by Tom Holt
‘You read his mind, didn’t you?’ said Staff quietly.
‘So?’
Staff was white as a sheet and trembling. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t do things like that.’
Ganger looked as if he’d just been kicked in the nuts by an angel. ‘Oh come off it,’ he said. ‘You’ve just heard me say that this jerk is responsible for everything. He’s a goddamn evolution criminal, that’s what he is. You do understand that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ Staff shouted. ‘That still doesn’t make it right.You can’t just go about peering in through people’s ears like that.’ He turned away. Ganger shook his head in disbelief and turned to Jane.
‘You don’t think it was wrong, do you?’ he said.
Jane thought about it for a moment. On the one hand, she didn’t hold with bugging. On the other hand . . . She thought for a moment about Homo sapiens, and many things crossed her mind: toothache, the division of the species into two genders, acne, comfort eating, split ends, clogged pores, catarrh, armpits. You could forgive most things, given time, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. And feet. If this guy was responsible for feet . . .
‘He had it coming,’ she said; then she, too, leaned forward. ‘Why five toes, you scumbag? Go on, answer me. Why five, for God’s sake? Four not good enough for you or something?’
Ganger nodded. ‘Motion carried, I think,’ he said. ‘Now then, all we’ve got to do is . . .’
The room suddenly filled with white light. From the street below, a tannoy invited them to reflect on the fact that the building was surrounded. If they had weapons, it might be a shrewd move at this stage to throw them out of the window.
Jane cleared her throat.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but who’s that, exactly?’
Ganger looked round at her. ‘Out there, you mean? The ones with the searchlights and the PA system?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I have an idea it’s my colleagues from Security,’ Staff interrupted. ‘This is just a wild guess, but I think they want to arrest us.’
‘I see,’ said Jane. ‘Why?’
‘It’s what they’re best at, I suppose,’ Gange said. ‘I mean, why do painters paint? Why do potters make pots? The question we should be addressing is, will they succeed?’
For his part, Bjorn gave them the kind of stare that large, stupid people reserve for their intellectual betters when they’re indulging in verbal fireworks instead of getting on with the job. That’s great, it said, and you won’t mind if I leave you to it and just look around for a gun or something. He started to search the drawers of the desk, and soon he’d found what he’d been looking for. The bad guys always have small, pearl-handled guns in their desk drawers.
‘Right,’ he said.
He crossed to the window and hurled a chair through it. Then he flattened his back against the wall, extended his arm through the shattered glass, and pulled the trigger.
Down below, a spectral warrior felt something land on top of his head. Gingerly he reached up and felt the crown of his cowl. It was damp.
Meanwhile, Bjorn was staring at the prisoner with contemptuous disbelief.
‘A water-pistol,’ he croaked. ‘What sort of chicken-shit wimp keeps a pearl-handled water-pistol in the top drawer of his desk?’
‘A pacifist?’ Ganger suggested. Staff sighed and pointed at the three tall potted ferns on top of the filing cabinet, just before they disintegrated in a hail of automatic fire from the street below.
‘Not so much a pistol,’ he mumbled (inevitable, since he was now hiding under the desk, with his head wedged sideways into the carpet) ‘as a novelty plant-mister. I seem to remember the lucky dip at the office party a few years back . . .’
‘They seem to be shooting at us,’ Jane remarked, enunciating the words with bell-like clarity. ‘Should they be doing that, I wonder?’
Staff raised his head painfully and glowered at Bjorn. ‘I think we seem to have started it,’ he growled. ‘They’re just defending themselves.’
‘Fine,’ Jane replied. ‘I can quite see their point. I mean, a water-pistol at this range, you could get absolutely soaked. You could get pneumonia.’
There was a hollow thump down below them somewhere, followed about half a second later by an explosion in the office. The room was suddenly full of charred and shredded paper.
‘Somebody would have appeared to have taken out the filing cabinet with a wire-guided missile,’ Staff announced. He sounded for all the world like a BBC Radio Royal Wedding’s compère commentating on Armageddon. ‘I can only assume they have their reasons, because . . .’
There was a faint whoosh, and something whirred past Staff ’s hiding place and vanished into the hole in the far wall where the filing cabinet had once been. It was Bjorn, jumping up, grabbing Jane in one hand and the hostage in the other, and running for it.
Staff realised that he was on his own. It crossed his mind that he shouldn’t be.
Something else crossed his mind. On tiptoe.
‘It won’t do you any good, you know,’ he sighed wearily. ‘I mean, if I go, you go too, so you’re just fooling yourself. ’
Maybe, replied a voice somewhere in his memory, but it’s all as broad as it’s long. Besides, there’s some amazingly good places to hide in here.
‘Where?’
Well, said the voice, can you remember that time you went on that fact-finding visit to those caves, right down in the heart of that mountain somewhere?
‘Vividly.’
Thanks. Yes, this’ll do nicely. You can’t remember a light, can you? It’s as dark as a bag down here.
‘No, I can’t.’
Or a sandwich, maybe? Come on, you must be able to remember something to eat. I could be down here for a very long time.
Staff didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he crawled out from under the desk, ducked as a lump of ceiling smashed down a few inches away from him, and then picked up his feet and ran.
He made it to the hole in the wall just a fraction of a second before it closed up.
‘. . . me down!’ Jane yelled, and then landed with a bump. ‘Ouch,’ she commented.
‘Sorry,’ Bjorn replied. ‘I thought you said “put me down”, so I did.’
Jane sat up and rubbed her shin vigorously, sending small and entirely unintentional electric signals running the length and breadth of Bjorn’s spinal column. ‘Where are we, anyway?’ she growled.
‘Dunno,’ Bjorn said. ‘Wherever this is, though, I don’t reckon we should stay here. Those guys out there weren’t just ordinary Security, you know. More like spectral warriors.’
Jane nodded, and then grabbed hold of the hostage by his nose.
‘You,’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’
The hostage, still tucked under Bjorn’s arm like a quivering football, made a tiny mewing noise of pure terror. Jane sighed.
‘Can you do anything to make him talk?’ she asked Bjorn. He nodded.
‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘all he’ll probably say is “oh shiiiit”, and “ouch, you’re breaking my arm”, and stuff like that, but . . .’
There was a nervous cough from under Bjorn’s armpit. ‘You’re in the vaults of the Central Administrative Section, directly under the closed file store,’ it twittered, ‘and if you hurt so much as a hair of my head, then so help me I’ll rip your lungs out and make Chinese lanterns out of them.’
Bjorn stared down. ‘You what?’ he demanded.
‘Don’t blame me,’ whimpered the tiny voice. ‘ That’s not me talking. I’m absolutely terrified of you. It’s him who’s making the threats.’
‘Him?’
‘Well, me. Other me. Him. Mercy!’
Bjorn frowned. ‘You mean there’s two of you?’
‘Sort of. Well, no. There’s just the one of me, but in two halves. One mind, two bodies, each body containing an undivided half-section of the same integral whole.’ The voice hesitated. �
�I’m the meek, cowardly one. AND I’M THE COMPLETE BASTARD. It’s all to do with making schizophrenia work for you rather than being a handicap.’
‘All right,’ said Jane, ‘that’ll do. At least we know where we are now.’ She paused. ‘Where are we?’
Bjorn furrowed his brow. ‘We’re under the closed file store in the vaults of . . .’
‘Quite,’ Jane interrupted. ‘I meant, where are we in relation to the way out. The sort of answer I’m looking for,’ she added helpfully, ‘is either “This way” or “Follow me”.’
Bjorn nodded. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
It was turning out to be a bad day.
The sun was refusing to start. A crew of seven muscular mechanics had given it their best shot and all they’d managed to do was flood the engine and bend the starting handle. The bright spark who’d suggested putting a set of jump leads on the battery of the moon was now in hiding, helped considerably by the fact that there was now no light of any description.
As a result of a freak short-out on the mainframe at Weather, it was now slashing up with rain over two continents. The same fault was having drastic effects in Perjury, where the thunderbolt cannons had jammed themselves on automatic override and were giving insurance salesmen, Presidential spokesmen and the organisers of awards ceremonies a very hard time indeed. Fortunately, the manifold cam rocker on the Liefinder unit had sheared its locking stud, which meant that each shot landed precisely eighteen inches to the left.
Gremlins in the signal-box at Chronology processing meant that the Western hemisphere had just had sixteen consecutive bank holidays in the space of fifteen minutes.
The random selector needle at Requisitions, the central prayer-answering agency, had stuck solid on God save the Queen, with the result that Her Majesty had had a truly unpleasant morning being repeatedly snatched from the jaws of sudden and unexpected death by supernatural forces. A gang of maintenance men were crawling towards the stylus across the main resonator disc with big hammers and extremely mixed feelings; because if they got the bloody thing free and then it went and stuck on Give us this day our daily bread, they were definitely not going to be held responsible.
All dreams delivered within the last forty-eight hours had been returned marked Not Known At This Address. Some of them were ticking.
And finally, as if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, the music of the spheres was suddenly distinctly audible throughout the length and breadth of the cosmos, and had turned out to be That’s Entertainment, played with one finger on a Yamaha organ.
This is what happens when no-one’s in charge.
‘CHARGE!’
‘Er, chief . . .’ ‘ARE YOU QUESTIONING A DIRECT ORDER, TROOPER?’
‘Not as such, chief, certainly not, no, perish the thought. It’s just, me and the lads, we were wondering . . .’
‘WHAT?’
‘Like, like, sort of, charge where, chief, because I mean, charge, yes, behind you every step of the way there, absolutely one-hundred-and-ten per cent commitment on all sides, no sweat, guaranteed, only it’s just that as orders go, sort of like, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine per cent absolutely brilliant, but directionally speaking, I wouldn’t say it was vague exactly, really not vague at all, vague’s quite the wrong word for this situation, more sort of general, in fact, more flexible really, yes, that’s it, flexible, but maybe just this once, you know, in the circumstances, perhaps if we were to play down the flexibility angle just somewhat in the interests of greater, well, er, precision, if you sort of catch my general drift, perhaps, well, it was just a thought, you know, maybe, er.’
‘FOLLOW ME!’
‘Thanks, chief. Got that. Right on. Right.’
‘You’re lost, aren’t you?’
Bjorn stopped dead in his tracks and frowned. Having a vocabulary marginally smaller than that of the average phrase-book compiler has its drawbacks. What Bjorn wanted to do was to explain that the sort of place where they were now, you were always, by definition, lost; the crucial thing was to be lost in the right way; because then, once all your directional preconceptions had been stripped away and you were floating free, like a magnetic needle in a saucer of water, the chances were that (because, in a truly random environment, objects take the line of least resistance) the barometric pressure of convenience would draw you on in the right direction, much more swiftly and surely than if there was a bloody great yellow line drawn on the floor with THIS WAY painted in fluorescent letters every five yards.
What he actually said was ‘Yuh.’
‘Thought so,’ Jane sighed. She sat down on something - it was too dark to see exactly what - slipped off her shoe and massaged the sole of her foot. ‘I had this horrible feeling, you know?’
Bjorn braced himself and took one final slash at the cliff-face of language. ‘We’re, like, meant to be lost, right? ‘Cos this isn’t a place you can sort of find on purpose. It more sort of finds you.’
To his great surprise, Jane nodded. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘Like the public lavatories in Italy. Yes, I can relate to that.’
There was a thoughtful silence, broken only by a faint, muffled, rather wet noise as the hostage surreptitiously tried to gnaw through the length of clothes-line by which he was tethered to Bjorn’s wrist. Since the hostage had small, uneven teeth and the washing-line was the same hawser-like article Bjorn had helped himself to before leaving the Idyll, they were content to leave him to it until there was a risk of him choking on his own displaced fillings.
‘Only,’ Jane mused, ‘you still haven’t said where it is we’re supposed to be going. I take it you do actually know? Or is that cheating?’
Bjorn made perhaps the greatest effort of his life. Well, not the very greatest; that had been when he’d passed by a pool of drying cement in the street and not left footprints in it. ‘Well,’ he said, hand-turning the words with exquisite care, ‘yuh, I do sort of know where we’re going, it’s just I don’t sort of know, you know? It’s more like the place knows, and I don’t.’
Jane tested the statement carefully and decided that it had the logical equivalent of a bent axle. ‘You mean we’re lost,’ she said.
‘Yuh.’
Jane stood up. ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’
She didn’t know how she knew, she just knew. So she walked directly into the wall.
‘Ouch!’ she said, a moment later.
And in her mind, along with a tasteful display of coloured lights and a dull throbbing sound, like the sea, a voice said, ‘Nice try, but you were a foot to the left. Try again.’
She tried again. And vanished.
Bjorn stared. There was the wall, and Jane had just walked through it. No dynamite, no careful feeling for the seams, not even a zip fastener or a yard or so of velcro. That was cool.
There was a soft clink. The hostage had broken a tooth.
Wearily, as if noticing his presence for the first time and deciding he didn’t really hold with it, Bjorn grabbed the hostage in one hand and his knapsack in the other, then he emptied out the sack and stuffed the hostage into it.
The hostage was small, but not that small; there was no way he was going to fit in there, at least not without the sort of pruning and editing usually reserved for a young reporter’s first major story. The head would have to go for a start . . .
He fitted. The sack could have been made to measure for him. How this came to be possible nobody knows, although it may have had something to do with the fact that the hostage sensed that if he didn’t, he was going to end up reduced to his bare essentials, like a Jerusalem artichoke. Bjorn buckled down the flap, adjusted the weight on his shoulders, and took a long, shrewd look at the wall.
Some people are cool by nature. The rest of us have to try just that little bit harder.
He lowered his head and charged.
Jane sat up.
‘I’ink I’oke y’ose,’ she said.
A party of nuns shifted their hand luggage from h
and to hand and stared at her. A young couple sitting under the departure board giggled. Nobody moved to help her up, or anything like that.
A few seconds later, Bjorn stumbled heavily forwards, fell over her and landed in the lap of a sleeping Japanese businessman, who woke up and stared at him for a long half-second before ostentatiously taking out his handkerchief and wiping blood from his collar. The blood was coming from a nasty but superficial gash on Bjorn’s scalp; nothing serious. Bjorn’s head, it should be apparent by now, had the density of a collapsed star. In a head-butting contest, he could have taken on the whole of Mount Rushmore and won.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘For a minute there, I thought we were in an airport.’
There was a pause, just long enough for Jane to satisfy herself that her nose was indeed still at unity with itself.
‘You were right,’ she said. ‘I suppose it had to happen eventually.’
There was a voice, and it wasn’t inside anybody’s head, and what it said was:
Leydis and Gennelmein, thiz iz the lazzt corl for Bee Dubbyu Ay fly nummer Six Six Sebben to Blyblollolob. Passgers for Bee Dubbyu Ay fly nummer Six Six Sebben to Blyblollolob procee to gate nummer zerch where borin izz in progrez.
- just like flight departure announcers the world over.
(It’s worth putting on record the fact that they don’t deliberately mislead or misinform; it really gets to them after a while, and a lot of them end up with serious psychological trauma. It’s just that they have this awful superstitious hang-up about not saying the names of places or the numbers of departure gates, which makes them subconsciously slur the words, or at best say them through three layers of compacted paper tissue.)
‘Jeez,’ Bjorn gasped, ‘we are in an airport. Hey . . .’ He froze, then his hand flicked behind his back where he could feel a spreading, soul-chilling dampness making its way slowly down from between his shoulder-blades to the base of his spine. In his experience, only one thing seeped quite so thoroughly, and that was blood. He brought his hand back, placed it under his nose, and sniffed the tips of the fingers.
