‘Like a black hole?’
‘Yes, a black hole is a singularity, in physics. When it comes to the laws of physics, all bets are off, so to speak. But singularity means something slightly different across different disciplines… Are you paying attention to me?’
Red Queen was not – was, rather, thinking about the patterns they’d been plotting in gambling odds in the big centres. Porlock’s clever idea. They’d let the numbers Doppler off against each other – Atlantic City and Vegas and bootlegged data for Tijuana; all-night poker hands flowing through the big Internet servers; roulette on reservations; anything that might pick up a sort of after-echo of the effect, like background radiation. Porlock had looked as smug as all hell when he’d brought the results, plotted through the day. It had suggested, however approximately, a vector: a field of disturbance heading due west from Atlanta, emitting a steady, Geiger-counter-like crackle of the unpredictable.
In Red Queen’s head, a map of America. Porlock thought these gambling centres might be a way of plotting a course. But a line between Atlanta – the place where the boy had stopped and handed this package to his employers – and San Francisco – the place where the boy was apparently heading before he decided to go off-map… it went more or less through the Nevada Desert.
‘Vegas. What would happen?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m thinking aloud. Let’s say, sake of argument, this is a terrorist action…’ Red Queen got up from the desk again, paced down one side of the room, now ignoring Hands altogether. ‘You have a coincidence machine. You want to cause maximum damage. Where do you go?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘You go to Vegas. You go to – what would happen if… if… everything came up black all at once?’
‘Well, I’m no expert on this, but generally casinos lay off odds. On average the people who bet red will cancel out the people who bet black. Rather as I was saying -’ Hands was keen to get back to his lecture – ‘the behaviour of a roulette wheel or a deck of cards – a straight one, so to speak – is perfectly predictable over a long period. That’s why the casino always wins. The most freakish results all cancel each other out, and -’
‘But say, Hands -’ this was the first time Red Queen had not called him ‘Professor’, and there was a definite edge of impatience in it – ‘say everyone happened to have bet on black. Or nobody bet on black. Then it came black. Or say -’ an image suddenly presented itself in Red Queen’s mind – rows and rows of women sitting like tortoises in velour leisure suits, in front of the slots in the waxy yellow light – ‘say every slot machine in Vegas paid out its top jackpot at once. What would happen?’
‘Theoretically -’
‘Theoretically hell. This would be – would be an act of war. It would wipe out companies, pension plans, stocks. It would cause chaos. This would be like dropping a coincidence bomb on America.’
‘I suppose, in -’
‘Professor, I need to make some phone calls, now. I would appreciate it if you were able to give us a little more of your time.’
‘Actually, as I was going to say,’ Hands returned, ‘I see that gambling or stock markets would present a problem, economically speaking. But I’m – when I said you had a problem I meant something rather more serious than that. A run of numbers in a gambling parlour is one thing, but a singularity is a problem of a quite different order of magnitude.’
‘I don’t see.’
‘There is something that baffles physicists about the beginning of the universe. We know a little about what gravity was like, in the very first moments of time. And the chances of the initial state of the universe having arisen by accident are one in ten to the power ten.’ Hands’s eyes rolled up and right and his tongue appeared in the corner of his mouth. He remembered: ‘To the power 123.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That is fantastically improbable.’
‘I thought you just said that there was no such thing as probability.’
‘Not as a force, no. But let’s talk as if probability exists as you understand it. For the sake of argument. The state of gravity at the beginning of the universe was so improbable that the odds-to-one against it are so great that if you wrote a 0 on every single atom in the universe, you still wouldn’t be able to write it down. I’m saying this machine could do something much more damaging than bankrupting a couple of casinos or crashing the United States’s economy.’
‘There is nothing more damaging than crashing the United States’s economy,’ said Red Queen. ‘Trust me.’
‘No. I don’t think you understand me. This machine could, if it – strange to put it this way – took a shine to the notion, pull our universe inside out through its own asshole.’ Far from being dismayed by the prospect – in the way Red Queen was dismayed, deeply dismayed, by the prospect of explaining a threat to the economy to the boss – Hands seemed positively to perspire with excitement.
‘Is that professor-speak?’ said Red Queen.
‘Yes.’
‘Singularity,’ said Red Queen thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’
‘Universe pulled inside out?’
‘Yup.’
‘Asshole.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t asking. Professor Hands, we would appreciate it if you stayed in overnight. I’ll have someone bring you a toothbrush. The universe being pulled inside out through its own asshole,’ Red Queen repeated wonderingly. ‘Nice. Well. That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it. Keeping this thing from getting anywhere near Binion’s Lucky Horseshoe Casino is the problem I propose to tackle first off.’
Red Queen got up and walked out of the room.
As Alex drove west, whistling on his way, little strangenesses proliferated in the world around him.
In one town in Nevada, the cashpoints malfunctioned. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars poured onto the pavements and were blown down the street by the wind. Children chased them. Adults chased the children. Some adults attempted to return the money to the banks. The banks blamed a lightning strike.
In Baton Rouge, a man in a tall hat removed it and a hummingbird flew out. He stopped in astonishment, not noticing the hummingbird, seeing nothing remarkable in the white sunlight on the sidewalk, overwhelmed only by a sense of déjàvu so powerful he forgot for an instant who he was.
Every narcoleptic in Mississippi went out at once. All of them were crossing roads at the time. People thought there was a plague. Cars backed up, honking, at pedestrian crossings as the pedestrians slept. And here, there and everywhere sleepers shared the same broken dream: of an old man in a shack in the mountains, a rainbow in the dark sky, a terrible wind. None of them remembered the dream.
Chapter 11
Alex had the idea of going to bed in Memphis, but he realised not long after dark that he wasn’t going to make it. So, just around the time his eyes were getting tired and the road was starting to seem strange, he stopped at a motel outside Tupelo. He got a room, and asked the clerk where he could get food at this time of night.
He drove the car down the road to a restaurant called Steak Break. There – eyeing through the near-pitch-darkness of the dining room the portion being eaten by a courting couple at the next-door booth, he ordered just a starter – ‘chicken tenders’, which turned out to be giant, volcanically hot kidney-shaped chicken nuggets – and a baked potato, which came soggy-skinned, waxy-fleshed, wearing a tinfoil leisure suit and a pompadour of whipped buttter.
It tasted comforting. Beer came in a large, fridge-cold glass. He had two sudsy pints as he ate. The waitress said something about his accent, and he wondered briefly, flattered, if she was trying to flirt with him.
The couple left and he was the last customer there. The waitress followed the couple to the door – dark wood, four patterned-glass panels, tiny curtains on a brass rail – and flipped over the wooden ‘We’re Open!’ sign on its chain.