Now looking around the room, it was anything but dull. As she stood in front of Sam, he saw that she was torn between wanting to give a full report whilst also wanting to get back to the problem at hand.
‘Sir, the gate pulsed and went dead ten minutes ago. There was a delay of sixty-five seconds and then it just switched back on. So far, none of the read-outs report that anything happened. If we hadn't seen it with our own eyes, we wouldn't have known that anything had happened.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘Sir, I have no idea. I’m running diagnostics on the hardware and the software, and I'm going to have all personnel screened in case of a mass hallucinogenic incident.’
Sam paused. The people in this room were the best in their field. It hadn't even occurred to him to test the staff.
‘How many teams do we have on Beta right now?’ This was the first concern. Without knowing if the system was safe, he didn't want them stepping back through. Nor did he want to send anyone to warn them.
‘Four teams right now. Diana and Johannes are due today, Piers and Qiang are due next week. We have a live event ending tomorrow, and there are four in that team.’
Sam didn't need the technician to name them, as he always knew who was on a live event.
‘Is the Step safe? Can we find out before Di and Jo return?’
‘Ma'am, Sir!’ a technician shouted out. ‘The portal map!’ All eyes turned to the screen, where masses of thin yellow lines were fracturing out from multiple radial points.
‘Yellow?! But that's temporal anomalies.’
‘Record this. Use a physical camera! Don't trust the system.’
Everyone grabbed phones and eyepieces, and some went as far as to grab pen and paper. No one had ever said Don't Trust the System before. As they watched and sketched, the yellow lines began to fracture further and faster until it looked as if the entire screen was a solid wall of yellow. Then in a flash of light all the yellow lines disappeared and the map returned to normal.
‘What the fuck! Farnaz?’
Farnaz was shouting to engineers and typing madly on a keyboard whilst looking at a holo display in front of her.
‘That did not just happen.’
‘What?’
‘What we saw, the system has no trace of it, and is also reporting no anomalies, neither spatial nor temporal. According to the system nothing just happened.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Sam, I cannot vouch for the safety of the Q Step. I recommend that no one from this side steps through until we’ve done a full evaluation.’
‘Cat’s teeth, Farnaz, what about those on the other side?’
‘Sir, all we can do is wait.’
‘Can we close it?’
‘Sir?’
‘Can we close it and stop them from stepping through?’
‘Potentially yes, but what if we can't open it up again? Or what if closing it breaks the current link?’
‘And what if them stepping through splices them into a thousand quantum states?’
‘Sam, it's not my call. If we close it, I think we almost certainly will lose them. If we leave it open, I don't know. Had I just walked in here I would say that the system is working perfectly.’
Sam glared. ‘Right. I'm going to see the chancellor. Tell me if anything else happens, and I want fifteen minute updates.’
The chancellor was enjoying a glass of port. This morning's tasks had been successful and he felt he deserved a reward. The living was easy and life was good.
‘We have a problem,’ announced Samuel Nymens as he burst into the office, no knocking, no deference due to the chancellor’s ranks, not even a decent salutation.
Nymens was one of those troublemakers who just never knew when to do as he was told. Heading up the Step division made him act as though he was Pharaoh. He wasn't even Egyptian, and there were rumours he wasn't even a fully qualified archivist, having come through the German School of Curators who were known to have a lax system of nomenclature.
‘Is it so serious that you have forgotten how to knock? A simple act that separates the uncivilised man from the mannered gentleman. Was it not Selassie that said —’
‘The Q Step is broken,’
Soliman choked on his drink. ‘What do you mean? It can't be broken, I was down there myself not an hour ago and everything was fine.’
‘Well, it’s not now. And why were you down there? I wasn't informed?’
‘This is my mouseion, Nymens, I can go where I want. Now I repeat, what do you mean, broken? Is it a simple misalignment of the vortices or the stars?’
Sam interrupted him. Soliman knew bugger all about quantum mechanics and could often be heard waxing lyrical about its poetic qualities. It was enough to make a grown man drink port.
‘I mean broken, as in flashing lights then no lights then weird noises then silence.’
‘My God. Has anyone been injured? Has flesh been torn asunder from the frail bones of a naïve operative?’
‘No one has been hurt. You're not going to be fired or sued. Yet. We still have three teams totalling eight people out in the field. We don't know whether to send a volunteer or wait to see if they step back safely.’
‘I thought you said it was broken.’
‘It was. Now it seems to be fine.’
‘Great Ra, man, which is it? Is it broken or working?’
‘That's just it, we don't know until we test it with a live subject. Which will be me by the way. I just thought we should let you know what was happening.’
‘For God's sake man you're
