His voice was quiet, and cold as hemlock moving up toward the heart. He took another step in my direction. I don’t have a big front room; he was already halfway across it.
Three more steps and he could do—I didn’t know what, but I’d read enough spy thrillers to make some guesses: reach inside my head and pinch off an arteiy, maybe. Unless a good forensic sorcerer helped do my autopsy, I’d go into the Thomas Brothers’ demographic records as just another case of apoplexy, younger than most.
I slapped backward, yanked open the closet door, whipped out the blasting rod, and pointed it at the spook’s midsection. “Back off!” I told him. This rod is primed and ready—all I have to do is say the Word and you’re cooked.”
Of course, my flat would be cooked, too; a rod operates on This Side as well as the Other. But I figured I had a better chance of escaping from a burning flat than from a CI spook.
He stood very still. He didn’t come forward, but he didn’t move back, not even when I thrust the rod out toward him.
As he had before, he said, “I think you’ll want to reconsider that. Unless you’re packing something very much out of the ordinary, you’ll hurt your books and furniture much more than me.”
I knew the military had developed some high-level protection for their own spectral operatives; it seemed reasonable that a Central Intelligence spook would enjoy the same shielding. Come to that, some of the goetic technology has trickled down to the Underworld, which makes constables unhappy. On the other hand—“This is a Mage Abramelin Mogen David Special,” I said.
“I don’t care how well you’re warded against Christian or Muslim magic: this is the fire that dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Now the spook backed up. Being transparent, his features were hard to make out, but I thought he looked thoughtful.
“You could be bluffing,” he said.
“So could you.”
“Impasse.” He went back to the chair, sat down again. I lowered the rod, but I didn’t let go of it The spook said,
“Since we are uncertain of each othefs powers, shall we proceed as if the recent unpleasantness had not taken place?
Let me ask you again, with no threat intended or implied, why you believe this case my be connected to national security issues.”
“Well, for one thing, why would you have walked through my door if it weren’t?” I said.
The spook grimaced mistily. “Heisenberg’s Thaumaturgic Principle: the mere act of observation magically affects that which is being observed. I console myself by remembering I’m not the first to fall victim to it, nor shall I be the last.”
I didn’t want any kind of spook, not even a philosophical one, in my front room. I went on, “If it makes you feel any better, I was worried about it before I ever set eyes on you.
Too many big Powers involved: Beelzebub, the whole Persian mess I haven’t got to the bottom of yet, now Huitzilopochtli.” I didn’t mention Charlie Kelly. I wasn’t sure he deserved my loyalty, not any more, but he still had it.
“I must advise you to keep your suspicions to yourself,” the spook said after a longish pause {he might as weU have been on the telephone ran through my mind—one of those maddening bursts of irrelevance that will pop up no matter what you do). “Reaching the wrong ears, your prophecy could become self-fulfilling.”
“It might help if you’d tell me which ears are the wrong ones.” If I sounded plaintive, can you blame me?
He shook his murky head. “No, for two reasons. First, the information is classified and therefore not to be casually disseminated under any circumstances. And second, the more you know, the more apt you are to betray yourself to those who may have reason to be interested in your knowledge.
Your basic assumption should be that no one may be privy to your speculations. If anyone with whom you come into contact shows undue interest in this area, summon me at once from Central Intelligence headquarters in D.StC.”
“How do I get hold of you in particular?” I asked—I mean. Central Intelligence has a lot of spooks on the payroll.
“My name is Legion,” he said. “Henry Legion.” He turned around, walked out through my chair and wall, and was gone.
Next day, thank God, was Friday. Traffic was light going in, as it often is on Friday mornings. I wasn’t fooled; I knew I’d have the usual devilish time getting home. I tried not to think about that. Maybe, I told myself as I floated up the elevator shaft, I’d have myself a nice easy day, knock off early, and beat the weekend crunch on St James’ Freeway.
I walked into my office, took one look at the IN basket, and screamed. Sitting there was one of the ugliest Confederal forms ever designed. In big block letters, the cover said, REQUEST FOR ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT. Slightly smaller letters added, PROPOSED IMPORTATION OF NEW SPECIES INTO BARONY OF ANGELS.
Having got the scream out of my system, I merely moaned as I sank into my chair. Who, I wondered, wanted to bring what into Angels City, and why? I just wished Huitzilopochtli had to fill out all the forms he’d need to establish himself here legally: we’d be free of him till Doomsday, or maybe twenty minutes longer.
Huitzilopochtli and his minions, unfortunately, didn’t bother with forms. With trembling fingers, I picked up the report request and opened it. Somebody, it seemed, was proposing to schlep leprechauns over from the Auld Sod in hibemiation, revive them once they got here, and establish a colony in Angels City.
At first glance it looked reasonable. We have a good number of Erse here, and a lot more who pretend they are when St. Padraig’s Day rolls around. The leprechauns wouldn’t have any trouble feeling at home in Angels City. Tracking the little critters to their pots of gold would help a few poor folk pay off the mortgage. The odds were about like winning the lottery, but who doesn’t plunk down a few crowns on the lottery every now and again?
The way of environmental issues, though, is to get more complicated the longer you look at them. Figuring out how leprechauns would affect the local thecology wasn’t going to be easy: tracing the interactions of beings from This Side is complicated enough, but when you start having Powers involved—I moaned again, medium loud. One of the things I’d have to examine was the impact importing leprechauns would have on the Chumash Powers (assuming those weren’t extinct). If the Chumash Powers were still around, hanging by a metaphorical fingernail, would bringing in leprechauns rob them of the tiny measure of devotion they needed to survive?
Bea walked by the open door just in time to hear that moan. She stuck her head into the office. “Why, David, whatever is the matter?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
This,” I said, pointing to the orange cover of the environmental impact report request. “Do you by any chance have a spell for making days forty-eight hours long so I can do everything I’m supposed to?”
“If I did, I’d use it myself,” she said, “but I don’t think God’s been in the habit of holding back the sun since Joshua’s day.”
“This is going to be a bear to handle,” I said, “especially on top of the Devonshire dump case and the Chumash extinction study—” St. Elmo’s fire came on above my head, just like you see in the cartoons. “That’s why you passed it on to me: so I could run it parallel to the Chumash project.”
That’s right, David.” She smiled sweetly. Bea isn’t what you’d call pretty, but she can look almost angelic sometimes: being sure you’re on the right path will do that for you, I guess. She went on, “I figured it would be better to have both of them in your hands than to make two people run back and forth checking with each other all the time and maybe working at cross purposes.”
“Okay,” I said; put that way, it made sense. Bea didn’t get to be boss of my unit on the strength of an angelic smile; she has a head on her shoulders.
The easiest way to handle the issue would be to work up two scenarios,” she said: “one for the leprechauns’ environmental effects without worrying about the Chumash powers, the other assuming those Powers do still manifes
t themselves here.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” I scribbled a note on a scrap of foolscap on my desk. “Thanks, Bea.”
“Any time,” she said, sweetly still, and went off to inflict impossible amounts of work on someone else. To be fair, I have to admit she worked like a team ofPercherons herself. And she had put her finger on the most efficient way to handle the two studies side by side. They still wouldn’t be easy or quick. I’d have to design simulations approximating the immediate effect of leprechauns on the thecology of Angels City with and without taking into account the Chumash Powers. Then an EPA wizard would animate the simulations and follow them under the crystal ball as far into the future as he could, noting changes every year or two until the images faded into uncertainty.
I’d have to justify every assumption I used in my initial simulations, too. The people who wanted to import leprechauns in carpetioad lots and the folk who were convinced bringing in even one wee fellow would disrupt the local thecosystem would both be preparing their own models and running them under crystal balls. I’d need to demonstrate that mine were the most accurate representations of what was likely to happen.
All of which meant that I didn’t get out to Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins that afternoon, let alone Chocolate Weasel.
And neither I nor anybody else did any fancy spellchecker sniffing around the Devonshire dump to try to find out just what (if anything) was leaking out.
People long for the days (or at least they say they do) when the king ruled instead of reigning, when the power of the barons was undiluted, when the prime minister kept quiet and did what he was told. They say the government’s gotten too big, too complex.
Maybe they’re right some of the time. I couldn’t teD you for sure; politics is a brand of theology that never excited me. But I will tell you this: some important EPA work wasn’t getting done because my department didn’t have enough people to deal with projects as fast as they came up. Am I supposed to assume we’re the only government outfit with that problem?
I know I worked overtime that night; I made it to the synagogue with bare minutes to spare before the rabbi started singing L’khah dodi to welcome in the Sabbath. Judy was sitting so close to the front on the women’s side that she didn’t even see me come in. I didn’t manage to nod at her—let alone say hello—until the service was done.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said after we hugged.
“Work.” I made it sound like the four-letter word it was.
“Listen, have you eaten yet?” I grimaced when she nodded.
“All right, you want to come along with me anyhow? I’ll get you pie and coffee or something. I flew straight here from the office.”
“Sure,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”
We ended up at a Lenny’s not far from the synagogue: a step up from the Golden Steeples, a step down from a real restaurant. I just wanted to feed my face—and they do have pretty fair pie.
And besides, I thought, remembering Henry Legion, it wasn’t a place that was likely to have a Listener planted in it.
I hadn’t called Judy back to tell her about the spook: by the time he got out of my flat, I was imagining people (and Things) listening to my phone calls. When I was through, she stared at me for a few seconds. Then she said, “You’re not making that up,” in a tone of voice that meant she’d been wondering right up to the end.
“Not a bit of it.” I was a little hurt she had trouble believing me, but only a little, because I would have had trouble believing a story like that from anybody else. I mean, people don’t just start having visits from spooks with threatening manners… except I did. I added, “From what he said, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”
“David Fisher, if you even thought of keeping me in the dark, I’d show your picture to a mirror and then break the mirror,” she said indignantly.
“I sort of expected as much,” I said. “Thing is, from what Henry Legion said, it’s liable to get dangerous.”
“You didn’t worry about that when you took me to the Thomas Brothers fire—”
I tried to interrupt: “I didn’t take you there; you invited yourself.”
She rode over me like the demon horses of the Wild Hunt. “-and you invited me to the swap meet with you day after tomorrow.”
“I did that before the spook showed up,” I muttered.
“Do you want me not to come?” she said. “Do you want me not to go back to your flat with you tonight? Do you want, me not to bother going ahead with the arrangements for the;. wedding? Do you think I’m afraid? Don’t you see I want to’ get to the bottom of this as badly as you do?”
I did the only thing I could possible do at that particular moment: I surrendered. I did it literally—I took a white handkerchief out of my pocket and waved it in the air between us. Judy, bless her, went from furious to giggling in the space of a second and a half. The waitress who’d been about to refill my coffee cup undoubtedly figured I’d gone out of my mind, but that was a small price to pay for keeping my fiancee happy.
Only trouble was, I was land of afraid myself.
After sunset Saturday, I flew up to St. Ferdinand’s Valley to pick up the heavy-duty constabulary spellchecker. An advantage of dealing with the constabulary is that they never close (given human nature, they’d better not). A disadvantage is that their parchmentwork is even more cumbersome than what the EPA uses (and if you didn’t think that was possible, you’re not the only one). By the language of their forms, they figured I’d abscond with the gadget the second their backs were turned unless I promised not to in writing ahead of time.
“Why don’t you just lay a gear on me?” I asked sarcastically.
“Oh no, sir,” said the clerk who kept shoving parchments at me. “That would be a violation of your rights.” Apparently signing away my life wasn’t.
Because I spent so long signing forms, I didn’t get back to my place until going on ten. I lugged the spellchecker upstairs (it was nominally portable, but being part troll didn’t hurt if you wanted to carry it more than a few feet), put it down so I could open the door, picked it up again with a grunt, and set it down in the middle of the front room.
“It’s about time you got back,” Judy said. “I was starting to worry about you.”
“Forms,” I said, and tried to make it sound as blasphemous as one of your more usual maledictions. I must have managed, because Judy laughed. I stretched. Something in my back went pop. It felt good. I suspected I’d lost about half an inch of height manhandling the spellchecker up to my flat. Maybe the pop meant I was getting it back again. I glared at the gadget “Miserable thing.”
“Twenty years ago, there weren’t any portables,” Judy reminded me. “Ten years ago, one with the capacity of the ’checker in your closet would have been bigger and heavier than this beast. Ten years from now, they’ll probably pack even more microimps into a case you can cany around in your hip pocket.”
“Too bad they haven’t done it yet,” I grumbled, and stretched some more.
Judy gave me a sidelong look. “Are you trying to tell me you want me to get on top tonight?”
“If that’s what you’d like,” I said. Far as I can see, it’s wonderful either way, or any others your imagination conjures up.
She asked her watch what time it was. A tiny vertical frown line appeared between her eyes.
“Whatever we do, let’s do it soon. We’re going to have to get up early to make it to the Valley when the swap meet dealers start coming in.”
So we did it soon, and it was fine. Judy is one of the most thoroughly pragmatic people I’ve ever met, but that doesn’t keep her from being able to enjoy herself. It just means she makes sure she blocks out the time in which to enjoy herself.
My alarm clock woke us up much too early on an otherwise perfectly good Sunday morning, then laughed at us as we staggered around like a couple of the not-quite-living dead. I swore I’d have to get a new clock one day soon.
I think I’ve said that before, but this time I really meant it.
I showered, then shaved while Judy went in after me. I was dressed by the time she came out, and fixed breakfast while she got that thick, wavy hair of hers dry. Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee—very basic. I threw the dishes in the sink for later, did my he-man weightlifting routine with the constabulary spellchecker, and offwe went They hold the Sunday morning swap meet at the Mason Fly-In. By night it’s the biggest outdoor light-and-magic house in the Valley. By day it’s just an enormous parking lot, so they get some extra use—and some extra crowns—out of the space.
Because we were good and early, we got to park dose to the dealers’ entrance, for which my overworked back was heartily grateful. The only people there were a couple of guards drinking coffee from a big jug. They looked like (and turned out to be) sunlighting off-duty constables.
Their names were Luke and Pete; I had trouble remembering which one was which. They both had the same short, dark hair, the same watchful eyes, the same big shoulders. They’d been told we were coming—somebody was on the ball there. They helped set up the spellchecker at the side of the gate, then poured more coffee for Judy and me. It was nice and hot; the jug must have had a tiny salamander in the base.
Some of the new storage vessels have a salamander on one side and an ice elemental on the other, so they can keep hot things hot and cold things cold. The only problem is, you don’t want to drop them. If the partition between the two elementals breaks, they fight like cats and dogs.
I explained what I was looking for, and why. Both guards looked grim. Pete—or maybe it was Luke—said, “I hope you nail the bastard. I got three kids at home; I don’t like thinking about anything like that happening to one of ’em.” Luke—or was it Pete?-pointed to the spellchecker and said, “I wish that thing could spot theft along with sorcery. It would sure make the department’s life a lot easier.”
Pete(?)—anyway, the other one—said, “I was at a briefing about theft detectors a couple of weeks ago. From what I heard, they operate by spotting guilt in a perpetrator’s soul. Trouble is, most perpetrators don’t feel enough guilt to set ’em off.”
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Page 16
