Cold Fusion (10 page)

They were gone. I made myself a mug of tea, the kettle boiling courtesy of the mystical dance of protons and neutrons in the fusion tank. I sat in the empty café, perched on a stool by Viv’s workbench. He’d taken a lot of stuff apart overnight, as if anticipating this visit. What had he said?
Whatever’s been set in motion will happen now.
Despite everything, I wished PW had chosen someone other than Alan Frost to come and inspect Viv’s work.

I hadn’t written a word aboard the
Sea Hawk
, not after my first fortnight. Alan knew that. I’d told him so, anyway—maybe he hadn’t been listening. We really hadn’t known each other all that well. The astonishingly good sex we’d shared had made us feel a lot more intimate than we were.

I hadn’t looked the gift horse in the mouth, and now it was too late. I grabbed a sheet of paper from Viv’s notebook and began to scrawl random shapes around its edges. The shapes resolved into letters, then disconnected words. Not words about the sea this time, or dried poppy heads, or other subjects obviously suited to poetry.
Blood
, I wrote. Then
shame
. Then
glass tank
,
sex
,
cable
,
betrayal
and
floor
.

Great. I was going mad. I turned the paper upside down and connected the various words with arrows. I crumpled it into a ball and flattened it to see how that looked, and I overwrote my first random phrases with a new set. In the Stavanger hostel, waiting for the Norway police to tell me I could go home, I’d found a dog-eared copy of
Doctor Zhivago
and read it distractedly. I hadn’t taken much in, but I’d remembered Lara’s arrival in the countryside, her revelation there.
She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name…
Surely that was the task of a poet—not only to sing and reflect on things already understood, but to open up the core of creation, as surely as Viv reached into the crazy quantum heart of the solid world around him. To find out and call things by their right names.

I lost myself. I covered sheet after sheet with heedless scrawl, not looking at the results, and then I just as suddenly stopped. I folded up the sheets, tucked them into my jacket’s inner pocket, rested my hands on the bench top and gazed across the sleet-whipped dunes. Snow was coming, Alan had said. I could believe it, looking at that sky. Time passed, marked for me only by changes in the cloud-shifted light in the room.

The outer door banged open. I jumped, grabbed the notebook and tried to look as if I’d been doing something useful in here. Alan strode into the lab, Vivian moving quietly a few paces behind him.

“Honestly, Mal,” Alan greeted me. “What did you tell me he was awkward for? He’s charming.”

I hadn’t called Viv awkward.
A little odd
, I’d said, but I didn’t bother arguing. Alan’s smile was fragile. Beneath it I could read shock. Well, I knew that feeling. He’d seen, and now he was a believer too. He was trying to hide his response.

“Well?” I said, tapping my pen on the table, unable to help a small grin. “I told you so, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“What do you think?”

“He’ll need to set a demo up from scratch in the Edinburgh labs. But yes, I think he’s done it. It’s real.”

Viv had disappeared into the kitchen. The kettle clicked, and he called out, in that laird-of-the-manor voice I’d have thought was natural to him if I hadn’t been privileged to hear what lay beneath it, “Would you like that coffee now?”

“Coffee? Are you joking?” Alan hoisted his rucksack onto a stool. “I did a little shopping on my way up. I’ll tell you right now, I never thought I’d be opening this.” He pulled out a champagne bottle. “Come on, Viv. Rustle up some glasses for us and sit down.”

I didn’t like that Alan was shortening his name. I didn’t like him issuing orders, or setting the bottle down on the bench in such a way that it knocked Viv’s tools out of line. Surreptitiously I straightened them again, wondering if whatever Viv suffered from was catching. When Viv arrived at the table with three mugs, I didn’t like his look of detached resignation, as if something had got hold of him, too big and inexorable for him to fight.

“Sorry,” he said. “It was these or test tubes. Thank you for bringing champagne, Alan.”

“None for me.” I surprised myself with the flat snap of the refusal. “I mean…I’ll toast this with the remains of my tea, if that’s okay.”

Alan’s eyebrows went up. “Are you not well?”

What, I have to be ill before I refuse a drink?
“I’m fine. But I seem to turn into an idiot at best these days when I’m drunk, and…” I shot Viv a quick, sorry glance, “…at worst, a complete git.”

“Don’t tell me you’re on the wagon.”

“No, of course not. Just keeping it for special occasions.”

“And your mate here inventing cold fusion isn’t special enough for you?”

“It isn’t something you invent. It’s—”

“I know that! It was a figure of speech, for God’s sake. Viv, would you like to do the honours?”

Viv sat down carefully on the stool next to mine. He didn’t look at me, but I felt a deep, silent brush of connection. “I believe I’ll pass too. If Mallory isn’t drinking.”

Alan surveyed us from the far side of the workbench. “Wow. Aren’t you two fun?”

“You don’t exactly have your champagne face on, either, Al.” I studied him. It was true. If anything he looked anxious, profoundly sobered. “What are you thinking?”

“I didn’t expect this to be real. No offence, Viv, but I expected to come out and have to humour another garden-shed physicist who thought he’d solved the world’s energy needs in a jam jar. You must have thought about some of the consequences. To you personally, I mean—not to a grateful planet.”

“Yes. I’ve thought about them long and hard.”

“Right. You’re cautious. So we’ve got Mal here to thank for blowing the gaff, yes?”

“No, not at all. We both decided that contacting Peace Warrior would be the best way forward.”

I couldn’t bear it. “Stop it, Viv. I did blow the gaff. You know me, Alan—anything for publicity. If that’s what you want to say, for Christ’s sake, just say it.”

“What? No.” He reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Of course not. I’ve apologised to you for that and I meant it, okay? All I mean is, you two will be in considerable danger if we decide to take this project out of the garden shed. So will I, and so will anybody else who knows of Viv’s success.”

“There isn’t anyone else,” Viv said quickly. “I’ve made sure of that.”

“No family or friends? I passed a place called Calder Castle on my way out here. Is that your home?”

“Yes, it is. But no one lives there now.”

“It looked fantastic. You know, you could have a great life there, being the Laird of Kerra.”

“I wouldn’t be. The title isn’t hereditary.”

“From what I know of these little Highland towns, they’ll always call the guy who lives in the big house the laird, as long as he looks the part. And I bet you do when you’re not in your overalls. Could you manage that, Viv?”

“Manage what?”

“Go home. Forget about all this.”

“No. The project isn’t complete. I have to finish.”

I wanted to knock their heads together. Viv’s neurotic compulsion to finish what he’d started wasn’t the point, and nor were our little individual lives, nice though it was of Alan to want to protect them. Between the two of them they would shove the genie back in the lamp and we’d never have cold fusion. Instead we’d have an oil war over the last reserves, and that would go nuclear and bring down the curtain forever. I didn’t quite understand why I wasn’t banging my hand off the bench top and insisting on this.

Alan looked puzzled too. “What about you, firecracker Mal? Nothing to say?”

All my old certainties are crumbling. I want my little individual life, and I want Viv to have his. Why does it have to be up to us to save the world?
“No. It’s Viv’s project. I’ll go with whatever he decides.”

“Okay. Viv, have you decided?”

“Perhaps this way is as good as any. What’s done is done.”

“Yeah, it is.” Alan sat up straight. He glanced around the lab, his expression at once troubled and assessing. I was glad for Viv’s sake that he was taking this so seriously, but his unease was catching. “Right,” Alan said. “The first thing I need to do is get you boys out of here and down to our Edinburgh HQ. They’ll be able to look after you there, Viv, and they’ll help you put together whatever you need to take this forward. Is some of this stuff portable?”

“Most of it.”

“Good. Then get cracking and take apart whatever will fit in my four-by-four.”

“I’ll need to shut the deuterium harvesters down.”

“How long will that take? I’d like to get going before the weather closes in.”

“I’ll have to go down to the chambers. Safe shutdown will take an hour or so.”

“Well, God forbid you should do an unsafe one. No disrespect, but the wiring you’ve put through this place and the chalets is enough to blow the place sky-high any minute as it is.” He yawned—a bit theatrically, I thought—and gave me an unsubtle wink. “Tell you what—I didn’t get any kip at all last night. Is there anywhere I can crash for half an hour?”

“Of course. There’s a bunk in the kitchen there. You’re welcome to—”

“It’s all right, Viv,” I interrupted. I didn’t want Alan in Viv’s chaste bed, where he’d slept in lonely peace for so many nights before my arrival. “I’ll take him out to my chalet.”

* * * * *

Alan hustled me gently through the chalet door. The wind had veered round and a sharp gust chased us in, throwing a handful of sleet at the windows after us. “Lovely place,” Alan observed, dropping his rucksack and pushing the door closed. “At least it’s warm.”

“Everywhere’s warm when Viv’s got his system running. It’s real, isn’t it? It works.”

“Certainly seems to.”

“Is the wiring really that bad?”

“Ready to blow. But we’ll worry about that later.”

“Oh? What are we gonna worry about in the meantime?”

He pushed me back to arm’s length. He looked me over, then took in my spartan surroundings. “How long have you been here?”

“Just a couple of days. He rescued me, kind of. He’s a nice guy.”

“I can see that. Handsome, too, with that lordly, brooding thing he’s got going on. I was starting to wonder—despite your palatial crate bed here…”

“What?”

“If there’d been two bodies in that kitchen bunk.”

There had been, but he’d never understand. I wished I’d been paying more attention myself, because that one night was a memory I’d have liked to keep. “No. He isn’t like that. And besides, I wasn’t over you.”

“Oh, Mal. I really am sorry for the way I treated you.”

“Forget it. You’re here now.” I ran my hands down the front of his sweater. I caressed the zip of his sensible all-weather trousers, smiling at the familiar heat rising behind it. “Here and ready for action, looks like. Now, do you want me to leave you to take that nap, or—”

He grasped the back of my skull. I winced as his mouth closed hard on my bruised lip, but the pain flared into arousal and I forgot it. He held me in place until I’d got over my shock and started to return his kiss with answering passion, then took capable hold of my backside and began to crush my hips against his.

I couldn’t handle much of that. He’d always turned me on, and my sorrow and anger had only formed a thin layer of ice over my sexual response. He’d forgiven me. Everything was flowing again, meltwater bright in the sun.

“Alan,” I rasped, pulling free for a moment. “I don’t know how we’re gonna manage, but I need you to fuck me.”

“You leave the managing to me.” He grabbed his rucksack, backed me up to the crate bed and assisted my scramble onto the mattress. I knelt for him, awkward and a bit embarrassed, too hot and hungry to care. I unzipped my jeans while he dug about in the rucksack, then glanced round at his grunt of satisfaction. “Wow. The Peace Warrior envoy brought lube with him on his mission?”

“Well, I thought it might…ease negotiations.” He assisted me in tugging down my jeans and briefs, and waited until my disgusted laughter died. Then to my surprise he kissed me with great tenderness, a blood-thrilling brush to the back of my neck. “Don’t be cross with me, lovely boy. I wasn’t taking anything for granted. Just hoping. Here, look—I brought condoms too.”

I stretched out on the mattress. Shudders were running through me, big, long shivers that hardly reached surface but cramped and clenched all through my cold, lonely innards and wouldn’t stop until I came. I needed him. I’d have spread for him on my back if he’d wanted, let him fuck me up against the wall. He was a pushy bastard in bed. So was I, but he’d outweighed me and outsmarted me, was richer and taller and older, and I’d let him bowl me down. There’d been times when I’d wished he’d give me a second to catch my breath, but this wasn’t going to be one of them.

“I’m not cross,” I said, grabbing the folded-up blanket I’d been using as a pillow. “Get on with it.”

He shoved into me hard and deep. For a few bumpy heartbeats I was scared. He’d lubed up with his usual efficiency, but the sudden stretch and plunge made me gasp. Then my innards sorted themselves out around him and we were there, locked together, his cock riding back and forth over my prostate.

I wasn’t going to last long. Just as well, because nor were the crates underneath us. I turned my head to one side, rubbing one cheek against my jumper sleeve. Through tears and sparks I watched the cabin door, which the wind had knocked open a few inches, blowing sand and stormy ozone scents into the room.

Christ. Viv was standing there. He was unmoving, pale as one of the silver birch trees on the far side of the track. I hadn’t seen him get there. He could have arrived between one blast of wind and the next. His eyes were fathomless, fixed on me.

Outrage flared once—flickered and died. His gaze became part of the tidal wave building up under my gut. One hand was clutching the doorframe, the other pushing wind-driven hair out of his eyes. He was just—for whatever unknowable bloody reasons of his own—watching.