of the art that the private sector doesn’t know it even exists, never mind the consumer. Weaponry that may not see a battlefield for ten years, if ever. Soldiers so electronically bedecked they look part-android. The mikes, the cameras, the computers, the arrays of screens, the banks of consoles bearing keyboards, tracking devices, laser-mapped 3D motion-capture grids. Not to mention enough medical monitoring and sensory instrumentation to give a hospital accountant a seizure were he to see it thus assembled in an NHS theatre. And all of it contained by walls of crisp white panelling like it’s Moon Base Alpha. Twenty years ago, throw in Maria Whittaker in an unbuttoned lab coat and this would have been close to his idea of heaven.
The panelling has a distinctive sheen, partially reflective in certain light. It’s almost like china. It was developed for heat resistance on the new generation of ICBMs, so it’s very tough. It’s also easy to clean. That’s the thing here. Easy to wipe down. But there are places where you can still see live rock visible through gaps between the panels. The reality of this location, of this circumstance, can be masked off, but it’s still there, inches behind the spotless veneer. Beneath the façade of science is a sin of selfish curiosity. Stains cannot be wiped away so easily from the live rock. The taint endures.
Merrick is slapped from his grim reverie by all of the screens giving that simultaneous hiccup he’s never got used to, despite the regularity of its rhythm. The images all shudder like some digitally manipulated wave-pulse effect, accompanied by a high-pitched pinging sound. All attempts at shielding have been powerless to prevent it during the surge phases of the machine’s cycle. Across the room, he sees Avedon adjusting the focus on a hand-held digital video camera: just in case they miss anything on the dozen other CCTV and infrared cameras. They’re all digital; magnetic tape having proven . . . problematic. The white panelling in here is also lead-lined and thus supposedly anti-magnetic, but Steinmeyer himself has confessed that they still don’t know what other forces the machine might be generating or even simply interfering with. Merrick just hopes nobody in here has plans to father any future kids.
Steinmeyer is hovering restlessly, close to the table, inspecting the surrounding instrumentation with simmering disdain. He looks apt to start knocking things over, to go hauling out tubes and cables and clamps. He’s got a headset mike in place so that he can communicate with the rest of the physics and bio teams, but he’s been in here forty minutes and so far he hasn’t uttered a word.
Lucius Steinmeyer: one of the leading scientific minds of his generation, but not one many people are likely to have heard from in a decade unless they hold sufficient security clearance. A man who thought he had long ago faced The Question when he accepted that only military resources could facilitate his ambitions. A man who remains haunted by a vivid dream he had, in which he was the person in charge of what was taking place here. Merrick could have sworn he had the same dream too, but now they’re both wide awake.
Whatever Merrick might be feeling, he knows Steinmeyer’s feeling it far worse. Merrick is merely head of the bio team. It’s Steinmeyer’s lifetime project that’s been hijacked and sub-hijacked in a rude awakening to what the phrase ‘eminent domain’ truly means; whose domain, and more pertinently, whose eminence. The physicist has come to realise that after a decade in bed with the devil, everything up until now has merely been foreplay. However, he’s not ready to surrender, not yet prepared to accept the renegotiated terms in which the glimpse gets smaller while the price gets higher. Steinmeyer is still fighting to wrest back control, and that, more than any practices doom-mongering clerics might find abhorrent, is what makes him dangerous; that is what genuinely designates him a ‘mad scientist’.
Bowed down over the consoles, Merrick’s perspective is flattened so that the table looks like just that, with a number of metal objects sat upon it. It’s only when he raises his head again that it resumes its true shape, and the metal objects reveal themselves to be welded and bolted into place. All around it, Merrick’s equipment stands in wait, like so many siege engines.
He runs another systems-diagnostic. He knows everything is good to go. Everything has been triple-, maybe quadruple-checked. It’s no more than