The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  - But hey, who can be bothered with all that, right? So instead, try 2ccs of lithium cryptosulphate on a sugar lump. Works a charm, and you don’t have to share your head with Mary’s lamb.

  A greatly underrated book, Emily said to herself as she pulled open her desk drawer and took out her bare-essentials stash of chemicals. She didn’t have anything to measure the lithium cryp with, but she was a good guesser: two drops on a cube of Tate & Lyall’s best, and down the hatch.

  Count to five; then pick up the phone.

  ‘Yes?’ reception answered.

  ‘Could you be awfully sweet,’ Emily said, ‘and just nip over to the closed-file store and get me everything on the Skallagrimson job? 1982, I think it was, but you may have to dig down a bit. Some time in the Eighties, anyhow.’

  Pause. ‘All right.’

  ‘No rush. Any time between now and half past five.’

  ‘All right.’

  Emily kept her mind closed for the ‘all’, then opened it on the ‘right’. The result made her sit up very straight in her chair, but it proved conclusively that the lithium cryp was doing its job, but hadn’t wiped out the effect completely. Far from it. She wondered where Nikki on the front desk had learned how to swear in goblin.

  ‘Thanks ever so much,’ she said, and put the phone down. That was all right, then. If she could control it (was the lithium-cryp effect permanent, or did you have to keep it topped up? She’d find out soon enough), she was definitely onto a winner. All advantages, no drawbacks, and wouldn’t it look good on her CV? If, of course, she chose to mention it to her employers, future or present…

  She sat back in her chair. The thought hadn’t occurred to her before; but if there was someone at Carringtons trying to kill her-because of work; what other reason could there be? wouldn’t the simplest, safest thing be to resign and get another job? She could do that. Just think: no more Colin Gomez, no more credit-control meetings with Mr Hook. No more waking up in the mornings and thinking, Oh shit, I’ve got to go to that place again today. And, of course, no more people trying to kill her. Werewolves and dragons and Atkinsonii and dark elves, yes, but not her colleagues. Presumably.

  Emily frowned. It wasn’t as though she liked it at Carringtons; but it was her job, and she felt strangely reluctant to part with it. Silly, really; actually, stupid verging on suicidal. Even so; her job, her office (her beat-up filing cabinet with the sticky top drawer, her frayed carpet, her chair that went sproing if you leaned too far back, her overflowing in-tray, her Too Difficult pile, her sheaf of While-You-Were-Outs, her fluorescent-tube ceiling light that flickered very faintly all the time and guaranteed a headache after forty-five minutes). Her life.

  There’s an old saying in the magic biz: all work and no play makes Jack a junior partner by age thirty. She wanted that; not a desperate, dream-haunting longing, but as much as she’d ever wanted anything. It’d all be different, after all, when she was on the letterhead. No more being ordered around by idiots, told off about her late invoices, badgered into ripping off the clients to meet some wildly overblown quarterly target. Her destiny was the centre seat, command, a starship of her own to roam the galaxy in. If she changed jobs, it’d mean starting all over again, settling herself into a new and probably hostile hierarchy, learning a whole new set of people.

  Excuses, Emily realised. I’m just too lazy.

  My life, she thought; and for some reason that conjured up a mental image of Frank Carpenter, of all people. Someone she’d only met once or twice (that she could remember …), someone she hardly knew. Someone she couldn’t really have much in common with, since he wasn’t even in the trade. Someone.

  Oh for crying out loud. Shaking her head, she reached for the stack of notes and stickies and shuffled through them, dividing them into piles - Not Now, Maybe Tomorrow, Sometime, Never. For a moment, she was tempted to sweep the whole lot off her desk onto the floor in a grand gesture; but she’d only have to pick them up again later, so why bother?

  Indeed.

  Now she was feeling guilty. So she picked out a note at random and looked at it. Mr Allenby at English Nature, please call back re application to cull giant spectral hound on Dartmoor within a site of special scientific interest. Silly. Someone had to go and dispose of the wretched thing before it ate a tourist, but she was going to have to grovel and plead and be made to feel she was being done an enormous favour by a stupid little man who’d probably wee in his pants if she saw so much as a single fluorescent footprint. Wouldn’t it be better, she caught herself thinking, if people could be made to deal with their own spiders? Probably not. If you left that sort of thing to the general public, bless them, the spiders’d probably end up squashing people.

  So she rang Mr Allenby, who was actually very nice and helpful, and promised to push the paperwork through as quickly as possible so she’d have her dispensation order before the autumn rains started and the moor turned into impassable bog. No trouble, that’s what we’re here for.

  Emily thought about that. Just when you’ve squared up to the solemn realisation that life is a bitch, it turns round and does something nice, just to confuse you.

  At twenty-five past five, Nikki staggered in with an armful of dusty old files and manila envelopes. ‘What’ve you got there?’ Emily asked her.

  ‘Skallagrimson files,’ Nikki grunted. ‘Where do you want them?’ Of course she’d forgotten all about that. ‘Oh, on the floor, anywhere,’ she mumbled guiltily. ‘Thanks.’

  “Salright.’ Nikki dumped the files on the floor, wiped cobweb out of her eye, and left. Yes, but it was a necessary experiment, Emily told herself. Like Bikini Atoll. She got up and shifted the pile so she wouldn’t trip over it all the time. So much for command. Now she thought about it, maybe she wouldn’t like it so much after all.

  Dutifully she made a file note of her chat with Mr Allenby, filled in Mr Pickersgill on her time sheet, wrote a memo to Colin Gomez and paper-clipped Mr PickersgilPs cheque to it; and then it was five past six. Doesn’t time fly when you’re doing tedious chores while racked by deep-rooted existential doubt? She switched off the plugs, turned off the lights, hurried upstairs to the stationery cupboard and signed out an RF700 0 scanner.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she panted, as she slid into a chair in the front bar of the Cumberland Arms a quarter of an hour later. ‘Got held up. Not a problem you ever have to face, I expect.’

  Frank smiled at her. There was a glass half full of what looked like orange juice in front of him on the table. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Partly because of the Door, but mostly because I don’t have an awful lot to do most of the time. I guess you rush about a lot.’

  My life, Emily thought. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s called earning a living-you should try it some time.’

  He looked at her. ‘Should I?’

  Shrug. ‘Maybe not. I don’t think it’d suit you. I’m not sure it suits me, actually, but I don’t have much of a choice.’ No, not where she wanted the conversation to go, even with a head full of lithium cryp. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me, about your Mr Sprague.’

  Frank gazed at her for a moment, then said, ‘I went round there.’

  ‘To his office, you mean?’

  Nod. ‘I sort of slipped in,’ he said.

  ‘And did you get to see him?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ Frank hesitated for a moment. ‘I saw something, but I’m not sure what it was.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I mean,’ he went on quickly, ‘it looked just like George, but it definitely wasn’t him. More or less admitted it, even. But when I tried to—’ He smiled feebly. ‘Actually, I sort of made a grab at it, and it vanished.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And all I was left with,’ he went on, ‘was this.’

  From his pocket he took an envelope; a New Zealand stamp, Emily noticed, and for a moment she wondered what it must be like, living with the Door. He picked out a single human hair. ‘I grabbed at him,’ he said. ‘Actually got a grip
on his collar, and then phut, like turning off a light. And I’m pretty sure this wasn’t in my hand before. I mean, I don’t know anybody with long blonde hair.’

  ‘Except me.’

  They looked at each other for a moment. Then she leaned forward and picked the hair up, tweezering it between thumbnail and forefinger. ‘That’s not mine,’ she said after a short, rather tense silence. ‘For one thing, it’s your actual movie-star blonde, as opposed to—’

  ‘Mouse?’

  ‘Mellow light brown. Hang on,’ she added, pulling the scanner across the table towards her. ‘Just as well I brought this.’ Frank’s eyebrows huddled. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Technology,’ she replied. ‘Don’t worry about it. But it might—’ The little screen flickered and the annoying welcome message came up. ‘Come on,’ she growled, and the screen went blue. ‘It takes a minute or two,’ she said.

  ‘Ah. A Microsoft product.’

  ‘No, but almost as bad. Right, here we go.’ Emily picked up the hair and laid it on the screen. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s human, for what that’s— Natural, no signs of chemical treatment, but it has been subjected to an intense transmorphic field at some time in the last forty-eight hours.’ She prodded some buttons, swore at the screen as a little hourglass icon popped up, prodded another button and twiddled a little rollerball thing. ‘If it says program not responding, it’s going to get an unscheduled flying lesson … Ah, that’s better.’ She studied a clutter of symbols that Frank didn’t recognise, then looked up at him. ‘I’ll hang on to this,’ she said, sweeping the hair back into the envelope. ‘Just a hunch, but I think I may have an idea about this. It’s perfect, you see.’

  He gave her a puzzled look. ‘Perfect?’

  She nodded. ‘Absolutely perfect. Hair any woman would die for. No colour, no conditioner or jojoba-root essence or moisturiser or any of the crap we spend billions of dollars a year on as a species; just perfect, natural hair. Doesn’t that strike you as just a bit suspicious?’

  ‘Urn,’ Frank said. ‘Well, no.’

  Emily glanced at him. ‘That’s because you’re a man,’ she said. ‘But you can’t help that.’ She tucked the envelope away in her bag and switched off the scanner. It chimed at her, and she winced. ‘You don’t happen to have your friend George’s home number, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. Because I’m prepared to bet he won’t be there if I call him. Or at the office. Or anywhere. First thing in the morning, give him a ring. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure he won’t be at his desk tomorrow, not unless— Where are you going?’

  ‘Won’t be a tick. Don’t go away.’

  ‘All right. Would it be OK if I got myself a drink? Only, this is supposed to be a pub, you see, and it’s been a long day.’

  ‘Fine,’ Frank said, and scampered off in the direction of the lavatories.

  Emily got herself a drink with plenty of gin in it. By the time she returned to the table Frank was back. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Not there.’

  ‘You phoned him?’

  ‘At the office,’ he replied. ‘Tomorrow morning. Mr Sprague won’t be in today. Well, tomorrow.’ He shook his head. ‘I know, it confuses the hell out of me sometimes, too. So,’ he went on, leaning forward a little, ‘how did you know that?’

  She smiled. All right, he could nip off to the toilet and Portable Door into the future to make a phone call, but she knew things. ‘It’s magic,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It’s a Chinese invention,’ she went on, ‘like most things, really. You can take a bit of yourself-hair’s the usual choice, for obvious reasons, though a bit of toenail clipping will do, or even a gob of spit-and turn it into a replica of yourself. Sort of like cloning, only magic, so cheaper, quicker and you don’t need specialist equipment or a licence or anything. If you’re really clever, and there’s only a few people in the trade right now who can do this, you can turn it into a copy of someone else.’

  ‘Oh,’ Frank said. ‘That’s—’

  ‘Quite.’ Emily frowned. ‘It has its limitations, of course. The replicant is usually pretty basic. They’re not generally very bright, for one thing. They’ve only got a very limited memory capacity, and you can get the appearance fairly exact, but the personality’s usually a bit sketchy. If you want to do a thorough job of replacing someone, you’re better off transfiguring a whole animal or making a golem. For a quick and dirty job on the fly, though, it’s a useful technique.’

  Frank wallowed about in the unfamiliar concepts for a moment. ‘You think that’s what this is?’

  She nodded. ‘When you grabbed at him, I guess you overloaded the programming and it broke down. Turned back into a hair. Hence, no Mr Sprague at the office tomorrow. And if I’m right about where that hair came from—’

  ‘Yes?’

  She shook her head. ‘Let’s not jump the gun,’ she said. ‘And don’t you dare go forward through that Door thing of yours and find out. If I’m stuck in boring old linear time, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be too.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, rather solemnly. ‘And thank you. I think I’d be dead from bewilderment poisoning by now if it wasn’t for you. Which only goes to show,’ he added, ‘how high my bewilderment threshold is, since I didn’t actually understand a word of what you’ve been telling me. But that’s all right,’ he added quickly, as she opened her mouth. ‘Just so long as one of us knows what’s going on, I’m not all that fussed if it isn’t me.’ He pulled a face and nodded toward the scanner. ‘What is that thing, anyway? And don’t say technology again.’

  Emily smiled. ‘It’s a scanning device,’ she said. ‘Just as well I brought it along, wouldn’t you say? Talking of which …’ She hesitated, then said, ‘Have you got any plans for the rest of the evening?’

  A look came over Frank’s face which she had difficulty interpreting. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought we might go over to your Mr Sprague’s office and take some readings, see if we can pick up any morphogenic residue-decay signatures.’

  ‘Oh. I mean, yes, if you think it’d help, that’d be great. Wonderful. Thanks ever so much.’

  Again, she wasn’t quite able to read his expression, and for just a moment she was tempted to override the lithium cryp and listen in … But no, she couldn’t do that. It’d be unethical and a gross violation of his sentient rights. Also, she was a bit afraid of what she might hear.

  ‘Right, then,’ Emily said, finishing her drink and standing up. ‘Let’s get going.’

  For some reason, Frank didn’t seem as enthusiastic as she’d been expecting. Odd; after all, he’d asked her to help him solve the Sprague mystery and here she was, all energy and do-itnow, and he seemed-disappointed? Not quite. But almost, as he swilled down the dregs of his orange juice and got to his feet. ‘We’ll use the Door,’ he said.

  ‘I assumed we would.’ She said it ever so casually, but in spite of everything - years in the trade, seen it all, done it all-a tiny part of her was squeezing its hands and hopping up and down in excitement. (Look at me, everyone, I’m going through the actual Portable Door, isn’t that just so amazing?) Colin Gomez had never been through it, or Mr Hook, or even Amelia Carrington herself. So cool—

  (And, even further back in her mind, in the grubby back streets where she preferred not to go, a little voice said: you know, a thing like that, it’s wasted on him. I mean, not even in the biz, doesn’t know how it works, could be really dangerous in the hands of the clueless. But if we had it … And then the rest of her mind reflected that when a part of you starts talking in the plural like that, it’s only a matter of time before it starts mucking up its grammar and saying ‘precious’ a lot. She closed her mind to the little voice and it crept away to its lair in the guilt stacks.)

  There was a convenient alleyway behind the pub, with a nice broad brick wall. Emily watched Frank tap the Door out of its cardboard tube and flick it against the bricks like a veteran fly-poster. She
hadn’t really watched closely before, not enough to observe the fine details with a professional eye; the way the lines went so subtly from two to three dimensions, the way it flowed rather than popped into existence. There was enough material for a doctorate, and he hadn’t even turned the handle yet—

  He opened it, and over his shoulder she saw into the room beyond: an office, dark but faintly lit by the lamps in the street below, shining up through the window. It was the sort of perspective that creased your mind, and instinctively she looked away; but he was hissing ‘Come on’ at her, and she felt ashamed. She followed him, heard the Door click; and then he leaned past her to catch it as it unrolled off the wall.

  We wants it, yes, precious, we wants it for our own—

  Stop that, Emily ordered herself. Even so; there was a line in the marriage service that referred to worldly goods. Whether the Door counted as worldly was perhaps a moot point, but if well, if they somehow metamorphosed into a couple (in her mind’s ear the word sounded strange, bizarre, even faintly obscene), surely Frank would have no objection if she wanted to borrow it, just now and then, for a specially demanding job.

  She shook her head, rattling the voice about until it shut up.

  ‘Switch the lights on,’ she snapped irritably, ‘before I fall over something.’

  A moment later, there was a click and a wash of bright white light from the overhead tubes. Mr Sprague’s office turned out to be just another enclosed space for making money in; the desk was bigger than hers, maybe, the chair a bit more sumptuous and commanding; but the framed photo of Anonymous Wife And Child was in almost exactly the same place on the desktop as its counterpart in Colin Gomez’s room, and the two people in it wore exactly the same long-suffering expression. It’s a basic law of magic that all places are one place, and where offices are concerned it’s literally as well as metaphysically true.