Chapter Seven...


     This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way's life,
and he  was  wondering  if  the  rain  would  hold  off for the
weekend. The forecast had  said  changeable  -  a  misty  night
tonight  followed  by  bright  but  chilly  days  on Friday and
Saturday with maybe a few scattered showers towards the end  of
Sunday when everyone would be heading back into town.
     Everyone, that is, other than Gordon Way.
     The  weather  forecast  hadn't  mentioned that, of course,
that wasn 't the job of the  weather  forecast,  but  then  his
horoscope  had been pretty misleading as well. lt had mentioned
an unusual amount of planetary activity in  his  sign  and  had
urged  him  to  differentiate between what he thought he wanted
and what he actually  needed,  and  suggested  that  he  should
tackle  emotional  or  work  problems  with  determination  and
complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to  mention  that
he would be dead before the day was out.
     He turned off the motorway near Cambridge and stopped at a
small  filling  station  for  some  petrol,  where he sat for a
moment, finishing off a call on his car phone.
     "OK, look, I'll call you tomorrow;"  he  said,  "or  maybe
later tonight. Or call me.1 should be at the cottage in half an
hour.  Yes,  I  know  how  important the project is to you. All
right, I know how important it is, full stop. You  want  it,  I
want  it.  Of  course  1  do.  And I'm not saying that we won't
continue to support it. I'm just saying it's expensive  and  we
should  look at the whole thing with determination and complete
honesty. Look, why don't you come out to the  cottage,  and  we
can talk it through. OK, yeah, yes, I know. I understand. Well,
think about it, Kate. Talk to you later. Bye."
     He hung up and continued to sit in his car for a moment.
     it was a large car. It was a large silver-grey Mercedes of
the sort   that  they  use  in  advertisements,  and  not  just
advertisements for Mercedes.  Gordon  Way,  brother  of  Susan,
employer  of  Richard  MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and
owner of WayForward Technologies  II.  WayForward  Technologies
itself  had  of  course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking
his entire first fortune with it.
     Luckily, he had managed to make another one.
     The "usual reason" was that he had been in the business of
computer hardware when every twelve-year-old in the country had
suddenly got bored  with  boxes  that  went  bing.  His  second
fortune  had  been made in software instead. As a result of two
major pieces of software, one of which was  Anthem  (the
other,  more  profitable  one had never seen the light of day),
WFT-II was the only British  software  company  that  could  be
mentioned  in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies as
Microsoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run  along  the
lines  of  "WayForward  Technologies,  unlike  such  major U.S.
companies as  Microsoft  or  Lotus..."  but  it  was  a  start.
WayForward was in there. And he owned it.
     He  pushed  a tape into the slot on the stereo console. It
accepted it with a soft and decorous click, and a moment or two
later Ravel's Bolиro  floated  out  of  eight  perfectly
matched  speakers  with  fine-meshed  matte-black  grilles. The
stereo was so smooth and spacious you could  almost  sense  the
whole ice-rink. He tapped his fingers lightly on the padded rim
of  the  steering  wheel.  He  gazed at the dashboard. Tasteful
illuminated figures and tiny,  immaculate  lights  gazed  dimly
back at him. After a while he suddenly realised this was a self
service station and got out to fill the tank.
     This  took  a  minute or two. He stood gripping the filler
nozzle, stamping his feet in the cold night  air,  then  walked
over to the small grubby kiosk, paid for the petrol, remembered
to  buy  a  couple  of  local  maps,  and  then  stood chatting
enthusiastically to the cashier for a  few  minutes  about  the
directions  the  computer  industry  was  likely to take in the
following year, suggesting that parallel processing  was  going
to  be  the  key to really intuitive productivity software, but
also strongly doubting whether artificial intelligence research
per se, particularly  artificial  intelligence  research
based  on  the ProLog language, was really going to produce any
serious commercially viable products in the foreseeable future,
at least  as  far  as  the  office  desk  top  environment  was
concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier not at all.
     "The  man  just  liked  to  talk," he would later tell the
police. "Man,I could have walked away to  the  toilet  for  ten
minutes  and  he  would've told it all to the till. If I'd been
fifteen minutes the till would have walked away too. Yeah,  I'm
sure  that's  him," he would add when shown a picture of Gordon
Way. "I only wasn't sure at first because in the  picture  he's
got his mouth closed."
     "And  you're  absolutely  certain  you didn't see anything
else suspicious?" the policeman insisted. "Nothing that  struck
you as odd in any way at all?"
     "No,  like  I said, it was just an ordinary customer on an
ordinary night, just like any other night."
     The policeman stared at him blankly. "Just for the sake of
argument," he went on  to  say,  "if  I  were  suddenly  to  do
this..."
- he  made  himself  go cross-eyed, stuck his tongue out of the
corner of his mouth and danced up and down twisting his fingers
in his ears - "would anything strike you about that?"
     "Well,  er,  yeah,"  said  the   cashier,   backing   away
nervously. "I'd think you'd gone stark raving mad."
     "Good,"  said  the  policeman,  putting his notebook away.
"It's just that different people  sometimes  have  a  different
idea  of  what  `odd' means, you see, sir. If last night was an
ordinary night just like any other night, then I am a pimple on
the bottom of the Marquess of Queensbury's aunt.  We  shall  be
requiring a statement later, sir. Thank you for your time."
     That was all yet to come.
     Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled
back towards  his car. Standing under the lights in the mist it
had gathered a finely beaded coat of matte moisture on it,  and
looked  like  -  well,  it  looked  like an extremely expensive
Mercedes-Benz. Gordon caught himself, just for  a  millisecond,
wishing  that  he had something like that, but he was now quite
adept at fending off that particular  line  of  thought,  which
only  led  off  in  circles  and left him feeling depressed and
confused.
     He patted it in  a  proprietorial  manner,  then,  walking
around  it,  noticed  that  the boot wasn't closed properly and
pushed it shut. It closed with a good healthy clunk. Well, that
made it all worth it, didn't it? Good healthy clunk like  that.
Old-fashioned  values of quality and workmanship. He thought of
a dozen things he had to talk to Susan about and  climbed  back
into  the  car, pushing the auto-dial code on his phone as soon
as the car was prowling back on to the road.
     "...so if you'd like to leave a message,I'll get  back  to
you as soon as possible. Maybe."  Beep.
     "Oh,  Susan, hi, it's Gordon," he said, cradling the phone
awkwardly on his shoulder. "Just on my way to the cottage. It's
er, Thursday night, and it's, er...  8.47.  Bit  misty  on  the
roads.  Listen, I have those people from the States coming over
this weekend to thrash out the  distribution  on  Anthem
Version  2.00, handling the promotion, all that stuff, and look
you know I don't like to ask you this sort of  thing,  but  you
know I always do anyway, so here it is.
     "I  just  need to know that Richard is on the case. I mean
really on the case. I can ask him, and  he  says,
Oh  sure,  it's  fine, but half the time - shit, that lorry had
bright lights, none of these bastard lorry  drivers  ever  dips
them  properly, it's a wonder I don't end up dead in the ditch,
that would be something, wouldn't it, leaving your famous  last
words  on  somebody's  answering machine, there's no reason why
these lorries shouldn't have automatic  light-activated  dipper
switches.  Look, can you make a note for me to tell Susan - not
you, of course, secretary Susan at the office - to tell her  to
send  a  letter from me to that fellow at the Department of the
Environment saying we can provide  the  technology  if  he  can
provide  the  legislation? It's for the public good, and anyway
he owes me a favour plus what's the point in having  a  CBE  if
you  can't  kick  a  little ass? You can tell I've been talking
t Americans all week.
     "That reminds me, God, I hope I  remembered  to  pack  the
shotguns.  What  is it with these Americans that they're always
so mad to shoot my rabbits? I bought them some maps in the hope
that I can persuade them to go on long healthy walks  and  take
their minds off shooting rabbits. I really feel quite sorry for
the  creatures.  I  think 1 should put one of those signs on my
lawn when the Americans are coming, you know, like they have in
Beverly Hills, saying `Armed Response'.
     "Make a note to Susan, would you please, to get an  `Armed
Response'  sign made up with a sharp spike on the bottom at the
right height for rabbits to see. That's secretary Susan at  the
office not you, of course.
     "Where was I?
     "Oh yes. Richard and Anthem 2.00. Susan, that thing
has got  to  be  in beta testing in two weeks. He tells me it's
fine. But every time I see him he's got a  picture  of  a  sofa
spinning  on  his  computer  screen.  He says it's an important
concept, but all I see is  furniture.  People  who  want  their
company accounts to sing to them do not want to buy a revolving
sofa.  Nor do I think he should be turning the erosion patterns
of the Himalayas into a flute quintet at this time.
     "And as for what Kate's up to, Susan, well, I  can't  hide
the  fact  that I get anxious at the salaries and computer time
it's eating up. Important long-term research and development it
might  be.  but  there  is  also  the   possibility,   only   a
possibility, I'm saying, but nevertheless a possibility which I
think  we  owe  it  to ourselves fully to evaluate and explore,
which is that it's a lemon. That's odd, there's a noise  coming
from the boot, I thought I'd just closed it properly.
     "Anyway,  the  main thing's Richard. And the point is that
there's only one person who's really in a position to  know  if
he's getting the important work done, or if he's just dreaming,
and that one person is, I'm afraid, Susan.
     "That's you, I mean, of course, not secretary Susan at the
office.
     "So can you, I don't like to ask you this, I really don't,
can you  really  get on his case? Make him see how important it
is? Just make sure he realises that WayForward Technologies  is
meant  to be an expanding commercial business, not an adventure
playground for crunch-heads. That's the  problem  with  crunch=
heads  -  they have one great idea that actually works and then
they expect you to carry on funding them for years  while  they
sit  and calculate the topographies of their navels. I'm sorry,
I'm going to have to stop and close the boot properly. Won't be
a moment."
     He put the telephone down on the seat beside  him,  pulled
over  on  to  the  grass  verge, and got out. As he went to the
boot, it opened, a figure rose out of it, shot him through  the
chest  with  both  barrels of a shotgun and then went about its
business.
     Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead  was
nothing to his astonishment at what happened next.

Chapter Eight...


     "Come in, dear fellow, come in."
     The door to Reg's set of rooms in college was up a winding
set of wooden stairs in the corner of Second Court, and was not
well lit,  or  rather  it was perfectly well lit when the light
was working, but the light was not working, so the door was not
well  lit  and  was,  furthermore,  locked.  Reg   was   having
difficulty  in  finding  the key from a collection which looked
like something that a fit Ninja warrior could hurl through  the
trunk of a tree.
     Rooms in the older parts of the college have double doors,
like airlocks,  and  like airlocks they are fiddly to open. The
outer door is a sturdy  slab  of  grey  painted  oak,  with  no
features  other than a very narrow slit for letters, and a Yale
lock, to which suddenly Reg at last found the key.
     He unlocked it and  pulled  it  open.  Behind  it  lay  an
ordinary white-panelled door with an ordinary brass doorknob.
     "Come  in,  come  in,"  repeated  Reg,  opening  this  and
fumbling for the light switch. For  a  moment  only  the  dying
embers  of  a fire in the stone grate threw ghostly red shadows
dancing around the room, but then electric light flooded it and
extinguished the magic. Reg hesitated on the  threshold  for  a
moment,  oddly  tense,  as  if  wishing to be sure of something
before he entered, then bustled in with at least the appearance
of cheeriness.
     It was a large panelled room, which a collection of gently
shabby furniture contrived to fill quite  comfortably.  Against
the far wall stood a large and battered old mahogany table with
fat  ugly  legs, which was laden with books, files, folders and
teetering piles of papers. Standing in its  own  space  on  the
desk,  Richard  was amused to note, was actually a battered old
abacus.
     There was a small Regency  writing  desk  standing  nearby
which  might  have  been quite valuable had it not been knocked
about so much, also a couple  of  elegant  Georgian  chairs,  a
portentous  Victorian  bookcase, and so on. It was, in short, a
don's room. It had a don's framed maps and prints on the  walls
a threadbare and faded don's carpet on the floor, and it looked
as  if little had changed in it for decades, which was probably
the case because a don lived in it.
     Two doors led out from either end of  the  opposite  wall,
and  Richard  knew from previous visits that one led to a study
which looked much like a smaller and more  intense  version  of
this room
- larger  clumps  of  books,  taller  piles  of  paper  in more
imminent danger of actually falling, furniture  which,  however
old  and  valuable, was heavily marked with myriad rings of hot
tea or  coffee  cups,  on  many  of  which  the  original  cups
themselves were probably still standing.
     The  other  door  led  to  a  small  and  rather basically
equipped kitchen, and a twisty internal staircase at the top of
which lay the Professor's bedroom and bathroom.
     "Try and make yourself comfortable on the  sofa,"  invited
Reg,  fussing around hospitably. "I don't know if you'll manage
it. It always feels to me as if it's been stuffed with  cabbage
leaves  and  cutlery."  He peered at Richard seriously. "Do you
have a good sofa?" he enquired.
     "Well, yes."  Richard  laughed.  He  was  cheered  by  the
silliness of the question.
     "Oh," said Reg solemnly. "Well; I wish you'd tell me where
you got  it.  I  have endless trouble with them, quite endless.
Never found a comfortable one in all my life. How do  you  find
yours?"  He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, a small
silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port  and  three
glasses.
     "Well,  it's odd you should ask that," said Richard. "I've
never sat on it."
     "Very wise," insisted Reg earnestly, "very, very wise." He
went through a palaver similar to his  previous  one  with  his
coat and hat.
     "Not  that  I  wouldn't like to," said Richard. "It's just
that it's stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which  leads
up  into my flat. As far as I can make it out, the delivery men
got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned  it  around
any  way  they  could,  couldn't  get  it any further, and then
found, curiously enough, that they couldn't get  it  back  down
again. Now, that should be impossible."
     "Odd,"  agreed  Reg. "I've certainly never come across any
irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field.
Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?"
     "I did better than that. I called in a neighbour's kid who
used to be able to solve Rubik's cube in seventeen seconds.  He
sat  on  a  step  and  stared  at  it  for  over an hour before
pronouncing it irrevocably stuck. Admittedly he's a  few  years
older  now  and  has  found  out  about  girls, but it's got me
puzzled."
     "Carry on talking, my dear fellow,  I'm  most  interested,
but  let  me know first if there's anything I can get you. Port
perhaps? Or brandy? The port I think is the  better  bet,  laid
down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think
you'll  find,  and  on the other hand I don't actually have any
brandy. Or coffee? Some more wine perhaps? There's an excellent
Margaux I've been Iooking for an  excuse  to  open,  though  it
should  of  course be allowed to stand open for an hour or two,
which is not to say that I couldn't... no," he said  hurriedly,
"probably best not to go for the Margaux tonight."
     "Tea  is  what I would really like," said Richard, "if you
have some."
     Reg raised his eyebrows. "Are you sure?"
     "I have to drive home."
     "Indeed. Then I shall be a moment or two in  the  kitchen.
Please carry on, I shall still be able to hear you. Continue to
tell  me  of your sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit
on mine. Has it been stuck there for long?"
     "Oh, only about three weeks," said Richard, sitting  down.
"I  could just saw it up and throw it away, but I can't believe
that there isn't a logical answer. And it also made me think  -
it  would  be  really  useful to know before you buy a piece of
furniture whether it's actually going to ht up  the  stairs  or
around  the  corner.  So  I've  modelled  the  problem in three
dimensions on my computer - and so far it just says no way."
     "It says what?" called Reg, over the noise of filling  the
kettte.
     "That  it  can't  be  done. I told it to compute the moves
necessary to get the sofa out, and it said there aren't any.  I
said `What?' and it said there aren't any. I then asked it, and
this  is  the  really  mysterious  thing,  to compute the moves
necessary to get the sofa into  its  present  position  in  the
first  place,  and it said that it couldn't have got there. Not
without fundamental restructuring  of  the  walls.  So,  either
there's  something  wrong with the fundamental structure of the
matter in  my  walls  or,"  he  added  with  a  sigh,  "there's
something wrong with the program. Which would you guess?"
     "And are you married?" called Reg.
     "What? Oh, I see what you mean. A sofa stuck on the stairs
for a month. Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a
specific girl that I'm not married to."
     "What's she like? What does she do?"
     "She's  a  professional  cellist. I have to admit that the
sofa has been a bit of a talking point.  In  fact  she's  moved
back to her own flat until I get it sorted out. She, well... "
     He  was  suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around
the room in a desultory sort of way and ended up  in  front  of
the  dying  fire.  He  gave  it  a bit of a poke and threw on a
couple of extra logs to try and ward off the chill of the room.
     "She's Gordon,s sister, in fact," he added at  last.  "But
they  are  very different. I 'm not sure she really approves of
computers very much. And she doesn't much like his attitude  to
money.  I  don't  think I entirely blame her, actually, and she
doesn't know the half of it."
     "Which is the half she doesn't know?"
     Richard sighed.
     "Well," he said, "it's to do with the project which  first
made the software incarnation of the company profitable. It was
called Reuson, and in its own way it was sensational."
     "What was it?"
     "Well,  it was a kind of back-to-front program. It's funny
how many of the best ideas are just an old idea  back-to-front.
You  see  there have already been several programs written that
help you to  arrive  at  decisions  by  properly  ordering  and
analysing  all  the  relevant  facts  so  that  they then point
naturally towards the right deeision. The clrawback with  these
is  that  the  decision  which  all  the  properly  ordered and
analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want."
     "Yeeeess..." said Reg's voice from the kitchen.
     "Well, Gordon's great insight  was  to  design  a  program
which  allowed  you  to  specify  in  advance what decision you
wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The
program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate
ease,  was  simply  to  construct   a   plausible   series   of
logical-sounding   steps  to  connect  the  premises  with  the
conclusion.
     "And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon  was
able  to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being
completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his  bank  manager
was  unable  to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon
wrote it off three weeks later."
     "Heavens. And did the program sell very well?" .
     "No. We never sold a single copy."
     "You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me."
     "It was," said Richard hesitantly. "The entire project was
bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the  Pentagon.  The  deal
put  WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral
foundation, on the other hand, is not something t would want to
trust my weight to. I,ve recently been analysing a lot  of  the
arguments  put  forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and
if you know  what  you're  looking  for,  the  pattern  of  the
algorithms is very clear.
     "So  much  so,  in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies
over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that
the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air
Force for some reason only has the beta-test  version  of  1.5.
Odd, that."
     "Do you have a copy?"
     "Certainly  not,"  said Richard, "I wouldn't have anything
to do with it. Anyway, when  the  Pentagon  bought  everything,
they  bought everything. Every scrap of code, every disk, every
notebook. I was glad to see the back of it. If indeed we  have.
I just busy myself with my own projects."
     He  poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing
here when he had  so  much  work  on.  Gordon  was  on  at  him
continually   about   getting   the   new,   super  version  of
Anthem ready for taking advantage of the  Macintosh  ll,
and  he was well behind with it. And as for the proposed module
for converting incoming Dow Jones stock-market information into
MIDI data in real time, he'd only meant that  as  a  joke,  but
Gordon,  of  course,  had flipped over the idea and insisted on
its being implemented. That too  was  meant  to  be  ready  but
wasn't. He suddenly knew exactly why it was he was here.
     Well,  it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn't
see why Reg had been quite so keen to see him. He picked  up  a
couple  of books from the table. The table obviously doubled as
a dining table, because although the piles looked  as  if  they
had  been  there  for  weeks,  the  absence of dust immediately
around them showed that they had been moved recently.
     Maybe, he thought, the need  for  amiable  chit-chat  with
someone  different  can become as urgent as any other need when
you live in a community as enclosed as a Cambridge college was,
even nowadays. He was a likeable old fellow, but it  was  clear
from   dinner   that   many   of   his   colleagues  found  his
eccentricities  formed  rather  a   rich   sustained   diet   -
particularly  when  they  had  so  many of their own to contend
with. A thought about Susan nagged him, but he was ued to
that. He flipped through the two books he'd picked up.
     One of them,  an  elderly  one,  was  an  account  of  the
hauntings of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England.
Its spine was getting raggedy, and the photographic plates were
so  grey  and  blurry  as  to be virtually indistinguishable. A
picture he thought must be a very lucky (or faked)  shot  of  a
ghostly apparition turned out, when he examined the caption, to
be a portrait of the author.
     The  other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence
was a guide to the Greek islands. He thumbed  through  it  idly
and a piece of paper fell out.
     "Earl  Grey  or  Lapsang  Souchong?"  called  out Reg. "Or
Darjeeling? Or PG Tips? It's all tea bags anyway.  I'm  afraid.
And none of them very fresh."
     "Darjeeling  will  do  fine,"  replied  Richard,  stooping
topick up the piece of paper.
     "Milk?" called Reg.
     "Er, please."
     "One lump or two?"
     "One, please."
     Richard slipped the paper back into the book, noticing  as
he  did  so  that  it had a hun-iedly scribbled note on it. The
note said,  oddly  enough,  "Regard  this  simple  silver  salt
cellar. Regard this simple hat."
     "Sugar?"
     "Er,  what?"  said  Richard,  startled.  He  put  the book
hurriedly back on the pile.
     "Just a tiny joke of mine," said Reg cheerily, "to see  if
people  are  listening."  He  emerged  beaming from the kitchen
carrying a small tray with two cups  on  it,  which  he  hurled
suddenly to the floor. The tea splashed over the carpet. One of
the  cups  shattered and the other bounced under the table. Reg
leaned against the door frame, white-faced and staring.
     A frozen instant of time slid silently  by  while  Richard
was  too startled to react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to
help. But the old man was already apologising and  offering  to
make him another cup. Richard helped him to the sofa.
     "Are  you  all  right?" asked Richard helplessly. "Shall I
get a doctor?"
     Reg waved him down. "It's all right,"  he  insisted,  "I'm
perfectly  well.  Thought  I heard, well, a noise that startled
me. But it was nothing. Just overcome with  the  tea  fumes,  I
expect. Let me just catch my breath. I think a little, er, port
will  revive me excellently. So sorry, I didn't mean to startle
you." He waved in the general direction of the  port  decanter.
Richard hurriedly poured a small glass and gave it to him.
     "What  kind  of  noise?" he asked, wondering what on earth
could shock him so much.
     At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and  an
extraordinary kind of heavy breathing noise.
     "That..."  whispered  Reg. The glass of port lay shattered
at his feet. Upstairs someone seemed to be stamping.  "Did  you
hear it?"
     "Well, yes."
     This seemed to relieve the old man.
     Richard  looked  nervously  up  at  the ceiling. "Is there
someone up there?" he asked, feeling this was a lame  question,
but one that had to be asked.
     "No,"  said  Reg  in a low voice that shocked Richard with
the fear it carried, "no one. Nobody that should be there."
     "Then..."
     Reg was struggling shakily to  his  feet,  but  there  was
suddenly a fierce determination about him.
     "I  must  go  up  there," he said quietly. "I must. Please
wait for me here."
     "Look, what is this?" demanded Richard,  standing  between
Reg and the doorway. "What is it, a burglar? Look, I'll go. I'm
sure  it's  nothing,  it's just the wind or something." Richard
didn't know why he was saying this. It clearly wasn't the wind,
or even anything like the wind, because though the  wind  might
conceivably  make heavy breathing noises, it rarely stamped its
feet in that way.
     "No," the old man said, politely  but  firmly  moving  him
aside, "it is for me to do."
     Richard  followed him helplessly through the door into the
small hallway, beyond which lay the tiny kitchen. A dark wooden
staircase led up  from  here;  the  steps  seemed  damaged  and
scuffed.
     Reg turned on a light. It was a dim one that hung naked at
the top  of  the  stairwell,  and  he  looked  up  it with grim
apprehension.
     "Wait here," he said, and walked up  two  steps.  He  then
turned  and  faced  Richard  with  a  look of the most profound
seriousness on his face.
     "I am sorry," he said, "that you have become  involved  in
what  is...  the  more  difficult  side of my life. But you are
involved now, regrettable though that  may  be,  and  there  is
something  I  must  ask  you.  I  do not know what awaits me up
there, do not know exactly. I do not know if  it  is  something
which  I  have  foolishly  brought  upon  myself  with my... my
hobbies, or if it is  something  to  which  I  have  fallen  an
innocent  victim.  If it is the former, then I have only myself
to blame, for I am like a doctor who cannot give up smoking, or
perhaps worse still, like an ecologist who cannot give  up  his
car - if the latter, then I hope it may not happen to you.
     "What  I must ask you is this. When I come back down these
stairs, always supposing of  course  that  I  do,  then  if  my
behaviour  strikes you as being in any way odd, if I appear not
to be myself, then you must leap on me and wrestle  me  to  the
ground.  Do  you  understand?  You  must  prevent me from doing
anything I may try to do."
     "But how will  I  know?"  asked  an  incredulous  Richard.
"Sorry  I  don't  mean  it to sound like that, but I don't know
what...?"
     "You will know," said Reg. "Now please wait for me in  the
main room. And close the door."
     Shaking his head in bewilderment, Richard stepped back and
did as  he  was  asked.  From  inside  the large untidy room he
listened to the sound of the  Professor's  tread  mounting  the
stairs one at a time.
     He  mounted  them  with  a  heavy  deliberation,  like the
ticking of a great, slow clock.
     Richard heard him reach the top landing. There  he  paused
in  silence.  Seconds  went  by, five, maybe ten, maybe twenty.
Then came again the heavy movement and breath that had first so
harrowed the Professor.
     Richard moved quickly to the door but did not open it. The
chill of the room oppressed and disturbed  him.  He  shook  his
head to try and shake off the feeling, and then held his breath
as  the footsteps started once again slowly to traverse the two
yards of the landing and to pause there again.
     After only a few seconds; this time Richard heard the long
slow squeak of a door  being  opened  inch  by  inch,  inch  by
cautious  inch,  until  it  must surely now at last be standing
wide agape.
     Nothing further seemed to happen for a long, long time.
     Then at last the door closed once again, slowly.
     The  footsteps  crossed  the  landing  and  paused  again.
Richard  backed  a  few  slight  paces  from  the door, staring
fixedly at it. Once more the footsteps started to  descend  the
stairs;  slowly,  deliberately  and quietly, until at last they
reached the bottom. Then after a  few  seconds  more  the  door
handle  began  to rotate. The door opened and Reg walked calmly
in.
     "It's all right, it's just a horse in  the  bathroom,"  he
said quietly.
     Richard leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground.
     "No,"  gasped  Reg,  "no,  get  off  me,  let  me  go, I'm
perfectly all right, damn it. It's just a  horse,  a  perfectly
ordinary  horse." He shook Richard off with no great difficulty
and sat up, puffing and blowing and pushing his  hands  through
his limited hair. Richard stood over him warily, but with great
and mounting embarrassment. He edged back, and let Reg stand up
and sit on a chair.
     "Just  a  horse," said Reg, "but, er, thank you for taking
me at my word." He brushed himself down.
     "A horse," repeated Richard.
     "Yes," said Reg.
     Richard went out and looked up the stairs  and  then  came
back in.
     "A horse?" he said again.
     "Yes,  it is," said the Professor. "Wait -" he motioned to
Richard, who was about to go out again and investigate  -  "let
it be. It won't be long."
     Richard  stared  in disbelief. "You say there's a horse in
your bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles
songs?"
     The Professor looked blankly at him.
     "Listen," he said, "I'm sorry if I... alarmed you earlier,
it was just a slight turn. These things happen, my dear fellow,
don't upset yourself about it. Dear me, I've known odder things
in my time. Many of them. Far odder. She's only  a  horse,  for
heaven's  sake.  I'll  go  and  let her out later. Please don't
concern yourself. Let us revive our spirits with some port."
     "But... how did it get in there?"
     "Well, the bathroom window's open. I expect  she  came  in
through that."
     Richard looked at him, not for the first and certainly not
for the  last  time,  through  eyes  that  were  narrowed  with
suspicion.
     "You're doing it deliberately, aren't you?" he said.
     "Doing what, my dear fellow?"
     "I don't believe there's a horse in your  bathroom,"  said
Richard  suddenly.  "I  don't  know what is there, I don't know
what you're doing, I don,t know what any of this evening means,
but I don't believe there's  a  horse  in.your  bathroom."  And
brushing aside Reg's further protestations he went up to look.

     The bathroom was not large.
     The  walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given
the  age  and  nature  of  the  building,  was  quite  probably
priceless,   but   otherwise   the   fittings  were  stark  and
institutional.
     There was old, scuffed, black-and-white  checked  linoleum
on  the  floor,  a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very
elderly stains and chips in the enamel, and also a small  basic
basin  with  a  toothbrush  and  toothpaste in a Duralex beaker
standing next to the taps. Screwed into the probably  priceless
panelling  above  the  basin  was a tin mirror-fronted bathroom
cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted many times,  and
the  mirror  was stained round the edges with condensation. The
lavatory had an  old-fashioned  cast-iron  chain-pull  cistern.
There  was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the
corner, with an old brown bentwood chair next to it,  on  which
lay  some  neatly folded but threadbare small towels. There was
also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it.
     Richard stared at it, and  it  stared  at  Richard  in  an
appraising  kind  of  way.  Richard  swayed slightly. The horse
stood quite still. After a while  it  looked  at  the  cupboard
instead.  It  seemed,  if  not content, then at least perfectly
resigned to being where it was until it was put somewhere else.
It also seemed... what was it?
     It was bathed in the glow of the moonlight that  strearned
in  through  the window. The window was open but small and was,
besides, on the second floor, so the notion that the horse  had
entered by that route was entirely fanciful.
     There  was  something odd about the horse, but he couldn't
say what. Well, there was one thing that was clearly  very  odd
about  iI  indeed,  which was that it was standing in a college
bathroom. Maybe that was all.
     He reached out, rather tentatively, to pat the creature on
its neck. It felt  normal  -  firm,  glossy,  it  was  in  good
condition. The effect of the moonlight on its coat was a little
mazy, but everything looks a little odd by moonlight. The horse
shook  its mane a little when he touched it, but didn't seem to
mind too much.
     After the success of patting it, Richard stroked it a  few
times  and  scratched  it gently under the jaw. Then he noticed
that there was another door  into  the  bathroom,  in  the  far
corner. He moved cautiously around the horse and approached the
other  door.  He  backed  up  against  it  and  pushed  it open
tentatively.
     It just opened into the Professor's bedroom, a small  room
cluttered  with  books  and  shoes and a small single bed. This
room, too, had another door, which opened out on to the landing
again.
     Richard noticed that the floor of the  landing  was  newly
scuffed  and  scratched as the stairs had been, and these marks
were consistent with the idea that the horse had  somehow  been
pushed  up the stairs. He wouldn't have liked to have had to do
it himself. and he would have liked  to  have  been  the  horse
having  it  done  to  him  even  less,  but  it  was just about
possible.
     But why? He had one last look at the horse, which had  one
last look back at him, and then he returned downstairs.
     "I agree," he said. "You have a horse in your bathroom and
1 will, after all, have a little port."
     He poured some for himself, and then some for Reg, who was
quietly contemplating the fire and was in need of a refill.
     "Just   as   well  I  did  put  out  three  glasses  after
all, said Reg chattily. "I  wondered  why  earlier.
and now I remember.
     "You  asked if you could bring a friend, but appear not to
have dor_e so. On account of the sofa  no  doubt.  Never  mind,
these things happen. Whoa. not too much, you'll spill it."
     All horse-related questions left Richard's mind abruptly.
     "I did?" he said.
     "Oh  yes. I remember now. You rang me back to ask me if it
would be all right, as I recall. I said I would be charmed, and
fully intended to be. I'd saw the thing up if I were you. Don't
want to sacrifice your  happiness  to  a  sofa.  Or  maybe  she
decided   that   an  evening  with  your  old  tutor  would  be
blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of
washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know  what  I  would  have
done.  It's  only  lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a
hectic social round these days."
     It was Richard's turn to be white-faced and staring.
     Yes, he had assumed that Susan would not want to come.
     Yes, he had said to her it would be terribly dull. But she
had insisted that she wanted to come because it  would  be  the
only way she'd get to see his face for a few minutes not bathed
in  the  light  of  a  computer  screen,  so  he had agreed and
arranged that he would bring her after all.
     Only he had completely forgotten this. He had  not  picked
her up.
     He said, "Can I use your phone, please?"

Chapter Nine....


     Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do.
     He  was  dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There
was a horrific hole in  his  chest,  but  the  blood  that  was
gobbing  out of it had slowed to a trickle. Otherwise there was
no movement from his chest at all, or, indeed, from  any  other
part of him.
     He  looked  up, and from side to side, and it became clear
to him that whatever part of him it was  that  was  moving,  it
wasn't any part of his body.
     The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At
a few  feet distant from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in
the grass.
     He continued to lie there, like  someone  lying  awake  at
four  o'clock in the morning, unable to put their mind to rest,
but unable to find anything to do with it. He realised that  he
had  just had something of a shock, which might account for his
inability to think clearly, but didn't account for his  ability
actually to think at all.
     In  the  great  debate  that has raged for centuries about
what, if anything, happens to you after death,  be  it  heaven,
hell,  purgatory  or  extinction.  one  thing has never been in
doubt - that you would at least know the answer when  you  were
dead.
     Gordon  Way  was  dead, but he simply hadn't the slightest
idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn't a situation he
had encountered before.
     He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to  him  as
the  body  that  still  lay  slowly coolingon the ground,
giving up its blood heat in wraiths of steam that mingled  with
the mist of the chill night air.
     Experimenting a bit further, he tried standing up, slowly,
wonderingly  and  wobblingly.  The  ground  seemed  to give him
support, it took his weight. But then of course he appeared  to
have  no  weight that needed to be taken. When he bent to touch
the ground he could feel nothing save a kind of distant rubbery
resistance like the sensation you  get  if  you  try  and  pick
something  up  when  your  arm  has gone dead. His arm had gone
dead. His legs too, and his other arm, and all  his  torso  and
his head.
     His body was dead. He could not say why his mind was not.
     He  stood  in a kind of frozen, sleepless horror while the
mist curled slowly through him.
     He looked back down at the him, the  ghastly,  astonished=
looking  him-thing  lying  still and mangled on the ground, and
his Hesh wanted to creep. Or rather, he wanted flesh that could
creep. He wanted flesh. He wanted body. He had none.
     A sudden cry of horror escaped  from  his  mouth  but  was
nothing and went nowhere. He shook and felt nothing.
     Music  and  a pool of light seeped from his car. He walked
towards it. He tried to walk sturdily, but it was a  faint  and
feeble    kind    of    walking,    uncertain   and,well,
insubstantial. The ground felt frail beneath his feet.
     The door of the car was still open on the  driver's  side,
as  he had left it when he had leaped out to deal with the boot
lid, thinking he'd only be two seconds.
     That was all of two minutes ago now, when he'd been alive.
When he'd been a person. When he'd thought he was going  to  be
leaping  straight  back  in  and driving off. Two minutes and a
lifetime ago.
     This was insane, wasn't it? he thought suddenly.
     He walked around the door and bent down to peer  into  the
external rear-view mirror.
     He  looked exactly like himself; albeit like himself after
he'd had a terrible fright, which was to be expected, but  that
was  him,  that  was  normal.  This  must  be  something he was
imagining, some horrible kind of waking dream. He had a  sudden
thought and tried breathing on the rear-view mirror.
     Nothing. Not a single droplet formed. That would satisfy a
doctor,  that's what they always did on television - if no mist
formed on the mirror, there was no breath. Perhaps, he  thought
anxiously  to  himself,  perhaps  it  was  something to do with
having heated wing mirrors. Didn't this car  have  heated  wing
mirrors?  Hadn't the salesman gone on and on about heated this,
electric that, and servo-assisted the other?  Maybe  they  were
digital   wing   mirrors.   That   was   it.  Digital,  heated,
servo-assisted,  computer=  controlled,  breath-resistant  wing
mirrors. . .
     He was, he realised, thinking complete nonsense. He turned
slowly and gazed again in apprehension at the body lying on the
ground  behind  him  with half its chest blown away. That would
certainly satisfy a doctor. The sight would be appalling enough
if it was somebody else's body, but his own. . .
     He was dead. Dead... dead... He tried  to  make  the  word
toll  dramatically  in  his mind, but it wouldn't. He was not a
film sound track, he was just dead.
     Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he  gradually
became distressed by the expression of asinine stupidity on its
face.
     It  was  perfectly  understandable, of course. It was just
such an expression as somebody who is in the  middle  of  being
shot  with  his  own shotgun by somebody who had been hiding in
the boot  of  his  car  might  be  expected  to  wear,  but  he
nevertheless  disliked  the  idea  that  anyone  might find him
looking like that.
     He knelt down beside it in  the  hope  of  being  able  to
rearrange  his  features  into some semblance of dignity, or at
least basic intelligence.
     It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He  tried  to
knead  the  skin, the sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he
couldn't seem to get a proper grip on it, or  on  anything.  It
was  like  trying to model plasticine when your arm has gone to
sleep, except that instead of his grip slipping off the  model,
it  would  slip  through  it.  In  this  case, his hand slipped
through his face.
     Nauseated horror and rage swept through him at  his  sheer
bloody  blasted impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find
himself throttling and shaking his own dead body  with  a  firm
and furious grip. He staggered back in amazed shock. All he had
managed  to  do was to add to the inanely stupefied look of the
corpse a twisted-up mouth and a squint. And  bruises  flowering
on its neck.
     He  started  to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a
strange howling from deep within whatever  this  thing  he  had
become  was.  Clutching  his  hands  to  his face, he staggered
backwards, retreated to his car  and  flung  himself  into  the
seat. The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way,
like  an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your
life and will therefore furnish you with a  basic  shecry,  but
refuses to catch your eye.
     Could he get himself to a doctor?
     To  avoid  facing  the  absurdity  of the idea he grappled
violently with  the  steering  wheel,  but  his  hands  slipped
through it. He tried to wrestle with the automatic transmission
shift  and  ended  up  thumping  it in rage, but not being able
properly to grasp or push it.
     The stereo was still playing light orchestral  music  into
the  telephone,  which  had  been  lying  on the passenger seat
listening patiently all this time. He stared at it and realised
with a growing fever of excitement that he was still  connected
to  Susan's  telephone-answering  machine. It was the type that
would simply run and run until he hung up.  lie  was  still  in
contact with the world.
     He tried desperately to pick up the receiver, fumbled, let
it slip,  and  was  in  the end reduced to bending himself down
over its mouthpiece. "Susan!" he cried into  it,  his  voice  a
hoarse  and  distant wail on the wind. "Susan, help me! Help me
for God's sake. Susan, I'm dead... I'm dead... I'm dead  and...
I  don't  know  what  to do.. " He broke down again, sobbing in
desperation, and tried to  cling  to  the  phone  like  a  baby
clinging to its blanket for comfort.
     "Help me, Susan... " he cried again.
     "Beep," said the phone.
     He  looked  down  at it again where he was cuddling it. He
had managed to push something after all. He had managed to push
the button which disconnected the call. Feverishly he attempted
to grapple the thing again, but it constantly  slipped  through
his  fingers  and eventually lay immobile on the seat. He could
not touch it. He could not push the buttons. In rage  he  flung
it  at  the windscreen. It responded to that, all right. It hit
the windscreen, careered straight back though him, bounced  off
the  seat  and  then  lay  still  on  the  transmission tunnel,
impervious to all his further attempts to touch it.
     For several minutes still he sat there, his  head  nodding
slowly as terror began to recede into blank desolation.
     A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing
odd -  a  car  stopped  by  the wayside. Passing swiftly in the
night their headlights would probably not have picked  out  the
body  lying  in  the grass behind the car. They certainly would
not have noticed a ghost sitting inside it crying to himself.
     He didn't know how long he sat there. He was hardly  aware
of  time  passing,  only  that  it didn't seem to pass quickly.
There was little external stimulus  to  mark  its  passage.  He
dicln't  feel  cold.  In fact he could almost not remember what
cotd meant or felt like, he just knew that it was something  he
would have expected to feel at this moment.
     Eventually  he  stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would
have to do something, though he didn't know  what.  Perhaps  he
should try and reach his cottage, though he didn't know what he
would  do  when  he  got there. He just needed something to try
for. He needed to make it through the night.
     Pulling himself together he slipped out of  the  car,  his
foot and knee grazing easily through part of the door frame. He
went to look again at his body, but it wasn't there.
     As  if the night hadn't produced enough shocks already. He
started, and stared at the damp depression in the grass.
     His body was not there.

Chapter Ten...


     Richard made the hastiest departure that politeness  would
allow.
     He said thank you very much and what a splendid evening it
had been  and that any time Reg was coming up to London he must
let him, Richard, know and was there anything he  could  do  to
help about the horse. No? Well, all right then, if you're sure,
and thank you again, so much.
     He  stood there for a moment or two after the door finally
closed, pondering things.
     He had noticed during the short time that the  light  from
Reg's room flooded out on to the landing of the main staircase,
that  there  were  no marks on the floorboards there at all. It
seemed  odd  that  the  horse  should.only  have  scuffed   the
floorboards inside Reg's room.
     Well,  it all seemed very odd, full stop, but here was yet
another curious fact to add  to  the  growing  pile.  This  was
supposed to have been a relaxing evening away from work.
     On an impulse he knocked on the door opposite to Reg's. It
took such  a long time to be answered that Richard had given up
and was turning to go when at last  he  heard  the  door  creak
open.
     He  had a slight shock when he saw that staring sharply up
at him like a small and suspicious bird was the  don  with  the
racing= yacht keel for a nose.
     "Er,  sorry,"  said  Richard, abruptly, "but, er, have you
seen or heard a horse coming up this staircase tonight?"
     The man stopped his obsessive twitching of his fingers. He
cocked his head slightly on one side and then seemed to need to
go on a long journey inside himself to find a voice, which when
found turned out to be a thin and soft little one.
     He said, "That is the first thing anybody has sa_d  to  me
for  seventeen  years,  three  months and two days, five hours,
nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I've been counting."
     He closed the door softly again.
     Richard virtually ran through Second Court.
     When he reached First Court he steadied himself and slowed
down to a walking pace.
     The chill night air was rasping in his lungs and there was
no point in running.  lie  hadn't  managed  to  talk  to  Susan
because  Reg's phone wasn't working, and this was another thing
that he had been mysteriously coy  about.  That  at  least  was
susceptible  of a rational explanation. He probably hadn't paid
his phone bill.
     Richard was about to emerge out  on  to  the  street  when
instead  he decided to pay a quick visit to the porter's lodge,
which was tucked away inside the great  archway  entrance  into
the  college.  It was a small hutchlike place filled with keys,
messages  and  a  single   electric   bar   heater.   A   radio
natered to itself in the background.
     "Excuse  me,"  he  said  to  the  large  black-suited  man
standing behind the counter with his arms folded. "I..."
     "Yes, Mr MacDuff, what can I do for you?"
     In his present state of mind Richard would have been hard=
pressed himself to remember his own name and was startled for a
moment.  However,  college  porters  are  legendary  for  their
ability to perform such feats of memory, and for their tendency
to show them off at the slightest provocation.
     "Is there," said Richard, "a horse anywhere in the college
- that you know of? I mean, you would know if there was a horse
in the college, wouldn't you?"
     The porter didn't blink.
     "No, sir, and yes, sir. Anything else I can help you with,
Mr MacDuff, sir?"
     "Er,  no," said Richard and tapped his fingers a couple of
times on the counter: "No. Thank you. Thank you very  much  for
your  help.  Nice  to  see  you again, er... Bob," he hazarded.
"Good= night, then."
     He left.
     The porter remained perfectly still with his arms  folded,
but shaking his head a very, very little bit.
     "Here's some coffee for you, Bill," said another porter, a
short  wiry one, emerging from an inner sanctum with a steaming
cup. "Getting a bit colder tonight?"
     "I think it is, Fred, thanks," said Bill, taking the cup.
     He took a sip. "You can say what you  like  about  people,
they  don't  get  any  less  peculiar.  Fellow in here just now
asking if there was a horse in the college."
     "Oh yes?" Fred sipped at his own coffee, and let the steam
smart his eyes. "I had a chap in here earlier. Sort of  strange
foreign  priest.  Couldn't  understand a word he said at first.
But he seemed happy just to stand by the fire and listen to the
news on the radio."
     "Foreigners, eh."
     "In the end I told him to shoot off. Standing in front  of
my fire like that. Suddenly he says is that really what he must
do?  Shoot  off?  I  said, in my best Bogart voice, `You better
believe it, buddy.' "
     "Really? Sounded more like Jimmy Cagney to me."
     "No, that's my Bogart voice. This is my Jimmy Cagney voice
- `You better believe it, buddy.' "
     Bill frowned at him. "Is that your Jimmy Cagney  voice?  I
always thought that was your Kenneth McKellar voice."
     "You don't listen properly, Bill, you haven't got the ear.
This is  Kenneth McKellar. `Oh, you take the high road and I'll
take the low road...' "
     "Oh, I  see.  I  was  thinking  of  the  Scottish  Kenneth
McKellar. So what did this priest fellow say then, Fred?"
     "Oh,  he  just  looked  me straight in the eyes, Bill, and
said in this strange sort of..."
     "Skip the accent, Fred, just tell me what he said, if it's
worth hearing."
     "He just said he did believe me."
     "So. Not a very interesting story then, Fred."
     "Well, maybe not. I only mention it because he  also  said
that  he'd left his horse in a washroom and would I see that it
was all right."

Chapter Eleven...


     Gordon Way drifted  miserably  along  the  dark  road,  or
rather, tried to drift.
     He felt that as a ghost - which is what he had to admit to
himself  he  had  become  - he should be able to drift. He knew
little enough about ghosts, but he felt that if you were  going
to  be one then there ought to be certain compensations for not
having a physical body to lug around, and that among them ought
to be the ability simply to drift. But no,  it  seemed  he  was
going to have to walk every step of the way.
     His  aim  was  to  try and make it to his house. He didn't
know what he would do when he got there, but even  ghosts  have
to  spend  the  night  somewhere,  and  he  felt  that being in
familiar surroundings might help. Help what, he didn't know. At
least the journey gave him an objective, and he would just have
to think of another one when he arrived.
     He  trudged  despondently  from  lamppost   to   lamppost,
stopping at each one to look at bits of himself.
     He was definitely getting a bit wraithlike.
     At  times he would fade almost to nothing, and would
seem to  be little more than  a  shadow  playing  in  the
mist, a dream of himself that could just evaporate and be gone.
At  other  times  he  seemed to be almost solid and real again.
Once or twice he would try  leaning  against  a  lamppost,  and
would fall straight through it if he wasn't careful.
     At  last,  and with great reluctance, he actually began to
turn his mind to what it  was  that  had  happened.  Odd,  that
reluctance.   He   really   didn't  want  to  think  about  it.
Psychologists say that the mind will often try to suppress  the
memory  of traumatic events, and this, he thought, was probably
the answer. After all, if having a strange figure jump  out  of
the  boot  of your own car and shoot you dead didn't count as a
traumatic experience, he'd like to know what did.
     He trudged on wearily.
     He tried to recall the figure to his mind's  eye,  but  it
was  like  probing  a  hurting  tooth,  and he thought of other
things.
     Like, was his will up-to-date? He couldn't  remember,  and
made  a  mental note to call his lawyer tomorrow, and then made
another mental note that he would have to  stop  making  mental
notes like that.
     How  would his company survive without him? He didn't like
either of the possible answers to that very much.
     What about his obituary? There was a thought that  chilled
him  to  his bones, wherever they'd got to. Would he be able to
get hold of a copy? What would it say? They'd better give him a
good  write-up,  the  bastards.  Look  at   what   he'd   done.
Single-handedly  saved  the  British  software  industry:  huge
exports,  charitable  contributions,   research   scholarships,
crossing the Atlantic in a solar-powered submarine (failed, but
a good try) - all sorts of things. They'd better not go digging
up that Pentagon stuff again or he'd get his lawyer on to them.
He made a mental note to call him in the mor...
     No.
     Anyway,  can  a dead person sue for libel? Only his iawyer
would know, and he was not going to be able to call him in  the
morning. He knew with a sense of creeping dread that of all the
things  he had left behind in the land of the living it was the
telephone that he was going to  miss  the  most,  and  then  he
turned  his  mind  determinedly back to where it didn't want to
go.
     The figure.
     It seemed to him that the figure had been  almost  like  a
figure  of  Death  itself;  or was that his imagination playing
tricks with him? Was he dreaming that it was a  cowled  figure?
What would any figure, whether cowled or just casually dressed,
be doing in the boot of his car?
     At  that  moment  a  car  zipped  past him on the road and
disappeared off into the night, taking its oasis of light  with
it.  He  thought with longing of the warm, leather-upholstered,
climate= controlled comfort of his own  car  abandoned  on  the
road behind him, and then a sudden extraordinary thought struck
him.
     Was  there  any  way  he  could hitch a lift? Could anyone
actually see him? How would anyone react if they  could?  Well,
there was only one way to find out.
     He  heard another car coming up in the distance behind him
and turned to face it. The twin pools of hazy lights approached
through the mist and Gordon gritted his phantom teeth and stuck
his thumb out at them.
     The car swept by regardless.
     Nothing.
     Angrily he made an indistinct V sign at the  receding  red
rear  lights,  and  realised,  looking straight through his own
upraised arm, that he wasn't at his most visible at the moment.
Was there perhaps some effort of will he could make  to  render
himself more visible when he wanted to'? He screwed up his eyes
in  concentration, then realised that he would need to have his
eyes open in order  to  judge  the  results.  He  tried  again,
forcing  his  mind  as  hard  as he could, but the results were
unsatisfactory.
     Though it did seem  to  make  some  kind  of  rudimentary,
glowing difference, he couldn't sustain it, and it faded almost
immediately,  however  much he piled on the mental pressure. He
would have to judge the timing very carefully if he  was  going
to make his presence felt, or at least seen.
     Another  car  approached  from behind, travelling fast. He
turned again, stuck his thumb out, waited till the  moment  was
right and willed himselfvisible.
     The  car  swerved  slightly,  and then carried on its way,
only a little more slowly. Well, that was something. What  else
could  he  do?  He  would  go  and stand under a lamppost for a
st-ri, and he would practise. The next car  he  would  get  for
sure.

Chapter Twelve...


     "... so if you'd like to leave a message, I'll get back to
you as soon as possible. Maybe."
     Beep.
     "Shit. Damn. Hold on a minute. Blast. Look... er... "
     Click.
     Richard  pushed the phone back into its cradle and slammed
his car into reverse for twenty yards to have another  look  at
the  sign= post by the road junction he'd just sped past in the
mist. He had  extracted  himself  from  the  Cambridge  one-way
system  by  the  usual  method,  which involved going round and
round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort  of  escape
velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which
he was now trying to identify and correct for.
     Arriving  back  at  the junction he tried to correlate the
information on the signpost with the information  on  the  map.
But   it   couldn't  be  done.  The  road  junction  was  quite
deliberately sitting on a page  divide  on  the  map,  and  the
signpost  was  revolving maliciously in the wind. Instinct told
him that he was heading in the wrong direction, but  he  didn't
want  to  go  back the way he'd come for fear of getting sucked
back into the gravitational whirlpool  of  Cambridge's  traffic
system.
     He  turned  left, therefore, in the hope of finding better
fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and
turned  a   speculative   right,,and   then   chanced   another
exploratory  left  and  after  a  few  more such manoeuvres was
thoroughly lost.
     He swore to himself and turned up the heating in the  car.
If  he had been concentrating on where he was going rather than
trying to navigate and telephone at  the  same  time,  he  told
himself,  he  would  at  least know where he was now. He didn't
actually like having a telephone in his  car,  he  found  it  a
bother and an intrusion. But Gordon had insisted and indeed had
paid for it.
     He  sighed  in  exasperation, backed up the black Saab and
turned around again. As he did so he nearly  ran  into  someone
lugging  a  body into a field. At least that was what it looked
like for a second to his overwrought brain, but in fact it  was
probably a local farmer with a sackful of something nutritious,
though  what  he  was  doing  with  it on a night like this was
anyone's guess. As his  headlights  swung  around  again,  they
caught  for  a  moment  a silhouette of the figure trudging off
across the field with the sack on his back.
     "Rather him than me," thought Richard  grimly,  and  drove
off again.
     After a few minutes he reached a junction with what looked
a little  more  like  a main road, nearly turned right down it,
but then turned left instead. There was no signpost.
     He poked at the buttons on his phone again.
     "... get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe."
     Beep.
     "Susan, it's Richard. Where do I start? What a mess.  Look
I'm  sorry, sorry, sorry. I screwed up very badly, and it's all
my fault. And look, whatever it takes to make up for  it,  I'll
do it, solemn promise..."
     He had a slight feeling that this wasn't the right tone to
adopt with an answering machine, but he carried straight on.
     "Honestly,  we  can go away, take a holiday for a week, or
even just this weekend if you like. Really, this weekend. We'll
go somewhere sunny. Doesn't matter  how  much  pressure  Gordon
tries  to  put  on me, and you know the sort of pressure he can
muster, he  is  your  brother,  after  all.  I'll  just...  er,
actually,  it  might have to be next weekend. Damn, damn, damn.
lt's just that I really have promised  to  get,  no,  look,  it
doesn't  matter.  We'll  just do it. I don't care about getting
Anthem finished for Comdex. It's  not  the  end  of  the
world.  We'll  just go. Gordon will just have to take a running
jump - Gaaarghhhh!"
     Richard swerved wildly to avoid the spectre of Gordon  Way
which suddenly loomed in his headlights and took a running jump
at him.
     He  slammed  on  the  brakes,  started  to  skid, tried to
remember what it was you were supposed to  do  when  you  found
yourself  skidding,  he  knew  he'd  seen it on some television
programme about driving  he'd  seen  ages  ago,  what  was  the
programme?  God,  he  couldn't  even  remember the title of the
programme, let alone - oh yes, they'd said you mustn't slam  on
the brakes. That was it. The world swung sickeningly around him
with  slow  and  appalling  force  as the car slewed across the
road, spun, thudded against the grass verge, then slithered and
rocked itself to a halt, facing the wrong  way.  He  collapsed,
panting, against the steering wheel.
     He picked up the phone from where he'd dropped it.
     "Susan," he gasped, "I'll get back to you," and hung up.
     He raised his eyes.
     Standing  full  in  the  glare  of  his headlights was the
spectral figure of Gordon Way staring straight in  through  the
windscreen  with ghastly horror in its eyes, slowly raising its
hand and pointing at him.

     He wasn't sure how long he just sat there. The  apparition
had  melted from view in a few seconds, but Richard simply sat,
shaking, probably for not more than a minute,  until  a  sudden
squeal of brakes and glare of lights roused him.
     He  shook  his  head.  He was, he realised, stopped in the
road facing the wrong way. The car that had just  screeched  to
an  abrupt  halt  almost bumper to bumper with him was a police
car. He took two or three deep  breaths  and  then,  stiff  and
trembling,  he climbed out and stood up to face the officer who
was walking slowly towards him, silhouetted in the police car's
headlights.
     The officer looked him up and down.
     "Er, I'm sorry,  officer,"  said  Richard,  with  as  much
calmness  as  he  could wrench into his voice. "I, er, skidded.
The roads are slippery and I, er... skidded. I spun  round.  As
you  see, I, I 'm facing the wrong way." He gestured at his car
to indicate the way it was facing.
     "Like to tell me why it was  you  skidded  then,  exactly,
sir?"  The  police  officer was looking him straight in the eye
while Qulling out a notebook.
     "Well, as I  said,"  Рxplained  Richard,  "the  roads  are
slippery because of the mist, and, well, to be erfectl honest,"
he  suddenly found himself saying, in spite of all his attempts
to stop himself, "I was  just  driving  along  and  I  suddenly
imagined that I saw my employer throwing himself in front of my
car."
     The officer gazed at him levelly.
     "Guilt complex, officer," added Richard with a twitch of a
smile,  "you  know  how  it  is. I was contemplating taking the
weekend off."
     The police officer seemed to hesitate, balanced on a knife
edge between sympathy and suspicion. His eyes narrowed a little
but didn't waver.
     "Been drinking, sir?"
     "Yes," said Richard, with a quick sigh, "but very  little.
Two  glasses  of  wine  max.  Er...  and a small glass of port.
Absolute max. It was really just a lapse of concentration.  I'm
fine now."
     "Name?"
     Richard gave him his name and address. The policeman wrote
it all  down  carefully  and neatly in his book, then peered at
the car registration number and wrote that down too.
     "And who is your employer then, sir?"
     "His name is Way. Gordon Way."
     "Oh,"  said  the  policeman  raising  his  eyebrows,  "the
computer gentleman."
     "Er, yes, that's right. I design software for the company.
WayForward Technologies II."
     "We've  got  one of your computers down the station," said
the policeman. "Buggered if I can get it to work."
     "Oh," said Richard wearily, "which model do you have?"
     "I think it's called a Quark II."
     "Oh, well that's simple," said Richard  with  relief.  "It
doesn't work. Never has done. The thing is a heap of shit."
     "Funny thing, sir, that's what I've always said," said the
policeman. "Some of the other lads don't agree."
     "Well,  you're  absolutely  right,  officer.  The thing is
hopeless. It's the major reason the original company went bust.
I suggest you use it as a big paperweight."
     "Well, I wouldn't like to do  that,  sir,"  the  policeman
persisted. "The door would keep blowing open."
     "What do you mean, officer?" asked Richard.
     "I  use  it  to  keep the door closed, sir. Nasty draughts
down our station this time of year. In the summer,  of  course,
we beat suspects round the head with it."
     He flipped his book closed and prodded it into his pocket.
     "My  advice to you, sir, is to go nice and easy on the way
back. Lock up the car and spend the weekend getting  completely
pissed. I find it's the only way. Mind how you go now."
     He returned to his car, wound down the window, and watched
Richard  manoeuvre  his car around and drive off into the night
before heading off himself.
     Richard took a deep breath, drove calmly back  to  London,
let  himself  calmly  into  his flat, clambered calmly over the
sofa, sat  down,  poured  himself  a  stiff  brandy  and  began
seriously to shake.
     There were three things he was shaking about.
     There  was the simple physical shock of his near-accident,
which is the sort of thing that always churns you up a lot more
than you expect. The body floods itself with adrenaline,  which
then hangs around your system turning sour.
     Then  there  was the cause of the skid - the extraordinary
apparition of Gordon throwing himself in front of  his  car  at
that  moment. Boy oh boy. Richard took a mouthful of brandy and
gargled with it. He put the glass down.
     It was well known that  Gordon  was  one  of  the  world's
richest  natural resources of guilt pressure, and that he could
deliver a ton on your doorstep fresh every morning, but Richard
hadn't realised he had let it get to  him  to  such  an  unholy
degree.
     He  took up his glass again, went upstairs and pushed open
the door to his workroom, which involved shifting  a  stack  of
BYTE magazines that had toppled against it. He pushed them away
with his foot and walked to the end of the large room. A lot of
glass  at  lhis  end  let  in  views over a large part of north
London, from which the mist was now clearing. St Paul's  glowed
in  the  dark  distance and he stared at it for a moment or two
but it didn't do anything special.  After  the  events  of  the
evening he found this came as a pleasant surprise.
     At  the other end of the room were a couple of long tables
smothered in, at thУ last count, six  Macintosh  computers.  In
the  middle  was  the Mac II on which a red wire-frame model of
his sofa was lazily revolving within a blue wire-frame model of
his narrow staircase, complete with banister rail, radiator and
fuse= box details, and of course the awkward turn halfway up.
     The sofa would start out spinning in one direction, hit an
obstruction,  twist  itself  in  another  plane,  hit   another
obstruction,  revolve  round  a third axis until it was stopped
again, then cycle through the moves again in a different order.
You didn't have to watch the sequence for very long before  you
saw it repeat itself.
     The sofa was clearly stuck.
     Three  other  Macs  were  connected up via long tangles of
cable to an untidy agglomeration of synthesisers - an  Emulator
11+ HD sampler, a rack of TX modules, a Prophet VS, a Roland JX
10,  a  Korg  DWROOO,  an Octapad, a left-handed Synth-Axe MIDI
guitar controller, and even an old drum machine stacked up  and
gathering dust in the corner - pretty much the works. There was
also  a  small  and rarely used cassette tape recorder: all the
music was stored in sequencer files  on  the  computers  rather
than on tape.
     He  dumped himself into a seat in front of one of the Macs
to see what, if anything, it was doing. It  was  displaying  a¦
"Untitled" Excel spreadsheet and he wondered why.
     He  saved  it  and  looked to see if he'd left himself any
notes and quickly discovered  that  the  spreadsheet  contained
some  of  the data he had previously downloaded after searching
the World Reporter and  Knowledge  on-line
databases for facts about swallows.
     He  now had figures which detailed their migratory habits,
their wing shapes, their  aerodynamic  profile  and  turbulence
characteristics,   and   some   sort   of  rudimentary  figures
concerning the patterns that a flock would adopt in flight, but
as yet he had orily the faintest idea as to how he was going to
synthesise them all together.
     Because  he  was   too   tired   to   think   particularly
constructively  tonight he savagely selected and copied a whole
swathe of figures from the spreadsheet at random,  pasted  them
into  his own conversion program, which scaled and filtered and
manipulated the  figures  according  to  his  own  experimental
algorithms,  loaded the converted file into Performer, a
powerful sequencer  program,  and  played  the  result  through
random  MIDI  channels to whichever synthesisers happened to be
on at the moment.
     The  result  was  a  short  burst  of  the  most   hideous
cacopttony, and he stopped it.
     He ran the conversion program again. this time instructing
it to  force-map  the  pitch  values  into  G minor. This was a
utility he was determined in the end to get rid of  because  he
regarded  it  as cheating. If there was any basis to his firmly
held belief that the rhythms and harmonies of  music  which  he
found  most  satisfying  could be found in, or at least derived
from,  the  rhythms  and  harmonies  of   naturally   occurring
phenomena,  then  satisfying  forms  of modality and intonation
should emerge naturally as well. rather than being forced.
     For the moment, though, he forced it.
     The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony
in G minor.
     So much for random shortcuts.
     The first task was a relatively simple one, which would be
simply to plot the waveform described by the tip of a swallow`s
wing as it flies, then synthesise that waveform.  That  way  he
would  end  up with a single note, which would be a good start,
and it shouldn't take more than the weekend to do.
     Except, of course, that he didn't have a weekend available
to do it in  because  he  had  somehow  to  get  Version  2  of
Anthem out of the door sometime during the course of the
next year, or "month" as Gordon called it.
     Which brought Richard inexorably to the third thing he was
shaking about.
     There  was  absolutely  no way that he could take the time
off this weekend or next to fulfil the promise he had  made  to
Susan's   telephone-answering   machine.   And  that,  if  this
evening's dиb[a^]cle had not  already  done  so,  would  surely
spell the final end.
     But  that was it. The thing was done. There is nothing you
can do about a message  on  someone  else's  answering  machine
other  than  let  events take their course. It was done. It was
irrevocable.
     An odd thought suddenly struck him.
     It took him by  considerable  surprise,  but  he  couldn't
really see what was wrong with it.

Chapter Thirteen...


     A  pair  of  binoculars scanning the London night skyline,
idly, curious, snooping. A little  look  here,  a  little  look
there,  just  seeing  what's  going  on,  anything interesting,
anything useful.
     The binoculars settle on the back of one particular house,
attracted  by  a  slight   movement.   One   of   those   large
late-Victorian  villas,  probably flats now. Lots of black iron
drainpipes. Green rubber dustbins. But dark. No, nothing.
     The binoculars are just moving onwards when another stight
movement catches in the moonlight. The binoculars refocus  very
slightly,  trying  to  find  a  detail,  a  hard edge, a slight
contrast in the darkness. The mist  has  lifted  now,  and  the
darkness glistens. They refocus a very, very little more.
     There  it  is.  Something,  definitely.  Only  this time a
little higher up, maybe  a  foot  or  so,  maybe  a  yard.  The
binocuiars  settle  and  relax  -  steady, trying for the edge,
trying for the detail. There. The  binoculars  settle  again  -
they  have found their mark, straddled between a windowsill and
a drainpipe.
     It is a dark figure, splayed  against  the  wall,  looking
down,  looking for a new foothold, looking upwards, looking for
a ledge. The binoculars peer intently.
     The figure is that of a tall, thin man.  His  clothes  are
right  for  the  job,  dark  trousers,  dark  sweater,  but his
movements are awkward and angular.  Nervous.  Interesting.  The
binoculars wait and consider, consider and judge.
     The man is clearly a rank amateur.
     Look  at  his  fumbling.  Look at his ineptitude. His feet
slip on the drainpipe, his hands  can't  reach  the  ledge.  He
nearly  falls.  He  waits  to catch his breath. For a moment he
starts to climb back down again, but seems to  find  that  even
tougher going.
     He  lunges  again  for the ledge and this time catches it.
His foot shoots out to steady himself  and  nearly  misses  the
pipe. Could have been very nasty, very nasty indeed.
     But  now  the  way  is  easier  and progress is better. He
crosses to another pipe, reaches a  third-floor  window  ledge,
flirts  briefly with deБth as he crawls painfully on to it, and
makes the cardinal error and looks down. He sways  briefly  and
sits back heavily. He shades his eyes and peers inside to check
that the room is dark, and sets about getting the window open.
     One  of  the  things that distinguish the amateur from the
professional is that this is the point when the amateur  thinks
it  would  have  been  a  good idea to bring along something to
prise the window  open  with.  Luckily  for  this  amateur  the
householder  is  an  amateur  too,  and  the sash window slides
grudgingly up. The climber crawls, with some relief, inside.
     He should be locked up for his own protection,  think  the
binoculars. A hand starts to reach for the phone. At the window
a  face  looks  back  out  and  for  a  moment is caught in the
moonlight, then it ducks back  inside  to  carry  on  with  its
business.
     The  hand  stays  hovering  over the phone for a moment or
two, while the  binoculars  wait  and  consider,  consider  and
judge.  The  hand  reaches  instead  for  the A-Z street map of
London.
     There is a long  studious  pause,  a  little  more  intent
binocular  work, and then the hand reaches for the phone again,
lifts it and dials.

Chapter Fourteen...


     Susan's flat was small but spacious, which  was  a  trick,
reflected  Richard tensely as he turned on the light, that only
women seemed able to pull off.
     It wasn't  that  observation  which  made  him  tense,  of
course=  he'd  thought  it  before, many times. Every time he'd
been in her flat,  in  fact.  It  always  struck  him,  usually
because  he  had  just  come  from his own flat, which was four
times the size and cramped. He'd just come from  his  own  flat
this  time,  only via a rather eccentric route, and it was this
that made his usual observation unusually tense.
     Despite the chill of the night he was sweating.
     He looked back out  of  the  window,  turned  and  tiptoed
across  the  room towards where the telephone and the answering
machine stood on their own small table.
     There was no point, he told himself, in  tiptoeing.  Susan
wasn't  in.  He would be extremely interested to know where she
was, in fact - just as she, he told himself, had probably  been
extremely  interested  in  knowing  where  he  had  been at the
beginning of the evening.
     He realised he was still tiptoeing. He hit his lУg to make
himself stop doing it, but carried on doing it none the less.
     Climbing up the outside wall had been terrifying.
     He wiped his forehead with  the  arm  of  his  oldest  and
greasiest  sweater. There had been a nasty moment when his life
had flashed before his eyes but he  had  been  too  preoccupied
with falling and had missed all the good bits. Most of the good
bits had involved Susan, he realised. Susan or computers. Never
Susan  and  computers  -  those  had Iargely been the bad bits.
Which was why he was here, he told himself. He seemed  to  need
convincing, and told himself again.
     He looked at his watch. Eleven forty-five.
     It  occurred  to him he had better go and wash his wet and
dirty hands before he touched anything. It wasn't the police he
was worried about, but Susan's terrifying  cleaner.  She  would
know.
     He  went  into  the  bathroom, turned on the light switch,
wiped it, and then stared at his own stanled face in the bright
neon-lit mirror as he ran the  water  over  his  hands.  For  a
moment  he  thought  of  the  dancing,  warm candlelight of the
Coleridge Dinner, and the images of it weIled up out of the dim
and distant past of the earlier part of the evening.  Life  had
seemed  easy  then,  and  carefree. The wine, the conversation,
simpIe conjuring tricks. He pictured the  round  pale  face  of
Sarah, pop-eyed with wonder. He washed his own face.
     He thought:
     "...  Beware!  Beware!  His  flashing  eyes,  his floating
hair!"

     He brushed his own hair. He thought, too, of the  pictures
hanging  high in the darkness above their heads. He cleaned his
teeth. The low buzz of the neon light snapped him back  to  the
present  and he suddenly remembered with appalled shock that he
was here in his capacity as burglar.
     Something made him look himself directly in  the  face  in
the mirror, then he shook his head, trying to cIear it.
     When would Susan be back? That, of course, would depend on
what she was dotng. He quickly wiped his hands and made his way
back to  the  answering  machine. He prodded at the buttons and
his conscience prodded back at him. The  tape  wound  back  for
what  seemed to be an interminable time, and he realised with a
jolt that it was probabIy  because  Gordon  had  been  in  fulI
flood.
     He  had forgotten, of course, that there would be messages
on the tape other than his own, and listening to other people's
phone messages was tantamount to opening their mail.
     He explained to himself once again that all he was  trying
to  do  was  to undo a mistake he had made before it caused any
irrevocable damage. He would just  play  the  tiniest  snippets
till  he  found  his  own  voice.  That wouldn't be too bad, he
wouldn't even be able to distinguish what was being said.
     He groaned inwardly, gritted his teeth and stabbed at  the
Play  button  so  roughly  that  he  missed  it and ejected the
cassette by mistake. He put it back  in  and  pushed  the  Play
button more carefully.  Beep.
     "Oh,  Susan, hi, it's Gordon," said the answering machine.
I "Just on my way to the cottage. It's, er..." He wound on  for
a  couple  of  seconds. "...need to know that Richard is on the
case. I mean really on..." Richard set his mouth  grimly
and stabbed at the Fast Forward again. He really hated the fact
that  Gordon  tried  to  put  pressure  on him via Susan, which
Gordon always stoutly denied he  did.  Richard  couldn't  blame
Susan  for getting exasperated about his work sometimes if this
sort of thing was going on. '
     Click.
     "... Response. Make a note to Susan would you  please,  to
get  an `Armed Response' sign made up with a sharp spike on the
bottom at the right height for rabbits to see."
     "What?" muttered Richard to himself, and his finger
hesitated for a second over the Fast Forward button. He  had  a
feeling  that  Gordon  desperately  wanted  to  be  like Howard
Hughes, and if he could never hope to be remotely as  rich,  he
could at least try to be twice as eccentric. An act. A palpable
act.
     "That's  secretary  Susan  at  the  office,  not  you,  of
course," continued Gordon's voice  on  the  answering  machine.
"Where  was  I?  Oh yes. Richard and Anthem 2.00. Susan,
that thing has got to be in beta  testing  in  two..."  Richard
stabbed at the Fast Forward, tight-lipped.
     "... point is that there's only one person who's really in
a position  to know if he's getting the important work done, or
if he's just dreaming, and  that  one  person.  ."  He  stabbed
angrily  again.  He  had promised himself he wouldn't listen to
any of it and now here he was getting  angry  at  what  he  was
hearing.  He  should really just stop this. Well, just one more
try.
     When he listened again he just got music.  Odd.  He  wound
forward  again,  and  still  got  music.  Why  would someone be
phoning to play music to an answering machine? he wondered.
     The phone rang. He stopped the tape and answered it,  then
almost  dropped  the  phone like an electric eel as he realised
what he was doing.  Hardly  daring  to  breathe,  he  held  the
telephone to his ear.
     "Rule  One  in housebreaking," said a voice. "Never answer
the, telephone when you're in the middle of a job. Who are  you
supposed to be, for heaven's sake?"
     Richard froze. It was a moment or two before he could find
where he had put his voice.
     "Who is this?" he demanded at last in a whisper.
     "Rule  Two,"  continued the voice. "Preparation. Bring the
right tools. Bring gloves. Try to have the faintest  glimmering
of  an idea of what you're about before you start dangling from
window ledges in the middle of the night.
     "Rule Three. Never forget Rule Two."
     "Who is this?" exclaimed Richard again.
     The voice was unperturbed. "Neighbourhood Watch," it said.
"If you just look out of the back window you'll see..."
     Trailing the phone, Richard hurried over to the window and
looked out. A distant flash startled him.
     "Rule Four. Never stand where you can be photographed.
     "Rule Five... Are you listening to me, MacDuff?"
     "What? Yes..." said Richard in bewilderment. "How  do  you
know me?"
     "Rule Five. Never admit to your name."
     Richard stood silent, breathing hard.
     "I  run  a  little  course,"  said  the  voice, "if you're
interested..."
     Richard said nothing.
     "You're  learning,"  continued  the  voice,  "slowly,  but
you're  learning.  If you were learning fast you would have put
the phone down by now, of course.  But  you're  curious  -  and
incompetent = and so you don't. I don't run a course for novice
burglars  as  it happens, tempting though the idea is. I'm sure
there would be grants available. If we have to have  them  they
may as well be trained.
     "However,  if I did run such a course I would allow you to
enrol for free, because I too am curious. Curious to  know  why
Mr  Richard  MacDuff  who,  I  am given to understand, is now a
wealthy young  man,  somethfng  in  the  computer  industry,  I
believe,    should   suddenly   be   needing   to   resort   to
house-breaking."
     "Who -?"
     "So I do a little research, phone Directory Enquiries  and
discover  that  the flat into which he is breaking is that of a
Miss S. Way. I know that Mr Richard MacDuff's employer  is  the
famous  Mr  G.  Way  and  I wonder if they can by any chance be
related."
     "Who -?"
     "You are speaking with Svlad,  commonly  known  as  `Dirk'
Cjelli,  currently trading under the name of Gently for reasons
which it would be otiose, at this moment, to  rehearse.  I  bid
you  good  evening.  If  you wish to know more I will be at the
Pizza Express in  Upper  Street  in  ten  minutes.  Bring  some
money."
     "Dirk?"  exclaimed  Richard.  "You...  Are  you  trying to
blackmail me?"
     "No, you fool, for the pizzas." There was a click and Dirk
Gently rang off.
     Richard stood transfixed for a moment or  two,  wiped  his
forehead  again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an
injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently  and  suck  its
thumb.  Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex
all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery
rhymes. He shook his head  to  try  and  make  them  stop,  and
quickly sat down at the answering machine again.
     He fought with himself over whether or not he was going to
push the  Play  button  again, and then did so anyway before he
had made up his mind. Hardly four seconds of  light  orchestral
music  had oozed soothingly past when there came the sound of a
key scratching in the lock out in the hallway.
     In panic Richard thumped  the  Eject  button,  popped  the
cassette  out,  rammed it into his jeans pocket and replaced it
from the pile of fresh cassettes that lay next to the  machine.
There was a similar pile next to his own machine at home. Susan
at the office provided them - poor, long-suffering Susan at the
office.  He  must  remember  to  feel  sympathy  for her in the
morning, when he had the time and concentration for it.
     Suddenly, without  even  noticing  himself  doing  it,  he
changed  his mind. In a flash he popped the substitute cassette
out of the machine again,  replaced  the  one  he  had  stolen,
rammed  down  the  rewind  button and made a lunge for the sofa
where, with two seconds to go before the door opened, he  tried
to arrange himself into a nonchalant and winning posture. On an
impulse  he  stuck  his  left  hand up behind his back where it
might come in useful.
     He was  just  trying  to  arrange  his  features  into  an
expression  composed in eyual parts of contrition, cheerfulness
and sexual allurement  when  the  door  opened  and  in  walked
Michael Wenton= Weakes.
     Everything stopped.
     Outside, the wind ceased. Owls halted in mid-flight. Well,
maybe  they  did,  maybe  they  didn't,  certainly  the central
heating chose that moment to shut down, unable perhaps to  cope
with  the  supernatural chill that suddenly whipped through the
room.
     "What are you doing here, Wednesday?" demanded Richard. He
rose from the sofa as if levitated with anger.
     Michael Wenton-Weakes was a large sad-faced man  known  by
some people as Michael Wednesday-Week, because that was when he
usually  promised  to  have things done by. He was dressed in a
suit that had been superbly well tailored when his father,  the
late Lord Magna; had bought it forty years previously.
     Michael  Wenton-Weakes  came  very  high  on the small but
select list of people whom Richard thoroughly dislikeu.
     He disliked him because he found the idea of  someone  who
was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because
he  thought  the world didn't really understand the problems of
privileged people, deeply  obnoxious.  Michae!,  on  the  other
hand,  disliked  Richard  for  the  fairly  simple  reason that
Richard disliked him and made no secret of it.
     Michael gave a slow and lugubrious look back out into  the
hallway  as  Susan  walked  through.  She  stopped when she saw
Richard.  She  put  down  her  handbag,  unwound   her   scarf,
unbuttoned  her  coat,  slipped  it  off, handed it to Michael,
walked over to Richard and smacked him in the face.
     "I've  been  saving  that  up  all  evening,"   she   said
furiously. "And don't try and pretend that's a bunch of flowers
you've forgotten to bring which you're hiding behind your back.
You tried that gag last t.ime." She turned and stalked off.
     "It's  a  box  of  chocolates  I  forgot  this time," said
Richard glumly and held out his empty hand  to  her  retreating
back. "I climbed up the entire outside wall without them. Did I
feel a fool when I got in."
     "Not  very  funny," said Susan. She swept into the kitchen
and sounded as if she was grinding coffee with her bare  hands.
For  someone  who  always looked so neat and sweet and delicate
she packed a hell of a temper.
     "It's true," said Richard, ignoring Michael completely. "I
nearly killed myself."
     "I'm not going to rise to that," said  Susan  from  within
the kitchen. "If you want something big and sharp thrown at you
why don't you come in here and be funny?"
     "I  suppose it would be pointless saying I'm sorry at this
point," Richard called out.
     "You bet," said Susan, sweeping back out  of  the  kitchen
again.  She  looked at him with her eyes flashing, and actually
stamped her foot.
     "Honestly, Richard," she said, "You're just going  to  say
you forgot again. How can you have the gall to stand there with
two  arms, two legs and a head as if you're a human being? This
is behaviour that a bout of amoebic dysentery would be  ashamed
of.  I  bet  that even the very lowest form of dysentery amoeba
shows up to take its girlfriend out for a quick trot around the
stomach lining once in a while. Well, I hope you  had  a  lousy
evening."
     "I  did," said Richard. "You wouldn't have liked it. There
was a horse in the bathroom, and you know  how  you  hate  that
sort of thing."
     "Oh,  Michael,"  said  Susan  brusquely, "don't just stand
there like a sinking pudding. Thank you very  much  for  dinner
and  the concert, you were very sweet and I did enjoy listening
to your troubles all evening because  they  were  such  a  nice
change  from mine. But I think it would be best if I just found
your book and pushed you out. I've got some serious jumping  up
and  down  and  ranting  to  do,  and I know how it upsets your
delicate sensibilities."
     She retrieved her coat from him and hung it up.  While  he
had  been  holding it he had seemed entirely taken up with this
task and oblivious to anything else. Without  it  he  seemed  a
little  lost and naked and was forced to stir himself back into
life. He turned his big heavy eyes back on Richard.
     "Richard," he said, "I,  er,  read  your  piece  in...  in
Fathom. On Music and, er..."
     "Fractal Landscapes," said Richard shortly. He didn't want
to talk  to  Michael, and he certainly didn't want to get drawn
into a  conversation  about  Michael's  wretched  magazine.  Or
rather, the magazine that used to be Michael's.
     That  was  the  precise  aspect  of  the conversation that
Richard didn't want to get drawn into.
     "Er, yes. Very interesting, of course,"  said  Michael  in
his silky, over-rounded voice. "Mountain shapes and tree shapes
and all sorts of things. Recycled algae."
     "Recursive algorithms."
     "Yes,  of  course.  Very  interesting.  But  so  wrong, so
terribly wrong. For the magazine, I mean. It is, after all,  an
arts review. I would never have allowed such a thing, of
course.  Ross has utterly ruined it. Utterly. He'll have to go.
Have to. He has no sensibilities and he's a thief."
     "He's not a thief, Wednesday, that's  absolutely  absurd,"
snapped  Richard,  instantly  getting drawn into it in spite of
his resolution not to. "He had nothing to do with your  getting
the push whatsoever. That was your own silly fault, and you..."
     There was a sharp intake of breath.
     "Richard,"  said  Michael in his softest, quietest voice -
arguing with him was like getting tangled in parachute  silk  -
"I think you do not understand how important..."
     "Michael,"  said Susan gently but firmly, holding open the
door.  Michael  Wenton-Weakes  nodded  faintly  and  seemed  to
deflate.
     "Your  book,"  Susan added, holding out to him a small and
elderly volume on the ecclesiastical architecture of  Kent.  He
took  it,  murmured  some slight thanks; looked about him for a
moment as if he'd suddenly realised something rather odd,  then
gathered himself together, nodded farewel! and left.
     Richard  didn't  appreciate  quite how tense he had become
till Michael left and he  was  suddenly  able  to  relax.  He'd
always  resented  the  indulgent  soft  spot that Susan had for
Michael even if she did try to disguise it  by  being  terribly
rude to him al! the time. Perhaps even because of that.
     "Susan, what can I say... ?" he started lamely.
     "You could say `Ouch' for a start. You didn't even give me
that satisfaction when I hit you, and I thought I did it rather
hard. God, it's freezing in here. What's that window doing wide
open?"
     She went over to shut it.
     "I told you. That's how I got in," said Richard.
     He sounded sufficiently as if he meant it to make her look
round at him in surprise.
     "Really,"  he  said.  "Like  in  the chocolate ads, only I
forgot the box of chocolates... " He shrugged sheepishly.
     She stared at him in amazement.
     "What on earth possessed you to do that?"  she  said.  She
stuck  her  head  out of the window and looked down. "You could
have got killed," she said, turning back to him.
     "Well, er, yes..." he said. "It just seemed the  only  way
to...  I  don't  know."  He rallied himself. "You took your key
back remember?"
     "Yes. I got fed up with you coming and raiding  my  larder
when you couldn't be bothered to do your own shopping. Richard,
you really climbed up this wall?"
     "Well, I wanted to be here when you got in."
     She  shook her head in bewilderment. "It would have been a
great deal better if you'd been here when I went out.  Is  that
why you're wearing those filthy old clothes?"
     "Yes.  You  don't think I went to dinner at St Cedd's like
this?"
     "Well, I no longer know what you consider to  be  rationai
behaviour."  She  sighed  and  fished  about in a small drawer.
"Here," she said, "if it's going to save your life," and handed
him a couple of keys on a ring. "I'm  too  tired  to  be  angry
anymore.  An  evening  of being lobbied by Michael has taken it
out of me."
     "Well, I'll never understand why you  put  up  with  him,"
said Richard, going to fetch the coffee.
     "I know you don't like him, but he's very sweet and can be
charming  in his sad kind of way. Usually it's very relaxing to
be with someone who's so self-absorbed, because it doesn't make
any demands on you. But he's obsessed with the idea that I  can
do  something  about  his  magazine.  I  can't, of course. Life
doesn't work like that. I do feel sorry for him, though."
     "I don't. He's had it very, very easy  all  his  life.  He
still  has it very, very easy. He's just had his toy taken away
from him that's all. It's hardly unjust, is it?"
     "It's not a matter of whether it's just  or  not.  I  feel
sorry for him because he's unhappy."
     "Well,   of  course  he's  unhappy.  AI  Ross  has  turned
Fathom into a really sharp,  intelligent  magazine  that
everyone  suddenly  wants  to  read.  It  was  just  a bumbling
shambles before. Its only real function was to let Michael have
lunch and toady about with whoever he liked on the pretext that
maybe they might like to write a little  something.  He  hardly
ever  got  an  actual issue out. The whole thing was a sham. He
pampered himself with it: I really don't find that charming  or
engaging.  I'm  sorry,  I'm going on about it and I didn't mean
to."
     Susan shrugged uneasily.
     "I think you overreact," she said, "though I think I  will
have to steer clear of him if he's going to keep on at me to do
something  I  simply  can't  do.  It's  too exhausting. Anyway,
listen, I'm glad you had a lousy evening. I want to talk  about
what we were going to do this weekend."
     "Ah," said Richard, "well..."
     "Oh, I'd better just check the messages first."
     She  walked  past  him to the telephone-answering machine,
played the first few  seconds  of  Gordon's  message  and  then
suddenly ejected the cassette.
     "I  can't be bothered," she said, giving it to him. "Could
you just give this straight to Susan at  the  office  tomorrow?
Save  her  a  trip. If there's anything important on it she can
tell me."
     Richard blinked, said, "Er, yes," and pocketed  the  tape,
tingling with the shock of the reprieve.
     "Anyway,  the  weekend  -" said Susan, sitting down on the
sofa.
     Richard wiped his hand over his brow. "Susan, I..."
     "I'm afraid I've got to work. Nicola's sick and I'm  going
to  have  to dep for her at the Wigmore on Friday week. There's
some Vivaldi and some Mozart I don't know  too  well,  so  that
means a lot ofextra practice this weekend, I'm afraid. Sorry."
     "Well,  in  fact," said Richard, "I have to work as well."
He sat down by her.
     "I know. Gordon keeps on at me  to  nag  you.  I  wish  he
wouldn't.  It's  none  of  my  business  and  it  puts me in an
invidious position. I'm tired of being pressurised  by  people,
Richard. At least you don't do that."
     She took a sip of her coffee.
     "But I'm sure," she added, "that there's some kind of grey
area between  being  pressurised and being completely forgotten
about that I'd quite like to explore. Give me a hug."
     He  hugged  her,  feeling  that  he  was  monstrously  and
unworthily  lucky.  An  hour  later  he  let  himself  out  and
discovered that the Pizza Express was closed.

     Meanwhile, Michael Wenton-Weakes made his way back to  his
home  in  Chelsea. As he sat in the back of the taxi he watched
the streets with a blank stare and tapped his  fingers  lightly
against the window in a slow thoughtful rhythm.  Rap tap tap
a  rap  tap  a  rap  a  tap.    He  was one of those
dangerous people who are soft,  squidgy  and  cowlike  provided
they have what they want. And because he had always had what he
wanted,  and  had  seemed  easily pleased with it, it had never
occurred to anybody that  he  was  anything  other  than  soft,
squidgy  and  cowlike.  You would have to push through a lot of
soft squidgy bits in order to find a bit that didn't give  when
you  pushed it. That was the bit that all the soft squidgy bits
were there to protect.
     Michael Wenton-Weakes was the younger son of  Lord  Magna,
publisher,  newspaper  owner  and  over-indulgent father, under
whose protective umbrella it had pleased Michael to run his own
little magazine at a magnificent loss. Lord Magna had  presided
over  the  gradual  but dignified and well-respected decline of
the publishing empire originally founded  by  his  father,  the
first Lord Magna.
     Michael  continued  to  tap  his  knuckles  lightly on the
glass.  A rap tap a rap a tap.  He remembered the
appalling,  terrible  day  when  his  father  had  electrocuted
himself  changing  a  plug,  and his mother, his mother,
took over the business. Not  only  took  it  over  but  started
running  it with completely unexpected verve and determination.
She examined the company with a very sharp eye as to how it was
being run, or walked, as she put it, and  eventually  even  got
around  to  looking  at the accounts of Michael's magazine.
Tap tap tap.  Now Michael knew just enough about the
business side of things to know what the figures ought  to  be,
and  he had simply assured his father that that was indeed what
they were.
     "Can't allow this job just to be a sinecure, you must  see
that,  old  fellow,  you  have  to pay your way or how would it
look, how would it be?" his father used  to  say,  and  Michael
would nod seriously, and start thinking up the figures for next
month,  or whenever it was he would next manage to get an issue
out.
     His mother, on the other hand, was not so  indulgent.  Not
by a lorryload.
     Michael   usually   referred  to  his  mother  as  an  old
battleaxe, but if she was fairly to be compared to a  battleaxe
it  would  only  be  to  an  exquisitely  crafted,  beautifully
balanced battleaxe, with an elegant minimum of  fine  engraving
which  stopped  just  short  of  its gleaming razored edge. One
swipe from such an instrument and you wouldn't even know  you'd
been  hit until you tried to look at your watch a bit later and
discovered that your arm wasn't on.
     She had been waiting patiently -  or  at  least  with  the
appearance  of patience - in the wings all this time, being the
devoted wife, the doting but strict  mother.  Now  someone  had
taken  her  -  to  switch  metaphors  for a moment - out of her
scabbard and everyone was running for cover.
     Including Michael.
     It was her firm belief  that  Michael,  whom  she  quietly
adored,  had been spoiled in the fullest and worst sense of the
word, and she was determined, at this late stage, to stop it.
     It didn't take her more than a few minutes to see that  he
had been simply making up the figures every month, and that the
rnagazine was haemorrhaging money as Michael toyed with it, all
the  time  running up huge lunch bills, taxi accounts and staff
costs  that  hewould  playfully  set  against  fictitious
taxes.  The  whole  thing  had simply got lost somewhere in the
gargantuan accounts of Magna House.
     She had then summoned Michael to see her.   Tap  tap  a
rap a tappa.  "How do you want me to treat you," she
said,  "as  my son or as the editor of one of my magazines? I'm
happy to do either."
     "Your magazines? Well, I am your son, but I don't see..."
     "Right. Michael, I want you to look at these figures," she
said briskly, handing over a sheet of computer  printout.  "The
ones  on  the  left  show the actual incomings and outgoings of
Fathom, the ones on the right are your own figures. Does
anything strike you about them?"
     "Mother, I can explain, I-"
     "Good," said Lady Magna sweetly, "I'm very glad of that."
     She took the piece of paper back. "Now. Do  you  have  any
views on how the magazine should best be run in the future?"
     "Yes, absolutely. Very strong ones. I-"
     "Good,"  said  Lady  Magna,  with  a  bright smile. "Well,
that's all perfectly satisfactory, then."
     "Don't you want to hear -?"
     "No, that's all right, dear. I'm just happy to  know  that
you  do have something to say on the matter to clear it all up.
I'm sure the new owner of Fathom will be glad to  listen
to whatever it is."
     "What?"  said a stunned Michael. "You mean you're actually
selling Fathom?"
     "No. I mean I've already sold it. Didn't get much for  it,
I'm afraid. One pound plus a promise that you would be retained
as editor for the next three issues, and after that it's at the
new owner's discretion."
     Michael stared, pop-eyed.
     "Well,  come  now,"  said his mother reasonably, "we could
hardly continue under the present arrangement,  could  we?  You
always  agreed  with  your  father that the job should not be a
sinecure for you. And since  I  would  have  a  great  deal  of
difficulty  in  either  believing  or resisting your stories, I
thought I would hand the problem on to  someone  with  whom.you
could  have  a more objective relationship. Now, I have another
appointment, Michael."
     "Well,  but...  who  have  you  sold  it  to?"  spluttered
Michael.
     "Gordon Way."
     "Gordon Way! But for heaven's sake, Mother, he's-"
     "He's very anxious to be seen to patronise the arts. And I
think  I  do mean patronise. I'm sure you'll get on splendidly,
dear. Now, if you don't mind "
     Michael stood his ground.
     "I've never heard of anything so outrageous! I "
     "Do you know, that's exactly  what  Mr  Way  said  when  I
showed  him these figures and then demanded that you be kept on
as editor for three issues."
     Michael huffed and puffed and  went  red  and  wagged  his
finger,  but  could think of nothing more to say. Except, "What
difference would it have made to all this if I'd said treat  me
as the editor of one of your magazines?"
     "Why,  dear,"  said Lady Magna with her sweetest smile, "I
would have called  you  Mr  Wenton-Weakes,  of  course.  And  I
wouldn't  now  be  telling you straighten your tie," she added,
with a tiny little gesture under her chin.  Rap tap tap  rap
tap tap.  "Number seventeen, was it, guv?"
     "Er... what?" said Michael, shaking his head.
     "It  was seventeen you said, was it?" said the cab driver:
"'Cause we're 'ere."
     "Oh. Oh, yes, thank you," said Michael. He climbed out and
fumbled in his pocket for some money.
     "Tap tap tap, eh?"
     "What?" said Michael handing over the fare.
     "Tap tap tap," said the cab driver, "all  the  bloody  way
here Got something on your mind, eh, mate?"
     "Mind   your   own   bloody   business,"  snapped  Michael
savagely
     "If you say so, mate. Just thought you might be going  mad
or something," said the cabbie and drove off.
     Michael  let himself into his house and walked through the
cold hall to the dining room, turned on the overhead light  and
poured  himself  a  brandy  from  the decanter. He took off his
coat, threw it across  the  large  mahogany  dining  table  and
pulled  a  chair  over  to  the window where he sat nursing his
drink and his grievances.  Tap tap tap, he went  on  the
window.
     He  had  sullenly  remained  as  editor for the stipulated
three issues and was then, with little ceremony, let go. A  new
editor  was  found, a certain A. K. Ross, who was young, hungry
and ambitious, and  he  quickly  turned  the  magazine  into  a
resounding success. Michael, in the meantime, had been lost and
naked. There was nothing else for him.
     He tapped on the window again and looked, as he frequently
did, at  the  small table lamp that stood on the sill. It was a
rather ugly, ordinary little lamp, and the only thing about  it
that  regularly  transfixed his attention was that this was the
lamp that had electrocuted his father, and this  was  where  he
had been sitting.
     The  old  boy  was  such  a  fool with anything technical.
Michael could just see him peering with profound  concentration
through his half moons and sucking his moustache as he tried to
unravel the arcane complexities of a thirteen-amp plug. He had,
it  seemed,  plugged it back in the wall without first scnewing
the caver back on and then tried to change the  fuse  in  situ.
From  this  he received the shock which had stilled his already
dicky heart.
     Such a simple, simple  error,  thought  Michael,  such  as
anyone could have made, anyone, but the consequences of it were
catastrophic. Utterly catastrophic. His father's death, his own
loss,  the  rise  of  the  appalling  Ross and his disastrously
successful magazine and...   Tap  tap  tap.    He
looked  at  the  window, at his own reflection, and at the dark
shadows of the bushes on the other side of it. He looked  again
at the lamp. This was the very object, this the very place, and
the  error  was  such  a  simple one. Simple to make, simple to
prevent.
     The only thing that separated him from that simple  moment
was  the  invisible  barrier  of  the months that had passed in
between.
     A sudden, odd calm descended on him as if something inside
him had suddenly been resolved.  Tap  tap  tap. 
Fathom  was his. It wasn't meant to be a success, it was
his life. His life had been taken from him, and that demanded a
response.
     Tap tap tap crack.  He surprised himself  by
suddenly  punching  his  hand  through  the  window and cutting
himself quite badly.

Chapter Fifteen...


     Some of the less  pleasant  aspects  of  being  dead  were
beginning to creep up on Gordon Way as he stood in front of his
"cottage."
     It  was  in  fact  a  rather large house by anybody else's
standards but he had always wanted to have  a  cottage  in  the
country  and  so  when the time came for him finally to buy one
and he discovered that he had rather more money available  than
he  had ever seriously believed he might own, he bought a large
old rectory and called it a  cottage  in  spite  of  its  seven
bedrooms  and  its four acres of dank Cambridgeshire land. This
did little to endear him to people who only had  cottages,  but
then  if  Gordon  Way had allowed his actions to be governed by
what endeared him to people he wouldn't have been Gordon Way.
     He wasn't, of course, Gordon Way any longer.  He  was  the
ghost of Gordon Way.
     In his pocket he had he ghosts of Gordon Way's keys.
     It  was this realisation that had stopped him for a moment
in his invisible tracks. The  idea  of  walking  through  walls
frankly  revolted  him.  It  was  something  he had been trying
strenuously to avoid all night. He had instead been fighting to
grip and grapple with every  object  he  touched  in  order  to
render  it,  and  thereby  himself,  substantial.  To enter his
house, his own house, by any means other than that  of  opening
the front door and striding in in a proprietorial manner filled
him with a hurtling sense of loss.
     He wished, as he stared at it, that the house was not such
an extreme  example of Victorian Gothic, and that the moonlight
didn't play so coldly on its  narrow  gabled  windows  and  its
forbidding  turrets.  He had joked, stupidly, when he bought it
that it looked as if it ought to be haunted, not realising that
one day it would be - or by whom.
     A chill of the spirit gripped  him  as  he  made  his  way
silently  up  the  driveway, lined by the looming shapes of yew
trees that were far older than the rectory  itself.  It  was  a
disturbing thought that anybody else might be scared walking up
such  a  driveway on such a night for fear of meeting something
such as him.
     Behind a screen of yew trees off to  his  left  stood  the
gloomy  bulk  of  the  old  church,  decaying now, only used in
rotation with others in neighbouring villages and presided over
by a vicar who was always breathless from bicycling  there  and
dispirited by the few who were waiting for him when he arrived.
Behind the steeple of the church hung the cold eye of the moon.
     A glimpse of movement seemed suddenly to catch his eye, as
if a figure had moved in the bushes near the house, but it was,
he told  himself,  only  his  imagination,  overwrought  by the
strain of being  dead.  What  was  there  here  that  he  could
possibly be afraid of?
     He  continued onwards, around the angle of the wing of the
rectory, towards the front door  set  deep  within  its  gloomy
porch wnathed in ivy. He was suddenly startled to realise
that  there  was  light  coming from within the house. Electric
light and also the dim Hicker of firelight.
     It was a moment or two before he realised that he was,  of
course, expected that night, though hardly in his present form.
Mrs  Bennett,  the  elderly  housekeeper, would have been in to
make the bed, light the fire and leave out a light  supper  for
him.
     The  television,  too,  would be on, especially so that he
could tum it off impatiently upon entering.
     His footsteps  failed  to  crunch  on  the  gravel  as  he
approached.  Though  he  knew that he must fail at the door, he
nevertheless could not but go there first, to try if  he  could
open it, and only then, hidden within the shadows of the porch,
would  he close his eyes and let himself slip ashamedly through
it. He stepped up to the door and stopped.
     It was open.
     Just half an inch, but it was open. His  spirit  fluttered
in  fearful  surprise.  How  could  it be open? Mrs Bennett was
always so conscientious about such things. He stood uncertainly
for a moment and then with difficulty exerted  himself  against
the  door.  Under the little pressure he could bring to bear on
it, it swung slowly and unwillingly open, its  hinges  groaning
in   protest.   He   stepped  through  and  slipped  along  the
stone-flagged  hallway.  A  wide  staircase  led  up  into  the
darkness, but the doors that led off from the hallway all stood
closed.
     The  nearest  door led into the drawing room, in which the
fire was burning, and from which he could hear  the  muted  car
chases of the late movie. He struggled futilely for a minute or
two  with  its shiny brass door knob, but was forced in the end
to admit a humiliating defeat, and with  a  sudden  rage  flung
himself straight at the door - and through it.
     The room inside was a picture of pleasant domestic warmth.
He staggered  violently into it, and was unable to stop himself
floating on through a small occasional  table  set  with  thick
sandwiches  and  a Thermos flask of hot coffee, through a large
overstuffed armchair, into the  fire,  through  the  thick  hot
brickwork and into the cold dark dining room beyond.
     The  connecting  door  back into the sitting room was also
closed. Gordon fingered it numbly and then, submitting  himself
to  the  inevitable,  braced himself, and slid back through it,
calmly, gently, noticing for the first time the  rich  internal
grain of the wood.
     The  coziness  of the room was almost too much for Gordon,
and he wandered  distractedly  around  it,  unable  to  settle,
letting  the warm liveliness of the firelight play through him.
Him it couldn't warm.
     What, he wondered, were ghosts supposed to do all night?
     He  sat,  uneasily,  and  watched  the  television.  Soon,
however, the car chases drifted peacefully to a close and there
was  nothing  left  but grey snow and white noise, which he was
unable to turn off.
     He found he'd sunk too far into  the  chair  and  confused
himself  with  bits  of  it as he pushed and pulled himself up.
I-ie tried to amuse himself by standing  in  the  middle  of  a
table,  but it did little to alleviate a mood that was slidirlg
inexorably from despondency downwards.
     Perhaps he would sleep.
     Perhaps.
     He felt no tiredness or  drowsiness,  but  just  a  deadly
craving  for  oblivion.  He passed back through the closed door
and into the dark hallway, from which the wide heavy stairs led
to the large gloomy bedrooms above.
     Up these, emptily, he trod.
     It was for nothing, he knew. If you cannot open  the  door
to  a  bedroom  you  cannot  sleep  in its bed. He slid himself
through the door and lifted himself on to the bed which he knew
to be cold though he could not feel it. The moon seemed  unable
to  leave  him  alone  and  shone  full  on him as he lay there
wide-eyed and empty, unable now to remember what sleep  was  or
how to do it.
     The  horror  of hollowness lay on him, the horror of lying
ceaselessly and forever awake at four o'clock in the morning.
     He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there, and
no one he  could  go  and  wake  up  who  wouldn't  be  utterly
horrified to see him.
     The  worst moment had been when he had seen Richard on the
road, Richard's face frozen white in  the  windscreen.  He  saw
again his face, and that of the pale figure next to him.
     That  had  been  the thing which had shaken out of him the
lingering shred of warmth at the back of his  mind  which  said
that  this  was just a temporary problem. It seemed terrible in
the night hours, but would be all right in the morning when  he
could see people and sort things out. He fingered the memory of
the rroment in his mind and could not let it go.
     He had seen Richard and Richard, he knew, had seen him.
     It was not going to be all right.
     Usually   when  he  felt  this  bad  at  night  he  popped
downstairs to see what was in the fridge, so he  went  now.  It
would be more cheerful than this moonlit bedroom. He would hang
around the kitchen going bump in the night.
     He  slid  down  -  and  partially through - the banisters,
wafted through the kitchen door without a  second  thought  and
then  devoted  all  his concentration and energy for about five
minutes to getting the light switch on.
     That  gave  him  a  real  sense  of  achievement  and   he
determined to celebrate with a beer.
     After  a minute or two of repeatedly juggling and dropping
a can of Fosters he gave  it  up.  He  had  not  the  slightest
conception  of  how  he  could  manage to open a ring pull, and
besides the stuff was all shaken up by now - and  what  was  he
going to do with the stuff even if he did get it open?
     He  didn't  have  a  body to keep it in. He hurled the can
away from him and it scuttled off under a cupboard.
     He began to notice something about himself, which was  the
way  in  which  his  ability to grasp things seemed to grow and
fade in a slow rhythm, as did his visibility.
     There was  an  irregularity  in  the  rhythm,  though,  or
perhaps  it  was just that sometimes the efPРcts of it would be
much more pronounced than at others. That, too, seemed to  vary
according  to a slower rhythm. Just at that moment it seemed to
him that his strength was on the increase.
     In a sudden fever of activity he tried  to  see  how  many
things  in  the  kitchen he could move or use or somehow get to
work.
     He  pulled  open  cupboards,  he   yanked   out   drawers,
scattering  cutlery  on  the floor. He got a brief whirr out of
the food processor, he knocked over the electric coffee grinder
without getting it to work, he turned on the gas on the  cooker
hob but then couldn't light it, he savaged a loaf of bread with
a  carvi¦g  knife.  He  tried  stuffing lumps of bread into his
mouth, but they simply fell through his mouth to the  floor.  A
mouse  appeared,  but  scumed  from the room, its coat electric
with fear.
     Eventually he  stopped  and  sat  at  the  kitchen  table,
emotionally exhausted but physically numb.
     How, he wondered, would people react to his death?
     Who would be most sorry to know that he had gone?
     For  a while there would be shock, then sadness, then they
would adjust, and he would be a fading memory as people got  on
with  their own lives without him, thinking that he had gone on
to wherever people go. That was a thought that filled him  with
the most icy dread.
     He had not gone. He was still here.
     He  sat facing one cupboard that he hadn't managed to open
yet because its handle was too stiff, and that annoyed him.  He
grappled awkwardly with a tin of tomatoes, then went over again
to the large cupboard and attacked the handle with the tin. The
door  flew  open  and  his  own  missing bloodstained body fell
horribly forward out of it.
     Gordon hadn't realised up till  this  point  that  it  was
possible for a ghost to faint.
     He realised it now and did it.
     He  was  woken a couple of hours later by the sound of his
gas cooker exploding.

Chapter Sixteen...


     The following morning Richard woke up twice.
     The first time he assumed he had made a mistake and turned
over for a fitful few minutes more. The second time he  sat  up
with  a  jolt  as  the  events  of  the previous night insisted
themselves upon him.
     He  went  downstairs  and  had  a  moody   and   unsettled
breakfast,  during  which  nothing  went  right.  He burned the
toast, spilled the coffee, and realised that though he'd  meant
to  buy  some  mor  marmalade  yesterday,  he  hadn't. He
surveyed his feeble attempt at feeding himself and thought that
maybe he could at least allow himself the time  to  take  Susan
out for an amazing meal tonight, to make up for last night.
     If he could persuade her to come.
     There  was  a  rest.aurant  that Gordon had been enthusing
about at gret length  and  recommending  that  they  try.
Gordon  was pretty good on restaurants - he certainly seemed to
spend enough time in them. He sat and tapped his teeth  with  a
pencil  for  a  couple  of  minutes,  and  then  went up to his
workroom and lugged a telephone directory out from under a pile
of computer magazines.
     L'Esprit d'Escalier.
     He phoned the restaurant and tried to book  a  table,  but
when  he  said  when  he  wanted  it for this seemed to cause a
little amusement.
     "Ah, non, m'sieur," said the mai^tre d', "I regret that it
is impossible.  At  this  moment  it  is  necessary   to   make
reservations at least three weeks in advance. Pardon. m'sieur."
     Richard  marvelled  at the idea that there were people who
actually knew what they wanted to do three  weeks  in  advance,
thanked  the  ma_tre d' and rang off. Well, maybe a pizza again
instead. This thought connected back to the appointment he  had
failed  to  keep  last  night,  and  after  a  moment curiosity
overcame him and he reached for the phone book again.
     Gentleman...
     Gentles...
     Gentry.
     There was no Gently at all. Not a single one. He found the
other directories, except for the S-Z book which  his  cleaning
lady  continually  threw  away  for  reasons  he  had never yet
fathomed.
     There was certainly no Cjelli, or anything like it.  There
was no Jently, no Dgently, no Djently, no Dzently, nor anything
remotely similar. He wondered about Tjently, Tsentli or Tzentli
and  tried  Directory  Enquiries, but they were out. He sat and
tapped his teeth with a  pencil  again  and  watched  his  sofa
slowly revolving on the screen of his computer.
     How  very peculiar it had been that it had only been hours
earlier that Reg had asked after Dirk with such urgency.
     If you really wanted to find someone, how  would  you  set
about it, what would you do?
     He  tried phoning the police, but they were out too. Well,
that was that. He had done all he could do for the moment short
of hiring a private  detective,  and  he  had  better  ways  of
wasting his time and money. He would run into Dirk again, as he
did every few years or so.
     He found it hard to believe there were really such people,
anyway, as private detectives.
     What  sort  of  people were they? What did they look like,
where did they work?
     What sort of tie would you wear  if  you  were  a  private
detective?  Presumably  it would have to be exactly the sort of
tie tjat people wouldn't expect  private  detectives  to  wear.
lmagine  having to sort out a problem like that when you'd just
got up.
     Just out of  curiosity  as  much  as  anything  else,  and
because  the  only  alternative  was  settling  down  to Anthem
coding, he found himself leafing through the Yellow Pages.
     Private Detectives - see Detective Agencies.
     The  words  looked  almost  odd  in  such  a   solid   and
businesslike  context.  He  flipped  back through the book. Dry
Cleaners,   Dog   Breeders,   Dental   Technicians,   Detective
Agencies...
     At that moment the phone rang and he answered it, a little
curtly. He didn't like being interrupted.
     "Something wrong, Richard?"
     "Oh, hi, Kate, so no. I was. . my mind was elsewhere."
     Kate  Anselm  was  another  star  programmer at WayForward
Technologies.  She  was  working  on  a  long-term   Artificial
Intelligence  project,  the  sort of thing that sounded like an
absurd pipe dream until you heard her talking about it.  Gordon
needed  to  hear  her  talking about it quite regularly, partly
because he was nervous about  the  money  it  was  costing  and
partly  because, well, there was little doubt that Gordon liked
to hear Kate talking anyway.
     "I didn't want to disturb you," she said. "It's just I was
trying to contact Gordon  and  can't.  There's  no  reply  from
London  or  the  cottage,  or his car or his bleeper. It's just
that for someone as obsessively in contact as Gordon it's a bit
odd. You heard he's had a phone  put  in  his  isolation  tank?
True."
     "I  haven't  spoken to him since yesterday," said Richard.
He suddenly remembered the  tape  he  had  taken  from  Susan's
answering  machine, and hoped to God there wasn't anything more
important in Gordon's message than ravings  about  rabbits.  He
said,  "I  know  he  was going to the cottage. Er, I don't know
where he is.  Have  you  tried  "  Richard  couldn't  think  of
anywhere else to try - "...er. Good God."
     "Richard?"
     "How extraordinary..."
     "Richard, what's the matter?"
     "Nothing,  Kate.  Er,  I've  just nead the most astounding
thing."
     "Really, what ane you reading?"
     "Well, the telephone directory, in fact. . "
     "Really? I must rush out and buy one. Have the film rights
gone?"
     "Look, sorry, Kate, can I get back to you?  I  don't  know
where Gordon is at the moment and-"
     "Don't worry. I know how it is when you can't wait to turn
the next  page.  They  always  keep  you guessing till the end,
don't they? It must have been Zbigniew that did it. Have a good
weekend." She hung up.
     Richard  hung  up  too,  and  sat  staring  at   the   box
advertisement lying open in front of him in the Yellow Pages.

      DIRK GENTLY'S
      HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
      We solve the whole crime
      We find the whole person
     Phone  today  for  the  whole  solution  to your
problem
      (Missing cats and messy divorces a speciality)
      33a Peckender St., London N1 O1-354 9112

     Peckender Street  was  only  a  few  minutes'  walk  away.
Richard  scribbled  down  the  address,  pulled on his coat and
trotted downstairs, stopping to make another  quick  inspection
of  the  sofa.  There  must,  he thought, be something terribly
obvious that he was overlooking.  The  sofa  was  jammed  on  a
slight  turn  in  the  long  narrow stairway. At this point the
stairs were interrupted for a couple of yards of flat  landing,
which  corresponded  with  the  position  of  the flat directly
beneath Richard's. However,  his  inspection  produced  no  new
insights, and he eventually clambered on over it and out of the
front door.
     In  Islington  you can hardly hurl a brick without hitting
three antique shops, an estate agent and a bookshop.
     Even if you didn't actually hit them you  would  certainly
set  off  their  burglar  alarms,  which wouldn't be turned off
again till after the weekend. A police car played  its  regular
game  of  dodgems down Upper Street and squealed to a halt just
past him. Richard crossed the road behind it.
     The day was cold and bright, which  he  liked.  He  walked
across  the  top of Islington Green, where winos get beaten up,
past the site of the old Collins Music Hall which had got  bumt
down,  and  through  Camden Passage where American tourists get
ripped off. He browsed among  the  antiques  for  a  while  and
looked  at a pair of earrings that he thought Susan would like,
but he wasn't sure. Then he wasn't sure that he liked them, got
confused and gave up. He looked in at a  bookshop,  and  on  an
impulse  bought  an anthology of Coleridge's poems since it was
just lying there.
     From here he threaded his way  through  the  winding  back
streets,  over  the  canal, past the council estates that lined
the canal, through a number of  smaller  and  smaller  squares,
till  finally he reached Peckender Street, which had turned out
to be a good deal farther than he'd thought.
     It was the sort of street  where  property  developers  in
large  Jaguars  drive  around at the weekend salivating. It was
full of end= of-lease shops, Victorian industrial  architecture
and  a  short, decaying late-Georgian terrace, all just itching
to be pulled down so that sturdy  young  concrete  boxes  could
sprout in their places. Estate agents roamed the area in hungry
packs,  eyeing  each  other  warily, their clipboards on a hair
trigger.
     Number 33, when he eventually found it  neatly  sandwiched
between  37  and  45,  was in a poorish state of repair, but no
worse than most of the rest.
     The ground floor was a dusty travel agent's  whose  window
was  cracked  and  whose  faded  BOAC posters were probably now
quite valuable. The doorway next to the shop had  been  painted
bright red, not well, but at least recently. A push button next
to  the  door  said, in neatly pencilled lettering, "Dominique,
French lessons, 3me Floor".
     The most striking feature of the door,  however,  was  the
bold  and shiny brass plaque fixed in the dead centre of it, on
which was engraved the legend "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency".
     Nothing else. It looked brand new - even the  screws  that
held it in place were still shiny.
     The door opened to Richard's push and he peered inside.
     He  saw  a  short and musty hallway which contained little
but the stairway that led up from it. A door at the back of the
hall showed little sign of having been opened in recent  years,
and  had  stacks  of  old  metal  shelving, a fish tank and the
carcass of a bike piled up against  it.  Everything  else,  the
walls,  the  floor,  the  stairs themselves, and as much of the
rear door as could be got at,  had  been  painted  grey  in  an
attempt  to  smarten  it  up  cheaply, but it was all now badly
scuffed, and little cups of fungus were  peeking  from  a  damp
stain near the ceiling.
     The  sounds of angry voices reached him, and as he started
up the stairs he was able to  disentangle  the  noises  of  two
entirely  separate  but  heated  arguments  that  were going on
somewhere above him.
     One ended abruptly - or at least half of it did  -  as  an
angry  overweight  man  came clattering down the stairs pulling
his raincoat collar straight. The other half  of  the  argument
continued  in  a  torrent  of  aggrieved French from high above
them. The man pushed past  Richard,  said,  "Save  your  money,
mate,  it's  a  complete washout," and disappeared out into the
chilly morning.
     The other argument was more muffled.  As  Richard  reached
the  first  corridor  a door slammed somewhere and brought that
too to an end. He looked into the nearest open doorway.
     It led into a small ante-office.  The  other,  inner  door
leading  from it was firmly closed. A youngish plump-faced girl
in a cheap blue coat was pulling sticks of make-up and boxes of
Kleenex out of her desk drawer and thrusting them into her bag.
     "Is  this  the  detective  agency?"  Richard   asked   her
tentatively.
     The girl nodded, biting her lip and keeping her head down.
     "And is Mr Gently in?"
     "He  may  be," she said, throwing back her hair, which was
too curly for throwing back properly, "and then  again  he  may
not  be.  I am not in a position to tell. It is not my busiaess
to know of his whereabouts. His whereabouts  are,  as  of  now,
entirely his own business."
     She  retrieved  her  last pot of nail varnish and tried to
slam the drawer shut. A fat book sitting upright in the  drawer
prevented  it from closing. She tried to slam the drawer again,
without success. She picked up the book, ripped out a clump  of
pages  and  replaced  it.  This  time  she was able to slam the
drawer with ease.
     "Are you his secretary?" asked Richard.
     "I am his ex-secretary and I intend to stay that way," she
said, firmly snapping her bag shut. "If he intends to spend his
money on stupid expensive brass plaques rather than  on  paying
me,  then  let him. But I won't stay to stand for it, thank you
very much. Good for business, my  foot.  Answering  the  phones
properly  is  good  for  business and I'd like to see his fancy
brass plaque do that. If you'll excuse me  I'd  like  to  storm
out, please."
     Richard stood aside, and out she stormed.
     "And  good  riddance!"  shouted  a  voice  from  the inner
office. A phone rang and was picked up immediately.
     "Yes?" answered the voice from the inner  office,  testly.
The  girl  popped  back  for  her  scarf,  but  quietly, so her
ex-employer wouldn't hear. Then she was finally gone.
     "Yes, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. How can  we
be of help to you?"
     The  torrent of French from upstairs had ceased. A kind of
tense calm descended.
     Inside, the voice said,  "That's  right,  Mrs  Sunderland,
messy divorces are our particular speciality."
     There was a pause.
     "Yes,  thank  you,  Mrs Sunderland, not quite that messy."
Down went the phone again, to  be  replaced  instantly  by  the
ringing of another one.
     Richard  looked  around  the grim little office. There was
very little in it. A battered chipboard  veneer  desk,  an  old
grey filing cabinet and a dark green tin wastepaper bin. On the
wall  was a Duran Duran poster on which someone had scrawled in
fat red felt tip, "Take this down please".
     Beneath that another hand had scrawled, "No".
     Beneath that again the first hand had written,  "l  insist
that you take it down".
     Beneath that the second hand had written, "Won't!"
     Beneath that - "You're fired".
     Beneath that - "Good!"
     And there the matter appeared to have rested.
     He  knocked  on  the  inner  door,  but  was not answered.
Instead the voice continued, "I'm very glad you asked me  that,
Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that
what   we   are   concerned   with   here  is  the  fundamental
interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself  with
such  petty  things  as  fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of
pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution  to  each
problem  as  being  detectable  in  the  pattern and web of the
whole. The connections between causes  and  effects  are  often
much  more  subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready
understanding of the physical world  might  naturally  suppose,
Mrs Rawlinson.
     "Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist
with toothache  he  sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do
you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?
     No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but  we  intend  to  find
out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye."
     Another phone was ringing as he put this one down.
     Richard eased the door open and looked in.
     It  was  the same Svlad, or Dirk, Cjelli. Looking a little
rounder about the middle, a little looser and redder about  the
eyes  and  the neck, but it was still essentially the same face
that he remembered most vividly smiling a  grim  smile  as  its
owner  climbed  into the back of one of the Black Marias of the
Cambridgeshire constabulary, eight years previously.
     He wore a heavy old light brown suit which looked as if it
has been worn extensively for bramble  hacking  expeditions  in
some  distant and better past, a red checked shirt which failed
entirely to harmonise with the suit, and a  green  striped  tie
which  refused  to  speak to either of them. He also wore thick
metal-rimmed spectacles, which probably accounted at  least  in
part for his dress sense.
     "Ah,  Mrs  Bluthall, how thoroughly uplifting to hear from
you," he was saying. "I was so distressed to  learn  that  Miss
Tiddles  has  passed  over.  This is desperate news indeed. And
yet, and yet... Should we allow black despair to hide  from  us
the  fairer  light  in  which  your  blessed  moggy now forever
dwells?
     "I think not. Hark. I think I hear Miss  Tiddles  miaowing
e'en  now.  She  calls  to  you,  Mrs Bluthall. She says she is
content, she is at peace. She says she'll be even more at peace
when you've paid some bill or other. Does that ring a bell with
you at all, Mrs Bluthall? Come to think of it I  think  I  sent
you one myself not three months ago. l wonder if it can be that
which is disturbing her eternal rest."
     Dirk  beckoned  Richard  in  with  a  brisk  wave and then
motioned him to pass the crumpled  pack  of  French  cigarettes
that was sitting just out of his reach.
     "Sunday  night, then, Mrs Bluthall, Sunday night at eight=
thirty. You know the address. Yes, I'm sure Miss  Tiddles  will
appear,  as  I'm  sure  will  your  cheque book. Till then, Mrs
Bluthall, till then."
     Another phone was already ringing as he  got  rid  of  Mrs
Bluthall.  He grabbed at it, lighting his crumpled cigarette at
the same time.
     "Ah, Mrs Sauskind," he said in answer to the  caller,  "my
oldest  and  may I say most valued client. Good day to you, Mrs
Sauskind, good day. Sadly, no sign as yet  of  young  Roderick,
I'm  afraid,  but  the  search is intensifying as it moves into
what I am confident are its closing stages, and I  am  sanguine
that  within mere days from today's date we wil1 have the young
rascal permanently restored to your arms and  mewing  prettily,
ah yes the bill, I was wondering if you had received it."
     Dirk's crumpled cigarette turned out to be too crumpled to
smoke,  so he hooked the phone on his shoulder and poked around
in the packet for another, but it was empty.
     He rummaged on his desk for a piece of paper and a stub of
pencil and wrote a note which he passed to Richard.
     "Yes, Mrs Sauskind,"  he  assured  the  telephone,  "I  am
listening
     with the utmost attention."
     The note said "Tell secretary get cigs".
     "Yes,"  continued  Dirk  into  the  phone,  "but as I have
endeavoured to explain to you, Mrs  Sauskind,  over  the  seven
years  of our acquaintance, I incline to the quantum mechanical
view in this matter. My theory is that your cat  is  not  lost,
but  that  his  waveform  has temporarily collapsed and must be
restored. Schrжdinger. Planck. And so on."
     Richard wrote on the note "You haven't got secretary"  and
pushed it back.
     Dirk  considered  this  for  a while, then wrote "Damn and
blast" on the paper and pushed it to Richard again.
     "I grant you,  Mrs  Sauskind,"  continued  Dirk  blithely,
"that  nineteen years is, shall we say, a distinguished age for
a cat to reach, yet can we allow ourselves to  believe  that  a
cat such as Roderick has not reached it?
     "And  should we now in the autumn of his years abandon him
to his fate? This surely is the time that  he  most  needs  the
support of our continuing investigations. This is the time that
we  should  redouble our efforts, and with your permission, Mrs
Sauskind, that is what I intend to do. Imagine,  Mrs  Sauskind,
how  you  would  face him if you had not done this simple thing
for him."
     Richard fidgeted with the note, shrugged to  himself,  and
wrote "I'll get them" on it and passed it back once more.
     Dirk  shook his head in admonition, then wrote "I couldn't
possibly that would be most kind". As soon as Richard had  read
this,  Dirk  took  the  note  back  and  added  "Get money from
secretary" to it.
     Richard looked at the paper thoughtfully, took the  pencil
and  put  a  tick  next to where he had previously written "You
haven't got secretary". He pushed the  paper  back  across  the
table  to Dirk, who merely glanced at it and ticked "I couldn't
possibly that would be most kind".
     "Well, perhaps," continued  Dirk  to  Mrs  Sauskind,  "you
could just run over any of the areas in the bill that cause you
difficulty. Just the broader areas."
     Richard let himself out.
     Running  down  the  stairs, he passed a young hopeful in a
denim jacket and close-cropped hair peering  anxiously  up  the
stairwell.
     "Any good, mate?" he said to Richard.
     "Amazing," murmured Richard, "just amazing."
     He  found  a  nearby newsagent's and picked up a couple of
packets of Disque Bleu for Dirk, and a copy of the new  edition
of  Personal  Computer  World,  which  had  a picture of
Gordon Way on the front.
     "Pity about him, isn't it?" said the newsagent.
     "What? Oh, er... yes," said Richard. He often thought  the
same  himself, but was surprised to find his feelings so widely
echoed. He picked up a Guardian as well, paid and left.
     Dirk was still on the phone with his  feet  on  the  table
when  Richard  returned,  and it was clear that he was relaxing
into his negotiations.
     Yes, expenses were, well, expensive in  the  Bahamas,  Mrs
Sauskind,  it  is in the nature of expenses to be so. Hence the
name." He took the  proffered  packets  of  cigarettes,  seemed
disappointed  there  were  only  two,  but  briefly  raised his
eyebrows to Richard in acknowledgment of the favour he had done
him, and then waved him to a chair.
     The sounds of  an  argument  conducted  partly  in  French
drifted down from the floor above.
     "Of course I will explain to you again why the trip to the
Bahamas was so vitally necessary," said Dirk Gently soothingly.
"Nothing  could  give  me  greater  pleasure. I believe, as you
know, Mrs Sauskind, in the  fundamental  interconnectedness  of
all  things.  Furthermore  I  have plotted and triangulated the
vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them
to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore necessary for me to
visit from time to time in the course of my  investigations.  I
wish  it were not the case, since, sadly, I am allergic to both
the sun and rum punches, but then we all have  our  crosses  to
bear, do we not, Mrs Sauskind?"
     A babble seemed to break out from the telephone.
     "You sadden me, Mrs Sauskind. I wish I could find it in my
heart  to  tell  you  that I find your scepticism rewarding and
invigorating, but with the best will in the world I  cannot.  I
am  drained by it, Mrs Sauskind, drained. I think you will find
a item in the bill to that effect. Let me see."
     He picked up a flimsy carbon copy lying near him.
     "`Detecting   and    triangulating    the    vectors    of
interconnectedness   of  all  things,  one  hundred  and  fifty
pounds.' We've dealt with that.
     "`Tracing same  to  beach  on  Bahamas,  fare  and  accom=
modation'.  A  mere  fifteen hundred. The accommodation was, of
course, distressingly modest.
     "Ah yes, here we  are,  `Struggling  on  in  the  face  of
draining  scepticism  from  client,  drinks - three hundred and
twenty-seven pounds fifty.'
     "Would that I did not have to make such charges,  my  dear
Mrs  Sauskind,  would  that  the  occasion  did not continually
arise. Not bУlieving in my  methods  only  makes  my  job  more
difficult,   Mrs   Sauskind,   and   hence,  regrettably,  more
expensive."
     Upstairs, the sounds of argument were becoming more heated
by the moment.  The  French  voice  seemed  to  be  verging  on
hysteria.
     "I do appreciate, Mrs Sauskind," continued Dirk, "that the
cost of   the  investigation  has  strayed  somewhat  from  the
original estimate, but I am sure that you  will  in  your  turn
appreciate  that  a  job  which  takes  seven  years to do must
clearly be more difficult than one that can be pulled off in an
afternoon and must therefore be charged at  a  higher  rate.  I
have  continually  to  revise  my estimate of how difficult the
task is in the light of how difficult it has so far  proved  to
be."
     The babble from the phone became more frantic.
     "My dear Mrs Sauskind - or may I call you Joyce? Very well
then.  My  dear  Mrs  Sauskind,  let  me say this. Do not worry
yourself about this bill, do not let it alarm or discomfit you.
Do not, I beg you, let it become a source of  anxiety  to  you.
Just grit your teeth and pay it."
     He  pulled  his feet down off the table and leaned forward
over the desk, inhing the telephone  receiver  inexorably
back towards its cradle.
     "As  always, the very greatest pleasure to speak with you,
Mrs Sauskind. For now, goodbye."
     He at last put down the receiver, picked it up again,  and
dropped it for the moment into the waste basket.
     "My dear Richard MacDuff," he said, producing a large flat
box from under his desk and pushing it across the table at him,
"your pizza."
     Richard started back in astonishment.
     "Er,  no  thanks,"  he said, "I had breakfast. Please. You
have it."
     Dirk shrugged. "I told them you'd pop  in  and  settle  up
over  the  weekend,"  he  said.  "Welcome,  by  the  way, to my
offices."
     He waved a vague hand around the tatty surroundings.
     "The light works," he said, indicating  the  window,  "the
gravity  works,"  he  said,  dropping  a  pencil  on the floor.
"Anything else we have to take our chances with."
     Richard cleared his throat. "What," he said, "is this?"
     "What is what?"
     "This," exclaimed Richard, "all this. You appear to have a
Holistic Detective Agency and I don't even know what one is."
     "I provide a service that is unique in this  world,"  said
Dirk. "The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we
are  concerned  with here is the fundamental interconnectedness
of all -"
     "Yes, I got that bit earlier," said Richard.  "I  have  to
say  that  it  sounded  a  bit  like  an  excuse for exploiting
gullible old ladies."
     "Exploiting?" asked Dirk. "Well, I suppose it would be  if
anybody  ever  paid  me,  but I do assure you, my dear Richard,
that there never seems to be the remotest  danger  of  that.  I
live  in  what  are  known as hopes. I hope for fascinating and
remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her
landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity
Board hopes that he will settle their bill, and so on.  I  find
it a wonderfully optimistic way of life.
     "Meanwhile  I  give  a  lot of charming and sill old
ladies something  to  be  happily  cross  about  and  virtually
guarantee  the freedom of their cats. Is there, you ask - and I
put the question for you because I know you know I hate  to  be
interrupted - is there a single case that exercises the tiniest
part of my intellect, which, as you hardly need me to tell you,
is  prodigious?  No.  But  do  1  despair?  Am I downcast? Yes.
Until," he added, "today."
     "Oh, well, I'm glad of that," said Richard, "but what  was
all that rubbish about cats and quantum mechanics?"
     With  a  sigh  Dirk flipped up the lid of the pizza with a
single Hick of practised fingers. He surveyed  the  cold  round
thing  with  a  kind of sadness and then tore off a hunk of it.
Pieces of pepperoni and anchovy scattered over his desk.
     "I am sure, Richard," he said, "that you are familiar with
the notion of Schrжdinger's Cat," and  he  stuffed  the  larger
part of the hunk into his mouth.
     "Ofcourse," said Richard. "Well, reasonably familiar."
     "What is it?" said Dirk through a mouthful.
     Richard   shifted   irritably   in   his  seat.  "It's  an
illustration," he said, "of the principle  that  at  a  quantum
level all events are governed by probabilities. . ."
     "At  a  quantum  level,  and  therefore  at  all  levels,"
interrupted  Dirk.  "Though  at  any  level  higher  than   the
subatomic  the  cumulative effect of those probabilities is, in
the normal course of events, indistinguishable from the  effect
of hard and fast physical laws. Continue."
     He put some more cold pizza into his face.
     Richard  reflected  that  Dirk's was a face into which too
much had already been put. What with that  and  the  amount  he
talked, the traffic through his mouth was almost incessant. His
ears,  on  the  other  hand,  remained almost totally unused in
normal conversation.
     It occurred to Richard that if Lamarck had been right  and
you  were  to  take  a  line through this behaviour for several
generations, the chances were that some radical  replumbing  of
the interior of the skull would eventually take place.
     Richard  continued,  "Not  only  are  quantum level events
governed by probabilities, but those probabilities aren't  even
resolved  into actual events until they are measured. Or to use
a phrase that I just heard you use in a rather bizarre context,
the act of measurement collapses the probability  waveform.  Up
until  that  point  all the possible courses of action open to,
say, an electron, coexist as probability wavefon¦s. Nothing  is
decided. Until it's measured."
     Dirk  nodded.  "More  or  less,"  he  said, taking another
mouthful. "But what of the cat?"
     Richard decided that there  was  only  one  way  to  avoid
having  to  watch  Dirk eat his way through all the rest of the
pizza, and that was to eat the rest himself. He  rolled  it  up
and  took  a  token  nibble off the end. It was rather good. He
took another bite.
     Dirk watched this with startled dismay.
     "So," said Richard, "the idea behind Schrжdinger's Cat was
to try and imagine a way in which the effects of  probabilistic
behaviour   at  a  quantum  level  could  be  considered  at  a
macroscopic level. Or let's say an everyday level."
     "Yes, let's," said Dirk, regarding the rest of  the  pizza
with  a  stricken look. Richard took another bite and continued
cheerfully.
     "So you imagine that you take a cat and put it  in  a  box
that  you  can seal completely. Also in the box you put a small
lump of radioactive material, and a phial of  poison  gas.  You
arrange  it  so  that within a given period of time there is an
exactly fifty-fifty chance that an atom in the radioactive lump
will decay and emit an electron.  If  it  does  decay  then  it
triggers  the  release  of  the  gas  and  kills the cat. If it
doesn't,  the  cat  lives.  Fifty-fifty.   Depending   on   the
fifty-fifty chance that a single atom does or does not decay.
     "The  point as I understand it is this: since the decay of
a single atom  is  a  quantum  level  event  that  wouldn't  be
resolved  either way until it was observed, and since you don't
make the observation until you open the box and see whether the
cat is alive or  dead,  then  there's  a  rather  extraordinary
consequence.
     "Until  you  do  open  the box the cat itself exists in an
indeterminate state. The possibility that it is alive, and  the
possibility  that  it  is  dead,  are  two  different waveforms
superimposed on each other  inside  the  box.  Schrжdinger  put
forward  this  idea  to  illustrate  what he thought was absurd
about quantum theory."
     Dirk got up and padded over to the window, probably not so
much for the meagre view it afforded over an old  warehouse  on
which  an  alternative  comedian  was  lavishing his vast lager
commercial fees developing into luxury apartments, as  for  the
lack   of   view  it  afforded  of  the  last  piece  of  pizza
disappearing.
     "Exactly," said Dirk, "bravo!"
     "But what's all that got to do with this - this  Detective
Agency?"
     "Oh,  that.  Well,  some  researchers were once conducting
such an experiment, but,when they opened up the  box,  the  cat
was  neither alive nor dead but was in fact completely missing,
and they called me in to investigate. I was able to deduce that
nothing very dramatic had happened. The cat had merely got  fed
up  with  being  repeatedly locked up in a box and occasionally
gassed and had taken the first opportunity to hoof  it  through
the  window. It was for me the work of a moment to set a saucer
of milk by the window and call `Bernice' in an enticing voice -
the cat's name was Bernice, you understand "
     "Now, wait a minute - " said Richard.
     " - and the cat was soon restored. A simple enough matter,
but it seemed to create quite an impression in certain circles,
and soon one thing led  to  another  as  they  do  and  it  all
culminated in the thriving career you see before you."
     "Wait a minute, wait a minute," insisted Richard, slapping
the table.
     "Yes?" enquired Dirk innocently.
     "Now, what are you talking about, Dirk?"
     "You have a problem with what I have told you?"
     "Well,  I  hardly know where to begin," protested Richard.
"All right. You said  that  some  people  were  performing  the
experiment.  That's  nonsense.  Schrжdinger's  Cat isn't a real
experiment. It's just an illustration  for  arguing  about  the
idea. It's not something you'd actually do."
     Dirk was watching him with odd attention.
     "Oh, really?" he said at last. "And why not?"
     "Well,  there's  nothing  you can test. The whole point of
the idea is to think about what happens before  you  make  your
observation.  You  can't  know  what's  going on inside the box
without looking, and the very instant you look the wave  packet
collapses  and  the probabilities resolve. It's self-defeating.
It's completely purposeless."
     "You are, of course, perfectly cornect as far as you  go,"
replied Dirk, returning to his seat. He drew a cigarette out of
the  packet,  tapped  it  several  times on the desk, and leant
across the desk and pointed the filter at Richard.
     "But think about this," he continued. "Supposing you  were
to  introduce  a psychic, someone with clairvoyant powers, into
the experiment - someone who is able to divine  what  state  of
health  the cat is in without opening the box. Someone who has,
perhaps, a certain eerie sympathy with cats. What  then?  Might
that  furnish us with an additional insight into the problem of
quantum physics?"
     "Is that what they wanted to do?"
     "It's what they did."
     "Dirk, this is complete nonsense."
     Dirk raised his eyebrows challengingly.
     "All right, all  right,"  said  Richard,  holding  up  his
palms,  "let's  just  follow  it  through. Even if I accepted -
which I don't for one second - that there was any basis at  all
for   clairvoyance,   it   wouldn't   alter   the   fundamental
undoableness of the experiment. As  I  said,  the  whole  thing
turns  on  what happens inside the box before it's observed. It
doesn't matter how you observe it whether you look into the box
with your eyes or - well, with your mind,  if  you  insist.  If
clairvoyance  works, then it's just another way of looking into
the box, and if it doesn't then of course it's irrelevant."
     "It might depend, of course,  on  the  view  you  take  of
clairvoyance. . . "
     "Oh  yes?  And  what  view  do you take of clairvoyance? I
should be very interested to know, given your history."
     Dirk tapped the cigarette on the  desk  again  and  looked
narrowly at Richard.
     There  was a deep and prolonged silence, disturbed only by
the sound of distant crying in French.
     "I  take  the  view  I  have  always  taken,"  said   Dirk
eventually.
     "Which is?"
     "That I am not clairvoyant."
     "Really," said Richard. "Then what about the exam papers?"
     The  eyes  of  Dirk Gently darkened at the mention of this
subject.
     "A coincidence," he said,  in  a  low,  savage  voice,  "a
strange   and   chilling  coincidence,  but  none  the  less  a
coincidence. One, I might add,  which  caused  me  to  spend  a
considerable  time  in  prison. Coincidences can be frightening
and dangerous things."
     Dirk gave Richard another of his long appraising looks.
     "I have been watching you carefully," he said.  "You  seem
to be extremely relaxed for a man in your position."
     This  seemed  to Richard to be an odd remark, and he tried
to make sense of it for a moment. Then the light dawned, and it
was an aggravating light.
     "Good heavens," he said, "he hasn't got to  you  as  well,
has he?"
     This remark seemed to puzzle Dirk in return.
     "Who hasn't got to me?" he said.
     "Gordon.  No, obviously not. Gordon Way. He has this habit
of trying to get other people to bring pressure on me to get on
with what he sees as important work. I thought for a  moment  =
oh, never mind. What did you mean, then?"
     "Ah. Gordon Way has this habit, has he?"
     "Yes. I don't like it. Why?"
     Dirk  looked  long  and  hard at Richard, tapping a pencil
lightly on the desk.
     Then he leaned back in his chair and said as follows: "The
body of Gordon Way was discovered before dawn this morning.  He
had  been  shot,  strangled,  and  then  his  house  was set on
fir. Police are working on the theory  that  he  was  not
actually  shot  m  the  house  because  no shotgun pellets were
discovered there other than those in the body.
     "However, pellets were found near to Mr Way's Mercedes 500
SEC, which was found  abandoned  about  three  miles  from  his
house.  This suggests that the body was moved after the murder.
Furthermore the doctor who examined the body is of the  opmiort
that  Mr  Way  was  in  fact strangled after he was shot, which
seems to suggest a ertain confusion in the  mind  of  the
killer.
     "By  a  startling  coincidence  it appears that the police
last night had occasion to interview  a  very  confused-seeming
gentleman  who  said  that  he  was suffering from some kind of
guilt complex about having just run over his employer.
     "That man was a Mr Richard MacDuff, and his  employer  was
the deceased, Mr Gordon Way. It has further been suggested thnt
Mr  Richard  MacDuff  is  one  of the two people most likely to
benefit from Mr  Way's  death,  since  WayForward  Technologies
would almost certainly pass at least partly into his hands. The
other  person is his only living relative, Miss Susan Way, into
whose flat Mr Richard MacDuff was observed to break last night.
The olice don't know that bit, of course. Nor, if we  can  help
it,  will  they.  However,  any relationship between the two of
them will naturally come under close scrutiny. The news reports
on the radio say that they are urgently seeking Mr MacDuff, who
they believe will be able to help them  with  their  enquiries,
but the tone of voice says that he's clearly guilty as hell.
     "My  scale  of charges is as follows: two hundred pounds a
day, plus  expenses.  Expenses  are  not  negotiable  and  will
sometimes  strike  those who do not understand these matters as
somewhat tangential. They are all necessary and are, as I  say,
not negotiable. Am I hired?"
     "Sorry,"  said Richard, nodding slightly. "Would you start
that again?"