Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“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.

The mechanical thrum on the Light Source’s experimental floor was growing louder. I had no idea what was happening in the vast ring—or in the linear accelerator off to one side that fed into it, or on the other beamlines Vic was diverting power from—but it was all accompanied by suitably impressive sound effects: a gathering storm of power. Overhead, the giant hemispherical lights flickered a couple of times, as if God himself were blinking in surprise.

When I’d changed states before—all three previous times—I’d been knocked out, and so there was a discontinuity. I’d been here and then I was there. I’d been seated, or standing, or, you know, trying to strangle someone, and then I was being carried down a corridor by a couple of professors, or lying facedown on the floor in a lab, or waking up disoriented in my bed. But this time there shouldn’t be a change in perspective.

Vic kept switching from looking at Menno on the gurney and looking at the graph on the monitor, but I kept my gaze glued to the display: the single superposition spike remained rock steady as the background thrum metamorphosed into a whine, a keening of ever-increasing pitch. And then, at last, it happened: a second spike popped up on the graph, and, as it did so, the entanglement band near the top of the screen looked like a braided rope being rotated around its long axis, changing and yet remaining the same.

And then—

But then—

Just then—

Vladimir Putin paced back and forth. His generals always took seats in his presence not because he encouraged them to be at ease—far from it—but rather because the president, who only managed 170 centimeters thanks to the lifts in his shoes, disliked having to look up at subordinates.

Putin walked along the red carpeting, the same red as the bottom field of the Russian tricolor flag, and, more importantly, at least to him, the same red as used on the old hammer and sickle from the glory days of the USSR.