Thanks
.
Lewis stepped into the kitchen and opened Joseph’s refrigerator. There was more Theobromos, which he couldn’t bear to look at. There were several six-packs of Anchor Steam beer. There was a loaf of Roman Meal bread and a package of unidentifiable sliced delicatessen product. Lewis groaned and opened the freezer. Ah! Ten boxes of frozen fettuccine Alfredo. He slid out the whole stack, opened them all, and put them in the microwave. Then he went to take a shower, uttering another silent prayer of thanks to Apollo, lord of civilized amenities.
Only after he’d eaten all the fettuccine did he gather up the pizza boxes and liter bottles and little black plastic dishes and fill a trash bag, which he set carefully beside Joseph’s front door. He found an ironing board and was pressing his suit when he heard the Lexus pull into the carport.
A moment later Joseph came across the gangplank and let himself in, rather awkwardly because he was carrying a large cardboard box.
“I got two dozen doughnuts,” he said, offering it. “I think there’s a couple left. I meant to leave more. Sorry.”
“Oh, no, thank you, you needn’t have. I ate all your fettuccine Alfredo.”
“Okay then,” said Joseph, and sat down to eat the remaining doughnuts. No Armani suit today; he was wearing a brilliant Hawaiian shirt over black Levis, and black high-top sneakers. “I phoned in sick,” he explained through a mouthful of doughnut, taking in Lewis’s stare. “We need to talk to somebody today. Do you have to get back anytime soon?”
“Not immediately, no.” Lewis unplugged the iron and pulled on his pants. “With whom do we need to talk?”
“I did some checking,” Joseph said, licking glazed sugar from his fingers, “on the operatives who were posted at Cahuenga Pass with Mendoza. One of them is still in California. Right here in Marin County, in fact.”
“That’s convenient.” Lewis tied his tie carefully.
“It gets better. It’s the ornithologist. The kid who was there with her when she went AWOL. The one who testified. Who actually saw the Englishman.” Joseph’s eyes were black and shiny as coal this morning, his gaze hard and direct. “So. We have another six hours before the effect of the helmet wears off and we start transmitting data to the Company again. Here’s what we do. We go see this guy right now, somehow or other we get him to put on the helmet and walk through Stonehenge, and then we ask him a few questions. Okay?”
“Nunc aut nunquam,”
said Lewis grimly, slipping on his coat.
“You said it, kiddo.” Joseph picked up his car keys and rose to his feet.
They took Highway
I
north, winding along coastline and cutting over to Tomales Bay. In the late twentieth century this was all pastoral land, dairy pastures on sea-facing hills, with redwoods along the creeks and wild rose and blackberry bramble thick beside the road. Here and there an isolated farmhouse sat back in the shadows
under its grove of laurel trees, unchanged in a hundred years except for a satellite dish for television reception.
At last there was a steel-framed gate across a dirt road on their left, with a posted sign. Joseph slowed and stopped as they came abreast of it. It read:
AUDUBON SANCTUARY, TOMALES BAY
RESTRICTED ENTRY
“Good place for an ornithologist,” said Lewis.
“Nice and isolated, too.” Joseph backed up and made a sharp turn across the highway, pulling up to the gate. There was a little communications box with a push button at one side. He got out and pressed the button. A moment later a voice responded, tinny and distorted by the weathered speaker.
“Are you here to see the smews?”
“Uh—” Joseph and Lewis exchanged a look.
“Or are you here to see the Hitchcock set?” the voice went on, in a slightly annoyed tone.
“Yeah, actually,” Joseph said.
“I have to tell you, you’re really missing an opportunity if you don’t see the smews while they’re here.”
“Ornithologist Grade Two Juan Bautista?”
“Oh.” The voice altered completely. “I’m sorry. Who’s that?”
“Facilitator Joseph and Literature Specialist Lewis.”
“Okay.” There was a loud buzz and click as the gate unlocked. “Please close up again after you come through.”
Once through the gate, they followed the road across a meadow and down the hill toward the bay. It led to a promontory where a frame house sat, shaded by three enormous cypress trees, looking out on a little boat dock. The location seemed eerily familiar.
“Alfred
Hitchcock,” said Joseph abruptly, slapping his forehead. “It’s the house from
The Birds!”
“Well, no wonder we drove up here to see it,” said Lewis in delight.
“Perfect,” Joseph growled, pulling up to the garage from which Rod, Tippi, Jessica, and Veronica made their final desperate escape.
As they approached the house, they heard what appeared to be a
violent argument going on between a child and an adult, though it ceased abruptly when Lewis knocked. The door opened, and an immortal stood there staring at them. He wore a khaki uniform with a plastic tag over the pocket that read
JOHN GREY EAGLE, SITE DOCENT
. His long hair, which had once been silver, was now dyed jet black and braided behind him.
“Hi,” he said. There was a violent flapping of wings from the room beyond, and a raven suddenly landed on his shoulder. He reached up swiftly and closed its beak between his thumb and forefinger.
“Whoa.” Joseph stepped back, laughing. “Is that one of the cast members still hanging around?”
“No,” said the man with a trace of sullenness. “This is just Raven. You guys understand that birds never, ever really behave that way, right? It was just a horror movie. Ravens never hurt mortals, and neither do seagulls, for that matter.”
“Well, sure, but it’s still a great movie.” Joseph thrust out his hand. “Hi. I’m Joseph and this is Lewis. We came to see the set, but—say, what
is
a smew, anyway?”
“I’m Juan Bautista.
Mergellus albellus, it’s
a Eurasian merganser, and they’re only accidental here, but we have a mated pair! Do you have any idea how rare that is?” said Juan Bautista, shaking hands.
“Amazing,” said Joseph. “So. Can we see the house?”
“All right,” sighed Juan Bautista, stepping back from the door. Then he stopped, staring at Joseph. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“Gee, I suppose it’s possible. I get around a lot,” said Joseph. “Come on, I want to see the fireplace where the sparrows attacked.”
There wasn’t really much to see, since no attempt had been made to reproduce any of the film’s furnishings. Juan showed them through the rooms anyway and recited a few film facts for their edification: that Hitchcock had thrown a lot of innocent helpless birds at Tippi
Hedren, and that the schoolhouse where the ravens massed for their completely out-of-character attack was now a private residence and thought to be haunted, though not by Suzanne Pleshette. The raven clacked its beak derisively.
“Well, isn’t that just fascinating,” said Lewis.
“Want to go see the smews now?”
“Great,” said Joseph.
A smew looked like a fat little black-and-white duck with a crest, though Juan Bautista insisted a merganser wasn’t a duck. They admired one paddling about on a reedy backwater for a few minutes, then started back to the house.
“I guess you don’t get into the city much,” said Joseph as they crossed the lawn.
“Me? No. What do you guys do?”
“Lewis here works for the studios in Hollywood—” Juan Bautista turned to stare at him, impressed. “Dealing in rare research stuff and old scripts.”
“I was stationed in Hollywood once,” said Juan Bautista. “It wasn’t there yet, though, so I never got to see any movie stars.”
“Yeah, that’s life in the service, isn’t it?” Joseph shook his head ruefully. “I don’t see many in my line of work, either. I work for—Say, I’ve just remembered, I have that helmet in the car!”
“That’s right, you do,” said Lewis. “Let’s show him.”
Juan Bautista looked from one to the other. “What?”
“You’ll love this. It’s
so
cool.” Joseph ran to the Lexus and popped the trunk.
“He was showing me only yesterday,” Lewis told Juan Bautista. “No end of fun, virtual reality stuff.”
Juan Bautista’s eyes lit up. “The graphics are still pretty crappy, but I understand they’re getting better.”
“Wait’ll you see this.” Joseph chortled, digging the white crate out of the trunk. “Come on, let’s take it in the house. It’s a prototype. You can try it out.”
“You work for
those
guys?” Juan Bautista recognized the logo on the box. “Wow.”
“Yeah, but I’m never involved in the movies themselves.” Joseph pushed the door open and set the box down. “Right now I’m a salesman for their cybernetic entertainment division. There are certain developments Dr. Zeus wants monitored. You know.” He lifted out the helmet. “Just sit down and get comfortable.”
“Okay.” Juan Bautista handed the raven off to a perch—it gronked and protested—and took a seat on his couch. Joseph stepped close and placed the helmet carefully on Juan Bautista’s head. Lewis winced and retreated a few paces. The raven cocked its head to look at him and looked back at Juan Bautista uneasily.
“Here we go!” Joseph took a small control out of his pocket and inserted a minidisc. “This is the sampler. My favorite’s the walk through Stonehenge, it’s the first one on the program. Check it out.” He thumbed the control and stepped well away from the couch. The raven ducked its head and began to flutter its wings, crying.
“Oh, shut up, bird. Hey, this is really something,” said Juan Bautista muffledly. “It’s a
lot
better than the other stuff I—ow!”
He began to fumble with the helmet. The raven flew off its perch and went straight for Joseph’s eyes, screaming, “Get it off him! Get it off him right now!”
Joseph dropped the control to defend himself and got a grip around the raven’s wings, trapping them. He held it out at arm’s length. Juan Bautista pushed off the helmet, panting. There was a moment of silence.
“Did that bird just talk?” asked Lewis at last.
“Uh—sure. Ravens can be taught to talk, you know,” said Juan Bautista, in a frantically reasonable voice. “Just like parrots. All the
Corvidae
are really intelligent.”
“Get it off him, get it off him right now,” said the raven rather lamely. “Polly wants a cracker, awk, awk, awk.”
“Nice try,” said Joseph, glaring at it. “Why don’t you do the nevermore bit next?”
“I hate that stupid poem,” said the raven. Juan Bautista groaned and slid down on the couch. “I’m sorry, Dad,” it added contritely.
Joseph grinned unpleasantly. Lewis was reminded that Joseph had worked for the Spanish Inquisition.
“Well, well,” he chuckled. “You’re not just any birdbrain, are you? Somebody’s done an augmentation job on you. Boy, that’s really illegal. The Company wouldn’t be at all happy if they found out. I wonder who could have done such a thing?”
“Dad didn’t do it!” shrieked the raven. “It was somebody else. Not Dad.”
“Shut
up
,” said Juan Bautista desperately.
“Oh, pal, have we ever got your ass in a sling,” Joseph said. “To say nothing of your bird in my hand. But, you know what? This is your lucky day. The Company won’t ever find out, because that helmet just shorted out your automatic datalink.”
“For a period of twenty-four hours,” Lewis added.
Juan Bautista looked from one to the other, then ran his self-diagnostic. “My God, it has,” he said after a moment. He scowled at Joseph. “Okay, what’s going on? Who are you guys? I’m sure I know you from somewhere.”
“Don’t worry. We just needed to ask you some questions in private, and the helmet was the only way to do it,” Lewis assured him.
“Let Raven go, and maybe I’ll talk to you,” Juan Bautista said.
“Okay, Raven, are you augmented enough to know what’ll happen to you if you go after me again?” Joseph asked her.
“I’ll be good,” the raven snarled. Juan Bautista put out his hand and she went to him, scurrying up his arm to busy herself with grooming his hair through the whole of the following conversation.
“Look, there’s no need for unpleasantness. We just want some information you might have about something that happened to a friend of ours,” said Lewis.
“You don’t tell anybody about this conversation,” said Joseph, pulling up a chair, “and we won’t tell anybody about your little friend. A deal? And if there are any inquiries about why you weren’t
transmitting for twenty-four hours, no problem.” Joseph held up his index finger. “We came here to see the Hitchcock set, got to talking, I persuaded you to try on the helmet, and it zapped you. You can tell it exactly as it happened. Then Lewis and I looked at each other and exclaimed, ‘My gosh, it must have been the helmet all along. It’s defective.’ I apologized, and we promised to take it apart tomorrow to see what’s wrong with it, which I’m going to anyway, so it’s not even a lie. Okay? That’s what you tell any security tech who comes to check on you. If they ask us, we’ll corroborate, and everybody’s happy.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a question, though?” Lewis stepped closer. “How did you manage to do the augmentation without being found out?”
Juan Bautista nodded in the direction of Tomales Bay. “The San Andreas Fault runs right along under there. Every time there’s any seismic activity at all, the electromagnetic disturbance shuts out transmissions for hours. I have a lot of time to myself, actually. The Company just ignores it, now, since there’s nothing they can do.”
“Neat,” said Joseph in awe. “For Christ’s sake don’t ever tell anybody else, though.”
“I’d heard rumors that storms will do it too,” said Lewis.
Juan Bautista nodded. “Bad electrical ones,” he said.
“It’s true,” Joseph admitted. “To let you in on a little Facilitator classified information. But you’re not supposed to know. So you don’t know, right, guys? And you’ll never speak or think about it again, after today.” He glanced at his chronometer. “After about fifteen hundred hours today. So let’s talk fast.”
“Indeed.” Lewis came and sat down gingerly on the couch, as far away as he could get from the raven. “Do you remember working with the Botanist Mendoza?”