The Japanese mu, it seemed, could mean boundless or nothingness or neither/nor: concepts not normally synonymous in Western minds, but apparently in Calzonni’s.

She was also an expert in something called jeet kune do. Rich, brilliant, masterful, and no one to argue with. The thought of meeting someone like that, especially a woman, was appalling.

But then there was that note from Grandma – apparently – and the triple gamma-ray burster event, observed by separate astronomical set-ups, but deleted from them all via simultaneous worm attacks. That had been three days ago, and still he had not told anyone about the data he had copied to his memory flake, an offline replica of the destroyed Cloud data.

Nor had he returned home, or seen Maria, because whenever he thought of her attitude as the mysterious message arrived on his holoterminal, the more he became afraid.

Why would a musically talented, nympho beauty hang around with a geek scientist like me?

Perhaps his low self-esteem was illusion; but he thought it was more likely realistic. And perhaps Maria’s calculating manner was just part of her personality – but what if she was only with him for a deliberate reason?

The qPad had few of the facilities available to Imperial’s holoterminals, so before looking at the data again, Lucas used low-level reflection and introspection hacks, pulling open the component structures, before running data-projection extracts, retrieving subsets suitable for 2-D rendering. That initial dissection turned out to be fortuitous, for hidden inside the nested object aggregates were worm vectors, lying in wait and ready to go wild.

‘You little bastards,’ Lucas told them.

As he popped up a flat still image containing the three shining dots among the stars, he remembered something from seeing the real time data as it arrived: in a subsidiary panel showing numeric data, two values were in familiar territory: the right ascension close to 6 hours, the declination close to +40°.

A second image, with lower resolution – showing the triplet as a single unresolved dot, but with a greater visible area of sky – confirmed that the gamma ray bursters shone from a little to the left of β Aurigae, at the bottom of the distorted hexagon that was the Auriga constellation.

From the direction of the galactic anti-centre.

‘So it has to be a hoax,’ he said aloud. ‘Has to be.’

While the scared voice inside his head told him it was real.

In the morning he travelled to Heathrow via a roundabout route: Victoria to Hounslow by coach, on to Slough by bus, then a second bus to the airport, paying via the touristToken he had bought for cash. Only at Terminal 7 did he revert to his legal identity, waiting as long as he dared before buying a seat on the next flight to Los Angeles.

She won’t even see me.

Perhaps it was better if he did not try. From all accounts, a copy of her original apparatus – or an early generation among variations – remained in the Caltech laboratory where she had constructed it, guaranteed a safe place due to her financial endowments. If he had to break into someplace, a university would surely be less challenging than some corporate headquarters.

Grandma, I’m scared shitless.

Had she ever been afraid like this?

FIFTY-SIX

EARTH, 1948 AD

Gavriela’s war ended like so many others: in anti-climax, forbidden to discuss her work, without guarantees of the future. Only the continuing support from Rupert on Brian’s behalf – Rupert being rather better off – gave her any feeling of security in the colourless desolation that followed victorious national euphoria. How many years would it be before the ubiquitous urban bomb sites were replaced with new buildings? Ten years? Twenty? Industries were slow to regain a peacetime footing. Among ordinary people, initial talk of the end of rationing faded soon.

But then there was Carl, the miracle of having a son.

Carl started school today, she wrote in her diary. My boy is a schoolboy!

She left no written record of her tears, of the wrench caused by his easy acceptance of the schoolyard, the difficulty of her walking away.

Her own work was not what she had expected, and yet it provided both income and challenge: teaching physics at a 1930s-built redbrick grammar school for boys that was trying to come to terms with its changing identity. The pupils were almost entirely middle class – being so much better prepared for the Eleven Plus, the national IQ test for eleven-year-olds that was supposed to be impartial – but the working-class entrants were more numerous than before, and some of them had been de facto socially elevated during the evacuation years, living among rural foster families. They were often troubled by living once more with parents they had half (or wholly) forgotten; and when it came to fathers, that applied to other boys besides the returned evacuees: changed men coming home to changed wives, if they came back at all.

An older generation of teachers was struggling with this newness. The ones who accepted Gavriela were the minority, but they were enough; and she came to care for the boys as much as for the science that she taught them. So this was survival, therefore victory, if not the life she had dreamed of.

Carl was in bed, and she was reading the new C.P. Snow, The Light and the Dark, when a triplet of knocks sounded from the front door of the flat, peremptory and recognizable.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked the empty room, putting down her book.

When she let Rupert in, he sauntered through to the small sitting-room and sat down on the burgundy two-seater, before crossing his legs and greeting her.

‘I’m really glad to see you again,’ he said. ‘Dear Gavi.’

His Oxonian drawl, to some ears, might have belied the surface meaning; but Gavriela thought, with surprise, that he meant it.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said.

‘No sugar, that’d be splendid.’

She came back with tea and bourbon creams; and they made a start on both before continuing their talk, preamble to whatever it was that Rupert wanted.

‘I’m known as Gabrielle these days,’ she said. ‘Gabby was a little too informal.’

‘One needs a smidgen or more of gravitas among the brats, I suppose. How is the world of teaching?’

‘I don’t need to use the cane more than twenty times a day.’ She looked at him. ‘That was a joke.’

‘My old school’s motto was: So many thrashings, so little time. At least that was how we translated the Latin.’

‘Ours is ad astra.’ She smiled. ‘I point out that the RAF adds per ardua, because if you dream of reaching the stars, you have to put in the work.’

‘Hmm.’

‘So why have you ventured out among the struggling classes, dear Rupert?’

They smiled more or less together, in a harmony that was new.

‘This and that,’ he said. ‘I’ve a couple of photographs to show you, but that’s not why I’m here. May I?’

‘If you like.’

They were in an envelope; he slid them out and handed over the first.

‘Do you recognize the older gentleman?’ he said. ‘Either of them, really.’

‘Sorry. They’re standing like father and son. Or …’

Rupert’s smile was more sad than cold.

‘Or two men with a relationship they dare not speak of? The former, in fact. The older gentleman is Max Planck, which is a name I gather you are bound to know.’

‘Of course.’ She laid a hand on the book she had put down. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Neither Virgil nor Homer wrote much about quantum mechanics,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s a little outside my purview.’

‘And the younger man?’ she said. ‘Is he significant?’

‘To Planck, certainly. It’s his son Erwin, or rather was. The Nazis hanged him in ‘45.’