The Fourth Bear

been joined by Ashley, who was showing her some photographs of hideously crushed vehicles.

“Jack, we’ve traced all the previous owners of Dorian Gray’s car sales—”

“Mary, I hardly think that’s important right now.”

“No, but I really think you should listen—every single one of them has died in a horrific traffic accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said.”

She showed him the pictures. Every car was a crumpled heap of scrap on the road.

“All of these were sold by Gray, and each was totaled shortly after the sale—and there was never any other vehicle involved.”

“What are you saying?”

“I did some research on Dorian Gray,” said Ashley, “and I could only find one person with this name, born in 1878.”

“You told me this already. It can’t be the same person—it would make him one hundred and twenty-six. The Dorian I met was barely thirty.”

“I thought it couldn’t be the same person either,” replied Ashley. “There wasn’t a death certificate. I did some more research and found a photograph from 1911. It’s… well, see for yourself.”

He handed over the picture, and Jack felt the hairs rise on his neck. The reason was clear: The Gray in the picture was the same one who had sold him the car. The smile was the same, even the mole on his left cheek.

“And from 1935,” said Ashley, passing him another, “and here, in 1953.”

They were all of the same man. Jack handed back the pictures and stared at the Allegro suspiciously. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem quite so pristine. The rubber windshield surround looked a bit faded, and there was a small discoloration on the front bumper.

“Every recipient of a Gray-‘guaranteed’ car died in it, you say?”

Ash nodded, and Jack looked between the two of them. If what Ashley was saying was true, this was bad— worse, it was evil.

“Forget face creams and all that ‘laboratoire’ crap you see on the telly,” he said slowly. “There’s only one tried and tested way to stay young, and that’s a pact with the Dark One. Damn. I knew there was a reason he had me sign the buyer’s agreement with red ink.” He shook his head sadly. “He must have been using some kind of suspended automotive decrepitude to channel a few luckless souls to Mephistopheles—and all for a few more years of his own miserable youth. What a louse.”

“It explains the reverse-running odometer,” said Mary.

“Just goes to show that if a deal looks too good to be true, it generally is. Thanks, Ash. I think this car is going to stay right where it is….”

His voice trailed off as he caught sight of someone familiar in the sea of heads.

“Isn’t that Dr. Parks?”

He called Parks over, and the lecturer moved through the crowd that was rapidly forming for no other reason than that there was a crowd forming.

“Hullo, Inspector,” said Parks, panting slightly. “I got here like you asked.”

“I didn’t ask you,” replied Jack with a frown, “but no matter—got something for us?”

“And how!” He looked around curiously at the milling crowd.

“What’s the ruckus?”

“Bartholomew’s holed up in there with a sloth of bears.”

“Ah! Well, check this out,” Parks said excitedly, handing them several photomicrographs from the scanning electron microscope.

“We had to search around, but we finally got there,” he said triumphantly, tapping the image. “How did you know?”

“Call it a hunch. I’d like you to get this on the Conspiracy Theorist Web site as soon as you can; spread it around so everyone knows. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“I see it,” said Mary, still staring at the pictures, “but what does it mean?”

“It means Bisky-Batt lied to us—I thought all that smarmy ‘In what way can I assist you, Officer?’ rubbish was too good to be true.”

There was a loud siren from close by, and an armored car drove up, parked and disgorged a dozen more troops, all heavily armed. It was turning into an all-out siege.

“There’s something else,” said Parks.

“Yes?”

“I was thinking again about the Nullarbor blast, and something stirred in my memory. I had a look through some back issues of Conspiracy Theorist and discovered that there is a theory that might explain the sort of damage we saw at Obscurity and on the Nullarbor. It was first postulated in the 1950s but was so far-fetched that even the hard-core pseudoscience elite dismissed it as nonsense. It was called Cold Ignition Fusion and was a way of building a small thermonuclear device using a deuterium/tritium fuel that could be self-extracting from the heavy hydrogen found in groundwater, and then a mass-induced organic trigger to set it off. It’s on a par with the moon being made of green cheese and the existence of a Mayan temple under Cleethorpes, but the result would be pretty much what we saw at Obscurity and all the others. A small thermonuclear blast in the region of a half to one kiloton.”

“Cold Ignition Fusion?” queried Jack. “Just how impossible is it?”

“In the current climate of scientific thought, it’s in frilly bonkers la-la land, but great minds have been wrong before. In 1933, Ernest Rutherford declared that the vast energies in the atomic nucleus could never be unlocked and that anyone who said otherwise was talking utter moonshine. An undisputed genius, Inspector, yet quite wrong on this occasion. Cold Ignition Fusion is perhaps not impossible but highly, highly improbable—and believe me, my mind is broad.”

“But if it could be done?” asked Mary.

“Hypothetically?” asked Parks.

“Hypothetically.”

“If it could be done,” he said with a smile, “can you imagine the value of such a discovery? Unlimited safe and cheap power from water. Truly, lightning in a bottle.”

“But on the other side of the coin,” said Mary, “bargain-basement nuclear weapons.”

A cold shiver ran down Jack’s spine as events suddenly popped into sharp focus.

“Shit,” he said, “I’ve been an idiot. Quickly: Using Cold Ignition, how much mass would a device have to reach before self-ignition would begin?”

“Almost exactly fifty kilos. The theory is suspect, but quite precise.”

Jack turned to Ashley. “Ash, I just hope your total recall is as good as you say. I need the weight of Cripps’s champion cucumber the last time he reported to Fuchsia.”

“110001 point 1010111.”

“That’s 49.87 kilos—Katzenberg’s?

“110001 point 1100000.”

“Okay, 49.96. What about Prong’s?”

“110001 point 1011001.”

“Still mighty close—49.89.”

“You’re right,” said Ashley. “There is a connection. Fuchsia’s was 110001 point 1001010; there’s barely one percent difference between them all.”

Jack thumped his fist into his palm. “All a few grams under the magic fifty kilos. I’ve been looking at this ass-about-face. People didn’t blow up those cucumbers. Those cucumbers blew up the people. The champions reach fifty kilos, hit critical mass and—boom.”

“What?” exclaimed Parks, who despite being a leading light in the pseudoscience movement was having serious trouble over this. “Come on, doesn’t that seem a bit improbable?”

“Improbable is standard working procedure within the NCD,” replied Jack grimly. “Cripps, Katzenberg, Prong