“Sorry I was so long,” he panted, slamming the bottle of Veuve Clicquot down on the reception desk. “I, um…”
“You’ve been seven minutes,” Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz replied, with a smile. “Not bad, considering.”
“What? Oh, I see what you—” Memo from his brain; stop talking, before you embarrass yourself. “One bottle of champagne,” he said. “Will there be anything else?”
She stood up. “No, that’s fine. Thank you very much. I expect it’ll be lovely and fizzy, after all that being shaken about.” Looking past her, he saw that a couple of the desk drawers, the ones that stuck a bit, weren’t properly closed, as they’d been when he left them. “Well,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Thanks for looking after the desk,” he remembered to say. “Were there any messages?”
“Two,” she replied. “I’ve left notes,” she added, nodding towards two yellow stickies on the desktop. “Enjoy the rest of your shift. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?”
He gave her back a thoughtful scowl as she walked away. Time flies, yes. Fun, no. That and the rummaged-in desk drawers, and the fact that she’d been Pieter’s wife – obviously she knew something; equally obviously, it wasn’t something to be admitted to or talked about openly, or else why all the sneaking about and room searching?
He sat back in the chair and thought about it all. Clearly she knew about YouSpace; so, in all probability, did Call-me-Bill and Matasuntha. It wasn’t an unreasonable exercise in conclusion gymnastics to assume that they wanted the bottle. Fine, Theo thought. It’s terrifying and potentially lethal, so why not let them have it?
If he’d been having this conversation with himself eight minutes ago, there’d have been no argument. Give them the stupid bottle. But things had changed since then. Sudden, unexpected and potentially troublesome as a Klingon battle cruiser at a garden party, echoes of Max were back in his life. Yippee.
Because of which, he really couldn’t let go of the bottle just yet, not if there was any possibility, however remote, of finding out what had become of Max, not to mention what connection, if any, he’d had with Pieter van Goyen. Of course, the likeliest explanation was that it was all a con; a captivating little Easter egg snuggled into the program by Pieter to snag his attention and nestle there, the sweet-corn husk of doubt wedged between the teeth of curiosity. Ninety-nine per cent sure that that must be the true explanation; because he had no reason whatsoever to believe that Pieter and Max had known each other, or that Max could do any form of mathematics not immediately relevant to losing money in a poker game. Take ninety-nine from a hundred, however, and you’re still left with one; just enough to persuade him to hang on to the bottle a little longer, and go back.
He glanced down at the yellow stickies, just in case. Flowers4U were terribly sorry, not a single chrysanthemum to be had this side of Nijmegen before Friday, so they were sending fifteen dozen white lilies instead, hope that’s OK. Oh, and Janine had called, didn’t leave a number, will call back.
Janine, he thought. That’s funny. I had a sister called Janine.
Janine. He shuddered so violently he nearly fell off his chair. Needless to say it could perfectly well be a totally different Janine, just as the skinny Max in the horrible YouSpace bar could be a totally different Max. He grabbed the yellow sticky, glared at it, turned it over and scrutinised the back. No, he hadn’t missed anything. Janine; neither a common nor an uncommon name; possibly, just possibly, his sister.
He thought about her. Blood is thicker than water; it’s also sticky, messy and frequently a sign that things aren’t going too well. Half reluctantly, he allowed his memory to present a medley of Janine’s most characteristic moments. Janine aged nine, using his computer and her father’s credit card to try and hire a professional assassin to kill her gym teacher; Janine aged fourteen, sad and angry because her boyfriend hadn’t found a gift of one of her teeth, drilled and hung on a silver chain, a specially romantic Valentine gesture; Janine going through her political phase at age seventeen, again using Dad’s card to buy ex-Soviet surface-to-air missiles to arm the Cockroaches Protection League; Janine, politely refused entry to her senior prom because of the axe imperfectly concealed in her corsage; Janine in her freak-religions era, in her full regalia as a priestess of Kali Ma; Janine, any age between nineteen and twenty-eight, in a plain white smock without pockets, swearing blind that this time she’d stay in the clinic and really get herself straightened out. Well, he thought. I do love my sister, really and truly; just not enough to want to be on the same planet as her, if it could be conveniently avoided.
And, if he wasn’t mistaken, she felt the same way about him; hence the injunction, the terms of which were such that if she’d left a number and he’d returned her call, he’d have been liable to spend the next ten years in jail. What, he couldn’t help wondering, might have induced her to change her mind? Not running out of money, because she knew he hadn’t got any. Besides, even when her brain was so monstrously infused with chemicals as to render her technically no longer human, she’d always been ferociously shrewd with her investments, so the chances of Janine having gone bust were Paris-Fashion-Week slender. But, if it wasn’t money, what the hell could it possibly be? And how could she possibly have found him?
Answer: it’s not Janine, just someone with the same name. Even so; just his rotten luck to be away from the desk when the call came through.
Max and Janine too; all the little vampire bats coming home to roost. Or (ninety-nine per cent probability) not. He made a conscious decision not to think about it, and accordingly spent the rest of his shift thinking about nothing else.
Janine didn’t ring the next day, or the day after that. He’d have known if she had, because he was on the desk from 7 a.m. to midnight both days –
“I’m really sorry,” Call-me-Bill had said, “but we’re short-handed right now, so we’re all having to pull double shifts until it’s all sorted out. You do understand, I’m sure.” By the end of the second day, he was pretty sure he did understand, and it was nothing to do with staffing levels, which were exactly the same as before – Call-me-Bill, Matasuntha and himself looking after two guests who put in an appearance roughly once every twelve hours; apart from that, he might as well have been on the Moon. The explanation, he was more or less certain, had to do with Call-me-Bill and Matasuntha wanting him pinned down at the desk while they searched for Pieter’s bottle.
Actually, he didn’t mind terribly much. He was right next to the phone, so he’d be there when Janine rang, and while he was on Reception he couldn’t sneak away into YouSpace, and when he got off shift all he wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep. It was good, he tried in vain not to admit to himself, to have an excuse for not going there and following up the clue about Max. For one thing, it was fairly obvious it had to be a trap of one sort; it couldn’t be more obvious if there were signs all over the stairs down to the wine cellar reading This Way To The Trap and Trap 50 metres. That wasn’t enough to stop him following up the clue, but it did make him feel a bit of a fool. True, it was very boring sitting behind the desk all day with nothing to do, and he’d never really learned how to cope with boredom, which made him feel like he was being nibbled to death by tiny invisible ants eating his brain, a millionth of a gramme at a time. Given the choice between boredom and the only trap on Earth obvious enough to be visible from orbit, however, boredom wasn’t so bad. And it gave him time to think the same agonising thoughts about his siblings, over and over and over again, which he wouldn’t have had an opportunity to do if he’d been busy.
On the third day, Matasuntha brought him a sandwich around noon. She looked tired and irritable and she was covered in dust. “Eat,” she grunted, and slammed the plate down on the desk.
“Thanks,” he replied. “Keeping busy?”
For a moment he thought she was going to hit him. Then she climbed into a smile. “Cleaning the wine cellar,” she said. “It’s filthy down there.”
The wine cellar. Where else? “That’s a big job. It’s huge.”
“Yes.” The smile held, like a pressurised cabin at fifty thousand feet. “You’ve been down there, then?”
“Couple of times.”
“Well, you’ll know how dirty it is.”
“Quite. But at least you can always find what you’re looking for.” He smiled back at her. “Thanks to the inventory on the computer, I mean.”
“That needs updating,” she said. “My next job.”
“Ah.”
“You should count yourself lucky,” she went on, gazing into his eyes like a cat at a mouse hole. “Sitting up here behind this nice clean desk while I’m down there, rummaging about among all those dusty old bottles.”
He tried to do a nonchalant shrug. It came out as the sort of gesture you’d expect from a giant centipede trying to pass itself off as human. “Swap jobs if you like,” he said. “You do the desk, I’ll muck out the cellar.”
“Sweet of you, but we’d better stick to the rota. Otherwise Bill won’t like it.”
When she’d gone, he realised he was sweating. Not, he was reasonably confident, that there was any immediate cause for concern. Thousands, tens of thousands of bottles; it’d take her weeks to pull each one out and look at the label. Time, though, was definitely on her side. Call-me-Bill could strand him here on the desk for weeks, months even, while Matasuntha fumbled about among the grime and the cobwebs. The sensible thing, therefore, would be to retrieve the bottle and find another hiding place; but he wasn’t sure that’d be wise. He wouldn’t put it past them to be staking the cellar out during his off hours, expecting him to do just that. What he really ought to do, he told himself gloomily, was go back into YouSpace, find out about Max, and then give them the stupid bottle and put them out of their misery. It’d be the humane thing to do (it’d be unfortunate if Matasuntha caught something nasty down there in all the dirt and grime, and her quest was clearly having a bad effect on her temper) and it’d mean he could stop worrying and get on with his life. As for the whole trap thing, he wasn’t so sure about that any more. Not a trap as such; more likely some gag or practical joke Pieter had set up for him, under the bizarre impression that YouSpace was fun. A door with a bucketful of soot balanced on top of it, or something equally sophisticated. Get it over with, he told himself.
At a quarter to midnight, when the end was in sight and he could hear the mattress on his bed calling to him like a phantom lover, Mr Nordstrom came in. He was wearing full evening dress, the effect of which was spoilt rather by the torn trouser knees and the missing left sleeve. His hair, however, was neatly combed, and he appeared to be perfectly sober.
“Brandy,” he said. “Remy Martin, quick as you like.”
“I’m sorry,” Theo started to say, “I’m not supposed to leave the—”
“I’ll look after the goddamn desk,” Mr Nordstrom growled. “Brandy. Now.”
The toes of his shoes were scuffed, and could that possibly be a tooth embedded in the welt between sole and upper? “That’ll be fine,” Theo said. “Won’t be a tick.”
He scampered down the stairs, his mind racing. They’d assume he was on the desk, so they wouldn’t be watching, but they must’ve given up searching and gone to bed by now, because even junior hotel staff don’t have that sort of stamina. The perfect opportunity, therefore, to grab the bottle –
“What are you doing down here?” Matasuntha snapped at him as he walked though the door. “You’re supposed to be on Reception.”
She’d climbed up to the very top row of the tallest rack, apparently without a ladder, and was hanging by one hand and a very precarious foothold. In her other hand was a dusty bottle. “Mr Nordstrom sent me down for a bottle of brandy,” he said. “Are you all right up there?”
“I’m fine.”
“It doesn’t look terribly safe.”
“I’m fine,” she practically shrieked. “Leave me alone.” She was taking enormous pains not to look down, and he couldn’t say he blamed her.
“Right, fine. Oh, the Remy Martin. Any idea?”
“Row C, stack 4, shelf 17.”
Two coincidences. It was the next row along from where Matasuntha was perched, and it happened to be where he’d hidden his bottle. If he’d come along ten minutes later, chances were she’d have found it. A single fat drop of sweat trickled down his forehead and hung in his eyebrow, just inside his field of view.
“Thanks,” he said. “Well, I’ll let you get on.”
He found the brandy easily enough, and, at the end of the row, Pieter’s bottle, which he slipped into his pocket. Then he rolled a couple of bottles along half an inch or so to close up the gap. He looked up, and saw Matasuntha’s three-inch heel pecking wildly at a shelf as she struggled to climb down. “Are you sure you’re—?”
“Go away.”
Fine. He got out of there quickly and sprinted halfway up the stairs. Then he stopped.
No time at all, in this universe. Well, why not? Then he could turn round, nip back, leave the bottle lying around somewhere obvious, where she couldn’t help finding it, and that’d be the end of all that. And what a relief that would be –
Yes. It would. Really.
He put the brandy down carefully, then fished about in his pocket for the manila envelope. A moment later –
“I said,” said the man in the hat, “you calling me a liar?”
It was a big hat; black, with a broad brim, casting a shadow over the man’s face. In doing so it performed a public service. Thanks to the hat, all Theo could definitely make out was the man’s piercingly bright eyes. That was more than enough to be going on with.
“Um,” he said.
As well as the hat, the man was wearing an old-fashioned black suit and a bootlace tie. Oh yes, and a gun belt, in which sat an ivory-handled revolver, over which the man’s gloved hand hovered like a mushroom cloud over a Pacific atoll.
“Say again?”
“Um,” Theo repeated. “I mean, no. Definitely not.”
The hat quivered slightly. “You saying you didn’t call me a liar, son?”
“Absolutely not.” Theo couldn’t quite bring himself to break eye contact, even though he was curious to find out what the heavy weight hanging from his own belt might be. That said, he had a pretty shrewd idea. “Wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing.”
The man under the hat was thinking. “So,” he said, “you’re saying that when I said you called me a liar, I was lying.”
“Yes. I mean—”
“So you’re calling me a liar.”
“Um.”
“Them’s fighting words, stranger.”
“What, um?”
The man under the hat frowned. “Yup.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Oh.”
“And in these parts—”
“What I really meant,” Theo heard himself gabble, “was that when you said I called you a liar, you were quite justifiably mistaken, because I expressed myself so badly, for which I apologise. Really and truly. Really.”
The man frowned, as though he’d taken a wrong turning several blocks ago and was trying to figure out where he was. “So,” he said, “you’re saying you didn’t call me a liar.”
“That’s right, yes.”
“You’re lying.”
Oh for crying out loud. “Well, yes, quite possibly. In fact—”
“I’m calling you a liar.”
An old man who’d dived under a table a moment ago reached out a hand and retrieved his hat. A cat wandered across the floor, stood next to the man under the hat, looked up at him, arched its back, rubbed its head against his left boot, curled up and went to sleep. “Yes,” Theo said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes you’re calling me a liar, and yes I am one.”
The man nodded. “We got our own way of dealing with liars in these parts, stranger,” he said, with a degree of satisfaction mixed with relief. “We give ’em a wooden overcoat and a one-way ticket to Boot Hill.”
“You don’t say.”
The man grinned. “Did you,” he said with great pleasure, “just call me a liar?”
Sod it, Theo thought, and without really knowing what he was doing, he reached for his gun. The next millionth of a second was a blur; then there was a very loud noise, something bashed against the web of his thumb, making him whimper, and the hat wearer’s gun flew out of his hand and sailed across the room.
There was a deadly silence, during which the cat got up and slowly walked away with its tail in the air. The man under the hat was staring at him in abject terror.
“Sorry,” Theo said. “Butterfingers.”
Very slowly, the man raised his hands and backed away. Theo looked round nervously, but instead of the traditional henchman with shotgun taking aim at the small of his back, all he saw was a bemused-looking man at a table near the window, staring dolefully at the ivory-handled butt of a revolver sticking up out of his bowl of chilli beans. Theo waited until his erstwhile opponent had retreated through the swing doors, then walked slowly and rather unsteadily to the bar.
“Whisky?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “And a doughnut.”
“Coming right up.”
He realised that he was still holding the gun he’d apparently disarmed the hat wearer with. He put it back in the holster. He had to have three goes at it.
The bartender was back with a half-tumblerful of whisky and an elderly-looking doughnut. Theo scrabbled in his pockets, which were empty.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”
“On the house,” the bartender said. “That was some mighty fine shooting, stranger.”
“Was it? Oh, good.” He lifted the glass, considered knocking it back in one, decided against it and nibbled at the meniscus like a tiny wee mouse. There was a brief moment of extreme disorientation, which he guessed was a bit like being sneezed on by a dragon. He put the glass down very carefully.
“Ain’t many folks in these parts as’d stand up to Big Red,” the bartender went on. “Leastways, not living. You’re a mighty cool hand, mister, and that’s no lie.”
Oh please don’t start all that again, Theo thought. “Awfully nice of you to say so,” he muttered. “Look, I was wondering. Is there anybody in this town by the name of Max?”
“Max?”
“Yes. Short for—”
“Let me see, now,” the bartender said. “There’s Big Max, Little Max, Cheyenne Max, Little Big Max, Banjo Billy Max, Max the Knife and Max Factor. Would the guy you’re after be one of them?”
“Um,” Theo replied. “OK, how about a short, round man with a bald head?”
The bartender scratched his chin. “Might you be meaning Doc Pete?”
“Mphm.”
“Hangs around with Nondescript Max at the Silver Dollar next to the livery,” the bartender said. “I don’t let ’em in here, see. They cause trouble.”
There was a soft clunk, which Theo identified as the chilli eater by the window fishing the gun out of his dinner and placing it on the table. Trouble, he muttered to himself, as opposed to the peaceful equilibrium of the average uneventful day. “I can see why you wouldn’t want any of that,” he said. “Um, what kind of trouble?”
The bartender looked both ways, then bent forward and lowered his voice. “Weird stuff,” he hissed. “Crazy stuff.”
“Ah.”
“It was getting so honest decent folk was scared to come in here.” The bartender shook his head sadly. “So I told them, get out and stay out, and you can get your doughnuts someplace else.”
Theo nodded slowly. “The Silver Dollar.”
“Mphm. That woman as runs it, she just don’t give a damn.”
The customer by the window had finished his chilli, and put the plate on the floor for the cat to lick out. “Near the livery stable, you said.”
“Turn left out of here, seventy-five yards on your right, you can’t miss it.”
The bar of the Silver Dollar was practically deserted. The only customer was a tall man, leaning up against the counter. His face wasn’t familiar, but his hat was. He turned to stare as Theo walked in, recoiled in terror, looked around wildly for somewhere to run, lunged sideways, slipped in a pool of spilt beer, skidded five yards, crashed into a wall and slowly crumpled into a heap. The woman behind the bar gave Theo a startled look, then beamed at him. “Drinks on the house, stranger,” she said. “Anyone who can throw a scare like that into Big Red—”
“Could I possibly have a glass of water, please?” Theo said.
“Water.” She said it the way a professor of geography might say “Atlantis”. “Sure. You want whisky in that?”
“Not really, no.”
She turned and examined a row of bottles lined up on a shelf behind the bar, eventually picking one out. It was dusty and draped in cobwebs, and a peeling handwritten label read WATR. She poured two fingers into a glass and slid it along the bar. Theo took a sip. It tasted of watered-down whisky.
“I’m looking,” he said, “for someone called Max.”
“Right. Would that be Crazy Max, Spanish Max, Big Little Max, Max the Axe—?”
“Nondescript Max.”
“Oh, him.” She frowned. “You just missed him. He was in here earlier with that other one.”
“Short fat bald—”
“I threw them out.” She peered at him closely. “You a friend of theirs?”
“Sort of.”
“Door’s right behind you, mister.”
It was the same story in the Golden Garter, the Long Branch, the Birdcage and the Lucky Strike. That just left the Last Chance –
“Well,” said the bartender, “there’s Slim Max, Fat Max, Apple Max—”
“Nondescript Max,” Theo said wearily. “Goes around with a short, fat, bald guy called Pete. They’re weird.”
The bartender nodded. “Wait there,” he said.
He scurried off into the back; and, for the first time since he’d arrived in wherever the hell it was supposed to be, Theo felt a tiny spasm of hope. He wasn’t kept waiting long. A few minutes later, the bartender was back. He’d brought some people with him. About twenty of them, including the sheriff.
“That’s him,” the bartender said.
They took him outside, put him on a horse and led him to the edge of town, where a single sad-looking tree stood beside the road. All of its branches had been sawn off except one, which stuck out at right angles, parallel to the ground. Why would anyone do that, he asked himself. Oh, he thought.
“Any last request?” the sheriff asked, as he threw the other end of the rope over the horizontal branch.
“Yes,” Theo replied. “I’d like a doughnut, please.”
“What is it with you people and doughnuts?” the sheriff asked; but he sent a runner to the Last Chance all the same. He looked surprised and hurt as Theo looked at him, through the doughnut’s hole, just before dematerialising –
He landed on the wine cellar stairs and there was still a noose around his neck. He clawed at it with both hands until he managed to prise open the knot and drag it off over his head. It was, of course, his tie.
The hell with you, Pieter, he thought, as he tottered up the stairs on legs that seemed to have no bones in them; and also with you, Max, even though you’re dead. When he reached the top of the stairs he couldn’t bear to put the tie back on, so he stuffed it in his pocket.
“Your brandy,” he said. “Sorry I was so long, but—”
Mr Nordstrom grabbed the bottle, ripped off the foil with his teeth, unscrewed the cap and swallowed five eye-watering mouthfuls. Then he wiped his mouth and put the bottle on the desk. “Why aren’t you wearing a tie?” he asked.
“Um.”
“Sloppy,” he said. “Improperly dressed. I never take my tie off, no matter what.”
Interesting mental images, for which he didn’t have the time or the processor capacity. “Sorry,” he said. “I won’t—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Mr Nordstrom glugged another three mouthfuls. The bottle was a third empty. “Charge it to my room, all right?” He stood up, straight and perfectly steady. “Oh, there was a phone call while you were gone. I wrote it down.”
The message, in immaculate old-fashioned copperplate on a yellow sticky –
Janine called. No message. Wouldn’t leave number. Will call back.
Well, of course. She probably had private detectives watching the hotel through lenses the size of rhino horns; the moment he left the desk, they called her and she called him. It was the sort of thing she might just conceivably do too.
When he got back to his room, he found the door was locked, which surprised him since the last time he’d looked there hadn’t been a lock on the door. But there was one there now. Also, a note-
Theo-
You must be sick to death of this rabbit hutch by now, so I’ve moved you to Room 9998 on the ground floor. It’s much nicer.
Cheers,
Bill.
It was well after 1 a.m. by the time he eventually found Room 9998. He eventually tracked it down at the far end of a long corridor leading from the laundry, a huge vaulted chamber crammed with vast, silent machines. The door was open and the light was on.
His first reaction was that he’d come home. It took him a moment to figure out why. Then he realised. He’d been in a very similar room before; in fact, he’d spent a great deal of time there. He hadn’t made the connection immediately because he’d never really noticed the room, only the stuff that was in it. Room 9998 was an almost exact replica of the static inversion chamber at the VVLHC complex; the place where the chain reaction had started, when he made his big mistake.
There were differences, of course. The static inversion chamber had been lined with a hundred and ninety centimetres’ thickness of lead panelling and had housed the impulse matrix and the muon wave generator, along with twelve billion dollars’ worth of computers and telemetry equipment. Room 9998, by contrast, was empty apart from a bed, a bedside table, an Ikea wardrobe, a single straight-backed wooden chair and a Corby trouser press. But the cathedral-high vaulted ceiling with the clear-glass observation cupola set in the exact centre were pretty much the same. The walls were bare plaster, but at regular intervals there were rows of plugged holes, where retaining bolts could once have held lead panels to the walls. There were also something like a thousand electric points set into the skirting; rather an extravagance for a room whose only electrical appliance was one table lamp, with a hundred-metre extension cable.
It made no sense, of course. But, in a cock-eyed sort of a way, it might explain why the corridor he’d just walked down was absolutely dead straight and lined with the same brand of ceramic tile that they’d used for the space shuttle project. And, of course, the projection range at the VVLHC.
Pieter’s friend, he thought, in a sudden flash of intuition. And a very good friend he must have been, to have given Pieter space in his hotel to build a private, entirely unofficial replica of the VVLHC; several orders of magnitude greater than the more usual can-I-dump-my-scuba-gear-in-your-garage sort of favour that passes for an act of friendship between ordinary mortals. Fine. Even so. Passing over the question of why anyone would feel the need to build a pirate hadron collider out back of a hotel; why, having built such a thing, would you then dismantle it, strip out all the gear and convert it into a bedroom?
A very good question, but not one he felt up to answering after a very long day. He kicked off his shoes, flopped on to the bed and reached for the light switch. He pressed it. The light came on.
Theo sighed, got off the bed and set off on the long, long walk to the doorway to turn off the overhead light. When he got there, however, there was no switch. He paused, frowned and looked up. It took him quite a while to scan the vast ceiling, and he got a crick in his neck from tilting his head back, but his search left him with some valuable but disturbing data. There was no overhead light.
Nor were there lights on the walls, or angled spots set into the floor. The only light bulb in the whole place was the one in the bedside lamp. The light, almost painfully bright, was coming from the walls. In other words, the room glowed in the dark.
Some time after 4 a.m., Theo finally got to sleep, in a semi-derelict bathroom on the third floor. He’d taken twelve consecutive baths, and only stopped there because he ran out of soap. At 5.16 he was woken by Call-me-Bill, standing over him with a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry.
“There you are,” he said. “We were worried. You weren’t in your room.”
Theo scowled at him. “That room,” he said, “is radioactive.”
“A bit,” Call-me-Bill said. “Nothing to worry about, though. Don’t you like it?”
“I just said, it’s radio—”
“Apart from that.”
Theo took a deep breath, then let it go. “I quit,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m resigning. I don’t want this job any more. I’m a tad fussy about my ambient radiation levels and I can’t stand the weirdness. Sorry.”
Call-me-Bill looked puzzled. “You’re leaving?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
“No, seriously,” Call-me-Bill said, “you can’t leave. Look. This’ll explain.”
From his coat pocket he produced a newspaper, rolled up tight into a tube. He flattened it out and pointed to a short column of text under a photograph of a scary-looking grinning lunatic. The headline read, Police Seek Suspect in Van Goyen Murder Hunt. The photo was an old one – Theo giving a press conference, the day before the VVLHC went online – but instantly recognisable.
“So you see,” Call-me-Bill went on, “if you set foot outside the hotel grounds, you’ll be arrested. It was on the TV news and the radio as well. It’s just a shame they couldn’t have come up with a better photo. This one makes you look like you’ve just stuck your fingers in a light socket.” He gently tugged the newspaper out of Theo’s hand, folded it and put it back in his pocket. “It’ll all blow over soon enough,” he went on reassuringly, “but till it does, you really ought to stay here, where you’re safe. I did promise Pieter I’d look after you.”
Theo opened his mouth, but it was as though someone had pressed the Mute button. Call-me-Bill smiled at him and gave his shoulder a friendly pat. “We’ll keep you off the desk for a bit, though, just in case. Don’t suppose you’ll mind that, you’ve been pulling some pretty long shifts recently. Tell you what, why don’t you give Mattie a hand sorting the linen? I can keep an eye on the desk, it’s not like we’re rushed off our feet right now.”
Theo glanced sideways at him. “That’s not what you said a few days ago.”
“Ah, well, the rush is over now, for a bit. Gives us all a chance to catch our breath.”
“What rush?”
“Good man.” Call-me-Bill beamed at him. “And if you really hate 9998, we can swap.”
“Sorry?”
“Swap,” Call-me-Bill repeated. “I’ll bunk down in 9998 and you can have my room. If you don’t mind mucking in with all my junk, I mean. Not ideal, I grant you, but we’re a bit pushed for space right now.”
“Pushed for space? We’ve got two guests.”
“Splendid.” Call-me-Bill nodded decisively. “So, if you make your way down to the laundry room, I’ll tell Mattie you’ll be giving her a hand. No rush.”
The laundry was a bit closer to the Room That Glowed than he’d have liked, and the grim, monolithic cast-iron-and-brass machines that stood silently in the corners gave him the creeps, although he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what they were or what they did. He found Matasuntha standing in front of an enormous floor-to-ceiling cupboard. The door was open, and a ladder was leaning against one of the countless shelves.
“What kept you?” she said.
He’d come straight from his bathroom. “Sorry,” he replied. “Look—”
“You can start,” she said, “by getting down all the stuff from the shelves and putting it on the floor in neat piles so I can go through it all.”
Every shelf – he lost count after thirty – was laden down with folded towels, sheets, pillowcases, eiderdowns, curtains. There was enough fabric in that cupboard to make a loose cover for the Sun. “All of it?”
“All of it. Come on, don’t just stand there like a pudding. Get on with it.”
He hadn’t actually seen the main reactor of the VVLHC overload, but he had an idea of what it must’ve been like. A bit like the indescribable build-up of pressure inside him when Matasuntha made her last remark. Fortunately, he knew about pressure. You can ignore it until it bursts and trashes mountains, or you can channel it into doing useful work. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll make a start, then.”
“About time.”
The top shelf was so far off the ground he could feel distinct symptoms of oxygen deprivation as he pulled out a crowded armful of blankets. He fought it, however, and clambered slowly back down the ladder. Matasuntha was writing something on a clipboard, with her back to him. He hesitated. He’d never deliberately attacked anyone in his life (YouSpace didn’t count) and the last time he’d been in a fight, he’d been eight, and he’d lost. On the other hand, he felt that he’d exhausted all the usual diplomatic channels, and there simply wasn’t time to get a UN resolution through the Security Council. Besides which, Russia would probably veto it. They usually did.
So, instead, he grabbed the nearest sheet, swung it through the air, like a Roman gladiator casting his net, and threw it as precisely as he could over Matasuntha’s head. For a split second it floated, parachute-fashion; then it dropped, like a bursting bubble.
Matasuntha squealed like a pig and lashed out frantically with her arms. Theo was just wishing he hadn’t embarked on this venture when suddenly the sheet collapsed and fell, quite empty, to the floor. Theo grabbed at it but he wasn’t quick enough. Then something hit him on the back of the head, and the world went offline for a while.
When normal service was resumed, he found himself lying on the floor, face downwards, with his nose in a sheet. For a moment or so he simply couldn’t think how he could possibly have got there. Then his aching head filled up with memories and he twisted himself over on to his back and looked up.
Matasuntha was standing over him, holding an ironing board. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” she yelled.
His head was swimming. “You hit me.”
“You chucked a sheet over my head.”
“You vanished.”
Slowly, she lowered the ironing board. “Yes, well. What was I supposed to do? You attacked me.”
“One moment you were there, the next—”
“Yes, all right. Oh, get up off the floor, for pity’s sake. I can’t hold a civilised conversation if you’re going to lie there all day.”
He stood up. About halfway, a great wave of pain surged through his head and crashed against the back of his eyes, making him whimper. “Serves you right,” Matasuntha said. “You scared the life out of me.”
But not, apparently, for very long. “All right, I’m sorry,” he mumbled, leaning hard against the cupboard door. “If I’d known you were going to dematerialise, I wouldn’t have done it.”
At that point, his knees gave way, and he slithered down the door and sat heavily on the floor, jarring his spine. All in all, he decided, he wasn’t cut out to be an action hero. Apparently she thought so too; she clicked her tongue and said, “Just sit still for a minute or so, you’ll be fine. Try and keep your head still, and if you throw up on my nice clean towels I’ll stove your head in. All right?”
He nodded. The great surge of energy brought on by terror, confusion and frustration had all been used up in the failed attack. Now all he wanted to do was sit very still and quiet for the rest of his life, doing exactly what he was told and not getting hit with ironing boards.
“Out of interest,” Matasuntha said, “why did you try and strangle me with a sheet?”
“I wasn’t trying to strangle you,” he said sadly. “I just want some answers, that’s all.”
“Answers?”
“Mphm.”
She sighed. “Here’s a tip for you. If you want answers, there’s these things called questions. You ask them. It’s the recognised procedure.”
“Yes, but—” He couldn’t find the energy to complete the sentence. “I said I’m sorry.”
She was looking at him. “You reckoned,” she said, “that the only way to get a straight answer out of someone around here was threats of physical violence.”
“Something like that.”
“Well.” She sat down next to him on the floor. “I have days like that,” she said. “It’s when people keep giving you bizarre things to do and making completely arbitrary decisions that affect you directly, and when you ask for a reason they pretend they haven’t heard you. I think that’s called management. You get it in a lot of businesses, including,” she added, “the hotel trade.”
He nodded. “But we’re not in the hotel trade, are we?”
She was perfectly still for a moment. Then she said, “No.”
Once, many years ago when he was a kid, he bet his friend he could hold his breath for ninety seconds. He could remember the feeling of relief when he gave up on eighty-three seconds and breathed in. That was nothing compared to this. “Not the hotel trade.”
“No. It’s just a cover.”
He took a deep breath, savoured it and let it go slowly. “What for?”
She was looking straight ahead. “You knew Pieter van Goyen.”
“Oh yes.”
“Fine. Well, Bill and me, we were his business partners.”
“YouSpace?”
“I what?”
“Sorry,” Theo said. “Ignore me. What business were you partners in?”
She frowned. “You know, I’m not entirely sure. It was something scientific and technical, and it was going to make us all very, very rich, but it was a bit against the law.”
“A bit.”
“Yup. Actually, that was your fault.”
“Most things are, apparently. What did I do?”
She grinned at him. “Need you ask?”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes.” She pursed her lips. “Apparently, after your fifteen minutes of universal fame they brought in a worldwide ban on whatever it was you were doing. In case any more mountains got blown up, I guess. Which was a total bummer as far as we were concerned, because Bill and I had invested rather a lot of money in the thing Pieter was doing – building this place, for a start – and suddenly it looked like it was all about to go down the toilet.“
“Hang on,” Theo said. “You built a copy of the VV—”
“Not an exact copy,” Matasuntha replied. “More a sort of tribute to it, if you get my meaning.”
“Tribute?”
“We took the ideas we wanted and didn’t pay anybody any money for them. That’s one of the reasons we had to keep it quiet. Also, this international ban thing, after your little accident. Anyhow, it was all coming along quite well, and then Pieter went and died on us, and now we’re screwed. He hadn’t finished doing the mathsy stuff, you see.”
Theo nodded slowly. “So you needed me?”
Matasuntha laughed. “Oh, that was Pieter’s idea. He said, if anything happened to him – and it was a distinct possibility, because this thing we’re doing can be a bit unsafe—”
“As well as a bit illegal.”
“A bit, yes. Anyhow, Pieter said, if anything happens to me, get a hold of Theo Bernstein, he’s a total flake but a bit brilliant. Actually, I think it was some stuff you did that we were paying tribute to.” She gave him a sweet smile, then went on, “Of course, once you’d trashed the big Swiss thing, obviously nobody was going to give you a job selling matches in the street. So Pieter set it up for you to come here if anything happened to him, and then we’d sort of trick you into finishing the mathsy stuff. I’m really not supposed to tell you that,” she added. “Bill’ll be livid if he finds out. But what the hell,” she said, flicking her hair away from her face with intent to cause irrelevant thoughts. “I figure, if we carry on pissing you off like we’ve been doing, you’ll up and leave anyhow, and then we’ll really be screwed. Bill’s my uncle, by the way, in case you were wondering.”
He hadn’t been, but now she mentioned it – no, definitely not. He waved his visible hand towards the huge machines in the corner. “So all this junk—”
“Isn’t for doing the laundry with, no. Again, you’d have to ask Uncle Bill about it, and probably he wouldn’t know, because Pieter saw to all that. What Uncle Bill mostly did was write cheques. He’s got really good at doing that.”
“And Room 9998?”
She pulled a sad face. “That was where it was all set up,” she said. “Of course, when Pieter died we closed it down, stripped out all the gear and crated it up in these enormous lead-lined boxes. It’s all stored in some warehouse right now, until we can get it back up and running. But we had to switch it off, because it was leaking a bit.”
He glared at her. “A bit.”
“More than a little but less than a lot. Uncle Bill’s got a little gadget, if the leak gets too bad it makes this squeaking noise. It’s fine now.”
Theo felt slightly reassured; as a passenger in a plane spinning out of control towards the ground might feel on fastening his seat belt. “A Geiger counter.”
“Whatever. Uncle Bill would know. Anyhow,” she went on, “that’s all there is to it, really. Mr Nordstrom and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz are sort of the financial side of things. We had to bring them in when our cash flow got a tad constipated. You don’t have to worry about them, they’re basically no bother. Nordstrom was in business with Uncle, and Mrs D-W’s a sort of cousin.”
Theo nodded slowly. “And the vanishing?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just now. You vanished.”
“Ah.” She blushed slightly. “I can do that. God only knows how, we certainly don’t. Pieter thought it was maybe something to do with the same effect that did that to your arm, but if you ask me he was just guessing. It’s useful sometimes, when I can control it. But it can be a pain as well. Tends to happen at moments of heightened emotion.” She looked down at her hands. “It makes it hard for me to keep a steady boyfriend, among other things. But what the hell.”
Theo thought for a moment, but thinking was like wading through piranha-infested porridge. “Are the police really after me?”
“ ‘Fraid so,” she replied. “For which, I have to say, you’ve got Uncle Bill to thank. His bright idea for keeping you from wandering off. I’ll talk to him about it,” she added, “because I think it’s a bit mean, framing someone for murder. He doesn’t usually do stuff like that, but he’s been under a lot of pressure since Pieter died, what with all the money and everything.”
She made it sound like he’d borrowed a lawn mower and brought it back with one of the little plastic knobs broken off. “Where on earth did he get that much money, anyhow?”
“Oh, it’s not his. Well, not really his. He’s got this hedge fund thing. I’m not entirely sure what that means.”
“It’s where a lot of rich people put money in a fund to buy hedges,” Theo said. “Then they sell the blackberries and make an absolute killing. Of course you know what a hedge fund is.”
She glowered at him, then shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “he took a bunch of money out of that, and then he borrowed some from Nordstrom and the Duchene woman, but that’s nearly all used up now. Which shouldn’t be a problem, provided we can get this thing working.”
“It’d help if you knew what it was,” Theo said warily. “I mean, it makes a difference, where the mathsy stuff’s concerned.”
“Does it?”
“Oh yes. You need a completely different set of equations if it’s supposed to be a quantum particle accelerator, say, than if what you’re trying to build is the last word in pencil-sharpeners. As you well know.” He tried to fix her with a steely glare, but it was a bit like trying to nail custard to a wall. “Admit it,” he said. “You were the girl on the train.”
“What train?”
“You can’t only vanish, you can change what you look like as well. And that’s creepy.”
She gave him a puzzled look. “What girl on what train? I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t ever travel on trains, I get motion sickness.”
The horrible possibility that she was telling the truth seeped into his mind like water through a ceiling. Nevertheless, he told her about the girl on the train; her beauty, her friendliness, her interest in quantum physics and the bloodcurdling manner of her departure. “That was you, wasn’t it?”
But instead of guilty or defiant, she just looked confused. “Sorry,” she said, “definitely not me. Until very recently I thought string theory was trying to explain how balls of wool get knots in them without you even touching them. And I’ve spent half my life trying to change how I look, and I still can’t get my hair to stay straight for more than ten minutes. Which means,” she added with a frown, “there’s somebody else out there who knows about all this stuff.” She looked at him. “That’s bad.”
“And who can disappear?”
“Apparently. Honestly,” she said, looking straight at him, “it wasn’t me. And if it wasn’t me, it had to have been someone else. That’s logic, that is.”
He didn’t want to believe her, but he didn’t seem to have any choice. “If you say so,” he said. “All I’m interested in is what you want me to do. And if I do it, will your uncle call off the police so I can get out of here?”
She actually looked hurt when he said that. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I always said we should be straight with you instead of messing you around, but Uncle Bill reckoned if we did that, you’d want a huge great cut of the profits.”
Theo told her where Uncle Bill could insert the profits, and she replied that that would certainly call for an innovative approach to money-laundering before they’d be able to spend it. “I know we haven’t exactly got off to a good start,” she went on, “but that’s no reason why we can’t make friends and cooperate. Anyway, you can’t leave. You know too much now.” She got to her feet and gathered up an armful of towels. “While you’re deciding what you’re going to do, you can help me with all this lot.”
“Why? This isn’t a hotel.”
“No, but Uncle Bill would like to think you still think it is. I’m not supposed to have told you anything, remember?”
“That still doesn’t mean I have to fold towels.”
“If you don’t, he might fire you.”
Arguing with her was like one of those games where you’ve got to jiggle a little plastic box around until all the little ball-bearings have settled in the holes. He’d always hated them and he’d always got one for Christmas. “Fine,” he said. “It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. But you’re going to talk to your lunatic uncle and get the police off my back. Otherwise, I suggest you buy yourself a really good calculator.”
Folding towels for the next four hours gave him time to think. Although Matasuntha wasn’t the sort of person he’d usually believe if she told him he was breathing, he had the feeling that parts of what she’d told him were probably the truth. Pieter had lured him here as a backup; well, that he could believe, though he wished he couldn’t. Also, the girl on the train hadn’t been Matasuntha, and she didn’t appear to know about YouSpace. In which case, Pieter and Call-me-Bill’s secret, illicit project was something else; and YouSpace –
Didn’t fit in anywhere. Something else Pieter was playing around with, nothing to do with Matasuntha or Uncle Bill. Pure coincidence? Sure, and the soft swishing overhead was the lazy wing beats of the flocks of circling pigs. Refusing to touch with a ten-foot pole the issue of how come a hedge fund manager was also a top-flight quantum physicist – one that he’d never heard of – he tried to come up with some reason why Pieter should’ve inflicted that terrible plaything on him at the same time as enticing him here to do cutting-edge mathsy stuff. He batted the idea round in his mind until his synapses were raw, but he could squeeze out only one possibility. Max. YouSpace was Pieter’s way of passing on some information about Max, while making it impossible for anyone who couldn’t solve the impossible equation that got you inside the bottle to intercept it.
As a hypothesis, it was still about as likely as free universal healthcare in the United States, but it was all he could think of. For one thing, Max was dead, had been for years. Therefore, anything to do with him could hardly be particularly urgent. Had Pieter known Max? No evidence for that whatsoever. His original hypothesis was that Pieter had dropped false hints about Max purely in order to lure him into YouSpace. That still made a kind of sense; turning it on its head, so that the Max stuff was both real and important, made no sense at all. In fact, he’d be inclined to reject the whole theory out of hand, except that it was the only one he’d got. Also, there was a nagging feeling at the back of his mind that there was something; hopelessly vague but just strong enough to keep him from walking out on the whole horrible mess, changing his name and making a new life for himself in Ulan Bator.
Nothing for it; he was going to have to try YouSpace again. As soon as he made the decision, a heavy weight seemed to press down on him, making him wonder if being stuck where he was with a bunch of devious lunatics was really as bad as all that. Or prison, even; he could go to the police and they’d put him in a nice quiet cell for a few months until they figured out that he couldn’t possibly have killed Pieter, during which time he could catch up on his reading, sew a few mailbags, nothing taxing or bewildering, and no being suddenly plunged into unexpected life-threatening situations where everybody knew what was going on except him. It was tempting, no question about that. But-
Screw you, Max, he thought. But.
“Where are you going?” she asked, as he headed for the door.
“Toilet.”
“Oh.” She frowned at him, as though he’d just claimed a day off for the funeral of his sixth grandmother. “Well, don’t be long.”
“I’ll be as long as it takes,” he replied with dignity, and bolted.
“I’m sorry,” said a voice in his head, “Could you repeat that?”
He stared. This wasn’t –
Not in his head. In his helmet. “Mission Control calling Alpha One. Please repeat. Over.”
In front of him, through the glass of his helmet visor, he saw a red desert meet a pink sky. He turned his head, and the movement nearly knocked him off his feet. He staggered, left the ground for a split second, and landed gently.
“To refresh your memory,” the voice said, “you got as far as one small step for. You were saying?”
“Shit.”
Pause. Crackle. “Um, you might care to rephrase that. Bear in mind, there’s two billion people watching this live back home.”
“Where the hell,” Theo asked, “is this?”
“Um. Mission Control to Alpha One, are you experiencing difficulties, over?”
Very carefully, Theo moved his head about ten degrees left. “This isn’t Earth.”
“No, Alpha One, that’s the point. Look, are you feeling OK? Any dizziness, nausea—?”
“Jesus Christ,” Theo yelled. “Get me out of here. Now.”
Two sharp crackles. “Alpha One, this is Mission Control, we’re having technical problems, so we’re signing off, we’ll get back to you soonest.” Crackle. Buzz. “What’s the matter with him, is he nuts or something? He’s f*cking lost it, man, what do you mean, the mike’s still—?”
The voice cut off abruptly. Theo looked down at his legs, and saw that they were covered in silver-foil trousers, which made him feel as though he really belonged in an oven. The boots were also silver, and huge. His arms were covered in the same material, and both of them were visible. He lifted his left foot, and it seemed to want to rise up in the air and float away.
Mission Control, he thought. Oh God.
He stared at the red desert, which was nothing but sand dunes, as far as the eye could see. Very carefully he turned round and looked behind, and saw what was presumably his landing module. It didn’t inspire confidence; a silver and white box on four frail, shiny legs, like a spider made out of biscuit tins and cardboard. I’m supposed to fly all the way back to Earth in that, he told himself. Yeah, sure.
Something nudged his leg, which made him jump. Not, with hindsight, the most sensible reaction; he soared his own height off the ground and nearly flipped over before sinking slowly back down again. As he touched down, he saw a creature, squatting in the sand, looking at him.
The first thing he noticed was the eyes. There were eight of them, in two bunches of four, like shiny black grapes, and they were set in an upside-down pear-shaped head that tapered steeply to a point. The creature’s head was slightly larger than its body, which was supported by three stumpy legs and from which hung four long, spindly arms. What he could see of its skin was green; the rest was covered in what looked like dark blue cloth, and around its foot-long neck was something that looked disconcertingly like a fat, drooping bow tie. It raised a nine-fingered hand and waved at him.
Little green men. Bug-eyed monsters. Oh please.
He edged round until he was facing the pathetic-attempt-at-a-spaceship thing and took a long step towards it, only to find he wasn’t moving. He looked down and saw a thin green hand wrapped round his ankle.
In space, proverbially, no one can hear you scream. So that was all right.
At the third try, he managed to yank his leg free of the hand, but that only made matters worse; once loose from his anchor, he sailed swiftly and gracefully through the whatever-passed-for-air and collided, head first, with the lowered ramp of the spaceship. He must have hit it at just the right angle; the foot of the ramp bounced and lifted, and all he could do was watch as it swung upwards and latched itself shut, about ten feet off the ground, sealing the spaceship as tight as a can of beans.
You clown.
The voice was inside his head, not his helmet, so it wasn’t Mission Control. At first he assumed it was his inner voice, the one that had taken over the job of nagging him when his mother left home. But it didn’t sound like the voice, with which he was all too familiar. Not that it –
It’s all right. I’ve got a ladder. But you want to be a bit more careful.
That wasn’t right; because his inner voice didn’t have a ladder. He pushed himself up off the ground with his hands, sat up and looked back. The little green man was standing next to him, shaking his head.
I’m assuming you’ve got a key or an access code or something.
He stared. The little green man’s lips weren’t moving, mainly because he didn’t have any. Of course, for an entirely telepathic species that wouldn’t be an insuperable problem –
He concentrated harder than he’d ever done before, and thought, Are you talking to me?
Yes. And there’s no need to shout. Look, if you’ve locked yourself out I know a guy with a cutting torch, but that’s going to make a mess of your flying-in-the-sky-thing. Did you really come here from another world in that heap of shit, by the way? You must be brave as two short planks where you come from.
You can hear me.
Well, yes. Oh, and why don’t you take that stupid hat off? You’ll be far more comfortable.
I can’t. I need it to –
Bull. The atmosphere here is 78 per cent nitrogen, 19 per cent oxygen and some other stuff. I’m not a zoologist, but your brain says you should be fine with that.
How do you—?
When I said take the helmet off, a chemical analysis of your home atmosphere flashed across your subconscious mind. I compared it with the local stuff, and it looks like it’s basically OK. Therefore losing the goldfish bowl should be no big deal, and then we can have a civilised conversation. How about it?
Yes, but—
Also, those other aliens that look like you can breathe our air just fine.
The sun chose that moment to rise, flooding the desert with red light the precise colour of strawberry jam. It was probably just a coincidence.
What other aliens?
The ones that look just like you.
Theo hesitated; then he fumbled for the catches of his helmet. In the end, the alien had to help him. That’s better, isn’t it? said its voice in his head, as he breathed in a lungful of air that tasted overpoweringly of soap, with a hint of maple syrup. It also made his head swim slightly, like whisky on an empty stomach. Now you can have a G’ntyhtruhjty cake.
A what?
The alien pulled its face off; or, rather, it lifted a tubular flap of skin up over its head, to reveal a sort of compartment, inside which was what looked very much like a doughnut, except that it was green. It lifted the doughnut out and put it on one of its stick-insect fingers, like a grossly oversized ring. Then it pulled the flap down again. A G’ntyhtruhjty cake. We offer them to guests as a token of friendship and hospitality.
Ah.
Refusing to accept a G’ntyhtruhjty cake is a mortal insult that can only be avenged through the complete annihilation of the offender’s tribe, or in your case, species, the voice pointed out. Go on, you don’t actually have to eat it. Stick it down your jumper and have it later.
There were no pockets in the space suit, so Theo hooked it over a projecting toggle on his chest. Thanks, he thought.
Don’t mention it. Well, I guess you’ll be wanting me to take you to our leader.
Not really, no.
Oh. You sure? He’s not that bad once you get to know him.
I’m sure he’s very busy, and I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance. No, I’m rather more interested in the other aliens you mentioned.
Really?
Yes.
The alien scratched the top of its head with eighteen fingers. Let me get this straight. You came all this way in that bizarre contraption just to talk to a couple of your own kind.
Yes.
You don’t want a guided tour of the therion reactors, or a trip along the Hanging Canyons of Foom?
Later, perhaps. First, though, I’d quite like to see these two aliens. How many of them are there, by the way?
Two. A tall one and a very tall one.
The alien was maybe four feet, so that wasn’t much help.
Did they happen to mention their names?
Long pause. What’s a name?
Fine. Could you just tell me where I can find them, please?
No. But I can take you to them, if that’d be any use.
That’d be fine, thank you, he thought fervently; and the alien pulled open its shoulder (this time it wasn’t quite so bad) and took out a little green box. It pressed a couple of buttons, and a panel on the box slid open. From it, the alien took a tiny little plant in a tiny little flowerpot, and a tiny little bottle, the contents of which it poured over the plant.
Won’t take a moment, the alien said.
The plant started to grow. Ten seconds later, it was about the size of a mature apple tree. Two more seconds, and Theo hurt his neck looking up at it.
A bit slow today, sorry about that.
Under his feet, Theo could feel the tree’s roots disturbing the ground as they forced their way down. Meanwhile, enormous blossoms formed on the tree’s lower branches. The petals fell away, revealing long bean-shaped pods, which lengthened and swelled until they were the size of a two-man canoe.
You might want to step back a bit.
Just in time; one of the pods quivered and fell to the ground, splitting open lengthwise to reveal a shiny, sticky, open-topped green sports car. With a single frog-like hop the alien jumped in and prodded something; the car started to purr like a cat. Get in, said the voice in Theo’s head. It’s not far.
The passenger seat was a bit too small, and Theo had to perch on top of it, clinging to the dashboard with both hands. Ready? He nodded, and the car sprang into the air.
A true scientist would have kept his eyes open, but Theo felt much happier with them shut, and he kept them that way for the next ten minutes, even when the alien prodded him in the thigh and urged him to look down and see the magnificent groves of washing-machine trees, which it claimed were one of the wonders of the continent. A slight bump suggested that they’d landed, but Theo wasn’t taking any chances. Only when all sensations of motion had stopped and the alien said we’re here did he open one eye about half a millimetre.
They were in a city. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the pink sky, the pink, red and mauve buildings and the blood-red sidewalk, he could have believed he was back home. The streets were deserted –
Well, of course they are. It’s the middle of the day.
– which was probably no bad thing. The alien hopped out of the car and told Theo to do the same; then it pressed a button and the car began to wither, until there was nothing left but a pale green papery husk. The alien screwed this up into a ball and dropped it into a nearby trash can. Come on, it said, and waddled away up the street so briskly that Theo had to break into a jog to keep up.
This is the Old Town, the alien was saying, some of it’s almost two years old. They’re on about clear-felling all the way up to the Broadwalk and replanting with affordable low-cost social housing, but I say the hell with that. Some people have no sense of history, you know? Right, we’ll try in here first. It paused outside what was unmistakably a bar, and looked up at Theo with a solemn expression in its eight dark eyes. You want to watch your step a bit in here. Folks are pretty easy-going as a rule, but there’s limits, you know? Just take it easy, and it’ll be fine.
Take it easy in what way exactly? Theo thought furiously, but the alien had pushed open the door and gone in, so he took a deep breath and followed.
There’s always a scene in westerns where the stranger walks into the saloon and the whole place goes dead quiet. The effect is diluted slightly on a planet of mute telepaths, but any loss of intensity was more than made up for by the fact that every one of the drinkers at the bar had four pairs of eyes to stare at him with. All of them except one.
Hey you, said a different voice in his head. Can’t you read?
There was, of course, no way of knowing who was thinking at him, though he had an idea it wasn’t going to matter terribly much in the long run. He looked round for the alien he’d come in with, but the space where it had been standing was now ominously empty. Several of the bar aliens were getting slowly to their feet.
I asked you, can’t you read? You stupid or something?
I’m sorry, he broadcast as hard as he could; and no, I can’t read your—
More chairs scraped. It says, no aliens, the voice translated helpfully. Reckon you’d better leave, while you still can.
Oddly enough, Theo had been thinking precisely the same thing. He reached for the alien doughnut he’d hung on the front of his suit, but it wasn’t there.
It’s all right. He’s with me.
It was another voice in his head; but this time it was a voice, not an array of verbalised thoughts. He spun round, lifting six inches off the ground in the process, and saw –
“Hello, Theo,” Pieter said. “Fancy seeing you here.”