Mopping the back of his neck with a kerchief. Mallory unhappily contemplated the headquarters of the Central Statistics Bureau. Ancient Egypt had been dead for twenty-five centuries, but Mallory had come to know it well enough to dislike it. The French excavation of the Suez Canal had been an heroic business, so that all things Egyptian had become the Parisian mode. The rage had seized Britain as well, leaving the nation awash with scarab neck-pins, hawk-winged teapots, lurid stereographs of toppled obelisks, and faux-marble miniatures of the noseless Sphinx. Manufacturers had Engine-embroidered that whole beast-headed rabble of pagan godlets on curtains and carpets and carriage-robes, much to Mallory’s distaste, and he had come to take an especial dislike to silly maunderings about the Pyramids, ruins which inspired exactly the sort of chuckle-headed wonderment that most revolted his sensibilities. He had, of course, read admiringly of the engineering feats of Suez. Lacking coal, the French had fueled their giant excavators with bitumen-soaked mummies, stacked like cordwood and sold by the ton. Still, he resented the space usurped by Egyptology in the geographical journals. The Central Statistics Bureau, vaguely pyramidal in form and excessively Egyptianate in its ornamental detail, squatted solidly in the governmental heart of Westminster, its uppermost stories slanting to a limestone apex. For the sake of increased space, the building’s lower section was swollen out-of-true, like some great stone turnip. Its walls, pierced by towering smokestacks, supported a scattered forest of spinning ventilators, their vanes annoyingly hawk-winged. “The whole vast pile was riddled top to bottom with thick black telegraph-lines, as though individual streams of the Empire’s information had bored through solid stone. A dense growth of wiring swooped down, from conduits and brackets, to telegraph-poles crowded thick as the rigging in a busy harbor. Mallory crossed the hot sticky tarmac of Horseferry Road, wary of the droppings of the pigeons clustered in the web-work of cable overhead. The Bureau’s fortress-doors, framed by lotus-topped columns and Briticized bronze sphinxes, loomed some twenty feet in height. Smaller, work-a-day doors were set into their corners. Mallory, scowling, strode into cool dimness and the faint but pervasive odors of lye and linseed oil. The simmering London stew was behind him now, but the damned place had no windows. Egyptianate jets lit the darkness, their flames breezily guttering in fan-shaped reflectors of polished tin. He showed his citizen-card at the visitors’ desk. The clerk — or perhaps he was some sort of policeman, for he wore a new-fangled Bureau uniform with an oddly military look — made careful note of Mallory’s destination. He took an Engine-printed floor-plan of the building from beneath his counter, and marked out Mallory’s twisting route in red ink. Mallory, still smarting from the morning’s meeting with the Nominations Committee of the Geographical, thanked the man rather too brusquely. Somehow — he didn’t know which devious strings had been pulled back-stage, but the plot was clear enough — Foulke had maneuvered his way onto the Geographical’s Nominations Committee. Foulke, whose aquatic theory of Brontosaurus had been spurned by Huxley’s museum, had taken Mallory’s arborivore hypothesis as a personal attack, with the result that an ordinarily pleasant formality had become yet another public trial for radical Catastrophism. Mallory had won his Fellowship, in the end, Oliphant having laid the ground too well for Foulke’s last minute ambush to succeed, but the business still rankled. He sensed damage to his reputation. Dr. Edward Mallory — “Leviathan Mallory,” as the penny-papers insisted on having it — had been made to seem fanatical, even petty. And this in front of dignified geographers of the first rank, men like Button of Mecca and Elliot of the Congo. Mallory followed his map, muttering to himself. The fortunes of scholarly warfare, Mallory thought, had never seemed to favor him as they did Thomas Huxley. Huxley’s feuds with the powers-that-be had only distinguished him as a wizard of debate, while Mallory was reduced to trudging this gas-lit mausoleum, where he hoped to identify a despicable race-track pimp. Taking his first turn, he discovered a marble bas-relief depicting the Mosaic Plague of Frogs, which he had always numbered among his favorite Biblical tales. Pausing in admiration, he was very nearly run down by a steel push-cart, stacked to the gunwales with decks of punch-cards. “Gangway!” yelped the carter, in brass-buttoned serge and a messenger’s billed cap. Mallory saw with astonishment that the man wore wheeled boots, stout lace-ups fitted with miniature axles and spokeless rounds of rubber. The fellow shot headlong down the hall, expertly steering the heavy cart, and vanished around a corner. Mallory passed a hall, blocked off with striped sawhorses, where two apparent lunatics, in gas-lit gloom, crept slowly about on all fours. Mallory stared. The creepers were plump, middle-aged women, dressed throat-to-foot in spotless white, their hair confined by snug elastic turbans. From a distance their clothing had the eerie look of winding-sheets. As he watched, one of the pair lurched heavily to her feet and began to tenderly wipe the ceiling with a sponge-mop on a telescoping pole. They were charwomen. Following his map to a lift, he was ushered in by a uniformed attendant and carried to another level. The air, here, was dry and static, the corridors busier. There were more of the odd-looking policemen, admixed with serious-looking gentlemen of the capital: barristers perhaps, or attorneys, or the legislative agents of great capitalists, men whose business it was to acquire and retail knowledge of the attitudes and influence of the public. Political men, in short, who dealt entirely in the intangible. And though they presumably had their wives, their children, their brownstone homes, here they struck Mallory as vaguely ghost-like or ecclesiastical. Some yards on. Mallory was forced to abruptly dodge a second wheeled messenger. He caught himself against a decorative cast-iron column. The metal scorched his hands. Despite its lavish ornamentation — lotus blossoms — the column was a smokestack. He could hear it emitting the muffled roar and mutter of a badly adjusted flue. Consulting his map again, he entered a corridor lined left and right with offices. White-coated clerks ducked from door to door, dodging young messenger-boys rolling about with card-laden wheelbarrows. The gas-lights were brighter here, but they fluttered in a steady draft of wind. Mallory glanced over his shoulder. At the end of the hall stood a giant steel-framed ventilator-fan. It squealed faintly, on an oiled chain-drive, propelled by an unseen motor in the bowels of the pyramid. Mallory began to feel rather dazed. Likely this had all been a grave mistake. Surely there were better ways to pursue the mystery of Derby Day, than hunting pimps with some bureaucratic crony of Oliphant’s. The very air of the place oppressed him, scorched and soapy and lifeless, the floors and walls polished and gleaming . . . He’d never before seen a place so utterly free of common dirt . . . These halls reminded him of something, another labyrinthine journey . . . Lord Darwin. Mallory and the great savant had been walking the leaf-shadowed hedgy lanes of Kent, Darwin poking at the moist black soil with his walking-stick. Darwin talking, on and on, in his endless, methodical, crushingly detailed way, of earthworms. Earthworms, always invisibly busy underfoot, so that even great sarsen-stones slowly sank into the loam. Darwin had measured the process, at Stonehenge, in an attempt to date the ancient monument. Mallory tugged hard at his beard, his map forgotten in his hand. A vision came to him of earthworms churning in catastrophic frenzy, till the soil roiled and bubbled like a witches’ brew. In years, mere months perhaps, all the monuments of slower eons would sink shipwrecked to primeval bedrock . . . “Sir? May I be of service?” Mallory came to himself with a start. A white-coated clerk was confronting him, staring into his face with bespectacled suspicion. Mallory glared back, confused. For a divine moment he had poised on the brink of revelation, and now it was gone, as miserably inglorious as a failed sneeze. Worse yet. Mallory now realized he had been muttering aloud again. About earthworms, presumably. Gruffly, he proffered his map. “Looking for Level 5, QC-50.” “That would be Quantitative Criminology, sir. This is Deterrence Research.” The clerk pointed at a shingle hung above a nearby office door. Mallory nodded numbly. “QC is just past Nonlinear Analysis, around the corner to your right,” the clerk said. Mallory moved on. He could feel the clerk’s skeptical eyes on his back. The QC section was a honeycomb of tiny partitions, the neck-high walls riddled with asbestos-lined cubbyholes. Gloved and aproned clerks sat neatly at their slanted desks, examining and manipulating punch-cards with a variety of specialized clacker’s devices: shufflers, pin-mounts, isin-glass color-coders, jeweler’s loupes, oiled tissues, and delicate rubber-tipped forceps. Mallory watched the familiar work with a happy lurch of reassurance. QC-50 was the office of the Bureau’s Undersecretary for Quantitative Criminology, whose name, Oliphant had said, was Wakefield. Mr. Wakefield possessed no desk, or rather his desk had encompassed and devoured the entirety of his office, and Wakefield worked from within it. Writing-tables sprang from wall-slots on an ingenious system of hinges, then vanished again into an arcane system of specialized cabinetry. There were newspaper-racks, letter-clamps, vast embedded cardfiles, catalogues, code-books, clacker’s-guides, an elaborate multi-dialed clock, three telegraph-dials whose gilded needles ticked out the alphabet, and printers busily punching tape. Wakefield himself was a pallid Scot with sandy, receding hair. His glance, if not positively evasive, was extremely mobile. A pronounced overbite dented his lower-lip. He struck Mallory as very young for a man of his position, perhaps only forty. No doubt, like most accomplished clackers, Wakefield had grown up with the Engine trade. Babbage’s very first Engine, now an honored relic, was still less than thirty years old, but the swift progression of Enginery had swept a whole generation in its wake, like some mighty locomotive of the mind. Mallory introduced himself. “I regret my tardiness, sir,” Mallory said. “I found myself a bit lost in your halls.” This was no news to Wakefield. “May I offer you tea? We have a very fine sponge cake.” Mallory shook his head, then opened his cigar-case with a flourish. “Smoke?” Wakefield went pale. “No! No thank you. A fire hazard, strictly against regulations.” Mallory put his case away, chagrined. “I see . . . But I don’t see any real harm in a fine cigar, do you?” “Ashes!” Wakefield said firmly. “And pneumatic particles! They float through air, soil the cog-oil, defile the gearing. And to clean the Bureau’s Engines — well, I needn’t tell you that’s a Sisyphean task, Dr. Mallory.” “Surely,” Mallory mumbled. He tried to change the subject. “As you must know, I am a paleontologist, but I have some small expertise in clacking. How many gear-yards do you spin here?” “Yards? We measure our gearage in miles here. Dr. Mallory.” ” ‘Struth! That much power?” “That much trouble, you might as easily say,” Wakefield said, with a modest flick of his white-gloved hand. “Heat builds up from spinning-friction, which expands the brass, which nicks the cog-teeth. Damp weather curdles the gear-oil — and in dry weather, a spinning Engine can even create a small Leyden-charge, which attracts all manner of dirt! Gears gum and jam, punch-cards adhere in the loaders . . . “Wakefield sighed. “We’ve found it pays well to take ‘every precaution in cleanliness, heat, and humidity. Even our tea-cake is baked specially for the Bureau, to reduce the risk of crumbs!” Something about the phrase “the risk of crumbs” struck Mallory as comic, but Wakefield had such a sober look that it was clear no jest was intended. “Have you tried Colgate’s Vinegar-Cleanser?” Mallory asked. “They swear by it at Cambridge.” “Ah yes,” Wakefield drawled, “the dear old Institute of Engine Analytics. I wish we had the leisurely pace of the academics! They pamper their brass at Cambridge, but here in public service, we must run and re-run the most grueling routines till we warp the decimal-levers.” Mallory, having been recently to the Institute, was up-to-date and determined to show it. “Have you heard of the new Cambridge compilers? They distribute gear-wear much more evenly –” Wakefield ignored him. “For Parliament and the police, the Bureau is simply a resource, you see. Always on demand, but kept on a tight lead for all of that. Funding, you see. They cannot fathom our requirements, sir! The old sad story, as I’m sure you know. Man of science yourself. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but the House of Commons can’t tell true clacking from a wind-up cooking-jack.” Mallory tugged his beard. “It does seem a pity. Miles of gearing! When I imagine what might be accomplished with that, the prospect is breathtaking.” “Oh, I’m sure you’d catch your breath soon enough. Dr. Mallory,” Wakefield said. “In clacking, demand always expands to overmatch the capacity. It’s as if it were a law of Nature!” “Perhaps it is a law,” Mallory said, “in some realm of Nature we’ve yet to comprehend . . . ” Wakefield smiled politely and shot a glance at his clock. “A shame, when one’s higher aspirations are overwhelmed by daily practicalities. I don’t often have the chance to discuss Engine philosophy. Except with my soi-disant colleague, Mr. Oliphant, of course. Has he, perhaps, told you of his visionary schemes for our Engines?” “Only quite briefly,” Mallory said. “It seemed to me his plans for, er, social studies, would demand more Engine-power than we have in Great Britain. To monitor every transaction in Piccadilly, and so forth. Struck me as a Utopian fancy, frankly.” “In theory, sir,” Wakefield responded, “it is entirely possible. We naturally keep a brotherly eye on the telegram-traffic, credit-records, and such. The human element is our only true bottle-neck, you see, for only a trained analyst can turn raw Engine-data into workable knowledge. And the ambitious scale of that effort, when compared with the modest scale of the Bureau’s current funding for personnel –” “I’m sure I wouldn’t care to add to the pressing burden of your duty,” Mallory broke in, “but Mr. Oliphant did indicate that you might help me to identify a criminal at large and his female accomplice. Having completed two of your request-forms in triplicate, I dispatched them in by special messenger . . . ” “Last week, yes.” Wakefield nodded. “And we’ve done our best for you. We’re always happy to oblige gentlemen as peculiarly distinguished as Mr. Oliphant and yourself. An assault, and a threat of death against a prominent savant, is a serious matter, of course.” Wakefield plucked up a needle-sharp pencil and a gridded pad of paper. “But a rather commonplace business, to attract Mr. Oliphant’s specialized interests, isn’t it?” Mallory said nothing. Wakefield looked grave. “You needn’t fear to speak frankly, sir. This isn’t the first time that Mr. Oliphant, or his superiors, have called on our resources. And, of course, as a sworn officer of the Crown, I can guarantee you the strictest confidentiality. Nothing you say will leave these walls.” He leaned forward. “So. What can you tell me, sir?” Mallory thought hard and quickly. Whatever blunder Lady Ada had committed — whatever act of desperation or recklessness had led her into the clutches of the tout and his whore — he could not imagine it helped by the name “Ada Byron” going onto that gridded pad. And Oliphant, of course, would not approve. So Mallory feigned a reluctant confession. “You have me at a disadvantage, Mr. Wakefield, for I don’t believe there’s much to the matter — nothing to truly earn me the privilege of your attention! As I said in my note to you, I encountered a drunken gambler at the Derby, and the rascal made a bit of a show with a knife. I thought little enough of it — but Mr. Oliphant suggested that I might be in genuine danger. He reminded me that one of my colleagues was murdered recently, in odd circumstances. And the case is still unresolved.” “Professor Fenwick, the dinosaur savant?” “Rudwick,” Mallory said. “You know the case?” “Stabbed to death. In a ratting-den.” Wakefield tapped his teeth with the pencil’s rubber. “Made all the papers, threw quite a bad light on the savantry. One feels that Rudwick rather let the side down.” Mallory nodded. “My sentiments exactly. But Mr. Oliphant seemed to feel that the incidents might be connected.” “Gamblers, stalking and killing savants?” Wakefield said. “I see no motive, frankly. Unless perhaps, and do forgive the suggestion, a large gambling debt is involved. Were you and Rudwick close friends? Wagering companions, perhaps?” “Not at all. I scarcely knew the man. And I owe no such debts, I assure you.” “Mr. Oliphant does not believe in accident,” Wakefield said. He seemed to have been convinced by Mallory’s evasion, for he was clearly losing interest. “Of course, it is only prudent of you to identify the rascal. If that’s all you need of us. I’m sure we can be of service. I’ll have a staffer take you to the library, and the Engines. Once we’ve this assailant’s number, we’ll be on firmer ground.” Wakefield flipped up a hinged rubber stopper and shouted into a speaking-tube. A young Cockney clerk appeared, in gloves and apron. “This is our Mr. Tobias,” Wakefield said. “He’s at your disposal.” The interview was over — Wakefield’s eyes were already glazing with the press of other business. He gave a mechanical bow. “Pleasure-to-have-met-you, sir. Please let me know if-we-can-be-of-any-further-service.” “You’re most kind,” Mallory said. The boy had shaven an inch of scalp at his hairline, elevating his forehead for a modishly intellectual look, but time had passed since the clerk’s last harboring, for he now had a prickly ridge of stubble across the front of his noggin. Mallory followed him out of the maze of cubicles into a hallway, noting his odd, rolling gait. The clerk’s shoe-heels were worn so badly that the nails showed, and his cheap cotton stockings had bagged at the ankles. “Where are we going, Mr. Tobias?” “Engines, sir. Downstairs.” They paused at the lift, where an ingenious indicator showed that it was on another floor. Mallory reached into his trouser-pocket, past the jack-knife and the keys. He pulled out a golden guinea. “Here.” “What’s this then?” Tobias asked, taking it. “It is what we call a tip, my boy,” Mallory said, with forced joviality. ” ‘To Insure Promptness,’ you know.” Tobias examined the coin as if he had never seen the profile of Albert before. He gave Mallory a sharp and sullen look from behind his spectacles. The lift’s door opened. Tobias hid the coin in his apron. He and Mallory stepped aboard amid a small crowd, and the attendant ratcheted the cage down into the Bureau’s bowels. Mallory followed Tobias out of the lift, past a rack of pneumatic mail-chutes, and through a pair of swinging doors, their edges lined with thick felt. They were alone again. Tobias stopped short. “You should know better than to offer gratuities to a public servant.” “You look as if you could use it,” Mallory said. “Ten days’ wage? Expect I could. Providin’ I find you right and fly.” “I mean no harm,” Mallory said mildly. “This place is strange territory. In such circumstances, I’ve found it wise to have a native guide.” “What’s wrong with the boss, then?” “I was hoping you’d tell me that, Mr. Tobias.” More than the coin, the remark itself seemed to win Tobias over. He shrugged. “Wakey’s not so bad. If I were him, I wouldn’t act any different. But he ran your number today, guv’nor, and pulled a stack on you nine inches high. You’ve some talkative friends, you do, Mr. Mallory.” “Did he now?” Mallory said, forcing a smile. “That file must make interesting reading. I’d surely like a look at it.” “I do suppose that intelligence might find its way to improper hands,” the boy allowed. “Of course, ‘twould be worth a fellow’s job, if he were caught at it.” “Do you like your work, Mr. Tobias?” “Pay’s not much. Gas-light ruins your eyes. But it has advantages.” He shrugged again, and pushed his way through another door, into a clattering anteroom, three of its walls lined with shelves and card-files, the fourth with fretted glass. Behind the glass loomed a vast hall of towering Engines — so many that at first Mallory thought the walls must surely be lined with mirrors, like a fancy ballroom. It was like some carnival deception, meant to trick the eye — the giant identical Engines, clock-like constructions of intricately interlocking brass, big as rail-cars set on end, each on its foot-thick padded blocks. The white-washed ceiling, thirty feet overhead, was alive with spinning pulley-belts, the lesser gears drawing power from tremendous spoked flywheels on socketed iron columns. White-coated clackers, dwarfed by their machines, paced the spotless aisles. Their hair was swaddled in wrinkled white berets, their mouths and noses hidden behind squares of white gauze. Tobias glanced at these majestic racks of gearage with absolute indifference. “All day starin’ at little holes. No mistakes, either! Hit a key-punch wrong and it’s all the difference between a clergyman and an arsonist. Many’s the poor innocent bastard ruined like that . . . ” The tick and sizzle of the monster clockwork muffled his words. Two men, well-dressed and quiet, were engrossed in their work in the library. They bent together over a large square album of color-plates. “Pray have a seat,” Tobias said. Mallory seated himself at a library table, in a maple swivel-chair mounted on rubber wheels, while Tobias selected a card-file. He sat opposite Mallory and leafed through the cards, pausing to dab a gloved finger in a small container of beeswax. He retrieved a pair of cards. “Were these your requests, sir?” “I filled out paper questionnaires. But you’ve put all that in Engine-form, eh?” “Well, QC took the requests,” Tobias said, squinting. “But we had to route it to Criminal Anthropometry. This card’s seen use — they’ve done a deal of the sorting-work already.” He rose suddenly and fetched a loose-leaf notebook — a clacker’s guide. He compared one of Mallory’s cards to some ideal within the book, with a look of distracted disdain. “Did you fill the forms out completely, sir?” “I think so,” Mallory hedged. “Height of suspect,” the boy mumbled, “reach . . . Length and width of left ear, left foot, left forearm, left forefinger.” “I supplied my best estimates,” Mallory said. “Why just the left side, if I may ask?” “Less affected by physical work,” Tobias said absently. “Age, coloration of skin, hair, eyes. Scars, birthmarks . . . ah, now then. Deformities.” “The man had a bump on the side of his forehead,” Mallory said. “Frontal plagiocephaly,” the boy said, checking his book. “Rare, and that’s why it struck me. But that should be useful. They’re spoony on skulls, in Criminal Anthropometry.” Tobias plucked up the cards, dropped them through a slot, and pulled a bell-rope. There was a sharp clanging. In a moment a clacker arrived for the cards. “Now what?” Mallory said. “We wait for it to spin through,” the boy said. “How long?” “It always takes twice as long as you think,” the boy said, settling back in his chair. “Even if you double your estimate. Something of a natural law.” Mallory nodded. The delay could not be helped, and might be useful. “Have you worked here long, Mr. Tobias?” “Not long enough to go mad.” Mallory chuckled. “You think I’m joking,” Tobias said darkly. “Why do you work here, if you hate it so?” “Everyone hates it, who has a spark of sense,” Tobias said. “Of course, it’s fine work here, if you work the top floors, and are one of the big’uns.” He jabbed his gloved thumb, discreetly, at the ceiling. “Which I ain’t, of course. But mostly, the work needs little folk. They need us by the scores and dozens and hundreds. We come and go. Two years of this work, maybe three, makes your eyes and your nerves go. You can go quite mad from staring at little holes. Mad as a dancing dormouse.” Tobias slid his hands into his apron-pockets. “I’ll wager you think, sir, from looking at us low clerks dressed like so many white pigeons, that we’re all the same inside! But we ain’t, sir, not at all. You see, there’s only so many people in Britain who can read and write, and spell and add, as neat as they need here. Most coves who can do that, they’ll get far better work, if they’ve a mind to look. So the Bureau gets your . . . well . . . unsettled sorts.” Tobias smiled thinly. “They’ve even hired women sometimes. Seamstresses, what lost their jobs to knitting-jennies. Government hire ’em to read and punch cards. Very good at detail-work, your former seamstresses.” “It seems an odd policy,” Mallory said. “Pressure of circumstance,” Tobias said. “Nature of the business. You ever work for Her Majesty’s Government, Mr. Mallory?” “In a way,” Mallory said. He’d worked for the Royal Society’s Commission on Free Trade. He’d believed their patriotic talk, their promises of back-stage influence — and they’d cut him loose to fend for himself, when they were through with him. A private audience with the Commission’s Lord Gallon, a warm handshake, an expression of “deep regret” that there could be “no open recognition of his gallant service . . . ” And that was all. Not so much as a signed scrap of paper. “What kind of Government work?” Tobias said. “Ever seen the so-called Land Leviathan?” “In the museum,” Tobias said. “Brontosaurus they call it, a reptile elephant. Had its teeth in the end of its trunk. The beast ate trees.” “Clever chap, Tobias.” “You’re Leviathan Mallory,” Tobias said, “the famous savant!” He flushed bright red. A bell rang. Tobias leapt to his feet. He took a pamphlet of accordioned paper from a tray in the wall. “In luck, sir. Male suspect is done. I told you the skull business would help.” Tobias spread the paper on the table, before Mallory. It was a collection of stipple-printed Engine-portraits. Dark-haired Englishmen with hangdog looks. The little square picture-bits of the Engine-prints were just big enough to distort their faces slightly, so that the men all seemed to have black drool in their mouths and dirt in the corners of their eyes. They all looked like brothers, some strange human sub-species of the devious and disenchanted. The portraits were nameless; they had citizen-numbers beneath them. “I hadn’t expected dozens of them,” Mallory said. “We could have narrowed the choice, with better parameters on the anthropometry,” Tobias said. “But just take your time, sir, and look closely. If we have him, he’s here.” Mallory stared at the glowering ranks of numbered scapegraces, many of them with disquietingly misshapen heads. He remembered the tout’s face with great clarity. He remembered it twisted with homicidal rage, bloody spittle in the cracked teeth. The sight was etched forever in his mind’s eye, as vivid as the knuckle-shapes of the beast’s spine, when first he’d seen his great prize jutting from the Wyoming shale. In one long dawning moment, then. Mallory had seen through those drab stone lumps and perceived the immanent glow of his own great glory, his coming fame. In just such a manner, he had seen, in the tout’s face, a lethal challenge that could transform his life. But none of these dazed and sullen portraits matched the memory. “Is there any reason why you wouldn’t have this man?” “Perhaps your man has no criminal record,” Tobias said. “We could run the card again, to check against the general population. But that would take us weeks of Engine-spinning, and require a special clearance from the people upstairs.” “Why so long, pray?” “Dr. Mallory, we have everyone in Britain in our records. Everyone who’s ever applied for work, or paid taxes, or been arrested.” Tobias was apologetic, painfully eager to help. “Is he a foreigner perhaps?” “I’m certain he was British, and a blackguard. He was armed and dangerous. But I simply don’t see him here.” “Perhaps it is a bad likeness, sir. Your criminal classes, they like to puff out their cheeks for criminal photography. Wads of cotton up their noses, and suchlike tricks. I’m sure he’s there, sir.” “I don’t believe it. Is there another possibility?” Tobias sat down, defeated. “That’s all we have, sir. Unless you want to change your description.” “Might someone have removed his portrait?” Tobias looked shocked. “That would be tampering with official files, sir. A felony transportation-offense. I’m sure none of the clerks would have done such a thing.” There was a heavy pause. “However?” Mallory urged. “Well, the files are sacrosanct, sir. It is what we’re all about here, as you know. But there are certain highly placed officials, from outside the Bureau — men who serve the confidential safety of the realm. If you know the gents I mean.” “I don’t believe I do,” Mallory said. “A very few gentlemen, in positions of great trust and discretion,” Tobias said. He glanced at the other men in the room, and lowered his voice. “Perhaps you’ve heard of what they call ‘the Special Cabinet’? Or the Special Bureau of the Bow Street police . . .?” “Anyone else?” Mallory said. “Well, the Royal Family, of course. We are servants of the Crown here, after all. If Albert himself were to command our Minister of Statistics . . .” “What about the Prime Minister? Lord Byron?” Tobias made no reply. His face had soured. “An idle question,” Mallory said. “Forget I asked it. It’s a scholar’s habit, you see — when a topic interests me, I explore its specifics, even to the point of pedantry. But it has no relevance here.” Mallory peered at the pictures again, with a show of close attention. “No doubt it is my own fault — the light here is not all it might be.” “Let me turn up the gas,” the boy said, half-rising. “No,” Mallory said. “Let me save my attention for the woman. Perhaps we’ll have better luck there.” Tobias sank back in his seat. As they awaited the Engine-spin, Mallory feigned a relaxed indifference. “Slow work, eh, Mr. Tobias? A lad of your intelligence must long for a greater challenge.” “I do love Engines,” Tobias said. “Not these great lummox monsters, but the cleverer, aesthetic ones. I wanted to learn clacking.” “Why aren’t you in school, then?” “Can’t afford it, sir. The family doesn’t approve.” “Did you try the National Merit Exams?” “No scholarship for me — I failed the calculus.” Tobias looked sullen. “I’m no scientist, anyway. It’s art that I live for. Kinotropy!” “Theatre work, eh? They say it’s in the blood.” “I spend every spare shilling on spinning-time,” the boy said. “We have a little club of enthusiasts. The Palladium rents its kinotrope to us, during the wee hours. You see quite amazing things, sometimes, along with a deal of amateur drivel.” “Fascinating,” Mallory said. “I hear that, er . . .” He had to struggle to recall the man’s name. “I hear that John Keats is quite good.” “He’s old,” the boy said, with a ruthless shrug. “You should see Sandys. Or Hughes. Or Etty! And there’s a clacker from Manchester whose work is quite splendid — Michael Radley. I saw a show of his here in London, last winter. A lecture tour, with an American.” “Kinotrope lectures can be very improving.” “Oh, the speaker was a crooked Yankee politician. If I had my way, they’d throw the speaker out entirely, and run silent pictures.” Mallory let the conversation lapse. Tobias squirmed a bit, wanting to speak again and not quite daring to take that liberty, and then the bell rang. The boy was up like a shot, with a scratchy skid of his worthless shoes, and back with another set of fan-fold paper. “Red-heads,” he said, and smiled sheepishly. Mallory grunted. He studied the women with close attention. They were fallen women, ruined women, with the sodden look of fall and ruin marked indelibly in the little black picture-bits of their printed femininity. Unlike the men, the female faces somehow leapt to life for Mallory. Here a round-faced Cockney creature, with a look more savage than a Cheyenne squaw. There a sweet-eyed Irish girl whose lantern jaw had surely embittered her life. There a street-walker with rat’s-nest hair and the blear of gin. There, defiance; here, tight-lipped insolence; there, a frozen cajoling look from an Englishwoman with her nape pinched for too long in the daguerreotype’s neck-brace. The eyes, with their calculated plea of injured innocence, held him with a shock of recognition. Mallory tapped the paper, looking up. “Here she is!” Tobias started. “That’s rum, sir! Let me take that number.” He punched the citizen-number into a fresh card with a small mahogany switch-press, then fed the card through the wall-tray again. He carefully emptied the bits of punched-out paper into a hinge-topped basket. “This will tell me all about her, will it?” Mallory said. He reached inside his jacket for his notebook. “Mostly, sir. A printed summary.” “And may I take these documents away with me for study?” “No, sir, strictly speaking, as you’re not an officer of the law . . . ” Tobias lowered his voice. “Truth to tell, sir, you could pay a common magistrate, or even his clerk, and have this intelligence for a few shillings, under the rose. Once you’ve someone’s number, the rest is simple enough. It’s a common clacker trick, to read the Engine-files on someone of the criminal class — they call it ‘pulling his string,’ or being ‘up on a cake.’ ” Mallory found this news of remarkable interest. “Suppose I asked for my own file?” he said. “Well, sir, you’re a gentleman, not a criminal. You’re not in the common police-files. Your magistrates, and court-clerks and such, would have to fill out forms, and show good cause for the search. Which we don’t grant easily.” “Legal protocols, eh?” Mallory said. “No, sir, it’s no law that stops us, but the simple trouble of it. Such a search consumes Engine-time and money, and we’re always over budget in both. But if an M.R made that request, or a Lordship . . .” “Suppose I had a good friend here in the Bureau,” Mallory said. “Someone who admired me for my generous ways.” Tobias looked reluctant, and a bit coy. “It ain’t a simple matter, sir. Every spinning-run is registered, and each request must have a sponsor. What we did today is done in Mr. Wakefield’s name, so there’ll be no trouble in that. But your friend would have to forge some sponsor’s name, and run the risk of that imposture. It is fraud, sir. An Engine-fraud, like credit-theft or stock-fraud, and punished just the same, when it’s found out.” “Very enlightening,” Mallory said. “I’ve found that one always profits by talking to a technical man who truly knows his business. Let me give you my card.” Mallory extracted one of his Maull & Polyblank cartes-de-visite from his pocket-book. Folding a five-pound note, he pinched it against the back of his card and passed it over. It was a handsome sum. A deliberate investment. Tobias dug about beneath his apron, found a greasy leather wallet, stuffed in Mallory’s card and money, and extracted a dog-eared bit of shiny pasteboard. J. J. TOBIAS, ESQ. , the card said, in grotesquely elaborate Engine-Gothic. KINOTROPY, AND THEATRE COLLECTIBLES. There was a Whitechapel address. “Never mind that telegraph number at the bottom,” Tobias told him. “I had to stop renting it.” “Have you any interest in French kinotropy, Mr. Tobias?” Mallory said. “Oh, yes, sir,” nodded Tobias. “Some lovely material is coming out of Montmartre these days.” “I understand the best French ordinateurs employ a special gauge of card.” “The Napoleon gauge,” Tobias said readily. “Smaller cards of an artificial substance, which move very swiftly in the compilers. That speed is quite handy in kino-work.” “Do you know where a fellow might rent one of these French compilers, here in London?” “To translate data from French cards, sir?” “Yes,” Mallory said, feigning an only casual interest. “I expect to receive some data from a French colleague, involving a scientific controversy — rather abstruse, but still a matter of some scholarly confidentiality. I prefer to examine it privately, at my own convenience.” “Yes, sir,” Tobias said. “That is to say, I do know a fellow with a French compiler, and he’d let you do whatever you like with it, if the pay were right. Last year, there was quite a mode in London clacking-circles for the French standard. But sentiment has turned quite against it, what with the troubles of the Grand Napoleon.” “Really,” Mallory said. Tobias nodded, delighted to show his authority. “I believe it’s felt now, sir, that the French were far ahead of themselves with their vast Napoleon project, and made something of a technical misstep!” Mallory stroked his beard. “That wouldn’t be British professional envy talking, I hope.” “Not at all, sir! It’s common knowledge that the Grand Napoleon suffered some dire mishap early this year,” Tobias assured him, “and the great Engine has never spun quite properly since.” He lowered his voice. “Some claim sabotage! Do you know that French term, sabotage” Comes from ‘sabots,’ the wooden shoes worn by French workers. They can kick an Engine half off its blocks!” Tobias grinned at this prospect, with a glee that rather disquieted Mallory. “The French have Luddite troubles of a sort, you see, sir, much as we once did, years ago!” Two short notes were sounded on a steam-whistle, reverberating through the white-washed ceiling. The two studious gentlemen, who had been joined by an equally studious third, now closed their albums and left. The bell rang once more, summoning Tobias to the wall-tray. The boy rose slowly, straightened a chair, wandered down the length of the table, examined the albums for nonexistent dust, and shelved them. “I think that’s our answer waiting,” Mallory said. Tobias nodded shortly, his back to Mallory. “Very likely, sir, but I’m on overtime, see. Those two blasts on the horn . . . ” Mallory rose impatiently and strode to the tray. “No, no,” Tobias yelped, “not without gloves! Pray let me do it!” “Gloves, indeed! Who’s to know?” “Criminal Anthropometry, that’s who! This is their room, and nothing they hate worse than the smudges from bare fingers!” Tobias turned with a sheaf of documents. “Well, sir, our suspect is one Florence Bartlett, nee Russell, late of Liverpool . . . ” “Thank you, Tobias,” Mallory said, creasing the sheaf of fan-fold so as to slip it more easily into his Ada-Checkered waistcoat. “I do appreciate your help.”