Chapter 10
Water hissed through the edges of the cupboard doors. It was a slow process, but nothing could be done now. Not until the cupboard was full.
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The library was silent, as libraries so often are. This library, however, was no longer a place of peaceful literary contemplation and study. It was the room in which five people were working out how to save the world.
"So what you're telling me," Lester said, his quiet voice resounding like thunder in the aural vacuum of the library, "is that the entire program is a jigsaw. It's parts written by the various members of your staff, yourself and the late Mr Temple. It was put together on a memory stick, which is, at present in Mr Temple's waistcoat pocket. You do however, have every part of the jigsaw except the one which Mr Temple himself wrote, which was written, unfortunately, directly onto said memory stick."
"That about sums it up, yes," Peta replied.
"Can you reconstruct the missing section?" Lester asked.
"In time, yes," Peta nodded, "I discussed the individual outcomes of the program at length with Connor. I should be able to reproduce my own version of the missing piece."
"But if the anomaly is already closed," Cutter interrupted, "what's the point?"
"How many times, Professor Cutter," Lester snapped, "has an anomaly reopened? I want to be as equipped as possible to deal with any such occurrence."
"Don't you think we've got more important things to worry about? An ocean full of invisible piranhas for a start!"
Lester sighed and rolled his eyes. Why did scientists have to be so impulsive? Why couldn't they just think logically for ones?
"Tell me, Professor," he said, wearily. "Do you have any idea what to do about these creatures? How to round them up? How to catch them? How to kill them? Perhaps how to build a big wall around the North Sea to stop them getting out?" Cutter shook his head. Lester continued. "And do you think that a team of IT specialists are going to come up with the answers to all of those questions any time soon?" Again, Cutter shook his head. Lester nodded triumphantly. "Then will you please allow me to allocate purposeful employment to those most able to do something constructive. You are free to spend your time worrying about the things we cannot change, please allow me the courage to change the things we can. One of us has to have the wisdom to know the difference!"
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Abby frowned in her sleep. On the edge of her consciousness, she was aware of the rain spattering against the window of her room and the wind rattling branches and cables against the window and outer wall. Within her drugged slumber, however, they were no longer a part of the real world, but morphic form haunting her mind.
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The water was rising faster now. It was almost up to his chin. It weighed heavily on his chest, pressing him back against the wall of the cupboard. He forced himself to breathe slowly. Oxygen was a precious commodity. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. The influx of water, blocking any escape for the air in the cupboard, had gradually increased both the pressure and the temperature within. It meant he would be left with some air at the top of the cupboard, but the oxygen in that air was gradually being replaced with carbon dioxide. What was more, as soon as the pressure on either side of the door was equal, he would be opening it and watching that precious air bubble upward faster than he could follow it. He had no idea how much water pressed down on his hiding place from above.
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"What have we got to work from?" Jenny asked as Lester followed Peta upstairs to brief her team.
"I had my teams bring up what we could from the research room," Becker shrugged, "That's as good a place to start as any."
"We don't have any of the fish," said Cutter. "They escaped when the water reached their tank."
"That wasn't the only tank though. The Aplysia brought in five sample tanks. Two of them, the one you were studying and another, are still downstairs and whatever was in them is now revelling in its new found freedom. The other three, though, are upstairs."
Nick Cutter looked from Becker to Jenny then back again. His face lit up.
"You're a genius, man! Take me to those tanks!"
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"So, talk me through this program er..." Lester paused to look at the name badge on the young man's jumper. "Nigel."
"Well, Sir James," Nigel began, pointing up at the top corner of the anomaly detector where a graph was busily doing an impression of an oscilloscope. "This graph shows the magnetic polarity of the anomaly. As you can see, the polarity reverses fairly regularly. The first thing we did when Mr Temple explained his idea was program in this graph to see if his hypothesis was right. This graph tells us that, at least as far as the reversals go, he was spot on."
"Is it usual for magnetic fields to reverse themselves like this?"
"That depends on the magnet. Your average bar magnet that you play with in science club isn't going to do it, but the Earth's magnetic field does."
"Really? Why haven't I noticed?"
"Well it only does it once every couple of hundred thousand years."
"So often? However did you scientists manage to find that out?"
"Oh, it's all in the rocks," Nigel breezed past Lester's sarcasm. "Anyway. We, sorry, Mr Temple, thought the same thing might be happening with the anomalies and it was."
"So where do we go from here?"
"Well, the second part of the Temple theory states that an alternative magnetic impulse fluctuating at the same rate as the anomaly, but in reversal, should cancel out the magnetic field and therefore annihilate any physical extension of the field."
Lester paused, thinking through Nigel's enthusiastic explanation and trying to put the words in an order that made sense. He gave up.
"What?" Lester sighed.
"Imagine you have a set of scales, or a seesaw, and the weight on one side keeps changing. You want to keep the seesaw level, so what do you do?"
"Put a big brick under my side."
Now it was Nigel's turn to roll his eyes.
"No, that's not an option," he said with the impatient patience of a child trying to teach it's younger sibling not to cheat at hide and seek. "You respond to changes in the situation. When the weight on the far end of the seesaw is large, you make your weight light. When the weight lessens at the far end, you increase it at yours."
"Which you can only do if you know when the weight is going to change and by how much," Lester finished.
Nigel smiled, cheered that light had finally dawned.
"Exactly," he said. "And this graph tells us just that."
"So the program?"
"It controls the 'weight' on our end of the 'seesaw'," Nigel made air quotes around the two words he had borrowed from his analogy, eager to keep Lester on track. Lester bit his tongue and waited for further explanation, preferably without air quotes.
"What," he said, when no more was forthcoming, "is that all?"
"You did say you wanted the short version!"
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He pressed his forehead and nose to the ceiling of the cupboard, gulping in what might be his last breath of air. The pressure was equal now: the water had stopped pouring in. The only thing that had stopped the last remnants of air pouring out had been the overhang of the cupboard door: the part that held the sliding door on its upper runners. He took a final breath and sank into the water. The door slid back easily now, giving him enough space to slide out into the flooded kitchen. He felt something brush past him as his natural buoyancy dragged him to the surface.