by Ward Wagher
Mrs. Willow shook her head. “The doctors cannot do much in these instances. He will simply have to ride it out. It won’t kill him.”
“I just feel like I’m going to die,” Larry groaned.
“The best thing to do, Young Mister Berthold, is to lie quietly and move as little as possible. Later in the day, perhaps, some soup might help.”
Larry gagged at the mention of soup. Mrs. Willow gave him a lopsided smile. “You will not die, Mr. Berthold. Just get as much sleep as possible.”
And she turned to leave the room. Maggie followed her out into the hallway.
“I have never heard of sleepy gas, Mrs. Willow,” she asked in a whisper. Why would somebody use that here?”
“Did you look to see if anything was missing?”
“The only thing of value that he owns is his computer, and it is still on the table.”
“Then, I do not know why somebody was in his room. I would suggest that he start locking his door in the future. Whoever it was may have been looking for someone else and got into his room by mistake.”
“What should I do, then?” Maggie asked.
“Keep an eye on him today. He should be none the worse by tomorrow. If he is still sick, then perhaps a visit to the doctor might be wise.”
“Thanks for coming up, Mrs. Willow,” Maggie said.
She grunted. “Always something, Child. Mr. Berthold is fortunate to have someone to pick up behind him.”
Maggie thought she heard the stairs creak as Mrs. Willow walked down them, but that was unlikely because they were concrete with steel reinforcement.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Larry awoke to a rhythmic tapping sound and he opened his eyes to see Maggie sitting at his table typing on her computer. The headache was much in abeyance, and his stomach had settled down. He was wrapped in the comforter and felt lethargic and warm. It was a nice place to be. He attempted to engage his mind and put together the pieces of the past couple of days. The memories scurried around like water droplets on a hot griddle. He could not seem to push them into place.
“Ho, Sleepers Awake!” Maggie said. “Finally decided to rejoin the land of the living, I see.”
Larry moved his mouth and made a decision that he was able to speak. “How long have I been out?”
“Since this morning,” she replied.
He gritted his teeth. As usual, he had to tease the information out of the girl. He often wondered if she was intentionally difficult, or if this was simply the way her mind worked.
“What time is it now?” he asked.
“It is seven in the evening.”
“I feel like I could go back to sleep for the rest of the night.”
“Don’t do that, just yet,” she ordered. “Mrs. Willow said that you will need to eat something as soon as you wake up.”
“So, what do we have to eat?” he asked.
“Mrs. Willow said she would bring something up. Hold on and I’ll go get her.”
Maggie stood up and stretched, her back unwinding itself with crackles and pops. Larry cringed inwardly. He hated hearing those noises. She walked over to the door and pulled it open. Mrs. Willow stood in the doorway, holding a cooking pot with both hands.
“I see Mr. Berthold is awake,” she said as she rumbled into the room like a piece of earthmoving equipment. She set the pot on the table with a thump. “You just lie there, Mr. Berthold. Maggie will bring you a bowl of the soup.”
Larry was content to lie wrapped in the comforter. It was an effort to speak, and he was happy to conserve the energy. Maggie pulled a bowl off the shelf and fished for a spoon in one of the drawers.
“I am going to have to go through these drawers again, Larry,” Maggie said. “I can’t believe how you let them get this way.”
Letting the world go by continued to be attractive, particularly when Maggie got into her mother-hen mood. Larry watched the activities with casual interest. Mrs. Willow pulled the lid off the pot and released an enormous cloud of steam. Larry caught a bit of the aroma and it did not smell like any soup he had ever eaten. It did not smell bad, merely different.
Maggie walked over to Larry’s bed, carrying a bowl of the soup. He struggled to sit up. His arms shook as he pushed himself off the mattress. She set the bowl to the side and wrapped the comforter around as he started shivering again.
“Here you go, Larry. Down the hatch.”
The soup was hot, but strange tasting. He swallowed the first spoonful.
“What is this, anyway?” Larry asked. “It doesn’t taste bad, really, but it is very different.”
“It is what you need to recover from the gas,” Mrs. Willow said. “You cannot afford to be down any longer than is absolutely necessary.”
Maggie watched as he sipped several more spoonfuls. “Mrs. Willow, I searched for sleepy gas on the global net but could find nothing about it. Can you tell us about it?”
“Just that we need to get young Mr. Berthold well again soon. He must get back to work.”
“But, that doesn’t tell me anything about the sleepy gas,” she persisted.
“And there is nothing else you need to know,” Mrs. Willow said. She turned to Larry. “You do not have time to lie here in your flat while you recover. This will get you back on your feet by the morning. Otherwise, it would be a week. Now, eat!”
Larry ate. Later, he slept again. He awakened once in the night when the pressure on his bladder became too great. He staggered down the hall to the small bathroom to take care of business. Wrapped in the comforter again, he slept until morning.
§ § §
Arthur Winkleman sat in his office and looked out the window over the snow-covered Central Plains. He had received his first reports from Larry and Maggie and read them with avid interest. Larry described his lack of progress in honest phrases. Winkleman concluded the young man was making better progress than he believed. Berthold was settling down well and had turned his research to more practical things. Winkleman was confident he would deliver value to the Palatinate and do so greatly.
He was troubled, however, in the report from Maggie. Not in her accomplishments, but rather the events that Larry clearly did not want to discuss. Winkleman was not surprised by the illness. He had long felt the northeasters were not careful enough in preparing their drinking water… or their food, for that matter. The intervention of Mrs. Willow, as Maggie described it, further unsettled him.
He had not heard of sleepy gas, either. And, whatever potion was in the soup was interesting, as well. This added to the unease he felt concerning the events that had originally driven the two from Cambridge to the Carolinas, and eventually to Indianapolis.
At Winkleman’s instruction, Philip Guidard had paid a quiet, surreptitious visit to the farm where they had spent the night following their wild ride in the grasshopper. He had reported back that the farm was abandoned and seemed to have been so for a long time. He had slipped into the house, which was empty and did not even show tracks in the years of accumulated dust. Guidard’s report had frightened the old man. Winkleman firmly believed Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation for anything was probably the correct one. In this case, any explanation led him into areas he did not want to countenance. Guidard was puzzled by it, as well. And, Maggie Bosstic’s email did not help things in the least.
Winkleman picked up his phone. “Ask Mister Guidard to come to my office, please.”
He studied the email further, and then looked at his personal calendar. As usual, the number of people who needed to see him far outstripped the slots in his day. He had wanted to govern with a minimal staff and to manage his own workload, but that appeared to be a faint hope. He refused to hire any more permanent government employees than was absolutely necessary. In fact, he had assigned many of the routine tasks to his business staff, absorbing the cost himself. He had about decided he was going to dragoon a group of leaders from the Palatinate to help him run things. By keeping quiet about it, he hoped to avoid precedents t
hat later Paladins might use to abuse their powers.
Winkleman pondered this for a while and looked up to see Philip Guidard sitting across from his desk. He jumped.
“Land sakes, Philip, you have got to be a ghost! I never hear you come in.”
“You just absorb yourself too much in your work, Arthur,” the little man said.
“Right. Take a look at this.” Winkleman picked up a printout of Maggie’s message and handed it to the investigator.
Guidard quickly scanned the two pages and looked up at the Paladin. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
“I think you need to go out there,” Winkleman said. “There is something going on under the surface, and I’m not seeing it.”
“You always were a bit unperceptive.”
“Go to blazes!”
Guidard laughed. “Your sense of humor isn’t getting any better, either.”
“Right,” Winkleman grunted. “Is there any reason why you cannot fly out there today or tomorrow?”
“Today’s flight has already left,” Guidard said. “I can leave tomorrow.”
Winkleman nodded. “Fine. If I need to say it, do not flash your credentials around unnecessarily.”
“You don’t need to say it, and I understand. I also agree. We don’t need to advertise your interest in this.”
Winkleman studied the little man as he rolled his tongue around in his cheek. “You did not write any conclusions in your report about the farmhouse.”
“I told you what I discovered, Arthur. That’s what you wanted.”
Winkleman tilted his head and gave the other man a crooked smile. “You know better than that. I was hoping you had a simple explanation for what you found.”
“The matter defies explanation.”
“Certainly, you can do better than that,” Winkleman said.
“I know your love for simple explanations. Okay, you want a simple explanation? Try this: either I went to the wrong farmhouse, or you encountered a ghost.”
“How many farmhouses are in that area?”
Guidard chuckled. “There are exactly fifteen in a five-mile circle. The house in question was exactly in the center, which, of course, agrees with the GPS coordinates from the grasshopper. And, after looking at the house in question, I did look at the other fourteen. For various reasons, the one I visited first had to be the correct one.”
“Which leaves us the ghost story,” Winkleman said heavily.
“You got it, Arthur. But, don’t worry about it. I’ll unravel it for you. There are obviously missing pieces to this puzzle. If you could have figured it out for yourself, you wouldn't have called me in.”
“There is that,” Winkleman conceded. “Very well. Get out to Cambridge and then tell me what’s going on.”
Guidard stood up and sketched a quick bow. “It that’s all, Paladin, I will be on my merry way.”
Winkleman laughed. “Begone, knave!”
After the little man walked out of the office, Winkleman settled down to his paperwork. When he wasn’t meeting with people, the paperwork piled up. He decided that since he was not likely to live long enough to complete it, he would hire somebody to take care of the paper. He could continue to do the fun stuff.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Maggie perched on the spare desk in Larry’s office. He didn’t understand how she could be comfortable the way she sat cross-legged. As he typed on his computer, she carried on a one-sided conversation. He could continue working while she talked, and it seemed like she sometimes needed to unburden herself.
“I assume you heard Mrs. Willow tell me that I didn’t need to know anything about the sleepy gas,” she said.
Larry stopped typing and leaned back in his chair. He had been at it most of the day and welcomed Maggie’s interruption.
“Actually, I did not. When did she say this?”
“It was when she brought the pot of soup up for you. Didn’t you hear?”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t tracking too well, then. All I wanted to do was crash, again. I’m surprised I felt so well, this morning.”
“When Mrs. Willow first came in, she said she smelled sleepy gas. She said that someone must have come into your room and you happened to wake up. The gas not only puts you out, but you don’t remember anything afterward.”
“I don’t remember much about the whole episode, Mags.” He picked up a pencil and scratched an item off his to-do list.
“When she brought the soup in, I asked her about the sleepy gas. I had done some searches and could find nothing about it. She told me I didn’t need to know.”
Larry had begun typing again but stopped. “I have never heard of it either.” He flipped his screen over to the Globalnet search tool. He typed in a few queries and then tapped his teeth with a fingernail. “Nothing there. Hmmm.”
“Hmmm is right,” she replied. “Why all the secrecy?”
“That is a good question. I suppose we could ask Arthur if he has heard of this.”
“I already sent him a report on the incident,” she said. “He replied back this morning and told us to sit tight.”
“He was frightened about the old lady, Mrs. Willow or whoever she was, who gave us lodging that night,” Larry said.
“I’m just glad he didn’t go all mysterious on us,” she said.
“Arthur seems to be pretty firmly anchored,” Larry said.
“Are you up to eating, tonight?” she asked.
“Well, yes! I am hungry. But, I hate to think about how many meals I owe you.”
“As well you should be worried,” she said in mock severity. “All the times I have to cook and clean up behind you...”
“Uh huh. Well, I do appreciate it, Mags. I’m not interrupting your work, this afternoon, am I?”
“No,” she replied. “The well ran dry a little while ago. I’ve learned not to just sit and beat my head on the desk. I thought I’d come down and bother you. Are you getting anything done?”
“Actually yes. I have lined out several possible approaches that utilize Clenèt’s work. I am beginning to see some real possibilities. I need to send the outline to Arthur and find out if he has any preference on what I work on.”
She slipped off the desk. “Show me.”
He scrolled his document back towards the beginning and pointed to a paragraph with his pencil.
“It looks like we can create some sort of quantum tunneling effect, using grav waves. It might be a means of instantaneous communication.” He scrolled down some. “And here. I think maybe we can use the focusing capabilities of Clenèt’s work on grav-based fusion. We might be able to lift vehicles slightly off the ground. I have some ideas about replacing railroads with this. It would be very efficient.”
“That’s pretty cool, Larry,” she said. “Do you think any of this is possible?”
“I think manipulating the grav waves is very possible. Clenèt was already doing it to a certain extent. I wonder why nobody ever followed up on his work.” She thought he looked excited. “There are all kinds of things here that nobody has worked on in the last fifty years.”
He scrolled back to the bottom of his screen. “Excuse me just a minute.”
And then, he typed another sentence. “That just came to mind. You seem to strike sparks in my thinking.”
“No extra charge,” she said.
“Right.”
They both turned as they heard a tapping at the door. It opened with a squeal of ancient hinges, and Philip Guidard stood in the doorway.
“The boss thought I needed to come to see you,” he said.
“You got here quick,” Maggie said.
“Quickly,” he corrected. “I am going to need some of your time as I investigate the recent events. I only just arrived and need to go arrange for my lodging. Are you two available at dinner?”
“I had planned to cook dinner,” Maggie said. “You can eat with us.”
“And if you don’t mind the sofa, you can stay in my flat.”
“There’s a rooming house around the corner,” he said. “I would prefer not to be seen with you two. There are too many mysteries, as is. I don’t want to have people putting me together with you in the minds.”
“I’m not sure where we can meet,” Maggie said. “There are a lot of nosy people in this town.”
“I accept your invitation to dinner,” Guidard said.
“We will eat in my flat,” Larry said. “Can you find it?”
“Fourth floor, right?”
Larry looked confused. “Uh, right. How did you know?”
Guidard laid a finger along the side of his nose. “I have my ways. Now, let me go arrange for my lodging and I will arrive in you flat at about six. Is that all right?”
“Yes,” Larry said. “We will be glad to have you.”
“I have a lot of work to accomplish while I am here,” he said.
With that, he turned and slipped out of the office, quietly pulling the door shut behind him. Maggie turned to look at Larry.
“Kind of quiet, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Probably the best way to do his job. You wouldn’t look twice at him if you saw him on the sidewalk.”
“There’s that. If we are having him for supper, we’d better start wrapping things up here, for the day. I need to pull a meal together.”
§ § §
“You really ought to pick this place up, once in a while,” Maggie said as she shuffled pans on and off the hot plate.
“It looks a lot better than your place does,” Larry said. “Besides, I’ve been sick.”
She growled and walked over to the far corner where she pulled the coverlet up over Larry’s bed. “This is what I mean. You men live like animals.”
He followed her over. “I usually make my bed. On the other hand, I’m just going to climb into it again the tonight.”
“And there are dirty clothes all over the place.”
“No there are not. I have them piled in the corner.” He shrugged. “Besides, there’s not a lot of closet space in here, in case you didn’t notice.”
