CHRIS WASN’T AT all sure he should do what he was about to do to what was, after all, somebody else’s property. But this book was irritating him and he wanted answers. Whatever its pages were made of, it wasn’t paper. Paper should not have the capacity to make you feel that it was looking at you. Staring, in fact. In fact, he corrected himself, paper doesn’t do that. That was an established fact, so well established that nobody had had previous cause to ever even suggest it.
So he set up the lab’s electron microscope, took some sharp scissors from a drawer, and went to slice off a tiny section of this suspicious non-paper substance. The sooner he had it on a slide and under the microscope, the sooner he would find out what it was, exclaim ‘Of course that’s what it is!’ and everything could go back to normal.
He couldn’t cut the paper-or-whatever-it-was.
Chris boggled.
He checked the pages in his fingers. They had the same strength as paper. And scissors cut paper.
He tried to cut another section of the same page. Again the scissors met the same resistance. Chris was having none of this. He carried the book over to the lab’s spectrograph, and switched the big white machine on at the mains. This would do the trick. Soon he’d be saying ‘Of course that’s what it is.’ He could feel the words hanging in the air, absolutely ready to be spoken.
The spectrograph warmed up. Chris opened the book at a random page, slid it face down into the scanning aperture and pressed the scan button. Soon he would have the answer.
The spectrograph performed a sweep of the book. Chris looked eagerly towards the little slot from which the answer would soon come in cold hard print. Whatever this book was made of, the spectrograph would identify it. eiπ + 1 = 0.
There was an explosion deep in the bowels of the machine. Thick black smoke began to pour from the little slot.
Chris, momentarily shocked back to reality by the thought And who’s going to pay for that, leapt across to the mains and pulled the plug from the wall. He coughed, waving away the clouds of smoke –
And the book, not even remotely scorched, shot out of the scanning aperture like an overenthusiastic slice of toast.
Chris picked it up, glared at it, then hurriedly opened all the windows onto the courtyard.
‘Right,’ he told the book. ‘Right!’
Chris had never shouted at a book before. (Except, of course, Jonathan Livingston Seagull).
He switched on the lab’s big old X-ray machine and positioned the book under the lens. Then he slipped on a protective apron, darted behind the protective shield, and pressed the switch to take the plate.
The lens flashed.
And the book glowed. For just a second, Chris saw it surrounded by an aura of tiny golden particles. It was a light like he had never seen before and it filled him with a superstitious awe that any number of magpies had never been able to manage. In that light he fancied he saw galaxies being born, time being torn apart. And the most curious thing was that he also saw two people.
One of them was a very tall man in some sort of long ceremonial robe. Like a medieval bishop, he carried a wooden staff. His face was forbiddingly stern and yet kindly.
The other person he saw in the light was Clare.
He blinked to clear his head.
The book sat innocuously under the X-ray machine.
Whatever it was, Chris thought, he was absolutely terrified of it.