‘You’re telling me. Those airlines don’t mind cramming ’em in.’
The man had no idea just how crammed Sean had been. ‘No, they don’t.’
There was an awkward pause before Todd said, ‘I’m sorry. That’s not why you’re here.’ He sighed, folded his arms and looked at the floor, examining his shoes. ‘This is against protocol, and I hate to be the one to tell people this sort of thing, I really do, but I don’t think there’s any harm in it now. Ruthy died a couple of weeks ago.’
Sean was already certain that she had, but hearing it out loud made him feel sick. The miles travelled was one thing, but Ruth was the only door to an answer left, and it had been slammed in his face.
Todd mistook his disappointment for him being upset. ‘Oh now, there’s no need to be sad,’ he said. ‘Ruthy lived a good life, a long, strong existence and died peacefully in her bed. She was a happy woman if ever I saw one.’
Sean nodded, not really listening. ‘How did she die?’ he asked.
‘Doctor said it was natural causes. She just stopped breathing in her sleep one night.’
‘Was there anything suspicious about her death? Anything at all? Did anything unusual happen just before she died? Did she say whether she’d met anyone new recently?’
Todd eyed him with caution. ‘Who did you say you were, again?’ he asked, wariness in his voice.
‘Never mind — I’m being silly.’ Sean said, and Todd seemed to settle back to his normal, sweating self. ‘I’m a journalist; I always look for the hidden agenda, even if there is none.’
Damn. He shouldn’t have said that. Hopefully it would be a detail that Todd overlooked.
‘A journalist? Now that is interesting. What publication do you write for?’
Double damn. ‘I work freelance. I mostly write for music magazines.’
‘You ever get to go to those after parties? With all the girls?’
‘No, not really. I’m not that rock and roll.’
Todd nodded. ‘Probably for the best.’
Sean thought hard. There must be something he could find out while he was here. After all he was a journalist, and he did always look for the hidden agenda. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I have a look through her things? We were very close when I was a kid, and it would be nice to, you know — catch up with her memory.’
Todd smiled. ‘Of course.’
They left the putrid humidity of Todd’s office and wandered the halls.
‘Ruthy really liked it here,’ Todd said. ‘She said it was her favourite place. She loved to sit in the lounge and tell stories. She had this one story about a scientist and an alien spacecraft that she used to tell. Boy that woman had a hell of an imagination. She could’ve made it as one of those science-fiction writers by my reckoning.’
This sounded interesting. ‘Could you tell me that story?’
‘Ah, well — I forget most of it…’
‘Please try. It’s very important to me.’
Todd stopped and scrunched his eyes up, thinking. Then he opened them again. ‘Gah, I don’t know. Tell you what — why don’t I show you her room while I think about it, see if I can remember?’
They turned off the corridor into room twenty-four. It was a modest but tidy space, with a small bed in the middle and a big glass window overlooking the desert.
‘Great view, huh?’ Todd said, looking out with his hands on his hips.
‘Sure,’ Sean said, giving it a cursory glance before scanning the room. There was a desk opposite the bed, so he opened the drawers and looked through them.
‘Let me see then, the story,’ Todd said, scratching his neck. ‘There was a scientist — a whole bunch of them in fact — and they found a box in the desert. Or was it a box the size of a house? I can’t remember. Anyways, they find this box and they take it back to a top secret laboratory.’
Sean rifled though the sheets of blank paper and stationary littering the drawers, but besides that, there was nothing. He closed them, and moved on to her bedside cabinet.
‘Say — are you looing for anything in particular?’ Todd asked.
‘No,’ Sean said, looking through a drawer of socks. ‘What happened after they found the box?’
‘Ah yes, the box. They took the box back, but they couldn’t do anything with it. It was solid — no way in, no way out. Come to think of it, that box must’ve been the size of a house or they wouldn’t have tried to get in it. A house is pretty big though, don’t you think—’
‘It doesn’t matter. What happened next?’
‘Er — no, I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ Todd said, sounding a little flustered. ‘Well, after a while, the scientists began seeing things, having visions. Like, real powerful stuff. Then one day the box takes one of them, and he was gone, just like that. But he returns, and he’s not the same as before he disappeared — he’s changed. It’s like he’s become one with the box. But the box makes the other scientists lose their minds, and so it’s decided that the box should be destroyed. They do, and the scientist that came back from the box dies with it. And that’s it.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not too good at telling stories. Not like Ruthy was.’
Sean had stopped looking through the drawers and was fixed on Todd. ‘So it’s true…’ he whispered.
‘What do you think it wants?’ Sally asked, gazing out the window of the MLM at the colourless cuboid.
‘I don’t know,’ Mikhail said, watching it with her.
‘It’s beautiful in an odd kind of way,’ Sally said, watching a star flicker as it passed behind it. ‘I think it wants to communicate with us, but it just doesn’t know how.’
Mikhail leaned closer to the window such that his nose touched the glass. ‘Do you think it wants to communicate through me?’
Sally looked at him, at his squashed nose, and laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, still chuckling a little. ‘Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we’ll never know.’
Mikhail pulled back from the window and turned to her, the tip of his nose bright red. Sally burst out laughing again and pushed him away.
‘What?’ he said smiling. ‘What is it?’
‘You’re so silly.’
Instead of doing her usual experiments, Sally spent the rest of the afternoon explaining to Mikhail about the stars. It was a strange experience; the more she talked to him, the more he seemed to be growing up, as if the youthful brain trapped in his adult body was maturing at an accelerated pace.
‘There are three hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way,’ Sally explained, ‘and about five hundred billion galaxies in the universe.’
‘And how many universes are there?’ Mikhail asked, hanging onto her every word.
It was a good question, she had to give him credit for that. ‘No one knows. Most people think there’s only one.’
Mikhail wrinkled his brow. ‘That’s not right,’ he said.
Sally blinked. ‘How many do you think there are?’
He leaned back, touching his head against the canvas wall. ‘It’s not really a thing for numbers. Other universes exist in a state that numbers can’t describe.’
At first Sally thought what he was saying was nonsense, but the look in his eye changed her mind. ‘Have you been there?’ she asked. ‘To the other universes, I mean.’
Mikhail’s face went blank for a second.
‘I can’t remember.’
Then his grin returned. ‘Do you have any more apple pie?’
Sally shook her head in humorous disbelief. They went for some more apple pie.
‘Back on Earth,’ Sally said, putting her finished pouch in the waste, ‘we have pies in many different flavours. You’d love it.’