Michael stopped reading and let his gaze gradually drift from the
page.
He wondered if he knew what such a music would be and tried to grope
in the dark recesses of his mind for it. Each part of his mind that he
visited seemed as if that music had been playing there only seconds
before and all that was left was the last dying echo of something he
was unable to catch at and hear. He laid the magazine limply aside.
Then he remembered what it was that the mention of Keats had jogged
in his memory.
The slimy things with legs from his dream.
A cold calm came over him as he felt himself coming very close to
something.
Coleridge. That man.
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’
Dazed, Michael walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down his
Coleridge anthology. He took it back to his seat and with a certain
apprehension he riffled through the pages until he found the opening
lines.
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
The words were very familiar to him, and yet as he read on through
them they awoke in him strange sensations and fearful memories that he
knew were not his. There reared up inside him a sense of loss and
desolation of terrifying intensity which, while he knew it was not his
own, resonated so perfectly now with his own aggrievements that he
could not but surrender to it absolutely.
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
[::: CHAPTER 20 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
The blind rolled up with a sharp rattle and Richard blinked.
‘A fascinating evening you appear to have spent,’ said Dirk Gently,
‘even though the most interesting aspects of it seem to have escaped
your curiosity entirely.’
He returned to his seat and lounged back in it pressing his
fingertips together.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘do not disappoint me by saying “where am I?” A
glance will suffice.’
Richard looked around him in slow puzzlement and felt as if he were
returning unexpectedly from a long sojourn on another planet where all
was peace and light and music that went on for ever and ever. He felt
so relaxed he could hardly be bothered to breathe.
The wooden toggle on the end of the blind cord knocked a few times
against the window, but otherwise all was now silent. The metronome was
still. He glanced at his watch. It was just after one o’clock.
‘You have been under hypnosis for a little less than an hour,’ said
Dirk, ‘during which I have learned many interesting things and been
puzzled by some others which I would now like to discuss with you. A
little fresh air will probably help revive you and I suggest a bracing
stroll along the canal. No one will be looking for you there. Janice!’
Silence.
A lot of things were still not clear to Richard, and he frowned to
himself. When his immediate memory returned a moment later, it was like
an elephant suddenly barging through the door and he sat up with a
startled jolt.
‘Janice!’ shouted Dirk again. ‘Miss Pearce! Damn the girl.’
He yanked the telephone receivers out of the wastepaper basket and
replaced them. An old and battered leather briefcase stood by the desk,
and he picked this up, retrieved his hat from the floor and stood up,
screwing his hat absurdly on his head.
‘Come,’ he said, sweeping through the door to where Miss Janice
Pearce sat glaring at a pencil, ‘let us go. Let us leave this festering
hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us
prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff
it after all. Now, Janice –’
‘Shut up.’
Dirk shrugged, and then picked off her desk the book which earlier
she had mutilated when trying to slam her drawer. He leafed through it,
frowning, and then replaced it with a sigh. Janice returned to what she
had clearly been doing a moment or two earlier, which was writing a
long note with the pencil.
Richard regarded all this in silence, still feeling only semi-
present. He shook his head.
Dirk said to him, ‘Events may seem to you to be a tangled mass of
confusion at the moment. And yet we have some interesting threads to
pull on. For of all the things you have told me that have happened,
only two are actually physically impossible.’
Richard spoke at last. ‘Impossible?’ he said with a frown.
‘Yes,’ said Dirk, ‘completely and utterly impossible.’
He smiled.
‘Luckily,’ he went on, ‘you have come to exactly the right place
with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as
“impossible” in my dictionary. In fact,’ he added, brandishing the
abused book, ‘everything between “herring” and “marmalade” appears to
be missing. Thank you, Miss Pearce, you have once again rendered me
sterling service, for which I thank you and will, in the event of a
successful outcome to this endeavour, even attempt to pay you. In the
meantime we have much to think on, and I leave the office in your very
capable hands.’
The phone rang and Janice answered it.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, ‘Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr
Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right
in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.’
She slammed the phone down. She looked up again to see the door
closing softly behind her ex-employer and his befuddled client.
‘Impossible?’ said Richard again, in surprise.
‘Everything about it,’ insisted Dirk, ‘completely and utterly —
well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word
“impossible” to describe something that has clearly happened. But it
cannot be explained by anything we know.’
The briskness of the air along the Grand Union Canal got in among
Richard’s senses and sharpened them up again. He was restored to his
normal faculties, and though the fact of Gordon’s death kept jumping at
him all over again every few seconds, he was at least now able to think
more clearly about it. Oddly enough, though, that seemed for the moment
to be the last thing on Dirk’s mind. Dirk was instead picking on the
most trivial of the night’s sequence of bizarre incidents on which to
cross-examine him.
A jogger going one way and a cyclist going the other both shouted at
each other to get out of the way, and narrowly avoided hurling each
other into the murky, slow-moving waters of the canal. They were
watched carefully by a very slow-moving old lady who was dragging an
even slower-moving old dog.
On the other bank large empty warehouses stood startled, every
window shattered and glinting. A burned-out barge lolled brokenly in
the water. Within it a couple of detergent bottles floated on the
brackish water. Over the nearest bridge heavy-goods lorries thundered,
shaking the foundations of the houses, belching petrol fumes into the
air and frightening a mother trying to cross the road with her pram.
Dirk and Richard were walking along from the fringes of South
Hackney, a mile from Dirk’s office, back towards the heart of
Islington, where Dirk knew the nearest lifebelts were positioned.
‘But it was only a conjuring trick, for heaven’s sake,’ said
Richard. ‘He does them all the time. It’s just sleight of hand. Looks
impossible but I’m sure if you asked any conjurer he’d say it’s easy
once you know how these things are done. I once saw a man on the street
in New York doing –’
‘I know how these things are done,’ said Dirk, pulling two lighted
cigarettes and a large glazed fig out of his nose. He tossed the fig up
in to the air, but it somehow failed to land anywhere. ‘Dexterity,
misdirection, suggestion. All things you can learn if you have a little
time to waste. Excuse me, dear lady,’ he said to the elderly, slow-
moving dog-owner as they passed her. He bent down to the dog and pulled
a long string of brightly coloured flags from its bottom. ‘I think he
will move more comfortably now,’ he said, tipped his hat courteously to
her and moved on.
‘These things, you see,’ he said to a flummoxed Richard, ‘are easy.
Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining
her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice. The
trick you described to me with the two-hundred-year-old vase and the
college salt cellar is –’ he paused for emphasis — ‘completely and
utterly inexplicable.’
‘Well there was probably some detail of it I missed, but…’
‘Oh, without question. But the benefit of questioning somebody under
hypnosis is that it allows the questioner to see the scene in much
greater detail than the subject was even aware of at the time. The girl
Sarah, for instance. Do you recall what she was wearing?’
‘Er, no,’ said Richard, vaguely, ‘a dress of some kind, I suppose —
’
‘Colour? Fabric?’
‘Well, I can’t remember, it was dark. She was sitting several places
away from me. I hardly glimpsed her.’
‘She was wearing a dark blue cotton velvet dress gathered to a
dropped waist. It had raglan sleeves gathered to the cuffs, a white
Peter Pan collar and six small pearl buttons down the front — the
third one down had a small thread hanging off it. She had long dark
hair pulled back with a red butterfly hairgrip.’
‘If you’re going to tell me you know all that from looking at a
scuff mark on my shoes, like Sherlock Holmes, then I’m afraid I don’t
believe you.’
‘No, no,’ said Dirk, ‘it’s much simpler than that. You told me
yourself under hypnosis.’
Richard shook his head.
‘Not true,’ he said, ‘I don’t even know what a Peter Pan collar is.’
‘But I do and you described it to me perfectly accurately. As you
did the conjuring trick. And that trick was not possible in the form in
which it occurred. Believe me. I know whereof I speak. There are some
other things I would like to discover about the Professor, like for
instance who wrote the note you discovered on the table and how many
questions George III actually asked, but –’
‘What?’
‘– but I think I would do better to question the fellow directly.
Except…’ He frowned deeply in concentration. ‘Except,’ he added,
‘that being rather vain in these matters I would prefer to know the
answers before I asked the questions. And I do not. I absolutely do
not.’ He gazed abstractedly into the distance, and made a rough
calculation of the remaining distance to the nearest lifebelt.
‘And the second impossible thing,’ he added, just as Richard was
about to get a word in edgeways, ‘or at least, the next completely
inexplicable thing, is of course the matter of your sofa.’
‘Dirk,’ exclaimed Richard in exasperation, ‘may I remind you that
Gordon Way is dead, and that I appear to be under suspicion of his
murder! None of these things have the remotest connection with that,
and I –’
‘But I am extremely inclined to believe that they are connected.’
‘That’s absurd!’
‘I believe in the fundamental inter–’
‘Oh, yeah, yeah,’ said Richard, ‘the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things. Listen, Dirk, I am not a gullible old lady and you won’t
be getting any trips to Bermuda out of me. If you’re going to help me
then let’s stick to the point.’
Dirk bridled at this. ‘I believe that all things are fundamentally
interconnected, as anyone who follows the principles of quantum
mechanics to their logical extremes cannot, if they are honest, help
but accept. But I also believe that some things are a great deal more
interconnected than others. And when two apparently impossible events
and a sequence of highly peculiar ones all occur to the same person,
and when that person suddenly becomes the suspect of a highly peculiar
murder, then it seems to me that we should look for the solution in the
connection between these events. You are the connection, and you
yourself have been behaving in a highly peculiar and eccentric way.’
‘I have not,’ said Richard. ‘Yes, some odd things have happened to
me, but I –’
‘You were last night observed, by me, to climb the outside of a
building and break into the flat of your girlfriend, Susan Way.’
‘It may have been unusual,’ said Richard, ‘it may not even have been
wise. But it was perfectly logical and rational. I just wanted to undo
something I had done before it caused any damage.’
Dirk thought for a moment, and slightly quickened his pace.
‘And what you did was a perfectly reasonable and normal response to
the problem of the message you had left on the tape — yes, you told me
all about that in our little session — it’s what anyone would have
done?’
Richard frowned as if to say that he couldn’t see what all the fuss
was about. ‘I don’t say anyone would have done it,’ he said, ‘I
probably have a slightly more logical and literal turn of mind than
many people, which is why I can write computer software. It was a
logical and literal solution to the problem.’
‘Not a little disproportionate, perhaps?’
‘It was very important to me not to disappoint Susan yet again.’
‘So you are absolutely satisfied with your own reasons for doing
what you did?’
‘Yes,’ insisted Richard angrily.
‘Do you know,’ said Dirk, ‘what my old maiden aunt who lived in
Winnipeg used to tell me?’
‘No,’ said Richard. He quickly took off all his clothes and dived
into the canal. Dirk leapt for the lifebelt, with which they had just
drawn level, yanked it out of its holder and flung it to Richard, who
was floundering in the middle of the canal looking completely lost and
disoriented.
‘Grab hold of this,’ shouted Dirk, ‘and I’ll haul you in.’
‘It’s all right,’ spluttered Richard, ‘I can swim –’
‘No, you can’t,’ yelled Dirk, ‘now grab it.’
Richard tried to strike out for the bank, but quickly gave up in
consternation and grabbed hold of the lifebelt. Dirk pulled on the rope
till Richard reached the edge, and then bent down to give him a hand
out. Richard came up out of the water puffing and spitting, then turned
and sat shivering on the edge with his hands in his lap.
‘God, it’s foul in there!’ he exclaimed and spat again. ‘It’s
absolutely disgusting. Yeuchh. Whew. God. I’m usually a pretty good
swimmer. Must have got some kind of cramp. Lucky coincidence we were so
close to the lifebelt. Oh thanks.’ This last he said in response to the
large towel which Dirk handed him.
He rubbed himself down briskly, almost scraping himself with the
towel to get the filthy canal water off him. He stood up and looked
about. ‘Can you find my pants?’
‘Young man,’ said the old lady with the dog, who had just reached
them. She stood looking at them sternly, and was about to rebuke them
when Dirk interrupted.
‘A thousand apologies, dear lady,’ he said, ‘for any offence my
friend may inadvertently have caused you. Please,’ he added, drawing a
slim bunch of anemones from Richard’s bottom, ‘accept these with my
compliments.’
The lady dashed them out of Dirk’s hand with her stick, and hurried
off, horror-struck, yanking her dog after her.
‘That wasn’t very nice of you,’ said Richard, pulling on his clothes
underneath the towel that was now draped strategically around him.
‘I don’t think she’s a very nice woman,’ replied Dirk, ‘she’s always
down here, yanking her poor dog around and telling people off. Enjoy
your swim?’
‘Not much, no,’ said Richard, giving his hair a quick rub. ‘I hadn’t
realised how filthy it would be in there. And cold. Here,’ he said,
handing the towel back to Dirk, ‘thanks. Do you always carry a towel
around in your briefcase?’
‘Do you always go swimming in the afternoons?’
‘No, I usually go in the mornings, to the swimming pool on Highbury
Fields, just to wake myself up, get the brain going. It just occurred
to me I hadn’t been this morning.’
‘And, er — that was why you just dived into the canal?’
‘Well, yes. I just thought that getting a bit of exercise would
probably help me deal with all this.’
‘Not a little disproportionate, then, to strip off and jump into the
canal.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘it may not have been wise given the state of the
water, but it was perfectly –’
‘You were perfectly satisfied with your own reasons for doing what
you did.’
‘Yes –’
‘And it was nothing to do with my aunt, then?’
Richard’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘What on earth are you talking
about?’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Dirk. He went and sat on a nearby bench and
opened his case again. He folded the towel away into it and took out
instead a small Sony tape recorder. He beckoned Richard over and then
pushed the Play button. Dirk’s own voice floated from the tiny speaker
in a lilting sing-song voice. It said, ‘In a minute I will click my
fingers and you will wake and forget all of this except for the
instructions I shall now give you.
‘In a little while we will go for a walk along the canal, and when
you hear me say the words “my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg” —
’
Dirk suddenly grabbed Richard’s arm to restrain him.
The tape continued, ‘You will take off all your clothes and dive
into the canal. You will find that you are unable to swim, but you will
not panic or sink, you will simply tread water until I throw you the
lifebelt…’
Dirk stopped the tape and looked round at Richard’s face which for
the second time that day was pale with shock.
‘I would be interested to know exactly what it was that possessed
you to climb into Miss Way’s flat last night,’ said Dirk, ‘and why.’
Richard didn’t respond — he was continuing to stare at the tape
recorder in some confusion. Then he said in a shaking voice, ’There was
a message from Gordon on Susan’s tape. He phoned from the car. The
tape’s in my flat. Dirk, I’m suddenly very frightened by all this.’
[::: CHAPTER 21 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Dirk watched the police officer on duty outside Richard’s house from
behind a van parked a few yards away. He had been stopping and
questioning everyone who tried to enter the small side alley down which
Richard’s door was situated, including, Dirk was pleased to note, other
policemen if he didn’t immediately recognise them. Another police car
pulled up and Dirk started to move.
A police officer climbed out of the car carrying a saw and walked
towards the doorway. Dirk briskly matched his pace with him, a step or
two behind, striding authoritatively.
‘It’s all right, he’s with me,’ said Dirk, sweeping past at the
exact moment that the one police officer stopped the other.
And he was inside and climbing the stairs.
The officer with the saw followed him in.
‘Er, excuse me, sir,’ he called up after Dirk.
Dirk had just reached the point where the sofa obstructed the
stairway. He stopped and twisted round.
‘Stay here,’ he said, ‘guard this sofa. Do not let anyone touch it,
and I mean anyone. Understood?’
The officer seemed flummoxed for a moment.
‘I’ve had orders to saw it up,’ he said.
‘Countermanded,’ barked Dirk. ‘Watch it like a hawk. I shall want a
full report.’
He turned back and climbed up over the thing. A moment or two later
he emerged into a large open area. This was the lower of the two floors
that comprised Richard’s flat.
‘Have you searched that?’ snapped Dirk at another officer who was
sitting at Richard’s dining table looking through some notes. The
officer looked up in surprise and started to stand up. Dirk was
pointing at the wastepaper basket.
‘Er, yes –’
‘Search it again. Keep searching it. Who’s here?’
‘Er, well –’
‘I haven’t got all day.’
‘Detective Inspector Mason just left, with –’
‘Good, I’m having him pulled off. I’ll be upstairs if I’m needed,
but I don’t want any interruptions unless it’s very important.
Understood?’
‘Er, who –’
‘I don’t see you searching the wastepaper basket.’
‘Er, right, sir. I’ll –’
‘I want it deep-searched. You understand?’
‘Er –’
‘Get cracking.’ Dirk swept on upstairs and into Richard’s workroom.
The tape was lying exactly where Richard had told him it would be,
on the long desk on which the six Macintoshes sat. Dirk was about to
pocket it when his curiosity was caught by the image of Richard’s sofa
slowly twisting and turning on the big Macintosh screen, and he sat
down at the keyboard.
He explored the program Richard had written for a short while, but
quickly realised that in its present form it was less than self-
explanatory and he learned little. He managed at last to get the sofa
unstuck and move it back down the stairs, but he realised that he had
had to turn part of the wall off in order to do it. With a grunt of
irritation he gave up.
Another computer he looked at was displaying a steady sine wave.
Around the edges of the screen were the small images of other waveforms
which could be selected and added to the main one or used to modify it
in other ways. He quickly discovered that this enabled you to build up
very complex waveforms from simple ones and he played with this for a
while. He added a simple sine wave to itself, which had the effect of
doubling the height of the peaks and troughs of the wave. Then he slid
one of the waves half a step back with respect to the other, and the
peaks and troughs of one simply cancelled out the peaks and troughs of
the other, leaving a completely flat line. Then he changed the
frequency of one of the sine waves by a small extent.
The result of this was that at some positions along the combined
waveform the two waves reinforced each other, and at others they
cancelled each other out. Adding a third simple wave of yet another
frequency resulted in a combined wave in which it was hard to see any
pattern at all. The line danced up and down seemingly at random,
staying quite low for some periods and then suddenly building into very
large peaks and troughs as all three waves came briefly into phase with
each other.
Dirk assumed that there must be amongst this array of equipment a
means for translating the waveform dancing on the Macintosh screen into
an actual musical tone and hunted among the menus available in the
program. He found one menu item which invited him to transfer the wave
sample into an Emu.
This puzzled him. He glanced around the room in search of a large
flightless bird, but was unable to locate any such thing. He activated
the process anyway, and then traced the cable which led from the back
of the Macintosh, down behind the desk, along the floor, behind a
cupboard, under a rug until it fetched up plugged into the back of a
large grey keyboard called an Emulator II.
This, he assumed, was where his experimental waveform has just
arrived. Tentatively he pushed a key.
The nasty farting noise that surged instantly out of the speakers
was so loud that for a moment he didn’t hear the words ‘Svlad Cjelli!’
that were barked simultaneously from the doorway.
Richard sat in Dirk’s office and threw tiny screwed-up balls of
paper at the wastepaper bin which was already full of telephones. He
broke pencils. He played major extracts from an old Ginger Baker solo
on his knees.
In a word, he fretted.
He had been trying to write down on a piece of Dirk’s notepaper all
that he could remember of the events of the previous evening and, as
far as he could pinpoint them, the times at which each had occurred. He
was astonished at how difficult it was, and how feeble his conscious
memory seemed to be in comparison with his unconscious memory, as Dirk
had demonstrated it to him.
‘Damn Dirk,’ he thought. He wanted to talk to Susan.
Dirk had told him he must not do so on any account as there would be
a trace on the phone lines.
‘Damn Dirk,’ he said suddenly, and sprang to his feet.
‘Have you got any ten-pence pieces?’ he said to the resolutely glum
Janice.
Dirk turned.
Framed in the doorway stood a tall dark figure.
The tall dark figure appeared to be not at all happy with what it
saw, to be rather cross about it, in fact. To be more than cross. It
appeared to be a tall dark figure who could very easily yank the heads
off half a dozen chickens and still be cross at the end of it.
It stepped forward into the light and revealed itself to be Sergeant
Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
‘Do you know,’ said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire
Constabulary, blinking with suppressed emotion, ‘that when I arrive
back here to discover one police officer guarding a sofa with a saw and
another dismembering an innocent wastepaper basket I have to ask myself
certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting sense
that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.
‘I then find myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition,
Svlad Cjelli, a very horrible premonition indeed. A premonition, I
might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can’t shed
any light on a horse discovered in a bathroom as well? That seemed to
have an air of you about it.’
‘I cannot,’ said Dirk, ‘as yet. Though it interests me strangely.’
‘I should think it bloody did. It would have interested you
strangely if you’d had to get the bloody thing down a bloody winding
staircase at one o’clock in the morning as well. What the hell are you
doing here?’ said Sergeant Gilks, wearily.
‘I am here,’ said Dirk, ‘in pursuit of justice.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t mix with me then,’ said Gilks, ‘and I certainly
wouldn’t mix with the Met. What do you know of MacDuff and Way?’
‘Of Way? Nothing beyond what is common knowledge. MacDuff I knew at
Cambridge.’
‘Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.’
‘Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a
preying mantis that doesn’t prey — a non-preying mantis if you like. A
sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up
tennis instead.’
‘Hmm,’ said Gilks gruffly, turning away and looking about the room.
Dirk pocketed the tape.
‘Sounds like the same one,’ said Gilks.
‘And of course,’ said Dirk, ‘completely incapable of murder.’
‘That’s for us to decide.’
‘And of course a jury.’
‘Tchah! Juries!’
‘Though, of course, it will not come to that, since the facts will
speak for themselves long before it comes to a court of law for my
client.’
‘Your bleeding client, eh? All right, Cjelli, where is he?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘I’ll bet you’ve got a billing address.’
Dirk shrugged.
‘Look, Cjelli, this is a perfectly normal, harmless murder enquiry,
and I don’t want you mucking it up. So consider yourself warned off as
of now. If I see a single piece of evidence being levitated I’ll hit
you so hard you won’t know if it’s tomorrow or Thursday. Now get out,
and give me that tape on the way.’ He held out his hand.
Dirk blinked, genuinely surprised. ‘What tape?’
Gilks sighed. ‘You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,’ he
said, ‘but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of
thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it’s for a reason, and
the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn’t need to see you pick
it up, I just had to see what was missing afterwards. We are trained
you know. We used to get half an hour Observation Training on Tuesday
afternoons. Just as a break after four hours solid of Senseless
Brutality.’
Dirk hid his anger with himself behind a light smile. He fished in
the pocket of his leather overcoat and handed over the tape.
‘Play it,’ said Gilks, ‘let’s see what you didn’t want us to hear.’
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to hear it,’ said Dirk, with a
shrug. ‘I just wanted to hear it first.’ He went over to the shelf
which carried Richard’s hi-fi equipment and slipped the tape into the
cassette player.
‘So do you want to give me a little introduction?’
‘It’s a tape,’ said Dirk, ‘from Susan Way’s telephone answering
machine. Way apparently had this habit of leaving long…’
‘Yeah, I know about that. And his secretary goes round picking up
his prattlings in the morning, poor devil.’
‘Well, I believe there may be a message on the tape from Gordon
Way’s car last night.’
‘I see. OK. Play it.’
With a gracious bow Dirk pressed the Play button.
‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ said the tape once again. ‘Just on my
way to the cottage –’
‘Cottage!’ exclaimed Gilks, satirically.
‘It’s, er, Thursday night, and it’s, er… 8.47. Bit misty on the
roads. Listen, I have those people from the States coming over this
weekend…’
Gilks raised his eyebrows, looked at his watch, and made a note on
his pad.
Both Dirk and the police sergeant experienced a chill as the dead
man’s voice filled the room.
‘– it’s a wonder I don’t end up dead in the ditch, that would be
something wouldn’t it, leaving your famous last words on somebody’s
answering machine, there’s no reason –’
They listened in a tense silence as the tape played on through the
entire message.
‘That’s the problem with crunch-heads — they have one great idea
that actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding them
for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their
navels. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop and close the boot
properly. Won’t be a moment.’
Next came the muffled bump of the telephone receiver being dropped
on the passenger seat, and a few seconds later the sound of the car
door being opened. In the meantime, the music from the car’s sound
system could be heard burbling away in the background.
A few seconds later still came the distant, muffled, but
unmistakable double blam of a shotgun.
‘Stop the tape,’ said Gilks sharply and glanced at his watch. ‘Three
minutes and twenty-five seconds since he said it was 8.47.’ He glanced
up at Dirk again. ‘Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. I’ve
made a note of the position of every particle of air in this room, so I
shall know if you’ve been breathing.’
He turned smartly and left. Dirk heard him saying as he went down
the stairs, ‘Tuckett, get on to WayForward’s office, get the details of
Way’s carphone, what number, which network…’ The voice faded away
downstairs.
Quickly Dirk twisted down the volume control on the hi-fi, and
resumed playing the tape.
The music continued for a while. Dirk drummed his fingers in
frustration. Still the music continued.
He flicked the Fast Forward button for just a moment. Still music.
It occurred to him that he was looking for something, but that he
didn’t know what. That thought stopped him in his tracks.
He was very definitely looking for something.
He very definitely didn’t know what.
The realisation that he didn’t know exactly why he was doing what he
was doing suddenly chilled and electrified him. He turned slowly like a
fridge door opening.
There was no one there, at least no one that he could see. But he
knew the chill prickling through his skin and detested it above all
things.
He said in a low savage whisper, ‘If anyone can hear me, hear this.
My mind is my centre and everything that happens there is my
responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to
believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know
it clearly. If you want something then let me know, but do not you dare
touch my mind.’
He was trembling with a deep and old rage. The chill dropped slowly
and almost pathetically from him and seemed to move off into the room.
He tried to follow it with his senses, but was instantly distracted by
a sudden voice that seemed to come at him on the edge of his hearing,
on a distant howl of wind.
It was a hollow, terrified, bewildered voice, no more than an
insubstantial whisper, but it was there, audible, on the telephone-
answering machine tape.
It said, ‘Susan! Susan, help me! Help me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m
dead –’
Dirk whirled round and stopped the tape.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said under his breath, ‘but I have the welfare of my
client to consider.’
He wound the tape back a very short distance, to just before where
the voice began, twisted the Record Level knob to zero and pressed
Record. He left the tape to run, wiping off the voice and anything that
might follow it. If the tape was going to establish the time of Gordon
Way’s death, then Dirk didn’t want any embarrassing examples of Gordon
speaking to turn up on the tape after that point, even if it was only
to confirm that he was, in fact, dead.
There seemed to be a great eruption of emotion in the air near to
him. A wave of something surged through the room, causing the furniture
to flutter in its wake. Dirk watched where it seemed to go, towards a
shelf near the door on which, he suddenly realised, stood Richard’s own
telephone-answering machine. The machine started to jiggle fitfully
where it sat, but then sat still as Dirk approached it. Dirk reached
out slowly and calmly and pushed the button which set the machine to
Answer.
The disturbance in the air then passed back through the room to
Richard’s long desk where two old-fashioned rotary-dial telephones
nestled among the piles of paper and micro floppy disks. Dirk guessed
what would happen, but elected to watch rather than to intervene.
One of the telephone receivers toppled off its cradle. Dirk could
hear the dialling tone. Then, slowly and with obvious difficulty, the
dial began to turn. It moved unevenly round, further round, slower and
slower, and then suddenly slipped back.
There was a moment’s pause. Then the receiver rests went down and up
again to get a new dialling tone. The dial began to turn again, but
creaking even more fitfully than the last time.
Again it slipped back.
There was a longer pause this time, and then the entire process was
repeated once more.
When the dial slipped back a third time there was a sudden explosion
of fury — the whole phone leapt into the air and hurtled across the
room. The receiver cord wrapped itself round an Anglepoise lamp on the
way and brought it crashing down in a tangle of cables, coffee cups and
floppy disks. A pile of books erupted off the desk and on to the floor.
The figure of Sergeant Gilks stood stony-faced in the doorway.
‘I’m going to come in again,’ he said, ‘and when I do, I don’t want
to see anything of that kind going on whatsoever. Is that understood?’
He turned and disappeared.
Dirk leapt for the cassette player and hit the Rewind button. Then
he turned and hissed at the empty air, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I
can guess. If you want my help, don’t you ever embarrass me like that
again!’
A few moments later, Gilks walked in again. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he
said.
He surveyed the wreckage with an even gaze. ‘I’ll pretend I can’t
see any of this, so that I won’t have to ask any questions the answers
to which would, I know, only irritate me.’
Dirk glowered.
In the moment or two of silence that followed, a slight ticking
whirr could be heard which caused the sergeant to look sharply at the
cassette player.
‘What’s that tape doing?’
‘Rewinding.’
‘Give it to me.’
The tape reached the beginning and stopped as Dirk reached it. He
took it out and handed it to Gilks.
‘Irritatingly, this seems to put your client completely in the
clear,’ said the sergeant. ‘Cellnet have confirmed that the last call
made from the car was at 8.46 pm last night, at which point your client
was lightly dozing in front of several hundred witnesses. I say
witnesses, in fact they were mostly students, but we will probably be
forced to assume that they can’t all be lying.’
‘Good,’ said Dirk, ‘well, I’m glad that’s all cleared up.’
‘We never thought he had actually done it, of course. Simply didn’t
fit. But you know us — we like to get results. Tell him we still want
to ask him some questions, though.’
‘I shall be sure to mention it if I happen to run into him.’
‘You just do that little thing.’
‘Well, I shan’t detain you any longer, Sergeant,’ said Dirk, airily
waving at the door.
‘No, but I shall bloody detain you if you’re not out of here in
thirty seconds, Cjelli. I don’t know what you’re up to, but if I can
possibly avoid finding out I shall sleep easier in my office. Out.’
‘Then I shall bid you good day, Sergeant. I won’t say it’s been a
pleasure because it hasn’t.’
Dirk swept out of the room, and made his way out of the flat, noting
with sorrow that where there had been a large chesterfield sofa wedged
magnificently in the staircase, there was now just a small, sad pile of
sawdust.
With a jerk Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up from his book.
His mind suddenly was alive with purpose. Thoughts, images,
memories, intentions, all crowded in upon him, and the more they seemed
to contradict each other the more they seemed to fit together, to pair
and settle.
The match at last was perfect, the teeth of one slowly aligned with
the teeth of another.
A pull and they were zipped.
Though the waiting had seemed an eternity of eternities when it was
filled with failure, with fading waves of weakness, with feeble groping
and lonely impotence, the match once made cancelled it all. Would
cancel it all. Would undo what had been so disastrously done.
Who thought that? It did not matter, the match was made, the match
was perfect.
Michael gazed out of the window across the well-manicured Chelsea
street and did not care whether what he saw were slimy things with legs
or whether they were all Mr A. K. Ross. What mattered was what they had
stolen and what they would be compelled to return. Ross now lay in the
past. What he was now concerned with lay still further in it.
His large soft cowlike eyes returned to the last few lines of ‘Kubla
Khan’, which he had just been reading. The match was made, the zip was
pulled.
He closed the book and put it in his pocket.
His path back now was clear. He knew what he must do. It only
remained to do a little shopping and then do it.
[::: CHAPTER 22 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘You? Wanted for murder? Richard what are you talking about?’
The telephone wavered in Richard’s hand. He was holding it about
half an inch away from his ear anyway because it seemed that somebody
had dipped the earpiece in some chow mein recently, but that wasn’t so
bad. This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it
was working at all. But Richard was beginning to feel as if the whole
world had shifted about half an inch away from him, like someone in a
deodorant commercial.
‘Gordon,’ said Richard, hesitantly, ‘Gordon’s been murdered —
hasn’t he?’
Susan paused before she answered.
‘Yes, Richard,’ she said in a distressed voice, ‘but no one thinks
you did it. They want to question you of course, but –’
‘So there are no police with you now?’
‘No, Richard,’ insisted Susan, ‘Look, why don’t you come here?’
‘And they’re not out searching for me?’
‘No! Where on earth did you get the idea that you were wanted for —
that they thought you had done it?’
‘Er — well, this friend of mine told me.’
‘Who?’
‘Well, his name is Dirk Gently.’
‘You’ve never mentioned him. Who is he? Did he say anything else?’
‘He hypnotised me and, er, made me jump in the canal, and, er, well,
that was it really –’
There was a terribly long pause at the other end.
‘Richard,’ said Susan at last with the sort of calmness that comes
over people when they realise that however bad things may seem to be,
there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t simply get worse and
worse, ‘come over here. I was going to say I need to see you, but I
think you need to see me.’
‘I should probably go to the police.’
‘Go to the police later. Richard, please. A few hours won’t make any
difference. I… I can hardly even think. Richard, it’s so awful. It
would just help if you were here. Where are you?’
‘OK,’ said Richard, ‘I’ll be with you in about twenty minutes.’
‘Shall I leave the window open or would you like to try the door?’
she said with a sniff.
[::: CHAPTER 23 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘No, please,’ said Dirk, restraining Miss Pearce’s hand from opening
a letter from the Inland Revenue, ‘there are wilder skies than these.’
He had emerged from a spell of tense brooding in his darkened office
and there was an air of excited concentration about him. It had taken
his actual signature on an actual salary cheque to persuade Miss Pearce
to forgive him for the latest unwarrantable extravagance with which he
had returned to the office and he felt that just to sit there blatantly
opening letters from the taxman was to take his magnanimous gesture in
entirely the wrong spirit.
She put the envelope aside.
‘Come!’ he said. ‘I have something I wish you to see. I shall
observe your reactions with the very greatest of interest.’
He bustled back into his own office and sat at his desk.
She followed him in patiently and sat opposite, pointedly ignoring
the new unwarrantable extravagance sitting on the desk.
The flashy brass plaque for the door had stirred her up pretty badly
but the silly phone with big red push buttons she regarded as being
beneath contempt. And she certainly wasn’t going to do anything rash
like smile until she knew for certain that the cheque wouldn’t bounce.
The last time he signed a cheque for her he cancelled it before the end
of the day, to prevent it, as he explained, ‘falling into the wrong
hands’. The wrong hands presumably, being those of her bank manager.
He thrust a piece of paper across the desk.
She picked it up and looked at it. Then she turned it round and
looked at it again. She looked at the other side and then she put it
down.
‘Well?’ demanded Dirk. ‘What do you make of it? Tell me!’
Miss Pearce sighed.
‘It’s a lot of meaningless squiggles done in blue felt tip on a
piece of typing paper,’ she said. ‘It looks like you did them
yourself.’
‘No!’ barked Dirk, ‘Well, yes,’ he admitted, ‘but only because I
believe that it is the answer to the problem!’
‘What problem?’
‘The problem,’ insisted Dirk, slapping the table, ‘of the conjuring
trick! I told you!’
‘Yes, Mr Gently, several times. I think it was just a conjuring
trick. You see them on the telly.’
‘With this difference — that this one was completely impossible!’
‘Couldn’t have been impossible or he wouldn’t have done it. Stands
to reason.’
‘Exactly!’ said Dirk excitedly. ‘Exactly! Miss Pearce, you are a
lady of rare perception and insight.’
‘Thank you, sir, can I go now?’
‘Wait! I haven’t finished yet! Not by a long way, not by a
bucketful! You have demonstrated to me the depth of your perception and
insight, allow me to demonstrate mine!’
Miss Pearce slumped patiently in her seat.
‘I think,’ said Dirk, ‘you will be impressed. Consider this. An
intractable problem. In trying to find the solution to it I was going
round and round in little circles in my mind, over and over the same
maddening things. Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to think of
anything else until I had the answer, but equally clearly I would have
to think of something else if I was ever going to get the answer. How
to break this circle? Ask me how.’
‘How?’ said Miss Pearce obediently, but without enthusiasm.
‘By writing down what the answer is!’ exclaimed Dirk. ‘And here it
is!’ He slapped the piece of paper triumphantly and sat back with a
satisfied smile.
Miss Pearce looked at it dumbly.
‘With the result,’ continued Dirk, ‘that I am now able to turn my
mind to fresh and intriguing problems, like, for instance…’
He took the piece of paper, covered with its aimless squiggles and
doodlings, and held it up to her.
‘What language,’ he said in a low, dark voice, ‘is this written in?’
Miss Pearce continued to look at it dumbly.
Dirk flung the piece of paper down, put his feet up on the table,
and threw his head back with his hands behind it.
‘You see what I have done?’ he asked the ceiling, which seemed to
flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation. ‘I
have transformed the problem from an intractably difficult and possibly
quite insoluble conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle. Albeit,’ he
muttered, after a long moment of silent pondering, ‘an intractably
difficult and possibly insoluble one.’
He swung back to gaze intently at Janice Pearce.
‘Go on,’ he urged, ‘say that it’s insane — but it might just work!’
Janice Pearce cleared her throat.
‘It’s insane,’ she said, ‘trust me.’
Dirk turned away and sagged sideways off his chair, much as the
sitter for The Thinker probably did when Rodin went off to be excused.
He suddenly looked profoundly tired and depressed.
‘I know,’ he said in a low, dispirited voice, ‘that there is
something profoundly wrong somewhere. And I know that I must go to
Cambridge to put it right. But I would feel less fearful if I knew what
it was…’
‘Can I get on now, please, then?’ said Miss Pearce.
Dirk looked up at her glumly.
‘Yes,’ he said with a sigh, ‘but just — just tell me –’ he flicked
at the piece of paper with his fingertips — ‘what do you think of
this, then?’
‘Well, I think it’s childish,’ said Janice Pearce, frankly.
‘But — but — but!’ said Dirk thumping the table in frustration.
‘Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to
understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it
hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things
that we don’t expect to see?’
‘Then why don’t you go and ask one?’
‘Thank you, Miss Pearce,’ said Dirk reaching for his hat, ‘once
again you have rendered me an inestimable service for which I am
profoundly grateful.’
He swept out.
[::: CHAPTER 24 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
The weather began to bleaken as Richard made his way to Susan’s
flat. The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the
morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its
normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth. Richard
took a taxi, which got him there in a few minutes.
‘They should all be deported,’ said the taxi driver as they drew to
a halt.
‘Er, who should?’ said Richard, who realised he hadn’t been
listening to a word the driver said.
‘Er –’said the driver, who suddenly realised he hadn’t been
listening either, ‘er, the whole lot of them. Get rid of the whole
bloody lot, that’s what I say. And their bloody newts,’ he added for
good measure.
‘Expect you’re right,’ said Richard, and hurried into the house.
Arriving at the front door of her flat he could hear from within the
sounds of Susan’s cello playing a slow, stately melody. He was glad of
that, that she was playing. She had an amazing emotional self
sufficiency and control provided she could play her cello. He had
noticed an odd and extraordinary thing about her relationship with the
music she played. If ever she was feeling emotional or upset she could
sit and play some music with utter concentration and emerge seeming
fresh and calm.
The next time she played the same music, however, it would all burst
from her and she would go completely to pieces.
He let himself in as quietly as possible so as not to disturb her
concentration.
He tiptoed past the small room she practised in, but the door was
open so he paused and looked at her, with the slightest of signals that
she shouldn’t stop. She was looking pale and drawn but gave him a
flicker of a smile and continued bowing with a sudden intensity.
With an impeccable timing of which it is very rarely capable the sun
chose that moment to burst briefly through the gathering rainclouds,
and as she played her cello a stormy light played on her and on the
deep old brown of the wood of the instrument. Richard stood transfixed.
The turmoil of the day stood still for a moment and kept a respectful
distance.
He didn’t know the music, but it sounded like Mozart and he
remembered her saying she had some Mozart to learn. He walked quietly
on and sat down to wait and listen.
Eventually she finished the piece, and there was about a minute of
silence before she came through. She blinked and smiled and gave him a
long, trembling hug, then released herself and put the phone back on
the hook. It usually got taken off when she was practising.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to stop.’ She briskly brushed away
a tear as if it was a slight irritation. ‘How are you Richard?’
He shrugged and gave her a bewildered look. That seemed about to
cover it.
‘And I’m going to have to carry on, I’m afraid,’ said Susan with a
sigh ‘I’m sorry. I’ve just been…’ She shook her head. ‘Who would do
it?’
‘I don’t know. Some madman. I’m not sure that it matters who.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Look, er, have you had any lunch?’
‘No. Susan, you keep playing and I’ll see what’s in the fridge. We
can talk about it all over some lunch.’
Susan nodded.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘except…’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, just for the moment I don’t really want to talk about Gordon.
Just till it sinks in. I feel sort of caught out. It would be easier if
I’d been closer to him, but I wasn’t and I’m sort of embarrassed by not
having a reaction ready. Talking about it would be all right except
that you have to use the past tense and that’s what’s…’
She clung to him for a moment and then quieted herself with a sigh.
‘There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,’ she said, ‘some
yoghurt, I think, and a jar of roll-mop herrings you could open. I’m
sure you’ll be able to muck it up if you try, but it’s actually quite
straightforward. The main trick is not to throw them all over the floor
or get jam on them.’
She gave him a hug, a kiss and a glum smile and then retreated back
to her music room.
The phone rang and Richard answered it.
‘Hello?’ he said. There was nothing, just a faint sort of windy
noise on the line.
‘Hello?’ he said again, waited, shrugged and put the phone back
down.
‘Was there anybody there?’ called Susan.
‘No, no one,’ said Richard.
‘That’s happened a couple of times,’ said Susan. ‘I think it’s a
sort of minimalist heavy breather.’ She resumed playing.
Richard went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He was less of
a health-conscious eater than Susan and was therefore less than
thrilled by what he found there, but he managed to put some roll-mop
herrings, some yoghurt, some rice and some oranges on a tray without
difficulty and tried not to think that a couple of fat hamburgers and
fries would round it off nicely.
He found a bottle of white wine and carried it all through to the
small dining table.
After a minute or two Susan joined him there. She was at her most
calm and composed, and after a few mouthsful she asked him about the
canal.
Richard shook his head in bemusement and tried to explain about it,
and about Dirk.
‘What did you say his name was?’ said Susan with a frown when he had
come, rather lamely, to a conclusion.
‘It’s, er, Dirk Gently,’ said Richard, ‘in a way.’
‘In a way?’
‘Er, yes,’ said Richard with a difficult sigh. He reflected that
just about anything you could say about Dirk was subject to these kind
of vague and shifty qualifications. There was even, on his letter
heading, a string of vague and shifty-looking qualifications after his
name. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he had vainly been
trying to organise his thoughts earlier in the day.
‘I…’ he started, but the doorbell rang. They looked at each other.
‘If it’s the police,’ said Richard, ‘I’d better see them. Let’s get
it over with.’
Susan pushed back her chair, went to the front door and picked up
the Entryphone.
‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Who?’ she said after a moment. She frowned as she listened then
swung round and frowned at Richard.
‘You’d better come up,’ she said in a less than friendly tone of
voice and then pressed the button. She came back and sat down.
‘Your friend,’ she said evenly, ‘Mr Gently.’
The Electric Monk’s day was going tremendously well and he broke
into an excited gallop. That is to say that, excitedly, he spurred his
horse to a gallop and, unexcitedly, his horse broke into it.
This world, the Monk thought, was a good one. He loved it. He didn’t
know whose it was or where it had come from, but it was certainly a
deeply fulfilling place for someone with his unique and extraordinary
gifts.
He was appreciated. All day he had gone up to people, fallen into
conversation with them, listened to their troubles, and then quietly
uttered those three magic words, ‘I believe you.’
The effect had invariably been electrifying. It wasn’t that people
on this world didn’t occasionally say it to each other, but they
rarely, it seemed, managed to achieve that deep timbre of sincerity
which the Monk had been so superbly programmed to reproduce.
On his own world, after all, he was taken for granted. People would
just expect him to get on and believe things for them without bothering
them. Someone would come to the door with some great new idea or
proposal or even a new religion, and the answer would be ‘Oh, go and
tell that to the Monk.’ And the Monk would sit and listen and patiently
believe it all, but no one would take any further interest.
Only one problem seemed to arise on this otherwise excellent world.
Often, after he had uttered the magic words, the subject would rapidly
change to that of money, and the Monk of course didn’t have any — a
shortcoming that had quickly blighted a number of otherwise very
promising encounters.
Perhaps he should acquire some — but where?
He reined his horse in for a moment, and the horse jerked gratefully
to a halt and started in on the grass on the roadside verge. The horse
had no idea what all this galloping up and down was in aid of, and
didn’t care. All it did care about was that it was being made to gallop
up and down past a seemingly perpetual roadside buffet. It made the
best of its moment while it had it.
The Monk peered keenly up and down the road. It seemed vaguely
familiar. He trotted a little further up it for another look. The horse
resumed its meal a few yards further along.
Yes. The Monk had been here last night.
He remembered it clearly, well, sort of clearly. He believed that he
remembered it clearly, and that, after all, was the main thing. Here
was where he had walked to in a more than usually confused state of
mind, and just around the very next corner, if he was not very much
mistaken, again, lay the small roadside establishment at which he had
jumped into the back of that nice man’s car — the nice man who had
subsequently reacted so oddly to being shot at.
Perhaps they would have some money there and would let him have it.
He wondered. Well, he would find out. He yanked the horse from its
feast once again and galloped towards it.
As he approached the petrol station he noticed a car parked there at
an arrogant angle. The angle made it quite clear that the car was not
there for anything so mundane as to have petrol put into it, and was
much too important to park itself neatly out of the way. Any other car
that arrived for petrol would just have to manoeuvre around it as best
it could. The car was white with stripes and badges and important
looking lights.
Arriving at the forecourt the Monk dismounted and tethered his horse
to a pump. He walked towards the small shop building and saw that
inside it there was a man with his back to him wearing a dark blue
uniform and a peaked cap. The man was dancing up and down and twisting
his fingers in his ears, and this was clearly making a deep impression
on the man behind the till.
The Monk watched in transfixed awe. The man, he believed with an
instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist,
must be a God of some kind to arouse such fervour. He waited with bated
breath to worship him. In a moment the man turned around and walked out
of the shop, saw the Monk and stopped dead.
The Monk realised that the God must be waiting for him to make an
act of worship, so he reverently danced up and down twisting his
fingers in his ears.
His God stared at him for a moment, caught hold of him, twisted him
round, slammed him forward spreadeagled over the car and frisked him
for weapons.
Dirk burst into the flat like a small podgy tornado.
‘Miss Way,’ he said, grasping her slightly unwilling hand and
doffing his absurd hat, ‘it is the most inexpressible pleasure to meet
you, but also the matter of the deepest regret that the occasion of our
meeting should be one of such great sorrow and one which bids me extend
to you my most profound sympathy and commiseration. I ask you to
believe me that I would not intrude upon your private grief for all the
world if it were not on a matter of the gravest moment and magnitude.
Richard — I have solved the problem of the conjuring trick and it’s
extraordinary.’
He swept through the room and deposited himself on a spare chair at
the small dining table, on which he put his hat.
‘You will have to excuse us, Dirk –’ said Richard, coldly.
‘No, I am afraid you will have to excuse me,’ returned Dirk. ‘The
puzzle is solved, and the solution is so astounding that it took a
seven-year-old child on the street to give it to me. But it is
undoubtedly the correct one, absolutely undoubtedly. “What, then, is
the solution?” you ask me, or rather would ask me if you could get a
word in edgeways, which you can’t, so I will save you the bother and
ask the question for you, and answer it as well by saying that I will
not tell you, because you won’t believe me. I shall instead show you,
this very afternoon.
‘Rest assured, however, that it explains everything. It explains the
trick. It explains the note you found — that should have made it
perfectly clear to me but I was a fool. And it explains what the
missing third question was, or rather — and this is the significant
point — it explains what the missing first question was!’
‘What missing question?’ exclaimed Richard, confused by the sudden
pause, and leaping in with the first phrase he could grab.
Dirk blinked as if at an idiot. ‘The missing question that George
III asked, of course,’ he said.
‘Asked who?’
‘Well, the Professor,’ said Dirk impatiently. ‘Don’t you listen to
anything you say? The whole thing was obvious!’ he exclaimed, thumping
the table, ‘So obvious that the only thing which prevented me from
seeing the solution was the trifling fact that it was completely
impossible. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the
impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. Now. Let
us go.’
‘No.’
‘What?’ Dirk glanced up at Susan, from whom this unexpected — or at
least, unexpected to him — opposition had come.
‘Mr Gently,’ said Susan in a voice you could notch a stick with,
‘why did you deliberately mislead Richard into thinking that he was
wanted by the police?’
Dirk frowned.
‘But he was wanted by the police,’ he said, ‘and still is.’
‘Yes, but just to answer questions! Not because he’s a suspected
murderer.’
Dirk looked down.
‘Miss Way,’ he said, ‘the police are interested in knowing who
murdered your brother. I, with the very greatest respect, am not. It
may, I concede, turn out to have a bearing on the case, but it may just
as likely turn out to be a casual madman. I wanted to know, still need
desperately to know, /why Richard climbed into this flat last night/.’
‘I told you,’ protested Richard.
‘What you told me is immaterial — it only reveals the crucial fact
that you do not know the reason yourself! For heaven’s sake I thought I
had demonstrated that to you clearly enough at the canal!’
Richard simmered.
‘It was perfectly clear to me watching you,’ pursued Dirk, ‘that you
had very little idea what you were doing, and had absolutely no concern
about the physical danger you were in. At first I thought, watching,
that it was just a brainless thug out on his first and quite possibly
last burgle. But then the figure looked back and I realised it was you
— and I know you to be an intelligent, rational, and moderate man.
Richard MacDuff? Risking his neck carelessly climbing up drainpipes at
night? It seemed to me that you would only behave in such a reckless
and extreme way if you were desperately worried about something of
terrible importance. Is that not true, Miss Way?’
He looked sharply up at Susan, who slowly sat down, looking at him
with an alarm in her eyes which said that he had struck home.
‘And yet, when you came to see me this morning you seemed perfectly
calm and collected. You argued with me perfectly rationally when I
talked a lot of nonsense about Schrцdinger’s Cat. This was not the
behaviour of someone who had the previous night been driven to extremes
by some desperate purpose. I confess that it was at that moment that I
stooped to, well, exaggerating your predicament, simply in order to
keep hold of you.’
‘You didn’t. I left.’
‘With certain ideas in your head. I knew you would be back. I
apologise most humbly for having misled you, er, somewhat, but I knew
that what I had to find out lay far beyond what the police would
concern themselves with. And it was this — if you were not quite
yourself when you climbed the wall last night… then /who were you, —
and why/?’
Richard shivered. A silence lengthened.
‘What has it got to do with conjuring tricks?’ he said at last.
‘That is what we must go to Cambridge to find out.’
‘But what makes you so sure — ?’
‘It disturbs me,’ said Dirk, and a dark and heavy look came into his
face.
For one so garrulous he seemed suddenly oddly reluctant to speak.
He continued, ‘It disturbs me very greatly when I find that I know
things and do not know why I know them. Maybe it is the same
instinctive processing of data that allows you to catch a ball almost
before you’ve seen it. Maybe it is the deeper and less explicable
instinct that tells you when someone is watching you. It is a very
great offence to my intellect that the very things that I despise other
people for being credulous of actually occur to me. You will remember
the… unhappiness surrounding certain exam questions.’
He seemed suddenly distressed and haggard. He had to dig deep inside
himself to continue speaking.
He said, ‘The ability to put two and two together and come up
instantly with four is one thing. The ability to put the square root of
five hundred and thirty-nine point seven together with the cosine of
twenty-six point four three two and come up with… with whatever the
answer to that is, is quite another. And I… well, let me give you an
example.’
He leant forward intently. ‘Last night I saw you climbing into this
flat. I /knew/ that something was wrong. Today I got you to tell me
every last detail you knew about what happened last night, and already,
as a result, using my intellect alone, I have uncovered possibly the
greatest secret lying hidden on this planet. I swear to you that this
is true and that I can prove it. Now you must believe me when I tell
you that I know, I know that there is something terribly, desperately,
appallingly wrong and that we must find it. Will you go with me now, to
Cambridge?’
Richard nodded dumbly.
‘Good,’ said Dirk. ‘What is this?’ he added, pointing at Richard’s
plate.
‘A pickled herring. Do you want one?’
‘Thank you, no,’ said Dirk, rising and buckling his coat. ‘There
is,’ he added as he headed towards the door, steering Richard with him,
‘no such word as “herring” in my dictionary. Good afternoon, Miss Way,
wish us God speed.’
[::: CHAPTER 25 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
There was a rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable
tight drizzle from the north-east by which so many of the world’s most
momentous events seem to be accompanied.
Dirk turned up the collar of his leather overcoat against the
weather, but nothing could dampen his demonic exuberance as he and
Richard approached the great twelfth-century gates.
‘St Cedd’s College, Cambridge,’ he exclaimed, looking at them for
the first time in eight years. ‘Founded in the year something or other,
by someone I forget in honour of someone whose name for the moment
escapes me.’
‘St Cedd?’ suggested Richard.
‘Do you know, I think it very probably was? One of the duller
Northumbrian saints. His brother Chad was even duller. Has a cathedral
in Birmingham if that gives you some idea. Ah, Bill, how good to see
you again,’ he added, accosting the porter who was just walking into
the college as well. The porter looked round.
‘Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of
bother, hope that’s all behind you now.’
‘Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is
she? Foot still troubling her?’
‘Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and
me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and
kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but
there we are, we have to take things as we find them.
‘Mr MacDuff, sir,’ he added, nodding curtly at Richard. ‘Oh that
horse you mentioned, sir, when you were here last night, I’m afraid we
had to have it removed. It was bothering Professor Chronotis.’
‘I was only curious, er, Bill,’ said Richard. ‘I hope it didn’t
disturb you.’
‘Nothing ever disturbs me, sir, so long as it isn’t wearing a dress.
Can’t abide it when the young fellers wear dresses, sir.’
‘If the horse bothers you again, Bill,’ interrupted Dirk, patting
him on the shoulder, ‘send it up to me and I shall speak with it. Now,
you mention the good Professor Chronotis. Is he in at the moment? We’ve
come on an errand.’
‘Far as I know, sir. Can’t check for you because his phone’s out of
order. Suggest you go and look yourself. Far left corner of Second
Court.’
‘I know it well, Bill, thank you, and my best to what remains of Mrs
Roberts.’
They swept on through into First Court, or at least Dirk swept, and
Richard walked in his normal heron-like gait, wrinkling up his face
against the measly drizzle.
Dirk had obviously mistaken himself for a tour guide.
‘St Cedd’s,’ he pronounced, ‘the college of Coleridge, and the
college of Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin
and the catflap!’
‘The what?’ said Richard.
‘The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and
invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a…’
‘Yes,’ said Richard, ‘there was also the small matter of gravity.’
‘Gravity,’ said Dirk with a slightly dismissive shrug, ‘yes, there
was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a
discovery. It was there to be discovered.’
He took a penny out of his pocket and tossed it casually on to the
pebbles that ran alongside the paved pathway.
‘You see?’ he said, ‘They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was
bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap… ah, there is a very
different matter. Invention, pure creative invention.’
‘I would have thought it was quite obvious. Anyone could have
thought of it.’
‘Ah,’ said Dirk, ‘it is a rare mind indeed that can render the
hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry “I could have thought
of that” is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that
they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. This
if I am not mistaken is the staircase we seek. Shall we ascend?’
Without waiting for an answer he plunged on up the stairs. Richard,
following uncertainly, found him already knocking on the inner door.
The outer one stood open.
‘Come in!’ called a voice from within. Dirk pushed the door open,
and they were just in time to see the back of Reg’s white head as he
disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Just making some tea,’ he called out. ‘Like some? Sit down, sit
down, whoever you are.’
‘That would be most kind,’ returned Dirk. ‘We are two.’ Dirk sat,
and Richard followed his lead.
‘Indian or China?’ called Reg.
‘Indian, please.’
There was a rattle of cups and saucers.
Richard looked around the room. It seemed suddenly humdrum. The fire
was burning quietly away to itself, but the light was that of the grey
afternoon. Though everything about it was the same, the old sofa, the
table burdened with books, there seemed nothing to connect it with the
hectic strangeness of the previous night. The room seemed to sit there
with raised eyebrows, innocently saying ‘Yes?’
‘Milk?’ called out Reg from the kitchen.
‘Please,’ replied Dirk. He gave Richard a smile which seemed to him
to be half-mad with suppressed excitement.
‘One lump or two?’ called Reg again.
‘One, please,’ said Dirk, ‘…and two spoons of sugar if you would.’
There was a suspension of activity in the kitchen. A moment or two
passed and Reg stuck his head round the door.
‘Svlad Cjelli!’ he exclaimed. ‘Good heavens! Well, that was quick
work, young MacDuff, well done. My dear fellow, how very excellent to
see you, how good of you to come.’
He wiped his hands on a tea towel he was carrying and hurried over
to shake hands.
‘My dear Svlad.’
‘Dirk, please, if you would,’ said Dirk, grasping his hand warmly,
‘I prefer it. It has more of a sort of Scottish dagger feel to it, I
think. Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are
certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to
disassociate myself.’
‘Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century,
for instance, was pretty grim,’ agreed Reg earnestly.
Dirk was about to correct the misapprehension, but thought that it
might be somewhat of a long trek and left it.
‘So how have you been, then, my dear Professor?’ he said instead,
decorously placing his hat and scarf upon the arm of the sofa.
‘Well,’ said Reg, ‘it’s been an interesting time recently, or
rather, a dull time. But dull for interesting reasons. Now, sit down
again, warm yourselves by the fire, and I will get the tea and
endeavour to explain.’ He bustled out again, humming busily, and left
them to settle themselves in front of the fire.
Richard leant over to Dirk. ‘I had no idea you knew him so well,’ he
said with a nod in the direction of the kitchen.
‘I don’t,’ said Dirk instantly. ‘We met once by chance at some
dinner, but there was an immediate sympathy and rapport.’
‘So how come you never met again?’
‘He studiously avoided me, of course. Close rapports with people are
dangerous if you have a secret to hide. And as secrets go, I fancy that
this is somewhat of a biggie. If there is a bigger secret anywhere in
the world I would very much care,’ he said quietly, ‘to know what it
is.’
He gave Richard a significant look and held his hands out to the
fire. Since Richard had tried before without success to draw him out on
exactly what the secret was, he refused to rise to the bait on this
occasion, but sat back in his armchair and looked about him.
‘Did I ask you,’ said Reg, returning at that moment, ‘if you wanted
any tea?’
‘Er, yes,’ said Richard, ‘we spoke about it at length. I think we
agreed in the end that we would, didn’t we?’
‘Good,’ said Reg, vaguely, ‘by a happy chance there seems to be some
ready in the kitchen. You’ll have to forgive me. I have a memory like
a… like a… what are those things you drain rice in? What am I
talking about?’
With a puzzled look he turned smartly round and disappeared once
more into the kitchen.
‘Very interesting,’ said Dirk quietly, ‘I wondered if his memory
might be poor.’
He stood, suddenly, and prowled around the room. His eyes fell on
the abacus which stood on the only clear space on the large mahogany
table.
‘Is this the table,’ he asked Richard in a low voice, ‘where you
found the note about the salt cellar?’
‘Yes,’ said Richard, standing, and coming over, ‘tucked into this
book.’ He picked up the guide to the Greek islands and flipped through
it.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Dirk, impatiently. ‘We know about all
that. I’m just interested that this was the table.’ He ran his fingers
along its edge, curiously.
‘If you think it was some sort of prior collaboration between Reg
and the girl,’ Richard said, ‘then I must say that I don’t think it
possibly can have been.’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ said Dirk testily, ‘I would have thought that
was perfectly clear.’
Richard shrugged in an effort not to get angry and put the book back
down again.
‘Well, it’s an odd coincidence that the book should have been…’
‘Odd coincidence!’ snorted Dirk. ‘Ha! We shall see how much of a
coincidence. We shall see exactly how odd it was. I would like you,
Richard, to ask our friend how he performed the trick.’
‘I thought you said you knew already.’
‘I do,’ said Dirk airily. ‘I would like to hear it confirmed.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Richard, ‘yes, that’s rather easy, isn’t it? Get
him to explain it, and then say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I thought it
was!” Very good, Dirk. Have we come all the way up here in order to
have him explain how he did a conjuring trick? I think I must be mad.’
Dirk bridled at this.
‘Please do as I ask,’ he snapped angrily. ‘You saw him do the trick,
you must ask how he did it. Believe me, there is an astounding secret
hidden within it. I know it, but I want you to hear it from him.’
He spun round as Reg re-entered, bearing a tray, which he carried
round the sofa and put on to the low coffee table that sat in front of
the fire.
‘Professor Chronotis…’ said Dirk.
‘Reg,’ said Reg, ‘please.’
‘Very, well,’ said Dirk, ‘Reg…’
‘Sieve!’ exclaimed Reg.
‘What?’
‘Thing you drain rice in. A sieve. I was trying to remember the
word, though I forget now the reason why. No matter. Dirk, dear fellow,
you look as if you are about to explode about something. Why don’t you
sit down and make yourself comfortable?’
‘Thank you, no, I would rather feel free to pace up and down
fretfully if I may. Reg…’
He turned to face him square on, and raised a single finger.
‘I must tell you,’ he said, ‘that I know your secret.’
‘Ah, yes, er — do you indeed?’ mumbled Reg, looking down awkwardly
and fiddling with the cups and teapot. ‘I see.’
The cups rattled violently as he moved them. ‘Yes, I was afraid of
that.’
‘And there are some questions that we would like to ask you. I must
tell you that I await the answers with the very greatest apprehension.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Reg muttered. ‘Well, perhaps it is at last time. I
hardly know myself what to make of recent events and am… fearful
myself. Very well. Ask what you will.’ He looked up sharply, his eyes
glittering.
Dirk nodded curtly at Richard, turned, and started to pace, glaring
at the floor.
‘Er,’ said Richard, ‘well. I’d be… interested to know how you did
the conjuring trick with the salt cellar last night.’
Reg seemed surprised and rather confused by the question. ‘The
/conjuring/ trick?’ he said.
‘Er, yes,’ said Richard, ‘the conjuring trick.’
‘Oh,’ said Reg, taken aback, ‘well, the conjuring part of it, I’m
not sure I should — Magic Circle rules, you know, very strict about
revealing these secrets. Very strict. Impressive trick, though, don’t
you think?’ he added slyly.
‘Well, yes,’ said Richard, ‘it seemed very natural at the time, but
now that I… think about it, I have to admit that it was a bit
dumbfounding.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Reg, ‘it’s skill. you see. Practice. Make it look
natural.’
‘It did look very natural,’ continued Richard, feeling his way, ‘I
was quite taken in.’
‘You liked it?’
‘It was very impressive.’
Dirk was getting a little impatient. He shot a look to that effect
at Richard.
‘And I can quite see,’ said Richard firmly, ‘why it’s impossible for
you to tell me. I was just interested, that’s all. Sorry I asked.’
‘Well,’ said Reg in a sudden seizure of doubt, ‘I suppose… well,
so long as you absolutely promise not to tell anyone else.’ he carried
on, ‘I suppose you can probably work out for yourself that I used two
of the salt cellars on the table. No one was going to notice the
difference between one and another. The quickness of the hand, you
know, deceives the eye, particularly some of the eyes around that
table. While I was fiddling with my woolly hat, giving, though I say so
myself, a very cunning simulation of clumsiness and muddle, I simply
slipped the salt cellar down my sleeve. You see?’
His earlier agitation had been swept away completely by his pleasure
in showing off his craft.
‘It’s the oldest trick in the world, in fact,’ he continued, ‘but
nevertheless takes a great deal of skill and deftness. Then a little
later, of course, I returned it to the table with the appearance of
simply passing it to someone else. Takes years of practice, of course,
to make it look natural, but I much prefer it to simply slipping the
thing down to the floor. Amateur stuff that. You can’t pick it up, and
the cleaners never notice it for at least a fortnight. I once had a
dead thrush under my seat for a month. No trick involved there, of
course. Cat killed it.’
Reg beamed.
Richard felt he had done his bit, but hadn’t the faintest idea where
it was supposed to have got them. He glanced at Dirk, who gave him no
help whatsoever, so he plunged on blindly.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I understand that that can be done by sleight
of hand. What I don’t understand is how the salt cellar got embedded in
the pot.’
Reg looked puzzled once again, as if they were all talking at cross
purposes. He looked at Dirk, who stopped pacing and stared at him with
bright, expectant eyes.
‘Well, that’s… perfectly straightforward,’ said Reg, ‘didn’t take
any conjuring skill at all. I nipped out for my hat, you remember?’
‘Yes,’ said Richard, doubtfully.
‘Well,’ said Reg, ‘while I was out of the room I went to find the
man who made the pot. Took some time, of course. About three weeks of
detective work to track him down and another couple of days to sober
him up, and then with a little difficulty I persuaded him to bake the
salt cellar into the pot for me. After that I briefly stopped off
somewhere to find some, er, powder to disguise the suntan, and of
course I had to time the return a little carefully so as to make it all
look natural. I bumped into myself in the ante-room, which I always
find embarrassing, I never know where to look, but, er… well, there
you have it.’
He smiled a rather bleak and nervous smile.
Richard tried to nod, but eventually gave up.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he said.
Reg looked at him in surprise.
‘I thought you said you knew my secret,’ he said.
‘I do,’ said Dirk, with a beam of triumph. ‘He, as yet, does not,
though he furnished all the information I needed to discover it. Let
me,’ he added, ‘fill in a couple of little blanks. In order to help
disguise the fact that you had in fact been away for weeks when as far
as anyone sitting at the table was concerned you had only popped out of
the door for a couple of seconds, you had to write down for your own
reference the last thing you said, in order that you could pick up the
thread of conversation again as naturally as possible. An important
detail if your memory is not what it once was. Yes?’
‘What it once was,’ said Reg, slowly shaking his white head, ‘I can
hardly remember what it once was. But yes, you are very sharp to pick
up such a detail.’
‘And then there is the little matter,’ continued Dirk, ‘of the
questions that George III asked. Asked you.’
This seemed to catch Reg quite by surprise.
‘He asked you,’ continued Dirk, consulting a small notebook he had
pulled from his pocket, ‘if there was any particular reason why one
thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it.
Did he not also ask you, and ask you first, if it was possible to move
backwards in time, or something of that kind?’
Reg gave Dirk a long and appraising look.
‘I was right about you,’ he said, ‘you have a very remarkable mind,
young man.’ He walked slowly over to the window that looked out on to
Second Court. He watched the odd figures scuttling through it hugging
themselves in the drizzle or pointing at things.
‘Yes,’ said Reg at last in a subdued voice, ‘that is precisely what
he said.’
‘Good,’ said Dirk, snapping shut his notebook with a tight little
smile which said that he lived for such praise, ‘then that explains why
the answers were yes, no and maybe — in that order. Now. Where is it?’
‘Where is what?’
‘The time machine.’
‘You’re standing in it.’ said Reg.
[::: CHAPTER 26 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
A party of noisy people spilled into the train at Bishop’s
Stortford. Some were wearing morning suits with carnations looking a
little battered by a day’s festivity. The women of the party were in
smart dresses and hats, chattering excitedly about how pretty Julia had
looked in all that silk taffeta, how Ralph still looked like a smug oaf
even done up in all his finery, and generally giving the whole thing
about two weeks.
One of the men stuck his head out of the window and hailed a passing
railway employee just to check that this was the right train and was
stopping at Cambridge. The porter confirmed that of course it bloody
was. The young man said that they didn’t all want to find they were
going off in the wrong direction, did they, and made a sound a little
like that of a fish barking, as if to indicate that this was a
pricelessly funny remark, and then pulled his head back in, banging it
on the way.
The alcohol content of the atmosphere in the carriage rose sharply.
There seemed to be a general feeling in the air that the best way of
getting themselves in the right mood for the post-wedding reception
party that evening was to make a foray to the bar so that any members
of the party who were not already completely drunk could finish the
task. Rowdy shouts of acclamation greeted this notion, the train
restarted with a jolt and a lot of those still standing fell over.
Three young men dropped into the three empty seats round one table,
of which the fourth was already taken by a sleekly overweight man in an
old-fashioned suit. He had a lugubrious face and his large, wet,
cowlike eyes gazed into some unknown distance.
Very slowly his eyes began to refocus all the way from infinity and
gradually to home in on his more immediate surroundings, his new and
intrusive companions. There was a need he felt, as he had felt before.
The three men were discussing loudly whether they would all go to
the bar, whether some of them would go to the bar and bring back drinks
for the others, whether the ones who went to the bar would get so
excited by all the drinks there that they would stay put and forget to
bring any back for the others who would be sitting here anxiously
awaiting their return, and whether even if they did remember to come
back immediately with the drinks they would actually be capable of
carrying them and wouldn’t simply throw them all over the carriage on
the way back, incommoding other passengers.
Some sort of consensus seemed to be reached, but almost immediately
none of them could remember what it was. Two of them got up, then sat
down again as the third one got up. Then he sat down. The two other
ones stood up again, expressing the idea that it might be simpler if
they just bought the entire bar.
The third was about to get up again and follow them, when slowly,
but with unstoppable purpose, the cow-eyed man sitting opposite him
leant across, and gripped him firmly by the forearm.
The young man in his morning suit looked up as sharply as his
somewhat bubbly brain would allow and, startled, said, ‘What do you
want?’
Michael Wenton-Weakes gazed into his eyes with terrible intensity,
and said, in a low voice, ‘I was on a ship…’
‘What?’
‘A ship…’ said Michael.
‘What ship, what are you talking about? Get off me. Let go!’
‘We came,’ continued Michael, in a quiet, almost inaudible, but
compelling voice, ‘a monstrous distance. We came to build a paradise. A
paradise. Here.’
His eyes swam briefly round the carriage, and then gazed briefly out
through the spattered windows at the gathering gloom of a drizzly East
Anglian evening. He gazed with evident loathing. His grip on the
other’s forearm tightened.
‘Look, I’m going for a drink,’ said the wedding guest, though
feebly, because he clearly wasn’t.
‘We left behind those who would destroy themselves with war,’
murmured Michael. ‘Ours was to be a world of peace, of music, of art,
of enlightenment. All that was petty, all that was mundane, all that
was contemptible would have no place in our world…’
The stilled reveller looked at Michael wonderingly. He didn’t look
like an old hippy. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder
brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune,
eating LSD doughnuts and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone
on to become a director of a merchant bank. The difference, of course,
was that he hardly ever still thought he was a tree, except just
occasionally, and he had long ago learnt to avoid the particular claret
which sometimes triggered off that flashback.
‘There were those who said we would fail,’ continued Michael in his
low tone that carried clearly under the boisterous noise that filled
the carriage, ‘who prophesied that we too carried in us the seed of
war, but it was our high resolve and purpose that only art and beauty
should flourish, the highest art, the highest beauty — music. We took
with us only those who believed, who wished it to be true.’
‘But what are you talking about?’ asked the wedding guest though not
challengingly, for he had fallen under Michael’s mesmeric spell. ‘When
was this? Where was this?’
Michael breathed hard. ‘Before you were born –’ he said at last,
‘be still, and I will tell you.’
[::: CHAPTER 27 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
There was a long startled silence during which the evening gloom
outside seemed to darken appreciably and gather the room into its grip.
A trick of the light wreathed Reg in shadows.
Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific
loquacity, wordless. His eyes shone with a child’s wonder as they
passed anew over the dull and shabby furniture of the room, the
panelled walls, the threadbare carpets. His hands were trembling.
Richard frowned faintly to himself for a moment as if he was trying
to work out the square root of something in his head, and then looked
back directly at Reg.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Reg brightly, ‘much of my memory’s
gone completely. I am very old, you see. Startlingly old. Yes, I think
if I were to tell you how old I was it would be fair to say that you
would be startled. Odds are that so would I, because I can’t remember.
I’ve seen an awful lot, you know. Forgotten most of it, thank God.
Trouble is, when you start getting to my age, which, as I think I
mentioned earlier, is a somewhat startling one — did I say that?’
‘Yes, you did mention it.’
‘Good. I’d forgotten whether I had or not. The thing is that your
memory doesn’t actually get any bigger, and a lot of stuff just falls
out. So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and
someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I’ve forgotten.
And after a while you even forget what it is you’ve forgotten, and
after that you even forget that there was something to remember. Then
you tend to forget, er, what it was you were talking about.’
He stared helplessly at the teapot.
‘Things you remember…’ prompted Richard gently.
‘Smells and earrings.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Those are things that linger for some reason,’ said Reg, shaking
his head in a puzzled way. He sat down suddenly. ‘The earrings that
Queen Victoria wore on her Silver Jubilee. Quite startling objects.
Toned down in the pictures of the period, of course. The smell of the
streets before there were cars in them. Hard to say which was worse.
That’s why Cleopatra remains so vividly in the memory, of course. A
quite devastating combination of earrings and smell. I think that will
probably be the last thing that remains when all else has finally fled.
I shall sit alone in a darkened room, /sans/ teeth, /sans/ eyes, /sans/
taste, /sans/ everything but a little grey old head, and in that little
grey old head a peculiar vision of hideous blue and gold dangling
things flashing in the light, and the smell of sweat, catfood and
death. I wonder what I shall make of it…’
Dirk was scarcely breathing as he began to move slowly round the
room, gently brushing his fingertips over the walls, the sofa, the
table.
‘How long,’ he said, ‘has this been –’
‘Here?’ said Reg. ‘Just about two hundred years. Ever since I
retired.’
‘Retired from what?’
‘Search me. Must have been something pretty good, though, what do
you think?’
‘You mean you’ve been in this same set of rooms here for… two
hundred years?’ murmured Richard. ‘You’d think someone would notice, or
think it was odd.’
‘Oh, that’s one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,’
said Reg, ‘everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning
what was odd about each other we’d be here till Christmas. Svlad, er —
Dirk, my dear fellow, please don’t touch that just at the moment.’
Dirk’s hand was reaching out to touch the abacus standing on its own
on the only clear spot on the big table.
‘What is it?’ said Dirk sharply.
‘It’s just what it looks like, an old wooden abacus,’ said Reg.
‘I’ll show you in a moment, but first I must congratulate you on your
powers of perception. May I ask how you arrived at the solution?’
‘I have to admit,’ said Dirk with rare humility, ‘that I did not. In
the end I asked a child. I told him the story of the trick and asked
him how he thought it had been done, and he said and I quote, “It’s
bleedin’ obvious, innit, he must’ve ‘ad a bleedin’ time machine.’ I
thanked the little fellow and gave him a shilling for his trouble. He
kicked me rather sharply on the shin and went about his business. But
he was the one who solved it. My only contribution to the matter was to
see that he /must/ be right. He had even saved me the bother of kicking
myself.’
‘But you had the perception to think of asking a child,’ said Reg.
‘Well then, I congratulate you on that instead.’
Dirk was still eyeing the abacus suspiciously.
‘How… does it work?’ he said, trying to make it sound like a
casual enquiry.
‘Well, it’s really terribly simple,’ said Reg, ‘it works any way you
want it to. You see, the computer that runs it is a rather advanced
one. In fact it is more powerful than the sum total of all the
computers on this planet including — and this is the tricky part —
including itself. Never really understood that bit myself, to be honest
with you. But over ninety-five per cent of that power is used in simply
understanding what it is you want it to do. I simply plonk my abacus
down there and it understands the way I use it. I think I must have
been brought up to use an abacus when I was a… well, a child, I
suppose.
‘Richard, for instance, would probably want to use his own personal
computer. If you put it down there, where the abacus is the machine’s
computer would simple take charge of it and offer you lots of nice
user-friendly time-travel applications complete with pull-down menus
and desk accessories if you like. Except that you point to 1066 on the
screen and you’ve got the Battle of Hastings going on outside your
door, er, if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.’
Reg’s tone of voice suggested that his own interests lay in other
areas.
‘It’s, er, really quite fun in its way,’ he concluded. ‘Certainly
better than television and a great deal easier to use than a video
recorder. If I miss a programme I just pop back in time and watch it.
I’m hopeless fiddling with all those buttons.’
Dirk reacted to this revelation with horror.
‘You have a time machine and you use it for… watching television?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t use it at all if I could get the hang of the video
recorder. It’s a very delicate business, time travel, you know. Full of
appalling traps and dangers, if you should change the wrong thing in
the past, you could entirely disrupt the course of history.
‘Plus, of course, it mucks up the telephone. I’m sorry,’ he said to
Richard a little sheepishly, ‘that you were unable to phone your young
lady last night. There seems to be something fundamentally inexplicable
about the British telephone system, and my time machine doesn’t like
it. There’s never any problem with the plumbing, the electricity, or
even the gas. The connection interfaces are taken care of at some
quantum level I don’t entirely understand, and it’s never been a
problem.
‘The phone on the other hand is definitely a problem. Every time I
use the time machine, which is, of course, hardly at all, partly
because of this very problem with the phone, the phone goes haywire and
I have to get some lout from the phone company to come and fix it, and
he starts asking stupid questions the answers to which he has no hope
of understanding.
‘Anyway, the point is that I have a very strict rule that I must not
change anything in the past at all –’ Reg sighed — ‘whatever the
temptation.’
‘What temptation?’ said Dirk, sharply.
‘Oh, it’s just a little, er, thing I’m interested in,’ said Reg,
vaguely, ‘it is perfectly harmless because I stick very strictly to the
rule. It makes me sad, though.’
‘But you broke your own rule!’ insisted Dirk. ‘Last night! You
changed something in the past –’
‘Well, yes,’ said Reg, a little uncomfortably, ‘but that was
different. Very different. If you had seen the look on the poor child’s
face. So miserable. She thought the world should be a marvellous place,
and all those appalling old dons were pouring their withering scorn on
her just because it wasn’t marvellous for them anymore.
‘I mean,’ he added, appealing to Richard, ‘remember Cawley. What a
bloodless old goat. Someone should get some humanity into him even if
they have to knock it in with a brick. No, that was perfectly
justifiable. Otherwise, I make it a very strict rule –’
Richard looked at him with dawning recognition of something.
‘Reg,’ he said politely, ‘may I give you a little advice?’
‘Of course you may, my dear fellow, I should adore you to,’ said
Reg.
‘If our mutual friend here offers to take you for a stroll along the
banks of the River Cam, /don’t go/.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘He means,’ said Dirk earnestly, ‘that he thinks there may be
something a little disproportionate between what you actually did, and
your stated reasons for doing it.’
‘Oh. Well, odd way of saying it –’
‘Well, he’s a very odd fellow. But you see, there sometimes may be
other reasons for things you do which you are not necessarily aware of.
As in the case of post-hypnotic suggestion — or possession.’
Reg turned very pale.
‘Possession –’ he said.
‘Professor — Reg — I believe there was some reason you wanted to
see me. What exactly was it?’
‘Cambridge! this is… Cambridge!’ came the lilting squawk of the
station public address system.
Crowds of noisy revellers spewed out on to the platform barking and
honking at each other.
‘Where’s Rodney?’ said one, who had clambered with difficulty from
the carriage in which the bar was situated. He and his companion looked
up and down the platform, totteringly. The large figure of Michael
Wenton-Weakes loomed silently past them and out to the exit.
They jostled their way down the side of the train, looking in
through the dirty carriage windows. They suddenly saw their missing
companion still sitting, trance-like, in his seat in the now almost
empty compartment. They banged on the window and hooted at him. For a
moment or two he didn’t react, and when he did he woke suddenly in a
puzzled way as if seeming not to know where he was.
‘He’s pie-eyed!’ his companions bawled happily, bundling themselves
on to the train again and bundling Rodney back off.
He stood woozily on the platform and shook his head. Then glancing
up he saw through the railings the large bulk of Michael Wenton-Weakes
heaving himself and a large heavy bag into a taxi- cab, and he stood
for a moment transfixed.
‘’Straordinary thing,’ he said, ‘that man. Telling me a long story
about some kind of shipwreck.’
‘Har har,’ gurgled one of his two companions, ‘get any money off
you?’
‘What?’ said Rodney, puzzled. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. Except it
wasn’t a shipwreck, more an accident, an explosion — ? He seems to
think he caused it in some way. Or rather there was an accident, and he
caused an explosion trying to put it right and killed everybody. Then
he said there was an awful lot of rotting mud for years and years, and
then slimy things with legs. It was all a bit peculiar.’
‘Trust Rodney! Trust Rodney to pick a madman!’
‘I think he must have been mad. He suddenly went off on a tangent
about some bird. He said the bit about the bird was all nonsense. He
wished he could get rid of the bit about the bird. But then he said it
would be put right. It would all be put right. For some reason I didn’t
like it when he said that.’
‘Should have come along to the bar with us. Terribly funny, we –’
‘I also didn’t like the way he said goodbye. I didn’t like that at
all.’
[::: CHAPTER 28 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘You remember,’ said Reg, ‘when you arrived this afternoon I said
that times recently had been dull, but for… interesting reasons?’
‘I remember it vividly,’ said Dirk, ‘it happened a mere ten minutes
ago. You were standing exactly there as I recall. Indeed you were
wearing the very clothes with which you are currently apparelled, and –
-’
‘Shut up, Dirk,’ said Richard, ‘let the poor man talk, will you?’
Dirk made a slight, apologetic bow.
‘Quite so,’ said Reg. ‘Well, the truth is that for many weeks,
months even, I have not used the time machine at all, because I had the
oddest feeling that someone or something was trying to make me do it.
It started as the very faintest urge, and then it seemed to come at me
in stronger and stronger waves. It was extremely disturbing. I had to
fight it very hard indeed because it was trying to make me do something
I actually wanted to do. I don’t think I would have realised that it
was something outside of me creating this pressure and not just my own
wishes asserting themselves if it wasn’t for the fact that I was so
wary of allowing myself to do any such thing. As soon as I began to
realise that it was something else trying to invade me things got
really bad and the furniture began to fly about. Quite damaged my
little Georgian writing desk. Look at the marks on the –’
‘Is that what you were afraid of last night, upstairs?’ asked
Richard.
‘Oh yes,’ said Reg in a hushed voice, ‘most terribly afraid. But it
was only that rather nice horse, so that was all right. I expect it
just wandered in when I was out getting some powder to cover up my
suntan.’
‘Oh?’ said Dirk, ‘And where did you go for that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t
think of many chemists that a horse would be likely to visit.’
‘Oh, there’s a planet off in what’s known here as the Pleiades where
the dust is exactly the right –’
‘You went,’ said Dirk in a whisper, ‘to another planet? To get face
powder?’
‘Oh, it’s no distance,’ said Reg cheerfully. ‘You see, the actual
distance between two points in the whole of the space\time continuum is
almost infinitely smaller than the apparent distance between adjacent
orbits of an electron. Really, it’s a lot less far than the chemist,
and there’s no waiting about at the till. I never have the right
change, do you? Go for the quantum jump is always my preference. Except
of course that you then get all the trouble with the telephone.
Nothing’s ever that easy, is it?’
He looked bothered for a moment.
‘I think you may be right in what I think you’re thinking, though,’
he added quietly.
‘Which is?’
‘That I went through a rather elaborate bit of business to achieve a
very small result. Cheering up a little girl, charming, delightful and
sad though she was, doesn’t seem to be enough explanation for — well,
it was a fairly major operation in time-engineering, now that I come to
face up to it. There’s no doubt that it would have been simpler to
compliment her on her dress. Maybe the… ghost — we are talking of a
ghost here, aren’t we?’
‘I think we are, yes,’ said Dirk slowly.
‘A ghost?’ said Richard, ‘Now come on –’
‘Wait!’ said Dirk, abruptly. ‘Please continue,’ he said to Reg.
‘It’s possible that the… ghost caught me off my guard. I was
fighting so strenuously against doing one thing that it easily tripped
me into another –’
‘And now?’
‘Oh, it’s gone completely. The ghost left me last night.’
‘And where, we wonder,’ said Dirk, turning his gaze on Richard, ‘did
it go?’
‘No, please,’ said Richard, ‘not this. I’m not even sure I’ve agreed
we’re talking about time machines yet, and now suddenly it’s ghosts?’
‘So what was it,’ hissed Dirk, ‘that got into you to make you climb
the wall?’
‘Well, you suggested that I was under post-hypnotic suggestion from
someone –’
‘I did not! I demonstrated the power of post-hypnotic suggestion to
you. But I believe that hypnosis and possession work in very, very
similar ways. You can be made to do all kinds of absurd things, and
will then cheerfully invent the most transparent rationalisations to
explain them to yourself. But — you cannot be made to do something
that runs against the fundamental grain of your character. You will
fight. You will resist!’
Richard remembered then the sense of relief with which he had
impulsively replaced the tape in Susan’s machine last night. It had
been the end of a struggle which he had suddenly won. With the sense of
another struggle that he was now losing he sighed and related this to
the others.
‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Dirk. ‘You wouldn’t do it! Now we’re getting
somewhere! You see, hypnosis works best when the subject has some
fundamental sympathy with what he or she is being asked to do. Find the
right subject for your task and the hypnosis can take a very, very deep
hold indeed. And I believe the same to be true of possession. So. What
do we have?
‘We have a ghost that wants something done and is looking for the
right person to take possession of to do that for him. Professor –’
‘Reg –’ said Reg.
‘Reg — may I ask you something that may be terribly personal? I
will understand perfectly if you don’t want to answer, but I will just
keep pestering you until you do. Just my methods, you see. You said
there was something that you found to be a terrible temptation to you.
That you wanted to do but would not allow yourself, and that the ghost
was trying to make you do? Please. This may be difficult for you, but I
think it would be very helpful if you would tell us what it is.’
‘I will not tell you.’
‘You must understand how important –’
‘I’ll show you instead,’ said Reg.
Silhouetted in the gates of St Cedd’s stood a large figure carrying
a large heavy black nylon bag. The figure was that of Michael Wenton-
Weakes, the voice that asked the porter if Professor Chronotis was
currently in his room was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, the ears that
heard the porter say he was buggered if he knew because the phone
seemed to be on the blink again was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, but
the spirit that gazed out of his eyes was his no longer.
He had surrendered himself completely. All doubt, disparity and
confusion had ceased.
A new mind had him in full possession.
The spirit that was not Michael Wenton-Weakes surveyed the college
which lay before it, to which it had grown accustomed in the last few
frustrating, infuriating weeks.
Weeks! Mere microsecond blinks.
Although the spirit — the ghost — that now inhabited Michael
Wenton-Weakes’ body had known long periods of near oblivion, sometimes
even for centuries at a stretch, the time for which it had wandered the
earth was such that it seemed only minutes ago that the creatures which
had erected these walls had arrived. Most of his personal eternity —
not really eternity, but a few billion years could easily seem like it
— had been spent wandering across interminable mud, wading through
ceaseless seas, watching with stunned horror when the slimy things with
legs suddenly had begun to crawl from those rotting seas — and here
they were, suddenly walking around as if they owned the place and
complaining about the phones.
Deep in a dark and silent part of himself he knew that he was now
mad, had been driven mad almost immediately after the accident by the
knowledge of what he had done and of the existence he faced, by the
memories of his fellows who had died and who for a while had haunted
him even as he had haunted the Earth.
He knew that what he now had been driven to would have revolted the
self he only infinitesimally remembered, but that it was the only way
for him to end the ceaseless nightmare in which each second of billions
of years had been worse than the previous one.
He hefted the bag and started to walk.
[::: CHAPTER 29 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain
forests, which was raining: hence the name.
It was a gentle, persistent rain, not the heavy slashing which would
come later in the year, in the hot season. It formed a fine dripping
mist through which the occasional shaft of sunlight would break, be
softened and pass through on its way towards the wet bark of a calvaria
tree on which it would settle and glisten. Sometimes it would do this
next to a butterfly or a tiny motionless sparkling lizard, and then the
effect would be almost unbearable.
Away up in the high canopy of the trees an utterly extraordinary
thought would suddenly strike a bird, and it would go flapping wildly
through the branches and settle at last in a different and altogether
better tree where it would sit and consider things again more calmly
until the same thought came along and struck it again, or it was time
to eat.
The air was full of scents — the light fragrance of flowers, and
the heavy odour of the sodden mulch with which the floor of the forest
was carpeted.
Confusions of roots tangled through the mulch, moss grew on them,
insects crawled.
In a space in the forest, on an empty patch of wet ground between a
circle of craning trees, appeared quietly and without fuss a plain
white door. After a few seconds it opened a little way with a slight
squeak. A tall thin man looked out, looked around, blinked in surprise,
and quietly pulled the door closed again.
A few seconds later the door opened again and Reg looked out.
‘It’s real,’ he said, ‘I promise you. Come out and see for
yourself.’ Walking out into the forest, he turned and beckoned the
other two to follow him.
Dirk stepped boldly through, seemed disconcerted for about the
length of time it takes to blink twice, and then announced that he saw
exactly how it worked, that it was obviously to do with the unreal
numbers that lay between minimum quantum distances and defined the
fractal contours of the enfolded Universe and he was only astonished at
himself for not having thought of it himself.
‘Like the catflap,’ said Richard from the doorway behind him.
‘Er, yes, quite so,’ said Dirk, taking off his spectacles and
leaning against a tree wiping them, ‘you spotted of course that I was
lying. A perfectly natural reflex in the circumstances as I think
you’ll agree. Perfectly natural.’ He squinted slightly and put his
spectacles back on. They began to mist up again almost immediately.
‘Astounding,’ he admitted.
Richard stepped through more hesitantly and stood rocking for a
moment with one foot still on the floor in Reg’s room and the other on
the wet earth of the forest. Then he stepped forward and committed
himself fully.
His lungs instantly filled with the heady vapours and his mind with
the wonder of the place. He turned and looked at the doorway through
which he had walked. It was still a perfectly ordinary door frame with
a perfectly ordinary little white door swinging open in it, but it was
standing free in the open forest, and through it could clearly he seen
the room he had just stepped out of.
He walked wonderingly round the back of the door, testing each foot
on the muddy ground, not so much for fear of slipping as for fear that
it might simply not be there. From behind it was just a perfectly
ordinary open door frame, such as you might fail to find in any
perfectly ordinary rain forest. He walked through the door from behind,
and looking back again could once more see, as if he had just stepped
out of them again, the college rooms of Professor Urban Chronotis of St
Cedd’s College, Cambridge, which must be thousands of miles away.
Thousands? Where were they?
He peered off through the trees and thought he caught a slight
shimmer in the distance, between the trees.
‘Is that the sea?’ he asked.
‘You can see it a little more clearly from up here,’ called Reg, who
had walked on a little way up a slippery incline and was now leaning,
puffing, against a tree. He pointed.
The other two followed him up, pulling themselves noisily through
the branches and causing a lot of cawing and complaining from unseen
birds high above.
‘The Pacific?’ asked Dirk.
‘The Indian Ocean,’ said Reg.
Dirk wiped his glasses again and had another look.
‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he said.
‘Not Madagascar?’ said Richard. ‘I’ve been there –’
‘Have you?’ said Reg. ‘One of the most beautiful and astonishing
places on Earth, and one that is also full of the most appalling…
temptations for me. No.’
His voice trembled slightly, and he cleared his throat.
‘No,’ he continued, ‘Madagascar is — let me see, which direction
are we — where’s the sun? Yes. That way. Westish. Madagascar is about
five hundred miles roughly west of here. The island of Rйunion lies
roughly in-between.’
‘Er, what’s the place called?’ said Dirk suddenly, rapping his
knuckles on the tree and frightening a lizard. ‘Place where that stamp
comes from, er — Mauritius.’
‘Stamp?’ said Reg.
‘Yes, you must know,’ said Dirk, ‘very famous stamp. Can’t remember
anything about it, but it comes from here. Mauritius. Famous for its
very remarkable stamp, all brown and smudged and you could buy Blenheim
Palace with it. Or am I thinking of British Guiana?’
‘Only you,’ said Richard, ‘know what you are thinking of.’
‘Is it Mauritius?’
‘It is,’ said Reg, ‘it is Mauritius.’
‘But you don’t collect stamps?’
‘No.’
‘What on /earth/’s that?’ said Richard suddenly, but Dirk carried on
with his thought to Reg, ‘Pity, you could get some nice first-day
covers, couldn’t you?’
Reg shrugged. ‘Not really interested,’ he said.
Richard slithered back down the slope behind them.
‘So what’s the great attraction here?’ said Dirk. ‘It’s not, I have
to confess, what I was expecting. Very nice in its way, of course, all
this nature, but I’m a city boy myself, I’m afraid.’ He cleaned his
glasses once again and pushed them back up his nose.
He started backwards at what he saw, and heard a strange little
chuckle from Reg. Just in front of the door back into Reg’s room, the
most extraordinary confrontation was taking place.
A large cross bird was looking at Richard and Richard was looking at
a large cross bird. Richard was looking at the bird as if it was the
most extraordinary thing he had ever seen in his life, and the bird was
looking at Richard as if defying him to find its beak even remotely
funny.
Once it had satisfied itself that Richard did not intend to laugh,
the bird regarded him instead with a sort of grim irritable tolerance
and wondered if he was just going to stand there or actually do
something useful and feed it. It padded a couple of steps back and a
couple of steps to the side and then just a single step forward again,
on great waddling yellow feet. It then looked at him again,
impatiently, and squarked an impatient squark.
The bird then bent forward and scraped its great absurd red beak
across the ground as if to give Richard the idea that this might be a
good area to look for things to give it to eat.
‘It eats the nuts of the calvaria tree,’ called out Reg to Richard.
The big bird looked sharply up at Reg in annoyance, as if to say
that it was perfectly clear to any idiot what it ate. It then looked
back at Richard once more and stuck its head on one side as if it had
suddenly been struck by the thought that perhaps it was an idiot it had
to deal with, and that it might need to reconsider its strategy
accordingly.
‘There are one or two on the ground behind you,’ called Reg softly.
In a trance of astonishment Richard turned awkwardly and saw one or
two large nuts lying on the ground. He bent and picked one up, glancing
up at Reg, who gave him a reassuring nod.
Tentatively Richard held the thing out to the bird, which leant
forward and pecked it sharply from between his fingers. Then, because
Richard’s hand was still stretched out, the bird knocked it irritably
aside with its beak.
Once Richard had withdrawn to a respectful distance, it stretched
its neck up, closed its large yellow eyes and seemed to gargle
gracelessly as it shook the nut down its neck into its maw.
It appeared then to be at least partially satisfied. Whereas before
it had been a cross dodo, it was at least now a cross, fed dodo, which
was probably about as much as it could hope for in this life.
It made a slow, waddling, on-the-spot turn and padded back into the
forest whence it had come, as if defying Richard to find the little
tuft of curly feathers stuck up on top of its backside even remotely
funny.
‘I only come to look,’ said Reg in a small voice, and glancing at
him Dirk was discomfited to see that the old man’s eyes were brimming
with tears which he quickly brushed away. ‘Really, it is not for me to
interfere –’
Richard came scurrying breathlessly up to them.
‘Was that a /dodo/?’ he exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ said Reg, ‘one of only three left at this time. The year is
1676. They will all be dead within four years, and after that no one
will ever see them again. Come,’ he said, ‘let us go.’
Behind the stoutly locked outer door in the corner staircase in the
Second Court of St Cedd’s College, where only a millisecond earlier
there had been a slight flicker as the inner door departed, there was
another slight flicker as the inner door now returned.
Walking through the dark evening towards it the large figure of
Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up at the corner windows. If any slight
flicker had been visible, it would have gone unnoticed in the dim
dancing firelight that spilled from the window.
The figure then looked up into the darkness of the sky, looking for
what it knew to be there though there was not the slightest chance of
seeing it, even on a clear night which this was not. The orbits of
Earth were now so cluttered with pieces of junk and debris that one
more item among them — even such a large one as this was — would pass
perpetually unnoticed. Indeed, it had done so, though its influence had
from time to time exerted itself. From time to time. When the waves had
been strong. Not for nearly two hundred years had they been so strong
as now they were again.
And all at last was now in place. The perfect carrier had been
found.
The perfect carrier moved his footsteps onwards through the court.
The Professor himself had seemed the perfect choice at first, but
that attempt had ended in frustration, fury, and then — inspiration!
Bring a Monk to Earth! They were designed to believe anything, to be
completely malleable. It could be suborned to undertake the task with
the greatest of ease.
Unfortunately, however, this one had proved to be completely
hopeless. Getting it to believe something was very easy. Getting it to
continue to believe the same thing for more than five minutes at a time
had proved to be an even more impossible task than that of getting the
Professor to do what he fundamentally wanted to do but wouldn’t allow
himself.
Then another failure and then, miraculously, the perfect carrier had
come at last.
The perfect carrier had already proved that it would have no
compunction in doing what would have to be done.
Damply, clogged in mist, the moon struggled in a corner of the sky
to rise. At the window, a shadow moved.
[::: CHAPTER 30 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
From the window overlooking Second Court Dirk watched the moon. ‘We
shall not,’ he said, ‘have long to wait.’
‘To wait for what?’ said Richard.
Dirk turned.
‘For the ghost,’ he said, ‘to return to us. Professor –’ he added
to Reg, who was sitting anxiously by the fire, ‘do you have any brandy,
French cigarettes or worry beads in your rooms?’
‘No,’ said Reg.
‘Then I shall have to fret unaided,’ said Dirk and returned to
staring out of the window.
‘I have yet to be convinced,’ said Richard, ‘that there is not some
other explanation than that of… ghosts to –’
‘Just as you required actually to see a time machine in operation
before you could accept it,’ returned Dirk. ‘Richard, I commend you on
your scepticism, but even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept
the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck,
and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility
that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.’
‘Then what is a ghost?’
‘I think that a ghost…’ said Dirk, ‘is someone who died either
violently or unexpectedly with unfinished business on his, her — or
its — hands. Who cannot rest until it has been finished, or put
right.’
He turned to face them again.
‘Which is why,’ he said, ‘a time machine would have such a
fascination for a ghost once it knew of its existence. A time machine
provides the means to put right what, in the ghost’s opinion, went
wrong in the past. To free it.
‘Which is why it will be back. It tried first to take possession of
Reg himself, but he resisted. Then came the incident with the conjuring
trick, the face powder and the horse in the bathroom which I –’ he
paused — ‘which even I do not understand, though I intend to if it
kills me. And then you, Richard, appear on the scene. The ghost deserts
Reg and concentrates instead on you. Almost immediately there occurs an
odd but significant incident. You do something that you then wish you
hadn’t done.
‘I refer, of course, to the phone call you made to Susan and left on
her answering machine.
‘The ghost seizes its chance and tries to induce you to undo it. To,
as it were, go back into the past and erase that message — to change
the mistake you had made. Just to see if you would do it. Just to see
if it was in your character.
‘If it had been, you would now be totally under its control. But at
the very last second your nature rebelled and you would not do it. And
so the ghost gives you up as a bad job and deserts you in turn. It must
find someone else.
‘How long has it been doing this? I do not know. Does this now make
sense to you? Do you recognise the truth of what I am saying?’
Richard turned cold.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you must be absolutely right.’
‘And at what moment, then,’ said Dirk, ‘did the ghost leave you?’
Richard swallowed.
‘When Michael Wenton-Weakes walked out of the room,’ he said.
‘So I wonder,’ said Dirk quietly, ‘what possibilities the ghost saw
in him. I wonder whether this time it found what it wanted. I believe
we shall not have long to wait.’
There was a knock on the door.
When it opened, there stood Michael Wenton-Weakes.
He said simply, ‘Please, I need your help.’
Reg and Richard stared at Dirk, and then at Michael.
‘Do you mind if I put this down somewhere?’ said Michael. ‘It’s
rather heavy. Full of scuba-diving equipment.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Susan, ‘oh well, thanks, Nicola, I’ll try that
fingering. I’m sure he only put the E flat in there just to annoy
people. Yes, I’ve been at it solidly all afternoon. Some of those
semiquaver runs in the second movement are absolute bastards. Well,
yes, it helped take my mind off it all. No, no news. It’s all just
mystifying and absolutely horrible. I don’t want even to — look, maybe
I’ll give you a call again later and see how you’re feeling. I know,
yes, you never know which is worse, do you, the illness, the
antibiotics, or the doctor’s bedside manner. Look after yourself, or at
least, make sure Simon does. Tell him to bring you gallons of hot
lemon. OK. Well, I’ll talk to you later. Keep warm. Bye now.’
She put the phone down and returned to her cello. She had hardly
started to reconsider the problem of the irritating E flat when the
phone went again. She had simply left it off the hook for the
afternoon, but had forgotten to do so again after making her own call.
With a sigh she propped up the cello, put down the bow, and went to
the phone again.
‘Hello?’ she demanded.
Again, there was nothing, just a distant cry of wind. Irritably, she
slammed the receiver back down once more.
She waited a few seconds for the line to clear, and then was about
to take the phone off the hook once more when she realised that perhaps
Richard might need her.
She hesitated.
She admitted to herself that she hadn’t been using the answering
machine, because she usually just put it on for Gordon’s convenience,
and that was something of which she did not currently wish to be
reminded.
Still, she put the answering machine on, turned the volume right
down, and returned again to the E flat that Mozart had put in only to
annoy cellists.
In the darkness of the offices of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective
Agency, Gordon Way clumsily fumbled the telephone receiver back on to
its rest and sat slumped in the deepest dejection. He didn’t even stop
himself slumping all the way through the seat until he rested lightly
on the floor.
Miss Pearce had fled the office the first time the telephone had
started actually using itself, her patience with all this sort of thing
finally exhausted again, since which time Gordon had had the office to
himself. However, his attempts to contact anybody had failed
completely.
Or rather, his attempts to contact Susan, which was all he cared
about. It was Susan he had been speaking to when he died and he knew he
had somehow to speak to her again. But she had left her phone off the
hook most of the afternoon and even when she had answered she could not
hear him.
He gave up. He roused himself from the floor, stood up, and slipped
out and down into the darkening streets. He drifted aimlessly for a
while, went for a walk on the canal, which was a trick that palled very
quickly, and then wandered back up to the street again.
The houses with light and life streaming from them upset him most
particularly since the welcome they seemed to extend would not be
extended to him. He wondered if anyone would mind if he simply slipped
into their house and watched television for the evening. He wouldn’t be
any trouble.
Or a cinema.
That would be better, he could go to the cinema.
He turned with more positive, if still insubstantial, footsteps into
Noel Road and started to walk up it.
Noel Road, he thought. It rang a vague bell. He had a feeling that
he had recently had some dealings with someone in Noel Road. Who was
it?
His thoughts were interrupted by a terrible scream of horror that
rang through the street. He stood stock still. A few seconds later a
door flew open a few yards from him and a woman ran out of it, wild-
eyed and howling.
[::: CHAPTER 31 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Richard had never liked Michael Wenton-Weakes and he liked him even
less with a ghost in him. He couldn’t say why, he had nothing against
ghosts personally, didn’t think a person should be judged adversely
simply for being dead, but — he didn’t like it.
Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel a little sorry for him.
Michael sat forlornly on a stool with his elbow resting on the large
table and his head resting on his fingers. He looked ill and haggard.
He looked deeply tired. He looked pathetic. His story had been a
harrowing one, and concluded with his attempts to possess first Reg and
then Richard.
‘You were,’ he concluded, ‘right. Entirely.’
He said this last to Dirk, and Dirk grimaced as if trying not to
beam with triumph too many times in a day.
The voice was Michael’s and yet it was not Michael’s. Whatever
timbre a voice acquires through a billion or so years of dread and
isolation, this voice had acquired it, and it filled those who heard it
with a dizzying chill akin to that which clutches the mind and stomach
when standing on a cliff at night.
He turned his eyes on Reg and on Richard, and the effect of the
eyes, too, was one that provoked pity and terror. Richard had to look
away.
‘I owe you both an apology,’ said the ghost within Michael ‘which I
offer you from the depths of my heart, and only hope that as you come
to understand the desperation of my predicament, and the hope which
this machine offers me, you will understand why I have acted as I have,
and that you will find it within yourselves to forgive me. And to help
me. I beg you.’
‘Give the man a whisky,’ said Dirk gruffly.
‘Haven’t got any whisky,’ said Reg. ‘Er, port? There’s a bottle or
so of Margaux I could open. Very fine one. Should be chambrйd for an
hour, but I can do that of course, it’s very easy, I –’
‘Will you help me?’ interrupted the ghost.
Reg bustled to fetch some port and some glasses.
‘Why have you taken over the body of this man?’ said Dirk.
‘I need to have a voice with which to speak and a body with which to
act. No harm will come to him, no harm –’
‘Let me ask the question again. Why have you taken over the body of
this man?’ insisted Dirk.
The ghost made Michael’s body shrug.
‘He was willing. Both of these two gentlemen quite understandably
resisted being… well, hypnotised — your analogy is fair. This one?
Well, I think his sense of self is at a low ebb, and he has acquiesced.
I am very grateful to him and will not do him any harm.’
‘His sense of self,’ repeated Dirk thoughtfully, ‘is at a low ebb.’
‘I suppose that is probably true,’ said Richard quietly to Dirk. ‘He
seemed very depressed last night. The one thing that was important to
him had been taken away because he, well, he wasn’t really very good at
it. Although he’s proud I expect he was probably quite receptive to the
idea of actually being wanted for something.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Dirk, and said it again. He said it a third time with
feeling. Then he whirled round and barked at the figure on the stool.
‘Michael Wenton-Weakes!’
Michael’s head jolted back and he blinked.
‘Yes?’ he said, in his normal lugubrious voice. His eyes followed
Dirk as he moved.
‘You can hear me,’ said Dirk, ‘and you can answer for yourself?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Michael, ‘most certainly I can.’
‘This… being, this spirit. You know he is in you? You accept his
presence? You are a willing party to what he wishes to do?’
‘That is correct. I was much moved by his account of himself, and am
very willing to help him. In fact I think it is right for me to do so.’
‘All right,’ said Dirk with a snap of his fingers, ‘you can go.’
Michael’s head slumped forward suddenly, and then after a second or
so it slowly rose again, as if being pumped up from inside like a tyre.
The ghost was back in possession.
Dirk took hold of a chair, spun it round and sat astride it facing
the ghost in Michael, peering intently into its eyes.
‘Again,’ he said, ‘tell me again. A quick snap account.’
Michael’s body tensed slightly. It reached out to Dirk’s arm.
‘Don’t — touch me!’ snapped Dirk. ‘Just tell me the facts. The
first time you try and make me feel sorry for you I’ll poke you in the
eye. Or at least, the one you’ve borrowed. So leave out all the stuff
that sounded like… er –’
‘Coleridge,’ said Richard suddenly, ‘it sounded exactly like
Coleridge. It was like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Well bits of
it were.’
Dirk frowned. ‘Coleridge?’ he said.
‘I tried to tell him my story,’ admitted the ghost, ‘I –’
‘Sorry,’ said Dirk, ‘you’ll have to excuse me — I’ve never cross-
examined a four-billion-year-old ghost before. Are we talking Samuel
Taylor here? Are you saying you told your story to Samuel Taylor
Coleridge?’
‘I was able to enter his mind at… certain times. When he was in an
impressionable state.’
‘You mean when he was on laudanum?’ said Richard.
‘That is correct. He was more relaxed then.’
‘I’ll say,’ snorted Reg, ‘I sometimes encountered him when he was
quite astoundingly relaxed. Look, I’ll make some coffee.’
He disappeared into the kitchen, where he could be heard laughing to
himself.
‘It’s another world,’ muttered Richard to himself, sitting down and
shaking his head.
‘But unfortunately when he was fully in possession of himself I, so
to speak, was not,’ said the ghost, ‘and so that failed. And what he
wrote was very garbled.’
‘Discuss,’ said Richard, to himself, raising his eyebrows.
‘Professor,’ called out Dirk, ‘this may sound absurd. Did —
Coleridge ever try to… er… use your time machine? Feel free to
discuss the question in any way which appeals to you.’
‘Well, do you know,’ said Reg, looking round the door, ‘he did come
in prying around on one occasion, but I think he was in a great deal
too relaxed a state to do anything.’
‘I see,’ said Dirk. ‘But why,’ he added turning back to the strange
figure of Michael slumped on its stool, ‘why has it taken you so long
to find someone?’
‘For long, long periods I am very weak, almost totally non-existent,
and unable to influence anything at all. And then, of course, before
that time there was no time machine here, and… no hope for me at all
–’
‘Perhaps ghosts exist like wave patterns,’ suggested Richard, ‘like
interference patterns between the actual with the possible. There would
be irregular peaks and troughs, like in a musical waveform.’
The ghost snapped Michael’s eyes around to Richard.
‘You…’ he said, ‘you wrote that article…’
‘Er, yes –’
‘It moved me very greatly,’ said the ghost, with a sudden remorseful
longing in his voice which seemed to catch itself almost as much by
surprise as it did its listeners.
‘Oh. I see,’ said Richard, ‘Well, thank you. You didn’t like it so
much last time you mentioned it. Well, I know that wasn’t you as such –
-’
Richard sat back frowning to himself.
‘So,’ said Dirk, ‘to return to the beginning –’
The ghost gathered Michael’s breath for him and started again. ‘We
were on a ship –’ it said.
‘A spaceship.’
‘Yes. Out from Salaxala, a world in… well, very far from here. A
violent and troubled place. We — a party of some nine dozen of us —
set out, as people frequently did, to find a new world for ourselves.
All the planets in this system were completely unsuitable for our
purpose, but we stopped on this world to replenish some necessary
mineral supplies.
‘Unfortunately our landing ship was damaged on its way into the
atmosphere. Damaged quite badly, but still quite reparable.
‘I was the engineer on board and it fell to me to supervise the task
of repairing the ship and preparing it to return to our main ship. Now,
in order to understand what happened next you must know something of
the nature of a highly-automated society. There is no task that cannot
be done more easily with the aid of advanced computerisation. And there
were some very specific problems associated with a trip with an aim
such as ours –’
‘Which was?’ said Dirk sharply.
The ghost in Michael blinked as if the answer was obvious.
‘Well, to find a new and better world on which we could all live in
freedom, peace and harmony forever, of course,’ he said.
Dirk raised his eyebrows.
‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘You’d thought this all out carefully, I
assume.’
‘We’d had it thought out for us. We had with us some very
specialised devices for helping us to continue to believe in the
purpose of the trip even when things got difficult. They generally
worked very well, but I think we probably came to rely on them too
much.’
‘What on earth were they?’ said Dirk.
‘It’s probably hard for you to understand how reassuring they were.
And that was why I made my fatal mistake. When I wanted to know whether
or not it was safe to take off, I didn’t want to know that it might
/not/ be safe. I just wanted to be reassured that it /was/. So instead
of checking it myself, you see, I sent out one of the Electric Monks.’
[::: CHAPTER 32 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
The brass plaque on the red door in Peckender Street glittered as it
reflected the yellow light of a street lamp. It glared for a moment as
it reflected the violent flashing light of a passing police car
sweeping by.
It dimmed slightly as a pale, pale wraith slipped silently through
it. It glimmered as it dimmed, because the wraith was trembling with
such terrible agitation.
In the dark hallway the ghost of Gordon Way paused. He needed
something to lean on for support, and of course there was nothing. He
tried to get a grip on himself, but there was nothing to get a grip on.
He retched at the horror of what he had seen, but there was, of course,
nothing in his stomach. He half stumbled, half swam up the stairs, like
a drowning man trying to grapple for a grip on the water.
He staggered through the wall, through the desk, through the door,
and tried to compose and settle himself in front of the desk in Dirk’s
office.
If anyone had happened into the office a few minutes later — a
night cleaner perhaps, if Dirk Gently had ever employed one, which he
didn’t on the grounds that they wished to be paid and he did not wish
to pay them, or a burglar, perhaps, if there had been anything in the
office worth burgling, which there wasn’t — they would have seen the
following sight and been amazed by it.
The receiver of the large red telephone on the desk suddenly rocked
and tumbled off its rest on to the desk top.
A dialling tone started to burr. Then, one by one, seven of the
large, easily pushed buttons depressed themselves, and after the very
long pause which the British telephone system allows you within which
to gather your thoughts and forget who it is you’re phoning, the sound
of a phone ringing at the other end of the line could be heard.
After a couple of rings there was a click, a whirr, and a sound as
of a machine drawing breath. Then a voice started to say, ‘Hello, this
is Susan. I can’t come to the phone right at the moment because I’m
trying to get an E flat right, but if you’d like to leave your name…’
‘So then, on the say so of an — I can hardly bring myself to utter
the words — Electric Monk,’ said Dirk in a voice ringing with
derision, ‘you attempt to launch the ship and to your utter
astonishment it explodes. Since when — ?’
‘Since when,’ said the ghost, abjectly, ‘I have been alone on this
planet. Alone with the knowledge of what I had done to my fellows on
the ship. All, all alone…’
‘Yes, skip that, I said,’ snapped Dirk angrily. ‘What about the main
ship? That presumably went on and continued its search for –’
‘No.’
‘Then what happened to it?’
‘Nothing. It’s still there.’
‘Still /there/?’
Dirk leapt to his feet and whirled off to pace the room, his brow
furiously furrowed.
‘Yes.’ Michael’s head drooped a little, but he looked up pitieously
at Reg and at Richard. ‘All of us were aboard the landing craft. At
first I felt myself to be haunted by the ghosts of the rest, but it was
only in my imagination. For millions of years, and then billions, I
stalked the mud utterly alone. It is impossible for you to conceive of
even the tiniest part of the torment of such eternity. Then,’ he added,
‘just recently life arose on the planet. Life. Vegetation, things in
the sea, then, at last, you. Intelligent life. I turn to you to release
me from the torment I have endured.’
Michael’s head sank abjectly on to his chest for some few seconds.
Then slowly, wobblingly, it rose and stared at them again, with yet
darker fires in his eyes.
‘Take me back,’ he said, ‘I beg you, take me back to the landing
craft. Let me undo what was done. A word from me, and it can be undone,
the repairs properly made, the landing craft can then return to the
main ship, we can be on our way, my torment will be extinguished, and I
will cease to be a burden to you. I beg you.’
There was a short silence while his plea hung in the air.
‘But that can’t work, can it?’ said Richard. ‘If we do that, then
this won’t have happened. Don’t we generate all sorts of paradoxes?’
Reg stirred himself from thought. ‘No worse than many that exist
already,’ he said. ‘If the Universe came to an end every time there was
some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got
beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a
human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt
it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just
the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and
people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as
they require it to make.
‘That isn’t to say that if you get involved in a paradox a few
things won’t strike you as being very odd, but if you’ve got through
life without that already happening to you, then I don’t know which
Universe you’ve been living in, but it isn’t this one.’
‘Well, if that’s the case,’ said Richard, ‘why were you so fierce
about not doing anything to save the dodo?’
Reg sighed. ‘You don’t understand at all. The dodo wouldn’t have
died if I hadn’t worked so hard to save the coelacanth.’
‘The coelacanth? The prehistoric fish? But how could one possibly
affect the other?’
‘Ah. Now there you’re asking. The complexities of cause and effect
defy analysis. Not only is the continuum like a human body, it is also
very like a piece of badly put up wallpaper. Push down a bubble
somewhere, another one pops up somewhere else. There are no more dodos
because of my interference. In the end I imposed the rule on myself
because I simply couldn’t bear it any more. The only thing that really
gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.’ He smiled bleakly,
and looked away.
Then he added, after a long moment’s reflection, ‘No, it can be
done. I’m just cynical because it’s gone wrong so many times. This poor
fellow’s story is a very pathetic one, and it can do no harm to put an
end to his misery. It happened so very, very long ago on a dead planet.
If we do this we will each remember whatever it is that has happened to
us individually. Too bad if the rest of the world doesn’t quite agree.
It will hardly be the first time.’
Michael’s head bowed.
‘You’re very silent, Dirk,’ said Richard.
Dirk glared angrily at him. ‘I want to see this ship,’ he demanded.
In the darkness, the red telephone receiver slipped and slid
fitfully back across the desk. If anybody had been there to see it they
might just have discerned a shape that moved it.
It shone only very faintly, less than would the hands of a luminous
watch. It seemed more as if the darkness around it was just that much
darker and the ghostly shape sat within it like thickened scar tissue
beneath the surface of the night.
Gordon grappled one last time with the recalcitrant receiver. At
length he got a final grip and slipped it up on to the top of the
instrument.
From there it fell back on to its rest and disconnected the call. At
the same moment the ghost of Gordon Way, his last call finally
completed, fell back to his own rest and vanished.
[::: CHAPTER 33 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Swinging slowly round in the shadow of the Earth, just one more
piece of debris among that which floated now forever in high orbit, was
one dark shape that was larger and more regularly formed than the rest.
And far, far older.
For four billion years it had continued to absorb data from the
world below it, scanning, analysing, processing. Occasionally it sent
pieces back if it thought they would help, if it thought they might be
received. But otherwise, it watched, it listened, it recorded. Not the
lapping of a wave nor the beating of a heart escaped its attention.
Otherwise, nothing inside it had moved for four billion years,
except for the air which circulated still, and the motes of dust within
the air that danced and danced and danced and danced… and danced.
It was only a very slight disturbance that occurred now. Quietly,
without fuss, like a dew drop precipitating from the air on to a leaf,
there appeared in a wall which had stood blank and grey for four
billion years, a door. A plain, ordinary white-panelled door with a
small dented brass handle.
This quiet event, too, was recorded and incorporated in the
continual stream of data processing that the ship ceaselessly
performed. Not only the arrival of the door, but the arrival of those
behind the door, the way they looked, the way they moved, the way they
felt about being there. All processed, all recorded, all transformed.
After a moment or two had passed, the door opened.
Within it could be seen a room unlike any on the ship. A room of
wooden floors, of shabby upholstery, a room in which a fire danced. And
as the fire danced, its data danced within the ship’s computers, and
the motes of dust in the air also danced with it.
A figure stood in the doorway — a large lugubrious figure with a
strange light that danced now in its eyes. It stepped forward across
the threshold into the ship, and its face was suddenly suffused with a
calm for which it had longed but had thought never again to experience.
Following him stepped out a smaller, older man with hair that was
white and wayward. He stopped and blinked with wonder as he passed from
out of the realm of his room and into the realm of the ship. Following
him came a third man, impatient and tense, with a large leather
overcoat that flapped about him. He, too, stopped and was momentarily
bewildered by something he didn’t understand. With a look of deepest
puzzlement on his face he walked forward and looked around at the grey
and dusty walls of the ancient ship.
At last came a fourth man, tall and thin. He stooped as he walked
out of the door, and then instantly stopped as if he had walked into a
wall.
He had walked into a wall, of a kind.
He stood transfixed. If anyone had been looking at his face at that
moment, it would have been abundantly clear to them that the single
most astonishing event of this man’s entire existence was currently
happening to him.
When slowly he began to move it was with a curious gait, as if he
was swimming very slowly. Each tiniest movement of his head seemed to
bring fresh floods of awe and astonishment into his face. Tears welled
in his eyes, and he became breathless with gasping wonder.
Dirk turned to look at him, to hurry him along.
‘What’s the matter?’ he called above the noise.
‘The… music…’ whispered Richard.
The air was full of music. So full it seemed there was room for
nothing else. And each particle of air seemed to have its own music, so
that as Richard moved his head he heard a new and different music,
though the new and different music fitted quite perfectly with the
music that lay beside it in the air.
The modulations from one to another were perfectly accomplished —
astonishing leaps to distant keys made effortlessly in the mere
shifting of the head. New themes, new strands of melody, all perfectly
and astoundingly proportioned, constantly involved themselves into the
continuing web. Huge slow waves of movement, faster dances that
thrilled through them, tiny scintillating scampers that danced on the
dances, long tangled tunes whose ends were so like their beginnings
that they twisted around upon themselves, turned inside out, upside
down, and then rushed off again on the back of yet another dancing
melody in a distant part of the ship.
Richard staggered against the wall.
Dirk hurried to grab him.
‘Come on,’ he said, brusquely, ‘what’s the matter? Can’t you stand
the music? It’s a bit loud, isn’t it? For God’s sake, pull yourself
together. There’s something here I still don’t understand. It’s not
right. Come on –’
He tugged Richard after him, and then had to support him as
Richard’s mind sank further and further under the overwhelming weight
of music. The visions that were woven in his mind by the million
thrilling threads of music as they were pulled through it, were
increasingly a welter of chaos, but the more the chaos burgeoned the
more it fitted with the other chaos, and the next greater chaos, until
it all became a vast exploding ball of harmony expanding in his mind
faster than any mind could deal with.
And then it was all much simpler.
A single tune danced through his mind and all his attention rested
upon it. It was a tune that seethed through the magical flood, shaped
it, formed it, lived through it hugely, lived through it minutely, was
its very essence. It bounced and trilled along, at first a little
tripping tune, then it slowed, then it danced again but with more
difficulty, seemed to founder in eddies of doubt and confusion, and
then suddenly revealed that the eddies were just the first ripples of a
huge new wave of energy surging up joyfully from beneath.
Richard began very, very slowly to faint.
He lay very still.
He felt he was an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun
to dry.
He felt like the body of an old horse burning hazily in the sun. He
dreamed of oil, thin and fragrant, of dark heaving seas. He was on a
white beach, drunk with fish, stupefied with sand, bleached, drowsing,
pummelled with light, sinking, estimating the density of vapour clouds
in distant nebulae, spinning with dead delight. He was a pump spouting
fresh water in the springtime, gushing into a mound of reeking newmown
grass. Sounds, almost unheard, burned away like distant sleep.
He ran and was falling. The lights of a harbour spun into night. The
sea like a dark spirit slapped infinitesimally at the sand, glimmering,
unconscious. Out where it was deeper and colder he sank easily with the
heavy sea swelling like oil around his ears, and was disturbed only by
a distant burr burr as of the phone ringing.
He knew he had been listening to the music of life itself. The music
of light dancing on water that rippled with the wind and the tides, of
the life that moved through the water, of the life that moved on the
land, warmed by the light.
He continued to lie very still. He continued to be disturbed by a
distant burr burr as of a phone ringing.
Gradually he became aware that the distant burr burr as of a phone
ringing was a phone ringing.
He sat up sharply.
He was lying on a small crumpled bed in a small untidy panelled room
that he knew he recognised but couldn’t place. It was cluttered with
books and shoes. He blinked at it and was blank.
The phone by the bed was ringing. He picked it up.
‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Richard!’ It was Susan’s voice, utterly distraught. He shook his
head and had no recollection of anything useful.
‘Hello?’ he said again.
‘Richard, is that you? /Where are you?/’
‘Er, hold on, I’ll go and look.’
He put the receiver down on the crumpled sheets, where it lay
squawking, climbed shakily off the bed, staggered to the door and
opened it.
Here was a bathroom. He peered at it suspiciously. Again, he
recognised it but felt that there was something missing. Oh yes. There
should be a horse in it. Or at least, there had been a horse in it the
last time he had seen it. He crossed the bathroom floor and went out of
the other door. He found his way shakily down the stairs and into Reg’s
main room.
He was surprised by what he saw when he got there.
[::: CHAPTER 34 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the
floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged
with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom
was a dreary kind of prickle.
Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the
low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a
kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.
It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of
magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at
a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible
than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages
dead.
The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly
along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,
the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.
But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was
not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering
deep within it.
It was this scene that Richard was surprised to see from a small
white doorway set in the side of the valley wall, a few hundred yards
from the tower.
‘Don’t step out!’ said Dirk, putting up an arm, ‘The atmosphere is
poisonous. I’m not sure what’s in it but it would certainly get your
carpets nice and clean.’
Dirk was standing in the doorway watching the valley with deep
mistrust.
‘Where are we?’ asked Richard.
‘Bermuda,’ said Dirk. ‘It’s a bit complicated.’
‘Thank you,’ said Richard and walked groggily back across the room.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to Reg, who was busy fussing round Michael
Wenton-Weakes, making sure that the scuba diving suit he was wearing
fitted snuggly everywhere, that the mask was secure and that the
regulator for the air supply was working properly.
‘Sorry, can I just get past?’ said Richard. ‘Thanks.’
He climbed back up the stairs, went back into Reg’s bedroom, sat
shakily on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone again.
‘Bermuda,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit complicated.’
Downstairs, Reg finished smearing Vaseline on all the joins of the
suit and the few pieces of exposed skin around the mask, and then
announced that all was ready.
Dirk swung himself away from the door and stood aside with the
utmost bad grace.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘be off with you. Good riddance. I wash my
hands of the whole affair. I suppose we will have to wait here for you
to send back the empty, for what it’s worth.’ He stalked round the sofa
with an angry gesture. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of it.
He particularly didn’t like Reg knowing more about space\time than he
did. It made him angry that he didn’t know why he didn’t like it.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Reg in a conciliatory tone, ‘consider what a
very small effort it is for us to help the poor soul. I’m sorry if it
seems to you an anti-climax after all your extraordinary feats of
deduction. I know you feel that a mere errand of mercy seems not enough
for you, but you should be more charitable.’
‘Charitable, ha!’ said Dirk. ‘I pay my taxes, what more do you
want?’
He threw himself on to the sofa, ran his hands through his hair and
sulked.
The possessed figure of Michael shook hands with Reg and said a few
words of thanks. Then he walked stiffly to the door, turned and bowed
to them both.
Dirk flung his head round and glared at him, his eyes flashing
behind their spectacles and his hair flying wildly. The ghost looked at
Dirk, and for a moment shivered inside with apprehension. A
superstitious instinct suddenly made the ghost wave. He waved Michael’s
hand round in a circle, three times, and then said a single word.
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
With that he turned again, gripped the sides of the doorway and
stepped resolutely out into the mud, and into the foul and poisonous
wind.
He paused for a moment to be sure that his footing was solid, that
he had his balance, and then without another look back he walked away
from them, out of the reach of the slimy things with legs, towards his
ship.
‘Now, what on earth did /that/ mean?’ said Dirk, irritably mimicking
the odd triple wave.
Richard came thundering down the stairs, threw open the door and
plunged into the room, wild-eyed.
‘Ross has been murdered!’ he shouted.
‘Who the hell’s Ross?’ shouted Dirk back at him.
‘Whatsisname Ross, for God’s sake,’ exclaimed Richard, ‘the new
editor of /Fathom/.’
‘What’s /Fathom/?’ shouted Dirk again.
‘Michael’s bloody magazine, Dirk! Remember? Gordon chucked Michael
off the magazine and gave it to this Ross guy to fun instead. Michael
hated him for that. Well, last night Michael went and bloody murdered
him!’
He paused, panting. ‘At least,’ he said, ‘he was murdered. And
Michael was the only one with any reason to.’
He ran to the door, looked out at the retreating figure disappearing
into the gloom, and spun round again.
‘Is he coming back?’ said Richard.
Dirk leapt to his feet and stood blinking for a moment.
‘That’s it…’ he said, ‘/that’s/ why Michael was the perfect
subject. /That’s/ what I should have been looking for. The thing the
ghost made him do in order to establish his hold, the thing he had to
be fundamentally /willing/ to do, the thing that would match the
ghost’s own purpose. Oh my dear God. He thinks we’ve supplanted them
and that’s what he wants to reverse.
‘He thinks this is their world not ours. /This/ was where they were
going to settle and build their blasted paradise. It matches every step
of the way.
‘You see,’ he said, turning on Reg, ‘what we have done? I would not
be surprised to discover that the accident your poor tormented soul out
there is trying to reverse is the very thing which started life on this
planet!’
He turned his eyes suddenly from Reg, who was white and trembling,
back to Richard.
‘When did you hear this?’ he said, puzzled.
‘Er, just now,’ said Richard, ‘on… on the phone. Upstairs.’
‘What?’
‘It was Susan, I don’t know how — said she had a message on her
answering machine telling her about it. She said the message… was
from — she said it was from Gordon, but I think she was hysterical.
Dirk, what the hell is happening? Where are we?’
‘We are four billion years in the past,’ said Reg in a shaking
voice, ‘please don’t ask me why it is that the phone works when we are
anywhere in the Universe other than where it’s actually connected,
that’s a matter you will have to take up with British Telecom, but –’
‘Damn and blast British Telecom,’ shouted Dirk, the words coming
easily from force of habit. He ran to the door and peered again at the
dim shadowy figure trudging through the mud towards the Salaxalan ship,
completely beyond their reach.
‘How long,’ said Dirk, quite calmly, ‘would you guess that it’s
going to take that fat self deluding bastard to reach his ship? Because
that is how long we have.
‘Come. Let us sit down. Let us think. We have two minutes in which
to decide what we are going to do. After that, I very much suspect that
the three of us, and everything we have ever known, including the
coelacanth and the dodo, dear Professor, will cease ever to have
existed.’
He sat heavily on the sofa, then stood up again and removed
Michael’s discarded jacket from under him. As he did so, a book fell
out of the pocket.
[::: CHAPTER 35 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘I think it’s an appalling act of desecration,’ said Richard to Reg,
as they sat hiding behind a hedge.
The night was full of summer smells from the cottage garden, and the
occasional whiff of sea air which came in on the light breezes that
were entertaining themselves on the coast of the Bristol Channel.
There was a bright moon playing over the sea off in the distance,
and by its light it was also possible to see some distance over Exmoor
stretching away to the south of them.
Reg sighed.
‘Yes, maybe,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid he’s right, you know, it must
be done. It was the only sure way. All the instructions were clearly
contained in the piece once you knew what you were looking for. It has
to be suppressed. The ghost will always be around. In fact two of him
now. That is, assuming this works. Poor devil. Still, I suppose he
brought it on himself.’
Richard fretfully pulled up some blades of grass and twisted them
between his fingers.
He held them up to the moonlight, turned them to different angles,
and watched the way light played on them.
‘Such music,’ he said. ‘I’m not religious, but if I were I would say
it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and I ought
to be religious. I have to keep reminding myself that they didn’t
create the music, they only created the instrument which could read the
score. And the score was life itself. And it’s all up there.’
He glanced into the sky. Unconsciously he started to quote:
‘Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!’
‘Hmmm,’ said Reg to himself, ‘I wonder if he arrived early enough.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just a thought.’
‘Good God, he can talk, can’t he?’ Richard exclaimed suddenly. ‘He’s
been in there over an hour now. I wonder what’s going on.’
He got up and looked over the hedge at the small farm cottage
basking in the moonlight behind them. About an hour earlier Dirk had
walked boldly up to the front door and rapped on it.
When the door had opened, somewhat reluctantly, and a slightly dazed
face had looked out, Dirk had doffed his absurd hat and said in a loud
voice, ‘Mr Samuel Coleridge?
‘I was just passing by, on my way from Porlock, you understand, and
I was wondering if I might trouble you to vouchsafe me an interview?
It’s just for a little parish broadsheet I edit. Won’t take much of
your time I promise, I know you must be busy, famous poet like you, but
I do so admire your work, and…’
The rest was lost, because by that time Dirk had effected his entry
and closed the door behind him.
‘Would you excuse me a moment?’ said Reg.
‘What? Oh sure,’ said Richard, ‘I’m just going to have a look and
see what’s happening.’
While Reg wandered off behind a tree Richard pushed open the little
gate and was just about to make his way up the path when he heard the
sound of voices approaching the front door from within.
He hurriedly darted back, as the front door started to open.
‘Well, thank you very much indeed, Mr Coleridge,’ said Dirk, as he
emerged, fiddling with his hat and bowing, ‘you have been most kind and
generous with your time, and I do appreciate it very much, as I’m sure
will my readers. I’m sure it will work up into a very nice little
article, a copy of which you may rest assured I will send you for you
to peruse at your leisure. I will most certainly welcome your comments
if you have any, any points of style, you know, hints, tips, things of
that nature. Well, thank you again, so much, for your time, I do hope I
haven’t kept you from anything important –’
The door slammed violently behind him.
Dirk turned with another in a long succession of triumphant beams
and hurried down the path to Richard.
‘Well, that’s put a stop to that,’ he said, patting his hands
together, ‘I think he’d made a start on writing it down, but he won’t
remember another word, that’s for certain. Where’s the egregious
Professor? Ah, there you are. Good heavens, I’d no idea I’d been that
long. A most fascinating and entertaining fellow, our Mr Coleridge, or
at least I’m sure he would have been if I’d given him the chance, but I
was rather too busy being fascinating myself.
‘Oh, but I did do as you asked, Richard, I asked him at the end
about the albatross and he said what albatross? So I said, oh it wasn’t
important, the albatross did not signify. He said what albatross didn’t
signify, and I said never mind the albatross, it didn’t matter, and he
said it did matter — someone comes to his house in the middle of the
night raving about albatrosses, he wanted to know why. I said blast the
bloody albatross and he said he had a good mind to and he wasn’t
certain that that didn’t give him an idea for a poem he was working on.
Much better, he said, than being hit by an asteroid, which he thought
was stretching credulity a bit. And so I came away.
‘Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do
with a pizza. What say you to such a proposal?’
Richard didn’t offer an opinion. He was staring instead with some
puzzlement at Reg.
‘Something troubling you?’ said Reg, taken aback.
‘That’s a good trick,’ said Richard, ‘I could have sworn you didn’t
have a beard before you went behind the tree.’
‘Oh –’ Reg fingered the luxuriant three-inch growth — ‘yes,’ he
said, ‘just carelessness,’ he said, ‘carelessness.’
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Oh, just a few adjustments. A little surgery, you understand.
Nothing drastic.’
A few minutes later as he ushered them into the extra door that a
nearby cowshed had mysteriously acquired, he looked back up into the
sky behind them, just in time to see a small light flare up and
disappear.
‘Sorry, Richard,’ he muttered, and followed them in.
[::: CHAPTER 36 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘Thank you, no,’ said Richard firmly, ‘much as I would love the
opportunity to buy you a pizza and watch you eat it, Dirk, I want to go
straight home. I have to see Susan. Is that possible, Reg? Just
straight to my flat? I’ll come up to Cambridge next week and collect my
car.’
‘We are already there,’ said Reg, ‘simply step out of the door, and
you are home in your own flat. It is early on Friday evening and the
weekend lies before you.’
‘Thanks. Er, look, Dirk, I’ll see you around, OK? Do I owe you
something? I don’t know.’
Dirk waved the matter aside airily. ‘You will hear from my Miss
Pearce in due course,’ he said.
‘Fine, OK, well I’ll see you when I’ve had some rest. It’s been,
well, unexpected.’
He walked to the door and opened it. Stepping outside he found
himself halfway up his own staircase, in the wall of which the door had
materialised.
He was about to start up the stairs when he turned again as a
thought struck him. He stepped back in, closing the door behind him.
‘Reg, could we make one tiny detour?’ he said. ‘I think it would be
a good move if I took Susan out for a meal tonight, only the place I
have in mind you have to book in advance. Could you manage three weeks
for me?’
‘Nothing could be easier,’ said Reg, and made a subtle adjustment to
the disposition of the beads on the abacus. ‘There,’ he said, ‘We have
travelled backwards in time three weeks. You know where the phone is.’
Richard hurried up the internal staircase to Reg’s bedroom and
phoned L’Esprit d’Escalier. The maоtre d’ was charmed and delighted to
take his reservation, and looked forward to seeing him in three weeks’
time. Richard went back downstairs shaking his head in wonder.
‘I need a weekend of solid reality,’ he said. ‘Who was that just
going out of the door?’
‘That,’ said Dirk, ‘was your sofa being delivered. The man asked if
we minded him opening the door so they could manoeuvre it round and I
said we would be delighted.’
It was only a few minutes later that Richard found himself hurrying
up the stairs to Susan’s flat. As he arrived at her front door he was
pleased, as he always was, to hear the deep tones of her cello coming
faintly from within. He quietly let himself in and then as he walked to
the door of her music room he suddenly froze in astonishment. The tune
she was playing was one he had heard before. A little tripping tune,
that slowed, then danced again but with more difficulty…
His face was so amazed that she stopped playing the instant she saw
him.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said, alarmed.
‘Where did you get that music?’ said Richard in a whisper.
She shrugged. ‘Well, from the music shop,’ she said, puzzled. She
wasn’t being facetious, she simply didn’t understand the question.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s from a cantata I’m playing in in a couple of weeks,’ she said,
‘Bach, number six.’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘Well, Bach I expect. If you think about it.’
‘Who?’
‘Watch my lips. Bach. B-A-C-H. Johannes Sebastian. Remember?’
‘No, never heard of him. Who is he? Did he write anything else?’
Susan put down her bow, propped up her cello, stood up and came over
to him.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘Er, it’s rather hard to tell. What’s…’
He caught sight of a pile of music books sitting in a corner of the
room with the same name on the top one. BACH. He threw himself at the
pile and started to scrabble through it. Book after book — J. S. BACH.
Cello sonatas. Brandenburg Concertos. A Mass in B Minor.
He looked up at her in blank incomprehension.
‘I’ve never seen any of this before,’ he said.
‘Richard my darling,’ she said, putting her hand to his cheek, ‘what
on earth’s the matter? It’s just Bach sheet music.’
‘But don’t you understand?’ he said, shaking a handful of the stuff.
‘I’ve never, ever seen any of this before!’
‘Well,’ she said with mock gravity, ‘perhaps if you didn’t spend all
your time playing with computer music…’
He looked at her with wild surprise, then slowly he sat back against
the wall and began to laugh hysterically.
On Monday afternoon Richard phoned Reg.
‘Reg!’ he said. ‘Your phone is working. Congratulations.’
‘Oh yes, my dear fellow,’ said Reg, ‘how delightful to hear from
you. Yes. A very capable young man arrived and fixed the phone a little
earlier. I don’t think it will go wrong again now. Good news, don’t you
think?’
‘Very good. You got back safely then.’
‘Oh yes, thank you. Oh, we had high excitement here when we returned
from dropping you off. Remember the horse? Well he turned up again with
his owner. They’d had some unfortunate encounter with the constabulary
and wished to be taken home. Just as well. Dangerous sort of chap to
have on the loose I think. So. How are you then?
‘Reg… The music –’
‘Ah, yes, I thought you’d be pleased. Took a bit of work, I can tell
you. I saved only the tiniest tiniest scrap, of course, but even so I
cheated. It was rather more than one man could actually do in a
lifetime, but I don’t suppose anybody will look at that too seriously.’
‘Reg, can’t we get some more of it?’
‘Well, no. The ship has gone, and besides –’
‘We could go back in time –’
‘No, well, I told you. They’ve fixed the phone so it won’t go wrong
again.’
‘So?’
‘Well, the time machine won’t work now. Burnt out. Dead as a dodo. I
think that’s it I’m afraid. Probably just as well, though, don’t you
think?’
On Monday, Mrs Sauskind phoned Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective
Agency to complain about her bill.
‘I don’t understand what all this is about,’ she said, ‘it’s
complete nonsense. What’s the meaning of it?’
‘My dear Mrs Sauskind,’ he said, ‘I can hardly tell you how much I
have been looking forward to having this exact same conversation with
you yet again. Where shall we begin today? Which particular item is it
that you would like to discuss?’
‘None of them, thank you very much, Mr Gently. I do not know who you
are or why you should think my cat is missing. Dear Roderick passed
away in my arms two years ago and I have not wished to replace him.’
‘Ah, well Mrs Sauskind,’ said Dirk, ‘what you probably fail to
appreciate is that it is as a direct result of my efforts that — If I
might explain about the interconnectedness of all…’ He stopped. It
was pointless. He slowly dropped the telephone back on its cradle.
‘Miss Pearce!’ he called out, ‘Kindly send out a revised bill would
you to our dear Mrs Sauskind. The new bill reads “To saving human race
from total extinction — no charge.”’
He put on his hat and left for the day.