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HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2014
Copyright © James Smythe 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs: © iStockphoto (astronaut). Shutterstock.com (background)
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007456789
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007456802
Version: 2014-12-10
Praise for The Anomaly Quartet:
‘Utterly gripping and highly original … explodes off the page’
Daily Mail
‘The Explorer has the dreamlike detachment of an Ishiguro novel … reminiscent of a 1970s space movie, where the darkness of the void mirrors the darkness of the human soul’
Financial Times
‘Beautifully written, creepy as hell. The Explorer is as clever in its unravelling as it is breathlessly claustrophobic’
Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
‘A wonderful examination of coping with loss, time and death’
SFX
Contents
Copyright
Praise
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Three
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Here’s an exclusive extract from No Harm Can Come to A Good Man
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher
The scientist is not the person who gives the right answers; he’s the one who asks the right questions.
– Claude Lévi-Strauss
The sense of pressure on us is immense. There is a feeling that if this fails – and if it were to fail it would be because of me and Tomas, and we are both far too acutely aware of that – but that if this fails, we might not try something like this again. I have seen the receipts for this project of ours. Tomas has signed off on them on my behalf, and we have decided that this is an endeavour that we should undertake. The weight of this endeavour falls onto our shoulders: his and mine. We are separated by only thirty minutes, and soon to be hundreds of thousands of miles. It feels like more already: because he is down there, in the comparative safety of his little bunker, dressed in his shirt and drinking his drink and smoking his cigarettes; and I am here, waiting to leave. I still find it hard to believe that I am the one going. We decided it, as with so many things in our life, on a game. The top bunk of our beds? The front seat of our mother’s car? Always on a game, because somehow that made it fair. If he won, he went to space; if I did, I was the lucky one. Maybe part of the reason that we both wanted it so much is only because the other one did.
But here I am. I am the one up here, and I will be the one going out there into the dark. Tomas has safety:
