‘Ralph takes a longer look at the display panel, the number on it, and his anger is mingled now with a confusion énorme. Because whichever way he tries to explain it, the explanation is the same, and it has preoccupied him ever since.

‘The number gives the count of the radioactive decay, but what the count suggests is impossible, it doesn’t make sense. It does not make sense. “Unless,” Ralph tells me, “the oaf has revised the laws of physics.”’

‘I have only Ralph’s word,’ said Gilles austerely, ‘but I trust him. If it is true what I suspect Ralph is beginning to think, then it would at once render obsolete a number of things in this room – that lamp, that fire, that radiator … and not only in this room.

‘Speaking commercially – my native tongue, you told me once,’ he was counting again on his fingers, ‘it could be worth more than Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple put together and multiplied by at least a million.’

Gilles had spent the past days urgently trying to get hold of Marvar. First, to ascertain if the story of his experiment was true; second, if it was, to offer him a proposal concerning the development of his invention. But despite all his efforts, Gilles had not managed to find him.

‘What is Marvar supposed to have invented?’

Gilles’s laugh floated back. ‘Ah, Jean, ever the curious innocent. The most dangerous challenge to the ambitious businessman is an honest man. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to you. It seems to exist at this moment only in the form of information. But information, from what I understand – pour faire une histoire courte – which could allow its owner to repeat the experiment again and again, and make them rich and powerful. No, no, let me rephrase that. The richest and most powerful person you can imagine.’

‘How so?’

Gilles contemplated him judicially. ‘I tell you this not because it interests you, which I know it doesn’t, but because it’s easy to find out.’