“Er, sorry about that,” Lewis giggled in embarrassment. “I’m a little jumpy today. What are you looking for, Mr.—?”
“I have to use a terminal,” repeated his visitor in a drippy little voice.
Lewis walked out into the main reading room and pointed to the closest bank of terminals. “Here you are. Please let me know if you need any—” But the visitor had already marched past him, sat down, and begun to type away with blinding speed. Lewis retreated behind the counter gladly enough.
“I’ll just continue my research, then, shall I?” he said, for no reason he could think of. The visitor ignored him. The rattling of keys in the echoing room sounded like a hailstorm.
Lewis sat down again, attempting to return his attention to the adventures of Commander Bell-Fairfax. What part of a boat was a gunwale anyway? And should it be cane instead of bamboo Edward cut for the poles? Mendoza could have told him . . .
He was accessing internal datafiles for his answers when the pattering of keys stopped. Lewis felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and turned in his chair to see the visitor advancing on him. What was so familiar about the creature?
“That terminal doesn’t work,” said the man.
“Oh, dear,” Lewis said. “What are you trying to locate? Perhaps I can—”
“I need to call home,” said the man, staring at him.
“Oh, I see, you need a public terminal,” Lewis said. “I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding. None of these are linked to a public line, I’m afraid. They’re for accessing information in the archives.”
“Oh,” said the visitor.
“Yes,” said Lewis.
“Got any Nasowipes?”
Lewis pulled out a handful of tissues and thrust them at the visitor, who accepted them without a word, turned, and went back into the reading room. Lewis leaned over the counter, staring after him.
“But don’t you want to—?” The visitor gave no sign of hearing him. Lewis shrugged and went back to his Buke. After a moment of staring at the last line, wherein Commander Bell-Fairfax had just rescued a frantic British tar who’d fallen into leech-infested water, Lewis adjusted his chair and console pullout so he was no longer sitting with his back to the reading room.
“Please, Commander, get ’em off me!” begged Johnson desperately.
“Courage, man.” Coolly, Edward lit up a long cheroot. “This is likely to be a bit unpleasant. Close your eyes.” The other sailors looked on in horror as Edward, having produced a red and glowing ember on the end of his cigar, reached down with his fine hand and applied it carefully to the horrible
“Got any paper clips?” the visitor asked, appearing at Lewis’s elbow like a ghost. Lewis restrained himself from levitating again and groped in a pigeonhole of the desk. He found a handful of paper clips and offered them to the man.
The man took them, turned, and headed back to the reading room. Lewis looked after him, wiping his hand on his coat lapel unconsciously. The man’s hand had been long, thin, and clammy.
Lewis revised:
applied it carefully to the disgusting
“Any magnedots?” asked the visitor. Lewis yanked open the drawer where he kept file labels and fished out a strip of magnedots for him. The visitor took them without a word and trudged away. Lewis sat jittering a moment before he resumed:
applied it carefully to the loathsome, blood-engorged
The street door was opening. Two mortals came hurriedly toward him, a man and a woman, passing through the inner door. They wore uniforms and were radiating alarm.
“Excuse me, please,” said the young woman. “We’re looking for a little man.”
“Ah,” said Lewis.
“We’re from the Neasden Adult Residential Facility,” said her companion. “We were taking our guests on an outing to the library, and Mr. Fancod seems to have wandered off. He’s about five feet tall—”
“Mr. Fancod!” exclaimed the young woman, catching sight of the visitor through the reading room arch. “How clever of you to find your way in here. Come along now, dear, your friends are very worried about you.” She rushed into the reading room, closely followed by her associate.
“I have to call home,” said Mr. Fancod.
“Oh, but we’re going home, Mr. Fancod,” the man assured him.
“I’m not finished yet.”
“Well, I’m afraid we really must ask you to come along anyhow . . .”
“Ask the cyborg if he has any raisins.”
Cyborg? Lewis sat perfectly still, heart pounding. He heard the male attendant stifling a chuckle. “Now then, Mr. Fancod, I think it’s time you stopped having fun with us. If you’ll come along now, we’ll stop at Prashant’s, and you can buy more raisins.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Fancod, and Lewis heard them coming out of the reading room. He glanced up cautiously. The two mortals were making apologetic faces at him. Mr. Fancod, following them obediently, had taken out his orange and was peeling it as they went along,
staring at it in utter absorption. He dropped pieces of peel on the floor as he walked.
Gnawing on his lower lip, Lewis watched them go. He looked down at his Buke and typed in:
applied it carefully to one of the loathsome, blood-engorged??????
He saved the document and closed the Buke. Rising, he got a tissue and carefully collected all the discarded orange peel. He tossed it in the dustbin. Wiping his hands, he ventured into the reading room to see if all was well.
It wasn’t.
All the consoles, except the nearest one, bore a cheery greeting above the logo and menu for the London Metropolitan Library. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was the black screen on the nearest console, crossed from top to bottom in something that resembled binary code but wasn’t quite. Lewis approached it reluctantly and stood looking down at the screen. He reached out at arm’s length and gave the command key a tentative tap.
The inexplicable code went away and was replaced by a menu. It said:
DR. ZEUS COMMUNICATION REQUEST
I
NITIALIZE
I
NITIAL REPLY
M
EMO
D
EPARTMENT
M
ETHODICAL
L
EFT MODE
E
NTER PERSONAL NOW:
Lewis looked over his shoulder and looked back at the screen. He leaned forward and examined the console. It was a moment before he found the small panel that had been broken out at one side, and the little alteration sticking out of it, made of paper clips and magnedots.
He looked around the room once more before crawling quickly underneath the seat recess to unplug the console. He found an
OUT OF ORDER
sign and spread it across the screen before scurrying back to his desk.
Opening his Buke again, he linked up with the Greater London Communication Listings and entered a search request for the name
FANCOD
.
There was only one. Thurwood Fancod, care of Neasden Adult Residential Facility. Registered challenged adult. Employed: Self-Reliance In-Home Data Entry Program. Sponsor: Jovian Integrated Systems.
Jovian Integrated Systems was one of the holding companies for Dr. Zeus Incorporated.
Lewis leaned back. “Oh dear,” he murmured. He exited the listings and swiveled in his chair, this way and that like a compass needle seeking true north. He closed his eyes to concentrate more deeply and at last found the frequency he sought.
Xenophon? Literature Specialist Lewis requesting reception
.
Xenophon receiving
, came the reply.
There seems to have been a security breach of some kind. My cover’s been compromised
.
Specify
.
A mortal named Thurwood Fancod has access to material quite a bit beyond my need to know
.
Xenophon swore electronically.
Details?
He identified me as a cyborg in front of two other mortals. They didn’t take him seriously, but he knew. And . . . he modified one of the library terminals to hack into a Dr. Zeus database. Seems to have been going after something classified
.
Damn!
Should I run?
Yes, you’d better. We’ll send a team over right away to confiscate the modified unit and replace it. I suppose somebody had better deal with Fancod, too. Where can we reach you?
Lewis gave him a set of coordinates.
Very good. Your new assignment and paperwork will be forwarded to you at that address on 7 March. Vale, Lewis
.
Vale
.
Sighing, Lewis got up and slipped his Buke into its case. He made a quick search through his desk drawers for any personal items he might want. There were none. He pulled on his coat, stowed the Buke case in an inner pocket, and took one last wistful look at his name in its gold lettering before walking out.
In the morning someone with unquestionable credentials as his next of kin would tearfully notify the library of an accident, or sudden death, or some terrible emergency. Shortly thereafter a person with splendid references would be perfectly positioned for promotion to the position of chief curator, and the space Lewis March had left in the world would vanish like a footprint in sand. It was standard operating procedure for a security breach, and he’d been warned that this sort of thing might begin to occur more frequently as he got closer to the Company’s end of time.
He caught an antigravity transport at the corner and rode the short distance to his house, where he packed a suitcase with his shaving bag and a change of clothes. Just before closing it, he went to a cabinet and took out a little bubblewrap package containing the old daguerreotype of Edward, nesting it between two shirts.
Lewis carried his suitcase down to the front hall and paused again, looking around at the comfortable rooms, the entertainment center, the furniture, the paintings. Within the next six hours there would be Company techs in here loading everything into a van. This time tomorrow the place would be spotless, silent, and empty, awaiting a rental agent’s powers of description. It had been nice while it lasted.
He put that out of his mind as he stepped outside, locked the door behind him, and walked away. Immortals say a lot of good-byes.
It wasn’t until Lewis was on the LPA transport bucketing along to Newhaven that he groaned and smacked his forehead. “The cheroot!”
he said out loud. “How would he light the damned thing?” A mortal woman looked across at him in affronted silence. She wasn’t affronted enough to go inform a Public Safety Monitor that there was a man talking to himself on the transport, however, so Lewis made it to the Dieppe ferry without incident.
Once on board, he went quickly up to the deserted upper deck and found himself a cozy seat near the tea station, a corner booth with a table. There he wedged his suitcase in securely, took out his Buke, and within minutes was lost in the problem of how to light a cigar in a longboat in a swamp on the Guinea Coast in 1845.
He had concluded that it really wouldn’t be all that improbable for Edward to be carrying sulfur friction matches (might even have had one of the new boxes with a safety striking surface), when two men clambered unsteadily onto the upper deck and sat down opposite the tea station.
Lewis frowned down at his last paragraph. Leeches.
Loathsome
and
blood-engorged
were a little overripe. So was
slimy
. What about . . .
vile gray creatures?
But leeches were black, not gray, weren’t they? Lewis sat back to think. Slugs were gray, and so were—he raised his eyes to scan the mortals who sat across from him. His mouth fell open in surprise.
They got up abruptly and came and sat on either side of him.
“Don’t shout,” said one of them.
“No,” said the other one.
Lewis stared from one to the other. “I beg your pardon?” he said at last.
“No use to beg,” the first speaker told him.
They were very odd looking mortals. White suits in England? In March? And very large black sunglasses, and fairly stupid hats: one wore a knitted ski hat, the other a shapeless canvas porkpie. They were small and spindly enough to make Lewis seem like a gorilla by comparison. Both had drippy little voices, just like Mr. Fancod’s.
They were quite the most feeble and ridiculous things Lewis had
seen in a long while, even including Mr. Fancod. Nevertheless, he felt a sudden urge to leap over the side and swim back to Newhaven.
Getting a grip on his nerves, Lewis affected a certain composure as he saved and closed his novel once again.
“Would you mind telling me who you fellows are?” he said.
“Yes,” said the man in the ski hat.
Lewis returned his Buke to its case, scanning them more closely.
“You’re carrying weapons, aren’t you?” he said. They started.
“Yes,” agreed the one in the ski hat.
“No,” said the one in the porkpie.
“No,” the one in the ski hat corrected himself.
Lewis pursed his lips. “I see. But you were threatening me, weren’t you? And if you’re not carrying weapons, how do you propose to make your threats good?”
The two men looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then they nodded and each drew from within his coat a pistol and pointed it at Lewis.
“We have weapons,” admitted the one in the porkpie.
Lewis looked at the pistols. They appeared to be modern disrupters but were not of any design he’d ever seen. All he could determine, on scanning them, was that they contained circuitry whose purpose seemed to be generating a wave field of some kind.
He folded his hands on the table and thought very carefully about the situation in which he found himself.
No danger at all, on the face of it. He might simply wink out from between the two little men, run down into the main lounge, and alert the Public Safety Monitor that there were lunatics with weapons on board. Of course, then there would be a scene, which was not something a running operative particularly wanted. No way to avoid being asked to make a statement to the authorities, and perhaps to the press, either of which would be in direct violation of Company policy as regarded quiet exits.
He could wrest the weapons away and throw them overboard,
which seemed like a good idea actually, though Lewis disliked hurting mortals. These particular mortals looked as though they might snap like toothpicks if he tried anything the least bit forceful, and that would cause a scene as well.