Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt

by Earth, Air, Fire

  When he'd read the memo that morning and seen the words just off the Charing Cross Road and collect a parcel for me, he'd known immediately what to expect. Charing Cross Road was where all the funny little second-hand bookshops were; it was the sort of neighbourhood where eccentricity was the rule rather than the exception, and even a specialist in magical texts and spell books would count as boringly normal. Obviously, therefore, the professor was sending him to collect a book. 16 Jowett Street, however, wasn't a bookshop at all; in fact, it was a small Italian café Sensibly he'd brought the memo with him, and he took it out and checked it again, just to be sure. But there it was, unambiguous as a kick in the face: 16, Jowett Street. A little bell tinged as he walked in, and a short, stocky man with a perfectly spherical head, thick glasses and a grin that looked as though it was larger than his face asked him what he wanted.

  'Um,' he said.

  The short man laughed. 'What you want to eat?' he repeated.

  'Nothing,' Paul replied; then, quickly, he added: 'Look, I've probably come to the wrong place, but have you got anything for a Professor Van Spee?'

  The short man's grin widened so alarmingly that Paul had visions of his face coming unzipped and falling off. 'Theo,' he said. Uno momento, per favore.' He vanished, then popped up again at the other end of the counter holding a white cardboard box, the sort cakes are packed in. 'Ecco,' he said. 'Zabaglione alla Romana.' He thrust the box at Paul like a fly-half passing the ball. 'For my good friend il professore. Buon'appetito.'

  Zabaglione? That was some sort of Italian bandit, wasn't it? No, it wasn't, it was a cake, or trifle or something. 'Um, thanks,' Paul said. 'How much do I-?'

  The man roared with laughter, as if the idea of paying for something was the funniest thing he'd come across in years. 'Is on the 'ouse,' he chuckled. 'And something for you,' he added. 'Any friend of Theo's is friend of mine.' He lunged at Paul with some species of choux pastry, chocolate-swathed and gushing cream at every splitting seam. 'You sit, eat, have a cup of coffee. Plenty of time,' he said; and Paul, catching sight of the clock on the wall, realised it was only just gone ten, and he wasn't due to meet the professor till 11.15. Also, he hadn't had any breakfast, and there are no grey areas or complex moral issues where chocolate-covered cream cakes are concerned. If one presents itself, you eat it. Simple as that.

  So he sat down with his cake, and the short man brought him a large frothy coffee with cocoa powder on the top, and while he was busy guzzling the choux thing a slice of exquisite-looking cheesecake somehow found its way onto the table just by his elbow, so he ate that too, and time passed swiftly and agreeably, the way it usually doesn't during the course of the average working day. A small part of him was trying to brew up a degree of indignation at being sent out like some kind of serf to fetch yummy puddings (and him a fully fledged assistant magician), but it was fighting a losing battle, and it knew it. So far, working for Theo Van Spee had been a tense business. Mostly he'd been summoned to the presence, given books to read and been politely dismissed; and each time the process was repeated, the professor would look at him thoughtfully for ten seconds or so and tell him that he wasn't ready yet. That was fine, in a way; no filing or photocopying or prodding 8 x 4s of assorted bits of Outback or filling in bewildering forms, nothing scary or disgusting or even particularly bizarre. Theo Van Spee was odd, of course, because everyone at JWW was odd; he was tall and thin and elderly and grave, so you hardly dared breathe in his presence, and his room was as dark as a bag (he had a great many ancient manuscripts, he'd explained, which would suffer horribly if exposed to the harsh glare of electric light; so the blinds were drawn, and the only illumination was a single oil lamp and a handful of chubby white candles), and of course he did have that unnerving habit of telling you things about yourself and other people that he couldn't possibly have known, not to mention his even creepier knack of seeming to know exactly what you'd been doing and what you were about to do, and always getting it absolutely right ... But when Paul had been assigned to Mr Wells junior, he'd tried to maroon him for ever in a small room with no doors or windows; and Countess Judy had tried to kill him in his sleep; and Benny Shumway had made him fight a dragon (albeit a very small one, and he'd killed it quite accidentally, by tripping over it and sitting on it) and had sent him into the kingdom of the dead to do the daily banking; and Ricky Wurmtoter had used him as live bait in his feud with Countess Judy, and shot him at point-blank range with a crossbow, killing him stone dead . . . Fetching cakes, by comparison, wasn't so bad after all, and neither, if he was going to be perfectly honest, was being sent to his office to read books, even if he couldn't make head nor tail of them.

  'Scusi.' The short man's voice snapped Paul out of his contemplative daze. 'Is ten forty-five. Thank you so much. Goodbye.'

  No point even being faintly surprised that the short, round-headed man knew when Paul had to be back at the office. He got up, said thank you politely for the nice cakes, and left, taking care not to squash the white box with the professor's zabaglione in it. Mr Tanner's mum was still on reception when he got back - for some reason she'd turned into a willowy Swedish blonde; but she changed shapes the way a daytime soap star changes outfits, so he wasn't at all fazed thereby - but she let him past with nothing more intrusive than a further reminder about the rehearsal tomorrow evening. He started to climb the stairs, and on the second-floor landing he collided with Sophie, who was coming out of the room where the big laser printer lurked. She was holding a huge wodge of papers, and of course he knocked them out of her hands all over the floor.

  'It's all right,' she snarled, as she knelt down to pick them up (small, dark, painfully thin; enormous eyes, like one of those fish that live right down at the bottom of the sea). 'I can manage. What are you doing with a cake box?'

  'Something I had to fetch for the professor,' Paul mumbled. He tried to gather a stray sheet of paper, but she blocked him with her shoulder and grabbed it. 'My fault,' he said, 'wasn't looking where I was-'

  'No,' she said. 'And I just spent half an hour getting them in order, but don't let it bother you, I'm sure you had really important stuff on your mind at the time.'

  He wasn't sure he followed that. 'What?'

  'Now you've been promoted.' The word came out like the first hiss of steam from a volcano on the point of eruption, and Paul took a step back, felt the edge of the stair under his heel, and grabbed the banister to keep himself from toppling over. 'So please don't let me hold you up,' she went on. 'I'm sure you've got an important executive meeting to go to, or clients to see, or you're expecting a really important call from Minneapolis or Dar-es-bloody-Salaam.' She grabbed his ankle, lifted it like a farrier shoeing a horse, and retrieved a stray page from under his foot. 'I just hope I haven't held you up too terribly much, that's all.'

  It simply hadn't occurred to Paul that Sophie hadn't been promoted too, and his mind emptied of helpful things to say as though someone had just phoned in a bomb threat. 'Look,' he muttered, 'it wasn't my idea, and you know what they're like, it's probably some horrible devious plan-'

  'Yes, right,' Sophie snapped. 'They've doubled your wages and given you holidays and everything because they're toying with you, trying to lull you into a true sense of security. The bastards,' she added, with a ferocious scowl.

  That was just a millitad more than Paul could stand. 'Oh come on, Sophe,' he wailed. 'Be reasonable. What do you think I ought to've done?'

  'Refused,' she snapped. 'Of course. Otherwise, it's - it's collaborating. But I don't expect you to see that.'

  The same tiny cell of his mind that had got all stroppy about fetching cakes now speculated about whether she'd have turned down a pay rise if she'd been offered it, but Paul knew better than to pay any heed to subconscious troublemakers. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'But I just assumed they'd promoted you as well, because-'

  'Balls,' she interrupted crisply. 'You knew perfectly well. It's because you're a man, so obviously you get the promotion and the extra money
and the BMW and the key to the executive toilet, and I'm stuck in the photocopier room copying bloody leases all morning. Honestly, Paul, I really thought you weren't like that, I really thought you had a shred of decency- Do you mind,' she added, 'you're standing on my hand.'

  Which was true, unfortunately. He hopped like a sparrow, and she made rather a show of rubbing her knuckles and biting her lip stoically. 'Sophe-'

  'Please don't call me that,' she said, in a voice you could've smashed into chunks and put in gin and tonic. 'Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better go and sort this lot into order. Again.'

  Paul opened his mouth for a bit more abject pleading, but it occurred to him that anything he said would only make things worse, and by now he must be late for Theo Van Spee. 'Sorry,' he mumbled, and charged up the stairs as fast as he could go, tripping over his feet once or twice because the light on the stairs had blown, until he was standing outside the professor's room. Just before knocking, he glanced down at his watch. 11.15 precisely. Then, just as his knuckles were about to impact on the door, it swung open, with the result that he tapped Professor Van Spee lightly on the chest, as though examining his tie for signs of dry rot.

  (Didn't predict that, though, you bastard, he said to himself by way of consolation; otherwise you'd have stood a step to the right.)

  'Please sit down,' the professor said. 'You have collected my parcel. Please put it carefully on the sheet of newspaper I have laid out on the desk.'

  He did so, observing without being even slightly interested that it was the Court Circular page of the Montreal Herald. 'You wanted to see me,' he said.

  The professor nodded very slightly, and sat down on his side of the desk. He was backlit by one of the chubby candles, which cast a pale honey-coloured halo round his shoulders while effectively silhouetting his profile. Poseur, Paul decided. 'Since you have at last tackled the first section of the book I asked you to read, you are now ready to help me with my current project. I have to recalibrate a number of rather delicate thaumaturgical instruments, and I need you to work out for me the mean differences and standard variations. You have not brought a calculator with you; I keep one in the second drawer down on your left.'

  'Excuse me,' Paul interrupted, 'but there wasn't anything in the book about what you just said. It was all about the world being a biscuit and stuff.'

  The professor sighed. 'You opened the book and started to read. You glanced at a couple of paragraphs, and then fell asleep.

  You had a strange dream, which you cannot now remember. Correct?'

  Paul nodded.

  'Excellent. We will begin with the differential field-polarity gauges.' Van Spee reached across the desk, picked up a flat rose-wood box slightly larger than a paperback book, and flipped the dainty little catches to open it. Inside, snuggled in frayed green baize, lay a pair of tiny little brass gadgets, with jaws and thumb-wheels and bits that slid in and out, and scales of numbers lightly engraved in teeny-tiny lettering, so faint and elegant and fine he couldn't actually read them. The professor picked one up, wound the jaws open and blew on it very lightly; then he picked a pin out of the lapel of his coat, whistled the opening bars of the 'Blue Danube', and held the sharp end of the pin between the jaws.

  'Eight hundred and thirty-six,' he said. 'Do you concur?'

  Paul was about to object that he hadn't got the faintest idea what the professor was talking about when his eyes blurred over, the way they do when you've just been crying or peeling onions. But it wasn't anything like that, he realised; they were just out of focus, like binoculars someone else has adjusted. Parallax; they'd done it at school but he'd been daydreaming, as usual. He lifted his head a little and tried to concentrate on something a bit further away. When he reached the professor's brass gadget, he found it was perfectly clear, amazingly so - in fact, the minute little numbers on the thing's sides were as deep and broad as ditches, and the figures themselves were almost too big to recognise. He blinked, then noticed the point of the pin; it was crawling with tiny moving things, small and busy as ants but darting about in a markedly orderly fashion, and in time to the professor's rather tuneless whistling.

  'The ants,' he said. 'Are they dancing?'

  'Not ants,' the professor replied, and Paul realised that they had little lacy wings, like mayflies. The professor gave up the waltz and started humming 'Blue Suede Shoes'; whereupon the mayflies stopped dead in their tracks for a split second, and then began whirling around even faster.

  'Jitterbugs?' Paul asked.

  'No,' the professor told him. 'Look carefully.'

  Not insects of any kind; they had minuscule legs and arms, they were even wearing clothes - long white smocks like old-fashioned nightshirts. Beyond question they were dancing, though- 'Eight hundred and thirty-six,' the professor repeated. 'Is that what you make it?'

  Paul wasn't aware of making a decision to count them; there was a moment when he quite simply knew that there were eight hundred and seventeen of them. Presumably in his excitement he said the total out loud. The professor sighed. 'Nineteen,' he said. 'Too large a margin of error.' He moved a thumbwheel on a couple of clicks and said, 'Try again.

  He'd been right. Not ants or mayflies, and even though the professor had stopped humming, they kept on dipping and whirling, waving their tiny arms about in time with the gap in nature where the tune had been.

  'Angels,' Paul said.

  'Correct.' The professor was peering down at the little brass gadget. 'Eight hundred and twenty-one,' he said. 'Do you agree?'

  'Eight hundred and nineteen,' Paul heard himself say. 'Only two out this time.'

  'That'll do,' the professor said, and he put the gadget he'd been playing with back in its box and took out its twin. 'Now I make it eight hundred and twenty-three.'

  'Twenty-one,' Paul insisted.

  'Excellent,' replied the professor. 'Down to a standard deviation of two - that's very helpful.' He shook the pin, like a nurse with a thermometer, and went through the same procedure, holding it between the jaws of the gadget and fiddling with the little wheels. 'Eight hundred and fifty-two.'

  'Yes,' Paul said, 'I make it that, too. Professor, how come I can see them when they're that small?'

  Either Professor Van Spee hadn't heard him, or he was deliberately taking no notice. He shook the pin again, and Paul realised he was clearing the angels off, then waiting for a new batch to settle on it so he could count them with the little brass doodad. This time round, Paul's total (he had no idea how he was doing the counting) was three less than the professor's, but that didn't seem to worry Van Spee as he put the brass callipers back in the box and closed the lid.

  'Most satisfactory.' The professor finished making notes in a small red book and glanced at the grandfather clock leaning against the opposite wall. 'Now you must excuse me for a moment, while I use the dimensional abacus. Once I have finished the job, I shall know whether it needs retuning.'

  The dimensional abacus looked like a doll's-house harp, only round and with very small dots or blobs strung out on the wires. There were eight of them, all different combinations of colours, like marbles; there was a silvery one, and a red one, and a blue-green one, and further back a big brown one with a single dot, and one that appeared to have a thin, sharp-edged disc round it-

  'Professor-' Paul started to say, but Van Spee was engrossed in what he was doing, teasing the balls along the wires with the tip of a biro. A tiny spark jumped across the frame, grazed the edge of the big yellow blob in the centre, and vanished in a bright blue flare.

  'Lefkowitz's Comet,' the professor explained. 'Due to collide with Mars in five hundred and seventy-six years' time. The result would have been substantial damage to the planet, resulting in a cloud of asteroids which would have bombarded Earth. A similar collision many millions of years ago led to the ice age which wiped out the dinosaurs.'

  Paul nodded slowly; he was feeling numb from the shoulders up. 'But it's not going to happen now,' he mumbled. 'Is it?'

  T
he professor dipped his head. 'A tiny alteration in the solar orbit of Neptune will cause the gravitational field of Jupiter to draw the comet half a million miles or so off its original course. This divergence will increase as the comet continues its journey; it will miss Mars by a comfortable margin, fall into the sun and burn up harmlessly. There will be some perceptible effects here on Earth - increased rainfall in the southern hemisphere for a year or two, and there will be bumper harvests of cocoa and soya beans in 2579 - but beyond that, nothing of any consequence.'

  Paul breathed out slowly through his nose. 'And you did that,' he said, 'nudging the blob things round with a pen.'

  'In a sense,' the professor replied mildly. 'This instrument,' he went on, 'is somewhat akin to a computer mouse; by moving it, one can initiate parallel movements in the world outside. One can, for example, make minor adjustments to a planet's orbit. It's a modern adaptation of a very old system of procedures commonly known as sympathetic magic - the same system that makes it possible to harm someone by sticking needles into a wax doll. Simple as it seems, it is in fact a tremendously complex and involved process, requiring many millions of complicated mathematical calculations.'

  'Right,' Paul said, fascinated in spite of himself. 'Which is what you need the abacus for.'

  'Excellent.' The professor's shadowy top lip moved a touch, just possibly a smile. 'No doubt you've heard one or other of the popularised versions of chaos theory - the most commonly cited example is the butterfly that flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, thereby giving rise to storms and tempests over Northern Europe. That is, of course, a gross oversimplification. However, the abacus may be considered as the equivalent of the butterfly in that scenario. The difference is that the movement of the ball-bearing along the wire is deliberate and calculated with the utmost care and attention to all possible operating factors.'