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Californian countryside. I pulled my coat tighter around me. Somehow I doubted this display marked
good news.
There was an empty police car on the gravel drive. The gate in the wire fence was closed, with a single
policeman standing before it. He watched me steadily.
Floodlights suspended over the fence beat at my face; moths fried on the glass. A siren cried within the
compound. 'You can't go through, buddy.' The policeman chewed gum with a practised rhythm, his eyes
in shadow.
'My brother's in there somewhere. What's the problem?'
He tilted his head back and stared at me. 'Sorry, sir. It's some kind of automatic radiation alert. Hey, you
from England?'
I walked away from him and followed the fence for a few feet, finishing up in a puddle of darkness
between two floods. The policeman's broad head returned to its survey of the driveway.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture George in there, his jumper covered by an ill-fitting white coat. He
must be alone. If what he was doing was so dangerous he would have made sure no-one else was on the
site.
Tyres crunched on the gravel a Jaguar driving up the path. Somehow I wasn't surprised to see Mary
and Mike Reaney climb out together. They were holding hands. I turned my face to the fence, trusting
they'd miss me
The explosion was like the fist of God slamming info the earth.
I was thrown backwards onto the shaking ground. The fence collapsed over me, bulbs popping.
Something was rising out of the ruins of the collider hall. It was hot and bright. A dry wind fled from it.
I had to crawl out from under the fence. My hands were caked with blood and dust. The officer had lost
his cap. With barked questions he checked we were okay, then trotted down the drive to his car.
I stood facing Mary and Reaney. He looked at the ground, his tracksuited frame clumsy with
embarrassment.
She stared into the fire and smiled.
I hit her, hard, across her face. She tumbled back onto the gravel.
'Hey ' Reaney came at me and drove his fist up into my stomach. I couldn't believe how far it
penetrated. I doubled into a squat; my diaphragm seemed to cramp up and I gulped for breath.
'Leave him, Mike.'
Reaney put one mitt under my armpit and hauled me to my feet. Pain lanced through the muscles of my
torso, but I stayed upright.
'You bitch,' I gasped. 'Are you so glad to be rid of him?'
She tried to talk, then spat out blood and a piece of tooth. 'You don't understand, do you?' She pointed
over my shoulder. 'Look.'
I turned. Out of the collider hall's ripped-open roof had risen a colourless sphere. It was the size of a
small house, and it contained a froth of bubbles that swelled and collapsed, flickering through existence
almost too fast for the eye to follow.
Sirens wailed in the darkness behind us.
'He did it,' Reaney growled. 'Damn him, he did it.' He stared into the sphere. There seemed to be genuine
wonder under his studied cynicism. 'That's a stabilized droplet of inflating quagma. And inside each of
those bubbles is a different set of physical laws. We'll be able to study creation physics with nothing more
elaborate than a freeze frame video camera.
'This will fast forward our understanding a thousand years. No wonder he was so desperate to finish this.
They'll build a statue to the silly old bastard, right here.' He laughed and scratched his scalp. He wore his
green pyramid badge; now he plucked it out of his tracksuit and threw it into the droplet. 'I guess that's
the end of this anti-science shit.' He turned and walked towards the Jag.
'I'm happy for him.' Mary's face was swelling a little, but the smile was returning. 'The endless deaths I
always understood it, you see. I just couldn't live with it...'
Her voice trailed off; she was looking at me strangely.
I found it an effort to speak. 'The door was metal,' I managed.
'What?'
Reaney turned back; I looked to him, willing him to understand. 'The room George was sleeping in. I
thought it was just a store room. But the door was metal.'
'That's the safety shelter,' Reaney said softly. 'The shelter!'
The three of us ran over the ruins of the fence, ignoring the cop's shouts.
'Well, of course I'm alive,' George snapped after they dug him out. 'What kind of dick-head do you think
I am?...'
Then he saw the droplet hanging above him. His head hinged back, eyes wide, mouth hanging. His face
shone in the creation light.
We pulled him to his feet. Mary grabbed his tattered sleeve, searched his face.
'My baby,' he said hoarsely, still staring upwards.
Mary's head dropped; she let him go. Reaney put an arm around her shoulders.
'Come on, George.' I took his hand and led him from the rubble.
No Longer Touch the Earth
Oberleutnant Hermann Göring emerged from the muggy warmth of the tent into bright, clear Polar air. To
get the blood flowing Göring stamped his feet and wrapped his arms around his torso; the leather of his
flying suit creaked reassuringly around him, and under his feet sandy frost-rime crunched over an
underlying hard surface. The Antarctic summer Sun hung to the north, separated by about a quarter of
the blue sky from the horizon; and the land was a tabletop of wedding-cake white.
This last fuel depot was less than two hundred kilometres from the South Pole. Less than two degrees of
latitude from the floor of the world; less than an hour's flight, Göring thought, from his destiny. He peered
into the South, savouring the crispness of the frozen air as it misted before his mouth... And there, like a
single ray of light passing from some Earthbound star into the huge sky, was the Axis itself; Göring tilted
his head back, following the clear line into Heaven.
He surveyed the little fuel depot. The crude tent in which he'd shared a night with the four English who
manned this station was a patch of mud-colour, jarring against the pristine white of the ice.
And ah there was his Fokker, emerged from the shelter the English had erected for it. Emptied fuel
cans and discarded canvas tarpaulins lay piled around the machine. Göring let his eyes rest on the
triplane's round, elegant form, relishing its vivid red paintwork. From the air, Göring thought, the plane
must look like a splash of blood, a wound in the icy carcase of this desolate land, alive with the bloody
shade which had struck terror into the heart of every Allied airman who had risen to face the
Jagdstaffeln in the war.
His goggles and facemask in hand, Göring walked the few metres of uneven, snow-strewn ice to his
plane. His arthritis which had driven him from the trenches, and which had almost precluded his
admission to the Air Service was his constant companion still, now sending needles of pain through his
legs and feet. Hermann Göring was not designed for the cold, he reflected ruefully.
Two of the doltish Englishmen, bundled up in their furs, were clearing the short strip they'd laid in the ice
for him. A third Collishaw? was working on the Fokker. And the fourth, Davies, the most senior of
them, waited for Göring in the long, striped shadow of the Fokker's triple wings. Davies was about forty, [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]

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