Free Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre Page B

making dumb jokes about it instead. Jesus. It hurt. It hurt so much. Maria knew there were some at CalORI who hadn’t accepted it yet, who were holding out for a happy ending. Dreaming up crazy scenarios, torturing themselves with a desperate hope that had no greater foundation than the fact that no bodies had been found. She appreciated the tempting succour it offered, but appreciated also that that way madness lay. Like signing up to join the mothers of the disappeared. Sandra Biscane’s death last year had forced her to understand that terrible things do happen, that your worst fears do get realised, and the big question marks still hanging over that dreadful episode had made her that bit more ready to accept further tragedy. But she wasn’t going to let her imagination run paranoid until all the facts were out in the open, any more than she was going to torment herself chasing the mirages of merest possibility.
    Whatever had happened to them, it happened three hundred miles out in the world’s biggest ocean. There would be no bodies. Only an endless absence. No more Mitch, no more Cody, no more Coop, no more Taylor. No more all‐
night work‐
ins with longnecks and pizza. No more lunch‐
time two‐
on‐
two in the parking lot. No more discussions, no more arguments, no more falling‐
outs, no more making ups. No more dumb jokes. Ironically, there had been a sense of impending doom in the air for a while before it happened, although this was hardly the outcome everyone had been afraid of. Nonetheless, there had been a pervasive feeling of time running out. That wasn’t hindsight putting a spin on it, and it wasn’t some stupid 1999 thing either. There had been a precariousness about the St John business from day one, and it had intensified in recent weeks. Maria hadn’t been involved in the project herself, being four months into her own team’s current study when it began, but it was Calori’s biggest undertaking in years, so it had infected the mood of the whole place. Time running out. Or, more accurately, money running out. They were all just waiting for the financial plug to be pulled on the whole deal, and every day it didn’t happen was a bonus. Backing for ocean geological research tended to come from three main sources: oil companies, oil companies, and occasionally, if you were real lucky, oil companies. Coop and Cody had found stuff twelve layers down in sediment cores that dated more recently than the last known government cash, and with a vision as wide as Cingrich’s (about two molecules; three tops) looking out from the public purse, that was unlikely to change. The government wouldn’t spend two bits on any kind of research that didn’t have a projected military or industrial application. It was as though they had decided we already know all the avenues the human race might ever need to go down; no time for the frivolities of the road less travelled‐
by. Jesus, girl, you might discover somethin’ we can’t monopolise, process, package and sell. And if we can’t blow folks up with it, what in the hell are we s’posed to do with it? As Mitch had put it, the money men don’t window‐
shop. They know what they’re in the research market to buy. They go to the petroleum geologists to buy ‘where’s the oil’.
    Seismologists like him and Maria they approach looking for ‘how can we stop this’ or ‘give us some notice’. Which was why he had spent so much time in Honolulu with the tsunami early‐
warning project. The sort of ‘pure research’ exploration the Gazes Also was undertaking and with those kind of resources – lay in the realms of what they called DBS. It was a cynical in‐
joke that had two definitions but one meaning: forget it. Dream Benefactor Scenario. Don’t Be Stupid. Except that it had happened. It happened to CalORI, right out of the proverbial blue. Admittedly, Luther St John was nobody’s dream anything, except maybe cell‐
mate for Hannibal Lecter,