrine of venison. “You—”
“Obvious when you think about it,” Pieter said cheerfully. “I’m the key element in the program. I come here, solve the problem—”
“Pieter.”
“And as soon as I realised that,” Pieter went blithely on, “as soon as I knew I was bound to succeed, I had this really rather wonderful idea. You see, basically, what you need is two huge great refrigeration units, one at each pole. What’s the main active agent in refrigeration? Propane gas. And what vast untapped natural resource lies directly under Alaska and Antarctica? Whopping great oil fields. So, all you’d need to do is—”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz let out a long but entirely dignified sigh. “When we get back home,” she said, “I’ll have to write to all the encyclopedias, because the Great Wall of China will no longer be the largest man-made structure on the planet. Your ego—”
“Dolly.” Pieter’s voice was quite quiet, but it shut her up instantly. “Young Theo here was just lecturing me on what a waste it’d be if I didn’t use my exceptional talents in the service of mankind—”
“Not quite how I put it,” Theo mumbled defensively, but he still got scowled at.
“Well,” Pieter went on, “for once he’s quite right. I’m here at this place, at this time, for a reason.”
“Manifest destiny,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said sourly.
“If you like, yes. I was sent here by a superior power. Me,” he added happily. “Not someone you argue with. Well, you do, of course, but that’s just your incredibly bossy nature. No, it’s quite plain. I ordained that I should come here and do this thing. So, obviously, it’s my duty.”
“Oh for pity’s sake,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “Well? What do you want?”
The waiter, who’d appeared with a tray in his hand, shrank back a step. “Signora—”
“What? Oh, put it down. And where’s the pasta? I told you, simultaneously.”
“Si, signora. Un momento, per favore.” He darted away and came back a few seconds later with a second tray. When he was a yard or so from the table, Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz barked “Stop!” He stopped. “Put the tray down, and go away.”
The waiter put the tray down carefully on the ground, backed off a few paces, then turned and fled. Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz examined both trays for a moment, then turned to face Pieter. “So,” she said. “You want to stay here, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. I wash my hands of you. You can stay here, work your miracles and rot, for all I care. Just don’t expect me to come traipsing round after you when you realise you’re stuck here for ever.”
Pieter grinned. “Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said. “Theo’ll come back for me, won’t you?”
“Um,” Theo said.
“Of course you will. Dolly,” he went on, “exactly what do you think you’re doing with those trays?”
She was holding one tray directly over the other, lining up the edges with total precision. “Really, Pieter,” she said. “A genius like you. You ought to be able to work it out from first principles.”
Pieter shook his head. “Not a clue, sorry.”
“Ah well.” She paused for effect, then went on: “According to the instructions on the cork, in order to get home we need to trigger a massive carbon-oxygen implosion. The only way we can do this in this particular reality is the total annihilation effect brought about by the collision of pasta and antipasta. So—”
“Dolly—”
She looked at him. “Goodbye, Pieter,” she said..
“Dolly, I was kidding. The instructions were meant as a joke. What you really need to do is—”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz let go of the tray. There was a crash, the sound of splintering crockery –
“Dolly—”
– followed by an ear-splitting roar and a sheet of white flame that blotted out everything.
“Oh,” Theo said, as his head stopped spinning. “It worked.”
He’d felt better. There had been the heat of the flames on his skin, the indescribable sensation of being poured uphill into the mouth of a narrow bottle; and then this. He took a deep breath, staggered, caught himself just in time and subsided, with some degree of control and dignity, on to the carpeted floor.
“Well, of course it worked,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “I followed the instructions on the bottle. Not what most men would have done, of course, but I have this strange belief that instructions are put there so you’ll know what to do. Must you sprawl on the floor like that, by the way? It’s so hard to have an intelligent conversation with someone in a different plane.”
Floor. Well, yes, she had a point there. “Sorry,” he said, and tried to stand up, but his knees wouldn’t take his weight. Fortunately, the carpet was deep and springy. “Where is this?” he said.
“Home. Well, sort of. Our reality.”
He had another go. This time, he made it, but only because someone helped him. He swung round to find out who his unseen assistant might be, and –
“Lunchbox.”
The tall, thin young man smiled awkwardly and made a grunting noise that might just possibly have been some sort of articulate speech. Theo yelped and tried to pull away, but Lunchbox’s hand was locked round his elbow. Where he kept his muscles was anybody’s guess, but he quite definitely had some.
“Don’t make a fuss,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said briskly, “you’ll only hurt yourself and it won’t do a bit of good.”
“But that’s not right,” Theo blurted out. “Lunchbox is one of Janine’s goons, surely.”
The look on the young man’s face made him feel desperately guilty, as though he’d just kicked a baby wolf cub. Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz clicked her tongue. “The term you’re groping for is private enquiry agent,” she said. “We don’t use the G-word, it’s not polite. Arthur, dear, you don’t have to grip quite so tightly. Mr Bernstein isn’t going to run away.”
The pressure on his elbow relaxed slightly, allowing a tiny trickle of blood to squeeze down into Theo’s almost completely numb forearm. “Where is this?” Theo repeated. “I don’t recognise it.”
“This is my daughter’s house,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “It’ll be your place of work from now on. Sorry, didn’t I tell you? You’re working for me now. After all, someone’s got to keep you on the ball. You’re very bright and a good physicist, but you lack focus.”
“You can’t do that,” Theo yelped. “You can’t just steal me.”
“Why not? Besides, it’s not stealing. You don’t belong to anyone.”
“I belong to me.”
“You don’t count. Also, you want to help. You want to get Max back. He’s your brother.”
They train dogs easily enough. Go about it the right way and you can transform a tail-wagging, face-licking man’s best friend into an implacable killing machine just by saying one word. But you couldn’t do that with humans, surely.
Maybe you could. It would all depend, presumably, on the word. Three letters, proper noun, beginning with M, rhymes with ‘fax’ –
“Screw Max. The hell with Max. I hope they catch him and feed him to the cuddly warthog from The Lion King. May meerkats feast on his decomposing—”
He stopped, but only because Lunchbox had stuck a sandwich in his mouth. It took him three seconds to choke and another two seconds to spit it out, by which time his fury had abated a little, and curiosity had elbowed its way in front of the mic. “What do you care about my useless brother, anyhow? Why is everybody obsessed with that lying, swindling, pathetic—?”
Lunchbox sighed tragically and produced another sandwich. Theo took the hint and lifted his free hand in token of surrender. And noticed something.
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz was way ahead of him. “It’s back,” she said. “Your invisible hand.”
“No, that’s not—” Theo stared at it, then shook his head. “We’re still in a YouSpace world, aren’t we?” he said. “You’re playing games with me.”
“Wait just a moment. You’ll see.”
Theo’s eyes were still fixed on his hand. Was it just his imagination, or was it getting paler? White, pearly white like a light bulb, translucent. “No!” he wailed, but it was no good. He could see the opposite wall through the outline of his metacarpal.
“Radiation,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “You did know that, didn’t you? That’s what happened to it when the hadron collider blew up. I imagine when you heard the blast or saw the flash, you instinctively raised your hand to shield your face. Which, on reflection, was probably just as well, or else your normal blank expression would’ve been blanker still.”
“That’s right, I—” Theo’s head snapped up, and he stared at her. “Radiation?”
She nodded slowly. “Rather a stiff dose, I’m afraid. As far as living on borrowed time is concerned, you’re the oncological equivalent of the Eurozone. However – oh, pull yourself together, for pity’s sake.”
Theo looked at her, but all he could see through the tears was a sort of blurry, splodgy mass. “However?”
“That—” She nodded at his hand, which was now just a cartoon outline sticking out of his shirt cuff. “That is an extremely hopeful sign. You see, every time you translocate to an alternative reality, a portion of the radioactive contamination is leeched out of your system. One or two more trips, and—” She shrugged. “No guarantees,” she said. “This is all practically unexplored territory, medically speaking. But it’s your best chance. After all, why else do you think Pieter left you the YouSpace technology?”
Theo’s head had been doing a lot of swimming lately, enough for it to be in serious contention for the 2016 Olympics. This one, though, had it doing butterfly stroke. “Pieter knew—”
“Of course he did. How do you suppose I know about it? Because Pieter told me. It was his way of making it up to you.”
Dead silence, apart from the strange, otherworldly sound of Lunchbox eating a Jaffa Cake. “Making it up to me for what, exactly?”
“For blowing up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider.”
“Um, no. Other way round, surely. It was me who blew up the VVLHC.”
“No.”
“Yes. It was me. Really it was. I moved the decimal place—”
The rest of the sentence melted away, like snow on a hot flue. What was it, Theo couldn’t help wondering, about this woman, anyhow? She had a knack of making him feel like he was five years old and had just flushed the keys to Daddy’s new Mercedes down the toilet. All she’d done was press her lips a tiny bit closer together and, well, look at him, and he felt a sudden urge to sit down and write out I Must Not Talk In Class five hundred times.
“My mistake,” she said eventually. “I said just now you were a good physicist. Obviously not.”
“That’s right. That’s why I blew up the—”
“You did not blow up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider. Oh, for crying out loud,” she added impatiently, “did it never occur to you to check the figures? Yes, you made a boo-boo with your sums. Yes, you moved the decimal point the wrong way. But if you’d bothered to go back and do the maths again, you’d have realised your mistake wasn’t anything like enough to blow the whole shooting match. The worst that would’ve happened was it’d have tripped a fuse and knocked it out for a day or so. Arthur, you can let go of him now. I think he’s changed his mind about wanting to run away.”
Lunchbox let go of Theo’s arm, which lolled bonelessly from his elbow and dangled, unnoticed. “But that’s not right,” Theo said weakly. “I mean, I—”
She was right, though. Even as he’d been speaking, his mind had been running the calculations, and she was right. There had been three fail-safes and two redundant systems standing between his misplaced dot and total meltdown. He’d been so quick to assume that it had been his fault, he hadn’t even considered them. “Hold on,” he whispered. “If I didn’t—”
She looked at him and didn’t say a word.
“Pieter?”
She nodded.
“No. No, I’m sorry, but that’s just impossible. Pieter may be a bit of a jerk sometimes, and slightly more self-centred than a centrifuge, but he could never make a mistake like—”
“It wasn’t a mistake.”
Lunchbox ate a sausage roll, two Garibaldi biscuits and an apple. Then Theo said, “What?”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz said. “It was deliberate. He needed to find out the maximum acceleration stress factor for the antigravitic buffers before he could use the same technology for the single-use module project. The wine cellar,” she translated helpfully. “Anyhow, the only way to do that was by destruct testing. So, he blew up the VVLHC.” She smiled at him. “And blamed it on you.”
The top of Theo’s head was a tooth, and his brain was an abscess. “No.”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz shrugged gracefully. “It’s the truth,” she said. “And I know it’s true, because Pieter told me so himself. All your misery and unhappiness, the shame, the disgrace, your wife leaving you, the whole thing, is all Pieter’s fault. All of it.”
“No.” He wanted to hit her, and presumably it showed, because Lunchbox hurriedly gulped down half a cherry Bakewell and flexed his long fingers. Theo didn’t notice. “And even if you’re right, it wasn’t all his fault. I mean, it wasn’t Pieter that made Schliemann Brothers go bust.”
She cleared her throat. “Actually,” she said, “yes, it was. Schliemanns had lent twelve billion dollars to a private consortium working on a roughly similar project to Pieter’s. When the VVLHC blew up, the other backers pulled out, the consortium folded and Schliemanns had to file for bankruptcy. Two birds with one stone, as far as Pieter was concerned. He got his test results and put his only rivals out of business, and you took the blame, got irradiated and lost all the money you inherited from your father. He’s smart, my brother.”
Enough is enough. With a wail of horrified fury, Theo lunged at her. She sidestepped neatly, and for a moment he seemed to hang in the air, like Tom the cat in the cartoons when he runs off a cliff. Then Lunchbox hit him over the head with a solid-steel thermos full of French onion soup, and for a while all his troubles seemed so far away.