Quantum Night

48

It tore Kayla apart, knowing that Jim was in town. Oh, she’d had numerous fast-and-furious love affairs in her youth, back when she’d been a Q2, but this one had seemed real—a partnership of peers, much better than her marriage to Ben. She’d known that had been a mistake, known it as she was walking down the aisle. If she’d still been a Q2, she’d have said “fuck this,” spun on her high heels, and headed right out the door, leaving that loser at the altar. But her days of psychopathy were long behind her by then, and with each step she’d taken in her white dress, she’d thought, “But it’ll be embarrassing,” or “But Mom will be heartbroken,” or “But we’ve already booked the honeymoon trip,” or “Maybe it’ll be okay; maybe Ben will change.”

There’d been none of those second thoughts back in college: Jim Marchuk had been good, solicitous company, bending over backward to do whatever she wanted, until right at the end. And, when they’d reconnected, what a joy it had been to find an intellectual equal and someone who wasn’t needy, didn’t require constant reassurance, wasn’t an emotional vampire, and who was a kind and attentive lover.

Kayla was following the worsening news, as she imagined every other Q3 in the world was—and she wanted to be with her family today. She didn’t really think the world was going to come to an end in the next few hours, but, still, she’d kept Ryan, whom she’d finally managed to pick up last night, home from day camp, and she’d called in sick to the Light Source, and the two of them had headed back to her mother’s place so they could all be together.

They made breakfast—eggs, bacon, sausages, all the things Jim would disapprove of—then, as Ryan was helping her grandmother with the dishes, Kayla went down the hall to talk privately with Travis. She sat on the edge of the bed so they’d be at the same eye level.

“So,” she said, “Jim came by here last night?”

Travis nodded.

“And Ryan mentioned a blind man and a dog. I presume that’s Professor Warkentin, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did, um, did he mention me?”

“He said you were an A student.”

“Not Warkentin. Jim.”

“I know.” And Travis smiled the smile with which brothers had teased sisters for millennia. “Sure, he mentioned you. He said he was sad about how things had gone down.” A pause. “And you know what I said? ‘I know how you feel.’ And I do.” He shook his head and looked at her as if he were about to add something more.

“What?” asked Kayla.

“Nothing.”

“I’ve had years of practice now,” she said, “but you’re still learning. Biggest difference, once you start listening to that voice in your head? Q2s are terrific liars; Q3s are lousy ones. What’s going on?”

Travis looked—well, like Kayla had never seen him look, at least not when he was younger: like he was at war with himself. And then at last, lifting his arms slightly from the chair’s rests, he said, “You and I, we’re mistakes.”

“Huh?”

“We got shifted,” he said. “Displaced.” Then, looking away: “This will fix it.”

“What will?”

“What Jim is planning to do.”

“You mean with the synchrotron? There’s no way. He’d need Vic’s help, and she’d never—”

“She is. She is helping Jim and Warkentin. Jim called her from here; I overheard.”

Kayla pushed her palms against the mattress, standing up. “I—no, no. That can’t be.”

“She agrees with him, with Jim: if something isn’t done, the world’s going to come to an end—if not today, with Putin or Carroway igniting World War III, then next week, or next month, or next year.”

Kayla ran out. Ryan called out “Mommy!” as she careened through the living room.

“Stay here!” Kayla said. “I’ll be back.”

“But—”

“I love you!”

And she hurried out the front door into the merciless summer heat.

Vic got Menno, Pax, and me in through security; she clipped a dosimeter to Pax’s collar. We headed along the first indoor mezzanine-level balcony and came to where it made a left-hand turn into the second one. Vic nodded affably at people who passed us going the other direction. We made another left onto the third balcony, went down its length, and at last came to the stairs, which Pax managed quickly—she knew to get out of the way and wait for Menno at the bottom. He headed down, his left hand on the railing. “Three more steps,” I said. “Two. One.”

And at last, we were on the experimental floor. But instead of heading out toward the synchrotron, Vic led us down a small side passage, and then, after a final ninja look over her shoulder to see if the coast was clear, she used a keycard to open a doorway and then ducked inside. Pax, Menno, and I followed.

The room was filled with conduits and pipes, compressors and tanks. The walls were bare cement; the floor crisscrossed by tire skid marks presumably from heavy equipment having been wheeled in and out. We closed the door, and I took out the disposable pay-as-you-go voice-only cell phone I’d picked up at 7-Eleven this morning. Shit. No bars! But, after a couple of seconds one appeared, and then, like its taller brother, another popped up beside it. Cell phones aren’t great for calling 911, so I’d jotted down the regular number for the Saskatoon Police Service on the back of an old restaurant receipt—the one from that meal Kayla and I had shared at Sydney’s—and punched it in now.

On the second ring, the phone was answered by an automated attendant. I worked my way through menus, until, at last, a gruff male voice said, “Saskatoon Police.”

“Good morning, sir,” I said—Canadian politeness to the end. “I’ve planted a bomb at the Canadian Light Source; you know, the synchrotron on the U of S campus.”

“Who is—”

“It will detonate in sixty minutes.” And then, to give it an appropriate patina of craziness: “Those godless scientists are messing with the forces of nature. They have to be stopped.”

“Sir, if you’ll just—”

I pushed the button that disconnected the call, and we stood there, waiting. The thrum of the machinery drowned out the sound of our breathing, although Pax was panting from the hellish heat in here.

It was almost four minutes before an alarm sounded, and then, muffled—there was no intercom speaker in this confined space—we heard Jeff Cutler’s voice, reverberating: “All right, folks. Yes, again: evacuate, evacuate! For now, report to your fire-muster points. Everybody out, right now, right now!”

The building was large; on a normal day, Vic had said it could take a good ten minutes to get from deep in its interior to the main doors. But it had emergency exits, and those would be used now. We waited five minutes—although it seemed much longer—and then, cautiously, Vic opened the door partway, sticking her head out. She then opened it farther and left the room, gesturing for us to follow. My forehead and armpits were slick with sweat.

The place was deserted: vast, empty, but still alive, equipment throbbing. On the desks in the experimental hutches we passed were the stereotypical abandoned half-drunk cups of coffee and half-eaten sandwiches, plus, stretched like flayed skins over the backs of chairs or hanging from hooks, abandoned jackets and sweaters that might have been needed in air-conditioned conference rooms but certainly weren’t required outdoors in the heat of a prairie summer.

The security cameras were still running, doubtless recording what we were doing, but no one would be watching the monitors just now. We made it to the end of the SusyQ beamline, and, as Vic had arranged, a gurney was there. “Okay,” I said to Menno, “we’re here.”

Victoria and I helped guide him to the gurney, and he mounted it with a visible effort, then lay down. Vic cinched the bone-colored strap against his forehead, and she motioned for me to help wheel him into place.

And, as she’d said she would last night, Vic ran her test, the graph appearing on a monitor. Up high, as usual, was the band representing the entanglement of the entire human race, and, down below, there was just one superposition spike; Menno Warkentin was indeed now a Q1.

“It’ll take a few minutes to divert the power from the other beamlines,” Vic said. She did things on her computer, and another animated diagram came up on-screen. “Then there will be a three-minute gap between the first boosting and the second one; it’ll take that long for the equipment to recharge before we can boost everyone the second time.”

I watched as various things I didn’t understand happened on the status display Vic was looking at, and then, at last, she said, “Sixty seconds.”

My heart was pounding; if it had actually had surgical seams, it might have burst along them.

Kayla’s car raced across the University of Saskatchewan campus, sending up, as she saw in the rearview mirror, clouds of dust like prairie locusts. She again told her phone, connected to the car’s Bluetooth sound system, to call Vic’s cell, then Jim’s, but they both were still going immediately to their voice mail—and every landline number she’d tried at the Light Source had rung and rung until finally shunting to an automated attendant.

She turned left onto Innovation Boulevard and—

—hit the brakes! Five police cruisers were blocking the way, their roof lights flashing. Kayla skidded forward. She spun her steering wheel to keep from colliding with the closest cop car. As soon as she came to a stop, she threw her door open and hurried out. A uniformed officer approached her. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said from behind aviator-style sunglasses. “Place has been evacuated.”

“What? Why?”

“Ma’am, we need you to turn around and head out of here.”

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “It’s a bomb threat, right? Somebody called in another bomb threat, didn’t they?” She spread her arms. “It’s a hoax.”

“Ma’am, the bomb squad will make that determination when they get here.”

“I’m Dr. Huron; I’m a physicist at the Light Source. I need to get in.”

“Please, ma’am, you don’t want me to have to—”

She scanned around and spotted a loud Hawaiian shirt about fifty meters away. “Jeff!” she shouted, but the summer wind just blew the syllable back in her face. He was with a knot of others—some in lab coats, others in jeans and T-shirts, a couple in overalls and hardhats—and no one in all black. “Jeff!”

“There’s nothing he can do for you, ma’am,” the cop said.

“You don’t understand,” Kayla replied. “I have to get in there. I have to stop them.”

The cop put a hand on the Taser attached to his belt. “Please, ma’am, you need to return to your vehicle and move it out of the way.”

Kayla took off, running across the grass, heading for the Light Source’s entrance, a hundred meters or more away.

“Ma’am, freeze!”

She continued, legs pistoning.

And then, from behind her, a sound like fishing line being cast, and—

—something hit her in the back, the force of it impelling her forward even more quickly, until—

—her eyes bugged out and her legs stopped working and she tumbled forward, skidding face-first across the grass like a runner desperately sliding toward home. She was dazed but still fully conscious—and, she knew, for a few more minutes at least, she also had a conscience, one that was awash with guilt for not having gotten there in time.