Combustion (5 page)

Lola’s impressed. ‘Thought of everything.’

They head towards a grassy knoll that overlooks the beach, the moonlight showing the way. Spike gallops ahead.

Corey stops at the spot where that moonlight glistens on the ocean at just the right angle, puts down the hamper and turns to Lola. She smiles and he realises this is it -
this
is the moment. Yes, he knows the night is young and he’s going early but it feels right.

She tilts her head. ‘What?’

‘If you don’t mind, I thought we could —’ He steps closer. ‘ — dance.’

‘Oh, God. Okay. I have to tell you I don’t do much of that. It’s like I’m from that town in
Footloose.’

He grins and takes her left hand in his, places his other hand on her waist and moves her in time to the rolling surf. He can see she’s surprised, but, he’s almost certain, delighted too. Their eyes meet.

Time slows.

She smiles and he takes in her beaming face. He can’t believe it. The moonlight, the beach, the dancing - ha! Maybe his unsophisticated plan isn’t so rudimentary and amateurish after all. He leans down to kiss her. She hesitates for a moment, rises up on her toes to meet him - then turns away.

Time speeds up.

‘I’m-seeing-someone-I’m-so-sorry.’ She blurts it out as one word.

Corey lets her go and steps back, shocked. ‘Oh. I didn’t, I had no — I mean I would never —’

‘I-met-him-just-before-I-met-you.’ That sounds like one word too.

‘Right. Well, that’s a bit embarrassing - for me.’

‘No, no, it’s not. I should have said something earlier.’

Corey is stunned. And sad. And yes, embarrassed. He rarely gets embarrassed but he’s definitely feeling it now. So he doesn’t just stand there like some fool who tried to kiss a girl and somehow screwed it up, he flaps out the blanket to lay it on the grass - then stops, mid-flap, his heart not in it. ‘Can I ask a question?’

~ * ~

Lola really doesn’t want him to. She can’t remember the last time someone asked her a question she didn’t already know the answer to. She likes to be prepared yet has no idea what the Australian is about to say. ‘Sure.’

‘If you have a boyfriend, why are we here?’

She takes a breath, studies the tartan blanket in his hand. It’s easier than looking into his blue eyes. ‘Because you’re a funny, unique guy and I enjoy your company and I hope we can be friends.’

Hope we can be friends.
It sounds so lame. As soon as she says it it’s like the air shifts somehow, even though there isn’t a breath of wind. He doesn’t say a word but he doesn’t have to. His response is all in his expression, the look of disappointment he’s trying to mask with that crooked grin she likes so much. She can see the smile is no longer genuine but forced, and that’s the saddest part of this whole sorry episode.

‘Can I ask one more question?’

She really doesn’t want him to. ‘Of course.’

‘Who’s your boyfriend?’ Then quickly: ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

She hesitates for a moment, then says: ‘Scott Ford.’

‘The Blue Cyclone guy? With the tights?’

She nods.

Corey is visibly surprised. Even if you don’t know who Scott Ford is you still know who Scott Ford is. He is currently
People
magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, has that classic, square-jawed American face, matched with the chiselled physique of a Greek god. He’s also a bona fide international movie star, with over four billion in worldwide grosses, a billion of that from
The Blue Cyclone
alone. He’s charming and debonair and has an easy way with people. He can have his pick of any woman on the planet but he picked Lola. They met at a fundraiser five weeks ago and have seen each other whenever their schedules allow, which has been two dates so far with a third pending. Though it’s not yet bedroom serious, they talk regularly and plan to meet up when he’s back in town tomorrow. Lola hesitated about telling Corey, but the fact is it’s only a matter of time before it hits the media and, well, she didn’t want him to find out that way.

Corey nods slowly. ‘Right, well, I’m really glad for you.’ He forces another grin but she doesn’t have the heart to return it.

~ * ~

In stark contrast to the drive to the beach, which had been fun and full of promise, the trip back is awful and silent and pretty damn depressing.

Scott bloody Ford!
Good God. It’s impossible to compete with a guy like that. Even with Corey’s limited understanding of who was ‘hot or not’ in the entertainment universe, he knew Scott Ford was a big deal. Whatever fame Corey had accidentally stumbled upon through helping save the hijacked shuttle or on his trip around America, they were but minor footnotes compared to that bloke’s career. And, ironically, Corey thought
The Blue Cyclone
movie totally rocked.

Lola turns to him. ‘You okay?’

‘Yep, no wuckers.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s short for “no wucking forries”, which is the reverse of —’

‘Oh. Yeah, got it.’

Corey guides the BMW along the road. That’s the third time she’s tried to start a conversation and it’s the longest response he’s given. He can tell she wants to talk but he doesn’t know what else there is to say. The more he thinks about what happened the more embarrassed he feels. Did he completely misread the signs? Obviously. It doesn’t matter, though. This is the end of it.

She tries once more. ‘Look, I feel like I should explain —’

‘There’s no need.’

‘But I really want —’

‘It’s okay, Lola, really.’

He pulls up beside her McMansion, doesn’t kill the engine, keeps his eyes forward. ‘In spite of everything, I appreciate you telling me, instead of just not returning my calls, or, you know, letting me see it in a magazine or something.’

She takes a breath, meets his eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugs. ‘It is what it is. Nothing to be sorry about.’

‘Well, I am. And I meant what I said. I’d like to be friends.’

He looks at her. ‘When has that ever happened in a situation like this?’

She studies him for an uncomfortable moment, then shakes her head. ‘Never.’ She opens the door, steps out of the vehicle, walks towards the very big house and out of his life.

He watches her go, wills her to stop, turn around, run back to the car, tell him that it’s all been a terrible misunderstanding.

That does not happen.

He slots the car into gear and pulls away from the kerb.

~ * ~

‘Well,
that
blew chunks.’ Corey rubs his face as he pulls the BMW onto Santa Monica Boulevard. He can’t remember the last time he felt this bad. Yes, he’d often been lonely back in the Northern Territory, but this is different, and, in many ways, worse, because he’d caught a glimpse of what life could be like with someone extraordinary - and then it was gone, like smoke on the wind. It feels like he’s lost something precious that will be impossible to replace.

And,
to ice the worst cake
ever,
he asked her who her boyfriend was, thinking he might be able to learn something from the answer, like what kind of guy you had to be to date a woman like her. Well, he learned something all right:
never ask questions like that!
The answer is a guy who is so far out of Corey’s league that they aren’t even playing the same game.

On the bright side, at least he didn’t have to explain Spike to Lola. Funny how the things you worry about are never the things that bite you on the arse.

Spike barks.

‘Well, I apologise if my lack of success with the opposite sex reflects poorly on you.’

Another bark.

‘Taking my shirt off would
not
have made any difference.’

Corey drives on. The memory of the night in ‘97 when the quake hit and he lost his mum floods back. It’s funny, that memory only resurfaces when he feels bad - and then makes him feel worse, which truly sucks. He finds the best way to deal with it is not to. Just bury it as deep as possible and ignore it. Eventually it will go away on its own. Of course, that means it will come back again later, but he’d cross that bridge when it reared up unexpectedly.

He did try to deal with it once. He was in his late teens and his need for answers became so strong that for a while he began reading about fault lines and earthquakes in his spare time, not just the ones in Australia but wherever they occurred across the planet. For a brief moment he’d even considered heading to Sydney University to study seismology and research earthquakes, but the call to fly was too strong and he didn’t think he could sit in a classroom for years on end, no matter how interesting the subject.

Corey pulls up at a red light. It’s an intersection. As he said to Lola earlier he’s not great at understanding subtext, but he can’t help but think he’s reached a crossroads in his life too.

Spike barks.

It’s actually a good question and takes his mind off the horrendous feeling-sorry-for-himself-fest he’s been indulging in for the last couple of minutes. What do they do now? He’s in no hurry to return to Central Australia. He loves his home but he wants to experience a world outside the desert. So where to next? He can stay in Los Angeles, try to find some work. He likes the vibrancy of the city, that there’s always something going on, but the Florida Keys are also tempting.

He’d visited them at the beginning of the tour around America, travelled the two-hundred-kilometre-long Overseas Highway, the one they blew up in
True Lies,
one of his favourite movies, and even though he’d only spent a week there, the place captured his heart more than any other spot during the journey. He’s pretty sure that’s because of the ocean: every time he looked at the Florida Strait it was a different shade of blue. There’s just something about the sea that, after living a desert life for so long, makes his heart sing. When the movie deal is finalised he’ll have the dough to move down there and, as Cape Canaveral is close, it’ll be easy to catch up with Judd and Rhonda when they’re in Florida.

The dog barks.

Corey glances at the animal and grins. ‘Yep, I’m thinking Florida, too.’

~ * ~

4

Alvy Blash is almost certain this is the day he will change the world.

Almost.

The next five minutes will tell him for sure.

He moves to the metre-wide fan positioned in front of the curvy, high-waisted Hyundai iX35 and flicks the power switch. The fan spins up and the large room, with cement walls, floor and ceiling, reverberates with the deep, flat chop of rotating blades. The torrent of air slams into the front of the car with such force it rattles the windscreen wipers.

Alvy points at Jacob, who sits behind the Hyundai’s steering wheel. Jacob pushes the start button on the dash and the engine cranks to life. He slides out of the vehicle and exits the room through the only door, which sits directly beside a long, thin horizontal window that’s double-glazed with shatterproof glass and built into the wall at eye level.

In front of the vehicle the woolly-haired Alvy holds a small, metal spray can in his left hand and turns to Bunsen, who stands behind the shatterproof glass. Bunsen nods then Alvy takes a deep breath and presses the button on top of the can. Once. It emits a fine puff of clear mist that is whisked by the airstream straight into the Hyundai’s front grille.

That clear mist is why they are here. Alvy almost called it
Hedorah,
after the fictional Japanese smog monster, but went with the Swarm instead because it better describes what it actually is: a very large group of very tiny particles working in perfect unison to complete a very sophisticated task. Granted, calling it the Swarm isn’t as exciting as naming it after one of Godzilla’s nemeses, but it feels right for an invention at the forefront of molecular nanotechnology.

Bunsen triggers a digital Seiko stopwatch as Alvy exits the room, closes the metal door behind him and moves to the window where they all study the Hyundai, its engine ticking over at just over a thousand revolutions per minute.

Alvy’s heart races. He’s never felt this nervous. He’s been fiddling with the Swarm’s formula for the last week, working on the molecular assembler, tinkering with the messenger RNA and tweaking the sequences of amino acids that construct the protein molecules. He’d really wanted to spend another day on it - he always wants to spend ‘another day’ on everything he works on - but gave in to Bunsen’s demand that they perform a live test to see where they stood.

‘Come-on-come-on-come-on,’ Alvy says it through an exhaled breath and glances at the stopwatch. The numbers blink and change, ten, eleven, twelve seconds. He’s spent the last thirty-four months, every day and night since Bunsen recruited him, creating and fine-tuning the Swarm, and now he’s about to find out if all of that time, effort and money were worthwhile.

He’s suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of dread. Did he miss a step? Is the self-replication sequence correct? He thinks so, but you never know until you run a real-world test. He’s actually glad Bunsen pushed him to do this. If it were up to him he would have put it off, then put it off again. It helps to have someone cracking the whip, not that the twenty-nine-year-old needs much motivation. He has embraced Bunsen’s worldview wholeheartedly, has not only drunk the Kool-Aid but come back for more until the jug was empty, then mixed up his own batch.