“As in perhaps next month.”
She started to leave again when Hasenpfeffer yelled, “Stop! Just what is the matter with you two? There are probably thousands of people awaiting us!”
“So let them wait,” Ian said.
“Yeah, or tell ’em to get back to work.”
“Or give them the day off.”
“Good idea,” I seconded. “I hereby declare a national holiday until further notice.”
“You are both being preposterous!”
“So, how do you figure?” I asked. “If I’m the boss, I can give my people a day off if I feel like it, or a month off for that matter.”
“At full pay,” Ian added.
“Uh, time and a half. I made it a holiday.”
“That makes it double time.”
“Well, be it so moved.” I resumed work on my blueberry pancakes.
“You guys can’t be serious!”
“Can’t we?” Ian poured more hot Vermont maple syrup on his last Famo Buckwheat pancake.
“But . . . But why?”
“Jim, I can’t speak for Tom, but personally I’m getting a little ticked off about being pushed around.”
“Hell, you can speak for me. People have been pushing me around for the past twenty years, first at that damned orphanage and then at the damned university and then at the double damned Air Farce. But this is the first goddamn time that people have told me that I’m in charge, but they want to push me around anyway.”
“But . . .”
“Jim, have you thought it out?” Ian asked. “Does it make any difference what we do? We’re going to be successful. Whether we do it today, or tomorrow or next year, we are predestined to get this city—and doubtless a lot more—accomplished. This place is an accomplished fact, and it is futile to try to change facts.”
“But . . .”
“Futile,” Ian repeated.
“Look,” I said. “If you feel some kind of social obligation, why don’t you go and satisfy it. If you want, you can give us a complete report.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“Well, I don’t know about Ian, but I’m going to find myself a book and a bottle and a small room with a big chair.”
“Make that two chairs, Tom, and add a pot of tea.”
We left with Hasenpfeffer looking at us with his mouth open. I stopped a beautiful, underdressed woman in the hall and asked, “So where do I find a book?”
“The library is this way, Tom.” She said my name like it was a title.
“Yeah, a whole library. I should have known. Lead us there.”
My library would have done justice to a small university, maybe a half million volumes. The librarian was, of course, yet another gorgeous female. She wore a trim, grey wool suit over a figure like a Barbie doll’s. Her hair was pulled tightly into a bun, and she wore large, round, horn-rimmed glasses that I was sure were made with flat, plain glass.
“Fiction,” Ian said curtly.
We followed her down another hall.
In the fiction room, I found myself in the “H’s” and pulled down a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a first edition, unread, and signed by the master himself. It felt Holy.
I ran to Ian with it, but he’d already found Verne’s autograph on 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea. He turned to the librarian.
“Are all the books here like this? First editions and autographed?”
“Uh . . . Effectively, sir.”
“Effectively?” I smelled a rat. “Exactly what percentage of the books here are autographed?”
“About two point six percent, Tom.”
“Then, how is two point six percent ‘effectively’ all?”
“All of the books that you will touch are first edition autographs, Tom. The rest were regarded as unimportant so we economized.”
Ian groaned, grabbed an armful of Mark Twain and hobbled out. I stopped to pick up a few books for myself, and caught up to him. He pointed to a heavy oak door.
“I’ll have a reading room right there, with two comfortable leather chairs and a fireplace. And I’ll have a pot of tea, Twining’s Earl Grey.”
“And a bottle of Jim Beam,” I added.
Ian opened the door and the room was as described, with a cheerful fire, one oversized and one undersized leather chair, with a marble-topped table between them. There was a bottle of Kentucky sour mash next to the big chair, with a glass and a full ice chest. A cup and a pot of hot tea stood next to the small one.
“Ian . . . How . . . ?”
“Sheer brilliance and accurate deduction, my son. Only I’ve changed my mind about the Earl Grey. I’ve heard that there are some Chinese teas that cost more than their weight in gold. I’d like to try some.”
A “French” maid came quietly in and removed the silver English tea pot, and Ming Po came in with a tray of tea-making stuff, bowing a lot.
She was the first of my servants that I’d ever seen twice, and she went through this little ceremony of whipping a tiny amount of green powder into a bowl of hot water.
“The water . . . ?” Ian asked.
“Dew from rose blossoms, sir. I gather this morning.” She bowed some more and left the room.
Ian tasted his tea. “Interesting . . . You know, if they were all like that last one, having servants wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Dammit, if you’ll tell me what you’re doing, I’ll give her to you.”
“Give a human being? Shame on you for the thought.”
“I mean, I’ll have her transferred to your staff. That can’t be immoral. Now what gives?”
“You’re slow, and here I’d had such hopes for you. Perhaps if we arranged a suitable course of study, starting with John Calvin and . . .”
“Dammit . . .”
“Okay, Tom. Make a wish.”
“All right. I’m rich now, so I’ll have Beam’s Choice instead of his regular sour mash, and make it a ten-gallon bottle.”
Within moments, a new bunch of nearly naked women removed the old bottle and rolled in a cart with a huge, pivoted bottle of booze. It was a gorgeous cart, with all sorts of intricate hand carving and fancy inlay work. The women left us alone again.
“Uh . . . They couldn’t have had that ready and waiting. I don’t think that Jim Beam makes a ten-gallon bottle.”
“They probably had a glass blower do it up special. They had plenty of time, since that cart must have been a year in the making.”
“Huh . . . ?”
“If you must be spoon fed, consider the situation of predestination along with the knowledge of future events. They probably have a microphone hidden in this room, and are placing orders far enough in the past so that we get things on request.”
“Uh, is that how you knew this room was here?”
“I didn’t know that this room was here! I ordered it here and they incorporated it into the architectural plans when they built the place.”
“Good God! But why are they doing all this?”
“A good question! A magnificent question! Another good one is ‘How far are they willing to go?’ ”
I was starting to catch on.
“Look, did you know that just beyond that wall is a scene that would entice the most decadent caliph of the ancient Saracen world? That this very wall, fireplace and all, can be slowly slid downwards, starting now, to expose a vast pleasure garden with a thousand naked odalisques undulating in their passion for our tender bodies to the slithering music of a hundred blind musicians. . . .”
The wall was moving downwards. Arabic music was coming in.
“No!” Ian yelled. “Damn it, Tom, they might do it! Would you have a man blinded?”
“Jesus Christ, you’re right! Cancel the blind musicians! Make that a full symphony orchestra, black tie and tails, and they can stare at the girls all they want.”
The wall vanished into the floor and there it was, as ordered. Pleasure garden. Orchestra. A thousand naked dancing girls. At least I think that there were a thousand.
Hell, I didn’t count.
But having ordered it, we felt obligated to watch it, which we did for at least fifteen minutes.
“Bored yet, Tom?”
“Yeah. And embarrassed. For the last ten minutes.”
“Then up with the wall. Let’s have the fireplace back.”
We shortly had the fireplace back, although I never did figure out how that chimney worked. I tried to get interested in my sour mash and a bound manuscript copy of H. Beam Piper’s Only the Arquebus. Good book. Good booze. But I couldn’t get into either one of them. Still, I tried, hoping perhaps that my subconscious could solve the problems that fuddled my rational self. But the words on the paper didn’t seem to mean much and mostly I just listened to the hum of the overworked air conditioner, fighting the heat from the fire in a decadent waste of power. After what seemed like a few hours, Ian broke the tension.