Tim Lebbon: Coldbrook

Vic picked up one tumbler and raised it. Jonah clinked glasses with him.

‘A toast,’ Jonah said, ‘to Bill Coldbrook. I wish he could have been here to see this.’

‘If he was, you wouldn’t be.’

Jonah ignored the quip and drank, closing his eyes and savouring the smooth burn of the whisky through his mouth and down his throat. It never failed to warm the depths of him. His eyelid twitched and he thought of the terrible nightmares, the thing he’d dreamed staring down into his face. He opened his eyes again and Vic was staring at him. He hadn’t touched his drink.

‘Don’t you realise what we’ve done, Jonah?’

‘Of course. What we’ve been trying to do for two decades — form a route from this Earth to another. We’ve tapped the multiverse.’ He laughed softly. ‘Vic, what’s happened here might echo across reality. Somewhere so many miles away there’s not enough room in our universe to write down the distance, there’s another you, toasting our success with another me, and the other you is pleased and happy and confident that-’

‘Don’t give me that bullshit!’ Vic snapped. And Jonah could see that he was genuinely scared. He has family up there , he thought, and for a second he tried to put himself in the other man’s place. Yes, with the enormity of what they’d done he could understand the worry, the tension.

But there were safeguards.

‘Remember Stephen Hawking’s visit?’ Jonah asked.

‘How could I not?’

‘He and Bill admired each other greatly, and he gave us his blessing. Said we were the sharpest part of the cutting edge.’

‘You say that as if you were proud.’

Jonah laughed softly. Vic above everyone knew that Jonah’s pride was a complex thing, untouched by fame or its shadow and more concerned with personal achievement.

‘He said we were the true explorers, and gave that plaque as Stephen Hawking’s stamp of approval. We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something special .’

‘Just because we pretend to understand doesn’t mean we’re special. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be scared .’

‘You should be pleased,’ Jonah said, sounding more petulant than he’d intended. But damn it, down here in the facility they weren’t walking in the footsteps of giants. They were making the footsteps.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Vic said, sounding tired rather than bitter. ‘It’s something I’ll be able to tell my grandkids.’

‘If you’re lucky enough to have them,’ Jonah said, ‘then yes, of course. You can tell them you were part of the most startling, audacious experiment in history. At Fermilab and CERN they’re knocking protons together to look for the Higgs boson particle and mini black holes. Theorists discuss Planck energies, and waste time arguing about Copernican and anthropic principles with those possessing narrow vision or blind faith. But here. . here, we’ve made much of theoretical physics redundant. Here, we have proof .’

Vic remained silent, turning his glass this way and that, catching the light and perhaps trying to see what Jonah saw in it.

‘What were you doing here, Vic?’ Jonah asked. ‘If what we’ve done makes you like this, why were you even here?’

‘I wanted it as much as everyone else did,’ Vic said. ‘But the reality is. . more massive than I ever imagined. The impact of what we’ve done here. .’ He trailed off, still staring into his glass.

‘Will be felt for ever,’ Jonah said.

‘We’ve changed the whole fucking world,’ Vic said softly. Then he put the glass down without drinking, stood, and leaned in close to Jonah as if to look inside him.

‘Vic?’ Jonah asked, for the first time a little unsettled.

And before leaving Vic Pearson spoke the stark truth. ‘Things can never be the same again.’

Holly Wright should have gone to bed hours ago. It had been like this since breach three days before, with her desire for sleep driven out by the unbridled excitement at what had happened. They would sit here together when others were sleeping, her and Jonah, analysing and theorising, speculating and sometimes just staring at the thing. But most of the time Control was buzzing, there was still much to be done, and staring had to be kept to a minimum.

She missed that time. For her, being a scientist was all about dreaming. Which was how she survived on two hours of sleep per night, and why she was here now. Staring and dreaming.

With her in Control were three guards and their captain, Alex. She had trouble remembering the guards’ names — she blamed the hats and short haircuts. They paced and talked, chatting into communicators, and she found their presence comforting. Jonah had once commented that their minds were too small to appreciate what was being done here, but she’d long known that attitude as a fault of his. He never suffered fools gladly, and as he was a genius most other people were fools to him.

Taking up most of the lowest of Coldbrook’s three main levels, Control was laid out like a small theatre. On the stage sat the breach, its containment field extending several metres in an outward curve. And where the seats should have been were the control desks and computer terminals, set in gentle curves up towards the rear of the room. The floor sloped up from the breach, set in four terraces, and the doors at the rear of Control were ten feet above the breach floor. The walls, floor and ceiling were constructed of the same materials as the core walls, and sometimes Holly felt the weight of everything around her.

Behind Control, the corridor curved around the one-hundred-feet-diameter core until it reached the staircase leading up to the middle level. In this largest level the corridor encircled the core completely, and leading off from it were the living quarters, plant rooms, store rooms, gym, canteen and common room, and beyond the common room the large garage area. The highest level — still over a hundred feet below ground — contained the medical suite and Secondary, the emergency control centre in case something happened in Control.

And in an experiment such as this, ‘something’ could mean anything.

The cosmologist Satpal was working at his station across the room, and though they chatted occasionally he was much like Holly — too excited to sleep, and when he was here, too wrapped up in what they had done to engage in small talk. One thing he’d said stuck with her. I can’t wait to see their stars . In an alternate universe where different possibilities existed, it was feasible that those possibilities had extended to the heavens.

Down on the breach floor — and closer than Vic would have allowed, had he been there — sat Melinda Price, their biologist. She had chosen the graveyard shift on purpose as her time to be down there. Since the formation of the breach she had been filming, photographing, and running tests with an array of sensors that had been pushed as close as Jonah would permit, and Holly knew that Melinda itched to go through. So far she’d recorded seventeen species of bird — both familiar and unknown — over a hundred types of insect, trees and flowers, some small mammals, and one creature that she had not been able to categorise. Her breathless enthusiasm was catching. If there was anyone who was going to quit their post and just run, it was Melinda.

Her favoured instrument was the huge pair of tripod-mounted binoculars. She spent so long looking through them that she had permanent red marks around her eyes from the eyepieces. That never failed to amuse Holly. Melinda used simple binoculars to view across distances that philosophers and scientists had been contemplating for millennia.