Down: Pinhole by Glenn Cooper Read Free Book Online

any answers,” he began. “I only have ideas based on the facts as we know them. Fact number one: we took our collision energies to the highest level ever tested, thirty TeV. Fact two: even with the brief window of data collection we have the telltale signatures of gravitons and strangelets. It would take a much longer window and many more collisions to get the results to statistical significance at five sigma but I think we have a pretty good handle on what we’re seeing. Fact three: Emily was standing directly over the collider. Fact four: she disappeared in anywhere from microseconds to nano-seconds or less. The video recording won’t allow us to get to any more precision. Fact five: a man who’s been identified as someone who was put to death in Dartford sixty-five years ago appeared in her place in the same micro-to-nano-second interval. According to John and Trevor there’s no doubt that it’s the same man, Brandon Woodbourne, who is now at large and responsible for a murder. Those are the facts. Would everyone agree?”
    There were nods around the table.
    “Now for the speculation,” he continued. “Let me stress that there is no empirical basis for my theory. I’ve tried to put aside my own preconceived notions of the cosmos and I’m merely attempting to fit the facts to an explanatory framework. I’ve told you already about my ideas on extra-dimensionality and strangelet-produced graviton-matter tunnels. I think that Emily may have been, quote-unquote, pulled into a kind of tunnel, a warp between two dimensions. The fact that Brandon Woodbourne, a dead man, appeared in her place suggests that she traded places with him, matter-for-matter, as if some kind of symmetry had to be maintained for the passage to work.”
    Trevor’s mouth had involuntarily opened while listening to Matthew. He interrupted, “Look here, I was raised a Christian and all that, but Woodbourne’s been dead for a long time, fellows. Are you saying that he’s from the hereafter or whatever you want to call it?”
    There was a pregnant pause until Matthew simply said, “Yes. That’s what I’m proposing. Much to the disappointment of my parents, I’m not religious myself. I am agnostic at best about notions of a supreme deity, the afterlife and all that, but this man died quite a while ago and here he is, materialized and appearing much the same age as when he was hanged by the neck till dead in Dartford Prison which, as you told me Trevor, was close to this very site until it was razed in the nineteen sixties. My working theory is that MAAC created a tunnel, a small one, no more than a pinhole in the fabric of the cosmos, connecting our dimension with another.”
    “And you think Emily is there?” John said.
    “I hope so. In much the same way that Brandon Woodbourne is here. Alive and kicking.”
    David Laurent clearly wasn’t having any of it. “Did you actually propose this nonsense to the Americans and the British?”
    “I’m afraid I did.”
    “And what did they say?”
    “There was no shortage of incredulity. But they listened and asked reasonably appropriate questions. Especially Bitterman. He’s a physicist unlike our energy lady who I believe had a carpet-cleaning business before going into Parliament.”
    “There’s only one thing I want to know,” John said. “How do we get Emily back?”
    Matthew took a deep breath and let it out noisily through his pursed lips. “We need to re-open the pinhole.”
    “How?” John asked.
    “My best guess would be to recreate the original conditions. We have to repeat the experiment exactly as before.”
    Quint was the first to respond. “I had rather hoped that Matthew would have spoken to me about this before bringing it up to our masters but it’s out there now.”
    “What did they say?” John asked.
    “They surprised me by saying that they would take it under advisement. They’re in a panic about any of this getting out. They want Woodbourne found and handed