by Tom Holt
There was a thoughtful silence.
‘Do we, though?’ said a voice at the back.
‘And he took my bicycle once without asking,’ said Grandmama. ‘And when I found it again, the forks were all bent.’
‘And there’s my lawnmower,’ added Lazy Olaf. ‘When am I going to get that back, I ask myself.’
‘He still hasn’t paid for that broken window.’
‘Loud music all hours of the day and night.’
‘Revving up his chainsaw when people are trying to sleep.’
Grandfather stooped to pick up an apple lying on the ground in front of him. ‘Go on,’ he shouted, ‘get on out of it. We can do without your sort around here.’ He threw the apple.
‘And if he comes back again,’ said Grandmama, savagely, ‘we’ll set the dogs on him.’
The little brown dog, which had come bounding out with its tail wagging, bared its teeth and snarled.
Halfway up the hill, Bjorn broke into a run.
‘She’s keen, certainly,’ said the director. ‘I have high hopes, you know. We need that sort of dedication and commitment in this department.’
The director’s secretary sniffed. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Someone’s left the lights on all weekend.’
‘Oh dear,’ the director replied, fumbling in his pocket for the key. ‘Wait a moment, though. It’s not locked. What on earth . . . ?’
He pushed open the door carefully and walked in to the main office.
‘Good-morning,’ Jane called out from behind the console. ‘I worked over the weekend, hope you don’t mind. You’re right, it’s easy once you get the hang of it. Of course, the computer helps marvellously. It’s just like the one we used to have where I worked before, except that the memory’s bigger, of course. Do you like it?’
The director was staring at the screen. From time to time, he made little choking noises.
The screen was different. Instead of the intricate cobwebs of inextricably tangled patterns, it looked like nothing so much as a very finely woven net.
‘What have you done?’ the director croaked.
‘I’ve sorted it,’ Jane replied cheerfully. ‘Looks so much better like that, don’t you think? Everybody living happily ever after, you see.’
‘But . . .’ The director struggled for words. ‘But, you stupid girl, they’re meant to be star-crossed lovers.’
‘So,’ Jane replied. ‘I uncrossed them. Simple as that,’ she added, and put the cover back over the console. ‘It’ll make life so much easier in the long run if people aren’t having to cope with shattering emotional crises all over the place. Do you realise how many working days were lost in the Soviet Union last year because of emotional trauma? I looked it up. Four million. And as for Scandinavia . . .’
The director collapsed against a filing cabinet, breathing heavily. ‘You - uncrossed them,’ he gasped. ‘My life’s work, and you . . .’ He made a noise like a horse whinnying and grabbed at the side of the cabinet for support. His secretary moved across to the desk and sharpened some pencils.
‘And,’ Jane went on, ‘I’ve programmed the computer to make sure they stay like that. It’s much easier that way, you know, and ever so much more efficient. In fact, all it’ll take from now on is one full-time member of staff to make sure it’s running smoothly, and a couple of part-timers to do the filing. I’m sure,’ she went on relentlessly, ‘they’ll be ever so pleased to hear that in the Treasurer’s Office.’
On the screen behind her, a galaxy of perfectly regulated blue and pink dots flashed in harmonious concord. All over the world, boy was meeting girl and falling in love, and they were immediately going out and choosing bathroom curtains together. The director’s secretary shrugged.
‘Well,’ she observed, ‘I’ll say this much, it’s a darned sight tidier than it used to be. I never could be doing with all those messy loops and squiggles.’
The director propped himself up against the filing cabinet and took off his spectacles. ‘Miss Frobisher,’ he roared in a voice like thunder. ‘Be so kind as to get me the Chief of Staff on the telephone immediately.’
But Miss Frobisher wasn’t listening. She was gazing, with an expression on her face like Stout Cortez finding a parking space in Piccadilly, at the electrician, who had come in to replace a light-bulb in the washroom. And he was gazing back.
‘Bingo,’ Jane commented. ‘You see what I mean about efficient.’
With a cry of enraged anguish the director dragged himself to his feet, shook a fist in Jane’s direction and staggered out of the door in the direction of the Main Office. For the record, he got no further than Accounts; where he happened to share a lift with a rather nice, motherly lady from Pensions. When, three months later, they got back from their honeymoon, he resigned from his old job and applied for the assistant librarianship in the reference section.
‘This protégé of yours,’ Ganger said. ‘I’m beginning to get bad feelings about the whole idea.’
Staff checked himself between the second and third syllables of ‘My protégé?’ and considered. He had, after all, been in the service for a very long time now, and one learned to expect this sort of thing. As the old Catalan proverb says: he who chooses to live among rats should not get aerated at the sight of paw marks in the butter.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Well.’ Ganger took up his usual position on the edge of the desk. Obviously chairs were completely passé where he came from. ‘Admittedly she’s got talent. Talent, yes; also initiative, drive, authority, intelligence, all that stuff. But, you know, I can’t help thinking she’s getting above herself. I mean, first that thing with the sun, and now all this stuff with Star-Crossed Lovers. Like, wiping out a whole department overnight. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere, haven’t you? She’s making too many enemies too soon.’
Staff stroked his chin with the rubber on the end of his propelling pencil. ‘And that means she’s making enemies for us, you mean?’
‘Naturally.’ Ganger picked up a handful of paperclips and started to weave them into a chain. ‘Major aggravation, at this rate. You don’t need me to tell you that.’
They considered the matter in silence for a while.
‘Finance and General Purposes smiled at me in the corridor the day before yesterday,’ Staff said at last. ‘I spent the rest of the morning searching this office for hidden microphones.’
‘Find any?’
‘No,’ Staff replied. Then he put his finger to his lips, picked up his empty coffee-cup, inverted it and put it over the buzzer on the edge of the desk. ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘Six. I left that one where it was to make them think they’d won.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Ganger said, smiling. ‘Sure, they’ve got every office in the building bugged - oh, and by the way, if you only found six, there’s three more about here somewhere, I was talking with that kid Vince from Supplies. But it’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Nothing to . . .’ Staff lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he hissed. ‘Have you the faintest idea . . .’
Ganger shrugged. ‘It all comes back to staffing levels,’ he said. ‘Think about it. So they’ve got the room bugged. In order for that to mean anything, think of all the backup you’d need. You’d have to have a guy listening in on each office, and another two guys to transcribe it all, and another guy to sort through the transcripts and put yellow highlighter on all the treasonable bits. With an organisation this size, you’re talking maybe a staff of twenty thousand people. You know how many people work in Internal Security? Four, and one of them’s a trainee. All they do is go around putting the bugs in, maybe fixing them when they go wrong, putting in new ones when they get found, and even doing that, there’s a waiting list of maybe six years. Nobody actually listens.’
‘Um.’ Staff thought for a moment, then rather shamefacedly removed his coffee-cup. ‘Even so,’ he said.
‘Exactly,’ Ganger replied, leaning forward. ‘Eve
n so. We just can’t afford to give those guys any more ammunition than we can help, and this crazy young kid of . . .’
‘Not mine,’ Staff couldn’t help saying. ‘You found her, remember.’
‘Maybe, yes, but . . .’
‘And you nagged her into joining.’
‘Okay, yes, we’re talking details here. It was your idea too. You didn’t stop me.’ There was a frown on Ganger’s face; a very incongruous sight, like Genghis Khan in a dinner jacket. ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that we’ve got to be careful, both of us. It’s a good idea, don’t let’s screw it up.’
‘It was my idea to put her in Records,’ Staff pointed out. ‘And it was you who made sure she was on hand when the sun got stolen. In fact, I’m not so sure . . .’ He stopped abruptly, aware that he’d been thinking aloud.
‘Sure,’ Ganger replied. ‘I put those kids up to it. We needed a new sun. The old one was a goddamn liability.’ He leaned closer forward still. ‘Now you see what you’re implicated in, huh?’
Staff half-rose; then he sat down again. ‘You lunatic,’ he said. ‘What did you want to go and do something like that for?’
‘Never you mind,’ Ganger answered, infuriatingly. ‘My department has a cross-departmental brief. I have to keep several things going at the same time.’
‘Is that an explanation?’
‘Yeah. Trust me.’
‘Oh.’ Staff bit the rubber on the end of his pencil in half and spat out the result. He was nervous when people from that particular department said ‘Trust me’; he couldn’t help but visualise the scene, many years ago now, when one of them had said, ‘Go on, eat the bloody apple; trust me.’ Of course, that sort of thing couldn’t happen now, not with the New Covenant and mortals being so depressingly litigious, but old habits die hard. ‘I think,’ he said decisively, ‘we ought to call the whole thing off. You’re right,’ he added quickly. ‘You’ve convinced me.’
Ganger was taken beautifully by surprise. ‘Hold on, now,’ he said. ‘I didn’t say we should call it off. All I said was . . .’
Staff smeared a bewildered look on his face. ‘You said she was becoming a liability,’ he replied. ‘I agree with you. By the way, what on earth possessed you to agree to all those demands of hers - pay and so forth? You realise that she’s only down on the books as a trainee.’
‘Wait a minute, now.’ Ganger was distinctly flustered, and his smile was melting and dripping down the side of his mouth, like jam on the run from a doughnut. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘The kid’s got personality, I guess. She just sort of came at me.’
‘Right,’ Staff replied, nodding. ‘And now I think it’s about time she came at somebody else around here.’
Another silence. In the corner of the room, unnoticed by anybody at all, one of the hidden microphones went wrong and began broadcasting the BBC World Service to its receiving station.
‘Like who?’ Ganger said cautiously. ‘I think you’re up to something.’
‘Me?’ Staff did a very creditable impression of startled innocence. ‘I’ve never been up to anything in my entire life. I was just thinking that, if she’s been attracting hostile criticism from certain quarters, then it’s about time we turned her loose on her critics. What do you reckon?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ganger stood up and walked across to the window, inadvertently treading on another hidden microphone and squashing it flat. The device in question had been installed by the trainee, and nobody had told him about putting them where they won’t get trodden on. ‘That could make things worse, you know? The last thing we want to do is precipitate a confrontation.’
‘Don’t we?’
‘Well, not that sort of confrontation.’ Ganger was starting to exhibit signs of great tension; that is to say, he appeared perfectly normal but his shoelaces were untying themselves and then weaving themselves back into fantastically intricate knots. ‘What did you have in mind, anyway?’
Staff smiled; at least, he drew his lips across his face like the curtain of an old-fashioned proscenium-arch theatre. ‘Nothing too dramatic,’ he replied. ‘I just think that the girl’s proved herself perfectly capable in the field, so why not try her out in administration? After all,’ he added carelessly, ‘she can’t get up to much mischief sat behind a desk all day, can she?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ganger replied, and his face was a blank. ‘Can she?’
Staff leaned back in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together. He was enjoying himself.
‘Let’s find out,’ he said. ‘Oh, and by the way.’
When one has worked in an office where mind-reading is the norm rather than the exception, one can’t help noticing nuances of expression, just as a telephone can’t get away from the fact that there are always people wanting to talk through it, regardless of whether it’s in the mood. Ganger’s face remained blank, but one of his shoelaces broke spontaneously. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘While we’re on the subject of bugging.’
‘Mm?’
‘I saw a psychiatrist yesterday,’ Staff said. He waited for some pleasantry or other from his interlocutor, and then went on: ‘I told him - quite untruthfully, as it happens - that for the last few weeks I’ve had this extraordinary idea that someone’s been listening to my thoughts. Inside my head, I told him. I didn’t expect him to take me seriously, of course, but he did.’
‘So I should think,’ Ganger muttered.
‘Well, he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill shrink,’ Staff admitted. ‘In fact, he’s the head departmental analyst, so he’s used to that sort of thing, I should imagine. And do you know what he suggested I should do?’
Ganger beamed. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you tell me.’
‘He said,’ Staff went on, ‘that it’s not a particularly uncommon condition in our line of work. He said - and this is just what he told me, mind - that the only odd thing about it was that I’d noticed. Funny he should say that, since I was making the whole thing up, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Hilarious.’
‘Anyway,’ Staff went on, ‘the point he was making was that apparently, one of our own departments, or at least a department of what you might call an associated agency, has perfected a technique of mental bugging, just so’s they can keep tabs on what the rest of us are thinking. A bit spooky, that, if it’s true.’
‘You’ve got my hair standing on end,’ Ganger said. ‘Do go on, please.’
‘Oh, there’s nothing to worry about,’ Staff said reassuringly. ‘Apparently, there’s a very simple solution to the problem.The boys in the research lab tumbled to it almost immediately. All you’ve got to do is this and . . . I say, are you all right?’
Ganger, who was sitting bolt upright with a face as white as the proverbial sheet, nodded his head stiffly. His hair really was standing on end, Staff noticed.
‘Sorry?’ he said. ‘I didn’t catch what you said.’
‘IIII sssaiiiid yyyyyesssssss, IIIIyummm ffffiynnn, thannnnnx,’ Ganger hissed. His eyes were bloodshot and he was starting to vibrate. ‘WWWWwouldddddd yyyy kkkkkindllleeeee sssstopppp ddddoinggg thattttt nnnow, pppppl?’
‘According to my friend the shrink,’ Staff continued, looking away and affecting not to notice anything unusual, ‘it’s just a question of earthing the interloper into one’s brainwaves. It’s easy once you’ve got the knack, he says, though how you’d ever know you were doing it right beats me. Still, he says there’s enough electricity inside the average person’s head to fry an intruder like a sausage. I’m sure he’s exaggerating. What do you think?’
‘Gggggggggggggg.’
‘Anyway,’ Staff said, making a very slight movement, after which Ganger stopped looking like a cross between a straight-backed chair and a pneumatic drill and slumped on to the floor in a heap, ‘it’s just as well nobody’s been trying to monkey about with the inside of my head, because he’d know he’d been in a fight if he did. My dear chap, what are you doing on the floor?’
�
��Resting,’ Ganger croaked. ‘I’ve had, you know, sort of a hard day.’ He reached out a trembling hand and picked up the lenses of his glasses, which were all that was left, apart from a few droplets of melted plastic in the worn pile of the carpet. ‘I think I’ll get back to my office and do something.’
‘Capital idea,’ Staff replied. ‘Mind how you go.’
‘I will.’ Ganger lifted himself on to his knees with an effort and crawled to the side of the desk.
‘Want to borrow a comb?’
‘Thanks,’ Ganger mumbled. ‘Don’t think I’d have the strength to lift one right now, but maybe I’ll take you up on it later.’
‘Please yourself,’ Staff said, picking up a file and opening it. ‘You know what? The one thing that really cheers me up about this whole business is knowing that, come what may, you and I are on the same side. You know, implicit mutual trust, that sort of thing. It’s a great comfort to me, it really is.’
‘Um.’
‘Cheerio, then.’
‘Ciao.’
‘Profiteroles,’ said the Lord High Cardinal. ‘I should live so long.’
The Count of the Stables winked at him. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘be a devi . . .’ He checked himself. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow you can have a salad.’
The Lord High Cardinal shrugged. ‘You convinced me,’ he said. ‘Or there’s the zuppa inglesi.’
‘Nah. That’s for thin people. C’mon, go for it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Right,’ said the Count of the Stables. ‘That’s six profiteroles. Hey, Rosa, six profiteroles over here.’
