Well, of course, he told himself. Everybody knows that. But what, he couldn’t help wondering, was it doing embossed on the bottom of a bottle, instead of the more usual 33cl please dispose of bottle tidily? And, anyway, strictly speaking, since the bottle was a cylinder topped by a sort of distorted cone, shouldn’t that be…?
But that wasn’t what it said; and Pieter’s letter had been quite categorical, do exactly what it says. In which case –
There was the stub of a pencil in his top pocket. Before he realised it, he had the back of the manila envelope on his knee and was jotting down figures. Of course, it simply didn’t work if you had 4-theta instead of 2. But just suppose for a moment that it did. After all, that was what Pieter had done all those years ago, when he’d marked the all-ballsed-up assignment. Yeah. Right. What if…?
He came to a dead end, and scowled at the gibberish he’d written on the envelope. For a moment there, a brief, fleeting moment, it had seemed as though he was on to something. But now the way ahead was blocked, as if (to take an example entirely at random) some fool had just blown up a mountain, and the whole lot had come tumbling down on to the freeway.
Just a moment, he thought. Not a cylinder topped by a cone; a cylinder topped by a distorted cone. He groped for the bottle, stared at it and lunged for the pencil. There was a slight but definite curve to the neck of the bottle; concave, just a little bit, and why the hell, when it really mattered, could he only remember pi to seventy-four decimal places?
Ten minutes later, he stopped and stared in horror at what he’d just written. He’d seen it before, not so very long ago; on the screen of a latest-model LoganBerry, on a train.
The bomb.
Oh no, he told himself, not again. Blowing up a mountain had been bad enough. He was three, maybe four calculations away from arming an equation whose effects would make his previous boo-boo look like a trivial mishap, like laughing while drinking coffee. If he made the same mistake again, after Fate had gone to the trouble of dropping so many helpful hints (career trashed, wife gone, lost all his money et cetera), they’d be justified in keeping him in after class and making him write out I MUST NOT BLOW UP THE WORLD a hundred times. And yet –
Pieter had said, follow the instructions. If that included what was on the bottom of the bottle, not just the label, then he couldn’t see he had much of a choice. He frowned, trying to remember. Now he came to think of it, it had been Pieter who’d got him the job at the VVLHC. Or at least he’d recommended him highly for it, which was more or less the same thing. Could it possibly be that Pieter wanted him to blow things up? Unlikely. Not unless they needed to be blown up, for some obscure but entirely valid reason.
You are going to have a really amazingly good life, thanks to the bottle. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? Enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. He scratched his head, entirely unable to decide what to do. He thought about the girl on the train; so far he’d managed to blot that memory out of his mind, but that wasn’t possible any more, not now that he had the same bomb resting on his knee, recreated from scratch by himself. Was it possible, he wondered, that Pieter had more than one favourite student? One of only five in existence. That left four of the things unaccounted for. Oh boy.
The pencil was still in his hand. Anyone walking into the room right now would see it hovering in the air, like a wingless dragonfly. I could finish the maths, he told himself, that wouldn’t hurt. Just because I arm the bomb doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got to set it off. And maybe –
Maybe just one small, teeny-tiny controlled explosion, to get into this stupid bottle and find out just exactly what’s going on. Besides, he rationalised, the weird girl on the train suggested that he wasn’t the only one facing this dilemma; and the impression he’d got from her was that she wasn’t bothered at all about the possible risks to the fabric of the multiverse. So; if he didn’t do it, then she, or someone like her, would almost certainly get there first, and then where would we all be? Good question.
It’s a lot of bother to go to, though, just to get inside a bottle. Ah, but you don’t know what’s in there. Fair enough. Let’s find out.
There was a knock at the door. Moving faster than he’d have thought possible, he pocketed the pencil and the envelope, stuffed the bottle under his pillow and said, “Yes?”
The door opened and Call-me-Bill’s head craned round the side of it. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. “Settling in all right?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Room OK?”
“Fantastic.”
“Splendid.” There was a pause, as if he was searching his mind for more small talk to make. “Got the uniform?”
“Right here.” Theo pointed to the jacket and trousers lying on the bed. “I was just about to try them on.”
“Ah, fine.” Another hiatus. “Well, soon as you’re ready, why not wander down to the lobby and I’ll show you what to do? No rush,” he added quickly. “Take your time.”
“No, that’s fine, now would suit me perfectly.” He got the impression that he hadn’t given the response Call-me-Bill had wanted to hear. “If that’s all right with you.”
“Absolutely. Unless you’d rather have a snack or a shower or something.”
“No.”
“Right.”
“I’ll just get changed.”
“Sorry?”
“The uniform.”
“Ah.” Call-me-Bill looked a bit like a chess Grand Master who’s just lost in six moves to a nine-year-old. “Of course. See you downstairs in, what, ten minutes?”
“Fine.”
The bottle, he was pleased to discover, sat quite happily in the pocket of the uniform jacket without bulging visibly. The pink powder compact (he’d forgotten all about that) went in the inside pocket, along with Pieter’s letter and the magnifying glass. That was that. He set off down the stairs, thinking hard.
Call-me-Bill had been Pieter’s friend; cling on to that thought, because otherwise he was profoundly creepy. There was no doubt at all in Theo’s mind that his room would be meticulously searched while he was downstairs – by Matasuntha, presumably, since she was the only other living creature he’d seen in the place, and she’d definitely been interested in the bottle. But Call-me-Bill had seemed reluctant for him to leave the room, implying that he knew the search would take place and didn’t want it to happen, but was powerless to prevent it. Crazy. But no problem. They could search all they liked, since there was nothing to find. He thought about the vanishing girl on the train, and the equations on her LoganBerry that were practically identical to the ones he’d come up with working through from the formula on the bottom of the bottle. More bottles like it out there somewhere. But the bottle contained nothing but stale air.
“Here are the telephones,” Call-me-Bill said, and he pointed at them helpfully. “If someone calls up, answer them.”
“Right.” Theo nodded. “Um, what shall I say?”
A slight pause. “Sorry, but we’re fully booked till further notice. And after that, we’ll be closed for redecoration.”
“Got that.” Theo tried not to ask the next question, but failed. “Is that right, though? Matasuntha said we only had two guests.”
Call-me-Bill shuddered slightly. “That’s right.”
“And we’re fully booked.”
“Oh yes.”
And then he was alone again, sitting in a very comfortable chair in the deserted lobby. He moved the phones so that they were exactly square to the corners of the desk. He opened the drawers and found two pencils and a pencil sharpener. He sharpened the pencils. He also found a state-of-the-art Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits XZP6000 calculator, the kind they’d wished they’d been able to afford for standard issue at the VVLHC, a protractor, an ivory slide rule, two rusty iron keys and a set of log tables. He put them all back where he’d found them and tried playing with the computer, which turned out to consist of a monitor and a CPU but no keyboard. Easy mistake to make, he told himself; maybe they’d got it cheap for that reason.
The envelope, with his unfinished calculations on the back, felt alive inside his jacket, as if he’d got a bird beating its wings in his inside pocket. Absolutely nothing else to do.
Theo was one of those people for whom prolonged inactivity is the worst thing that can possibly happen, with the possible exception of the Earth colliding with a very large asteroid. He knew his limitations. He could stick ten minutes of doing nothing, if he absolutely had to. After twelve minutes, he started scratching his chin or rubbing the palm of his hand with his thumb. Thirteen minutes, and the most luxuriously comfortable chair ever made felt like a medieval torture chamber. Fourteen minutes, and he’d be twitching all over, shuffling his feet, squirming in his chair. Fifteen minutes; unless there was something productive he could do, like count the number of bricks in a wall, he was ready to kill someone.
He held out for twenty minutes. Then he pulled out the envelope, took one of the newly sharpened pencils, and got to work.
He didn’t need the slide rule, the log tables or the calculator. The numbers and symbols just seemed to move gracefully to their allotted places, like actors at a dress rehearsal. When the calculation had arrived at its inevitable conclusion, he leaned back in the chair, as though he was trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the envelope, and stared at it. Here we go, he thought.
Had Pieter, at some point before his death, found himself staring at the same neat, slender line of characters? Presumably he had; the letter implied that he’d known what the bottle did, and had made it do it. The thought made him feel very slightly better. There’s a difference, albeit only one contour line on the gradient of the moral high ground, between being the inventor of a weapon of mass destruction and the man in the warehouse who uncrates the fiftieth completed bomb. Also, consider this: Pieter had done the maths and found the answer, used it to get inside the bottle, and the universe was still here, still reasonably intact and not-blown-up. Therefore, if he were to duplicate what Pieter had done, there couldn’t be any harm in it. Could there?
It’s supposed to be fun.
Slowly, he put the envelope back in his pocket. It occurred to him as he did so that he’d just made a discovery of a Newton-Einstein-Hawking level of magnitude, and if he was back in the university, if he hadn’t accidentally pulverised an Alp and with it any chance he’d had of being taken seriously ever again, he’d be minutes away from being worshipped as a god. Instead, here he was with two phones and a keyboardless computer for company, and nobody to share the glory with but himself.
He frowned. No, he thought, not me. Pieter had got there first – and Pieter hadn’t blown up any mountains, so there’d have been nothing to stop him publishing his results and clearing a space on his mantelpiece for seventy kilos’ weight of awards. But he hadn’t, and it occurred to Theo to wonder why the hell not. Because –
Quite, he thought. There are some things you don’t share, in the same way that a policeman doesn’t drop by the holding cells and ask if anybody fancies having a go with his gun. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? Enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. Was that what Pieter had done? Invented the ultimate Doomsday equation and somehow reverse-engineered it into a game? And, while we’re asking awkward questions, what exactly had Pieter died of?
“You there.” Theo looked up and saw a man standing over him, scowling. “Clerk.”
That was the sort of thing you’d expect this man to say; along with we meet again, Mr Bond, or guards, seize him, or I like a girl with spirit or, quite possibly, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Given time and a huge dose of steroids, Arnold Schwarzenegger might’ve grown into his hand-me-down trousers, and he had a thin black moustache, like a fine line of eyebrow pencil drawn on his upper lip with a steady hand, and a perfectly bald head. He was wearing a light grey suit and one of those bootlace ties you occasionally see on senators from Texas.
“Um,” Theo said.
“My key.”
It made no sense; until, quite suddenly, Theo remembered that this was a hotel. In which case, Grendel’s big brother here was a guest. Which made him –
“Mr Nordstrom.”
The monster grunted. “Key,” he repeated. “Now.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know—” Then he remembered the two rusty iron keys he’d found in the desk drawer. He yanked it open and chose one at random. “There you are, Mr Nordstrom,” he said, with a degree of composure he found quite remarkable in the circumstances. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Mr Nordstrom nodded. “Get me a bottle of Château d’Yquem 1932. Now.”
“Certainly, Mr Nordstrom,” Theo said politely, and ran.
Through the door that led to the stairs; instead of up, towards his room, he went down. The down staircase was improbably long, straight and pitch dark; he could feel it getting steadily colder as he descended, and when he put his hand out to steady himself against the wall, the surface he touched was damp and rather sticky. He could smell mould, saltpetre and something else he couldn’t quite identify. Eventually, though, the stairs ended in a door, which he discovered by walking into it. He turned the handle, took a step forward and groped until he found a light switch.
He’d found the wine cellar, no doubt about it. He also understood at once why there had been so many stairs. It was like being in an underground cathedral. The ceiling, supported by a forest of fluted marble pillars topped with Corinthian capitals, was so high he hurt his neck looking for it. He didn’t want to guess how big the room was. If you were into model railways, you could probably have fitted in a 1:1 scale replica of the Gare du Nord, but you’d have had to move an awful lot of stuff out of the way first. The room was crammed to bursting with wine racks, whose top layers reached almost to the roof. And all the racks were full; not an empty slot to be seen.
His first impression of Mr Nordstrom was that he probably wasn’t the most patient man ever to see the light of day. Tough. Unless there was a catalogue of some sort, and there was no sign of one, he was going to have to wait a while – years, possibly – while Theo searched for a 1932 Château d’Yquem in all this lot.
He picked a rack at random and squinted at the labels, but they were thick with dust and illegible. Theo didn’t know very much about wine, but he clearly remembered getting yelled at by his father for picking up a bottle and thereby disturbing the sediment; it was something you weren’t meant to do, he knew that much. So he leaned as close to the bottles as he could get and gently wiped at the dust with his forefinger. Château d’ Yquem, he read. 1931.
Too easy. He tried a few more bottles and found the 1930, the 1933, the 1934, the 1935. Would it matter so terribly much if he was a year out? He pictured Mr Nordstrom in his head and decided that, yes, it probably would. He tried the next row down, which proved to be 1936 to 1941. The three rows above were all 1929. He remembered his mother giving his father an incredibly hard time over a wine merchant’s bill, and it occurred to him that the contents of the cellar must represent an absolutely colossal sum of money. Ah well.
At the far left end of the next row, a solitary bottle of the 1932. He sighed with relief and, as tenderly as he could, he picked it up, trying his level best to keep it at the same angle it had been lying on the rack. It felt curiously light.
A thought tore across his mind like a light aircraft making a forced landing in a maize field. The hell with it; he shifted the bottle upright and held it up to the light. The cork and the foil were intact, but the bottle was empty.
He stared at it. What was most surprising, however, was how relatively little he was surprised. He put it carefully down on the floor, then pulled out another bottle at random. Also empty. Likewise the next, and the one after that, and the one after that. It was only after he’d dragged out thirty-odd bottles that he found one that held anything apart from air: a 1968 Margaux contained a very, very small amount of crumbly red dust.
He put the bottles back where he’d found them, shrugged, hefted his 1932 Château d’Yquem and headed for the door. With his hand on the light switch, he paused and turned back. He’d left footprints in the dust, but there was a broom leaning up against a rack not far away. He walked back to where he’d been standing, took Pieter’s bottle out of his pocket and put it in the slot, the one empty slot in the entire room, where he’d taken down Mr Nordstrom’s bottle. Then, as carefully as he could, he paced out the distance from the door to the exact spot on the rack, and jotted down the number on his envelope. Then he swept about fifteen square metres of floor, to eradicate any helpful tracks. He put the broom back where he’d got it from, and grinned. If you want to hide a needle, get a haystack. He shifted the bottle into his visible left hand and started up the stairs.
By the time he got back to the reception desk he was exhausted; the long, long climb up from the cellar, followed by a frantic search for the kitchen, where he found, in a huge and otherwise empty cupboard, a single dusty wineglass. “Sorry to have kept you,” he panted, as Mr Nordstrom looked up from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. “One bottle of 1932—”
“Thanks.” Mr Nordstrom grabbed the bottle, forced it into his jacket pocket (Theo heard a seam ripping) and waved away the glass. “Put it on my bill.”
“Mr Nordstrom.”
“Hm?”
Theo took a deep breath. How to put this? “If the wine isn’t, you know, exactly perfect—”
“It’ll be fine.”
He must have noticed, Theo told himself, like I did, by the weight. He’d turned his back and was lumbering away towards the stairs. But then, Theo thought, wine’s such a transitory thing. It has no real existence in time. You open the bottle, you drink it, it’s gone, and such enduring pleasure as the experience holds lies in the memory, or the anticipation. You can, of course, soak off the label and pin it up on the wall to impress your friends, but that’s the only lasting trophy you get, like a stag’s head mounted on a board to remind you of the hunt. So; if the wine’s not actually there, does it really matter all that much?
Mr Nordstrom stopped and turned round. For a moment, he looked at Theo, as if noticing him for the first time. “You’re new,” he said.
“Yes, Mr Nordstrom.”
“Name.”
I mean, Call-me-Bill had said, what sort of a world would it be if we went around calling ourselves by our real names? “Pieter,” Theo said. “Pieter van Goyen.”
“Mphm.” Mr Nordstrom nodded and plunged through the door to the stairs. It took some time for the air to refill the volume he’d displaced. It occurred to Theo to wonder if he’d given him the right key, although somehow he doubted whether any locked door would delay Mr Nordstrom for very long.
Still, he thought, it’s a job; on balance, marginally better than the slaughterhouse. And Pieter had arranged it for him, don’t forget that; Pieter, his friend and benefactor. Even so; a million empty bottles, and Mr Nordstrom too. If he was still a scientist, if he cared, it’d be enough to drive him crazy. It’s supposed to be fun. Right.
“Hello.”
Not again, he thought, and looked up.
She really was very beautiful. But nobody’s parents would choose a name like Matasuntha. “Hello,” he replied.
She perched on the edge of the desk and smiled at him. “So,” she said, “how’s it going?”
“Oh, fine. I just met Mr Nordstrom.” She grinned. “He’s such a lamb.”
Maybe, he thought, but where I come from we don’t call them lambs, we call them rhinoceroses. “I fetched him a bottle of wine from the cellar,” he said. “I suppose I ought to make a note of it somewhere, so it can go on his bill.”
“Oh. Right, yes, good idea.” She reached past him and brushed the VDU with her fingertip. At once, a picture of a keyboard appeared on the screen. Oh, Theo thought, and felt vaguely ashamed of himself. “So,” she was saying, “one bottle of – what was it?”
“Château d’Yquem 1932.”
She was pecking at the screen with her fingernails, and various boxes were appearing and disappearing. “I didn’t know we had any of that left.”
“Just the one bottle.”
“You’re right.” She’d brought up a screen labelled wine cellar manifest; and scrolled down a monstrous list of names. “There you go.” She highlighted the box next to Château d’Yquem 1932 and changed the one to a zero. “You found it all right, then? It’s a big cellar.”
“I was lucky.”
“You were, weren’t you? Right, for future reference, here’s the manifest, look; and these coordinates next to the name refer to this plan here.” The screen changed to a diagram of the cellar, with each block numbered in what Theo recognised from his time at Leiden as a cunning variation on the Dewey Decimal System. “Just be sure to update the manifest every time you take out a bottle. Otherwise,” she added with a grin, “it’d be chaos.”
So much, he thought wistfully, for his haystack. “Right,” he said, “I’ll do that. It’s an impressive collection they’ve got down there, isn’t it?”
“One of the best in this part of Holland, apparently,” she replied. “I don’t drink the stuff so I wouldn’t know. How about you?” She turned up the thermostat on her smile a degree or so. “Are you a wine buff?”
He kept perfectly still. “Me? No. My dad was, a bit. I’d just as soon have a beer.”
“Me too. Or a coffee. I love coffee. How about you? Do you like coffee?”
She didn’t look at all like the vanishing girl on the train, but in other respects there were distinct similarities. Any minute now, her thought, she’ll be pulling out her maths homework for me to do. “Yes. I used to drink it a lot a while back. Not so much now, though.”
“Same here. It’s supposed to be not very good for you. But I do like it.” She paused, the way a mountain lion does just before it pounces. “What made you stop?”
“Well.” Instinctively he wanted to lie, but lying is so exhausting. It’s like being nice to people. You can only keep it up for so long. “I used to be a scientist—”
“Ooh, how exciting.”
“Or at least,” he quickly amended, “I used to work in a sciency sort of place. And I had to do tricky maths problems, and the coffee helped me concentrate. Now, though—” He shrugged.
“I love science,” she said. “I find it absolutely fascinating. What made you give it up?”
Gestures, of course, can lie for you as effectively as a bought-and-paid for politician. He lifted his invisible arm and said, “Accident. After that, well, I just didn’t—”
He let the sentence drain away into the silence. She gave him a look of sympathy so deep you could’ve dumped radioactive waste down it and never had to worry about it again.
“That’s so terrible,” she said; and then, “I expect you don’t want to talk about it,” at precisely the same moment as he said, “I don’t like talking about it.” She smiled at him and said, “Of course, I do understand.” Then, just when he thought he was home safe and she’d lost interest and was about to go away, she said, “So, where are you from? Have you got any brothers or sisters?”
Deep inside, he smiled. She’d overreached herself. Long experience had taught him that nobody, no matter how inquisitive or predatory, could bear to listen to him talking about his family for very long. He relaxed slightly, almost feeling sorry for her. “Well,” he said.
He gave her the complete treatment. He told her about his father, the only son of Bart Bernstein. Pause. The Bart Bernstein.
“Who?” she obliged.
The Bart Bernstein, who’d written all those appallingly soppy sentimental ballads round about the time of the First World War. Since Bart was a shrewd cookie when it came to investing the proceeds of bestselling slush, his son had never done a day’s work in his life, preferring to devote his considerable energies to annoying his wife and children. Eventually Mrs Bernstein decided she’d had enough and vanished without trace, leaving Bart Junior with two sons, Max and Theo, and a daughter, Janine. Max grew up to be a slightly more acceptable version of his father, and was generally well regarded until he accumulated a collection of gambling debts that even his father regarded as unconscionable and refused to pay; whereupon Max took the sensible precaution of making himself very difficult to find. But not difficult enough, apparently, because nine years ago, shortly before his father’s death, the remains of a pair of his hand-made shoes and one DNA-identified tooth were found in a quicklime pit in Honduras. Janine Bernstein, meanwhile, was spending her share of her father’s fortune on a tour of the world’s premier rehab clinics, though to judge by results she hadn’t found one she liked yet. The only reason she wasn’t in prison was that they kept letting her out again, and when he’d written to her to ask for a loan to tide him over till he got on his feet again, shortly after he lost all his money in the Schliemann Brothers thing, her lawyers had written back threatening him with injunctions if he ever came within fifty miles of her. All in all, therefore, the answer to the original question was effectively No.
This was the point at which they always said, “That’s dreadful, I’m so sorry,” and Matasuntha was no exception. But every other woman who’d ever spoken those words to him used them to mean get away from me, you might be contagious. This time, he was at a loss to interpret them. About the only thing he was sure she wasn’t trying to say was, that’s dreadful, I’m so sorry, but that wasn’t really much help. Intrigued, he smiled. “Well,” he said, “that’s the story of my life. How about you?”
“Me?” The question seemed to startle her a little. “Well, all I ever wanted to do ever since I was a little girl was work in a hotel.”
“And?”
“Here I am.” She beamed at him. “So you’re a scientist, then,” she said. “That’s pretty amazing.”
“What is?”
“Being a scientist.”
“Oh, I don’t know. If it was that difficult, most of the scientists I know wouldn’t be able to do it. Anyway, like I said, I’m not one any more. They threw me out, I wasn’t smart enough.”
“You’re just being modest.”
“Not really. Modesty is when you tell lies.” He stared at the phone, willing it to ring, but it didn’t. Life can be so unkind. “So, what is it about working in hotels that you like so much?”
That slowed her up a little. “Oh, loads of things. Meeting new people, stuff like that.” She was looking at him with her head slightly on one side. “I thought you said you gave up being a scientist because of the accident.”
“I did. I caused the accident. That’s why they fired me.”
“Ah.” In her eyes, buried deep, he thought he saw a little flash of triumph, as though she’d finally got what she’d come for. Damn. “Well, I mustn’t hold you up any longer. It was nice talking to you. See you around.”
She read me like a book, he told himself bitterly, after she’d gone away. And not just any book; one of the large-print editions they do for people with poor eyesight. I’m pathetic. And (he thought, with a sudden rush of panic) if she’s really looking for Pieter’s bottle and she’s already searched the room, it shouldn’t take her too long to figure out where it’s hidden.
The thought of revisiting the wine cellar wasn’t a cheerful one; his knees still ached from all those stairs, and it was a pretty spooky kind of a place. Never mind. He looked round to make sure nobody was about, and scuttled off through the door to the staircase.
The bottle was still there. He took it out of the rack, then hesitated. It was still a marvellous haystack. He found the useful broom, which was where he’d left it, then crossed to the furthest rack on the left. Six rows up, twelve bottles across from the right; he picked out a Cheval Blanc 1977 (whatever that was) and put Pieter’s bottle in its place. The Cheval Blanc went where he’d got the Château d’Yquem from. Ten minutes’ vigorous broom activity obscured his tracks. Job done.
When he got back to the desk, he found Call-me-Bill leaning against it looking deeply bewildered.
“There you are,” he said. “Where have you been?”
“Toilet,” Theo managed to reply.
“Oh.” Call-me-Bill thought about that for a moment. “Oh, fair enough. But it’d be nice if you left a note or something if you’re not at the desk. Better still, give me or Matasuntha a shout, so we can cover for you. It’s really quite important, you know.”
Theo mumbled an apology, which Call-me-Bill waved aside. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just so long as you know for next time. I just came to tell you, your shift’s over. I imagine you’d like to go back to your room and get some rest. You must be exhausted.”
An hour sitting peacefully at a desk; well, that’d take it out of you, for sure. “Thanks,” he said.
“Not at all. You’re doing a great job.”
Well, he thought as he climbed the stairs, anything’s possible. Maybe the attrition rate among hotel desk clerks is on a par with junior officers in the trenches in the First World War, and just still being there at the end of an hour’s enough to qualify you for the Silver Star. But he was inclined to doubt that. True, Mr Nordstrom had been a bit alarming, but all he’d actually done was ask for his key and a bottle of wine.
The elephant in the room can be ignored, with determination and practice, so long as it’s content to sit quietly in a corner, doing nothing more energetic than gently massaging its neck with the tip of its trunk. When it starts trumpeting and crushing the furniture, the only sensible course is to give in and officially recognise its presence. There is, Theo formally admitted to himself, something profoundly weird going on around here. This is not a normal hotel, the people aren’t regular people, it’s got something to do with Pieter’s bottle and a way of busting holes in the quantum partitions between alternate universes. If I was involved in any way, if I was still a physicist who gave a damn about all that stuff, I might be getting a little antsy at this point. Just as well I’m neither of those things, isn’t it?
In denial, the voice of his former analyst muttered in the depths of his memory. Too damn right, Theo replied. And why not? Denial’s the clove of garlic that keeps you from getting bitten. All around you, mystery and melodrama; but just so long as you’ve got your clove of garlic, you can carry on being the shoemaker in the little village at the foot of the mountain with the castle on it, and what the hell? Strangers may go up to the castle and not come back, but folks’ll always need shoes, come what may. So long as you’ve got your clove, there’s not a problem.
Provided, of course, that you don’t get bored.
It’s not something that the shoemaker needs to worry about, because there’s always someone banging on his door with a seam that needs stitching or a heel that rubs. But a hotel clerk who gets off work at (he checked his watch) 4 p.m. and the rest of the day’s his own, boredom is the maximum enemy. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, but he’d never felt wider awake in his entire life.
Suddenly, there was an impossibly loud bang, enough to shake the whole room and set the lights flickering. For a moment Theo was sure he was dreaming, reliving the moment when the VVLHC blew up (he did that quite often, for some reason); but then he heard voices shouting, doors banging, feet running, none of which featured in his all-too-familiar flashback. He slid off the bed, landing on the balls of his feet, and hurled himself at the door.
On the landing, the door of the room opposite was wide open, but there was nobody to be seen. The commotion was coming from downstairs. He hesitated for a moment, sniffed for smoke, then darted down the staircase as fast as he could go.
When he reached the lobby, he found out what had caused all the noise. A huge man – he didn’t need to see the face to identify Mr Nordstrom – was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Call-me-Bill was kneeling over him, twisting a tourniquet fashioned from Mr Nordstrom’s idiotic cowboy tie around his blood-soaked elbow. Matasuntha was hurrying forward with a big black tin box. Another woman was tearing open a packet of gauze dressing. A shattered wine bottle lay on the ground a yard or so away.
“Dressing,” Call-me-Bill said, tense but calm, not looking up; the woman Theo didn’t know knelt beside him holding it, while he cut Nordstrom’s jacket sleeve lengthways with a pair of scissors. “It’s all right,” he went on, “it’s gone straight through and out the other side, and it’s missed the bone. Thanks,” he added, as the woman handed him the dressing and he pressed it carefully into place. “Bandage.” Matasuntha took a roll of crêpe bandage out of the tin box and gave it to him; he gently lifted Nordstrom’s arm and started to wind the bandage round it. “That was lucky. That could’ve been—”
Matasuntha cleared her throat loudly; Call-me-Bill looked up and noticed Theo for the first time. He froze for a moment, hedgehog-in-headlights fashion, then smiled and said, “Hi.”
“Um,” Theo said. “Is there anything—?”
“No, everything’s under control, thanks.” Call-me-Bill lifted the arm so that Matasuntha could fasten the bandage with a safety pin. “One of our guests has been in the wars a bit. You’ve met Mr Nordstrom, haven’t you?”
“Um.”
Mr Nordstrom lifted his head a little, groaned, “Good evening”, and appeared to pass out. Theo tried to reply, but all that came out was a tiny squeak.
“Poor fellow slipped and cut himself on the bottle he was carrying,” Call-me-Bill said. “Still, no harm done. He’ll be right as rain in no time.”
The pool of blood on the floor was half a metre square. “Ah,” Theo said. “That’s all right, then. Are you sure there’s nothing I can—?”
“No, no, we’re fine, you go on back upstairs and have a good rest.” Call-me-Bill lifted his bright red hands and looked round for something to wipe them on. Matasuntha obliged with a towel. “Remember, breakfast’s at seven to ten thirty in the kitchen. You know where that is, don’t you? If not, ask Mattie, she’ll show you the way.” Matasuntha nodded and smiled brightly; she had blood on her cheek, like minimalist war paint.
“Right,” Theo said. “I’ll, um—”
“Yes, that’s the ticket.” All three of them were looking at him, not moving, clearly waiting for him to go away. “See you in the morning.”
“Sweet dreams,” Matasuntha said, and the woman he didn’t know gave him what, if a smile was a sandwich, would have been the filling. He backed away towards the door he’d just come through. Mr Nordstrom came round and groaned, but they didn’t seem to have noticed. It was as though they were trying to push him through the door using only their eyes.
Theo could take a hint, particularly when bludgeoned round the head with it. He turned, pushed the door open, and walked through it. Then he stopped and held perfectly still.
“Right,” he heard Call-me-Bill snap, “on three. Mattie, get his feet. Dora, you got his head? Ready? One, two—”
Another horrible groan, then Call-me-Bill said, “It’s all right, nearly there”, followed by loud shuffling noises and the sound of a chair being knocked over. “Steady,” Call-me-Bill warned someone. “And for crying out loud, somebody clear up that glass.”
More shuffling; then Theo heard Mr Nordstrom moaning, “It was supposed to be Paris and it was Hanoi, didn’t stand a chance,” before Matasuntha cut him short with, “It’s all right, we’ve got you,” and someone kicked open a door.
Theo went up to his room, shut the door, looked to see if there was a lock or a bolt (there wasn’t) and dragged the chair across to wedge under the handle. He wasn’t a doctor (well, he was, but not of medicine), but he had an idea that it’s gone straight through and out the other side, and it’s missed the bone wasn’t how you described an injury from a splinter of broken glass. Also, he remembered, now that he came to think of it, there hadn’t been any kind of a stain on the carpet where the fragments of broken bottle lay, which suggested to him that the bottle had been empty. But, then, around here weren’t they all?
Gunshot wounds, he recalled suddenly, had to be reported to the police, by law; but not nasty nicks you got off smashed bottles. That, he told himself, could well be part of an explanation that might eventually make some sort of sense. Paris and Hanoi, on the other hand, were beyond him entirely.
Clove of garlic, he thought. Even if Mr Nordstrom had got himself shot up in the course of some illegal activity, and Call-me-Bill, Matasuntha and the unidentified woman were in it up to their necks, it was still nothing at all to do with him. That, evidently, was how they wanted him to see it, he was only too happy to indulge them, and, really, there was nothing else to say on the subject. He glanced at his watch; three minutes past six. A little earlier than his usual bedtime, but it had been a rather wearing day, one way or another. He groped on the floor for the plastic carrier bag that held all his earthly possessions and found his copy of Greenidge and Chen’s Macrodimensional Field Inversion Dynamics; ten times more effective than Nembutal, safe and reusable. He read five pages and fell asleep.
He sat up. It was pitch dark. Someone was sitting on the end of the bed.
“Who’s there?” he said.
A light flared, and lit up a head. It had bright red skin, pointed Spock ears, a flat stub of a nose, shrunken cheeks, yellow eyes and no hair at all. It grinned, revealing a mouthful of needle-sharp cats’ teeth.
“Max?”
He had no idea why he’d said that. The head sighed. “Do I look even remotely like your dear departed brother?” it said wearily.
“No.”
“Well, then.” The light grew brighter, and under the head he saw a squat, short body with long arms, sitting cross-legged an inch or so from his feet. It was wearing some kind of body armour made of overlapping steel scales, and its huge feet were bare, revealing claws instead of toenails. “Looks like I’m not him, then.”
It was also holding a brown manila envelope. Theo felt an urge to grab at it, but the presence of the whatever-it-was appeared to have paralysed him, so he mumbled, “Give me that,” in a high, squeaky voice instead.
“In a minute,” the goblin replied. It looked at him, as though expecting something of him; then it sighed. “You were reading,” it said. “Yes?”
Theo could feel the corner of Greenidge and Chen’s Macrodimensional Field Inversion Dynamics digging into his side. “Yes. Yes, I was.”
“And you fell asleep.”
“Yes?”
The goblin clicked its tongue, which was brown and forked at the tip. “You had the bedside light on.”
“I suppose so.”
The goblin pulled an oh-for-crying-out-loud face. “The bedside light is off,” he said, with exaggerated patience. “What does this tell you?”
Theo stared at him. “You turned it off?”
The goblin held up one hand. Claws, an inch long and twisted into spirals, in place of fingernails. “You seriously think I can manipulate a fiddly little switch with these? Oh come on.”
A tiny scrap of scientific method, left behind from his previous existence, supplied the answer. “This is a dream. I’m dreaming.”
The goblin put down the envelope and clapped its hands slowly four times. “Like British Airways,” he said. “It was long and traumatic, but we got there in the end. Yes, this is a dream. I am not real. All right?”
Theo nodded. He could move again. “Hold on,” he said. “If I’m dreaming, how come I know I’m—?”
The goblin scowled at him. “You just do, all right?” He picked up the manila envelope and tapped it with a claw. “This is good stuff, you know? Impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course, you’ve forgotten to compensate for Heisenberg,” it went on, “and here” – it stabbed at the paper with a claw – “you’ve written a three, but your writing’s so bad you subsequently read it as an eight, so your calculations from that point on are garbage; a careless mistake, and quite typical, I might add, you really must do something about your slapdash attitude to details. Apart from that, though,” it concluded with a nod, “not bad at all.”
Theo blinked. Heisenberg, of course. And the misread 3 would explain why the last few lines had felt a little strained. “You’re my subconscious,” he said. “Really it’s me figuring out what I did wrong.”
The goblin shrugged. “If you say so,” it said. “You’re the doctor, as the expression goes.” It put the envelope down on the bed and crossed its arms. “What are we going to do with you, I wonder?”
“You sound like my mother.”
For some reason, that made the goblin grin broadly. “A word of warning. From,” it added with a snicker, “your subconscious. Watch yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
The goblin bent forward a little. “These people,” it said, “are not what they seem.”
Theo laughed. “You don’t say.”
He’d offended the goblin. It gave him a cold look. “All right, Mister Know-It-All, since you’re so very clever, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from your extensive and accurate observations. Just don’t come whinneting to me if it all ends in tears.”
“Sorry,” Theo said, and then he stopped dead. “Whinneting?”
“Whining,” the goblin explained. “Complaining in a pitiful manner.”
“Yes, I know. It was one of Max’s words.”
“Ah yes, so it was.” The goblin shrugged. “Let’s see. The embodiment of your subconscious mind seeks to give you sage advice, such as a caring elder brother might—”
“Max never gave a damn about me. Or anyone except himself.”
The goblin nodded. “True. Anyway, we’re drifting off topic. You want to be on your guard around these people. They’re up to something.”
“All due respect,” Theo said carefully, “but I’d sort of gathered. What are they up to, do you know?”
“Me? I’m just your—”
“Pretend you aren’t,” Theo said firmly.
“Ah, well, in that case,” the goblin said, “I’d draw your attention to the bottles, in particular the one left to you by Pieter van Goyen. Once you’ve got inside—”
There was a loud crash, and the goblin vanished. Theo sat bolt upright, and saw Call-me-Bill standing in the doorway, framed by the splintered wreckage of the door.
“Sorry if I startled you,” Call-me-Bill said, with a pleasant smile. “Door must’ve been a bit sticky.” He stepped over the shattered remains of the chair Theo had jammed the door closed with, looked down at it and shrugged. “Just thought I’d remind you, it’s ten fifteen and breakfast finishes at ten thirty. Of course, I’m sure we could rustle you up an omelette or something if you want a lie in, but—”
“No,” Theo said. “No, that’s fine. I—”
“And when you’ve had breakfast,” Call-me Bill went on, “if you could see your way to doing an hour on the desk, that’d be grand. Cheers, then.”
He smiled again and withdrew, and Theo vaulted off the bed, noticing in passing that the bedside light was on. He scrabbled in his carrier bag for his comb and dragged it through his hair, then shook the bag out on the floor searching for his razor. He shaved quickly and brutally, and was heading for the door when he saw the brown manila envelope lying on the bed, where he hadn’t left it the night before.
He spent his hour on the desk in perfect isolation, which suited him just fine, since it gave him exactly the time he needed to fix the mistakes in his calculations that the dream-goblin had so thoughtfully pointed out. When he reached the last line, he paused. Leaving an armed bomb lying around isn’t the smartest thing a person can do, even if it’s lying around in a pocket, or hidden under a pillow, or sealed in a concrete silo at the bottom of the sea. At least two of the people in this hotel had taken a lively interest in his brown manila envelope, and he wasn’t sure their motives were unimpeachably good. However, unless they were top-flight mathematicians, the incomplete formula would be useless to them. He, on the other hand, could solve the last line in a minute or so. He put the pencil and the envelope in his pocket.
No sooner had he done so than Matasuntha came in through the front door, holding a pair of secateurs. “Morning,” she said. “Sleep OK?”
“How is he?”
“Sorry?”
“Mr Nordstrom.”
“Oh, he’s fine, I expect. I haven’t seen him since last evening. Had breakfast?”
“Yes. Look, what exactly—?”
“What did you have?”
“Slice of toast and a coffee. What exactly happened last night? It looked like he’d been—”
“Just a slice of toast? That’s not enough. You should try the scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and oregano.”
Fine. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I overslept this morning. Mr, um, Negative had to come and wake me up.”
She nodded. “He’s very good about that,” she said.
“He didn’t seem to mind, but I don’t know if he was being sarcastic.”
“Oh, Bill’s not like that. Quite easy-going. Really, this isn’t a bad place to work, you know.”
He smiled at her. “You must’ve been up bright and early.”
“No, I—What makes you say that?”
“Well.” He looked at her. “Last night this carpet was absolutely soaked in blood, there was a great pool of it right here, where I’m sitting. And now there’s not a trace of it. I assumed you’d been up at dawn with the carpet shampoo.”
Just for a moment, a look of furious hatred shot across her face, like share prices on a ticker-tape machine. Then it was gone, leaving behind the unruffled surface of her smile. “We have cleaners for that sort of thing,” she said. “And there wasn’t very much blood. Mr Nordstrom slipped and cut himself when the bottle he was holding broke. Just a little nick, that was all. No big drama.”
“Ah.” Theo nodded. “That’s all right, then. Presumably I imagined all the blood.”
“Presumably.” She put the secateurs down on the desk. “Well,” she said, “I expect you need a break. I’ll cover for you for a bit.”
It wasn’t a suggestion, more like an order. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”
“Really, it’s no trouble. Why not drop by the kitchen and have a coffee and a doughnut? They’re very good.”
He looked at her. A firing squad would’ve been friendlier. “That’s extremely kind of you,” he said, “but honestly, I’m fine. I don’t want to give a bad impression if Mr Negative comes by.”
“He won’t mind. Trust me.”
The last thing in the world he was prepared to do. On the other hand, he didn’t really want to force the issue any further, and she had a grimly determined look in her eye that suggested physical force was definitely an option. “Thanks,” he said, and stood up. “I’ll do the same for you some time.”
She smiled, surged past him and sat in the chair. “Or if you don’t like doughnuts,” she said, “there’s always the apple turnovers.”
He nodded. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said, and withdrew.
The hell with it, he thought, as he finished his coffee in the deserted kitchen. Pieter’s bottle.
He’d found a cup laid out for him on the kitchen table, along with a plate of doughnuts and another of apple turnovers. The coffee was freshly made, with milk, sugar and cream all within arm’s reach. Who the hell had put them there he had no idea.
Pieter sent me here, he told himself; and Pieter was my old tutor and my friend. He fixed me up with this – he paused to clarify his thoughts – this extremely strange but basically not-too-bad job, and he left me the bottle. Oh yes, and it was supposed to be fun. Dangerous (Mr Nordstrom weltering in blood on the lobby floor) but a good laugh nevertheless. All right. Enough of the fooling around. Let’s do it.
Down the long staircase, therefore, to the wine cellar. He turned on the light, and saw that the entire floor had been carefully swept, so that not a speck of dust remained anywhere. He thought about that for a while, then shrugged and put it out of his mind. His bottle was exactly where he’d left it, label uppermost, as far as he could tell untouched. He lifted it out, pocketed it and swiftly withdrew, taking care to turn out the light.
He went back to his room, to find the door had been replaced (not repaired; the paint was dry) and he had a new chair, of the same pattern but a slightly lighter colour wood. Wedging it under the handle didn’t inspire quite the same level of confidence as it had done previously, but it was the best he could do. He sat down on the bed, put the bottle on the pillow and took out the manila envelope. Zero hour.
Presumably his subconscious mind had been chewing over the last line of the calculation while his conscious mind had been occupied with fending off Matasuntha and fretting itself stupid with vanishing bloodstains and similar trivia; he sailed through it with contemptuous ease, and there it suddenly was, on the paper in front of him, in his own abysmal handwriting. The formula; the key; the bomb. He stared at it, the way you sometimes stare at a familiar word that’s suddenly stopped making sense. Then, with a sort of well-here-goes-nothing shrug, he picked up the bottle and carefully measured its length and width with his trusty Vernier caliper.
Well now, he said to himself, as he wrote the numbers and symbols out again; if H = 30.17 and D = 8.72, then according to the formula –