The Time Gene, page 11
Siegi’s nostrils flared. “Hmmm. You have not written me in nineteen years.”
What did the old boffin expect? Tycoons didn’t keep pen pals.
“Tell me about...what you do.”
“Currently I am leading a team in isolating particles of antihydrogen,” he returned. “We have been working on W and Z bosons.”
“That is incredible!” Dirk bluffed. “You know I always loved science.”
Siegi’s jaw twitched. “Yes, you almost graduated to Doctor Who.”
Typical Siegfried...bloody condescending. Dirk knew all about the Super Proton Synchrotron and Tevatron colliders. For a world record breaker, the latest developments in physics were of paramount importance. “Nonsense! I love bosoms...er...bosons. Who could forget our chemistry lectures together in our first year!”
Siegfried glowered. “I had to wake you to stop you snoring!”
“Okay, guilty as charged.”
“Then you dropped chemistry and read art history.” His tone left no doubt as to his opinion of the latter as an academic discipline.
“Art is the solace of the spirit; the wings of the mind; the absolution of the soul,” Dirk protested.
“The worst thing was, I knew more about it than you did by the time we graduated.”
Dirk felt a tad sheepish.
“In fact, you spent most of your degree drunk or chasing girls. You scraped a third only after waking up in bed with the dean and threatening to tell her husband.
“You have done well, though,” Siegfried acknowledged. Dirk thought this flagrant understatement given they were standing in a twenty-bedroom villa. But he doubted Siegfried would have been impressed if he acquisitioned the White House.
“You own...is it...four tabloid newspapers?”
“Five.”
Dirk’s muscles stiffened. Where was the respect? He might just as well have owned five unusual jugs, or five rare stamps. “And two record companies. I own BluTV and eight satellite channels.” Dirk swaggered like a Sultan presenting his palace. But Siegfried merely nodded, as if they’d been two grimy-kneed boys in 1950s Brixton and Dirk was showing him the free gobstoppers from his Beano. Never mind. A tour of Blue Iguana ought to teach him his place.
Even he couldn’t cock a snook at 72 000 square feet of Roman opulence. How could you but swoon at its gleaming crimson roofs, its champagne-tinted swimming pools; its psychodelic grotto, its babbling lagoon; its white gold beach with a sheen to shame virgin snow? Who could but swoon before the cinema that jumped out of the floor, the revolving penthouse roof; and the rooftop maze? Why, Siegi had to be that very moment choking with jealousy, as swathes of emerald forest, luscious jade palm groves, hoyas and birds of paradise intoxicated his senses. And who would not die for the blue iguana lizard pair, known only to the Cayman Islands?
Dirk had peppered the lobbies and gardens with statues, fountains and shrines. All the sea gods:
Poseidon, Aegaeon, Amphitrite (or was it Aphrodite?), Doris (or Boris?). Marble pillars encased the largest outdoor pool, replicating ancient temples to Apollo and Artemis, that dominated the sinuous sands of the villa’s beach. They had been built to capture the sun in its zenith, weaving shimmering patterns at noon on the summer solstice.
Dirk liked to think of the aula as his pièce de résistance. He’d commissioned an indoor tropical forest almost as lush as the outdoor, a fountain to the goddess of love that stained its waters crimson, and a large revolving hologram of a blue iguana (Dirk’s own idea). The main staircase would knock anyone’s socks off, because it was two staircases in one. They had modelled the original white marble staircase on Gone With The Wind. But if you pressed a button, that staircase detached from the landing and sank into the foundations, and a spiralling baroque flight of steps rose in its place. “Its heat and movement sensors prevent the staircase from changing when there’s someone on it, and there is an alarm that goes off three minutes before the changeover.”
Yet none of the villa’s hi-tech secrets daunted Siegfried. Only the science fascinated him. He quizzed Dirk about the blend of limestone and polymers in the fake stalactites and stalagmites. He inquisitioned him over the retractable staircases’ hydraulics. To cap it all off, he scoffed at Dirk’s explanation of the hologram lasers. And he jeered when Dirk muddled the gods’ names. How did someone atheistic enough to make Richard Dawkins look like the pope remember the entire Greek Pantheon? “Gods are an offset for man’s own ephemerality,” Siegfried said, his thin lips curling. “The only offset is science; boundless; illimitable; eternal.”
“The sculptures are art,” Dirk protested.
Siegfried waved his hand dismissively. “Are we alone here?” he asked. “I mean...apart from the staff?”
“Spez is upstairs in the...let’s see...Sunday evening...” He calculated with his fingers. “Sorry...Spez’ schedule is a little much to handle sometimes...though mornings are easier as she’s up at 6 and runs three miles, then it’s two hours in the gym, but… (I’ve got this saved on my computer somewhere)...Sunday night is aquatherapy, then full-body massage, so she should be in the Jacuzzi at the moment. I can’t keep up with her!”
“Spez?”
“Oh, come on!” Dirk guffawed, clapping Siegfried’s shoulders. “I know you don’t read my newspapers, but you’re not an ostrich.” He looked most ungracious. “And you a Chelsea fan!”
“I am not unaware,” said Siegfried stiffly, “that your latest squeeze is the pulchritudinous yet vacuous Esperanza del Soliz, erstwhile fiancée of Chelsea captain Rafael Lopez de Cortes.”
“More fool you, Siegi! Spez is a highly intelligent woman.”
“Hit the big time shagging a footballer.”
“I thought,” Dirk said drily, “that you were above reading rags such as mine.”
“Chelsea fan magazines,” he elucidated. “Raked in millions telling them how Lopez ‘beat her’ (who would blame him?) All the time she was ogling that male model...the plastic-faced one... and she was violent...tried to scratch Lopez’ eyes out!”
Dirk’s throat tightened. “Are you going to stand here and insult my partner?” he bellowed. “I will have you escorted from this building...”
Siegfried leaned back his head and cackled. “Take it not evil, my old friend. When you date a – moderately – intelligent woman, I will never speak ill of her.”
Dirk was in a quandary as to how to respond. Siegfried continued coolly. “Ms del Soliz had children by Lopez, not?”
Dirk rolled his eyes. “Yes. Rebel and Ninja are upstairs in the indoor pool with their nanny.”
“She calls her kids that and you expect choir boys?”
“It was your precious Lopez who named them,” Dirk retorted. “Spez was against it.”
He twisted his face. “A woman has a thousand ruses to beguile a man. I weaned myself from women. I am invulnerable.”
Dirk elbowed him in the ribs. “Back in the day, you were as happy to pick up a bird as anyone! Remember when we got locked out of Reggies naked and had to climb the ivy. And...you fell off!” he cried, savouring the remembrance. “Only that holly bush broke your fall.”
Siegfried grimaced. “Holly...and ivy. A disgrace. It was destroying the fabric of the building.”
“Didn’t do much for the fabric of your buttocks either!”
Siegfried’s face turned purple.
Hah! Billionaire mogul 1. Mad scientist 0.
Eager to exploit his upper hand, Dirk twisted his lips. “My good friend, you still have not explained to what happy circumstance I owe the honour of your visit.”
“I have come to petition pecuniary assistance, as you have ascertained,” Siegfried mumbled. “But for no personal gain.”
Dirk erupted with mirth. “I don’t doubt it is for the noblest of causes. But naturally a genius of your calibre will have calculated that you haven’t an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting a penny out of me. But go on. Amuse me. Regale me with the sob story.”
“Sob? I do not sob,” Siegfried grimaced. “CERN have withdrawn funding from some world-shattering research I am undertaking. I have written to in excess of sixty government bodies, institutes, universities and companies, none of whom will grant me the monies I require!” He appeared not just nonplussed at these refusals, but astonished and incredulous.
What a knob this guy was. “So what’s the research in, then?” Dirk asked, trying not to smirk.
“Chronological engineering, in layman’s terms time travel,” Siegfried replied, oblivious to the lampooning.
“And you wonder why they refused you?”
Siegfried’s expression remained dead-pan. “Copernicus was ridiculed; Galileo condemned; Darwin derided....and like their delusional detractors, you do not understand science. Chronokinesis is man’s next frontier. whosoever denies it is a fool.”
Fury raged to Dirk’s head. “Is branding me an idiot your best way of begging a favour?”
Siegfried glared at the marble balustrades, floor mosaics of Perseus and Medusa, frescoes of Theseus and the Minotaur and busts of Venus. “Pardon me for not kissing your feet. Listen to me, you dickhead. When you die, your flesh turns black, and worms eat your entrails. Nothing but dust. Sod money, sod power!”
“Conversing with you was always life-affirming!”
Siegfried banged his fists against a pillar. “Only he who wields the fabric of spacetime will be invincible.”
Dirk leaned against a gilded chair, like a sun king lapping adulation from his minions. Did this lunatic suppose that Dirk Slater, media mogul, tycoon, megalomaniac, could be bullied by a nerd in a labcoat? “You can’t just invade my home and blackmail me into bankrolling a time machine, so that you can be master of the universe. I’d sooner pour all my billions down the drain at the bottom of the fountain!”
“You suppose this is about me? Man is so myopic! Our race is doomed. The sun will swell and dissolve the planets, and all life will be extinguished. Homo sapiens must evolve or perish. The fittest must beget a superintelligence that can conquer the stars. I am half way there, Dirky...I know how to build a rocket that will enable interstellar, even intergalactic, travel.”
A high-pitched scream ricocheted from the ceiling.
Siegfried twitched. “That sounds like a woman.”
A canon ball smashed into Dirk’s chest. Spez...
He extracted his walkie-talkie. “Security! Intruder in the Jacuzzi room. Spez is in there, come fast.” His heart hammered like a battering ram. But Dirk Slater hadn’t scaled the dizzy heights by being a candy ass in a crisis. He activated the alarms and ran up the stairs. Siegfried whined nonsensicalities about the “cacophony” and its threat to his eardrums. Dirk frowned. He swore that if it turned out to be a machete-wielding maniac, he’d pay him to kill Siegfried slowly.
“Invasion! Rape! Pillage! Murder!”
A woman was running down the stairs. The whole room span in her liquid gold halo. Her hair gleamed like ears of corn in the evening sun. He saw no evidence of an intruder. Keeling over, she flung herself into his arms, tears flooding down her cheeks.
“Tell me what happened, sweetheart,” Dirk said, massaging her ivory shoulders.
“Two men...watching me...in the Jacuzzi,” she quailed. “Huge men.” Her kohl-rimmed eyes fluttered like duskywing butterflies. “They came floating towards me...in mid-air...across the water. I nearly died. I screamed for Orchid. When she came back in, they vanished!”
Since he could get no sense out of her, Dirk turned to her physiotherapist, a voluptuous native named Orchid, as fifteen armed guards in riot gear burst into the room. The burly woman replied that she might have seen a flash of light. But, in her opinion, Miss del Soliz ate too much watercress soup and grapefruit oil and too few honest potatoes and cream buns. Had there been anything there, it wouldn’t have messed with Orchid.
Dirk didn’t disagree. Even he was scared of Orchid.
“They were agents of the devil,” Spez panted. “One had red hair and a tangled, pointy beard. The other...had spikes...on his head...like horns!”
Dirk panned the landing and stairwell. His eyes almost flew out their sockets. A bright ball of light was zigzagging across the hallway. And it was no firefly. The glow widened until the light almost blinded them. Gradually, Dirk traced the outline of two figures, drifting into focus until the imprint of two men, suspended above the floor, began to stabilise. The glow faded to a milky white oval. Dirk’s feet froze onto the floor...
“Do you think we got the wrong hoose?” demanded one. “Or the wrong day?”
“No, no,” replied the other. “The Tobie biography was emphatic that they met here, on this very night.”
“I dinnae remember any mention o’ yon hysterical wifey in the Jacuzzi,” moaned the first man.
Recovering his capacities, Dirk yelled for his guards. “OUT HERE! Summon the police instantly. Use extreme force if necessary. Alert the British embassy.”
By the time he turned back round, the intruders had vanished.
“What the...”
Dirk tore downstairs, splashed through the lagoon, clambered into the caves, and sprinted towards the sea. Siegfried, athletic for an android, followed hot on his heels. “Dirky!” he garbled. “The roof...”
Still cocooned in a phosphorescent halo, the felons had invaded Dirk’s roof garden. How the hell had they got there? The guards had barricaded the main stairway, and you needed a fob to access the tradesmen’s staircases...
“God Almighty, was that really Siegfried Canute, in the flesh?”
“Try not to drool, Murdo. Remember why we’re here. Lord help this planet if they refuse!”
The second Dirk summoned the guards, the pair had scarpered again.
“Harry Houdini had nothing on those two,” Dirk sighed. Having turned the villa upside down and found no trace of them, the police were combing the forest and the beach. Dirk and Siegfried had reluctantly sat down to dinner, tolerably satisfied that the intruders were screwballs rather than psychopaths.
“They will not be found if they don’t want to be found,” Siegfried remarked. “That was a hologram, and one of such complexity that even my colossal brain may require some time to compute it.” Siegfried wrinkled his nostrils. “Disappointing that Ms del Soliz has not recovered enough to join us.”
Dirk laughed. Spez usually ate with her dietician. Sunday, so that would be chopped carrot followed by grated orange peel.
Siegfried looked affronted. “I mean it in earnest. I am fascinated by her chin. The surgeon who designed it must be immensely rich.”
“Give Spez a break,” Dirk lambasted. “She’s been through a terrible ordeal.”
Siegfried gurgled deep in his throat. “Look,” he said, “no doubt her suffering was unparalleled. But, despite her tribulations, she arranged her first towel like a ballgown, and her second like an eastern headdress.”
Siegfried stopped in his tracks. The apparition had slithered, ghost-like, through the chandelier. Siegfried barely paled. Perhaps he was too bloodless. His brows knotted as though solving a conundrum. Dirk’s most pressing concerns right now were his 8.5 ton Sultan Qaboos chandelier and million-dollar Ajanta frescoes. He tried to call his entourage. A boneless arm struck him dumb.
“Don’t bother calling them.”
A loud, grating voice, as tinny as a laptop speaker. “If you do, we will disappear again. They will never catch us. We will plague and torment you until you hear what we have to say.”
Dirk had had enough. “You are guilty of breaking and entering, trespassing, invasion of privacy, voyeurism...”
“I’m no’ quite sure how I can be guilty o’ breakin’ an’ enterin’,” said the bearded man, “seein’ as how I’m no’ here...”
“Attempted rape, resisting arrest...”
“How can a’body get raped by a hologram?”
“Siegfried,” Dirk barked. “Pass me my gun. Dresser, third drawer down.”
“Dirky, use your wits!” he yelled. “You can’t shoot a hologram...it would decimate your blue iguana frescoes and not give them so much as a papercut.”
Dirk was perfecting a scathing riposte when the younger man began to snivel.
“The blue iguana...just one species gone extinct through man’s folly...”
“An ignoramus as well as an intruder,” Dirk sniped. “The blue iguana is not extinct.”
Dirk’s eyes goggled. He realised, for the first time, that their feet were not touching the floor. They glinted in the chalky light, insubstantial as gauze. Dirk could see his frescoes right through the bearded man’s torso. He backed against the wall, mouth agape.
The man with the bushy beard butted in again. “Before we get doon tae business, I’d just like tae say...I’m a huge fan o’ yours. You’re my hero.”
Dirk flexed his muscles. “Look. I love all my fans to bits. But no-one, bar no-one, has the right to install spyware and surveillance on my property.” He paused, pensive. The technology behind these gizmos had to be pretty slick. There could be wonga in this. Perhaps it would be worth offering an olive branch. “If you’ll grant my reporter an exclusive interview for The Daily Sketch, I may consider dropping the charges.”
The red-haired man looked at Dirk as if he were a cockroach on his shoe. “I wasnae talkin’ tae you!”
Ye gods! If there was one thing more ridiculous than standing in your own dining room talking to a hologram, it was a man who idolised his frog-cloning ex-roomie.
The bearded man turned towards Siegfried with a worshipping look. Dirk promised himself if one of his dogs looked at him like that he’d have it put down.
“You are revered above Einstein where I come from,” said the bearded man. “Planck, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg...all are nothin’ tae you.”
Siegfried, predictably, beamed. “Really?” he said with utterly fake modesty.
This bootlicking stuff was just up Siegfried’s alley. It’d do him no good at all.
The spiky-haired hologram, the senior in the partnership, elbowed his companion in the ribs. “Be careful what we tell him. Remember we need Slater as well.” He cleared his throat. “My name is Professor Prometheus Cartwright, and this is my associate, Dr Murdo Ironside. We are the Director-General and Deputy Director-General of the League of Kairos.”
