Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Read Free Page A

have much of an office left if you carry on like this.”
    “Hm? Yes, yes. Absolutely right. It’s just that there’s a larger cycle here, I’m sure of it. Something about the numbers is off. The rhythm is wrong.”
    “The rhythm.”
    “Yes, yes, the rhythm.” He tapped with his fingers on the floor. “The rhythm is wrong. The numbers are wrong.”
    “They can’t be wrong. There must be something wrong with the collider. It’s an engineering problem.”
    “But if it’s not, then the numbers are changing. But the numbers can’t be changing. So that must mean that we’re changing.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
    “Not yet. Not yet.”
    “Look, you’ve been thinking about this too much. How long have you been working on it?”
    “I don’t know. Last night. The night before. It’s almost there.”
    “Why don’t you take a rest? A day off.”
    “It won’t help. Everything is changing. We’re moving out of the human section now.”
    “What?”
    “We’re leaving the world behind. That’s what it is. Everything is going to change. Everything.”
    “Professor?”
    He said nothing, lost in thought, fingers thrum-thrum-thrumming on the carpeted floor.
    “I’ll go and get someone.” She stood, backed away. Glay made no move to follow her, sat there staring at his scarlet threads, looking lost in the corner of his web, connected to the walls of the office by lines of gossamer. Spider or fly? she thought.
    “It won’t help,” he said.
    “What won’t help?”
    “We’re moving away. The planets are spinning and the stars are moving and we’re moving too, farther and farther away from what we were. The Earth moves around the sun, and the sun moves around the centre of the galaxy, and the galaxy moves within the centre of the universe, wheels within wheels within wheels, all moving and changing and altering as we’re altering. And it’s the universal constants, Rebecca. They’re changing.”
    She was at the door. “I’m going to the medical centre. I’ll be back in a bit.”
    He didn’t move. Sat there. Looking down at the carpet, the drawing pins pinning the red string to the floor. He muttered something.
    “What was that?” she said.
    Glay looked up at her. Rebecca had never seen his eyes so sad. “Everything will be different now.”
    She walked quickly to fetch the doctor, but Glay was gone when she returned.

    ♦

    The day was warm. They sat on an old blue blanket and ate tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches on the grassy area outside the red brick walls of the admin building.
    “D’you think they’ll lock him up?” asked Paul.
    “Until he gets better,” Rebecca said. “I mean, he was rambling about the universal constants changing.”
    “Pretend I’m management.”
    She laughed at that. “Universal constants. Things that are the same everywhere. If they were to change, the world would work differently. Like... Like the strong nuclear force. That’s the force that holds all of the protons and neutrons in the middle of an atom together. If it’s a bit higher, the stars burn out too fast. The elements fuse together too quickly, all the way to cold iron, and they never last long enough for us to evolve. A bit lower, and the stars never light in the first place. A dead universe, filled with nothing but hydrogen.”
    “Hold on. So you’re saying the universe was explicitly created for people then?”
    “Sort of. But you’re looking at it the wrong way,” she said. “It’s more that people were created by the universe. If the universal constants had different numbers, maybe nothing would’ve happened. Maybe nothing could evolve at all. But if nothing evolved in a universe, there’d be no one to look up at the stars and say: Wow. What a coincidence that the universe happens to be just right for people to live in.”
    “But if the numbers are changing, doesn’t that mean we’re all going to die?”
    “We’re all going to die. That, and pay taxes.