In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (13 page)

But that note! The cheery briskness of it—so like him, and so unlike my mood.
Thought he could help
. With what, friend B.? For a moment the exception I had made for Budge broke down, and I included him in my resentment against the well-funded world of the (as they like to say) hard sciences. I tossed the wad of paper in a corner of my office, and strode angrily out of doors.

—They’re in what? Astronomy? Agronomy you say, oh dear. Were their shoes clean? They won’t start tilling up the back yard, will they? What? Nematodes? They’re little worms, I think. Well I don’t think worms are preferable to animals, no.

I could hear Budge sigh, and then silence, cut through by a tiny insect’s voice. When it was still at last Budge spoke again.

—Fly out? I don’t think—Yes, you’re right, I will be the one to complain if it’s a sty. The schools? Oh, I’d forgotten, they’re coming too, aren’t they. We could board—You spoke with them about it? And they? Oh. Like that. My idea? Well I suppose you’re right it was.

Another sigh. At my ear I heard impatient whispering, but I lingered at the door, listening, as if the sounds coming through the door were smells and I was hungry.

—Dear? I’m terribly sorry to have left you with all this. I can see what a bother. Well I’m done now, you know. Yes, just this morning, yes, and you should see! You’d like that? Yes, I can, but what I wanted to say was I can take all this household-packing—Yes, all of it, of course. Tonight? Oh, that would be lovely, yes. I’ll make the reservations. Celebrate your emancipation, yes. And my success, all right if you insist. Well then: until this evening?

A brief, intimate kiss against the receiver, and then the sound of the one kissed being cradled. Another sigh. I knocked.

—What? What?

Furniture moved, journals falling slapped the floor, and then the door opened wide. Budge was in the doorway waving his limbs, beside himself with anxious hospitality.

—Oh,——, it’s you, so glad you could come I’m terribly sorry I heard it on the grapevine don’t you know, no don’t sit over there it will fall over sit here, yes, I think it’s a terrible thing but don’t get excited I happened to call the Foundation this morning to clear something up and I asked, naturally, after you, assuming you had one too, just wanted to spread the jolly around, you know, and imagine my surprise. I was quite cool with him, but I gather there’s no appeal, nothing to do until next year, hmm? anyhow I say are you all right?

A cold blush had flowed up out of my chest as I sat down. For a moment, Budge vanished in a gray, humming haze. Words may have come out of my mouth, something about the stairs.

—Those infernal elevators again. Stuck on the sixteenth floor I don’t doubt. Always carting something in or out up in plasma physics, though why they need both at once I can’t understand. Keeps you fit, though, climbing up and down, don’t you think?

He waved his arms and inhaled.—Feeling better?

I leaned back, feeling the resentment that had brought me in evaporate, diffusing into that chill sweat fuming off my scalp. I waved a deprecatory hand.

—Good. He bounced up from his chair again, caromed off the corners of the room.—I’m so glad you made it over, you see. I’d almost forgotten. Up to here—he sliced a palm-edge across his neck—with packing and such.

He ricocheted to a storage cabinet, drummed resonantly within, emerged trailing wires like mummy-cloths.

—Oh yes of course you, you’re the lucky one, none of this domestic clutter, just jetting off to the Nile whenever—He stopped, clapping a hand over his mouth.—Oh dear fellow I’m sorry of course you can’t. I mean you think you can’t now, don’t you?

His voice dropped to a whisper.—But that’s what I want to talk to you about.

With an absurd pantomime of caution he eased his short, round form over to the door. Closing it softly, turning his back against it, arms spread from jamb to jamb, he leaned out toward me, and hissed,—Mum’s the word. Eh?

I must have goggled at him, apparently the correct response, for a look of satisfaction, turning his ordinarily pleasant face into something terribly reminiscent of a fed pig, spread upward from the discrete knob of his chin until his eyes half closed. He scampered back to his desk, spread a trough through the mounded printouts and journals, and funneled a conspiratorial gaze down its length.

—Your grant: What were you going to spend it on? What’s the expensive part? Eh?

Before I could think, he answered for me.

—Labor, eh? Equipment, eh?
Time
. All that digging around. And why?
Because you don’t know where to look
.

I drew back, wondering suddenly how much he knew: with Nur-Mar’s scroll, I did know where to look—within five miles or so. With proper funding, with luck, I might have found the site within four seasons.

—But what if you knew?

His face was lost in darkness, his arms waving around a pulsing void.

—What if you
knew,
I say? Knew
exactly
.

I may have murmured something weakly. I felt weak.

—
Precisely
. Budge surged on, caught up in the glory of his idea.—Where. To. Look. I’ve read your work. There’s always an entrance passage, yes? With a door, heaped up with rubble, just a few meters below the surface. Right?

I nodded.

—And what if you could point at a spot in the ground, and tell your man,—There: right there. You dig down until you strike a door, and then let me know. Eh? And it was really there? No guessing? You just go back to your tent and fan yourself while they dig a simple little pit. Do it yourself, if you had to. None of that trenching this way and that, all that blind rooting about. Eh? What then? How much will your expedition cost then?

I didn’t believe a word of it—he was babbling from the abysmal depths of ignorance, I knew—but even so I was terribly excited. What would such an expedition cost? If I could find the entrance right away? I could hire a single fellah for a month for less than the cost of a night in Cairo.

And once I was in?

—Oh, I know, once you’re in you’ll need equipment—I know you you fox, you’re on to something big I can tell—once you’re in you’ll need your local bearers, trucks, all that preservation gear.

He waved a hand airily toward the door.—But that’s the beauty of it, don’t you see? Once you need all that, the bloody foundations will be falling all over each other with their money. Hah! Let ’em! You know what we can tell them: Put it where the sun don’t shine! Eh?

The vision of it opened up before me then, exactly as if the door had rolled away: not prized down stone by stone, but hinged, noiselessly opening for me—for me alone. Budge was right: if I only knew where to start, I wouldn’t need the elaborate support an exploratory dig requires. But he was wrong as well. Once I was in that door, I would need no help from anyone, ever again. Let the trash and glitter go to ruin. I would be—

I would be a damned fool, I realized, to go on thinking this way. I could no more tell the exact location of the entrance than I could speak the name of the King.

—Ah, I know. You’re thinking old Budge has dropped a bearing somewhere, am I right? Fused my logic circuits, yes? Ho ho, my friend, just you wait and see.

He straightened, and glanced around the cramped and cluttered office.

—But remember, he hissed.—Mum’s the word.

While the nurse’s back was turned, I snatched the folder, vanished through the door. An empty corridor; an elevator at my elbow gaped, the doors quivered and I leapt in. Dim in brushed chrome, my reflection hunched over a brown square of manila. The thing itself was in my hands. Pink carbon sheets, a sheaf of gray transparencies: I recoiled.

What had I been thinking of? Did I really think that doing away with the evidence would help me now? And if I was caught, what better way to make it public—to spread it far beyond my doctor’s office? Had he returned yet, and found me missing? Had he summoned the police?

The elevator halted: I stepped out, alone in a long hallway. Doors opened on blank corridors; down one hall they all stood open, and in each a small child lay inside a bird-cage, suspended above the floor. At the end I faced a wall of glass, and beyond it cribs and incubators, the dreaming reach of small arms, of feet thrust out falling slowly down.

My anxiety returned. The nurse had discovered the theft; police were seeking me at this moment. I turned, walking quickly, blindly down inconclusive corridors, the envelope clutched at my chest. At a door labeled
NECROPSY
I shied away, clattered down a flight of stairs (the elevators were a trap), and out into bedlam.

Three ambulances crowding the entrance, hatches open and disgorging three clusters of pale green attendants, flash of chrome and white, an arm asplay, a shocking blot of red. As I watched, my back against the door through which I had emerged, more figures in green converged on each sprawling form until the red was obscured entirely, and each cluster started moving, like a swarm of bees deciding, of a moment, to fly in my direction.

And in the center of the nearest swarm, pale and deathly still, I saw the face of Budge.