LIGHT

'He's not here.'

A

Kearney rapped on the window.

'See?' A

Kearney got his cellphone out and dialled Tate's number. 'Knock on the door again,' he said, putting the phone to his ear. He got an old-fashioned answer machine and said, 'Brian, if you're there, pick up. I'm outside your house and I need to talk to you.' The tape ran for half a minute then stopped. 'For God's sake Brian, I can see you in there.' Kearney was dialling again when Tate opened the front door and looked out uncertainly. 'It's no good doing that,' he said. 'I keep the phone somewhere else.' He was wearing some kind of heavily insulated silver parka over cargo pants and a T-shirt. A wave of heat came out of the door behind him. The hood of the parka obscured his face, but Kearney could see that it was hollow and tired-looking, in need of a shave. He looked from Kearney to A

'Do you want to come in?' he said vaguely.

'Brian -' Kearney began.

'Don't go in,' A

'You don't have to come with me,' Kearney told her.

She stared at him angrily. 'Oh yes I do.'

Inside, the house was thick with heat and humidity. Tate led them into a small room at the back.

'Could you shut the door after you?' he said. 'Keep the warmth in.'

Kearney looked around.

'Brian, what the fuck are you doing?'

Tate had made the room into a Faraday cage by tacking copper chicken wire to the walls and ceiling. As an extra precaution he had covered the windows with Bacofoil. Nothing electromagnetic could get into him from outside that room; nothing could get out. No one could know what he was doing, if he was doing anything. Boxes of tacks, rolls of chicken wire and Bacofoil cartons lay everywhere. The central heating was turned up full. Two standalone heaters ru

'Beth left,' Tate explained. He shivered and put his hands out to one of the heaters. His face was hard to see inside the hood of the parka. 'She went back to Davis. She took the kids.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' Kearney said.

'I bet you are,' Tate said. 'I bet you are.' He raised his voice suddenly. 'Look,' he said, 'what do you want? I keep the phone in another room, you know? I've got work to do here.'

Meanwhile, A

'I'm living in just the one room,' Tate said.

'What's happened, Brian?' Kearney said gently. 'I thought you said it was a glitch.'

Tate held his hands out from his sides.

'I was wrong.'

Rooting about in the tangle of USB cable, stacked peripherals and old coffee cups that covered the desk, he came up with a 100Gb pocket drive in a polished titanium shell. This he offered to Kearney, who weighed it cautiously in his hand.

'What's this?'

'The results of the last run. It was decoherence-free for a whole minute. We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before interference set in. That's like a million years down there. That's like the indeterminacy principle is suspended.'He gave a strained laugh. 'Is a million years long enough for us, do you think? Will that do? But then… I don't know what happened then. The fractals… '

Kearney felt this wasn't going anywhere. He thought results like these were probably wrong, and that anyway they couldn't explain what he had seen in the laboratory.

'Why did you smash the monitors up, Brian?'

'Because it wasn't physics any more. Physics was off. The fractals started to — ' he couldn't think of a word, nothing had prepared him for whatever he was seeing in his head ' — leak. Then the cat went inside after them. She just walked through the screen and into the data.' He laughed, looking from Kearney to A

Underneath it all — underneath the inexplicable fear, the weirdness, the simple guilt of selling the project out first to Meadows then to Sony-Tate was just a teenager good at physics. He hadn't developed past a hip haircut and the idea that his talent gave him some sort of edge in the world, if only he would always be forgiven by adults. Now his wife had disabused him of that. Worse, perhaps, physics itself had come looking for him in some unfathomable way he couldn't live with. Kearney felt sorry for him, but he only said carefully:

'The cat's here, Brian. She's on your shoulder now.'

Tate glanced at Kearney, then at his own shoulder. He didn't seem to see the white cat perched there, purring and kneading the material of his coat. He shook his head.

'No,' he said abjectly. 'She's gone now.'

A

'I'm leaving,' she said. 'I'll call a taxi, if no one minds.'

'You can't call from in here,' Tate told her, as if he was talking to a child. 'It's a cage.'Then he whispered, 'I had no idea Beth felt so badly about things.'

Kearney touched his arm.

'Why do you need the cage, Brian? What really happened?'

Tate began to cry. 'I don't know,' he said.

'Why do you need the cage?' Kearney persisted. He made Tate face him. 'Are you afraid something will get in?'

Tate wiped at his eyes. 'No, I'm frightened it will get out,' he said. He shivered and made a curious half-turn away from Kearney, raising his hand to zip the neck of the parka; this brought him face to face with A

'I'm always cold.'

He was silent for a moment, then he said: 'I'm not really here. None of us are.'

Tears rolled down the dark grooves around his mouth.

'Michael, we're none of us here at all.'

Kearney stepped forward quickly and, before Tate could react, pulled back the hood of the parka. Fluorescent light fell mercilessly across Tate's face, stubbled, exhausted, old-looking, and with an abraded appearance about the eyes, as if he had been working without spectacles, or crying all night. Probably, Kearney thought, he had been doing both. The eyes themselves were watery, a little bloodshot, with pale blue irises. Nothing was odd about them in the end except the tears pouring in a silvery stream from their i