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Synopsis
Best-selling author Simon Morden draws upon his expertise as a bona fide rocket scientist to deliver mindbending science fiction. In Theories of Flight, Petrovich is the guardian of several secrets. For starters, he knows how to make anti-gravity. And if that’s not impressive enough, he also knows which secret server farm hides a sentient computer program—the same one that nearly wiped out the Metrozone. Now someone wants to kill Petrovich—and doesn’t seem to care what is destroyed in the process.
Release date: May 1, 2011
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 368
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Theories of Flight
Simon Morden
Petrovitch stared at the sphere in his hands, turning it slowly to reveal different parts of its intricately patterned surface.
Shining silver lines of metal in curves and whorls shone against the black resin matrix, the seeming chaos replicated throughout
the hidden depths of the globe; a single strand of wire that swam up and down, around and around, its path determined precisely
by equations he himself had discovered.
It was a work of art; dense, cold, beautiful, a miracle of manufacture. A kilometer of fine alloy wound up into a ball the
size of a double fist.
But it was supposed to be more than that. He let it fall heavily onto his desk and flicked his glasses off his face. His eyes,
always so blue, were surrounded with red veins. He scrubbed at them again.
The yebani thing didn’t, wouldn’t work, no matter how much he yelled and hit it. The first practical test of the Ekanobi-Petrovitch
laws, and it just sat there, dumb, blind, motionless.
Stanford—Stanford! Those raspizdyay kolhoznii amerikanskij—were breathing down his neck, and he knew that if he didn’t crack it soon, they’d either beat him to his own discovery or
debunk the whole effort. He was damned if he was going to face them across a lecture hall having lost the race. And Pif would
string him up by his yajtza, which was a more immediate problem.
So, the sphere didn’t work. It should. Every test he’d conducted on it showed that it’d been made with micrometer precision,
exactly in the configuration he’d calculated. He’d run it with the right voltage.
Everything was perfect, and still, and still…
He picked up his glasses from where he’d thrown them. The same old room snapped into focus: the remnants of Pif’s time with
him scattered across her old desk, the same pot plants existing on a diet of cold coffee, the light outside leaking in around
the yellowed slats of the Venetian blinds.
Sound leaked in, too: sirens that howled toward the crack of distant gunfire, carried on cold, still winter air. Banging and
clattering, hammers and drills, the reverberations of scaffolding. A tank slapping its caterpillar tracks down on the tarmac.
None of it loud enough to distract him from the hum of the fluorescent tube overhead.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of printed paper, which he placed squarely in front of him. He stared at the symbols
on it, knowing the answer was there somewhere, if only he knew where to look. He turned his wedding ring in precise quarter
circles, still finding it a cold and alien presence on his body.
Time passed. Voices in the corridor outside grew closer, louder, then faded.
Petrovitch looked up suddenly. His eyes narrowed and he pushed his glasses back up his nose. His heart spun faster, producing
a surge of blood that pricked his skin with sweat.
Now everything was slow, deliberate, as he held on to his idea. He reached for a pencil and turned the sheet of paper over,
blank side to him. He started to scratch out a diagram, and when he’d finished, some numbers to go with it.
Petrovitch put down the pencil and checked his answer.
Dubiina, he whispered to himself, durak, balvan.
The ornate sphere had taunted him from across the desk for the last time. He was going to be its master now. He reached over
and fastened his hand around it, then threw it in the air with such casual defiance that it would have had his head of department
leaping to save it.
He caught it deftly on its way down, and knew that it would never have to touch the floor again.
He carried it to the door, flung it open, and stepped through. The two paycops lolling beside the lift caught a flavor of
his mood. One nudged the other, who turned to see the white blond hair and tight-lipped smile of Petrovitch advancing toward
them at a steady gait.
“Doctor Petrovitch?” asked one. “Is there a problem?”
Petrovitch held the sphere up in front of him. “Out of the way,” he said. “Science coming through.”
He ran down the stairs; two stories, sliding his hand over the banister and only taking a firm hold to let his momentum carry
him through the air for the broad landings. Now was not the time to wait, foot-tapping, for a crawling lift car that gave
him the creeps anyway. Everything was urgent, imminent, immanent.
Second floor: his professor had given him two graduate students, and he had had little idea what to do with them. The least
he could do to compensate for several months of make-work was to include them in this. He needed witnesses, anyway. And their
test rig. Which may or may not be completed: Petrovitch hadn’t seen either student for a week, or it might have been two.
Either way, he was certain he could recognize them again.
He kicked the door to their lab space open. They were there, sitting in front of an open cube of wood, a cat’s cradle of thin
wires stretched inside. An oscilloscope—old school cathode tube—made a pulsing green line across its gridded screen.
The woman—blonde, skin as pale as parchment, eyes gray like a ghost’s… McNeil: yes, that was her name—glanced over her shoulder.
She jumped up when she saw Petrovitch’s expression and what he was carrying.
“You’ve finished it.”
“This? Yeah, about a week ago. Should have mentioned it, but that’s not what’s important now.” He advanced on a steel trolley.
In time-honored fashion, new equipment was built in the center of the lab. The old was pushed to the wall to be cannibalized
for parts or left to fossilize.
He inspected the collection of fat transformers on the trolley’s top shelf. When he squatted down to inspect the lower deck,
he found some moving coil meters and something that might have been the heavy-duty switching gear from a power station. “Do
either of you need any of this?”
He waited all of half a second for a reply before seizing the trolley in his free hand and trying to tip it over. Some of
the transformers were big ferrite ones, and he couldn’t manage it one-handed. McNeil and the man—Petrovitch’s mind was too full to remember his name—looked at each other.
“You,” he said to the man, “catch.”
He threw the sphere and, without waiting to see if it had a safe arrival, wedged his foot under one of the trolley’s castors
and heaved. The contents slid and fell, collecting in a blocky heap on the fifties lino.
He righted the trolley and looked around for what he needed. “Power supply there,” he pointed, and McNeil scurried to get
it. “That bundle of leads there. Multimeter, any, doesn’t matter. And the Mukhanov book.”
The other student was frozen in place, holding the sphere like it was made of crystal. Hugo Dominguez, that was it. Had problems
pronouncing his sibilants.
“You all right with that?”
Dominguez nodded dumbly.
The quantum gravity textbook was the last thing slapped on the trolley, and Petrovitch took the handle again.
“Right. Follow me.”
McNeil trotted by his side. “Doctor Petrovitch,” she said.
And that was almost as strange as being married. Doctor. What else could the university have done, but confer him with the
title as soon as was practically possible?
“Yeah?”
“Where are we going?”
“Basement. And pray to whatever god you believe in that we’re not over a tube line.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Sure.” They’d reached the lift. He leaned over the trolley and punched the button to go down.
“Okay,” she said, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “Why?”
“Because what I was doing before wasn’t working. This will.” The lift pinged and the door slid aside. Petrovitch took a good
long look at the empty space before gritting his teeth and launching the trolley inside. He ushered the two students in, then
after another moment’s hesitation on the threshold, he stepped in.
He reached behind him and thumbed the stud marked B for basement.
As the lift descended, they waited for him to continue. “What’s the mass of the Earth?” he said. When neither replied, he
rolled his eyes. “Six times ten to the twenty-four kilos. All that mass produces a pathetic nine point eight one meters per
second squared acceleration at the surface. An upright ape like me can outpull the entire planet just by getting out of a
chair.”
“Which is why you had us build the mass balance,” she said.
“Yeah. You’re going to have to take it apart and bring it down here.” The door slid back to reveal a long corridor with dim
overhead lighting. “Not here here. This is just to show that it works. We’ll get another lab set up. Find a kettle. Stuff
like that.”
He pushed the trolley out before the lift was summoned to a higher floor.
“Doctor,” said Dominguez, finally finding his voice, “that still does not explain why we are now underground.”
“Doesn’t it?” Petrovitch blinked. “I guess not. Find a socket for the power supply while I wire up the rest of it.” He took
the sphere from Dominguez and turned it around until he found the two holes. His hand chased out a couple of leads from the
bird’s nest of wires, spilling some of them to the floor. The lift disappeared upstairs, making a grinding noise as it went.
They worked together. McNeil joined cables together until she’d made two half-meter lengths. Dominguez set up the multimeter
and twisted the dial to read current. Petrovitch plugged two jacks into the sphere, and finally placed Mukhanov and Winitzki’s
tome on the floor. He set the sphere on top of it.
“Either of you two worked it out yet?” he asked. “No? Don’t worry: I’m supposed to be a genius, and it took me a week. Hugo,
dial up four point eight volts. Watch the current. If it looks like it’s going to melt something, turn it off.”
The student had barely put his hand on the control when the lift returned. A dozen people spilled out, all talking at once.
“Yobany stos!” He glared out over the top of his glasses. “I’m trying to conduct an epoch-making experiment which will turn this place into
a shrine for future generations. So shut the huy up.”
One of the crowd held up his camera phone, and Petrovitch thought that wasn’t such a bad idea.
“You. Yes, you. Come here. I don’t bite. Much. Stand there.” He propelled the young man front and center. “Is it recording?
Good.”
All the time, more people were arriving, but it didn’t matter. The time was now.
“Yeah, okay. Hugo? Hit it.”
Nothing happened.
“You are hitting it, right?”
“Yes, Doctor Petrovitch.”
“Then why isn’t the little red light on?” He sat back on his heels. “Chyort. There’s no yebani power in the ring main.”
There was an audible groan.
Petrovitch looked up again at all the expectant faces. “Unless someone wants to stick their fingers in a light socket, I suggest
you go and find a very long extension lead.”
Some figures at the back raced away, their feet slapping against the concrete stairs. When they came back, it wasn’t with
an extension lead proper, but one they’d cobbled together out of the cable from several janitorial devices and gaffer tape.
The bare ends of the wire were live, and it was passed over the heads of the watching masses gingerly.
It took a few moments more to desleeve the plug from the boxy power supply and connect everything together. The little red
light glimmered on.
Petrovitch looked up at the cameraman. “Take two?”
“We’re on.”
Petrovitch got down on his hands and knees, and took one last look at the inert black sphere chased with silver lines. In
a moment, it would be transformed, and with it, the world. No longer a thing of beauty, it would become just another tool.
“Hugo?” He was aware of McNeil crouched beside him. She was holding her breath, just like he was.
Dominguez flicked the on switch and slowly turned the dial. The digital figures on the multimeter started to flicker.
Then, without fuss, without sound, the sphere leaped off the book and into the air. It fell back a little, rose, fell, rose,
fell, each subsequent oscillation smaller than the previous one until it was still again: only it was resting at shin-height
with no visible means of support.
Someone started clapping. Another joined in, and another, until the sound of applause echoed, magnified, off the walls.
His heart was racing again, the tiny turbine in his chest having tasted the amount of adrenaline flooding into his blood. He felt dizzy, euphoric, ecstatic even. Here was science elevated
to a religious experience. Dominguez was transfixed, motionless like his supervisor. It was McNeil who was the first of the
three to move. She reached forward and tapped the floating sphere with her fingernail. It slipped sideways, pulling the cables
with it until it lost momentum and stopped. She waved her hand under it, over it.
She turned to Petrovitch and grinned. He staggered to his feet and faced the crowd. “Da! Da! Da!” He punched the air each time, and found he couldn’t stop. Soon he had all of them, young and old, men and women, fists in
the air, chanting “Da!” at the tops of their voices.
He reached over and hauled Dominguez up. He held his other hand out to McNeil, who crawled up his arm and clung on to him
in a desperate embrace. Thus encumbered, he turned to the camera phone and extended his middle finger—not his exactly, but
he was at least its owner. “Yob materi vashi, Stanford.”
At first, Petrovitch thought the buzzing coming from his leg was the first sign that his circulation was failing like it used
to do, and his heart needed charging up again.
Then he realized it was his phone, the one that Maddy made him carry on pain of death—his, naturally. He unVelcroed his pocket
even as staff and students swirled around him, slapping his back, shaking his hand, kissing him. Some of them were crying,
wetting his cheeks with their tears of joy.
It was party time, and he’d brought the best present of all.
He palmed the phone and glanced at the screen. He was clearly lucky to get a signal at all down in the depths. He checked
the caller ID, and frowned. It wasn’t his wife, and he wasn’t aware of anyone else who would know his carefully guarded number.
He ducked clear of the crowd, which seemed to be growing by the minute, and walked further down the corridor to answer the
call.
“Yeah?”
“Doctor Samuil Petrovitch? Husband of Sergeant Madeleine Petrovitch?”
It definitely wasn’t her. And with all the noise around him, it was almost impossible to hear the man at the other end of
the connection.
“What’s wrong?”
The reply was lost, and Petrovitch growled in frustration. He jammed his finger in his ear and tried to cup his hand around
the phone.
“Say again?”
“Sergeant Petrovitch has been injured. She’s been taken to…” and that was all he could make out.
Petrovitch lowered the phone and yelled at the top of his voice: “Past’ zabej! I’m trying to talk to someone here.” When the sound level had dropped below cacophony, he tried again. “Where is she?”
“St. Bart’s. She’s—”
“She’s what?” he interrupted. He had no control over the speed of his heart. It had no beats to miss, but it felt like it
had momentarily stalled. “Do I actually have time to get there?”
“Walking wounded. Three rounds to the chest, but the armor held up. But that’s…”
“Yebani v’rot,” said Petrovitch, exasperated, “shut up and listen. Who are you?”
“Casualty clearing orderly.”
“Is she going to die?”
“No.”
“Has she asked for me?”
“Yes.”
“Then why the chyort didn’t you say any of that in the first place? I’m on my way.” He cut the call and plunged back into the mass of people,
heading purposefully for the lift.
McNeil caught his arm. “Who was it? Press?”
“The militia. I have to go.” He tried to advance, but she held him back with surprising strength.
She leaned in close. “You have to talk to the press. Get the news out about what’s happened here today,” she said.
“They’re going to find out soon enough, with or without my help.” He pried her fingers away. “Why don’t you and Hugo talk
to the cameras. You’ll do just fine.”
Petrovitch pushed through to the stairs to find she was still on his heels.
“We can’t do that!” she complained. “We don’t even know what you did!”
“The field attenuates to the seventh power. Upstairs, it had nothing to push against: down here, it does. Can you handle it
now, because I really need to go?”
“Doctor, the head of department is here,” she called after him. “He wants to congratulate you.”
Petrovitch was already starting to climb. “You know what? Do pizdy.”
She tried one last time. “But Doctor Petrovitch: science!”
He stopped and brought his knuckle up to his mouth. He bit hard into it to stiffen his resolve.
“This… this is going to be with us forever,” he said. “Now we’ve discovered how to do it, everybody will be copying us. Good
luck to them. My life is more than this now. Someone else needs me, and that won’t wait. Give my apologies to the head. Tell
him… I don’t know—tell him my wife’s been shot. He’ll understand.”
He left her, her mouth forming a perfect O, and ran up one flight of stairs to the ground floor. He was passed on the way
by more people, some of whom turned their heads as they recognized him, and some, like the ninja reporter with a broadcast camera and an armful of studio lights, so intent on getting to the site of the miracle that they failed to
spot the prophet.
He skipped past the ground floor and kept on going: he wasn’t dressed for outside, and he’d need money, travelcard and identification
if he was going to get across the central Metrozone and not get stranded, arrested or worse en route. It had never been the
easiest of journeys: now it took wits as well as patience.
Back on the fourth floor, he took everything he needed out of his top drawer and threw on the scorched leather coat that had
become his prized possession. In his pocket were clip-on lenses in a slim case. He slid them over the bridge of his own glasses,
and the world became info-rich.
He knew the temperature, the wind speed, the likelihood of rain. He knew that the tube was still completely out, shallow tunnels
crushed, deep tunnels flooded, but that there was a limited bus service along the Embankment as far as London Bridge. He knew
that there was Outie activity around Hampstead Heath—firefights all along the A5/M1 corridor as well—but that was too far
out to affect him. A bomb in Finsbury Park earlier, with twenty dead and a legion of whackos ready to claim it for their own.
As wedding presents went, the clip-ons were pretty cool. Even cooler when he’d hacked the controller and got it to display
lots of things the manufacturers hadn’t meant it to.
Back down four floors to the foyer: a mere ten minutes after he’d discovered artificial gravity. There was still a steady
drift of people heading for the basement, enough that it had started to become congested and the paycops didn’t quite know
what to do with everyone.
Petrovitch was ignored, and in turn, he ignored them. He headed for the street, passing through the foyer doors and experiencing one of the flashbulb flashbacks he sometimes had.
The present blinked into the past, and he was striding out into the night, Madeleine behind him. A packet of hand-written
equations burned in his pocket.
The scene vanished as abruptly as it had arrived. He was back with weak daylight, the sound of people, the swoosh of automatic
doors.
It had been quiet and cold when he’d trekked in from Clapham A and through the govno-smeared realms of Battersea—even the Outies had to sleep sometime. Now it was even colder, and there was an electric tension
in the air, not helped by the battle tank parked on the corner of Exhibition Road, gun muzzle trained across Hyde Park. There’d
always been direction to Metrozone pedestrians—a purpose for being on the streets, A to B, going to work, to school, to the
shops—now there wasn’t. There were gaps between people, and they spilled aimlessly along the pavements.
The city was broken, and he hated the thought that something he’d spilled good, honest blood over was losing its way. He hated
it, and still he stayed.
He headed south toward Chelsea, where he had to pass through an impromptu checkpoint thrown hastily across the road. Even
though it was nothing more than a few waist-high barriers, a white van with MEA stencilled on the side and two paycops with
Authority armbands, he took them seriously because of their guns. He affected a calm, cool exterior as he approached the screen.
The cops were edgy, looking for those who might dodge through the unscreened, northbound stream in an attempt to avoid the
scanner. They were edgy in a way that suggested they might shoot without warning.
It was his turn. He walked smartly through the arch and kept going. No contraband, no weapons: he was clean. There was nothing
for the computer to latch on to, and no human operator to spot anything out of the ordinary.
Petrovitch’s hand went to the back of his neck, where his hair had grown uncharacteristically long. His fingers touched surgical
metal.
The buildings around him bore scars, too. The visible tidemark on their street-side faces rose higher the closer he got to
the river, and such was the pressure of population, some people found themselves forced to live in the stinking lower floors,
amidst walls and floors and ceilings still damp and contaminated with gods-knew-what.
He came to the Thames, brown and sluggish, shining wetly. A barge, once embedded in a riverfront property, lay broken and
sad on the mudslick that had been a line of trees. Across the Albert Bridge, he could almost see home.
The Embankment road had been scraped with a bulldozer, washed down by pumps. The white line was visible again down its center,
and off to one side beside the Regency town houses swathed in scaffolding was the temporary bus stop. The virtual arrow above
it was almost unnecessary, but finding he only had a five-minute wait was welcome news.
There was a queue. There always was. He took the opportunity to view the chasm carved through the London skyline, right through
the heart of Brompton and out onto the Chelsea embankment. Across the river, the clear-cutting of buildings continued along
the shoreline before petering out.
He was one of the few who knew it was the route of the Shinjuku line, mark two, terminating at the Oshicora Tower. Almost
everyone else saw it as a random wound, born of chaos like everything else that night.
The bus, windows glazed with grime and protected by close-meshed grilles, strained along toward him. It sagged at the curbside
and folded its tired doors aside. Inside, it was literally standing room only. The vehicle had no seats apart from the driver’s:
they’d been stripped out and thrown away. Passengers grabbed at a pole or a hang-strap, or each other. Cattle-class for all:
egalitarian transport for the twenty-first century.
Petrovitch slid his pass across the sensor and elbowed his way toward the back, where the crush would be less and the air
a little clearer.
The journey along the north bank of the Thames was dreary and dull. The filth on the windows was sufficiently thick to render
the view outside nothing more than variations in dark and light. With his info shades on, he was provided with a virtual map
of his journey. Most of his fellow passengers had to rely on the driver’s announcements over the tannoy to give them clues
as to where they were.
But no matter their status, they were all stuck together on the same bus, rocking this way and that, jerked by the inconstant
acceleration and braking, clinging on to handles welded to the roof.
Chelsea Bridge, Claverton Street, Vauxhall Bridge, Lambeth Bridge—where the putative Keiyo line was driven through, narrowly
missing Westminster Abbey—and Westminster Bridge. At each stop, people got on or off in an exchange that was interminably
slow. No one would move out of the way from simple courtesy, choosing instead to shuffle sullenly aside. Fights were common,
but there were no paycops on the buses. MEA, always on the verge of bankruptcy, couldn’t afford them.
He used his pocket controller to catch a news wire. The Metrozone’s litany of disasters was usually relegated to the third
or fourth item on any given day, unless someone pulled off a spectacular. Top of the cycle was rioting in Paris—l’anglais causing problems as Metrozone refugees filled up French parks. Second was a late-season hurricane bearing down on Florida.
Third, was him, managing to p. . .
Shining silver lines of metal in curves and whorls shone against the black resin matrix, the seeming chaos replicated throughout
the hidden depths of the globe; a single strand of wire that swam up and down, around and around, its path determined precisely
by equations he himself had discovered.
It was a work of art; dense, cold, beautiful, a miracle of manufacture. A kilometer of fine alloy wound up into a ball the
size of a double fist.
But it was supposed to be more than that. He let it fall heavily onto his desk and flicked his glasses off his face. His eyes,
always so blue, were surrounded with red veins. He scrubbed at them again.
The yebani thing didn’t, wouldn’t work, no matter how much he yelled and hit it. The first practical test of the Ekanobi-Petrovitch
laws, and it just sat there, dumb, blind, motionless.
Stanford—Stanford! Those raspizdyay kolhoznii amerikanskij—were breathing down his neck, and he knew that if he didn’t crack it soon, they’d either beat him to his own discovery or
debunk the whole effort. He was damned if he was going to face them across a lecture hall having lost the race. And Pif would
string him up by his yajtza, which was a more immediate problem.
So, the sphere didn’t work. It should. Every test he’d conducted on it showed that it’d been made with micrometer precision,
exactly in the configuration he’d calculated. He’d run it with the right voltage.
Everything was perfect, and still, and still…
He picked up his glasses from where he’d thrown them. The same old room snapped into focus: the remnants of Pif’s time with
him scattered across her old desk, the same pot plants existing on a diet of cold coffee, the light outside leaking in around
the yellowed slats of the Venetian blinds.
Sound leaked in, too: sirens that howled toward the crack of distant gunfire, carried on cold, still winter air. Banging and
clattering, hammers and drills, the reverberations of scaffolding. A tank slapping its caterpillar tracks down on the tarmac.
None of it loud enough to distract him from the hum of the fluorescent tube overhead.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of printed paper, which he placed squarely in front of him. He stared at the symbols
on it, knowing the answer was there somewhere, if only he knew where to look. He turned his wedding ring in precise quarter
circles, still finding it a cold and alien presence on his body.
Time passed. Voices in the corridor outside grew closer, louder, then faded.
Petrovitch looked up suddenly. His eyes narrowed and he pushed his glasses back up his nose. His heart spun faster, producing
a surge of blood that pricked his skin with sweat.
Now everything was slow, deliberate, as he held on to his idea. He reached for a pencil and turned the sheet of paper over,
blank side to him. He started to scratch out a diagram, and when he’d finished, some numbers to go with it.
Petrovitch put down the pencil and checked his answer.
Dubiina, he whispered to himself, durak, balvan.
The ornate sphere had taunted him from across the desk for the last time. He was going to be its master now. He reached over
and fastened his hand around it, then threw it in the air with such casual defiance that it would have had his head of department
leaping to save it.
He caught it deftly on its way down, and knew that it would never have to touch the floor again.
He carried it to the door, flung it open, and stepped through. The two paycops lolling beside the lift caught a flavor of
his mood. One nudged the other, who turned to see the white blond hair and tight-lipped smile of Petrovitch advancing toward
them at a steady gait.
“Doctor Petrovitch?” asked one. “Is there a problem?”
Petrovitch held the sphere up in front of him. “Out of the way,” he said. “Science coming through.”
He ran down the stairs; two stories, sliding his hand over the banister and only taking a firm hold to let his momentum carry
him through the air for the broad landings. Now was not the time to wait, foot-tapping, for a crawling lift car that gave
him the creeps anyway. Everything was urgent, imminent, immanent.
Second floor: his professor had given him two graduate students, and he had had little idea what to do with them. The least
he could do to compensate for several months of make-work was to include them in this. He needed witnesses, anyway. And their
test rig. Which may or may not be completed: Petrovitch hadn’t seen either student for a week, or it might have been two.
Either way, he was certain he could recognize them again.
He kicked the door to their lab space open. They were there, sitting in front of an open cube of wood, a cat’s cradle of thin
wires stretched inside. An oscilloscope—old school cathode tube—made a pulsing green line across its gridded screen.
The woman—blonde, skin as pale as parchment, eyes gray like a ghost’s… McNeil: yes, that was her name—glanced over her shoulder.
She jumped up when she saw Petrovitch’s expression and what he was carrying.
“You’ve finished it.”
“This? Yeah, about a week ago. Should have mentioned it, but that’s not what’s important now.” He advanced on a steel trolley.
In time-honored fashion, new equipment was built in the center of the lab. The old was pushed to the wall to be cannibalized
for parts or left to fossilize.
He inspected the collection of fat transformers on the trolley’s top shelf. When he squatted down to inspect the lower deck,
he found some moving coil meters and something that might have been the heavy-duty switching gear from a power station. “Do
either of you need any of this?”
He waited all of half a second for a reply before seizing the trolley in his free hand and trying to tip it over. Some of
the transformers were big ferrite ones, and he couldn’t manage it one-handed. McNeil and the man—Petrovitch’s mind was too full to remember his name—looked at each other.
“You,” he said to the man, “catch.”
He threw the sphere and, without waiting to see if it had a safe arrival, wedged his foot under one of the trolley’s castors
and heaved. The contents slid and fell, collecting in a blocky heap on the fifties lino.
He righted the trolley and looked around for what he needed. “Power supply there,” he pointed, and McNeil scurried to get
it. “That bundle of leads there. Multimeter, any, doesn’t matter. And the Mukhanov book.”
The other student was frozen in place, holding the sphere like it was made of crystal. Hugo Dominguez, that was it. Had problems
pronouncing his sibilants.
“You all right with that?”
Dominguez nodded dumbly.
The quantum gravity textbook was the last thing slapped on the trolley, and Petrovitch took the handle again.
“Right. Follow me.”
McNeil trotted by his side. “Doctor Petrovitch,” she said.
And that was almost as strange as being married. Doctor. What else could the university have done, but confer him with the
title as soon as was practically possible?
“Yeah?”
“Where are we going?”
“Basement. And pray to whatever god you believe in that we’re not over a tube line.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Sure.” They’d reached the lift. He leaned over the trolley and punched the button to go down.
“Okay,” she said, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “Why?”
“Because what I was doing before wasn’t working. This will.” The lift pinged and the door slid aside. Petrovitch took a good
long look at the empty space before gritting his teeth and launching the trolley inside. He ushered the two students in, then
after another moment’s hesitation on the threshold, he stepped in.
He reached behind him and thumbed the stud marked B for basement.
As the lift descended, they waited for him to continue. “What’s the mass of the Earth?” he said. When neither replied, he
rolled his eyes. “Six times ten to the twenty-four kilos. All that mass produces a pathetic nine point eight one meters per
second squared acceleration at the surface. An upright ape like me can outpull the entire planet just by getting out of a
chair.”
“Which is why you had us build the mass balance,” she said.
“Yeah. You’re going to have to take it apart and bring it down here.” The door slid back to reveal a long corridor with dim
overhead lighting. “Not here here. This is just to show that it works. We’ll get another lab set up. Find a kettle. Stuff
like that.”
He pushed the trolley out before the lift was summoned to a higher floor.
“Doctor,” said Dominguez, finally finding his voice, “that still does not explain why we are now underground.”
“Doesn’t it?” Petrovitch blinked. “I guess not. Find a socket for the power supply while I wire up the rest of it.” He took
the sphere from Dominguez and turned it around until he found the two holes. His hand chased out a couple of leads from the
bird’s nest of wires, spilling some of them to the floor. The lift disappeared upstairs, making a grinding noise as it went.
They worked together. McNeil joined cables together until she’d made two half-meter lengths. Dominguez set up the multimeter
and twisted the dial to read current. Petrovitch plugged two jacks into the sphere, and finally placed Mukhanov and Winitzki’s
tome on the floor. He set the sphere on top of it.
“Either of you two worked it out yet?” he asked. “No? Don’t worry: I’m supposed to be a genius, and it took me a week. Hugo,
dial up four point eight volts. Watch the current. If it looks like it’s going to melt something, turn it off.”
The student had barely put his hand on the control when the lift returned. A dozen people spilled out, all talking at once.
“Yobany stos!” He glared out over the top of his glasses. “I’m trying to conduct an epoch-making experiment which will turn this place into
a shrine for future generations. So shut the huy up.”
One of the crowd held up his camera phone, and Petrovitch thought that wasn’t such a bad idea.
“You. Yes, you. Come here. I don’t bite. Much. Stand there.” He propelled the young man front and center. “Is it recording?
Good.”
All the time, more people were arriving, but it didn’t matter. The time was now.
“Yeah, okay. Hugo? Hit it.”
Nothing happened.
“You are hitting it, right?”
“Yes, Doctor Petrovitch.”
“Then why isn’t the little red light on?” He sat back on his heels. “Chyort. There’s no yebani power in the ring main.”
There was an audible groan.
Petrovitch looked up again at all the expectant faces. “Unless someone wants to stick their fingers in a light socket, I suggest
you go and find a very long extension lead.”
Some figures at the back raced away, their feet slapping against the concrete stairs. When they came back, it wasn’t with
an extension lead proper, but one they’d cobbled together out of the cable from several janitorial devices and gaffer tape.
The bare ends of the wire were live, and it was passed over the heads of the watching masses gingerly.
It took a few moments more to desleeve the plug from the boxy power supply and connect everything together. The little red
light glimmered on.
Petrovitch looked up at the cameraman. “Take two?”
“We’re on.”
Petrovitch got down on his hands and knees, and took one last look at the inert black sphere chased with silver lines. In
a moment, it would be transformed, and with it, the world. No longer a thing of beauty, it would become just another tool.
“Hugo?” He was aware of McNeil crouched beside him. She was holding her breath, just like he was.
Dominguez flicked the on switch and slowly turned the dial. The digital figures on the multimeter started to flicker.
Then, without fuss, without sound, the sphere leaped off the book and into the air. It fell back a little, rose, fell, rose,
fell, each subsequent oscillation smaller than the previous one until it was still again: only it was resting at shin-height
with no visible means of support.
Someone started clapping. Another joined in, and another, until the sound of applause echoed, magnified, off the walls.
His heart was racing again, the tiny turbine in his chest having tasted the amount of adrenaline flooding into his blood. He felt dizzy, euphoric, ecstatic even. Here was science elevated
to a religious experience. Dominguez was transfixed, motionless like his supervisor. It was McNeil who was the first of the
three to move. She reached forward and tapped the floating sphere with her fingernail. It slipped sideways, pulling the cables
with it until it lost momentum and stopped. She waved her hand under it, over it.
She turned to Petrovitch and grinned. He staggered to his feet and faced the crowd. “Da! Da! Da!” He punched the air each time, and found he couldn’t stop. Soon he had all of them, young and old, men and women, fists in
the air, chanting “Da!” at the tops of their voices.
He reached over and hauled Dominguez up. He held his other hand out to McNeil, who crawled up his arm and clung on to him
in a desperate embrace. Thus encumbered, he turned to the camera phone and extended his middle finger—not his exactly, but
he was at least its owner. “Yob materi vashi, Stanford.”
At first, Petrovitch thought the buzzing coming from his leg was the first sign that his circulation was failing like it used
to do, and his heart needed charging up again.
Then he realized it was his phone, the one that Maddy made him carry on pain of death—his, naturally. He unVelcroed his pocket
even as staff and students swirled around him, slapping his back, shaking his hand, kissing him. Some of them were crying,
wetting his cheeks with their tears of joy.
It was party time, and he’d brought the best present of all.
He palmed the phone and glanced at the screen. He was clearly lucky to get a signal at all down in the depths. He checked
the caller ID, and frowned. It wasn’t his wife, and he wasn’t aware of anyone else who would know his carefully guarded number.
He ducked clear of the crowd, which seemed to be growing by the minute, and walked further down the corridor to answer the
call.
“Yeah?”
“Doctor Samuil Petrovitch? Husband of Sergeant Madeleine Petrovitch?”
It definitely wasn’t her. And with all the noise around him, it was almost impossible to hear the man at the other end of
the connection.
“What’s wrong?”
The reply was lost, and Petrovitch growled in frustration. He jammed his finger in his ear and tried to cup his hand around
the phone.
“Say again?”
“Sergeant Petrovitch has been injured. She’s been taken to…” and that was all he could make out.
Petrovitch lowered the phone and yelled at the top of his voice: “Past’ zabej! I’m trying to talk to someone here.” When the sound level had dropped below cacophony, he tried again. “Where is she?”
“St. Bart’s. She’s—”
“She’s what?” he interrupted. He had no control over the speed of his heart. It had no beats to miss, but it felt like it
had momentarily stalled. “Do I actually have time to get there?”
“Walking wounded. Three rounds to the chest, but the armor held up. But that’s…”
“Yebani v’rot,” said Petrovitch, exasperated, “shut up and listen. Who are you?”
“Casualty clearing orderly.”
“Is she going to die?”
“No.”
“Has she asked for me?”
“Yes.”
“Then why the chyort didn’t you say any of that in the first place? I’m on my way.” He cut the call and plunged back into the mass of people,
heading purposefully for the lift.
McNeil caught his arm. “Who was it? Press?”
“The militia. I have to go.” He tried to advance, but she held him back with surprising strength.
She leaned in close. “You have to talk to the press. Get the news out about what’s happened here today,” she said.
“They’re going to find out soon enough, with or without my help.” He pried her fingers away. “Why don’t you and Hugo talk
to the cameras. You’ll do just fine.”
Petrovitch pushed through to the stairs to find she was still on his heels.
“We can’t do that!” she complained. “We don’t even know what you did!”
“The field attenuates to the seventh power. Upstairs, it had nothing to push against: down here, it does. Can you handle it
now, because I really need to go?”
“Doctor, the head of department is here,” she called after him. “He wants to congratulate you.”
Petrovitch was already starting to climb. “You know what? Do pizdy.”
She tried one last time. “But Doctor Petrovitch: science!”
He stopped and brought his knuckle up to his mouth. He bit hard into it to stiffen his resolve.
“This… this is going to be with us forever,” he said. “Now we’ve discovered how to do it, everybody will be copying us. Good
luck to them. My life is more than this now. Someone else needs me, and that won’t wait. Give my apologies to the head. Tell
him… I don’t know—tell him my wife’s been shot. He’ll understand.”
He left her, her mouth forming a perfect O, and ran up one flight of stairs to the ground floor. He was passed on the way
by more people, some of whom turned their heads as they recognized him, and some, like the ninja reporter with a broadcast camera and an armful of studio lights, so intent on getting to the site of the miracle that they failed to
spot the prophet.
He skipped past the ground floor and kept on going: he wasn’t dressed for outside, and he’d need money, travelcard and identification
if he was going to get across the central Metrozone and not get stranded, arrested or worse en route. It had never been the
easiest of journeys: now it took wits as well as patience.
Back on the fourth floor, he took everything he needed out of his top drawer and threw on the scorched leather coat that had
become his prized possession. In his pocket were clip-on lenses in a slim case. He slid them over the bridge of his own glasses,
and the world became info-rich.
He knew the temperature, the wind speed, the likelihood of rain. He knew that the tube was still completely out, shallow tunnels
crushed, deep tunnels flooded, but that there was a limited bus service along the Embankment as far as London Bridge. He knew
that there was Outie activity around Hampstead Heath—firefights all along the A5/M1 corridor as well—but that was too far
out to affect him. A bomb in Finsbury Park earlier, with twenty dead and a legion of whackos ready to claim it for their own.
As wedding presents went, the clip-ons were pretty cool. Even cooler when he’d hacked the controller and got it to display
lots of things the manufacturers hadn’t meant it to.
Back down four floors to the foyer: a mere ten minutes after he’d discovered artificial gravity. There was still a steady
drift of people heading for the basement, enough that it had started to become congested and the paycops didn’t quite know
what to do with everyone.
Petrovitch was ignored, and in turn, he ignored them. He headed for the street, passing through the foyer doors and experiencing one of the flashbulb flashbacks he sometimes had.
The present blinked into the past, and he was striding out into the night, Madeleine behind him. A packet of hand-written
equations burned in his pocket.
The scene vanished as abruptly as it had arrived. He was back with weak daylight, the sound of people, the swoosh of automatic
doors.
It had been quiet and cold when he’d trekked in from Clapham A and through the govno-smeared realms of Battersea—even the Outies had to sleep sometime. Now it was even colder, and there was an electric tension
in the air, not helped by the battle tank parked on the corner of Exhibition Road, gun muzzle trained across Hyde Park. There’d
always been direction to Metrozone pedestrians—a purpose for being on the streets, A to B, going to work, to school, to the
shops—now there wasn’t. There were gaps between people, and they spilled aimlessly along the pavements.
The city was broken, and he hated the thought that something he’d spilled good, honest blood over was losing its way. He hated
it, and still he stayed.
He headed south toward Chelsea, where he had to pass through an impromptu checkpoint thrown hastily across the road. Even
though it was nothing more than a few waist-high barriers, a white van with MEA stencilled on the side and two paycops with
Authority armbands, he took them seriously because of their guns. He affected a calm, cool exterior as he approached the screen.
The cops were edgy, looking for those who might dodge through the unscreened, northbound stream in an attempt to avoid the
scanner. They were edgy in a way that suggested they might shoot without warning.
It was his turn. He walked smartly through the arch and kept going. No contraband, no weapons: he was clean. There was nothing
for the computer to latch on to, and no human operator to spot anything out of the ordinary.
Petrovitch’s hand went to the back of his neck, where his hair had grown uncharacteristically long. His fingers touched surgical
metal.
The buildings around him bore scars, too. The visible tidemark on their street-side faces rose higher the closer he got to
the river, and such was the pressure of population, some people found themselves forced to live in the stinking lower floors,
amidst walls and floors and ceilings still damp and contaminated with gods-knew-what.
He came to the Thames, brown and sluggish, shining wetly. A barge, once embedded in a riverfront property, lay broken and
sad on the mudslick that had been a line of trees. Across the Albert Bridge, he could almost see home.
The Embankment road had been scraped with a bulldozer, washed down by pumps. The white line was visible again down its center,
and off to one side beside the Regency town houses swathed in scaffolding was the temporary bus stop. The virtual arrow above
it was almost unnecessary, but finding he only had a five-minute wait was welcome news.
There was a queue. There always was. He took the opportunity to view the chasm carved through the London skyline, right through
the heart of Brompton and out onto the Chelsea embankment. Across the river, the clear-cutting of buildings continued along
the shoreline before petering out.
He was one of the few who knew it was the route of the Shinjuku line, mark two, terminating at the Oshicora Tower. Almost
everyone else saw it as a random wound, born of chaos like everything else that night.
The bus, windows glazed with grime and protected by close-meshed grilles, strained along toward him. It sagged at the curbside
and folded its tired doors aside. Inside, it was literally standing room only. The vehicle had no seats apart from the driver’s:
they’d been stripped out and thrown away. Passengers grabbed at a pole or a hang-strap, or each other. Cattle-class for all:
egalitarian transport for the twenty-first century.
Petrovitch slid his pass across the sensor and elbowed his way toward the back, where the crush would be less and the air
a little clearer.
The journey along the north bank of the Thames was dreary and dull. The filth on the windows was sufficiently thick to render
the view outside nothing more than variations in dark and light. With his info shades on, he was provided with a virtual map
of his journey. Most of his fellow passengers had to rely on the driver’s announcements over the tannoy to give them clues
as to where they were.
But no matter their status, they were all stuck together on the same bus, rocking this way and that, jerked by the inconstant
acceleration and braking, clinging on to handles welded to the roof.
Chelsea Bridge, Claverton Street, Vauxhall Bridge, Lambeth Bridge—where the putative Keiyo line was driven through, narrowly
missing Westminster Abbey—and Westminster Bridge. At each stop, people got on or off in an exchange that was interminably
slow. No one would move out of the way from simple courtesy, choosing instead to shuffle sullenly aside. Fights were common,
but there were no paycops on the buses. MEA, always on the verge of bankruptcy, couldn’t afford them.
He used his pocket controller to catch a news wire. The Metrozone’s litany of disasters was usually relegated to the third
or fourth item on any given day, unless someone pulled off a spectacular. Top of the cycle was rioting in Paris—l’anglais causing problems as Metrozone refugees filled up French parks. Second was a late-season hurricane bearing down on Florida.
Third, was him, managing to p. . .
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