Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Douglas Adams (1987)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Douglas Adams (1987)
[::: CHAPTER 1 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] This time there would be no witnesses. This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by which so many of the world’s most momentous events seem to be accompanied. 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. The light was only just visible — except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a little brighter and then faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same time a low keening noise drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind of wailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away. Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile light. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit of the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the shadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared inside once more. An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. The world seemed dead, the night a blankness. And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this time growing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of brightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing, increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and stridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on and on till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness. And then, abruptly, both ceased. There was a millisecond of silent darkness. An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep within the mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud convulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horrible pinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the clouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply, hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkle of water. But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on a day that was, or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be if there had been anybody there to whom it could seem to be anything at all, warmer, clearer and brighter — an altogether livelier day than any yet known. A clear river ran through the shattered remains of the valley. And time began seriously to pass. [::: CHAPTER 2 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley, with which it was having a problem. The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly to try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved. The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink. This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that this was one of the silliest. How long did the Monk believe these things? Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually about its lot. So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? An unusual horse perhaps? No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever. When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be important that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects. There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. You wouldn’t want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day while it was watching TV. You wouldn’t want it picking its nose, drinking beer and sending out for pizzas. So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things. This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all as well. This is why instruction manuals are so important. So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model. That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make. For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be three, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven hundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric trust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant- asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock, overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of the Monk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit. Time passed. [::: CHAPTER 3 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Time passed. Susan waited. The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone. She looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the time that she could legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already, of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak. They were well and truly into his time now, and even allowing for traffic, mishaps, and general vagueness and dilatoriness, it was now well over half an hour past the time that he had insisted was the latest time they could possibly afford to leave, so she’d better be ready. She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but didn’t believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she’d do it herself. Now there was an idea. She threw herself crossly into the armchair and watched the news on television. The news made her cross. She flipped the remote control and watched something on another channel for a bit. She didn’t know what it was, but it also made her cross. Perhaps she should phone. She was damned if she was going to phone. Perhaps if she phoned he would phone her at the same moment and not be able to get through. She refused to admit that she had even thought that. Damn him, where was he? Who cared where he was anyway? She didn’t, that was for sure. Three times in a row he’d done this. Three times in a row was enough. She angrily flipped channels one more time. There was a programme about computers and some interesting new developments in the field of things you could do with computers and music. That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ultimate it. She jumped to her feet and went to the phone, gripping an angry Filofax. She flipped briskly through it and dialed a number. ‘Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should call you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely, completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for miles around. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice to you. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.’ She pulled on her shoes and coat, paused when she remembered that it was Thursday and that she should put a fresh, extra-long tape on the answering machine, and two minutes later was out of the front door. When at last the phone did ring the answering machine said sweetly that Susan Way could not come to the phone just at the moment, but that if the caller would like to leave a message, she would get back to them as soon as possible. Maybe. [::: CHAPTER 4 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] It was a chill November evening of the old-fashioned type. The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a night like this. It rose unwillingly and hung like an ill spectre. Silhouetted against it, dim and hazy through the dampness which rose from the unwholesome fens, stood the assorted towers and turrets of St Cedd’s, Cambridge, a ghostly profusion of buildings thrown up over centuries, medieval next to Victorian, Odeon next to Tudor. Only rising through the mist did they seem remotely to belong to one another. Between them scurried figures, hurrying from one dim pool of light to another, shivering, leaving wraiths of breath which folded themselves into the cold night behind them. It was seven o’clock. Many of the figures were heading for the college dining hall which divided First Court from Second Court, and from which warm light, reluctantly, streamed. Two figures in particular seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted heron. The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older than that, but — well, it was impossible to tell. Certainly his face was heavily lined, and the small amount of hair that escaped from under his red woollen skiing hat was thin, white, and had very much its own ideas about how it wished to arrange itself. He too was muffled inside a heavy coat, but over it he wore a billowing gown with very faded purple trim, the badge of his unique and peculiar academic office. As they walked the older man was doing all the talking. He was pointing at items of interest along the way, despite the fact that it was too dark to see any of them. The younger man was saying ‘Ah yes,’ and ‘Really? How interesting…’ and ‘Well, well, well,’ and ‘Good heavens.’ His head bobbed seriously. They entered, not through the main entrance to the hall, but through a small doorway on the east side of the court. This led to the Senior Combination Room and a dark-panelled anteroom where the Fellows of the college assembled to slap their hands and make ‘brrrrrr’ noises before making their way through their own entrance to the High Table. They were late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This was complicated for the older man by the necessity first of taking off his professorial gown, and then of putting it back on again once his coat was off, then of stuffing his hat in his coat pocket, then of wondering where he’d put his scarf, and then of realising that he hadn’t brought it, then of fishing in his coat pocket for his handkerchief, then of fishing in his other coat pocket for his spectacles, and finally of finding them quite unexpectedly wrapped in his scarf, which it turned out he had brought after all but hadn’t been wearing despite the damp and bitter wind blowing in like a witch’s breath from across the fens. He bustled the younger man into the hall ahead of him and they took the last two vacant seats at the High Table, braving a flurry of frowns and raised eyebrows for interrupting the Latin grace to do so. Hall was full tonight. It was always more popular with the undergraduates in the colder months. More unusually, the hall was candlelit, as it was now only on very few special occasions. Two long, crowded tables stretched off into the glimmering darkness. By candlelight, people’s faces were more alive, the hushed sounds of their voices, the clink of cutlery and glasses, seemed more exciting, and in the dark recesses of the great hall, all the centuries for which it had existed seemed present at once. High Table itself formed a crosspiece at the top, and was raised about a foot above the rest. Since it was a guest night, the table was set on both sides to accommodate the extra numbers, and many diners therefore sat with their backs to the rest of the hall. ‘So, young MacDuff,’ said the Professor once he was seated and flapping his napkin open, ‘pleasure to see you again, my dear fellow. Glad you could come. No idea what all this is about,’ he added, peering round the hall in consternation. ‘All the candles and silver and business. Generally means a special dinner in honour of someone or something no one can remember anything about except that it means better food for a night.’ He paused and thought for a moment, and then said, ‘It seems odd, don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness. Could be worth a try, I think. Got some good vaults in the college that could be turned over to the purpose. I think I showed you round them once, hmmm? Nice brickwork.’ All this came as something of a relief to his guest. It was the first indication his host had given that he had the faintest recollection who he was. Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology, or ‘Reg’ as he insisted on being called had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colourful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct. When he had telephoned with the invitation a few days previously, he had seemed extremely keen to see his former pupil, and yet when Richard had arrived this evening, a little on the late side, admittedly, the Professor had thrown open the door apparently in anger, had started in surprise on seeing Richard, demanded to know if he was having emotional problems, reacted in annoyance to being reminded gently that it was now ten years since he had been Richard’s college tutor, and finally agreed that Richard had indeed come for dinner, whereupon he, the Professor, had started talking rapidly and at length about the history of the college architecture, a sure sign that his mind was elsewhere entirely. ‘Reg’ had never actually taught Richard, he had only been his college tutor, which meant in short that he had had charge of his general welfare, told him when the exams were and not to take drugs, and so on. Indeed, it was not entirely clear if Reg had ever taught anybody at all and what, if anything, he would have taught them. His professorship was an obscure one, to say the least, and since he dispensed with his lecturing duties by the simple and time-honoured technique of presenting all his potential students with an exhaustive list of books that he knew for a fact had been out of print for thirty years, then flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no one had ever discovered the precise nature of his academic discipline. He had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did. Since Richard had always managed to get on reasonably well with the old fruitcake, he had one day plucked up courage to ask him what, exactly, the Regius Professorship of Chronology was. It had been one of those light summery days when the world seems about to burst with pleasure at simply being itself, and Reg had been in an uncharacteristically forthcoming mood as they had walked over the bridge where the River Cam divided the older parts of the college from the newer. ‘Sinecure, my dear fellow, an absolute sinecure,’ he had beamed. ‘A small amount of money for a very small, or shall we say non-existent, amount of work. That puts me permanently just ahead of the game, which is a comfortable if frugal place to spend your life. I recommend it.’ He leaned over the edge of the bridge and started to point out a particular brick that he found interesting. ‘But what sort of study is it supposed to be?’ Richard had pursued. ‘Is it history? Physics? Philosophy? What?’ ‘Well,’ said Reg, slowly, ‘since you’re interested, the chair was originally instituted by King George III, who, as you know, entertained a number of amusing notions, including the belief that one of the trees in Windsor Great Park was in fact Frederick the Great. ‘It was his own appointment, hence “Regius”. His own idea as well, which is somewhat more unusual.’ Sunlight played along the River Cam. People in punts happily shouted at each other to fuck off. Thin natural scientists who had spent months locked away in their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinking into the light. Couples walking along the bank got so excited about the general wonderfulness of it all that they had to pop inside for an hour. ‘The poor beleaguered fellow,’ Reg continued, ‘George III, I mean, was, as you may know, obsessed with time. Filled the palace with clocks. Wound them incessantly. Sometimes would get up in the middle of the night and prowl round the palace in his nightshirt winding clocks. He was very concerned that time continued to go forward, you see. So many terrible things had occurred in his life that he was terrified that any of them might happen again if time were ever allowed to slip backwards even for a moment. A very understandable fear, especially if you’re barking mad, as I’m afraid to say, with the very greatest sympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly was. He appointed me, or rather I should say, my office, this professorship, you understand, the post that I am now privileged to hold to — where was I? Oh yes. He instituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then take the rest of my career off.’ ‘And your predecessors?’ ‘Er, were much of the same mind.’ ‘But who were they?’ ‘Who were they? Well, splendid fellows of course, splendid to a man. Remind me to tell you about them some day. See that brick? Wordsworth was once sick on that brick. Great man.’ All that had been about ten years ago. Richard glanced around the great dining hall to see what had changed in the time, and the answer was, of course, absolutely nothing. In the dark heights, dimly seen by the flickering candlelight, were the ghostly portraits of prime ministers, archbishops, political reformers and poets, any of whom might, in their day, have been sick on that same brick. ‘Well,’ said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, ‘I hear you’ve suddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?’ ‘Er, well, yes, in fact,’ said Richard, who was as surprised at the fact as anybody else, ‘yes, I have.’ Around the table several gazes stiffened on him. ‘Computers,’ he heard somebody whisper dismissively to a neighbour further down the table. The stiff gazes relaxed again, and turned away. ‘Excellent,’ said Reg. ‘I’m so pleased for you, so pleased.’ ‘Tell me,’ he went on, and it was a moment before Richard realised that the Professor wasn’t talking to him any more, but had turned to the right to address his other neighbour, ‘what’s all this about, this,’ he flourished a vague hand over the candles and college silver, ‘…stuff?’ His neighbour, an elderly wizened figure, turned very slowly and looked at him as if he was rather annoyed at being raised from the dead like this. ‘Coleridge,’ he said in a thin rasp, ‘it’s the Coleridge Dinner you old fool.’ He turned very slowly back until he was facing the front again. His name was Cawley, he was a Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, and it was frequently said of him, behind his back, that he regarded it not so much as a serious academic study, more as a chance to relive his childhood. ‘Ah, is it,’ murmured Reg, ‘is it?’ and turned back to Richard. ‘It’s the Coleridge Dinner,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Coleridge was a member of the college, you know,’ he added after a moment. ‘Coleridge. Samuel Taylor. Poet. I expect you’ve heard of him. This is his Dinner. Well, not literally, of course. It would be cold by now.’ Silence. ‘Here, have some salt.’ ‘Er, thank you, I think I’ll wait,’ said Richard, surprised. There was no food on the table yet. ‘Go on, take it,’ insisted the Professor, proffering him the heavy silver salt cellar. Richard blinked in bemusement but with an interior shrug he reached to take it. In the moment that he blinked, however, the salt cellar had completely vanished. He started back in surprise. ‘Good one, eh?’ said Reg as he retrieved the missing cruet from behind the ear of his deathly right-hand neighbour, provoking a surprisingly girlish giggle from somewhere else at the table. Reg smiled impishly. ‘Very irritating habit, I know. It’s next on my list for giving up after smoking and leeches.’ Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg’s vice was a harmless if peculiar one — an addiction to childish conjuring tricks. Richard remembered the first time he had been to see Reg with a problem — it was only the normal /Angst/ that periodically takes undergraduates into its grip, particularly when they have essays to write, but it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the time. Reg had sat and listened to his outpourings with a deep frown of concentration, and when at last Richard had finished, he pondered seriously, stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned forward and looked him in the eye. ‘I suspect that your problem,’ he said, ‘is that you have too many paper clips up your nose.’ Richard stared at him. ‘Allow me to demonstrate,’ said Reg, and leaning across the desk he pulled from Richard’s nose a chain of eleven paper clips and a small rubber swan. ‘Ah, the real culprit,’ he said, holding up the swan. ‘They come in cereal packets, you know, and cause no end of trouble. Well, I’m glad we’ve had this little chat, my dear fellow. Please feel free to disturb me again if you have any more such problems.’ Needless to say, Richard didn’t. Richard glanced around the table to see if there was anybody else he recognised from his time at the college. Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s Director of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him at all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three years here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a beard and pretending to be someone else. Next to him was a man whom Richard had never managed to identify. Neither, in fact, had anyone else. He was thin and vole-like and had the most extraordinarily long bony nose — it really was very, very long and bony indeed. In fact it looked a lot like the controversial keel which had helped the Australians win the America’s Cup in 1983, and this resemblance had been much remarked upon at the time, though not of course to his face. No one had said anything to his face at all. No one. Ever. Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled and embarrassed by his nose to speak, and the second time was worse because of the first time, and so on. Years had gone by now, seventeen in all. In all that time he had been cocooned in silence. In hall it had long been the habit of the college servants to position a separate set of salt, pepper and mustard on either side of him, since no one could ask him to pass them, and to ask someone sitting on the other side of him was not only rude but completely impossible because of his nose being in the way. The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures he made and repeated regularly throughout every evening. They consisted of tapping each of the fingers of his left hand in order, and then one of the fingers of his right hand. He would then occasionally tap some other part of his body, a knuckle, an elbow or a knee. Whenever he was forced to stop this by the requirements of eating he would start blinking each of his eyes instead, and occasionally nodding. No one, of course, had ever dared to ask him why he did this, though all were consumed with curiosity. Richard couldn’t see who was sitting beyond him. In the other direction, beyond Reg’s deathly neighbour, was Watkin, the Classics Professor, a man of terrifying dryness and oddity. His heavy rimless glasses were almost solid cubes of glass within which his eyes appeared to lead independent existences like goldfish. His nose was straight enough and ordinary, but beneath it he wore the same beard as Clint Eastwood. His eyes gazed swimmingly around the table as he selected who was going to be spoken at tonight. He had thought that his prey might be one of the guests, the newly appointed Head of Radio Three, who was sitting opposite — but unfortunately he had already been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase ‘too much Mozart’ was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy. The poor man was already beginning to grip his cutlery too tightly. His eyes darted about desperately looking for rescue, and made the mistake of lighting on those of Watkin. ‘Good evening,’ said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in the most friendly way, and then letting his gaze settle glassily on to his bowl of newly arrived soup, from which position it would not allow itself to be moved. Yet. Let the bugger suffer a little. He wanted the rescue to be worth at least a good half dozen radio talk fees. Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the little girlish giggle that had greeted Reg’s conjuring trick. Astonishingly enough it was a little girl. She was about eight years old with blonde hair and a glum look. She was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at the table leg. ‘Who’s that?’ Richard asked Reg in surprise. ‘Who’s what?’ Reg asked Richard in surprise. Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction. ‘The girl,’ he whispered, ‘the very, very little girl. Is it some new maths professor?’ Reg peered round at her. ‘Do you know,’ he said in astonishment, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Never known anything like it. How extraordinary.’ At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, who suddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which his neighbours had got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table. She stopped kicking the table, and instead kicked the air with redoubled vigour. He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kicked him. This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her glum evening, but it didn’t last. Her father briefly shared with the table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but nobody felt able to run with the topic. ‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is of course clearly long overdue. I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to remedying this situation at the first opportunity.’ ‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er, that is… he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’ The little girl kicked the table leg again. When her father looked sternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at him. ‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could. ‘When, then?’ ‘Later. Maybe. Later, we’ll see.’ She hunched grumpily back in her seat. ‘You always say later,’ she mouthed at him. ‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg. ‘There isn’t a don at this table who doesn’t behave exactly like that inside. Ah, thank you.’ Their soup arrived, distracting his attention, and Richard’s. ‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple of spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was not a taste explosion, ‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap. Something to do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music. I thought you read English when you were here — though only, I realise, in your spare time.’ He looked at Richard significantly over the rim of his soup spoon. ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?’ ‘Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but…’ ‘Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg. ‘In skilled hands it’s a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.’ ‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard. ‘True enough,’ conceded Reg. ‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard, ‘but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim- witted pupil.’ Reg looked at him quizzically. ‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said. ‘I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’ ‘I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?’ This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?’ ‘It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,’ came a low growl from somewhere on the table, ‘without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy.’ ‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do. I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC. A simple search and replace routine would take about three hours.’ ‘I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?’ ‘Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not were absolutely fascinating. For instance, I discovered that…’ He broke off, laughing at himself. ‘I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,’ he added. ‘That didn’t help.’ ‘Now, that I didn’t know,’ said Reg. ‘Your past has murkier things in it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup.’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin very carefully. ‘I must go and have a word with the kitchen staff one day. I would like to be sure that they are keeping the right bits and throwing the proper bits away. So. A rock group, you say. Well, well, well. Good heavens.’ ‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother’, so we didn’t. I left Cambridge and starved for three years.’ ‘But didn’t I bump into you during that period,’ said Reg, ‘and you said you were doing very well?’ ‘As a road sweeper, yes. There was an awful lot of mess on the roads. More than enough, I felt, to support an entire career. However, I got the sack for sweeping the mess on to another sweeper’s patch.’ Reg shook his head. ‘The wrong career for you, I’m sure. There are plenty of vocations where such behaviour would ensure rapid preferment.’ ‘I tried a few — none of them much grander, though. And I kept none of them very long, because I was always too tired to do them properly. I’d be found asleep slumped over the chicken sheds or filing cabinets – – depending on what the job was. Been up all night with the computer you see, teaching it to play “Three Blind Mice”. It was an important goal for me.’ ‘I’m sure,’ agreed Reg. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the college servant who took his half-finished plate of soup from him, ‘thank you very much. “Three Blind Mice”, eh? Good. Good. So no doubt you succeeded eventually, and this accounts for your present celebrated status. Yes?’ ‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.’ ‘I feared there might be. Pity you didn’t bring it with you though. It might have cheered up the poor young lady who is currently having our dull and crusty company forced upon her. A swift burst of “Three Blind Mice” would probably do much to revive her spirits.’ He leaned forward to look past his two right-hand neighbours at the girl, who was still sitting sagging in her chair. ‘Hello,’ he said. She looked up in surprise, and then dropped her eyes shyly, swinging her legs again. ‘Which do you think is worse,’ enquired Reg, ‘the soup or the company?’ She gave a tiny, reluctant laugh and shrugged, still looking down. ‘I think you’re wise not to commit yourself at this stage,’ continued Reg. ‘Myself, I’m waiting to see the carrots before I make any judgements. They’ve been boiling them since the weekend, but I fear it may not be enough. The only thing that could possibly be worse than the carrots is Watkin. He’s the man with the silly glasses sitting between us. My name’s Reg, by the way. Come over and kick me when you have a moment.’ The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, who stiffened and made an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good- naturedly. ‘/Well/, little girl,’ he said to her awkwardly, and she had desperately to suppress a hoot of laughter at his glasses. Little conversation therefore ensued, but the girl had an ally, and began to enjoy herself a tiny little bit. Her father gave her a relieved smile. Reg turned back to Richard, who said, suddenly, ‘Do you have any family?’ ‘Er… no,’ said Reg, quietly. ‘But tell me. After “Three Blind Mice”, what then?’ ‘Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working for WayForward Technologies…’ ‘Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way. Tell me, what’s he like?’ Richard was always faintly annoyed by this question, probably because he was asked it so often. ‘Both better and worse than he’s represented in the press. I like him a lot, actually. Like any driven man he can be a bit trying at times, but I’ve known him since the very early days of the company when neither he nor I had a bean to our names. He’s fine. It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.’ ‘What? Why’s that?’ ‘Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder.’ ‘A blue one, eh?’ ‘Ask me why he doesn’t simply use a tape recorder,’ said Richard with a shrug. Reg considered this. ‘I expect he doesn’t use a tape recorder because he doesn’t like talking to himself,’ he said. ‘There is a logic there. Of a kind.’ He took a mouthful of his newly arrived /porc au poivre/ and ruminated on it for a while before gently laying his knife and fork aside again for the moment. ‘So what,’ he said at last, ‘is the role of young MacDuff in all this?’ ‘Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the Apple Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics. I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just said, “Everything. I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.” And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally. ‘You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can be used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process — and so on. And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers. So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbers and do what you like with them. If you just want a bar graph it’ll do them as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If you want dancing girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do that as well. Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company. Great for producing animated corporate logos that actually /mean/ something. ‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it.’ Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt. ‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard. ‘Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths.’ ‘You mean tunes,’ said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet. Richard grinned. ‘Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that.’ ‘It would help you speak more easily.’ Reg returned the carrot to his plate, untasted. ‘And this software did well, then?’ he asked. ‘Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from /Saul/, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end. Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing, commercially. Though the thing that’s interesting me most now is what happens if you leave the accounts out of it. Turn the numbers that represent the way a swallow’s wings beat directly into music. What would you hear? Not the sound of cash registers, according to Gordon.’ ‘Fascinating,’ said Reg, ‘quite fascinating,’ and popped the carrot at last into his mouth. He turned and leaned forward to speak to his new girlfriend. ‘Watkin loses,’ he pronounced. ‘The carrots have achieved a new all- time low. Sorry, Watkin, but awful as you are, the carrots, I’m afraid, are world-beaters.’ The girl giggled more easily than last time and she smiled at him. Watkin was trying to take all this good-naturedly, but it was clear as his eyes swam at Reg that he was more used to discomfiting than being discomfited. ‘Please, Daddy, can I now?’ With her new-found, if slight, confidence, the girl had also found a voice. ‘Later,’ insisted her father. ‘This is already later. I’ve been timing it.’ ‘Well…’ He hesitated, and was lost. ‘We’ve been to Greece,’ announced the girl in a small but awed voice. ‘Ah, have you indeed,’ said Watkin, with a little nod. ‘Well, well. Anywhere in particular, or just Greece generally?’ ‘Patmos,’ she said decisively. ‘It was beautiful. I think Patmos is the most beautiful place in the whole world. Except the ferry never came when it said it would. Never, ever. I timed it. We missed our flight but I didn’t mind.’ ‘Ah, Patmos, I see,’ said Watkin, who was clearly roused by the news. ‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.’ She frowned at him. ‘I found a pot,’ she said. ‘Probably nothing,’ interrupted her father hastily. ‘You know the way it is. Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinks they’ve found a pot, don’t they? Ha, ha.’ There were general nods. This was true. Irritating, but true. ‘I found it in the harbour,’ she said, ‘in the water. While we were waiting for the damn ferry.’ ‘Sarah! I’ve told you…’ ‘It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words I didn’t think you knew. Anyway, I thought that if everyone here was meant to be so clever, then someone would be able to tell me if it was a proper ancient Greek thing or not. I think it’s /very/ old. Will you please let them see it, Daddy?’ Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under his chair. ‘Did you know, young lady,’ said Watkin to her, ‘that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that very suggestive. Perhaps you should write a paper on it.’ He nodded at her. She looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Well, here it is,’ said her father, plonking the thing down on the table. ‘Just a pot, as you see. She’s only six,’ he added with a grim smile, ‘aren’t you, dear?’ ‘Seven,’ said Sarah. The pot was quite small, about five inches high and four inches across at its widest point. The body was almost spherical, with a very narrow neck extending about an inch above the body. The neck and about half of the surface area were encrusted with hard-caked earth, but the parts of the pot that could be seen were of a rough, ruddy texture. Sarah took it and thrust it into the hands of the don sitting on her right. ‘You look clever,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you think.’ The don took it, and turned it over with a slightly supercilious air. ‘I’m sure if you scraped away the mud from the bottom,’ he remarked wittily, ‘it would probably say “Made in Birmingham”.’ ‘That old, eh?’ said Sarah’s father with a forced laugh. ‘Long time since anything was made there.’ ‘Anyway,’ said the don, ‘not my field, I’m a molecular biologist. Anyone else want to have a look?’ This question was not greeted with wild yelps of enthusiasm, but nevertheless the pot was passed from hand to hand around the far end of the table in a desultory fashion. It was goggled at through pebble glasses, peered at through horn-rims, gazed at over half-moons, and squinted at by someone who had left his glasses in his other suit, which he very much feared had now gone to the cleaner’s. No one seemed to know how old it was, or to care very much. The young girl’s face began to grow downhearted again. ‘Sour lot,’ said Reg to Richard. He picked up a silver salt cellar again and held it up. ‘Young lady,’ he said, leaning forward to address her. ‘Oh, not again, you old fool,’ muttered the aged archaeologist Cawley, sitting back and putting his hands over his ears. ‘Young lady,’ repeated Reg, ‘regard this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple hat.’ ‘You haven’t got a hat,’ said the girl sulkily. ‘Oh,’ said Reg, ‘a moment please,’ and he went and fetched his woolly red one. ‘Regard,’ he said again, ‘this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple woolly hat. I put the salt cellar in the hat, thus, and I pass the hat to you. The next part of the trick, dear lady… is up to you.’ He handed the hat to her, past their two intervening neighbours, Cawley and Watkin. She took the hat and looked inside it. ‘Where’s it gone?’ she asked, staring into the hat. ‘It’s wherever you put it,’ said Reg. ‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘I see. Well… that wasn’t very good.’ Reg shrugged. ‘A humble trick, but it gives me pleasure,’ he said, and turned back to Richard. ‘Now, what were we talking about?’ Richard looked at him with a slight sense of shock. He knew that the Professor had always been prone to sudden and erratic mood swings, but it was as if all the warmth had drained out of him in an instant. He now wore the same distracted expression Richard had seen on his face when first he had arrived at his door that evening, apparently completely unexpected. Reg seemed then to sense that Richard was taken aback and quickly reassembled a smile. ‘My dear chap!’ he said. ‘My dear chap! My dear, dear chap! What was I saying?’ ‘Er, you were saying “My dear chap”.’ ‘Yes, but I feel sure it was a prelude to something. A sort of short toccata on the theme of what a splendid fellow you are prior to introducing the main subject of my discourse, the nature of which I currently forget. You have no idea what I was about to say?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh. Well, I suppose I should be pleased. If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there? Now, how’s our young guest’s pot doing?’ In fact it had reached Watkin, who pronounced himself no expert on what the ancients had made for themselves to drink out of, only on what they had written as a result. He said that Cawley was the one to whose knowledge and experience they should all bow, and attempted to give the pot to him. ‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘yours was the knowledge and experience to which we should bow. Oh, for heaven’s sake, take your hands off your ears and have a look at the thing.’ Gently, but firmly, he drew Cawley’s right hand from his ear, explained the situation to him once again, and handed him the pot. Cawley gave it a cursory but clearly expert examination. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about two hundred years old, I would think. Very rough. Very crude example of its type. Utterly without value, of course.’ He put it down peremptorily and gazed off into the old minstrel gallery, which appeared to anger him for some reason. The effect on Sarah was immediate. Already discouraged, she was thoroughly downcast by this. She bit her lip and threw herself back against her chair, feeling once again thoroughly out of place and childish. Her father gave her a warning look about misbehaving, and then apologised for her again. ‘Well, Buxtehude,’ he hurried on to say, ‘yes, good old Buxtehude. We’ll have to see what we can do. Tell me…’ ‘Young lady,’ interrupted a voice, hoarse with astonishment, ‘you are clearly a magician and enchantress of prodigious powers!’ All eyes turned to Reg, the old show-off. He was gripping the pot and staring at it with manic fascination. He turned his eyes slowly to the little girl, as if for the first time assessing the power of a feared adversary. ‘I bow to you,’ he whispered. ‘I, unworthy though I am to speak in the presence of such a power as yours, beg leave to congratulate you on one of the finest feats of the conjurer’s art it has been my privilege to witness!’ Sarah stared at him with widening eyes. ‘May I show these people what you have wrought?’ he asked earnestly. Very faintly she nodded, and he fetched her formerly precious, but now sadly discredited, pot a sharp rap on the table. It split into two irregular parts, the caked clay with which it was surrounded falling in jagged shards on the table. One side of the pot fell away, leaving the rest standing. Sarah’s eyes goggled at the stained and tarnished but clearly recognisable silver college salt cellar, standing jammed in the remains of the pot. ‘Stupid old fool,’ muttered Cawley. After the general disparagement and condemnation of this cheap parlour trick had died down — none of which could dim the awe in Sarah’s eyes — Reg turned to Richard and said, idly: ‘Who was that friend of yours when you were here, do you ever see him? Chap with an odd East European name. Svlad something. Svlad Cjelli. Remember the fellow?’ Richard looked at him blankly for a moment. ‘Svlad?’ he said. ‘Oh, you mean Dirk. Dirk Cjelli. No. I never stayed in touch. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times in the street but that’s all. I think he changes his name from time to time. Why do you ask?’ [::: CHAPTER 5 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] High on his rocky promontory the Electric Monk continued to sit on a horse which was going quietly and uncomplainingly spare. From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into the valley, with which it was having a problem, but the problem was a new and hideous one to the Monk, for it was this — Doubt. He never suffered it for long, but when he did, it gnawed at the very root of his being. The day was hot; the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. But strange things were beginning to fizz in its brain, as they did from time to time when a piece of data became misaddressed as it passed through its input buffer. But then the Monk began to believe, fitfully and nervously at first, but then with a great searing white flame of belief which overturned all previous beliefs, including the stupid one about the valley being pink, that somewhere down in the valley, about a mile from where he was sitting, there would shortly open up a mysterious doorway into a strange and distant world, a doorway through which he might enter. An astounding idea. Astoundingly enough, however, on this one occasion he was perfectly right. The horse sensed that something was up. It pricked up its ears and gently shook its head. It had gone into a sort of trance looking at the same clump of rocks for so long, and was on the verge of imagining them to be pink itself. It shook its head a little harder. A slight twitch on the reins, and a prod from the Monk’s heels and they were off, picking their way carefully down the rocky incline. The way was difficult. Much of it was loose shale — loose brown and grey shale, with the occasional brown and green plant clinging to a precarious existence on it. The Monk noticed this without embarrassment. It was an older, wiser Monk now, and had put childish things behind it. Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment. The sun beat hard on them. The Monk wiped the sweat and dust off its face and paused, leaning forward on the horse’s neck. It peered down through the shimmering heat haze at a large outcrop of rock which stood out on to the floor of the valley. There, behind that outcrop, was where the Monk thought, or rather passionately believed to the core of its being, the door would appear. It tried to focus more closely, but the details of the view swam confusingly in the hot rising air. As it sat back in its saddle, and was about to prod the horse onward, it suddenly noticed a rather odd thing. On a flattish wall of rock nearby, in fact so nearby that the Monk was surprised not to have noticed it before, was a large painting. The painting was crudely drawn, though not without a certain stylish sweep of line, and seemed very old, possibly very, very old indeed. The paint was faded, chipped and patchy, and it was difficult to discern with any clarity what the picture was. The Monk approached the picture more closely. It looked like a primitive hunting scene. The group of purple, multi-limbed creatures were clearly early hunters. They carried rough spears, and were in hot pursuit of a large horned and armoured creature, which appeared to have been wounded in the hunt already. The colours were now so dim as to be almost non- existent. In fact, all that could be clearly seen was the white of the hunters’ teeth, which seemed to shine with a whiteness whose lustre was undimmed by the passage of what must have been many thousands of years. In fact they even put the Monk’s own teeth to shame, and he had cleaned them only that morning. The Monk had seen paintings like this before, but only in pictures or on the TV, never in real life. They were usually to be found in caves where they were protected from the elements, otherwise they would not have survived. The Monk looked more carefully at the immediate environs of the rock wall and noticed that, though not exactly in a cave, it was nevertheless protected by a large overhang and was well sheltered from the wind and rain. Odd, though, that it should have managed to last so long. Odder still that it should appear not to have been discovered. Such cave paintings as there were were all famous and familiar images, but this was not one that he had ever seen before. Perhaps this was a dramatic and historic find he had made. Perhaps if he were to return to the city and announce this discovery he would be welcomed back, given a new motherboard after all and allowed to believe — to believe — believe what? He paused, blinked, and shook his head to clear a momentary system error. He pulled himself up short. He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to… to… The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to. Brusquely he tugged the horse’s head round and urged it onward and downward. Within a few minutes more of tricky manoeuvring they had reached the valley floor, and he was momentarily disconcerted to discover that the fine top layer of dust that had settled on the brown parched earth was indeed a very pale brownish pink, particularly on the banks of the sluggish trickle of mud which was all that remained, in the hot season, of the river that flowed through the valley when the rains came. He dismounted and bent down to feel the pink dust and run it through his fingers. It was very fine and soft and felt pleasant as he rubbed it on his skin. It was about the same colour, perhaps a little paler. The horse was looking at him. He realised, a little belatedly perhaps, that the horse must be extremely thirsty. He was extremely thirsty himself, but had tried to keep his mind off it. He unbuckled the water flask from the saddle. It was pathetically light. He unscrewed the top and took one single swig. Then he poured a little into his cupped hand and offered it to the horse, who slurped at it greedily and briefly. The horse looked at him again. The Monk shook his head sadly, resealed the bottle and replaced it. He knew, in that small part of his mind where he kept factual and logical information, that it would not last much longer, and that, without it, neither would they. It was only his Belief that kept him going, currently his Belief in The Door. He brushed the pink dust from his rough habit, and then stood looking at the rocky outcrop, a mere hundred yards distant. He looked at it not without a slight, tiny trepidation. Although the major part of his mind was firm in its eternal and unshakeable Belief that there would be a Door behind the outcrop, and that the Door would be The Way, yet the tiny part of his brain that understood about the water bottle could not help but recall past disappointments and sounded a very tiny but jarring note of caution. If he elected not to go and see The Door for himself, then he could continue to believe in it forever. It would be the lodestone of his life (what little was left of it, said the part of his brain that knew about the water bottle). If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to the Door and it wasn’t there… what then? The horse whinnied impatiently. The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the door was not. He pulled himself together. The Door would be there, and he must now go to it, because The Door was The Way. Instead of remounting his horse, he led it. The Way was but a short way, and he should enter the presence of the Door in humility. He walked, brave and erect, with solemn slowness. He approached the rocky outcrop. He reached it. He turned the corner. He looked. The Door was there. The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised. The Monk fell to his knees in awe and bewilderment. So braced was he for dealing with the disappointment that was habitually his lot that, though he would never know to admit it, he was completely unprepared for this. He stared at The Door in sheer, blank system error. It was a door such as he had never seen before. All the doors he knew were great steel-reinforced things, because of all the video recorders and dishwashers that were kept behind them, plus of course all the expensive Electric Monks that were needed to believe in it all. This one was simple, wooden and small, about his own size. A Monk-size door, painted white, with a single, slightly dented brass knob slightly less than halfway up one side. It was set simply in the rock face, with no explanation as to its origin or purpose. Hardly knowing how he dared, the poor startled Monk staggered to his feet and, leading his horse, walked nervously forward towards it. He reached out and touched it. He was so startled when no alarms went off that he jumped back. He touched it again, more firmly this time. He let his hand drop slowly to the handle — again, no alarms. He waited to be sure, and then he turned it, very, very gently. He felt a mechanism release. He held his breath. Nothing. He drew the door towards him, and it came easily. He looked inside, but the interior was so dim in contrast with the desert sun outside that he could see nothing. At last, almost dead with wonder, he entered, pulling the horse in after him. A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of sight around the next outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust on his face, stood up, stretched his limbs and made his way back towards the door, patting his clothes as he did so. [::: CHAPTER 6 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:’ The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted by reading it in a silly voice. He soared and swooped at the words until they seemed to duck and run for cover. ‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.’ Richard relaxed back into his seat. The words were very, very familiar to him, as they could not help but be to any English graduate of St Cedd’s College, and they settled easily into his mind. The association of the college with Coleridge was taken very seriously indeed, despite the man’s well-known predilection for certain recreational pharmaceuticals under the influence of which this, his greatest work, was composed, in a dream. The entire manuscript was lodged in the safe-keeping of the college library, and it was from this itself, on the regular occasion of the Coleridge Dinner, that the poem was read. ‘So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’ Richard wondered how long it took. He glanced sideways at his former Director of Studies and was disturbed by the sturdy purposefulness of his reading posture. The singsong voice irritated him at first, but after a while it began to lull him instead, and he watched a rivulet of wax seeping over the edge of a candle that was burning low now and throwing a guttering light over the carnage of dinner. ‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’ The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself during the course of the meal seeped warmly through his veins, and soon his own mind began to wander, and provoked by Reg’s question earlier in the meal, he wondered what had lately become of his former… was friend the word? He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person. The idea of him actually having friends as such seemed not so much unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like the idea of the Suez crisis popping out for a bun. Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular — everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk. He was rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats. That is to say, there was just the one hat which he habitually wore, but he wore it with a passion that was rare in one so young. The hat was dark red and round, with a very flat brim, and it appeared to move as if balanced on gimbals, which ensured its perfect horizontality at all times, however its owner moved his head. As a hat it was a remarkable rather than entirely successful piece of persona! decoration. It would make an elegant adornment, stylish, shapely and flattering, if the wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise. People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he denied about himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if not his own denials, was never entirely clear. The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he’d supposedly inherited from his mother’s side of the family who he claimed, had lived at the smarter end of Transylvania. That is to say, he didn’t make any such claim at all, and said it was the most absurd nonsense. He strenuously denied that there were bats of any kind at all in his family and threatened to sue anybody who put about such malicious fabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappy leather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which are supposed to help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them. He would allow people to discover him hanging from this machine at all kinds of odd hours of the day, and more particularly of the night, expressly so that he could vigorously deny that it had any significance whatsoever. By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat. What did ‘psychosassic’ mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all. ‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted…’ Dirk had also been perpetually broke. This would change. It was his room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow called Mander, who, if the truth were known, had probably been specially selected by Dirk for his credulity. Steve Mander noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk he would talk in his sleep. Not only that, but the sort of things he would say in his sleep would be things like, ‘The opening up of trade routes to the mumble mumble burble was the turning point for the growth of empire in the snore footle mumble. Discuss.’ ‘…like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:’ The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright in bed. This was shortly before prelim exams in the second year, and what Dirk had just said, or judiciously mumbled, sounded remarkably like a very likely question in the Economic History paper. Mander quietly got up, crossed over to Dirk’s bed and listened very hard, but other than a few completely disconnected mumblings about Schleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian war, the latter being largely directed by Dirk into his pillow, he learned nothing more. News, however, spread — quietly, discreetly, and like wildfire. ‘And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river.’ For the next month Dirk found himself being constantly wined and dined in the hope that he would sleep very soundly that night and dream-speak a few more exam questions. Remarkably, it seemed that the better he was fed, and the finer the vintage of the wine he was given to drink, the less he would tend to sleep facing directly into his pillow. His scheme, therefore, was to exploit his alleged gifts without ever actually claiming to have them. In fact he would react to stories about his supposed powers with open incredulity, even hostility. ‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!’ Dirk was also, he denied, a clairaudient. He would sometimes hum tunes in his sleep that two weeks later would turn out to be a hit for someone. Not too difficult to organise, really. In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessary to support these myths. He was lazy, and essentially what he did was allow people’s enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him. The laziness was essential — if his supposed feats of the paranormal had been detailed and accurate, then people might have been suspicious and looked for other explanations. On the other hand, the more vague and ambiguous his ‘predictions’ the more other people’s own wishful thinking would close the credibility gap. Dirk never made much out of it — at least, he appeared not to. In fact, the benefit to himself, as a student, of being continually wined and dined at other people’s expense was more considerable than anyone would expect unless they sat down and worked out the figures. And, of course, he never claimed — in fact, he actively denied — that any of it was even remotely true. He was therefore well placed to execute a very nice and tasty little scam come the time of finals. ‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’ ‘Good heavens…!’ Reg suddenly seemed to awake with a start from the light doze into which he had gently slipped under the influence of the wine and the reading, and glanced about himself with blank surprise, but nothing had changed. Coleridge’s words sang through a warm and contented silence that had settled on the great hall. After another quick frown, Reg settled back into another doze, but this time a slightly more attentive one. ‘A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.’ Dirk allowed himself to be persuaded to make, under hypnosis, a firm prediction about what questions would be set for examination that summer. He himself first planted the idea by explaining exactly the sort of thing that he would never, under any circumstances, be prepared to do, though in many ways he would like to, just to have the chance to disprove his alleged and strongly disavowed abilities. And it was on these grounds, carefully prepared, that he eventually agreed — only because it would once and for all scotch the whole silly — immensely, tediously silly — business. He would make his predictions by means of automatic writing under proper supervision, and they would then be sealed in an envelope and deposited at the bank until after the exams. Then they would be opened to see how accurate they had been /after/ the exams. He was, not surprisingly, offered some pretty hefty bribes from a pretty hefty number of people to let them see the predictions he had written down, but he was absolutely shocked by the idea. That, he said, would be /dishonest/… ‘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!’ Then, a short time later, Dirk allowed himself to be seen around town wearing something of a vexed and solemn expression. At first he waved aside enquiries as to what it was that was bothering him, but eventually he let slip that his mother was going to have to undergo some extremely expensive dental work which, for reasons that he refused to discuss, would have to be done privately, only there wasn’t the money. From here, the path downward to accepting donations for his mother’s supposed medical expenses in return for quick glances at his written exam predictions proved to be sufficiently steep and well-oiled for him to be able to slip down it with a minimum of fuss. Then it further transpired that the only dentist who could perform this mysterious dental operation was an East European surgeon now living in Malibu, and it was in consequence necessary to increase the level of donations rather sharply. He still denied, of course, that his abilities were all that they were cracked up to be, in fact he denied that they existed at all, and insisted that he would never have embarked on the exercise at all if it wasn’t to disprove the whole thing — and also, since other people seemed, at their own risk, to have a faith in his abilities that he himself did not, he was happy to indulge them to the extent of letting them pay for his sainted mother’s operation. He could only emerge well from this situation. Or so he thought. ‘And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ The exam papers Dirk produced under hypnosis, by means of automatic writing, he had, in fact, pieced together simply by doing the same minimum research that any student taking exams would do, studying previous exam papers, and seeing what, if any, patterns emerged, and making intelligent guesses about what might come up. He was pretty sure of getting (as anyone would be) a strike rate that was sufficiently high to satisfy the credulous, and sufficiently low for the whole exercise to look perfectly innocent. As indeed it was. What completely blew him out of the water, and caused a furore which ended with him being driven out of Cambridge in the back of a Black Maria, was the fact that all the exam papers he sold turned out to be the same as the papers that were actually set. Exactly. Word for word. To the very comma. ‘Wave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise…’ And that, apart from a flurry of sensational newspaper reports which exposed him as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the real thing so that they could have another round of exposing him as a fraud again and then trumpeting him as the real thing again, until they got bored and found a nice juicy snooker player to harass instead, was that. In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some. Dirk’s regular name changes suggested to Richard that he wasn’t alone in being treated like this. He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly alive within the small confines of a university community should have seemed to fade so much in the light of common day. And he wondered at Reg’s asking after him like that, suddenly and out of the blue, in what seemed altogether too airy and casual a manner. He glanced around him again, at his lightly snoring neighbour, Reg; at little Sarah rapt in silent attention; at the deep hall swathed in darkly glimmering light; at the portraits of old prime ministers and poets hung high in the darkness with just the odd glint of candlelight gleaming off their teeth; at the Director of English Studies standing reading in his poetry-reading voice; at the book of ‘Kubla Khan’ that the Director of English Studies held in his hand; and finally, surreptitiously, at his watch. He settled back again. The voice continued, reading the second, and altogether stranger part of the poem… [::: CHAPTER 7 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way’s life, and he was wondering if the rain would hold off for the weekend. The forecast had said changeable — a misty night tonight followed by bright but chilly days on Friday and Saturday with maybe a few scattered showers towards the end of Sunday when everyone would be heading back into town. Everyone, that is, other than Gordon Way. The weather forecast hadn’t mentioned that, of course, that wasn‘t the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out. He turned off the motorway near Cambridge and stopped at a small filling station for some petrol, where he sat for a moment, finishing off a call on his car phone. ‘OK, look, I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said, ‘or maybe later tonight. Or call me. I should be at the cottage in half an hour. Yes, I know how important the project is to you. All right, I know how important it is, full stop. You want it, I want it. Of course I do. And I’m not saying that we won’t continue to support it. I’m just saying it’s expensive and we should look at the whole thing with determination and complete honesty. Look, why don’t you come out to the cottage, and we can talk it through. OK, yeah, yes, I know. I understand. Well, think about it, Kate. Talk to you later. Bye.’ He hung up and continued to sit in his car for a moment. It was a large car. It was a large silver-grey Mercedes of the sort that they use in advertisements, and not just advertisements for Mercedes. Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II. WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it. Luckily, he had managed to make another one. The ‘usual reason’ was that he had been in the business of computer hardware when every twelve-year-old in the country had suddenly got bored with boxes that went bing. His second fortune had been made in software instead. As a result of two major pieces of software, one of which was /Anthem/ (the other, more profitable one had never seen the light of day), WFT-II was the only British software company that could be mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run along the lines of ‘WayForward Technologies, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus…’ but it was a start. WayForward was in there. And he owned it. He pushed a tape into the slot on the stereo console. It accepted it with a soft and decorous click, and a moment or two later Ravel’s /Bolйro/ floated out of eight perfectly matched speakers with fine- meshed matte-black grilles. The stereo was so smooth and spacious you could almost sense the whole ice-rink. He tapped his fingers lightly on the padded rim of the steering wheel. He gazed at the dashboard. Tasteful illuminated figures and tiny, immaculate lights gazed dimly back at him. After a while he suddenly realised this was a self service station and got out to fill the tank. This took a minute or two. He stood gripping the filler nozzle, stamping his feet in the cold night air, then walked over to the small grubby kiosk, paid for the petrol, remembered to buy a couple of local maps, and then stood chatting enthusiastically to the cashier for a few minutes about the directions the computer industry was likely to take in the following year, suggesting that parallel processing was going to be the key to really intuitive productivity software, but also strongly doubting whether artificial intelligence research /per se/, particularly artificial intelligence research based on the ProLog language, was really going to produce any serious commercially viable products in the foreseeable future, at least as far as the office desk top environment was concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier not at all. ‘The man just liked to talk,’ he would later tell the police. ‘Man, I could have walked away to the toilet for ten minutes and he would’ve told it all to the till. If I’d been fifteen minutes the till would have walked away too. Yeah, I’m sure that’s him,’ he would add when shown a picture of Gordon Way. ‘I only wasn’t sure at first because in the picture he’s got his mouth closed.’ ‘And you’re absolutely certain you didn’t see anything else suspicious?’ the policeman insisted. ‘Nothing that struck you as odd in any way at all?’ ‘No, like I said, it was just an ordinary customer on an ordinary night, just like any other night.’ The policeman stared at him blankly. ‘Just for the sake of argument,’ he went on to say, ‘if I were suddenly to do this…’ — he made himself go cross-eyed, stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and danced up and down twisting his fingers in his ears — ‘would anything strike you about that?’ ‘Well, er, yeah,’ said the cashier, backing away nervously. ‘I’d think you’d gone stark raving mad.’ ‘Good,’ said the policeman, putting his notebook away. ‘It’s just that different people sometimes have a different idea of what “odd” means, you see, sir. If last night was an ordinary night just like any other night, then I am a pimple on the bottom of the Marquess of Queensbury’s aunt. We shall be requiring a statement later, sir. Thank you for your time.’ That was all yet to come. Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled back towards his car. Standing under the lights in the mist it had gathered a finely beaded coat of matte moisture on it, and looked like — well, it looked like an extremely expensive Mercedes-Benz. Gordon caught himself, just for a millisecond, wishing that he had something like that, but he was now quite adept at fending off that particular line of thought, which only led off in circles and left him feeling depressed and confused. He patted it in a proprietorial manner, then, walking around it, noticed that the boot wasn’t closed properly and pushed it shut. It closed with a good healthy clunk. Well, that made it all worth it, didn’t it? Good healthy clunk like that. Old-fashioned values of quality and workmanship. He thought of a dozen things he had to talk to Susan about and climbed back into the car, pushing the auto-dial code on his phone as soon as the car was prowling back on to the road. ‘…so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe.’ /Beep./ ‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ he said, cradling the phone awkwardly on his shoulder. ‘Just on my way to the cottage. 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 to thrash out the distribution on /Anthem/ Version 2.00, handling the promotion, all that stuff, and look you know I don’t like to ask you this sort of thing, but you know I always do anyway, so here it is. ‘I just need to know that Richard is on the case. I mean /really/ on the case. I can ask him, and he says, Oh sure, it’s fine, but half the time — shit, that lorry had bright lights, none of these bastard lorry drivers ever dips them properly, 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 why these lorries shouldn’t have automatic light-activated dipper switches. Look, can you make a note for me to tell Susan — not you, of course, secretary Susan at the office — to tell her to send a letter from me to that fellow at the Department of the Environment saying we can provide the technology if he can provide the legislation? It’s for the public good, and anyway he owes me a favour plus what’s the point in having a CBE if you can’t kick a little ass? You can tell I’ve been talking to Americans all week. ‘That reminds me, God, I hope I remembered to pack the shotguns. What is it with these Americans that they’re always so mad to shoot my rabbits? I bought them some maps in the hope that I can persuade them to go on long healthy walks and take their minds off shooting rabbits. I really feel quite sorry for the creatures. I think I should put one of those signs on my lawn when the Americans are coming, you know, like they have in Beverly Hills, saying `Armed Response’. ‘Make a note to Susan, would you please, to get an `Armed Response’ sign made up with a sharp spike on the bottom at the right height for rabbits to see. That’s secretary Susan at the office not you, of course. ‘Where was I? ‘Oh yes. Richard and /Anthem/ 2.00. Susan, that thing has got to be in beta testing in two weeks. He tells me it’s fine. But every time I see him he’s got a picture of a sofa spinning on his computer screen. He says it’s an important concept, but all I see is furniture. People who want their company accounts to sing to them do not want to buy a revolving sofa. Nor do I think he should be turning the erosion patterns of the Himalayas into a flute quintet at this time. ‘And as for what Kate’s up to, Susan, well, I can’t hide the fact that I get anxious at the salaries and computer time it’s eating up. Important long-term research and development it might be, but there is also the possibility, only a possibility, I’m saying, but nevertheless a possibility which I think we owe it to ourselves fully to evaluate and explore, which is that it’s a lemon. That’s odd, there’s a noise coming from the boot, I thought I’d just closed it properly. ‘Anyway, the main thing’s Richard. And the point is that there’s only one person who’s really in a position to know if he’s getting the important work done, or if he’s just dreaming, and that one person is, I’m afraid, Susan. ‘That’s you, I mean, of course, not secretary Susan at the office. ‘So can you, I don’t like to ask you this, I really don’t, can you really get on his case? Make him see how important it is? Just make sure he realises that WayForward Technologies is meant to be an expanding commercial business, not an adventure playground for crunch- heads. 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.’ He put the telephone down on the seat beside him, pulled over on to the grass verge, and got out. As he went to the boot, it opened, a figure rose out of it, shot him through the chest with both barrels of a shotgun and then went about its business. Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing to his astonishment at what happened next. [::: CHAPTER 8 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] ‘Come in, dear fellow, come in.’ The door to Reg’s set of rooms in college was up a winding set of wooden stairs in the corner of Second Court, and was not well lit, or rather it was perfectly well lit when the light was working, but the light was not working, so the door was not well lit and was, furthermore, locked. Reg was having difficulty in finding the key from a collection which looked like something that a fit Ninja warrior could hurl through the trunk of a tree. Rooms in the older parts of the college have double doors, like airlocks, and like airlocks they are fiddly to open. The outer door is a sturdy slab of grey painted oak, with no features other than a very narrow slit for letters, and a Yale lock, to which suddenly Reg at last found the key. He unlocked it and pulled it open. Behind it lay an ordinary white- panelled door with an ordinary brass doorknob. ‘Come in, come in,’ repeated Reg, opening this and fumbling for the light switch. For a moment only the dying embers of a fire in the stone grate threw ghostly red shadows dancing around the room, but then electric light flooded it and extinguished the magic. Reg hesitated on the threshold for a moment, oddly tense, as if wishing to be sure of something before he entered, then bustled in with at least the appearance of cheeriness. It was a large panelled room, which a collection of gently shabby furniture contrived to fill quite comfortably. Against the far wall stood a large and battered old mahogany table with fat ugly legs, which was laden with books, files, folders and teetering piles of papers. Standing in its own space on the desk, Richard was amused to note, was actually a battered old abacus. There was a small Regency writing desk standing nearby which might have been quite valuable had it not been knocked about so much, also a couple of elegant Georgian chairs, a portentous Victorian bookcase, and so on. It was, in short, a don’s room. It had a don’s framed maps and prints on the walls a threadbare and faded don’s carpet on the floor, and it looked as if little had changed in it for decades, which was probably the case because a don lived in it. Two doors led out from either end of the opposite wall, and Richard knew from previous visits that one led to a study which looked much like a smaller and more intense version of this room — larger clumps of books, taller piles of paper in more imminent danger of actually falling, furniture which, however old and valuable, was heavily marked with myriad rings of hot tea or coffee cups, on many of which the original cups themselves were probably still standing. The other door led to a small and rather basically equipped kitchen, and a twisty internal staircase at the top of which lay the Professor’s bedroom and bathroom. ‘Try and make yourself comfortable on the sofa,’ invited Reg, fussing around hospitably. ‘I don’t know if you’ll manage it. It always feels to me as if it’s been stuffed with cabbage leaves and cutlery.’ He peered at Richard seriously. ‘Do you have a good sofa?’ he enquired. ‘Well, yes.’ Richard laughed. He was cheered by the silliness of the question. ‘Oh,’ said Reg solemnly. ‘Well, I wish you’d tell me where you got it. I have endless trouble with them, quite endless. Never found a comfortable one in all my life. How do you find yours?’ He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, a small silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port and three glasses. ‘Well, it’s odd you should ask that,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve never sat on it.’ ‘Very wise,’ insisted Reg earnestly, ‘very, very wise.’ He went through a palaver similar to his previous one with his coat and hat. ‘Not that I wouldn’t like to,’ said Richard. ‘It’s just that it’s stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which leads up into my flat. As far as I can make it out, the delivery men got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned it around any way they could, couldn’t get it any further, and then found, curiously enough, that they couldn’t get it back down again. Now, that should be impossible.’ ‘Odd,’ agreed Reg. ‘I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?’ ‘I did better than that. I called in a neighbour’s kid who used to be able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a step and stared at it for over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck. Admittedly he’s a few years older now and has found out about girls, but it’s got me puzzled.’ ‘Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I’m most interested, but let me know first if there’s anything I can get you. Port perhaps? Or brandy? The port I think is the better bet, laid down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think you’ll find, and on the other hand I don’t actually have any brandy. Or coffee? Some more wine perhaps? There’s an excellent Margaux I’ve been looking for an excuse to open, though it should of course be allowed to stand open for an hour or two, which is not to say that I couldn’t… no,’ he said hurriedly, ‘probably best not to go for the Margaux tonight.’ ‘Tea is what I would really like,’ said Richard, ‘if you have some.’ Reg raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I have to drive home.’ ‘Indeed. Then I shall be a moment or two in the kitchen. Please carry on, I shall still be able to hear you. Continue to tell me of your sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit on mine. Has it been stuck there for long?’ ‘Oh, only about three weeks,’ said Richard, sitting down. ‘I could just saw it up and throw it away, but I can’t believe that there isn’t a logical answer. And it also made me think — it would be really useful to know before you buy a piece of furniture whether it’s actually going to fit up the stairs or around the corner. So I’ve modelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer — and so far it just says no way.’ ‘It says what?’ called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle. ‘That it can’t be done. I told it to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa out, and it said there aren’t any. I said “What?” and it said there aren’t any. I then asked it, and this is the really mysterious thing, to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa into its present position in the first place, and it said that it couldn’t have got there. Not without fundamental restructuring of the walls. So, either there’s something wrong with the fundamental structure of the matter in my walls or,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there’s something wrong with the program. Which would you guess?’ ‘And are you married?’ called Reg. ‘What? Oh, I see what you mean. A sofa stuck on the stairs for a month. Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I’m not married to.’ ‘What’s she like? What does she do?’ ‘She’s a professional cellist. I have to admit that the sofa has been a bit of a talking point. In fact she’s moved back to her own flat until I get it sorted out. She, well…’ He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around the room in a desultory sort of way and ended up in front of the dying fire. He gave it a bit of a poke and threw on a couple of extra logs to try and ward off the chill of the room. ‘She’s Gordon’s sister, in fact,’ he added at last. ‘But they are very different. I’m not sure she really approves of computers very much. And she doesn’t much like his attitude to money. I don’t think I entirely blame her, actually, and she doesn’t know the half of it.’ ‘Which is the half she doesn’t know?’ Richard sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s to do with the project which first made the software incarnation of the company profitable. It was called /Reason/, and in its own way it was sensational.’ ‘What was it?’ ‘Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’ ‘Yeeeess…’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. ‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’ ‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’ ‘No. We never sold a single copy.’ ‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’ ‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear. ‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.’ ‘Do you have a copy?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said Richard, ‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Anyway, when the Pentagon bought everything, they bought everything. Every scrap of code, every disk, every notebook. I was glad to see the back of it. If indeed we have. I just busy myself with my own projects.’ He poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing here when he had so much work on. Gordon was on at him continually about getting the new, super version of /Anthem/ ready for taking advantage of the Macintosh II, and he was well behind with it. And as for the proposed module for converting incoming Dow Jones stock-market information into MIDI data in real time, he’d only meant that as a joke, but Gordon, of course, had flipped over the idea and insisted on its being implemented. That too was meant to be ready but wasn’t. He suddenly knew exactly why it was he was here. Well, it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn’t see why Reg had been quite so keen to see him. He picked up a couple of books from the table. The table obviously doubled as a dining table, because although the piles looked as if they had been there for weeks, the absence of dust immediately around them showed that they had been moved recently. Maybe, he thought, the need for amiable chit-chat with someone different can become as urgent as any other need when you live in a community as enclosed as a Cambridge college was, even nowadays. He was a likeable old fellow, but it was clear from dinner that many of his colleagues found his eccentricities formed rather a rich sustained diet — particularly when they had so many of their own to contend with. A thought about Susan nagged him, but he was used to that. He flipped through the two books he’d picked up. One of them, an elderly one, was an account of the hauntings of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England. Its spine was getting raggedy, and the photographic plates were so grey and blurry as to be virtually indistinguishable. A picture he thought must be a very lucky (or faked) shot of a ghostly apparition turned out, when he examined the caption, to be a portrait of the author. The other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence was a guide to the Greek islands. He thumbed through it idly and a piece of paper fell out. ‘Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?’ called out Reg. ‘Or Darjeeling? Or PG Tips? It’s all tea bags anyway, I’m afraid. And none of them very fresh.’ ‘Darjeeling will do fine,’ replied Richard, stooping to pick up the piece of paper. ‘Milk?’ called Reg. ‘Er, please.’ ‘One lump or two?’ ‘One, please.’ Richard slipped the paper back into the book, noticing as he did so that it had a hurriedly scribbled note on it. The note said, oddly enough, ‘Regard this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple hat.’ ‘Sugar?’ ‘Er, what?’ said Richard, startled. He put the book hurriedly back on the pile. ‘Just a tiny joke of mine,’ said Reg cheerily, ‘to see if people are listening.’ He emerged beaming from the kitchen carrying a small tray with two cups on it, which he hurled suddenly to the floor. The tea splashed over the carpet. One of the cups shattered and the other bounced under the table. Reg leaned against the door frame, white-faced and staring. A frozen instant of time slid silently by while Richard was too startled to react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to help. But the old man was already apologising and offering to make him another cup. Richard helped him to the sofa. ‘Are you all right?’ asked Richard helplessly. ‘Shall I get a doctor?’ Reg waved him down. ‘It’s all right,’ he insisted, ‘I’m perfectly well. Thought I heard, well, a noise that startled me. But it was nothing. Just overcome with the tea fumes, I expect. Let me just catch my breath. I think a little, er, port will revive me excellently. So sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ He waved in the general direction of the port decanter. Richard hurriedly poured a small glass and gave it to him. ‘What kind of noise?’ he asked, wondering what on earth could shock him so much. At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and an extraordinary kind of heavy breathing noise. ‘That…’ whispered Reg. The glass of port lay shattered at his feet. Upstairs someone seemed to be stamping. ‘Did you hear it?’ ‘Well, yes.’ This seemed to relieve the old man. Richard looked nervously up at the ceiling. ‘Is there someone up there?’ he asked, feeling this was a lame question, but one that had to be asked. ‘No,’ said Reg in a low voice that shocked Richard with the fear it carried, ‘no one. Nobody that should be there.’ ‘Then…’ Reg was struggling shakily to his feet, but there was suddenly a fierce determination about him. ‘I must go up there,’ he said quietly. ‘I must. Please wait for me here.’ ‘Look, what is this?’ demanded Richard, standing between Reg and the doorway. ‘What is it, a burglar? Look, I’ll go. I’m sure it’s nothing, it’s just the wind or something.’ Richard didn’t know why he was saying this. It clearly wasn’t the wind, or even anything like the wind, because though the wind might conceivably make heavy breathing noises, it rarely stamped its feet in that way. ‘No,’ the old man said, politely but firmly moving him aside, ‘it is for me to do.’ Richard followed him helplessly through the door into the small hallway, beyond which lay the tiny kitchen. A dark wooden staircase led up from here; the steps seemed damaged and scuffed. Reg turned on a light. It was a dim one that hung naked at the top of the stairwell, and he looked up it with grim apprehension. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and walked up two steps. He then turned and faced Richard with a look of the most profound seriousness on his face. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘that you have become involved in what is… the more difficult side of my life. But you are involved now, regrettable though that may be, and there is something I must ask you. I do not know what awaits me up there, do not know exactly. I do not know if it is something which I have foolishly brought upon myself with my… my hobbies, or if it is something to which I have fallen an innocent victim. If it is the former, then I have only myself to blame, for I am like a doctor who cannot give up smoking, or perhaps worse still, like an ecologist who cannot give up his car — if the latter, then I hope it may not happen to you. ‘What I must ask you is this. When I come back down these stairs, always supposing of course that I do, then if my behaviour strikes you as being in any way odd, if I appear not to be myself, then you must leap on me and wrestle me to the ground. Do you understand? You must prevent me from doing anything I may try to do.’ ‘But how will I know?’ asked an incredulous Richard. ‘Sorry I don’t mean it to sound like that, but I don’t know what…?’ ‘You will know,’ said Reg. ‘Now please wait for me in the main room. And close the door.’ Shaking his head in bewilderment, Richard stepped back and did as he was asked. From inside the large untidy room he listened to the sound of the Professor’s tread mounting the stairs one at a time. He mounted them with a heavy deliberation, like the ticking of a great, slow clock. Richard heard him reach the top landing. There he paused in silence. Seconds went by, five, maybe ten, maybe twenty. Then came again the heavy movement and breath that had first so harrowed the Professor. Richard moved quickly to the door but did not open it. The chill of the room oppressed and disturbed him. He shook his head to try and shake off the feeling, and then held his breath as the footsteps started once again slowly to traverse the two yards of the landing and to pause there again. After only a few seconds, this time Richard heard the long slow squeak of a door being opened inch by inch, inch by cautious inch, until it must surely now at last be standing wide agape. Nothing further seemed to happen for a long, long time. Then at last the door closed once again, slowly. The footsteps crossed the landing and paused again. Richard backed a few slight paces from the door, staring fixedly at it. Once more the footsteps started to descend the stairs, slowly, deliberately and quietly, until at last they reached the bottom. Then after a few seconds more the door handle began to rotate. The door opened and Reg walked calmly in. ‘It’s all right, it’s just a horse in the bathroom,’ he said quietly. Richard leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground. ‘No,’ gasped Reg, ‘no, get off me, let me go, I’m perfectly all right, damn it. It’s just a horse, a perfectly ordinary horse.’ He shook Richard off with no great difficulty and sat up, puffing and blowing and pushing his hands through his limited hair. Richard stood over him warily, but with great and mounting embarrassment. He edged back, and let Reg stand up and sit on a chair. ‘Just a horse,’ said Reg, ‘but, er, thank you for taking me at my word.’ He brushed himself down. ‘A horse,’ repeated Richard. ‘Yes,’ said Reg. Richard went out and looked up the stairs and then came back in. ‘A /horse/?’ he said again. ‘Yes, it is,’ said the Professor. ‘Wait –’ he motioned to Richard, who was about to go out again and investigate — ‘let it be. It won’t be long.’ Richard stared in disbelief. ‘You say there’s a horse in your bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?’ The Professor looked blankly at him. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry if I… alarmed you earlier, it was just a slight turn. These things happen, my dear fellow, don’t upset yourself about it. Dear me, I’ve known odder things in my time. Many of them. Far odder. She’s only a horse, for heaven’s sake. I’ll go and let her out later. Please don’t concern yourself. Let us revive our spirits with some port.’ ‘But… how did it get in there?’ ‘Well, the bathroom window’s open. I expect she came in through that.’ Richard looked at him, not for the first and certainly not for the last time, through eyes that were narrowed with suspicion. ‘You’re doing it deliberately, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Doing what, my dear fellow?’ ‘I don’t believe there’s a horse in your bathroom,’ said Richard suddenly. ‘I don’t know what is there, I don’t know what you’re doing, I don’t know what any of this evening means, but I don’t believe there’s a horse in your bathroom.’ And brushing aside Reg’s further protestations he went up to look. The bathroom was not large. The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given the age and nature of the building, was quite probably priceless, but otherwise the fittings were stark and institutional. There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum on the floor, a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very elderly stains and chips in the enamel, and also a small basic basin with a toothbrush and toothpaste in a Duralex beaker standing next to the taps. Screwed into the probably priceless panelling above the basin was a tin mirror- fronted bathroom cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted many times, and the mirror was stained round the edges with condensation. The lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern. There was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the corner, with an old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which lay some neatly folded but threadbare small towels. There was also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it. Richard stared at it, and it stared at Richard in an appraising kind of way. Richard swayed slightly. The horse stood quite still. After a while it looked at the cupboard instead. It seemed, if not content, then at least perfectly resigned to being where it was until it was put somewhere else. It also seemed… what was it? It was bathed in the glow of the moonlight that streamed in through the window. The window was open but small and was, besides, on the second floor, so the notion that the horse had entered by that route was entirely fanciful. There was something odd about the horse, but he couldn’t say what. Well, there was one thing that was clearly very odd about it indeed, which was that it was standing in a college bathroom. Maybe that was all. He reached out, rather tentatively, to pat the creature on its neck. It felt normal — firm, glossy, it was in good condition. The effect of the moonlight on its coat was a little mazy, but everything looks a little odd by moonlight. The horse shook its mane a little when he touched it, but didn’t seem to mind too much. After the success of patting it, Richard stroked it a few times and scratched it gently under the jaw. Then he noticed that there was another door into the bathroom, in the far corner. He moved cautiously around the horse and approached the other door. He backed up against it and pushed it open tentatively. It just opened into the Professor’s bedroom, a small room cluttered with books and shoes and a small single bed. This room, too, had another door, which opened out on to the landing again. Richard noticed that the floor of the landing was newly scuffed and scratched as the stairs had been, and these marks were consistent with the idea that the horse had somehow been pushed up the stairs. He wouldn’t have liked to have had to do it himself, and he would have liked to have been the horse having it done to him even less, but it was just about possible. But why? He had one last look at the horse, which had one last look back at him, and then he returned downstairs. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘You have a horse in your bathroom and I will, after all, have a little port.’ He poured some for himself, and then some for Reg, who was quietly contemplating the fire and was in need of a refill. ‘Just as well I did put out three glasses after all,’ said Reg chattily. ‘I wondered why earlier, and now I remember. ‘You asked if you could bring a friend, but appear not to have done so. On account of the sofa no doubt. Never mind, these things happen. Whoa, not too much, you’ll spill it.’ All horse-related questions left Richard’s mind abruptly. ‘I did?’ he said. ‘Oh yes. I remember now. You rang me back to ask me if it would be all right, as I recall. I said I would be charmed, and fully intended to be. I’d saw the thing up if I were you. Don’t want to sacrifice your happiness to a sofa. Or maybe she decided that an evening with your old tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have done. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hectic social round these days.’ It was Richard’s turn to be white-faced and staring. Yes, he had assumed that Susan would not want to come. Yes, he had said to her it would be terribly dull. But she had insisted that she wanted to come because it would be the only way she’d get to see his face for a few minutes not bathed in the light of a computer screen, so he had agreed and arranged that he would bring her after all. Only he had completely forgotten this. He had not picked her up. He said, ‘Can I use your phone, please?’ [::: CHAPTER 9 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do. He was dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There was a horrific hole in his chest, but the blood that was gobbing out of it had slowed to a trickle. Otherwise there was no movement from his chest at all, or, indeed, from any other part of him. He looked up, and from side to side, and it became clear to him that whatever part of him it was that was moving, it wasn’t any part of his body. The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At a few feet distant from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in the grass. He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o’clock in the morning, unable to put their mind to rest, but unable to find anything to do with it. He realised that he had just had something of a shock, which might account for his inability to think clearly, but didn’t account for his ability actually to think at all. In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt — that you would at least know the answer when you were dead. Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before. He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to him as the body that still lay slowly cooling on the ground, giving up its blood heat in wraiths of steam that mingled with the mist of the chill night air. Experimenting a bit further, he tried standing up, slowly, wonderingly and wobblingly. The ground seemed to give him support, it took his weight. But then of course he appeared to have no weight that needed to be taken. When he bent to touch the ground he could feel nothing save a kind of distant rubbery resistance like the sensation you get if you try and pick something up when your arm has gone dead. His arm had gone dead. His legs too, and his other arm, and all his torso and his head. His body was dead. He could not say why his mind was not. He stood in a kind of frozen, sleepless horror while the mist curled slowly through him. He looked back down at the him, the ghastly, astonished-looking him- thing lying still and mangled on the ground, and his flesh wanted to creep. Or rather, he wanted flesh that could creep. He wanted flesh. He wanted body. He had none. A sudden cry of horror escaped from his mouth but was nothing and went nowhere. He shook and felt nothing. Music and a pool of light seeped from his car. He walked towards it. He tried to walk sturdily, but it was a faint and feeble kind of walking, uncertain and, well, insubstantial. The ground felt frail beneath his feet. The door of the car was still open on the driver’s side, as he had left it when he had leaped out to deal with the boot lid, thinking he’d only be two seconds. That was all of two minutes ago now, when he’d been alive. When he’d been a person. When he’d thought he was going to be leaping straight back in and driving off. Two minutes and a lifetime ago. This was insane, wasn’t it? he thought suddenly. He walked around the door and bent down to peer into the external rear-view mirror. He looked exactly like himself, albeit like himself after he’d had a terrible fright, which was to be expected, but that was him, that was normal. This must be something he was imagining, some horrible kind of waking dream. He had a sudden thought and tried breathing on the rear- view mirror. Nothing. Not a single droplet formed. That would satisfy a doctor, that’s what they always did on television — if no mist formed on the mirror, there was no breath. Perhaps, he thought anxiously to himself, perhaps it was something to do with having heated wing mirrors. Didn’t this car have heated wing mirrors? Hadn’t the salesman gone on and on about heated this, electric that, and servo-assisted the other? Maybe they were digital wing mirrors. That was it. Digital, heated, servo- assisted, computer-controlled, breath-resistant wing mirrors… He was, he realised, thinking complete nonsense. He turned slowly and gazed again in apprehension at the body lying on the ground behind him with half its chest blown away. That would certainly satisfy a doctor. The sight would be appalling enough if it was somebody else’s body, but his own… He was dead. Dead… dead… He tried to make the word toll dramatically in his mind, but it wouldn’t. He was not a film sound track, he was just dead. Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he gradually became distressed by the expression of asinine stupidity on its face. It was perfectly understandable, of course. It was just such an expression as somebody who is in the middle of being shot with his own shotgun by somebody who had been hiding in the boot of his car might be expected to wear, but he nevertheless disliked the idea that anyone might find him looking like that. He knelt down beside it in the hope of being able to rearrange his features into some semblance of dignity, or at least basic intelligence. It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He tried to knead the skin, the sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he couldn’t seem to get a proper grip on it, or on anything. It was like trying to model plasticine when your arm has gone to sleep, except that instead of his grip slipping off the model, it would slip through it. In this case, his hand slipped through his face. Nauseated horror and rage swept through him at his sheer bloody blasted impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find himself throttling and shaking his own dead body with a firm and furious grip. He staggered back in amazed shock. All he had managed to do was to add to the inanely stupefied look of the corpse a twisted-up mouth and a squint. And bruises flowering on its neck. He started to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a strange howling from deep within whatever this thing he had become was. Clutching his hands to his face, he staggered backwards, retreated to his car and flung himself into the seat. The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye. Could he get himself to a doctor? To avoid facing the absurdity of the idea he grappled violently with the steering wheel, but his hands slipped through it. He tried to wrestle with the automatic transmission shift and ended up thumping it in rage, but not being able properly to grasp or push it. The stereo was still playing light orchestral music into the telephone, which had been lying on the passenger seat listening patiently all this time. He stared at it and realised with a growing fever of excitement that he was still connected to Susan’s telephone- answering machine. It was the type that would simply run and run until he hung up. He was still in contact with the world. He tried desperately to pick up the receiver, fumbled, let it slip, and was in the end reduced to bending himself down over its mouthpiece. ‘Susan!’ he cried into it, his voice a hoarse and distant wail on the wind. ‘Susan, help me! Help me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m dead… I’m dead… I’m dead and… I don’t know what to do…’ He broke down again, sobbing in desperation, and tried to cling to the phone like a baby clinging to its blanket for comfort. ‘Help me, Susan…’ he cried again. ‘/Beep/,’ said the phone. He looked down at it again where he was cuddling it. He had managed to push something after all. He had managed to push the button which disconnected the call. Feverishly he attempted to grapple the thing again, but it constantly slipped through his fingers and eventually lay immobile on the seat. He could not touch it. He could not push the buttons. In rage he flung it at the windscreen. It responded to that, all right. It hit the windscreen, careered straight back though him, bounced off the seat and then lay still on the transmission tunnel, impervious to all his further attempts to touch it. For several minutes still he sat there, his head nodding slowly as terror began to recede into blank desolation. A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing odd — a car stopped by the wayside. Passing swiftly in the night their headlights would probably not have picked out the body lying in the grass behind the car. They certainly would not have noticed a ghost sitting inside it crying to himself. He didn’t know how long he sat there. He was hardly aware of time passing, only that it didn’t seem to pass quickly. There was little external stimulus to mark its passage. He didn’t feel cold. In fact he could almost not remember what cold meant or felt like, he just knew that it was something he would have expected to feel at this moment. Eventually he stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would have to do something, though he didn’t know what. Perhaps he should try and reach his cottage, though he didn’t know what he would do when he got there. He just needed something to try for. He needed to make it through the night. Pulling himself together he slipped out of the car, his foot and knee grazing easily through part of the door frame. He went to look again at his body, but it wasn’t there. As if the night hadn’t produced enough shocks already. He started, and stared at the damp depression in the grass. His body was not there. [::: CHAPTER 10 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Richard made the hastiest departure that politeness would allow. He said thank you very much and what a splendid evening it had been and that any time Reg was coming up to London he must let him, Richard, know and was there anything he could do to help about the horse. No? Well, all right then, if you’re sure, and thank you again, so much. He stood there for a moment or two after the door finally closed, pondering things. He had noticed during the short time that the light from Reg’s room flooded out on to the landing of the main staircase, that there were no marks on the floorboards there at all. It seemed odd that the horse should only have scuffed the floorboards inside Reg’s room. Well, it all seemed very odd, full stop, but here was yet another curious fact to add to the growing pile. This was supposed to have been a relaxing evening away from work. On an impulse he knocked on the door opposite to Reg’s. It took such a long time to be answered that Richard had given up and was turning to go when at last he heard the door creak open. He had a slight shock when he saw that staring sharply up at him like a small and suspicious bird was the don with the racing-yacht keel for a nose. ‘Er, sorry,’ said Richard, abruptly, ‘but, er, have you seen or heard a horse coming up this staircase tonight?’ The man stopped his obsessive twitching of his fingers. He cocked his head slightly on one side and then seemed to need to go on a long journey inside himself to find a voice, which when found turned out to be a thin and soft little one. He said, ‘That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I’ve been counting.’ He closed the door softly again. Richard virtually ran through Second Court. When he reached First Court he steadied himself and slowed down to a walking pace. The chill night air was rasping in his lungs and there was no point in running. He hadn’t managed to talk to Susan because Reg’s phone wasn’t working, and this was another thing that he had been mysteriously coy about. That at least was susceptible of a rational explanation. He probably hadn’t paid his phone bill. Richard was about to emerge out on to the street when instead he decided to pay a quick visit to the porter’s lodge, which was tucked away inside the great archway entrance into the college. It was a small hutchlike place filled with keys, messages and a single electric bar heater. A radio nattered to itself in the background. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the large black-suited man standing behind the counter with his arms folded. ‘I…’ ‘Yes, Mr MacDuff, what can I do for you?’ In his present state of mind Richard would have been hard-pressed himself to remember his own name and was startled for a moment. However, college porters are legendary for their ability to perform such feats of memory, and for their tendency to show them off at the slightest provocation. ‘Is there,’ said Richard, ‘a horse anywhere in the college — that you know of? I mean, you would know if there was a horse in the college, wouldn’t you?’ The porter didn’t blink. ‘No, sir, and yes, sir. Anything else I can help you with, Mr MacDuff, sir?’ ‘Er, no,’ said Richard and tapped his fingers a couple of times on the counter. ‘No. Thank you. Thank you very much for your help. Nice to see you again, er… Bob,’ he hazarded. ‘Good-night, then.’ He left. The porter remained perfectly still with his arms folded, but shaking his head a very, very little bit. ‘Here’s some coffee for you, Bill,’ said another porter, a short wiry one, emerging from an inner sanctum with a steaming cup. ‘Getting a bit colder tonight?’ ‘I think it is, Fred, thanks,’ said Bill, taking the cup. He took a sip. ‘You can say what you like about people, they don’t get any less peculiar. Fellow in here just now asking if there was a horse in the college.’ ‘Oh yes?’ Fred sipped at his own coffee, and let the steam smart his eyes. ‘I had a chap in here earlier. Sort of strange foreign priest. Couldn’t understand a word he said at first. But he seemed happy just to stand by the fire and listen to the news on the radio.’ ‘Foreigners, eh.’ ‘In the end I told him to shoot off. Standing in front of my fire like that. Suddenly he says is that really what he must do? Shoot off? I said, in my best Bogart voice, “You better believe it, buddy.”’ ‘Really? Sounded more like Jimmy Cagney to me.’ ‘No, that’s my Bogart voice. This is my Jimmy Cagney voice — “You better believe it, buddy.”’ Bill frowned at him. ‘Is that your Jimmy Cagney voice? I always thought that was your Kenneth McKellar voice.’ ‘You don’t listen properly, Bill, you haven’t got the ear. This is Kenneth McKellar. “Oh, you take the high road and I’ll take the low road…”’ ‘Oh, I see. I was thinking of the Scottish Kenneth McKellar. So what did this priest fellow say then, Fred?’ ‘Oh, he just looked me straight in the eyes, Bill, and said in this strange sort of…’ ‘Skip the accent, Fred, just tell me what he said, if it’s worth hearing.’ ‘He just said he did believe me.’ ‘So. Not a very interesting story then, Fred.’ ‘Well, maybe not. I only mention it because he also said that he’d left his horse in a washroom and would I see that it was all right.’ [::: CHAPTER 11 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Gordon Way drifted miserably along the dark road, or rather, tried to drift. He felt that as a ghost — which is what he had to admit to himself he had become — he should be able to drift. He knew little enough about ghosts, but he felt that if you were going to be one then there ought to be certain compensations for not having a physical body to lug around, and that among them ought to be the ability simply to drift. But no, it seemed he was going to have to walk every step of the way. His aim was to try and make it to his house. He didn’t know what he would do when he got there, but even ghosts have to spend the night somewhere, and he felt that being in familiar surroundings might help. Help what, he didn’t know. At least the journey gave him an objective, and he would just have to think of another one when he arrived. He trudged despondently from lamppost to lamppost, stopping at each one to look at bits of himself. He was definitely getting a bit wraithlike. At times he would fade almost to nothing, and would seem to be little more than a shadow playing in the mist, a dream of himself that could just evaporate and be gone. At other times he seemed to be almost solid and real again. Once or twice he would try leaning against a lamppost, and would fall straight through it if he wasn’t careful. At last, and with great reluctance, he actually began to turn his mind to what it was that had happened. Odd, that reluctance. He really didn’t want to think about it. Psychologists say that the mind will often try to suppress the memory of traumatic events, and this, he thought, was probably the answer. After all, if having a strange figure jump out of the boot of your own car and shoot you dead didn’t count as a traumatic experience, he’d like to know what did. He trudged on wearily. He tried to recall the figure to his mind’s eye, but it was like probing a hurting tooth, and he thought of other things. Like, was his will up-to-date? He couldn’t remember, and made a mental note to call his lawyer tomorrow, and then made another mental note that he would have to stop making mental notes like that. How would his company survive without him? He didn’t like either of the possible answers to that very much. What about his obituary? There was a thought that chilled him to his bones, wherever they’d got to. Would he be able to get hold of a copy? What would it say? They’d better give him a good write-up, the bastards. Look at what he’d done. Single-handedly saved the British software industry: huge exports, charitable contributions, research scholarships, crossing the Atlantic in a solar-powered submarine (failed, but a good try) — all sorts of things. They’d better not go digging up that Pentagon stuff again or he’d get his lawyer on to them. He made a mental note to call him in the mor… No. Anyway, can a dead person sue for libel? Only his lawyer would know, and he was not going to be able to call him in the morning. He knew with a sense of creeping dread that of all the things he had left behind in the land of the living it was the telephone that he was going to miss the most, and then he turned his mind determinedly back to where it didn’t want to go. The figure. It seemed to him that the figure had been almost like a figure of Death itself; or was that his imagination playing tricks with him? Was he dreaming that it was a cowled figure? What would any figure, whether cowled or just casually dressed, be doing in the boot of his car? At that moment a car zipped past him on the road and disappeared off into the night, taking its oasis of light with it. He thought with longing of the warm, leather-upholstered, climate-controlled comfort of his own car abandoned on the road behind him, and then a sudden extraordinary thought struck him. Was there any way he could hitch a lift? Could anyone actually see him? How would anyone react if they could? Well, there was only one way to find out. He heard another car coming up in the distance behind him and turned to face it. The twin pools of hazy lights approached through the mist and Gordon gritted his phantom teeth and stuck his thumb out at them. The car swept by regardless. Nothing. Angrily he made an indistinct V sign at the receding red rear lights, and realised, looking straight through his own upraised arm, that he wasn’t at his most visible at the moment. Was there perhaps some effort of will he could make to render himself more visible when he wanted to? He screwed up his eyes in concentration, then realised that he would need to have his eyes open in order to judge the results. He tried again, forcing his mind as hard as he could, but the results were unsatisfactory. Though it did seem to make some kind of rudimentary, glowing difference, he couldn’t sustain it, and it faded almost immediately, however much he piled on the mental pressure. He would have to judge the timing very carefully if he was going to make his presence felt, or at least seen. Another car approached from behind, travelling fast. He turned again, stuck his thumb out, waited till the moment was right and willed himself visible. The car swerved slightly, and then carried on its way, only a little more slowly. Well, that was something. What else could he do? He would go and stand under a lamppost for a start, and he would practise. The next car he would get for sure. [::: CHAPTER 12 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] ‘…so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe.’ /Beep./ ‘Shit. Damn. Hold on a minute. Blast. Look… er…’ /Click./ Richard pushed the phone back into its cradle and slammed his car into reverse for twenty yards to have another look at the sign-post by the road junction he’d just sped past in the mist. He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for. Arriving back at the junction he tried to correlate the information on the signpost with the information on the map. But it couldn’t be done. The road junction was quite deliberately sitting on a page divide on the map, and the signpost was revolving maliciously in the wind. Instinct told him that he was heading in the wrong direction, but he didn’t want to go back the way he’d come for fear of getting sucked back into the gravitational whirlpool of Cambridge’s traffic system. He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left and after a few more such manoeuvres was thoroughly lost. He swore to himself and turned up the heating in the car. If he had been concentrating on where he was going rather than trying to navigate and telephone at the same time, he told himself, he would at least know where he was now. He didn’t actually like having a telephone in his car, he found it a bother and an intrusion. But Gordon had insisted and indeed had paid for it. He sighed in exasperation, backed up the black Saab and turned around again. As he did so he nearly ran into someone lugging a body into a field. At least that was what it looked like for a second to his overwrought brain, but in fact it was probably a local farmer with a sackful of something nutritious, though what he was doing with it on a night like this was anyone’s guess. As his headlights swung around again, they caught for a moment a silhouette of the figure trudging off across the field with the sack on his back. ‘Rather him than me,’ thought Richard grimly, and drove off again. After a few minutes he reached a junction with what looked a little more like a main road, nearly turned right down it, but then turned left instead. There was no signpost. He poked at the buttons on his phone again. ‘…get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe.’ /Beep./ ‘Susan, it’s Richard. Where do I start? What a mess. Look I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. I screwed up very badly, and it’s all my fault. And look, whatever it takes to make up for it, I’ll do it, solemn promise…’ He had a slight feeling that this wasn’t the right tone to adopt with an answering machine, but he carried straight on. ‘Honestly, we can go away, take a holiday for a week, or even just this weekend if you like. Really, this weekend. We’ll go somewhere sunny. Doesn’t matter how much pressure Gordon tries to put on me, and you know the sort of pressure he can muster, he is your brother, after all. I’ll just… er, actually, it might have to be next weekend. Damn, damn, damn. It’s just that I really have promised to get, no, look, it doesn’t matter. We’ll just do it. I don’t care about getting /Anthem/ finished for Comdex. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll just go. Gordon will just have to take a running jump — Gaaarghhhh!’ Richard swerved wildly to avoid the spectre of Gordon Way which suddenly loomed in his headlights and took a running jump at him. He slammed on the brakes, started to skid, tried to remember what it was you were supposed to do when you found yourself skidding, he knew he’d seen it on some television programme about driving he’d seen ages ago, what was the programme? God, he couldn’t even remember the title of the programme, let alone — oh yes, they’d said you mustn’t slam on the brakes. That was it. The world swung sickeningly around him with slow and appalling force as the car slewed across the road, spun, thudded against the grass verge, then slithered and rocked itself to a halt, facing the wrong way. He collapsed, panting, against the steering wheel. He picked up the phone from where he’d dropped it. ‘Susan,’ he gasped, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and hung up. He raised his eyes. Standing full in the glare of his headlights was the spectral figure of Gordon Way staring straight in through the windscreen with ghastly horror in its eyes, slowly raising its hand and pointing at him. He wasn’t sure how long he just sat there. The apparition had melted from view in a few seconds, but Richard simply sat, shaking, probably for not more than a minute, until a sudden squeal of brakes and glare of lights roused him. He shook his head. He was, he realised, stopped in the road facing the wrong way. The car that had just screeched to an abrupt halt almost bumper to bumper with him was a police car. He took two or three deep breaths and then, stiff and trembling, he climbed out and stood up to face the officer who was walking slowly towards him, silhouetted in the police car’s headlights. The officer looked him up and down. ‘Er, I’m sorry, officer,’ said Richard, with as much calmness as he could wrench into his voice. ‘I, er, skidded. The roads are slippery and I, er… skidded. I spun round. As you see, I, I’m facing the wrong way.’ He gestured at his car to indicate the way it was facing. ‘Like to tell me why it was you skidded then, exactly, sir?’ The police officer was looking him straight in the eye while pulling out a notebook. ‘Well, as I said,’ explained Richard, ‘the roads are slippery because of the mist, and, well, to be perfectly honest,’ he suddenly found himself saying, in spite of all his attempts to stop himself, ‘I was just driving along and I suddenly imagined that I saw my employer throwing himself in front of my car.’ The officer gazed at him levelly. ‘Guilt complex, officer,’ added Richard with a twitch of a smile, ‘you know how it is. I was contemplating taking the weekend off.’ The police officer seemed to hesitate, balanced on a knife edge between sympathy and suspicion. His eyes narrowed a little but didn’t waver. ‘Been drinking, sir?’ ‘Yes,’ said Richard, with a quick sigh, ‘but very little. Two glasses of wine max. Er… and a small glass of port. Absolute max. It was really just a lapse of concentration. I’m fine now.’ ‘Name?’ Richard gave him his name and address. The policeman wrote it all down carefully and neatly in his book, then peered at the car registration number and wrote that down too. ‘And who is your employer then, sir?’ ‘His name is Way. Gordon Way.’ ‘Oh,’ said the policeman raising his eyebrows, ‘the computer gentleman.’ ‘Er, yes, that’s right. I design software for the company. WayForward Technologies II.’ ‘We’ve got one of your computers down the station,’ said the policeman. ‘Buggered if I can get it to work.’ ‘Oh,’ said Richard wearily, ‘which model do you have?’ ‘I think it’s called a Quark II.’ ‘Oh, well that’s simple,’ said Richard with relief. ‘It doesn’t work. Never has done. The thing is a heap of shit.’ ‘Funny thing, sir, that’s what I’ve always said,’ said the policeman. ‘Some of the other lads don’t agree.’ ‘Well, you’re absolutely right, officer. The thing is hopeless. It’s the major reason the original company went bust. I suggest you use it as a big paperweight.’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t like to do that, sir,’ the policeman persisted. ‘The door would keep blowing open.’ ‘What do you mean, officer?’ asked Richard. ‘I use it to keep the door closed, sir. Nasty draughts down our station this time of year. In the summer, of course, we beat suspects round the head with it.’ He flipped his book closed and prodded it into his pocket. ‘My advice to you, sir, is to go nice and easy on the way back. Lock up the car and spend the weekend getting completely pissed. I find it’s the only way. Mind how you go now.’ He returned to his car, wound down the window, and watched Richard manoeuvre his car around and drive off into the night before heading off himself. Richard took a deep breath, drove calmly back to London, let himself calmly into his flat, clambered calmly over the sofa, sat down, poured himself a stiff brandy and began seriously to shake. There were three things he was shaking about. There was the simple physical shock of his near-accident, which is the sort of thing that always churns you up a lot more than you expect. The body floods itself with adrenaline, which then hangs around your system turning sour. Then there was the cause of the skid — the extraordinary apparition of Gordon throwing himself in front of his car at that moment. Boy oh boy. Richard took a mouthful of brandy and gargled with it. He put the glass down. It was well known that Gordon was one of the world’s richest natural resources of guilt pressure, and that he could deliver a ton on your doorstep fresh every morning, but Richard hadn’t realised he had let it get to him to such an unholy degree. He took up his glass again, went upstairs and pushed open the door to his workroom, which involved shifting a stack of BYTE magazines that had toppled against it. He pushed them away with his foot and walked to the end of the large room. A lot of glass at this end let in views over a large part of north London, from which the mist was now clearing. St Paul’s glowed in the dark distance and he stared at it for a moment or two but it didn’t do anything special. After the events of the evening he found this came as a pleasant surprise. At the other end of the room were a couple of long tables smothered in, at the last count, six Macintosh computers. In the middle was the Mac II on which a red wire-frame model of his sofa was lazily revolving within a blue wire-frame model of his narrow staircase, complete with banister rail, radiator and fuse-box details, and of course the awkward turn halfway up. The sofa would start out spinning in one direction, hit an obstruction, twist itself in another plane, hit another obstruction, revolve round a third axis until it was stopped again, then cycle through the moves again in a different order. You didn’t have to watch the sequence for very long before you saw it repeat itself. The sofa was clearly stuck. Three other Macs were connected up via long tangles of cable to an untidy agglomeration of synthesisers — an Emulator II+ HD sampler, a rack of TX modules, a Prophet VS, a Roland JX 10, a Korg DW8000, an Octapad, a left-handed Synth-Axe MIDI guitar controller, and even an old drum machine stacked up and gathering dust in the corner — pretty much the works. There was also a small and rarely used cassette tape recorder: all the music was stored in sequencer files on the computers rather than on tape. He dumped himself into a seat in front of one of the Macs to see what, if anything, it was doing. It was displaying an ‘Untitled’ /Excel/ spreadsheet and he wondered why. He saved it and looked to see if he’d left himself any notes and quickly discovered that the spreadsheet contained some of the data he had previously downloaded after searching the /World Reporter/ and /Knowledge/ on-line databases for facts about swallows. He now had figures which detailed their migratory habits, their wing shapes, their aerodynamic profile and turbulence characteristics, and some sort of rudimentary figures concerning the patterns that a flock would adopt in flight, but as yet he had only the faintest idea as to how he was going to synthesise them all together. Because he was too tired to think particularly constructively tonight he savagely selected and copied a whole swathe of figures from the spreadsheet at random, pasted them into his own conversion program, which scaled and filtered and manipulated the figures according to his own experimental algorithms, loaded the converted file into /Performer/, a powerful sequencer program, and played the result through random MIDI channels to whichever synthesisers happened to be on at the moment. The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony, and he stopped it. He ran the conversion program again, this time instructing it to force-map the pitch values into G minor. This was a utility he was determined in the end to get rid of because he regarded it as cheating. If there was any basis to his firmly held belief that the rhythms and harmonies of music which he found most satisfying could be found in, or at least derived from, the rhythms and harmonies of naturally occurring phenomena, then satisfying forms of modality and intonation should emerge naturally as well, rather than being forced. For the moment, though, he forced it. The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor. So much for random shortcuts. The first task was a relatively simple one, which would be simply to plot the waveform described by the tip of a swallow’s wing as it flies, then synthesise that waveform. That way he would end up with a single note, which would be a good start, and it shouldn’t take more than the weekend to do. Except, of course, that he didn’t have a weekend available to do it in because he had somehow to get Version 2 of /Anthem/ out of the door sometime during the course of the next year, or ‘month’ as Gordon called it. Which brought Richard inexorably to the third thing he was shaking about. There was absolutely no way that he could take the time off this weekend or next to fulfil the promise he had made to Susan’s telephone- answering machine. And that, if this evening’s dйbacle had not already done so, would surely spell the final end. But that was it. The thing was done. There is nothing you can do about a message on someone else’s answering machine other than let events take their course. It was done. It was irrevocable. An odd thought suddenly struck him. It took him by considerable surprise, but he couldn’t really see what was wrong with it. [::: CHAPTER 13 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] A pair of binoculars scanning the London night skyline, idly, curious, snooping. A little look here, a little look there, just seeing what’s going on, anything interesting, anything useful. The binoculars settle on the back of one particular house, attracted by a slight movement. One of those large late-Victorian villas, probably flats now. Lots of black iron drainpipes. Green rubber dustbins. But dark. No, nothing. The binoculars are just moving onwards when another slight movement catches in the moonlight. The binoculars refocus very slightly, trying to find a detail, a hard edge, a slight contrast in the darkness. The mist has lifted now, and the darkness glistens. They refocus a very, very little more. There it is. Something, definitely. Only this time a little higher up, maybe a foot or so, maybe a yard. The binoculars settle and relax – – steady, trying for the edge, trying for the detail. There. The binoculars settle again — they have found their mark, straddled between a windowsill and a drainpipe. It is a dark figure, splayed against the wall, looking down, looking for a new foothold, looking upwards, looking for a ledge. The binoculars peer intently. The figure is that of a tall, thin man. His clothes are right for the job, dark trousers, dark sweater, but his movements are awkward and angular. Nervous. Interesting. The binoculars wait and consider, consider and judge. The man is clearly a rank amateur. Look at his fumbling. Look at his ineptitude. His feet slip on the drainpipe, his hands can’t reach the ledge. He nearly falls. He waits to catch his breath. For a moment he starts to climb back down again, but seems to find that even tougher going. He lunges again for the ledge and this time catches it. His foot shoots out to steady himself and nearly misses the pipe. Could have been very nasty, very nasty indeed. But now the way is easier and progress is better. He crosses to another pipe, reaches a third-floor window ledge, flirts briefly with death as he crawls painfully on to it, and makes the cardinal error and looks down. He sways briefly and sits back heavily. He shades his eyes and peers inside to check that the room is dark, and sets about getting the window open. One of the things that distinguish the amateur from the professional is that this is the point when the amateur thinks it would have been a good idea to bring along something to prise the window open with. Luckily for this amateur the householder is an amateur too, and the sash window slides grudgingly up. The climber crawls, with some relief, inside. He should be locked up for his own protection, think the binoculars. A hand starts to reach for the phone. At the window a face looks back out and for a moment is caught in the moonlight, then it ducks back inside to carry on with its business. The hand stays hovering over the phone for a moment or two, while the binoculars wait and consider, consider and judge. The hand reaches instead for the A-Z street map of London. There is a long studious pause, a little more intent binocular work, and then the hand reaches for the phone again, lifts it and dials. [::: CHAPTER 14 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Susan’s flat was small but spacious, which was a trick, reflected Richard tensely as he turned on the light, that only women seemed able to pull off. It wasn’t that observation which made him tense, of course — he’d thought it before, many times. Every time he’d been in her flat, in fact. It always struck him, usually because he had just come from his own flat, which was four times the size and cramped. He’d just come from his own flat this time, only via a rather eccentric route, and it was this that made his usual observation unusually tense. Despite the chill of the night he was sweating. He looked back out of the window, turned and tiptoed across the room towards where the telephone and the answering machine stood on their own small table. There was no point, he told himself, in tiptoeing. Susan wasn’t in. He would be extremely interested to know where she was, in fact — just as she, he told himself, had probably been extremely interested in knowing where he had been at the beginning of the evening. He realised he was still tiptoeing. He hit his leg to make himself stop doing it, but carried on doing it none the less. Climbing up the outside wall had been terrifying. He wiped his forehead with the arm of his oldest and greasiest sweater. There had been a nasty moment when his life had flashed before his eyes but he had been too preoccupied with falling and had missed all the good bits. Most of the good bits had involved Susan, he realised. Susan or computers. Never Susan and computers — those had largely been the bad bits. Which was why he was here, he told himself. He seemed to need convincing, and told himself again. He looked at his watch. Eleven forty-five. It occurred to him he had better go and wash his wet and dirty hands before he touched anything. It wasn’t the police he was worried about, but Susan’s terrifying cleaner. She would know. He went into the bathroom, turned on the light switch, wiped it, and then stared at his own startled face in the bright neon-lit mirror as he ran the water over his hands. For a moment he thought of the dancing, warm candlelight of the Coleridge Dinner, and the images of it welled up out of the dim and distant past of the earlier part of the evening. Life had seemed easy then, and carefree. The wine, the conversation, simple conjuring tricks. He pictured the round pale face of Sarah, pop-eyed with wonder. He washed his own face. He thought: ‘…Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ He brushed his own hair. He thought, too, of the pictures hanging high in the darkness above their heads. He cleaned his teeth. The low buzz of the neon light snapped him back to the present and he suddenly remembered with appalled shock that he was here in his capacity as burglar. Something made him look himself directly in the face in the mirror, then he shook his head, trying to clear it. When would Susan be back? That, of course, would depend on what she was doing. He quickly wiped his hands and made his way back to the answering machine. He prodded at the buttons and his conscience prodded back at him. The tape wound back for what seemed to be an interminable time, and he realised with a jolt that it was probably because Gordon had been in full flood. He had forgotten, of course, that there would be messages on the tape other than his own, and listening to other people’s phone messages was tantamount to opening their mail. He explained to himself once again that all he was trying to do was to undo a mistake he had made before it caused any irrevocable damage. He would just play the tiniest snippets till he found his own voice. That wouldn’t be too bad, he wouldn’t even be able to distinguish what was being said. He groaned inwardly, gritted his teeth and stabbed at the Play button so roughly that he missed it and ejected the cassette by mistake. He put it back in and pushed the Play button more carefully. /Beep./ ‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ said the answering machine. ‘I’m just on my way to the cottage. It’s, er…’ He wound on for a couple of seconds. ‘…need to know that Richard is on the case. I mean /really/ on…’ Richard set his mouth grimly and stabbed at the Fast Forward again. He really hated the fact that Gordon tried to put pressure on him via Susan, which Gordon always stoutly denied he did. Richard couldn’t blame Susan for getting exasperated about his work sometimes if this sort of thing was going on.’ /Click./ ‘…Response. Make a note to Susan would you please, to get an “Armed Response” sign made up with a sharp spike on the bottom at the right height for rabbits to see.’ ‘/What?/’ muttered Richard to himself, and his finger hesitated for a second over the Fast Forward button. He had a feeling that Gordon desperately wanted to be like Howard Hughes, and if he could never hope to be remotely as rich, he could at least try to be twice as eccentric. An act. A palpable act. ‘That’s secretary Susan at the office, not you, of course,’ continued Gordon’s voice on the answering machine. ‘Where was I? Oh yes. Richard and /Anthem/ 2.00. Susan, that thing has got to be in beta testing in two…’ Richard stabbed at the Fast Forward, tight-lipped. ‘…point is that there’s only one person who’s really in a position to know if he’s getting the important work done, or if he’s just dreaming, and that one person…’ He stabbed angrily again. He had promised himself he wouldn’t listen to any of it and now here he was getting angry at what he was hearing. He should really just stop this. Well, just one more try. When he listened again he just got music. Odd. He wound forward again, and still got music. Why would someone be phoning to play music to an answering machine? he wondered. The phone rang. He stopped the tape and answered it, then almost dropped the phone like an electric eel as he realised what he was doing. Hardly daring to breathe, he held the telephone to his ear. ‘Rule One in housebreaking,’ said a voice. ‘Never answer the telephone when you’re in the middle of a job. Who are you supposed to be, for heaven’s sake?’ Richard froze. It was a moment or two before he could find where he had put his voice. ‘Who is this?’ he demanded at last in a whisper. ‘Rule Two,’ continued the voice. ‘Preparation. Bring the right tools. Bring gloves. Try to have the faintest glimmering of an idea of what you’re about before you start dangling from window ledges in the middle of the night. ‘Rule Three. /Never/ forget Rule Two.’ ‘Who is this?’ exclaimed Richard again. The voice was unperturbed. ‘Neighbourhood Watch,’ it said. ‘If you just look out of the back window you’ll see…’ Trailing the phone, Richard hurried over to the window and looked out. A distant flash startled him. ‘Rule Four. Never stand where you can be photographed. ‘Rule Five… Are you listening to me, MacDuff?’ ‘What? Yes…’ said Richard in bewilderment. ‘How do you know me?’ ‘Rule Five. /Never/ admit to your name.’ Richard stood silent, breathing hard. ‘I run a little course,’ said the voice, ‘if you’re interested…’ Richard said nothing. ‘You’re learning,’ continued the voice, ‘slowly, but you’re learning. If you were learning fast you would have put the phone down by now, of course. But you’re curious — and incompetent — and so you don’t. I don’t run a course for novice burglars as it happens, tempting though the idea is. I’m sure there would be grants available. If we have to have them they may as well be trained. ‘However, if I did run such a course I would allow you to enrol for free, because I too am curious. Curious to know why Mr Richard MacDuff who, I am given to understand, is now a wealthy young man, something in the computer industry, I believe, should suddenly be needing to resort to house-breaking.’ ‘Who — ?’ ‘So I do a little research, phone Directory Enquiries and discover that the flat into which he is breaking is that of a Miss S. Way. I know that Mr Richard MacDuff’s employer is the famous Mr G. Way and I wonder if they can by any chance be related.’ ‘Who — ?’ ‘You are speaking with Svlad, commonly known as “Dirk” Cjelli, currently trading under the name of Gently for reasons which it would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse. I bid you good evening. If you wish to know more I will be at the Pizza Express in Upper Street in ten minutes. Bring some money.’ ‘Dirk?’ exclaimed Richard. ‘You… Are you trying to blackmail me?’ ‘No, you fool, for the pizzas.’ There was a click and Dirk Gently rang off. Richard stood transfixed for a moment or two, wiped his forehead again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery rhymes. He shook his head to try and make them stop, and quickly sat down at the answering machine again. He fought with himself over whether or not he was going to push the Play button again, and then did so anyway before he had made up his mind. Hardly four seconds of light orchestral music had oozed soothingly past when there came the sound of a key scratching in the lock out in the hallway. In panic Richard thumped the Eject button, popped the cassette out, rammed it into his jeans pocket and replaced it from the pile of fresh cassettes that lay next to the machine. There was a similar pile next to his own machine at home. Susan at the office provided them — poor, long-suffering Susan at the office. He must remember to feel sympathy for her in the morning, when he had the time and concentration for it. Suddenly, without even noticing himself doing it, he changed his mind. In a flash he popped the substitute cassette out of the machine again, replaced the one he had stolen, rammed down the rewind button and made a lunge for the sofa where, with two seconds to go before the door opened, he tried to arrange himself into a nonchalant and winning posture. On an impulse he stuck his left hand up behind his back where it might come in useful. He was just trying to arrange his features into an expression composed in equal parts of contrition, cheerfulness and sexual allurement when the door opened and in walked Michael Wenton-Weakes. Everything stopped. Outside, the wind ceased. Owls halted in mid-flight. Well, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, certainly the central heating chose that moment to shut down, unable perhaps to cope with the supernatural chill that suddenly whipped through the room. ‘What are you doing here, Wednesday?’ demanded Richard. He rose from the sofa as if levitated with anger. Michael Wenton-Weakes was a large sad-faced man known by some people as Michael Wednesday-Week, because that was when he usually promised to have things done by. He was dressed in a suit that had been superbly well tailored when his father, the late Lord Magna, had bought it forty years previously. Michael Wenton-Weakes came very high on the small but select list of people whom Richard thoroughly disliked. He disliked him because he found the idea of someone who was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the world didn’t really understand the problems of privileged people, deeply obnoxious. Michael, on the other hand, disliked Richard for the fairly simple reason that Richard disliked him and made no secret of it. Michael gave a slow and lugubrious look back out into the hallway as Susan walked through. She stopped when she saw Richard. She put down her handbag, unwound her scarf, unbuttoned her coat, slipped it off, handed it to Michael, walked over to Richard and smacked him in the face. ‘I’ve been saving that up all evening,’ she said furiously. ‘And don’t try and pretend that’s a bunch of flowers you’ve forgotten to bring which you’re hiding behind your back. You tried that gag last time.’ She turned and stalked off. ‘It’s a box of chocolates I forgot this time,’ said Richard glumly and held out his empty hand to her retreating back. ‘I climbed up the entire outside wall without them. Did I feel a fool when I got in.’ ‘Not very funny,’ said Susan. She swept into the kitchen and sounded as if she was grinding coffee with her bare hands. For someone who always looked so neat and sweet and delicate she packed a hell of a temper. ‘It’s true,’ said Richard, ignoring Michael completely. ‘I nearly killed myself.’ ‘I’m not going to rise to that,’ said Susan from within the kitchen. ‘If you want something big and sharp thrown at you why don’t you come in here and be funny?’ ‘I suppose it would be pointless saying I’m sorry at this point,’ Richard called out. ‘You bet,’ said Susan, sweeping back out of the kitchen again. She looked at him with her eyes flashing, and actually stamped her foot. ‘Honestly, Richard,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re going to say you forgot again. How can you have the gall to stand there with two arms, two legs and a head as if you’re a human being? This is behaviour that a bout of amoebic dysentery would be ashamed of. I bet that even the very lowest form of dysentery amoeba shows up to take its girlfriend out for a quick trot around the stomach lining once in a while. Well, I hope you had a lousy evening.’ ‘I did,’ said Richard. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it. There was a horse in the bathroom, and you know how you hate that sort of thing.’ ‘Oh, Michael,’ said Susan brusquely, ‘don’t just stand there like a sinking pudding. Thank you very much for dinner and the concert, you were very sweet and I did enjoy listening to your troubles all evening because they were such a nice change from mine. But I think it would be best if I just found your book and pushed you out. I’ve got some serious jumping up and down and ranting to do, and I know how it upsets your delicate sensibilities.’ She retrieved her coat from him and hung it up. While he had been holding it he had seemed entirely taken up with this task and oblivious to anything else. Without it he seemed a little lost and naked and was forced to stir himself back into life. He turned his big heavy eyes back on Richard. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I, er, read your piece in… in /Fathom/. On Music and, er…’ ‘Fractal Landscapes,’ said Richard shortly. He didn’t want to talk to Michael, and he certainly didn’t want to get drawn into a conversation about Michael’s wretched magazine. Or rather, the magazine that used to be Michael’s. That was the precise aspect of the conversation that Richard didn’t want to get drawn into. ‘Er, yes. Very interesting, of course,’ said Michael in his silky, over-rounded voice. ‘Mountain shapes and tree shapes and all sorts of things. Recycled algae.’ ‘Recursive algorithms.’ ‘Yes, of course. Very interesting. But so wrong, so terribly wrong. For the magazine, I mean. It is, after all, an /arts/ review. I would never have allowed such a thing, of course. Ross has utterly ruined it. Utterly. He’ll have to go. /Have/ to. He has no sensibilities and he’s a thief.’ ‘He’s not a thief, Wednesday, that’s absolutely absurd,’ snapped Richard, instantly getting drawn into it in spite of his resolution not to. ‘He had nothing to do with your getting the push whatsoever. That was your own silly fault, and you…’ There was a sharp intake of breath. ‘Richard,’ said Michael in his softest, quietest voice — arguing with him was like getting tangled in parachute silk — ‘I think you do not understand how important…’ ‘Michael,’ said Susan gently but firmly, holding open the door. Michael Wenton-Weakes nodded faintly and seemed to deflate. ‘Your book,’ Susan added, holding out to him a small and elderly volume on the ecclesiastical architecture of Kent. He took it, murmured some slight thanks, looked about him for a moment as if he’d suddenly realised something rather odd, then gathered himself together, nodded farewell and left. Richard didn’t appreciate quite how tense he had become till Michael left and he was suddenly able to relax. He’d always resented the indulgent soft spot that Susan had for Michael even if she did try to disguise it by being terribly rude to him all the time. Perhaps even because of that. ‘Susan, what can I say…?’ he started lamely. ‘You could say “Ouch” for a start. You didn’t even give me that satisfaction when I hit you, and I thought I did it rather hard. God, it’s freezing in here. What’s that window doing wide open?’ She went over to shut it. ‘I told you. That’s how I got in,’ said Richard. He sounded sufficiently as if he meant it to make her look round at him in surprise. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘Like in the chocolate ads, only I forgot the box of chocolates…’ He shrugged sheepishly. She stared at him in amazement. ‘What on earth possessed you to do that?’ she said. She stuck her head out of the window and looked down. ‘You could have got killed,’ she said, turning back to him. ‘Well, er, yes…’ he said. ‘It just seemed the only way to… I don’t know.’ He rallied himself. ‘You took your key back remember?’ ‘Yes. I got fed up with you coming and raiding my larder when you couldn’t be bothered to do your own shopping. Richard, you really climbed up this wall?’ ‘Well, I wanted to be here when you got in.’ She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘It would have been a great deal better if you’d been here when I went out. Is that why you’re wearing those filthy old clothes?’ ‘Yes. You don’t think I went to dinner at St Cedd’s like this?’ ‘Well, I no longer know what you consider to be rational behaviour.’ She sighed and fished about in a small drawer. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘if it’s going to save your life,’ and handed him a couple of keys on a ring. ‘I’m too tired to be angry anymore. An evening of being lobbied by Michael has taken it out of me.’ ‘Well, I’ll never understand why you put up with him,’ said Richard, going to fetch the coffee. ‘I know you don’t like him, but he’s very sweet and can be charming in his sad kind of way. Usually it’s very relaxing to be with someone who’s so self-absorbed, because it doesn’t make any demands on you. But he’s obsessed with the idea that I can do something about his magazine. I can’t, of course. Life doesn’t work like that. I do feel sorry for him, though.’ ‘I don’t. He’s had it very, very easy all his life. He still has it very, very easy. He’s just had his toy taken away from him that’s all. It’s hardly unjust, is it?’ ‘It’s not a matter of whether it’s just or not. I feel sorry for him because he’s unhappy.’ ‘Well, of course he’s unhappy. Al Ross has turned /Fathom/ into a really sharp, intelligent magazine that everyone suddenly wants to read. It was just a bumbling shambles before. Its only real function was to let Michael have lunch and toady about with whoever he liked on the pretext that maybe they might like to write a little something. He hardly ever got an actual issue out. The whole thing was a sham. He pampered himself with it. I really don’t find that charming or engaging. I’m sorry, I’m going on about it and I didn’t mean to.’ Susan shrugged uneasily. ‘I think you overreact,’ she said, ‘though I think I will have to steer clear of him if he’s going to keep on at me to do something I simply can’t do. It’s too exhausting. Anyway, listen, I’m glad you had a lousy evening. I want to talk about what we were going to do this weekend.’ ‘Ah,’ said Richard, ‘well…’ ‘Oh, I’d better just check the messages first.’ She walked past him to the telephone-answering machine, played the first few seconds of Gordon’s message and then suddenly ejected the cassette. ‘I can’t be bothered,’ she said, giving it to him. ‘Could you just give this straight to Susan at the office tomorrow? Save her a trip. If there’s anything important on it she can tell me.’ Richard blinked, said, ‘Er, yes,’ and pocketed the tape, tingling with the shock of the reprieve. ‘Anyway, the weekend –’ said Susan, sitting down on the sofa. Richard wiped his hand over his brow. ‘Susan, I…’ ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to work. Nicola’s sick and I’m going to have to dep for her at the Wigmore on Friday week. There’s some Vivaldi and some Mozart I don’t know too well, so that means a lot of extra practice this weekend, I’m afraid. Sorry.’ ‘Well, in fact,’ said Richard, ‘I have to work as well.’ He sat down by her. ‘I know. Gordon keeps on at me to nag you. I wish he wouldn’t. It’s none of my business and it puts me in an invidious position. I’m tired of being pressurised by people, Richard. At least you don’t do that.’ She took a sip of her coffee. ‘But I’m sure,’ she added, ‘that there’s some kind of grey area between being pressurised and being completely forgotten about that I’d quite like to explore. Give me a hug.’ He hugged her, feeling that he was monstrously and unworthily lucky. An hour later he let himself out and discovered that the Pizza Express was closed. Meanwhile, Michael Wenton-Weakes made his way back to his home in Chelsea. As he sat in the back of the taxi he watched the streets with a blank stare and tapped his fingers lightly against the window in a slow thoughtful rhythm. /Rap tap tap a rap tap a rap a tap./ He was one of those dangerous people who are soft, squidgy and cowlike provided they have what they want. And because he had always had what he wanted, and had seemed easily pleased with it, it had never occurred to anybody that he was anything other than soft, squidgy and cowlike. You would have to push through a lot of soft squidgy bits in order to find a bit that didn’t give when you pushed it. That was the bit that all the soft squidgy bits were there to protect. Michael Wenton-Weakes was the younger son of Lord Magna, publisher, newspaper owner and over-indulgent father, under whose protective umbrella it had pleased Michael to run his own little magazine at a magnificent loss. Lord Magna had presided over the gradual but dignified and well-respected decline of the publishing empire originally founded by his father, the first Lord Magna. Michael continued to tap his knuckles lightly on the glass. /A rap tap a rap a tap./ He remembered the appalling, terrible day when his father had electrocuted himself changing a plug, and his mother, his /mother/, took over the business. Not only took it over but started running it with completely unexpected verve and determination. She examined the company with a very sharp eye as to how it was being run, or walked, as she put it, and eventually even got around to looking at the accounts of Michael’s magazine. /Tap tap tap./ Now Michael knew just enough about the business side of things to know what the figures ought to be, and he had simply assured his father that that was indeed what they were. ‘Can’t allow this job just to be a sinecure, you must see that, old fellow, you have to pay your way or how would it look, how would it be?’ his father used to say, and Michael would nod seriously, and start thinking up the figures for next month, or whenever it was he would next manage to get an issue out. His mother, on the other hand, was not so indulgent. Not by a lorryload. Michael usually referred to his mother as an old battleaxe, but if she was fairly to be compared to a battleaxe it would only be to an exquisitely crafted, beautifully balanced battleaxe, with an elegant minimum of fine engraving which stopped just short of its gleaming razored edge. One swipe from such an instrument and you wouldn’t even know you’d been hit until you tried to look at your watch a bit later and discovered that your arm wasn’t on. She had been waiting patiently — or at least with the appearance of patience — in the wings all this time, being the devoted wife, the doting but strict mother. Now someone had taken her — to switch metaphors for a moment — out of her scabbard and everyone was running for cover. Including Michael. It was her firm belief that Michael, whom she quietly adored, had been spoiled in the fullest and worst sense of the word, and she was determined, at this late stage, to stop it. It didn’t take her more than a few minutes to see that he had been simply making up the figures every month, and that the magazine was haemorrhaging money as Michael toyed with it, all the time running up huge lunch bills, taxi accounts and staff costs that he would playfully set against fictitious taxes. The whole thing had simply got lost somewhere in the gargantuan accounts of Magna House. She had then summoned Michael to see her. /Tap tap a rap a tappa./ ‘How do you want me to treat you,’ she said, ‘as my son or as the editor of one of my magazines? I’m happy to do either.’ ‘Your magazines? Well, I am your son, but I don’t see…’ ‘Right. Michael, I want you to look at these figures,’ she said briskly, handing over a sheet of computer printout. ‘The ones on the left show the actual incomings and outgoings of /Fathom/, the ones on the right are your own figures. Does anything strike you about them?’ ‘Mother, I can explain, I –’ ‘Good,’ said Lady Magna sweetly, ‘I’m very glad of that.’ She took the piece of paper back. ‘Now. Do you have any views on how the magazine should best be run in the future?’ ‘Yes, absolutely. Very strong ones. I –’ ‘Good,’ said Lady Magna, with a bright smile. ‘Well, that’s all perfectly satisfactory, then.’ ‘Don’t you want to hear — ?’ ‘No, that’s all right, dear. I’m just happy to know that you do have something to say on the matter to clear it all up. I’m sure the new owner of /Fathom/ will be glad to listen to whatever it is.’ ‘What?’ said a stunned Michael. ‘You mean you’re actually selling /Fathom/?’ ‘No. I mean I’ve already sold it. Didn’t get much for it, I’m afraid. One pound plus a promise that you would be retained as editor for the next three issues, and after that it’s at the new owner’s discretion.’ Michael stared, pop-eyed. ‘Well, come now,’ said his mother reasonably, ‘we could hardly continue under the present arrangement, could we? You always agreed with your father that the job should not be a sinecure for you. And since I would have a great deal of difficulty in either believing or resisting your stories, I thought I would hand the problem on to someone with whom you could have a more objective relationship. Now, I have another appointment, Michael.’ ‘Well, but… who have you sold it to?’ spluttered Michael. ‘Gordon Way.’ ‘Gordon Way! But for heaven’s sake, Mother, he’s –’ ‘He’s very anxious to be seen to patronise the arts. And I think I do mean patronise. I’m sure you’ll get on splendidly, dear. Now, if you don’t mind –’ Michael stood his ground. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous! I –’ ‘Do you know, that’s exactly what Mr Way said when I showed him these figures and then demanded that you be kept on as editor for three issues.’ Michael huffed and puffed and went red and wagged his finger, but could think of nothing more to say. Except, ‘What difference would it have made to all this if I’d said treat me as the editor of one of your magazines?’ ‘Why, dear,’ said Lady Magna with her sweetest smile, ‘I would have called you Mr Wenton-Weakes, of course. And I wouldn’t now be telling you straighten your tie,’ she added, with a tiny little gesture under her chin. /Rap tap tap rap tap tap./ ‘Number seventeen, was it, guv?’ ‘Er… what?’ said Michael, shaking his head. ‘It was seventeen you said, was it?’ said the cab driver, ‘‘Cause we’re ‘ere.’ ‘Oh. Oh, yes, thank you,’ said Michael. He climbed out and fumbled in his pocket for some money. ‘Tap tap tap, eh?’ ‘What?’ said Michael handing over the fare. ‘Tap tap tap,’ said the cab driver, ‘all the bloody way here. Got something on your mind, eh, mate?’ ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ snapped Michael savagely. ‘If you say so, mate. Just thought you might be going mad or something,’ said the cabbie and drove off. Michael let himself into his house and walked through the cold hall to the dining room, turned on the overhead light and poured himself a brandy from the decanter. He took off his coat, threw it across the large mahogany dining table and pulled a chair over to the window where he sat nursing his drink and his grievances. /Tap tap tap/, he went on the window. He had sullenly remained as editor for the stipulated three issues and was then, with little ceremony, let go. A new editor was found, a certain A. K. Ross, who was young, hungry and ambitious, and he quickly turned the magazine into a resounding success. Michael, in the meantime, had been lost and naked. There was nothing else for him. He tapped on the window again and looked, as he frequently did, at the small table lamp that stood on the sill. It was a rather ugly, ordinary little lamp, and the only thing about it that regularly transfixed his attention was that this was the lamp that had electrocuted his father, and this was where he had been sitting. The old boy was such a fool with anything technical. Michael could just see him peering with profound concentration through his half moons and sucking his moustache as he tried to unravel the arcane complexities of a thirteen-amp plug. He had, it seemed, plugged it back in the wall without first screwing the cover back on and then tried to change the fuse /in situ/. From this he received the shock which had stilled his already dicky heart. Such a simple, simple error, thought Michael, such as anyone could have made, anyone, but the consequences of it were catastrophic. Utterly catastrophic. His father’s death, his own loss, the rise of the appalling Ross and his disastrously successful magazine and… /Tap tap tap./ He looked at the window, at his own reflection, and at the dark shadows of the bushes on the other side of it. He looked again at the lamp. This was the very object, this the very place, and the error was such a simple one. Simple to make, simple to prevent. The only thing that separated him from that simple moment was the invisible barrier of the months that had passed in between. A sudden, odd calm descended on him as if something inside him had suddenly been resolved. /Tap tap tap./ /Fathom/ was his. It wasn’t meant to be a success, it was his life. His life had been taken from him, and that demanded a response. /Tap tap tap crack./ He surprised himself by suddenly punching his hand through the window and cutting himself quite badly. [::: CHAPTER 15 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Some of the less pleasant aspects of being dead were beginning to creep up on Gordon Way as he stood in front of his ‘cottage’. It was in fact a rather large house by anybody else’s standards but he had always wanted to have a cottage in the country and so when the time came for him finally to buy one and he discovered that he had rather more money available than he had ever seriously believed he might own, he bought a large old rectory and called it a cottage in spite of its seven bedrooms and its four acres of dank Cambridgeshire land. This did little to endear him to people who only had cottages, but then if Gordon Way had allowed his actions to be governed by what endeared him to people he wouldn’t have been Gordon Way. He wasn’t, of course, Gordon Way any longer. He was the ghost of Gordon Way. In his pocket he had the ghosts of Gordon Way’s keys. It was this realisation that had stopped him for a moment in his invisible tracks. The idea of walking through walls frankly revolted him. It was something he had been trying strenuously to avoid all night. He had instead been fighting to grip and grapple with every object he touched in order to render it, and thereby himself, substantial. To enter his house, his own house, by any means other than that of opening the front door and striding in in a proprietorial manner filled him with a hurtling sense of loss. He wished, as he stared at it, that the house was not such an extreme example of Victorian Gothic, and that the moonlight didn’t play so coldly on its narrow gabled windows and its forbidding turrets. He had joked, stupidly, when he bought it that it looked as if it ought to be haunted, not realising that one day it would be — or by whom. A chill of the spirit gripped him as he made his way silently up the driveway, lined by the looming shapes of yew trees that were far older than the rectory itself. It was a disturbing thought that anybody else might be scared walking up such a driveway on such a night for fear of meeting something such as him. Behind a screen of yew trees off to his left stood the gloomy bulk of the old church, decaying now, only used in rotation with others in neighbouring villages and presided over by a vicar who was always breathless from bicycling there and dispirited by the few who were waiting for him when he arrived. Behind the steeple of the church hung the cold eye of the moon. A glimpse of movement seemed suddenly to catch his eye, as if a figure had moved in the bushes near the house, but it was, he told himself, only his imagination, overwrought by the strain of being dead. What was there here that he could possibly be afraid of? He continued onwards, around the angle of the wing of the rectory, towards the front door set deep within its gloomy porch wreathed in ivy. He was suddenly startled to realise that there was light coming from within the house. Electric light and also the dim flicker of firelight. It was a moment or two before he realised that he was, of course, expected that night, though hardly in his present form. Mrs Bennett, the elderly housekeeper, would have been in to make the bed, light the fire and leave out a light supper for him. The television, too, would be on, especially so that he could turn it off impatiently upon entering. His footsteps failed to crunch on the gravel as he approached. Though he knew that he must fail at the door, he nevertheless could not but go there first, to try if he could open it, and only then, hidden within the shadows of the porch, would he close his eyes and let himself slip ashamedly through it. He stepped up to the door and stopped. It was open. Just half an inch, but it was open. His spirit fluttered in fearful surprise. How could it be open? Mrs Bennett was always so conscientious about such things. He stood uncertainly for a moment and then with difficulty exerted himself against the door. Under the little pressure he could bring to bear on it, it swung slowly and unwillingly open, its hinges groaning in protest. He stepped through and slipped along the stone-flagged hallway. A wide staircase led up into the darkness, but the doors that led off from the hallway all stood closed. The nearest door led into the drawing room, in which the fire was burning, and from which he could hear the muted car chases of the late movie. He struggled futilely for a minute or two with its shiny brass door knob, but was forced in the end to admit a humiliating defeat, and with a sudden rage flung himself straight at the door — and through it. The room inside was a picture of pleasant domestic warmth. He staggered violently into it, and was unable to stop himself floating on through a small occasional table set with thick sandwiches and a Thermos flask of hot coffee, through a large overstuffed armchair, into the fire, through the thick hot brickwork and into the cold dark dining room beyond. The connecting door back into the sitting room was also closed. Gordon fingered it numbly and then, submitting himself to the inevitable, braced himself, and slid back through it, calmly, gently, noticing for the first time the rich internal grain of the wood. The coziness of the room was almost too much for Gordon, and he wandered distractedly around it, unable to settle, letting the warm liveliness of the firelight play through him. Him it couldn’t warm. What, he wondered, were ghosts supposed to do all night? He sat, uneasily, and watched the television. Soon, however, the car chases drifted peacefully to a close and there was nothing left but grey snow and white noise, which he was unable to turn off. He found he’d sunk too far into the chair and confused himself with bits of it as he pushed and pulled himself up. He tried to amuse himself by standing in the middle of a table, but it did little to alleviate a mood that was sliding inexorably from despondency downwards. Perhaps he would sleep. Perhaps. He felt no tiredness or drowsiness, but just a deadly craving for oblivion. He passed back through the closed door and into the dark hallway, from which the wide heavy stairs led to the large gloomy bedrooms above. Up these, emptily, he trod. It was for nothing, he knew. If you cannot open the door to a bedroom you cannot sleep in its bed. He slid himself through the door and lifted himself on to the bed which he knew to be cold though he could not feel it. The moon seemed unable to leave him alone and shone full on him as he lay there wide-eyed and empty, unable now to remember what sleep was or how to do it. The horror of hollowness lay on him, the horror of lying ceaselessly and forever awake at four o’clock in the morning. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there, and no one he could go and wake up who wouldn’t be utterly horrified to see him. The worst moment had been when he had seen Richard on the road, Richard’s face frozen white in the windscreen. He saw again his face, and that of the pale figure next to him. That had been the thing which had shaken out of him the lingering shred of warmth at the back of his mind which said that this was just a temporary problem. It seemed terrible in the night hours, but would be all right in the morning when he could see people and sort things out. He fingered the memory of the moment in his mind and could not let it go. He had seen Richard and Richard, he knew, had seen him. It was not going to be all right. Usually when he felt this bad at night he popped downstairs to see what was in the fridge, so he went now. It would be more cheerful than this moonlit bedroom. He would hang around the kitchen going bump in the night. He slid down — and partially through — the banisters, wafted through the kitchen door without a second thought and then devoted all his concentration and energy for about five minutes to getting the light switch on. That gave him a real sense of achievement and he determined to celebrate with a beer. After a minute or two of repeatedly juggling and dropping a can of Fosters he gave it up. He had not the slightest conception of how he could manage to open a ring pull, and besides the stuff was all shaken up by now — and what was he going to do with the stuff even if he did get it open? He didn’t have a body to keep it in. He hurled the can away from him and it scuttled off under a cupboard. He began to notice something about himself, which was the way in which his ability to grasp things seemed to grow and fade in a slow rhythm, as did his visibility. There was an irregularity in the rhythm, though, or perhaps it was just that sometimes the effects of it would be much more pronounced than at others. That, too, seemed to vary according to a slower rhythm. Just at that moment it seemed to him that his strength was on the increase. In a sudden fever of activity he tried to see how many things in the kitchen he could move or use or somehow get to work. He pulled open cupboards, he yanked out drawers, scattering cutlery on the floor. He got a brief whirr out of the food processor, he knocked over the electric coffee grinder without getting it to work, he turned on the gas on the cooker hob but then couldn’t light it, he savaged a loaf of bread with a carving knife. He tried stuffing lumps of bread into his mouth, but they simply fell through his mouth to the floor. A mouse appeared, but scurried from the room, its coat electric with fear. Eventually he stopped and sat at the kitchen table, emotionally exhausted but physically numb. How, he wondered, would people react to his death? Who would be most sorry to know that he had gone? For a while there would be shock, then sadness, then they would adjust, and he would be a fading memory as people got on with their own lives without him, thinking that he had gone on to wherever people go. That was a thought that filled him with the most icy dread. He had not gone. He was still here. He sat facing one cupboard that he hadn’t managed to open yet because its handle was too stiff, and that annoyed him. He grappled awkwardly with a tin of tomatoes, then went over again to the large cupboard and attacked the handle with the tin. The door flew open and his own missing bloodstained body fell horribly forward out of it. Gordon hadn’t realised up till this point that it was possible for a ghost to faint. He realised it now and did it. He was woken a couple of hours later by the sound of his gas cooker exploding. [::: CHAPTER 16 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] The following morning Richard woke up twice. The first time he assumed he had made a mistake and turned over for a fitful few minutes more. The second time he sat up with a jolt as the events of the previous night insisted themselves upon him. He went downstairs and had a moody and unsettled breakfast, during which nothing went right. He burned the toast, spilled the coffee, and realised that though he’d meant to buy some more marmalade yesterday, he hadn’t. He surveyed his feeble attempt at feeding himself and thought that maybe he could at least allow himself the time to take Susan out for an amazing meal tonight, to make up for last night. If he could persuade her to come. There was a restaurant that Gordon had been enthusing about at great length and recommending that they try. Gordon was pretty good on restaurants — he certainly seemed to spend enough time in them. He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil for a couple of minutes, and then went up to his workroom and lugged a telephone directory out from under a pile of computer magazines. L’Esprit d’Escalier. He phoned the restaurant and tried to book a table, but when he said when he wanted it for this seemed to cause a little amusement. ‘Ah, non, m’sieur,’ said the maоtre d’, ‘I regret that it is impossible. At this moment it is necessary to make reservations at least three weeks in advance. Pardon, m’sieur.’ Richard marvelled at the idea that there were people who actually knew what they wanted to do three weeks in advance, thanked the maоtre d’ and rang off. Well, maybe a pizza again instead. This thought connected back to the appointment he had failed to keep last night, and after a moment curiosity overcame him and he reached for the phone book again. Gentleman… Gentles… Gentry. There was no Gently at all. Not a single one. He found the other directories, except for the S-Z book which his cleaning lady continually threw away for reasons he had never yet fathomed. There was certainly no Cjelli, or anything like it. There was no Jently, no Dgently, no Djently, no Dzently, nor anything remotely similar. He wondered about Tjently, Tsentli or Tzentli and tried Directory Enquiries, but they were out. He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil again and watched his sofa slowly revolving on the screen of his computer. How very peculiar it had been that it had only been hours earlier that Reg had asked after Dirk with such urgency. If you really wanted to find someone, how would you set about it, what would you do? He tried phoning the police, but they were out too. Well, that was that. He had done all he could do for the moment short of hiring a private detective, and he had better ways of wasting his time and money. He would run into Dirk again, as he did every few years or so. He found it hard to believe there were really such people, anyway, as private detectives. What sort of people were they? What did they look like, where did they work? What sort of tie would you wear if you were a private detective? Presumably it would have to be exactly the sort of tie that people wouldn’t expect private detectives to wear. Imagine having to sort out a problem like that when you’d just got up. Just out of curiosity as much as anything else, and because the only alternative was settling down to Anthem coding, he found himself leafing through the Yellow Pages. Private Detectives — see Detective Agencies. The words looked almost odd in such a solid and businesslike context. He flipped back through the book. Dry Cleaners, Dog Breeders, Dental Technicians, Detective Agencies… At that moment the phone rang and he answered it, a little curtly. He didn’t like being interrupted. ‘Something wrong, Richard?’ ‘Oh, hi, Kate, sorry, no. I was… my mind was elsewhere.’ Kate Anselm was another star programmer at WayForward Technologies. She was working on a long-term Artificial Intelligence project, the sort of thing that sounded like an absurd pipe dream until you heard her talking about it. Gordon needed to hear her talking about it quite regularly, partly because he was nervous about the money it was costing and partly because, well, there was little doubt that Gordon liked to hear Kate talking anyway. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ she said. ‘It’s just I was trying to contact Gordon and can’t. There’s no reply from London or the cottage, or his car or his bleeper. It’s just that for someone as obsessively in contact as Gordon it’s a bit odd. You heard he’s had a phone put in his isolation tank? True.’ ‘I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday,’ said Richard. He suddenly remembered the tape he had taken from Susan’s answering machine, and hoped to God there wasn’t anything more important in Gordon’s message than ravings about rabbits. He said, ‘I know he was going to the cottage. Er, I don’t know where he is. Have you tried –’ Richard couldn’t think of anywhere else to try — ‘…er. Good God.’ ‘Richard?’ ‘How extraordinary…’ ‘Richard, what’s the matter?’ ‘Nothing, Kate. Er, I’ve just read the most astounding thing.’ ‘Really, what are you reading?’ ‘Well, the telephone directory, in fact…’ ‘Really? I must rush out and buy one. Have the film rights gone?’ ‘Look, sorry, Kate, can I get back to you? I don’t know where Gordon is at the moment and –’ ‘Don’t worry. I know how it is when you can’t wait to turn the next page. They always keep you guessing till the end, don’t they? It must have been Zbigniew that did it. Have a good weekend.’ She hung up. Richard hung up too, and sat staring at the box advertisement lying open in front of him in the Yellow Pages. DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY We solve the /whole/ crime We find the /whole/ person Phone today for the /whole/ solution to your problem (Missing cats and messy divorces a speciality) 33a Peckender St., London N1 01-354 9112 Peckender Street was only a few minutes’ walk away. Richard scribbled down the address, pulled on his coat and trotted downstairs, stopping to make another quick inspection of the sofa. There must, he thought, be something terribly obvious that he was overlooking. The sofa was jammed on a slight turn in the long narrow stairway. At this point the stairs were interrupted for a couple of yards of flat landing, which corresponded with the position of the flat directly beneath Richard’s. However, his inspection produced no new insights, and he eventually clambered on over it and out of the front door. In Islington you can hardly hurl a brick without hitting three antique shops, an estate agent and a bookshop. Even if you didn’t actually hit them you would certainly set off their burglar alarms, which wouldn’t be turned off again till after the weekend. A police car played its regular game of dodgems down Upper Street and squealed to a halt just past him. Richard crossed the road behind it. The day was cold and bright, which he liked. He walked across the top of Islington Green, where winos get beaten up, past the site of the old Collins Music Hall which had got burnt down, and through Camden Passage where American tourists get ripped off. He browsed among the antiques for a while and looked at a pair of earrings that he thought Susan would like, but he wasn’t sure. Then he wasn’t sure that he liked them, got confused and gave up. He looked in at a bookshop, and on an impulse bought an anthology of Coleridge’s poems since it was just lying there. From here he threaded his way through the winding back streets, over the canal, past the council estates that lined the canal, through a number of smaller and smaller squares, till finally he reached Peckender Street, which had turned out to be a good deal farther than he’d thought. It was the sort of street where property developers in large Jaguars drive around at the weekend salivating. It was full of end-of-lease shops, Victorian industrial architecture and a short, decaying late- Georgian terrace, all just itching to be pulled down so that sturdy young concrete boxes could sprout in their places. Estate agents roamed the area in hungry packs, eyeing each other warily, their clipboards on a hair trigger. Number 33, when he eventually found it neatly sandwiched between 37 and 45, was in a poorish state of repair, but no worse than most of the rest. The ground floor was a dusty travel agent’s whose window was cracked and whose faded BOAC posters were probably now quite valuable. The doorway next to the shop had been painted bright red, not well, but at least recently. A push button next to the door said, in neatly pencilled lettering, ‘Dominique, French lessons, 3me Floor’. The most striking feature of the door, however, was the bold and shiny brass plaque fixed in the dead centre of it, on which was engraved the legend ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’. Nothing else. It looked brand new — even the screws that held it in place were still shiny. The door opened to Richard’s push and he peered inside. He saw a short and musty hallway which contained little but the stairway that led up from it. A door at the back of the hall showed little sign of having been opened in recent years, and had stacks of old metal shelving, a fish tank and the carcass of a bike piled up against it. Everything else, the walls, the floor, the stairs themselves, and as much of the rear door as could be got at, had been painted grey in an attempt to smarten it up cheaply, but it was all now badly scuffed, and little cups of fungus were peeking from a damp stain near the ceiling. The sounds of angry voices reached him, and as he started up the stairs he was able to disentangle the noises of two entirely separate but heated arguments that were going on somewhere above him. One ended abruptly — or at least half of it did — as an angry overweight man came clattering down the stairs pulling his raincoat collar straight. The other half of the argument continued in a torrent of aggrieved French from high above them. The man pushed past Richard, said, ‘Save your money, mate, it’s a complete washout,’ and disappeared out into the chilly morning. The other argument was more muffled. As Richard reached the first corridor a door slammed somewhere and brought that too to an end. He looked into the nearest open doorway. It led into a small ante-office. The other, inner door leading from it was firmly closed. A youngish plump-faced girl in a cheap blue coat was pulling sticks of make-up and boxes of Kleenex out of her desk drawer and thrusting them into her bag. ‘Is this the detective agency?’ Richard asked her tentatively. The girl nodded, biting her lip and keeping her head down. ‘And is Mr Gently in?’ ‘He may be,’ she said, throwing back her hair, which was too curly for throwing back properly, ‘and then again he may not be. I am not in a position to tell. It is not my business to know of his whereabouts. His whereabouts are, as of now, entirely his own business.’ She retrieved her last pot of nail varnish and tried to slam the drawer shut. A fat book sitting upright in the drawer prevented it from closing. She tried to slam the drawer again, without success. She picked up the book, ripped out a clump of pages and replaced it. This time she was able to slam the drawer with ease. ‘Are you his secretary?’ asked Richard. ‘I am his ex-secretary and I intend to stay that way,’ she said, firmly snapping her bag shut. ‘If he intends to spend his money on stupid expensive brass plaques rather than on paying me, then let him. But I won’t stay to stand for it, thank you very much. Good for business, my foot. Answering the phones properly is good for business and I’d like to see his fancy brass plaque do that. If you’ll excuse me I’d like to storm out, please.’ Richard stood aside, and out she stormed. ‘And good riddance!’ shouted a voice from the inner office. A phone rang and was picked up immediately. ‘Yes?’ answered the voice from the inner office, testly. The girl popped back for her scarf, but quietly, so her ex-employer wouldn’t hear. Then she was finally gone. ‘Yes, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. How can we be of help to you?’ The torrent of French from upstairs had ceased. A kind of tense calm descended. Inside, the voice said, ‘That’s right, Mrs Sunderland, messy divorces are our particular speciality.’ There was a pause. ‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Sunderland, not quite that messy.’ Down went the phone again, to be replaced instantly by the ringing of another one. Richard looked around the grim little office. There was very little in it. A battered chipboard veneer desk, an old grey filing cabinet and a dark green tin wastepaper bin. On the wall was a Duran Duran poster on which someone had scrawled in fat red felt tip, ‘Take this down please’. Beneath that another hand had scrawled, ‘No’. Beneath that again the first hand had written, ‘I insist that you take it down’. Beneath that the second hand had written, ‘Won’t!’ Beneath that — ‘You’re fired’. Beneath that — ‘Good!’ And there the matter appeared to have rested. He knocked on the inner door, but was not answered. Instead the voice continued, ‘I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term “holistic” refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. ‘Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? ‘No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.’ Another phone was ringing as he put this one down. Richard eased the door open and looked in. It was the same Svlad, or Dirk, Cjelli. Looking a little rounder about the middle, a little looser and redder about the eyes and the neck, but it was still essentially the same face that he remembered most vividly smiling a grim smile as its owner climbed into the back of one of the Black Marias of the Cambridgeshire constabulary, eight years previously. He wore a heavy old light brown suit which looked as if it has been worn extensively for bramble hacking expeditions in some distant and better past, a red checked shirt which failed entirely to harmonise with the suit, and a green striped tie which refused to speak to either of them. He also wore thick metal-rimmed spectacles, which probably accounted at least in part for his dress sense. ‘Ah, Mrs Bluthall, how thoroughly uplifting to hear from you,’ he was saying. ‘I was so distressed to learn that Miss Tiddles has passed over. This is desperate news indeed. And yet, and yet… Should we allow black despair to hide from us the fairer light in which your blessed moggy now forever dwells? ‘I think not. Hark. I think I hear Miss Tiddles miaowing even now. She calls to you, Mrs Bluthall. She says she is content, she is at peace. She says she’ll be even more at peace when you’ve paid some bill or other. Does that ring a bell with you at all, Mrs Bluthall? Come to think of it I think I sent you one myself not three months ago. I wonder if it can be that which is disturbing her eternal rest.’ Dirk beckoned Richard in with a brisk wave and then motioned him to pass the crumpled pack of French cigarettes that was sitting just out of his reach. ‘Sunday night, then, Mrs Bluthall, Sunday night at eight-thirty. You know the address. Yes, I’m sure Miss Tiddles will appear, as I’m sure will your cheque book. Till then, Mrs Bluthall, till then.’ Another phone was already ringing as he got rid of Mrs Bluthall. He grabbed at it, lighting his crumpled cigarette at the same time. ‘Ah, Mrs Sauskind,’ he said in answer to the caller, ‘my oldest and may I say most valued client. Good day to you, Mrs Sauskind, good day. Sadly, no sign as yet of young Roderick, I’m afraid, but the search is intensifying as it moves into what I am confident are its closing stages, and I am sanguine that within mere days from today’s date we will have the young rascal permanently restored to your arms and mewing prettily, ah yes the bill, I was wondering if you had received it.’ Dirk’s crumpled cigarette turned out to be too crumpled to smoke, so he hooked the phone on his shoulder and poked around in the packet for another, but it was empty. He rummaged on his desk for a piece of paper and a stub of pencil and wrote a note which he passed to Richard. ‘Yes, Mrs Sauskind,’ he assured the telephone, ‘I am listening with the utmost attention.’ The note said ‘Tell secretary get cigs’. ‘Yes,’ continued Dirk into the phone, ‘but as I have endeavoured to explain to you, Mrs Sauskind, over the seven years of our acquaintance, I incline to the quantum mechanical view in this matter. My theory is that your cat is not lost, but that his waveform has temporarily collapsed and must be restored. Schrцdinger. Planck. And so on.’ Richard wrote on the note ‘You haven’t got secretary’ and pushed it back. Dirk considered this for a while, then wrote ‘Damn and blast’ on the paper and pushed it to Richard again. ‘I grant you, Mrs Sauskind,’ continued Dirk blithely, ‘that nineteen years is, shall we say, a distinguished age for a cat to reach, yet can we allow ourselves to believe that a cat such as Roderick has not reached it? ‘And should we now in the autumn of his years abandon him to his fate? This surely is the time that he most needs the support of our continuing investigations. This is the time that we should redouble our efforts, and with your permission, Mrs Sauskind, that is what I intend to do. Imagine, Mrs Sauskind, how you would face him if you had not done this simple thing for him.’ Richard fidgeted with the note, shrugged to himself, and wrote ‘I’ll get them’ on it and passed it back once more. Dirk shook his head in admonition, then wrote ‘I couldn’t possibly that would be most kind’. As soon as Richard had read this, Dirk took the note back and added ‘Get money from secretary’ to it. Richard looked at the paper thoughtfully, took the pencil and put a tick next to where he had previously written ‘You haven’t got secretary’. He pushed the paper back across the table to Dirk, who merely glanced at it and ticked ‘I couldn’t possibly that would be most kind’. ‘Well, perhaps,’ continued Dirk to Mrs Sauskind, ‘you could just run over any of the areas in the bill that cause you difficulty. Just the broader areas.’ Richard let himself out. Running down the stairs, he passed a young hopeful in a denim jacket and close-cropped hair peering anxiously up the stairwell. ‘Any good, mate?’ he said to Richard. ‘Amazing,’ murmured Richard, ‘just amazing.’ He found a nearby newsagent’s and picked up a couple of packets of Disque Bleu for Dirk, and a copy of the new edition of /Personal Computer World/, which had a picture of Gordon Way on the front. ‘Pity about him, isn’t it?’ said the newsagent. ‘What? Oh, er… yes,’ said Richard. He often thought the same himself, but was surprised to find his feelings so widely echoed. He picked up a /Guardian/ as well, paid and left. Dirk was still on the phone with his feet on the table when Richard returned, and it was clear that he was relaxing into his negotiations. ‘Yes, expenses were, well, expensive in the Bahamas, Mrs Sauskind, it is in the nature of expenses to be so. Hence the name.’ He took the proffered packets of cigarettes, seemed disappointed there were only two, but briefly raised his eyebrows to Richard in acknowledgement of the favour he had done him, and then waved him to a chair. The sounds of an argument conducted partly in French drifted down from the floor above. ‘Of course I will explain to you again why the trip to the Bahamas was so vitally necessary,’ said Dirk Gently soothingly. ‘Nothing could give me greater pleasure. I believe, as you know, Mrs Sauskind, in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Furthermore I have plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my investigations. I wish it were not the case, since, sadly, I am allergic to both the sun and rum punches, but then we all have our crosses to bear, do we not, Mrs Sauskind?’ A babble seemed to break out from the telephone. ‘You sadden me, Mrs Sauskind. I wish I could find it in my heart to tell you that I find your scepticism rewarding and invigorating, but with the best will in the world I cannot. I am drained by it, Mrs Sauskind, drained. I think you will find an item in the bill to that effect. Let me see.’ He picked up a flimsy carbon copy lying near him. ‘“Detecting and triangulating the vectors of interconnectedness of all things, one hundred and fifty pounds.” We’ve dealt with that. ‘“Tracing same to beach on Bahamas, fare and accommodation.” A mere fifteen hundred. The accommodation was, of course, distressingly modest. ‘Ah yes, here we are, “Struggling on in the face of draining scepticism from client, drinks — three hundred and twenty-seven pounds fifty.” ‘Would that I did not have to make such charges, my dear Mrs Sauskind, would that the occasion did not continually arise. Not believing in my methods only makes my job more difficult, Mrs Sauskind, and hence, regrettably, more expensive.’ Upstairs, the sounds of argument were becoming more heated by the moment. The French voice seemed to be verging on hysteria. ‘I do appreciate, Mrs Sauskind,’ continued Dirk, ‘that the cost of the investigation has strayed somewhat from the original estimate, but I am sure that you will in your turn appreciate that a job which takes seven years to do must clearly be more difficult than one that can be pulled off in an afternoon and must therefore be charged at a higher rate. I have continually to revise my estimate of how difficult the task is in the light of how difficult it has so far proved to be.’ The babble from the phone became more frantic. ‘My dear Mrs Sauskind — or may I call you Joyce? Very well then. My dear Mrs Sauskind, let me say this. Do not worry yourself about this bill, do not let it alarm or discomfit you. Do not, I beg you, let it become a source of anxiety to you. Just grit your teeth and pay it.’ He pulled his feet down off the table and leaned forward over the desk, inching the telephone receiver inexorably back towards its cradle. ‘As always, the very greatest pleasure to speak with you, Mrs Sauskind. For now, goodbye.’ He at last put down the receiver, picked it up again, and dropped it for the moment into the waste basket. ‘My dear Richard MacDuff,’ he said, producing a large flat box from under his desk and pushing it across the table at him, ‘your pizza.’ Richard started back in astonishment. ‘Er, no thanks,’ he said, ‘I had breakfast. Please. You have it.’ Dirk shrugged. ‘I told them you’d pop in and settle up over the weekend,’ he said. ‘Welcome, by the way, to my offices.’ He waved a vague hand around the tatty surroundings. ‘The light works,’ he said, indicating the window, ‘the gravity works,’ he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. ‘Anything else we have to take our chances with.’ Richard cleared his throat. ‘What,’ he said, ‘is this?’ ‘What is what?’ ‘This,’ exclaimed Richard, ‘all this. You appear to have a Holistic Detective Agency and I don’t even know what one is.’ ‘I provide a service that is unique in this world,’ said Dirk. ‘The term “holistic” refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all –’ ‘Yes, I got that bit earlier,’ said Richard. ‘I have to say that it sounded a bit like an excuse for exploiting gullible old ladies.’ ‘Exploiting?’ asked Dirk. ‘Well, I suppose it would be if anybody ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that. I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating and remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes that he will settle their bill, and so on. I find it a wonderfully optimistic way of life. ‘Meanwhile I give a lot of charming and silly old ladies something to be happily cross about and virtually guarantee the freedom of their cats. Is there, you ask — and I put the question for you because I know you know I hate to be interrupted — is there a single case that exercises the tiniest part of my intellect, which, as you hardly need me to tell you, is prodigious? No. But do I despair? Am I downcast? Yes. Until,’ he added, ‘today.’ ‘Oh, well, I’m glad of that,’ said Richard, ‘but what was all that rubbish about cats and quantum mechanics?’ With a sigh Dirk flipped up the lid of the pizza with a single flick of practised fingers. He surveyed the cold round thing with a kind of sadness and then tore off a hunk of it. Pieces of pepperoni and anchovy scattered over his desk. ‘I am sure, Richard,’ he said, ‘that you are familiar with the notion of Schrцdinger’s Cat,’ and he stuffed the larger part of the hunk into his mouth. ‘Of course,’ said Richard. ‘Well, reasonably familiar.’ ‘What is it?’ said Dirk through a mouthful. Richard shifted irritably in his seat. ‘It’s an illustration,’ he said, ‘of the principle that at a quantum level all events are governed by probabilities…’ ‘At a quantum level, and therefore at all levels,’ interrupted Dirk. ‘Though at any level higher than the subatomic the cumulative effect of those probabilities is, in the normal course of events, indistinguishable from the effect of hard and fast physical laws. Continue.’ He put some more cold pizza into his face. Richard reflected that Dirk’s was a face into which too much had already been put. What with that and the amount he talked, the traffic through his mouth was almost incessant. His ears, on the other hand, remained almost totally unused in normal conversation. It occurred to Richard that if Lamarck had been right and you were to take a line through this behaviour for several generations, the chances were that some radical replumbing of the interior of the skull would eventually take place. Richard continued, ‘Not only are quantum level events governed by probabilities, but those probabilities aren’t even resolved into actual events until they are measured. Or to use a phrase that I just heard you use in a rather bizarre context, the act of measurement collapses the probability waveform. Up until that point all the possible courses of action open to, say, an electron, coexist as probability waveforms. Nothing is decided. Until it’s measured.’ Dirk nodded. ‘More or less,’ he said, taking another mouthful. ‘But what of the cat?’ Richard decided that there was only one way to avoid having to watch Dirk eat his way through all the rest of the pizza, and that was to eat the rest himself. He rolled it up and took a token nibble off the end. It was rather good. He took another bite. Dirk watched this with startled dismay. ‘So,’ said Richard, ‘the idea behind Schrцdinger’s Cat was to try and imagine a way in which the effects of probabilistic behaviour at a quantum level could be considered at a macroscopic level. Or let’s say an everyday level.’ ‘Yes, let’s,’ said Dirk, regarding the rest of the pizza with a stricken look. Richard took another bite and continued cheerfully. ‘So you imagine that you take a cat and put it in a box that you can seal completely. Also in the box you put a small lump of radioactive material, and a phial of poison gas. You arrange it so that within a given period of time there is an exactly fifty-fifty chance that an atom in the radioactive lump will decay and emit an electron. If it does decay then it triggers the release of the gas and kills the cat. If it doesn’t, the cat lives. Fifty-fifty. Depending on the fifty-fifty chance that a single atom does or does not decay. ‘The point as I understand it is this: since the decay of a single atom is a quantum level event that wouldn’t be resolved either way until it was observed, and since you don’t make the observation until you open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead, then there’s a rather extraordinary consequence. ‘Until you do open the box the cat itself exists in an indeterminate state. The possibility that it is alive, and the possibility that it is dead, are two different waveforms superimposed on each other inside the box. Schrцdinger put forward this idea to illustrate what he thought was absurd about quantum theory.’ Dirk got up and padded over to the window, probably not so much for the meagre view it afforded over an old warehouse on which an alternative comedian was lavishing his vast lager commercial fees developing into luxury apartments, as for the lack of view it afforded of the last piece of pizza disappearing. ‘Exactly,’ said Dirk, ‘bravo!’ ‘But what’s all that got to do with this — this Detective Agency?’ ‘Oh, that. Well, some researchers were once conducting such an experiment, but when they opened up the box, the cat was neither alive nor dead but was in fact completely missing, and they called me in to investigate. I was able to deduce that nothing very dramatic had happened. The cat had merely got fed up with being repeatedly locked up in a box and occasionally gassed and had taken the first opportunity to hoof it through the window. It was for me the work of a moment to set a saucer of milk by the window and call “Bernice” in an enticing voice — the cat’s name was Bernice, you understand –’ ‘Now, wait a minute –’ said Richard. ‘ — and the cat was soon restored. A simple enough matter, but it seemed to create quite an impression in certain circles, and soon one thing led to another as they do and it all culminated in the thriving career you see before you.’ ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ insisted Richard, slapping the table. ‘Yes?’ enquired Dirk innocently. ‘Now, what are you talking about, Dirk?’ ‘You have a problem with what I have told you?’ ‘Well, I hardly know where to begin,’ protested Richard. ‘All right. You said that some people were performing the experiment. That’s nonsense. Schrцdinger’s Cat isn’t a real experiment. It’s just an illustration for arguing about the idea. It’s not something you’d actually do.’ Dirk was watching him with odd attention. ‘Oh, really?’ he said at last. ‘And why not?’ ‘Well, there’s nothing you can test. The whole point of the idea is to think about what happens before you make your observation. You can’t know what’s going on inside the box without looking, and the very instant you look the wave packet collapses and the probabilities resolve. It’s self-defeating. It’s completely purposeless.’ ‘You are, of course, perfectly correct as far as you go,’ replied Dirk, returning to his seat. He drew a cigarette out of the packet, tapped it several times on the desk, and leant across the desk and pointed the filter at Richard. ‘But think about this,’ he continued. ‘Supposing you were to introduce a psychic, someone with clairvoyant powers, into the experiment — someone who is able to divine what state of health the cat is in without opening the box. Someone who has, perhaps, a certain eerie sympathy with cats. What then? Might that furnish us with an additional insight into the problem of quantum physics?’ ‘Is that what they wanted to do?’ ‘It’s what they did.’ ‘Dirk, this is /complete nonsense/.’ Dirk raised his eyebrows challengingly. ‘All right, all right,’ said Richard, holding up his palms, ‘let’s just follow it through. Even if I accepted — which I don’t for one second — that there was any basis at all for clairvoyance, it wouldn’t alter the fundamental undoableness of the experiment. As I said, the whole thing turns on what happens inside the box before it’s observed. It doesn’t matter how you observe it, whether you look into the box with your eyes or — well, with your mind, if you insist. If clairvoyance works, then it’s just another way of looking into the box, and if it doesn’t then of course it’s irrelevant.’ ‘It might depend, of course, on the view you take of clairvoyance…’ ‘Oh yes? And what view do you take of clairvoyance? I should be very interested to know, given your history.’ Dirk tapped the cigarette on the desk again and looked narrowly at Richard. There was a deep and prolonged silence, disturbed only by the sound of distant crying in French. ‘I take the view I have always taken,’ said Dirk eventually. ‘Which is?’ ‘That I am not clairvoyant.’ ‘Really,’ said Richard. ‘Then what about the exam papers?’ The eyes of Dirk Gently darkened at the mention of this subject. ‘A coincidence,’ he said, in a low, savage voice, ‘a strange and chilling coincidence, but none the less a coincidence. One, I might add, which caused me to spend a considerable time in prison. Coincidences can be frightening and dangerous things.’ Dirk gave Richard another of his long appraising looks. ‘I have been watching you carefully,’ he said. ‘You seem to be extremely relaxed for a man in your position.’ This seemed to Richard to be an odd remark, and he tried to make sense of it for a moment. Then the light dawned, and it was an aggravating light. ‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘he hasn’t got to you as well, has he?’ This remark seemed to puzzle Dirk in return. ‘Who hasn’t got to me?’ he said. ‘Gordon. No, obviously not. Gordon Way. He has this habit of trying to get other people to bring pressure on me to get on with what he sees as important work. I thought for a moment — oh, never mind. What did you mean, then?’ ‘Ah. Gordon Way /has/ this habit, has he?’ ‘Yes. I don’t like it. Why?’ Dirk looked long and hard at Richard, tapping a pencil lightly on the desk. Then he leaned back in his chair and said as follows: ‘The body of Gordon Way was discovered before dawn this morning. He had been shot, strangled, and then his house was set on fire. Police are working on the theory that he was not actually shot in the house because no shotgun pellets were discovered there other than those in the body. ‘However, pellets were found near to Mr Way’s Mercedes 500 SEC, which was found abandoned about three miles from his house. This suggests that the body was moved after the murder. Furthermore the doctor who examined the body is of the opinion that Mr Way was in fact strangled after he was shot, which seems to suggest a certain confusion in the mind of the killer. ‘By a startling coincidence it appears that the police last night had occasion to interview a very confused-seeming gentleman who said that he was suffering from some kind of guilt complex about having just run over his employer. ‘That man was a Mr Richard MacDuff, and his employer was the deceased, Mr Gordon Way. It has further been suggested that Mr Richard MacDuff is one of the two people most likely to benefit from Mr Way’s death, since WayForward Technologies would almost certainly pass at least partly into his hands. The other person is his only living relative, Miss Susan Way, into whose flat Mr Richard MacDuff was observed to break last night. The police don’t know that bit, of course. Nor, if we can help it, will they. However, any relationship between the two of them will naturally come under close scrutiny. The news reports on the radio say that they are urgently seeking Mr MacDuff, who they believe will be able to help them with their enquiries, but the tone of voice says that he’s clearly guilty as hell. ‘My scale of charges is as follows: two hundred pounds a day, plus expenses. Expenses are not negotiable and will sometimes strike those who do not understand these matters as somewhat tangential. They are all necessary and are, as I say, not negotiable. Am I hired?’ ‘Sorry,’ said Richard, nodding slightly. ‘Would you start that again?’ [::: CHAPTER 17 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] The Electric Monk hardly knew what to believe any more. He had been through a bewildering number of belief systems in the previous few hours, most of which had failed to provide him with the long-term spiritual solace that it was his bounden programming eternally to seek. He was fed up. Frankly. And tired. And dispirited. And furthermore, which caught him by surprise, he rather missed his horse. A dull and menial creature, to be sure, and as such hardly worthy of the preoccupation of one whose mind was destined forever to concern itself with higher things beyond the understanding of a simple horse, but nevertheless he missed it. He wanted to sit on it. He wanted to pat it. He wanted to feel that it didn’t understand. He wondered where it was. He dangled his feet disconsolately from the branch of the tree in which he had spent the night. He had climbed it in pursuit of some wild fantastic dream and then had got stuck and had to stay there till the morning. Even now, by daylight, he wasn’t certain how he was going to get down. He came for a moment perilously close to believing that he could fly, but a quick-thinking error-checking protocol cut in and told him not to be so silly. It was a problem though. Whatever burning fire of faith had borne him, inspired on wings of hope, upwards through the branches of the tree in the magic hours of night, had not also provided him with instructions on how to get back down again when, like altogether too many of these burning fiery night- time faiths, it had deserted him in the morning. And speaking — or rather thinking — of burning fiery things, there had been a major burning fiery thing a little distance from here in the early pre-dawn hours. It lay, he thought, in the direction from which he himself had come when he had been drawn by a deep spiritual compulsion towards this inconveniently high but otherwise embarrassingly ordinary tree. He had longed to go and worship at the fire, to pledge himself eternally to its holy glare, but while he had been struggling hopelessly to find a way downwards through the branches, fire engines had arrived and put the divine radiance out, and that had been another creed out of the window. The sun had been up for some hours now, and though he had occupied the time as best as he could, believing in clouds, believing in twigs, believing in a peculiar form of flying beetle, he believed now that he was fed up, and was utterly convinced, furthermore, that he was getting hungry. He wished he’d taken the precaution of providing himself with some food from the dwelling place he had visited in the night, to which he had carried his sacred burden for entombment in the holy broom cupboard, but he had left in the grip of a white passion, believing that such mundane matters as food were of no consequence, that the tree would provide. Well, it had provided. It had provided twigs. Monks did not eat twigs. In fact, now he came to think of it, he felt a little uncomfortable about some of the things he had believed last night and had found some of the results a little confusing. He had been quite clearly instructed to ‘shoot off’ and had felt strangely compelled to obey but perhaps he had made a mistake in acting so precipitately on an instruction given in a language he had learned only two minutes before. Certainly the reaction of the person he had shot off at had seemed a little extreme. In his own world when people were shot at like that they came back next week for another episode, but he didn’t think this person would be doing that. A gust of wind blew through the tree, making it sway giddily. He climbed down a little way. The first part was reasonably easy, since the branches were all fairly close together. It was the last bit that appeared to be an insuperable obstacle — a sheer drop which could cause him severe internal damage or rupture and might in turn cause him to start believing things that were seriously strange. The sound of voices over in a distant corner of the field suddenly caught his attention. A lorry had pulled up by the side of the road. He watched carefully for a moment, but couldn’t see anything particular to believe in and so returned to his introspection. There was, he remembered, an odd function call he had had last night, which he hadn’t encountered before, but he had a feeling that it might be something he’d heard of called remorse. He hadn’t felt at all comfortable about the way the person he had shot at had just lain there, and after initially walking away the Monk had returned to have another look. There was definitely an expression on the person’s face which seemed to suggest that something was up, that this didn’t fit in with the scheme of things. The Monk worried that he might have badly spoiled his evening. Still, he reflected, so long as you did what you believed to be right, that was the main thing. The next thing he had believed to be right was that having spoiled this person’s evening he should at least convey him to his home, and a quick search of his pockets had produced an address, some maps and some keys. The trip had been an arduous one, but he had been sustained on the way by his faith. The word ‘bathroom’ floated unexpectedly across the field. He looked up again at the lorry in the distant comer. There was a man in a dark blue uniform explaining something to a man in rough working clothes, who seemed a little disgruntled about whatever it was. The words ‘until we trace the owner’ and ‘completely batty, of course’ were gusted over on the wind. The man in the working clothes clearly agreed to accept the situation, but with bad grace. A few moments later, a horse was led out of the back of the lorry and into the field. The Monk blinked. His circuits thrilled and surged with astonishment. Now here at last was something he could believe in, a truly miraculous event, a reward at last for his unstinting if rather promiscuous devotion. The horse walked with a patient, uncomplaining gait. It had long grown used to being wherever it was put, but for once it felt it didn’t mind this. Here, it thought, was a pleasant field. Here was grass. Here was a hedge it could look at. There was enough space that it could go for a trot later on if it felt the urge. The humans drove off and left it to its own devices, to which it was quite content to be left. It went for a little amble, and then, just for the hell of it, stopped ambling. It could do what it liked. What pleasure. What very great and unaccustomed pleasure. It slowly surveyed the whole field, and then decided to plan out a nice relaxed day for itself. A little trot later on, it thought, maybe around threeish. After that a bit of a lie down over on the east side of the field where the grass was thicker. It looked like a suitable spot to think about supper in. Lunch, it rather fancied, could be taken at the south end of the field where a small stream ran. Lunch by a stream, for heaven’s sake. This was bliss. It also quite liked the notion of spending half an hour walking alternately a little bit to the left and then a little bit to the right, for no apparent reason. It didn’t know whether the time between two and three would be best spent swishing its tail or mulling things over. Of course, it could always do both, if it so wished, and go for its trot a little later. And it had just spotted what looked like a fine piece of hedge for watching things over, and that would easily while away a pleasant pre-prandial hour or two. Good. An excellent plan. And the best thing about it was that having made it the horse could now completely and utterly ignore it. It went instead for a leisurely stand under the only tree in the field. From out of its branches the Electric Monk dropped on to the horse’s back, with a cry which sounded suspiciously like ‘Geronimo’. [::: CHAPTER 18 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] Dirk Gently briefly ran over the salient facts once more while Richard MacDuff’s world crashed slowly and silently into a dark, freezing sea which he hadn’t even known was there, waiting inches beneath his feet. When Dirk had finished for the second time the room fell quiet while Richard stared fixedly at his face. ‘Where did you hear this?’ said Richard at last. ‘The radio,’ said Dirk, with a slight shrug, ‘at least the main points. It’s all over the news of course. The details? Well, discreet enquiries among contacts here and there. There are one or two people I got to know at Cambridge police station, for reasons which may occur to you.’ ‘I don’t even know whether to believe you,’ said Richard quietly. ‘May I use the phone?’ Dirk courteously picked a telephone receiver out of the wastepaper bin and handed it to him. Richard dialled Susan’s number. The phone was answered almost immediately and a frightened voice said, ‘Hello?’ ‘Susan, it’s Ri –’ ‘/Richard!/ Where are you? For God’s sake, where are you? Are you all right?’ ‘Don’t tell her where you are,’ said Dirk. ‘Susan, what’s happened?’ ‘Don’t you — ?’ ‘Somebody told me that something’s happened to Gordon, but…’ ‘Something’s /happened/ — ? He’s /dead/, Richard, he’s been /murdered/ –’ ‘Hang up,’ said Dirk. ‘Susan, listen. I –’ ‘Hang up,’ repeated Dirk, and then leaned forward to the phone and cut him off. ‘The police will probably have a trace on the line,’ he explained. He took the receiver and chucked it back in the bin. ‘But I have to go to the police,’ Richard exclaimed. ‘Go to the police?’ ‘What else can I do? I have to go to the police and tell them that it wasn’t me.’ ‘Tell them that it wasn’t you?’ said Dirk incredulously. ‘Well I expect that will probably make it all right, then. Pity Dr Crippen didn’t think of that. Would have saved him a lot of bother.’ ‘Yes, but he was guilty!’ ‘Yes, so it would appear. And so it would appear, at the moment, are you.’ ‘But I didn’t do it, for God’s sake!’ ‘You are talking to someone who has spent time in prison for something he didn’t do, remember. I told you that coincidences are strange and dangerous things. Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you’re innocent, than to languish in a cell hoping that the police — who already think you’re guilty — will find it for you.’ ‘I can’t think straight,’ said Richard, with his hand to his forehead. ‘Just stop for a moment and let me think this out –’ ‘If I may –’ ‘Let me think — !’ Dirk shrugged and turned his attention back to his cigarette, which seemed to be bothering him. ‘It’s no good,’ said Richard shaking his head after a few moments, ‘I can’t take it in. It’s like trying to do trigonometry when someone’s kicking your head. OK, tell me what you think I should do.’ ‘Hypnotism.’ ‘What?’ ‘It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that you should be unable to gather your thoughts clearly. However, it is vital that somebody gathers them. It will be much simpler for both of us if you will allow me to hypnotise you. I strongly suspect that there is a very great deal of information jumbled up in your head that will not emerge while you are shaking it up so — that might not emerge at all because you do not realise its significance. With your permission we can short- cut all that.’ ‘Well, that’s decided then,’ said Richard, standing up, ‘I’m going to the police.’ ‘Very well,’ said Dirk, leaning back and spreading his palms on the desk, ‘I wish you the very best of luck. Perhaps on your way out you would be kind enough to ask my secretary to get me some matches.’ ‘You haven’t got a secretary,’ said Richard, and left. Dirk sat and brooded for a few seconds, made a valiant but vain attempt to fold the sadly empty pizza box into the wastepaper bin, and then went to look in the cupboard for a metronome. Richard emerged blinking into the daylight. He stood on the top step rocking slightly, then plunged off down the street with an odd kind of dancing walk which reflected the whirling dance of his mind. On the one hand he simply couldn’t believe that the evidence wouldn’t show perfectly clearly that he couldn’t have committed the murder; on the other hand he had to admit that it all looked remarkably odd. He found it impossible to think clearly or rationally about it. The idea that Gordon had been murdered kept blowing up in his mind and throwing all other thoughts into total confusion and disruption. It occurred to him for a moment that whoever did it must have been a damn fast shot to get the trigger pulled before being totally overwhelmed by waves of guilt, but instantly he regretted the thought. In fact he was a little appalled by the general quality of the thoughts that sprang into his mind. They seemed inappropriate and unworthy and mostly had to do with how it would affect his projects in the company. He looked about inside himself for any feeling of great sorrow or regret, and assumed that it must be there somewhere, probably hiding behind the huge wall of shock. He arrived back within sight of Islington Green, hardly noticing the distance he had walked. The sudden sight of the police squad car parked outside his house hit him like a hammer and he swung on his heel and stared with furious concentration at the menu displayed in the window of a Greek restaurant. ‘Dolmades,’ he thought, frantically. ‘Souvlaki,’ he thought. ‘A small spicy Greek sausage,’ passed hectically through his mind. He tried to reconstruct the scene in his mind’s eye without turning round. There had been a policeman standing watching the street, and as far as he could recall from the brief glance he had, it looked as if the side door of the building which led up to his flat was standing open. The police were in his flat. /In/ his flat. Fassolia Plaki! A filling bowl of haricot beans cooked in a tomato and vegetable sauce! He tried to shift his eyes sideways and back over his shoulder. The policeman was looking at him. He yanked his eyes back to the menu and tried to fill his mind with finely ground meat mixed with potato, breadcrumbs, onions and herbs rolled into small balls and fried. The policeman must have recognised him and was at that very moment dashing across the road to grab him and lug him off in a Black Maria just as they had done to Dirk all those years ago in Cambridge. He braced his shoulders against the shock, but no hand came to grab him. He glanced back again, but the policeman was looking unconcernedly in another direction. Stifado. It was very apparent to him that his behaviour was not that of one who was about to go and hand himself in to the police. So what else was he to do? Trying in a stiff, awkward way to walk naturally, he yanked himself away from the window, strolled tensely down the road a few yards, and then ducked back down Camden Passage again, walking fast and breathing hard. Where could he go? To Susan? No — the police would be there or watching. To the WFT offices in Primrose Hill? No — same reason. What on earth, he screamed silently at himself, was he doing suddenly as a fugitive? He insisted to himself, as he had insisted to Dirk, that he should not be running away from the police. The police, he told himself, as he had been taught when he was a boy, were there to help and protect the innocent. This thought caused him instantly to break into a run and he nearly collided with the proud new owner of an ugly Edwardian floor lamp. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘sorry.’ He was startled that anyone should want such a thing, and slowed his pace to a walk, glancing with sharp hunted looks around him. The very familiar shop fronts full of old polished brass, old polished wood and pictures of Japanese fish suddenly seemed very threatening and aggressive. Who could possibly have wanted to kill Gordon? This was the thought that suddenly hammered at him as he turned down Charlton Place. All that had concerned him so far was that he hadn’t. But who had? This was a new thought. Plenty of people didn’t care for him much, but there is a huge difference between disliking somebody — maybe even disliking them a lot — and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day. Was it just theft? Dirk hadn’t mentioned anything being missing but then he hadn’t asked him. Dirk. The image of his absurd but oddly commanding figure sitting like a large toad, brooding in his shabby office, kept insisting itself upon Richard’s mind. He realised that he was retracing the way he had come, and deliberately made himself turn right instead of left. That way madness lay. He just needed a space, a bit of time to think and collect his thoughts together. All right — so where was he going? He stopped for a moment, turned around and then stopped again. The idea of dolmades suddenly seemed very attractive and it occurred to him that the cool, calm and collected course of action would have been simply to walk in and have some. That would have shown Fate who was boss. Instead, Fate was engaged on exactly the same course of action. It wasn’t actually sitting in a Greek restaurant eating dolmades, but it might as well have been, because it was clearly in charge. Richard’s footsteps drew him inexorably back through the winding streets, over the canal. He stopped, briefly, at a corner shop, and then hurried on past the council estates, and into developer territory again until he was standing once more outside 33, Peckender Street. At about the same time as Fate would have been pouring itself the last of the retsina, wiping its mouth and wondering if it had any room left for baklavas, Richard gazed up at the tall ruddy Victorian building with its soot-darkened brickwork and its heavy, forbidding windows. A gust of wind whipped along the street and a small boy bounded up to him. ‘Fuck off,’ chirped the little boy, then paused and looked at him again. ‘‘Ere, mister,’ he added, ‘can I have your jacket?’ ‘No,’ said Richard. ‘Why not?’ said the boy. ‘Er, because I like it,’ said Richard. ‘Can’t see why,’ muttered the boy. ‘Fuck off.’ He slouched off moodily down the street, kicking a stone at a cat. Richard entered the building once more, mounted the stairs uneasily and looked again into the office. Dirk’s secretary was sitting at her desk, head down, arms folded. ‘I’m not here,’ she said. ‘I see,’ said Richard. ‘I only came back,’ she said, without looking up from the spot on her desk at which she was staring angrily, ‘to make sure he notices that I’ve gone. Otherwise he might just forget.’ ‘Is he in?’ asked Richard. ‘Who knows? Who cares? Better ask someone who works for him, because I don’t.’ ‘Show him in!’ boomed Dirk’s voice. She glowered for a moment, stood up, went to the inner door, wrenched it open, said ‘Show him in yourself,’ slammed the door once more and returned to her seat. ‘Er, why don’t I just show myself in?’ said Richard. ‘I can’t even hear you,’ said Dirk’s ex-secretary, staring resolutely at her desk. ‘How do you expect me to hear you if I’m not even here?’ Richard made a placatory gesture, which was ignored, and walked through and opened the door to Dirk’s office himself. He was startled to find the room in semi-darkness. A blind was drawn down over the window, and Dirk was lounging back in his seat, his face bizarrely lit by the strange arrangement of objects sitting on the desk. At the forward edge of the desk sat an old grey bicycle lamp, facing backwards and shining a feeble light on a metronome which was ticking softly back and forth, with a highly polished silver teaspoon strapped to its metal rod. Richard tossed a couple of boxes of matches on to the desk. ‘Sit down, relax, and keep looking at the spoon,’ said Dirk, ‘you are already feeling sleepy…’ Another police car pulled itself up to a screeching halt outside Richard’s flat, and a grim-faced man climbed out and strode over to one of the constables on duty outside, flashing an identity card. ‘Detective Inspector Mason, Cambridgeshire CID,’ he said. ‘This the MacDuff place?’ The constable nodded and showed him to the side-door entrance which opened on to the long narrow staircase leading up to the top flat. Mason bustled in and then bustled straight out again. ‘There’s a sofa halfway up the stairs,’ he told the constable. ‘Get it moved.’ ‘Some of the lads have already tried, sir,’ the constable replied anxiously. ‘It seems to be stuck. Everyone’s having to climb over it for the moment, sir. Sorry, sir.’ Mason gave him another grim look from a vast repertoire he had developed which ranged from very, very blackly grim indeed at the bottom of the scale, all the way up to tiredly resigned and only faintly grim, which he reserved for his children’s birthdays. ‘Get it moved,’ he repeated grimly, and bustled grimly back through the door grimly hauling up his trousers and coat in preparation for the grim ascent ahead. ‘No sign of him yet?’ asked the driver of the car, coming over himself. ‘Sergeant Gilks,’ he introduced himself. He looked tired. ‘Not as far as I know,’ said the constable, ‘but no one tells me anything.’ ‘Know how you feel,’ agreed Gilks. ‘Once the CID gets involved you just get relegated to driving them about. And I’m the only one who knows what he looked like. Stopped him in the road last night. We just came from Way’s house. Right mess.’ ‘Bad night, eh?’ ‘Varied. Everything from murder to hauling horses out of bathrooms. No, don’t even ask. Do you have the same cars as these?’ he added, pointing at his own. ‘This one’s been driving me crazy all the way up. Cold even with the heater on full blast, and the radio keeps turning itself on and off.’ [::: CHAPTER 19 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] The same morning found Michael Wenton-Weakes in something of an odd mood. You would need to know him fairly well to know that it was an especially odd mood, because most people regarded him as being a little odd to start with. Few people knew him that well. His mother, perhaps, but there existed between them a state of cold war and neither had spoken to the other now in weeks. He also had an elder brother, Peter, who was now tremendously senior in the Marines. Apart from at their father’s funeral, Michael had not seen Peter since he came back from the Falklands, covered in glory, promotion, and contempt for his younger brother. Peter had been delighted that their mother had taken over Magna, and had sent Michael a regimental Christmas card to that effect. His own greatest satisfaction still remained that of throwing himself into a muddy ditch and firing a machine gun for at least a minute, and he didn’t think that the British newspaper and publishing industry, even in its current state of unrest, was likely to afford him that pleasure, at least until some more Australians moved into it. Michael had risen very late after a night of cold savagery and then of troubled dreams which still disturbed him now in the late morning daylight. His dreams had been filled with the familiar sensations of loss, isolation, guilt and so forth, but had also been inexplicably involved with large quantities of mud. By the telescopic power of the night, the nightmare of mud and loneliness had seemed to stretch on for terrifying, unimaginable lengths of time, and had only concluded with the appearance of slimy things with legs that had crawled on the slimy sea. This had been altogether too much and he had woken with a start in a cold sweat. Though all the business with the mud had seemed strange to him, the sense of loss, of isolation, and above all the aggrievement, the need to undo what had been done, these had all found an easy home in his spirit. Even the slimy things with legs seemed oddly familiar and ticked away irritably at the back of his mind while he made himself a late breakfast, a piece of grapefruit and some China tea, allowed his eyes to rest lightly on the arts pages of the /Daily Telegraph/ for a while, and then rather clumsily changed the dressing on the cuts on his hand. These small tasks accomplished, he was then in two minds as to what to do next. He was able to view the events of the previous night with a cool detachment that he would not have expected. It had been right, it had been proper, it had been correctly done. But it resolved nothing. All that mattered was yet to be done. All what? He frowned at the odd way his thoughts ebbed and flowed. Normally he would pop along to his club at about this time. It used to be that he would do this with a luxurious sense of the fact that there were many other things that he should be doing. Now there was nothing else to do, which made time spent there, as anywhere else, hang somewhat heavy on his hands. When he went he would do as he always did — indulge in a gin and tonic and a little light conversation, and then allow his eyes to rest gently on the pages of the /Times Literary Supplement/, /Opera/, /The New Yorker/ or whatever else fell easily to hand, but there was no doubt that he did it these days with less verve and relish than previously. Then there would be lunch. Today, he had no lunch date planned — again — and would probably therefore have stayed at his club, and eaten a lightly grilled Dover sole, with potatoes garnished with parsley and boiled to bits, followed by a large heap of trifle. A glass or two of Sancerre. And coffee. And then the afternoon, with whatever that might bring. But today he felt oddly impelled not to do that. He flexed the muscles in his cut hand, poured himself another cup of tea, looked with curious dispassion at the large kitchen knife that still lay by the fine bone china teapot, and waited for a moment to see what he would do next. What he did next, in fact, was to walk upstairs. His house was rather chill in its formal perfection, and looked much as people who buy reproduction furniture would like their houses to look. Except of course that everything here was genuine — crystal, mahogany and Wilton — and only looked as if it might be fake because there was no life to any of it. He walked up into his workroom, which was the only room in the house that was not sterile with order, but here the disorder of books and papers was instead sterile with neglect. A thin film of dust had settled over everything. Michael had not been into it in weeks, and the cleaner was under strict instructions to leave it well alone. He had not worked here since he edited the last edition of /Fathom/. Not, of course, the actual last edition, but the last proper edition. The last edition as far as /he/ was concerned. He set his china cup down in the fine dust and went to inspect his elderly record player. On it he found an elderly recording of some Vivaldi wind concertos, set it to play and sat down. He waited again to see what he would do next and suddenly found to his surprise that he was already doing it, and it was this: he was /listening/ to the music. A bewildered look crept slowly across his face as he realised that he had never done this before. He had /heard/ it many, many times and thought that it made a very pleasant noise. Indeed, he found that it made a pleasant background against which to discuss the concert season, but it had never before occurred to him that there was anything actually to /listen/ to. He sat thunderstruck by the interplay of melody and counterpoint which suddenly stood revealed to him with a clarity that owed nothing to the dust-ridden surface of the record or the fourteen-year-old stylus. But with this revelation came an almost immediate sense of disappointment, which confused him all the more. The music suddenly revealed to him was oddly unfulfilling. It was as if his capacity to understand the music had suddenly increased up to and far beyond the music’s ability to satisfy it, all in one dramatic moment. He strained to listen for what was missing, and felt that the music was like a flightless bird that didn’t even know what capacity it had lost. It walked very well, but it walked where it should soar, it walked where it should swoop, it walked where it should climb and bank and dive, it walked where it should thrill with the giddiness of flight. It never even looked up. He looked up. After a while he became aware that all he was doing was simply staring stupidly at the ceiling. He shook his head, and discovered that the perception had faded, leaving him feeling slightly sick and dizzy. It had not vanished entirely, but had dropped deep inside him, deeper than he could reach. The music continued. It was an agreeable enough assortment of pleasant sounds in the background, but it no longer stirred him. He needed some clues as to what it was he had just experienced, and a thought flicked momentarily at the back of his mind as to where he might find them. He let go of the thought in anger, but it flicked at him again, and kept on flicking at him until at last he acted upon it. From under his desk he pulled out the large tin wastepaper bin. Since he had barred his cleaning lady from even coming in here for the moment, the bin had remained unemptied and he found in it the tattered shreds of what he was looking for with the contents of an ashtray emptied over them. He overcame his distaste with grim determination and slowly jiggled around the bits of the hated object on his desk, clumsily sticking them together with bits of sticky tape that curled around and stuck the wrong bit to the wrong bit and stuck the right bit to his pudgy fingers and then to the desk, until at last there lay before him, crudely reassembled, a copy of /Fathom/. As edited by the execrable creature A. K. Ross. Appalling. He turned the sticky lumpish pages as if he was picking over chicken giblets. Not a single line drawing of Joan Sutherland or Marilyn Horne anywhere. No profiles of any of the major Cork Street art dealers, not a one. His series on the Rossettis: discontinued. ‘Green Room Gossip’: discontinued. He shook his head in incredulity and then he found the article he was after. ‘Music and Fractal Landscapes’ by Richard MacDuff. He skipped over the first couple of paragraphs of introduction and picked it up further on: Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature — the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people — all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical in their simplicity. Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word ‘natural’ that we have often taken to mean ‘unstructured’ in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work. They can all be described by numbers. Oddly, this idea seemed less revolting now to Michael than it had done on his first, scant reading. He read on with increasing concentration. We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball’s spin. And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they /can actually catch a flying ball./ People who call this ‘instinct’ are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything. I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts — it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself. Every single aspect of a piece of music can be represented by numbers. From the organisation of movements in a whole symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm that make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, in short, all the elements of a noise that distinguish between the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one thumping a drum — all of these things can be expressed by patterns and hierarchies of numbers. And in my experience the more internal relationships there are between the patterns of numbers at different levels of the hierarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships may be, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seem to be. In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships, and the further they are beyond the grasp of the conscious mind, the more the instinctive part of your mind — by which I mean that part of your mind that can do differential calculus so astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the right place to catch a flying ball — the more that part of your brain revels in it. Music of any complexity (and even ‘Three Blind Mice’ is complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing about. Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it’s never been out of it. The things by which our emotions can be moved — the shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you love moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement, the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of a piece of music — all these things can be described by the complex flow of numbers. That’s not a reduction of it, that’s the beauty of it. Ask Newton. Ask Einstein. Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth. He might also have said that what the hand seizes as a ball must be truth, but he didn’t, because he was a poet and preferred loafing about under trees with a bottle of laudanum and a notebook to playing cricket, but it would have been equally true. This jogged a thought at the back of Michael’s memory, but he couldn’t immediately place it. Because that is at the heart of the relationship between on the one hand our ‘instinctive’ understanding of shape, form, movement, light, and on the other hand our emotional responses to them. And that is why I believe that there must be a form of music inherent in nature, in natural objects, in the patterns of natural processes. A music that would be as deeply satisfying as any naturally occurring beauty — and our own deepest emotions are, after all, a form of naturally occurring beauty…