Visit from Aunt and Cousin

Today, Dirk's Aunt Caroline and cousin Lewis came to visit. Dirk wasn't awake
very much, which meant that Lewis could play with his stuff!

When you Walk through the Storm

Photo notwithstanding, Dirk has been holding his own head up and having a
good look around today.

Doctor

Two days after officially springing into existence at the Register Office, Dirk registered as a patient at our doctor's Surgery, thus enabling him to become ill.

Today we decided that Dirk's steely-blue eyes have become steely-grey. Watch this space for updates!

Register Office & Hospital Again

At 9.30am today, Dirk's birth was registered at Luton register office. There is a couple of photographs in the Photos pages.

Just minutes after he started to officially exist, Dirk joined the library.

On Wednesday evening, Dirk swallowed some bathwater and we were very worried he had inhaled some too, as his head had been submerged for a second. We took him to A&E, where he was X-rayed. Later, he and Mum went to the children's department and had to stay overnight on Squirrel Ward.

After a night of monitoring, Dirk was pronounced fit and well. Emerging from the hospital, Dirk encountered his first snow.

Dirk meets an Uncle and an Aunt

Dirk's Uncle Lindsay (Elaine's brother) and Aunt Sarah (Greg's sister) came to visit today. Thanks to both for the lovely gifts.

Dirk's Ambulance Ride

This evening Dirk's breathing seemed a little uneven. At half-past nine, on the advice of the maternity ward midwife, Greg and Elaine dialled 999 for an ambulance.

Dirk was very lethargic (yes, even by his standards!) during his time at the Accident and Emergency Department. The sister said his temperature was a bit high and agreed that his breathing was uneven.

However, while he was being walked upstairs to the children's ward, Dirk rallied and became quite perky. On the ward, he objected loudly to all kinds of poking and prodding; but he was very good when left alone. A doctor examined him and tested his blood. She said that uneven breathing is not usually a serious problem, but that Mum & Dad should keep an eye on him and phone for an ambulance straight away if he has any problems.

Shopping

Today Dirk went to into town. He slept the whole time!

Meet The Grandparents (Part 2)

A midwife knocked on the door this morning, saying that another midwife had
tried twice yesterday. (Not true!)

Anyway, she had a look at Mum and Baby and said that all looks well. Tomorrow
she will be back to do a test...

Today was the day Dirk was supposed to be born. Greg's parents have
come to spend a couple of days in Luton to see their first grandchild.

Coming Home

Elaine and Dirk came home after lunch on Saturday - two days before baby was scheduled to be born!

To see a video of Dirk meeting Queeg, click here.

Dirk's Second Day

Today Dirk had a routine hearing test. He responded satisfactorily.

Elaine and Dirk have been making a huge sucess of breastfeeding. Dirk has a big appetite, feeding often and long!

A needle was incorrectly put in Elaine's wrist the night of the birth and for several hours fluid was being dripped straight into the tissue of her lower arm (rather than a vein!) A day later, the swelling has started to go down.

Arrival!

Dirk was born by Caesarean section at 1.22am on 9 February 2006, at Luton & Dunstable Hospital.

His parents are Greg and Elaine Withnail.

Meet The Grandparents (Part 1)

Dirk is introduced to representatives of a more experienced generation. Between them, Gran and Grandad have been around sixty-six thousand times longer than he!

Chapters 1 to 4

[::: CHAPTER 1 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
This time there would be no witnesses. This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, andthe onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east bywhich so many of the world’s most momentous events seem to beaccompanied. The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and thefloods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulgedwith rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloomwas a dreary kind of prickle. Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through thelow hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, akind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning. It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion ofmagma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terriblethan its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long agesdead. The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishlyalong the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground. But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower wasnot entirely without life. There was a single dim red light gutteringdeep within it. The light was only just visible -- except of course that there wasno one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless alight. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a littlebrighter and then faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same timea low keening noise drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind ofwailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away. Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobilelight. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuitof the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and theshadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappearedinside once more. An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. Theworld seemed dead, the night a blankness. And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this timegrowing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak ofbrightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing,increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch andstridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on andon till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness. And then, abruptly, both ceased. There was a millisecond of silent darkness. An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep withinthe mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mudconvulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horriblepinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained theclouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply,hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkleof water. But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on aday that was, or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be ifthere had been anybody there to whom it could seem to be anything atall, warmer, clearer and brighter -- an altogether livelier day thanany yet known. A clear river ran through the shattered remains of thevalley. And time began seriously to pass.

[::: CHAPTER 2 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down intoanother valley, with which it was having a problem. The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat downupon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, noteven the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly totry and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved. The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or avideo recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus savingyou the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watchedtedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at ityourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you whatwas becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all thethings the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and hadstarted to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It waseven beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing inSalt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Norhad it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number ofmiles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believedthat the valley and everything in the valley and around it, includingthe Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing fromany other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhereimpossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobilityof the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up witha lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion thatthis was one of the silliest. How long did the Monk believe these things? Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith whichmoves mountains, or at least believes them against all the availableevidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rockagainst which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would notbe shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usuallyabout its lot. So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and wassceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? Anunusual horse perhaps? No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example ofits species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such asconvergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is tobe found. They have always understood a great deal more than they leton. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some othercreature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, everyday, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thoughtabout them whatsoever. When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to beimportant that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects.There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. Youwouldn’t want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all daywhile it was watching TV. You wouldn’t want it picking its nose,drinking beer and sending out for pizzas. So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design andalso for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People,and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs wereheld to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primesof seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were givenwas pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead ofcrenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, butwere given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two.A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing themost preposterous things. This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much tobelieve in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a videorecorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and thiscaused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder onlyhad to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all aswell. This is why instruction manuals are so important. So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that goodwas bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed alot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believethat thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and thenbroke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole newmotherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plusmodels were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-taskingNegative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteenentirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneouslywithout generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast andat least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one forless than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model. That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it couldbelieve what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard doneby. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap tomake. For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to bethree, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand sevenhundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electrictrust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant-asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock,overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of theMonk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit. Time passed.

[::: CHAPTER 3 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Time passed. Susan waited. The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or thephone. She looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the timethat she could legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already,of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak. They werewell and truly into his time now, and even allowing for traffic,mishaps, and general vagueness and dilatoriness, it was now well overhalf an hour past the time that he had insisted was the latest timethey could possibly afford to leave, so she’d better be ready. She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, butdidn’t believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him,though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. Ifnothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she’d do it herself. Nowthere was an idea. She threw herself crossly into the armchair and watched the news ontelevision. The news made her cross. She flipped the remote control andwatched something on another channel for a bit. She didn’t know what itwas, but it also made her cross. Perhaps she should phone. She wasdamned if she was going to phone. Perhaps if she phoned he would phoneher at the same moment and not be able to get through. She refused to admit that she had even thought that. Damn him, where was he? Who cared where he was anyway? She didn’t,that was for sure. Three times in a row he’d done this. Three times in a row wasenough. She angrily flipped channels one more time. There was aprogramme about computers and some interesting new developments in thefield of things you could do with computers and music. That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herselfthat that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final realultimate it. She jumped to her feet and went to the phone, gripping an angryFilofax. She flipped briskly through it and dialed a number. ‘Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should callyou if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in aditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely,completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for milesaround. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice toyou. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.’ She pulled on her shoes and coat, paused when she remembered that itwas Thursday and that she should put a fresh, extra-long tape on theanswering machine, and two minutes later was out of the front door.When at last the phone did ring the answering machine said sweetly thatSusan Way could not come to the phone just at the moment, but that ifthe caller would like to leave a message, she would get back to them assoon as possible. Maybe.

[::: CHAPTER 4 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
It was a chill November evening of the old-fashioned type. The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a nightlike this. It rose unwillingly and hung like an ill spectre.Silhouetted against it, dim and hazy through the dampness which rosefrom the unwholesome fens, stood the assorted towers and turrets of StCedd’s, Cambridge, a ghostly profusion of buildings thrown up overcenturies, medieval next to Victorian, Odeon next to Tudor. Only risingthrough the mist did they seem remotely to belong to one another. Between them scurried figures, hurrying from one dim pool of lightto another, shivering, leaving wraiths of breath which foldedthemselves into the cold night behind them. It was seven o’clock. Many of the figures were heading for thecollege dining hall which divided First Court from Second Court, andfrom which warm light, reluctantly, streamed. Two figures in particularseemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; evenmuffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affrontedheron. The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainlyrestlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape froma sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate.If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older thanthat, but -- well, it was impossible to tell. Certainly his face washeavily lined, and the small amount of hair that escaped from under hisred woollen skiing hat was thin, white, and had very much its own ideasabout how it wished to arrange itself. He too was muffled inside aheavy coat, but over it he wore a billowing gown with very faded purpletrim, the badge of his unique and peculiar academic office. As they walked the older man was doing all the talking. He waspointing at items of interest along the way, despite the fact that itwas too dark to see any of them. The younger man was saying ‘Ah yes,’and ‘Really? How interesting...’ and ‘Well, well, well,’ and ‘Goodheavens.’ His head bobbed seriously. They entered, not through the main entrance to the hall, but througha small doorway on the east side of the court. This led to the SeniorCombination Room and a dark-panelled anteroom where the Fellows of thecollege assembled to slap their hands and make ‘brrrrrr’ noises beforemaking their way through their own entrance to the High Table. They were late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This wascomplicated for the older man by the necessity first of taking off hisprofessorial gown, and then of putting it back on again once his coatwas off, then of stuffing his hat in his coat pocket, then of wonderingwhere he’d put his scarf, and then of realising that he hadn’t broughtit, then of fishing in his coat pocket for his handkerchief, then offishing in his other coat pocket for his spectacles, and finally offinding them quite unexpectedly wrapped in his scarf, which it turnedout he had brought after all but hadn’t been wearing despite the dampand bitter wind blowing in like a witch’s breath from across the fens. He bustled the younger man into the hall ahead of him and they tookthe last two vacant seats at the High Table, braving a flurry of frownsand raised eyebrows for interrupting the Latin grace to do so. Hall was full tonight. It was always more popular with theundergraduates in the colder months. More unusually, the hall wascandlelit, as it was now only on very few special occasions. Two long,crowded tables stretched off into the glimmering darkness. Bycandlelight, people’s faces were more alive, the hushed sounds of theirvoices, the clink of cutlery and glasses, seemed more exciting, and inthe dark recesses of the great hall, all the centuries for which it hadexisted seemed present at once. High Table itself formed a crosspieceat the top, and was raised about a foot above the rest. Since it was aguest night, the table was set on both sides to accommodate the extranumbers, and many diners therefore sat with their backs to the rest ofthe hall. ‘So, young MacDuff,’ said the Professor once he was seated andflapping his napkin open, ‘pleasure to see you again, my dear fellow.Glad you could come. No idea what all this is about,’ he added, peeringround the hall in consternation. ‘All the candles and silver andbusiness. Generally means a special dinner in honour of someone orsomething no one can remember anything about except that it meansbetter food for a night.’ He paused and thought for a moment, and then said, ‘It seems odd,don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inverselywith the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinaryheights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them toperpetual darkness. Could be worth a try, I think. Got some good vaultsin the college that could be turned over to the purpose. I think Ishowed you round them once, hmmm? Nice brickwork.’ All this came as something of a relief to his guest. It was thefirst indication his host had given that he had the faintestrecollection who he was. Professor Urban Chronotis, the RegiusProfessor of Chronology, or ‘Reg’ as he insisted on being called had amemory that he himself had once compared to the Queen AlexandraBirdwing Butterfly, in that it was colourful, flitted prettily hitherand thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct. When he had telephoned with the invitation a few days previously, hehad seemed extremely keen to see his former pupil, and yet when Richardhad arrived this evening, a little on the late side, admittedly, theProfessor had thrown open the door apparently in anger, had started insurprise on seeing Richard, demanded to know if he was having emotionalproblems, reacted in annoyance to being reminded gently that it was nowten years since he had been Richard’s college tutor, and finally agreedthat Richard had indeed come for dinner, whereupon he, the Professor,had started talking rapidly and at length about the history of thecollege architecture, a sure sign that his mind was elsewhere entirely. ‘Reg’ had never actually taught Richard, he had only been hiscollege tutor, which meant in short that he had had charge of hisgeneral welfare, told him when the exams were and not to take drugs,and so on. Indeed, it was not entirely clear if Reg had ever taughtanybody at all and what, if anything, he would have taught them. Hisprofessorship was an obscure one, to say the least, and since hedispensed with his lecturing duties by the simple and time-honouredtechnique of presenting all his potential students with an exhaustivelist of books that he knew for a fact had been out of print for thirtyyears, then flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no onehad ever discovered the precise nature of his academic discipline. Hehad, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the onlyextant copies of the books on his reading list from the university andcollege libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well,to do whatever it was he did. Since Richard had always managed to get on reasonably well with theold fruitcake, he had one day plucked up courage to ask him what,exactly, the Regius Professorship of Chronology was. It had been one ofthose light summery days when the world seems about to burst withpleasure at simply being itself, and Reg had been in anuncharacteristically forthcoming mood as they had walked over thebridge where the River Cam divided the older parts of the college fromthe newer. ‘Sinecure, my dear fellow, an absolute sinecure,’ he had beamed. ‘Asmall amount of money for a very small, or shall we say non-existent,amount of work. That puts me permanently just ahead of the game, whichis a comfortable if frugal place to spend your life. I recommend it.’He leaned over the edge of the bridge and started to point out aparticular brick that he found interesting. ‘But what sort of study isit supposed to be?’ Richard had pursued. ‘Is it history? Physics?Philosophy? What?’ ‘Well,’ said Reg, slowly, ‘since you’re interested, the chair wasoriginally instituted by King George III, who, as you know, entertaineda number of amusing notions, including the belief that one of the treesin Windsor Great Park was in fact Frederick the Great. ‘It was his own appointment, hence “Regius”. His own idea as well,which is somewhat more unusual.’ Sunlight played along the River Cam. People in punts happily shoutedat each other to fuck off. Thin natural scientists who had spent monthslocked away in their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinkinginto the light. Couples walking along the bank got so excited about thegeneral wonderfulness of it all that they had to pop inside for anhour. ‘The poor beleaguered fellow,’ Reg continued, ‘George III, I mean,was, as you may know, obsessed with time. Filled the palace withclocks. Wound them incessantly. Sometimes would get up in the middle ofthe night and prowl round the palace in his nightshirt winding clocks.He was very concerned that time continued to go forward, you see. Somany terrible things had occurred in his life that he was terrifiedthat any of them might happen again if time were ever allowed to slipbackwards even for a moment. A very understandable fear, especially ifyou’re barking mad, as I’m afraid to say, with the very greatestsympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly was. He appointed me, orrather I should say, my office, this professorship, you understand, thepost that I am now privileged to hold to -- where was I? Oh yes. Heinstituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was anyparticular reason why one thing happened after another and if there wasany way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were,I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then takethe rest of my career off.’ ‘And your predecessors?’ ‘Er, were much of the same mind.’ ‘But who were they?’ ‘Who were they? Well, splendid fellows of course, splendid to a man.Remind me to tell you about them some day. See that brick? Wordsworthwas once sick on that brick. Great man.’ All that had been about ten years ago. Richard glanced around the great dining hall to see what had changedin the time, and the answer was, of course, absolutely nothing. In thedark heights, dimly seen by the flickering candlelight, were theghostly portraits of prime ministers, archbishops, political reformersand poets, any of whom might, in their day, have been sick on that samebrick. ‘Well,’ said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as ifintroducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, ‘I hear you’vesuddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?’ ‘Er, well, yes, in fact,’ said Richard, who was as surprised at thefact as anybody else, ‘yes, I have.’ Around the table several gazes stiffened on him. ‘Computers,’ he heard somebody whisper dismissively to a neighbourfurther down the table. The stiff gazes relaxed again, and turnedaway. ‘Excellent,’ said Reg. ‘I’m so pleased for you, so pleased.’ ‘Tell me,’ he went on, and it was a moment before Richard realisedthat the Professor wasn’t talking to him any more, but had turned tothe right to address his other neighbour, ‘what’s all this about,this,’ he flourished a vague hand over the candles and college silver,‘...stuff?’ His neighbour, an elderly wizened figure, turned very slowly andlooked at him as if he was rather annoyed at being raised from the deadlike this. ‘Coleridge,’ he said in a thin rasp, ‘it’s the Coleridge Dinner youold fool.’ He turned very slowly back until he was facing the frontagain. His name was Cawley, he was a Professor of Archaeology andAnthropology, and it was frequently said of him, behind his back, thathe regarded it not so much as a serious academic study, more as achance to relive his childhood. ‘Ah, is it,’ murmured Reg, ‘is it?’ and turned back to Richard.‘It’s the Coleridge Dinner,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Coleridge was amember of the college, you know,’ he added after a moment. ‘Coleridge.Samuel Taylor. Poet. I expect you’ve heard of him. This is his Dinner.Well, not literally, of course. It would be cold by now.’ Silence.‘Here, have some salt.’ ‘Er, thank you, I think I’ll wait,’ said Richard, surprised. Therewas no food on the table yet. ‘Go on, take it,’ insisted the Professor, proffering him the heavysilver salt cellar. Richard blinked in bemusement but with an interior shrug he reachedto take it. In the moment that he blinked, however, the salt cellar hadcompletely vanished. He started back in surprise. ‘Good one, eh?’ said Reg as he retrieved the missing cruet frombehind the ear of his deathly right-hand neighbour, provoking asurprisingly girlish giggle from somewhere else at the table. Regsmiled impishly. ‘Very irritating habit, I know. It’s next on my listfor giving up after smoking and leeches.’ Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people picktheir noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg’svice was a harmless if peculiar one -- an addiction to childishconjuring tricks. Richard remembered the first time he had been to seeReg with a problem -- it was only the normal Angst that periodicallytakes undergraduates into its grip, particularly when they have essaysto write, but it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the time. Reghad sat and listened to his outpourings with a deep frown ofconcentration, and when at last Richard had finished, he ponderedseriously, stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned forward andlooked him in the eye. ‘I suspect that your problem,’ he said, ‘is that you have too manypaper clips up your nose.’ Richard stared at him. ‘Allow me to demonstrate,’ said Reg, and leaning across the desk hepulled from Richard’s nose a chain of eleven paper clips and a smallrubber swan. ‘Ah, the real culprit,’ he said, holding up the swan. ‘They come incereal packets, you know, and cause no end of trouble. Well, I’m gladwe’ve had this little chat, my dear fellow. Please feel free to disturbme again if you have any more such problems.’ Needless to say, Richard didn’t. Richard glanced around the table to see if there was anybody else herecognised from his time at the college. Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’sDirector of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising himat all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his threeyears here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing abeard and pretending to be someone else. Next to him was a man whom Richard had never managed to identify.Neither, in fact, had anyone else. He was thin and vole-like and hadthe most extraordinarily long bony nose -- it really was very, verylong and bony indeed. In fact it looked a lot like the controversialkeel which had helped the Australians win the America’s Cup in 1983,and this resemblance had been much remarked upon at the time, thoughnot of course to his face. No one had said anything to his face at all. No one. Ever. Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled andembarrassed by his nose to speak, and the second time was worse becauseof the first time, and so on. Years had gone by now, seventeen in all.In all that time he had been cocooned in silence. In hall it had longbeen the habit of the college servants to position a separate set ofsalt, pepper and mustard on either side of him, since no one could askhim to pass them, and to ask someone sitting on the other side of himwas not only rude but completely impossible because of his nose beingin the way. The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures he made andrepeated regularly throughout every evening. They consisted of tappingeach of the fingers of his left hand in order, and then one of thefingers of his right hand. He would then occasionally tap some otherpart of his body, a knuckle, an elbow or a knee. Whenever he was forcedto stop this by the requirements of eating he would start blinking eachof his eyes instead, and occasionally nodding. No one, of course, hadever dared to ask him why he did this, though all were consumed withcuriosity. Richard couldn’t see who was sitting beyond him. In the other direction, beyond Reg’s deathly neighbour, was Watkin,the Classics Professor, a man of terrifying dryness and oddity. Hisheavy rimless glasses were almost solid cubes of glass within which hiseyes appeared to lead independent existences like goldfish. His nosewas straight enough and ordinary, but beneath it he wore the same beardas Clint Eastwood. His eyes gazed swimmingly around the table as heselected who was going to be spoken at tonight. He had thought that hisprey might be one of the guests, the newly appointed Head of RadioThree, who was sitting opposite -- but unfortunately he had alreadybeen ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor ofPhilosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that thephrase ‘too much Mozart’ was, given any reasonable definition of thosethree words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that anysentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby renderedmeaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of anargument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy. The poorman was already beginning to grip his cutlery too tightly. His eyesdarted about desperately looking for rescue, and made the mistake oflighting on those of Watkin. ‘Good evening,’ said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in the mostfriendly way, and then letting his gaze settle glassily on to his bowlof newly arrived soup, from which position it would not allow itself tobe moved. Yet. Let the bugger suffer a little. He wanted the rescue tobe worth at least a good half dozen radio talk fees. Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the littlegirlish giggle that had greeted Reg’s conjuring trick. Astonishinglyenough it was a little girl. She was about eight years old with blondehair and a glum look. She was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly atthe table leg. ‘Who’s that?’ Richard asked Reg in surprise. ‘Who’s what?’ Reg asked Richard in surprise. Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction. ‘Thegirl,’ he whispered, ‘the very, very little girl. Is it some new mathsprofessor?’ Reg peered round at her. ‘Do you know,’ he said in astonishment, ‘Ihaven’t the faintest idea. Never known anything like it. Howextraordinary.’ At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, whosuddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which hisneighbours had got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table.She stopped kicking the table, and instead kicked the air withredoubled vigour. He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kickedhim. This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into herglum evening, but it didn’t last. Her father briefly shared with thetable at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, butnobody felt able to run with the topic. ‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is ofcourse clearly long overdue. I’m sure you’ll be looking forward toremedying this situation at the first opportunity.’ ‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er,that is... he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’ The little girl kicked the table leg again. When her father lookedsternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question athim. ‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could. ‘When, then?’ ‘Later. Maybe. Later, we’ll see.’ She hunched grumpily back in her seat. ‘You always say later,’ shemouthed at him. ‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg. ‘There isn’t a don at this table whodoesn’t behave exactly like that inside. Ah, thank you.’ Their souparrived, distracting his attention, and Richard’s. ‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple ofspoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it wasnot a taste explosion, ‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap. Somethingto do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music. Ithought you read English when you were here -- though only, I realise,in your spare time.’ He looked at Richard significantly over the rim ofhis soup spoon. ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before Richard even had achance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some sort ofcomputer when you were here? When was it? 1977?’ ‘Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind ofelectric abacus, but...’ ‘Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg. ‘In skilledhands it’s a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore itrequires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, andnever goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.’ ‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard. ‘True enough,’ conceded Reg. ‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’tdo yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard,‘but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil.’ Reg looked at him quizzically. ‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said.‘I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’ ‘I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point oftrying to teach anything to anybody?’ This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approvalfrom up and down the table. Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want tounderstand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someoneelse. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the moreslow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things downinto more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence ofprogramming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea intolittle steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainlylearned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns morethan the pupil. Isn’t that true?’ ‘It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,’ came a lowgrowl from somewhere on the table, ‘without undergoing a pre-frontallobotomy.’ ‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16Kmachine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, butwhat was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to themachine what it was I wanted it to do. I virtually wrote my own wordprocessor in BASIC. A simple search and replace routine would takeabout three hours.’ ‘I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?’ ‘Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not wereabsolutely fascinating. For instance, I discovered that...’ He broke off, laughing at himself. ‘I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,’ he added.‘That didn’t help.’ ‘Now, that I didn’t know,’ said Reg. ‘Your past has murkier thingsin it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shareswith this soup.’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin very carefully. ‘Imust go and have a word with the kitchen staff one day. I would like tobe sure that they are keeping the right bits and throwing the properbits away. So. A rock group, you say. Well, well, well. Good heavens.’ ‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band,but in fact we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of theearly eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice thanthe Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother’, so we didn’t.I left Cambridge and starved for three years.’ ‘But didn’t I bump into you during that period,’ said Reg, ‘and yousaid you were doing very well?’ ‘As a road sweeper, yes. There was an awful lot of mess on theroads. More than enough, I felt, to support an entire career. However,I got the sack for sweeping the mess on to another sweeper’s patch.’ Reg shook his head. ‘The wrong career for you, I’m sure. There areplenty of vocations where such behaviour would ensure rapidpreferment.’ ‘I tried a few -- none of them much grander, though. And I kept noneof them very long, because I was always too tired to do them properly.I’d be found asleep slumped over the chicken sheds or filing cabinets -- depending on what the job was. Been up all night with the computeryou see, teaching it to play “Three Blind Mice”. It was an importantgoal for me.’ ‘I’m sure,’ agreed Reg. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the college servantwho took his half-finished plate of soup from him, ‘thank you verymuch. “Three Blind Mice”, eh? Good. Good. So no doubt you succeededeventually, and this accounts for your present celebrated status. Yes?’ ‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.’ ‘I feared there might be. Pity you didn’t bring it with you though.It might have cheered up the poor young lady who is currently havingour dull and crusty company forced upon her. A swift burst of “ThreeBlind Mice” would probably do much to revive her spirits.’ He leanedforward to look past his two right-hand neighbours at the girl, who wasstill sitting sagging in her chair. ‘Hello,’ he said. She looked up in surprise, and then dropped her eyes shyly, swingingher legs again. ‘Which do you think is worse,’ enquired Reg, ‘the soup or thecompany?’ She gave a tiny, reluctant laugh and shrugged, still looking down. ‘I think you’re wise not to commit yourself at this stage,’continued Reg. ‘Myself, I’m waiting to see the carrots before I makeany judgements. They’ve been boiling them since the weekend, but I fearit may not be enough. The only thing that could possibly be worse thanthe carrots is Watkin. He’s the man with the silly glasses sittingbetween us. My name’s Reg, by the way. Come over and kick me when youhave a moment.’ The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, whostiffened and made an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good-naturedly. ‘Well, little girl,’ he said to her awkwardly, and she haddesperately to suppress a hoot of laughter at his glasses. Littleconversation therefore ensued, but the girl had an ally, and began toenjoy herself a tiny little bit. Her father gave her a relieved smile. Reg turned back to Richard, who said, suddenly, ‘Do you have anyfamily?’ ‘Er... no,’ said Reg, quietly. ‘But tell me. After “Three BlindMice”, what then?’ ‘Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working forWayForward Technologies...’ ‘Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way. Tell me, what’s he like?’ Richard was always faintly annoyed by this question, probablybecause he was asked it so often. ‘Both better and worse than he’s represented in the press. I likehim a lot, actually. Like any driven man he can be a bit trying attimes, but I’ve known him since the very early days of the company whenneither he nor I had a bean to our names. He’s fine. It’s just thatit’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless youpossess an industrial-grade answering machine.’ ‘What? Why’s that?’ ‘Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’stalking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever willlisten. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which isincreasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well.He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whosesole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned,transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day ina blue folder.’ ‘A blue one, eh?’ ‘Ask me why he doesn’t simply use a tape recorder,’ said Richardwith a shrug. Reg considered this. ‘I expect he doesn’t use a tape recorderbecause he doesn’t like talking to himself,’ he said. ‘There is a logicthere. Of a kind.’ He took a mouthful of his newly arrived porc au poivre andruminated on it for a while before gently laying his knife and forkaside again for the moment. ‘So what,’ he said at last, ‘is the role of young MacDuff in allthis?’ ‘Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for theApple Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing,powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics. I asked him exactly what hewanted in it, and he just said, “Everything. I want the top piece ofall-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.” And beingof a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally. ‘You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, canbe used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process -- and soon. And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern ofnumbers. So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbersand do what you like with them. If you just want a bar graph it’ll dothem as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graphit’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If you want dancinggirls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention fromthe figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will dothat as well. Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flockof seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which thewings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of eachdivision of your company. Great for producing animated corporate logosthat actually mean something. ‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your companyaccounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well.Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas overit.’ Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poiseddelicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt. ‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as asequence or pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard. ‘Numbers can expressthe pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches andlengths.’ ‘You mean tunes,’ said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet. Richard grinned. ‘Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that.’ ‘It would help you speak more easily.’ Reg returned the carrot tohis plate, untasted. ‘And this software did well, then?’ he asked. ‘Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companiesemerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan theywent for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery companyanthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’dprobably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing,commercially. Though the thing that’s interesting me most now is whathappens if you leave the accounts out of it. Turn the numbers thatrepresent the way a swallow’s wings beat directly into music. Whatwould you hear? Not the sound of cash registers, according to Gordon.’ ‘Fascinating,’ said Reg, ‘quite fascinating,’ and popped the carrotat last into his mouth. He turned and leaned forward to speak to hisnew girlfriend. ‘Watkin loses,’ he pronounced. ‘The carrots have achieved a new all-time low. Sorry, Watkin, but awful as you are, the carrots, I’m afraid,are world-beaters.’ The girl giggled more easily than last time and she smiled at him.Watkin was trying to take all this good-naturedly, but it was clear ashis eyes swam at Reg that he was more used to discomfiting than beingdiscomfited. ‘Please, Daddy, can I now?’ With her new-found, if slight,confidence, the girl had also found a voice. ‘Later,’ insisted her father. ‘This is already later. I’ve been timing it.’ ‘Well...’ He hesitated, and was lost. ‘We’ve been to Greece,’ announced the girl in a small but awedvoice. ‘Ah, have you indeed,’ said Watkin, with a little nod. ‘Well, well.Anywhere in particular, or just Greece generally?’ ‘Patmos,’ she said decisively. ‘It was beautiful. I think Patmos isthe most beautiful place in the whole world. Except the ferry nevercame when it said it would. Never, ever. I timed it. We missed ourflight but I didn’t mind.’ ‘Ah, Patmos, I see,’ said Watkin, who was clearly roused by thenews. ‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that theGreeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world,are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work oftrue creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer ofcourse to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction.Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. Ithink so.’ She frowned at him. ‘I found a pot,’ she said. ‘Probably nothing,’ interrupted her father hastily. ‘You know theway it is. Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinksthey’ve found a pot, don’t they? Ha, ha.’ There were general nods. This was true. Irritating, but true. ‘I found it in the harbour,’ she said, ‘in the water. While we werewaiting for the damn ferry.’ ‘Sarah! I’ve told you...’ ‘It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words Ididn’t think you knew. Anyway, I thought that if everyone here wasmeant to be so clever, then someone would be able to tell me if it wasa proper ancient Greek thing or not. I think it’s very old. Will youplease let them see it, Daddy?’ Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under hischair. ‘Did you know, young lady,’ said Watkin to her, ‘that the Book ofRevelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John theDivine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having beenwritten while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off,doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killingtime, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and thengradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I findthat very suggestive. Perhaps you should write a paper on it.’ Henodded at her. She looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Well, here it is,’ said her father, plonking the thing down on thetable. ‘Just a pot, as you see. She’s only six,’ he added with a grimsmile, ‘aren’t you, dear?’ ‘Seven,’ said Sarah. The pot was quite small, about five inches high and four inchesacross at its widest point. The body was almost spherical, with a verynarrow neck extending about an inch above the body. The neck and abouthalf of the surface area were encrusted with hard-caked earth, but theparts of the pot that could be seen were of a rough, ruddy texture. Sarah took it and thrust it into the hands of the don sitting on herright. ‘You look clever,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you think.’ The don took it, and turned it over with a slightly superciliousair. ‘I’m sure if you scraped away the mud from the bottom,’ heremarked wittily, ‘it would probably say “Made in Birmingham”.’ ‘That old, eh?’ said Sarah’s father with a forced laugh. ‘Long timesince anything was made there.’ ‘Anyway,’ said the don, ‘not my field, I’m a molecular biologist.Anyone else want to have a look?’ This question was not greeted with wild yelps of enthusiasm, butnevertheless the pot was passed from hand to hand around the far end ofthe table in a desultory fashion. It was goggled at through pebbleglasses, peered at through horn-rims, gazed at over half-moons, andsquinted at by someone who had left his glasses in his other suit,which he very much feared had now gone to the cleaner’s. No one seemedto know how old it was, or to care very much. The young girl’s facebegan to grow downhearted again. ‘Sour lot,’ said Reg to Richard. He picked up a silver salt cellaragain and held it up. ‘Young lady,’ he said, leaning forward to address her. ‘Oh, not again, you old fool,’ muttered the aged archaeologistCawley, sitting back and putting his hands over his ears. ‘Young lady,’ repeated Reg, ‘regard this simple silver salt cellar.Regard this simple hat.’ ‘You haven’t got a hat,’ said the girl sulkily. ‘Oh,’ said Reg, ‘a moment please,’ and he went and fetched hiswoolly red one. ‘Regard,’ he said again, ‘this simple silver salt cellar. Regardthis simple woolly hat. I put the salt cellar in the hat, thus, and Ipass the hat to you. The next part of the trick, dear lady... is up toyou.’ He handed the hat to her, past their two intervening neighbours,Cawley and Watkin. She took the hat and looked inside it. ‘Where’s it gone?’ she asked, staring into the hat. ‘It’s wherever you put it,’ said Reg. ‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘I see. Well... that wasn’t very good.’ Reg shrugged. ‘A humble trick, but it gives me pleasure,’ he said,and turned back to Richard. ‘Now, what were we talking about?’ Richard looked at him with a slight sense of shock. He knew that theProfessor had always been prone to sudden and erratic mood swings, butit was as if all the warmth had drained out of him in an instant. Henow wore the same distracted expression Richard had seen on his facewhen first he had arrived at his door that evening, apparentlycompletely unexpected. Reg seemed then to sense that Richard was takenaback and quickly reassembled a smile. ‘My dear chap!’ he said. ‘My dear chap! My dear, dear chap! What wasI saying?’ ‘Er, you were saying “My dear chap”.’ ‘Yes, but I feel sure it was a prelude to something. A sort of shorttoccata on the theme of what a splendid fellow you are prior tointroducing the main subject of my discourse, the nature of which Icurrently forget. You have no idea what I was about to say?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh. Well, I suppose I should be pleased. If everyone knew exactlywhat I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it,would there? Now, how’s our young guest’s pot doing?’ In fact it had reached Watkin, who pronounced himself no expert onwhat the ancients had made for themselves to drink out of, only on whatthey had written as a result. He said that Cawley was the one to whoseknowledge and experience they should all bow, and attempted to give thepot to him. ‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘yours was the knowledge and experience towhich we should bow. Oh, for heaven’s sake, take your hands off yourears and have a look at the thing.’ Gently, but firmly, he drew Cawley’s right hand from his ear,explained the situation to him once again, and handed him the pot.Cawley gave it a cursory but clearly expert examination. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about two hundred years old, I would think. Veryrough. Very crude example of its type. Utterly without value, ofcourse.’ He put it down peremptorily and gazed off into the old minstrelgallery, which appeared to anger him for some reason. The effect on Sarah was immediate. Already discouraged, she wasthoroughly downcast by this. She bit her lip and threw herself backagainst her chair, feeling once again thoroughly out of place andchildish. Her father gave her a warning look about misbehaving, andthen apologised for her again. ‘Well, Buxtehude,’ he hurried on to say, ‘yes, good old Buxtehude.We’ll have to see what we can do. Tell me...’ ‘Young lady,’ interrupted a voice, hoarse with astonishment, ‘youare clearly a magician and enchantress of prodigious powers!’ All eyes turned to Reg, the old show-off. He was gripping the potand staring at it with manic fascination. He turned his eyes slowly tothe little girl, as if for the first time assessing the power of afeared adversary. ‘I bow to you,’ he whispered. ‘I, unworthy though I am to speak inthe presence of such a power as yours, beg leave to congratulate you onone of the finest feats of the conjurer’s art it has been my privilegeto witness!’ Sarah stared at him with widening eyes. ‘May I show these people what you have wrought?’ he asked earnestly. Very faintly she nodded, and he fetched her formerly precious, butnow sadly discredited, pot a sharp rap on the table. It split into two irregular parts, the caked clay with which it wassurrounded falling in jagged shards on the table. One side of the potfell away, leaving the rest standing. Sarah’s eyes goggled at the stained and tarnished but clearlyrecognisable silver college salt cellar, standing jammed in the remainsof the pot. ‘Stupid old fool,’ muttered Cawley. After the general disparagement and condemnation of this cheapparlour trick had died down -- none of which could dim the awe inSarah’s eyes -- Reg turned to Richard and said, idly: ‘Who was that friend of yours when you were here, do you ever seehim? Chap with an odd East European name. Svlad something. SvladCjelli. Remember the fellow?’ Richard looked at him blankly for a moment. ‘Svlad?’ he said. ‘Oh, you mean Dirk. Dirk Cjelli. No. I neverstayed in touch. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times in the streetbut that’s all. I think he changes his name from time to time. Why doyou ask?’

Chapters 5 to 7

[::: CHAPTER 5 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
High on his rocky promontory the Electric Monk continued to sit on ahorse which was going quietly and uncomplainingly spare. From under itsrough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into the valley, withwhich it was having a problem, but the problem was a new and hideousone to the Monk, for it was this -- Doubt. He never suffered it for long, but when he did, it gnawed at thevery root of his being. The day was hot; the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat downupon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, noteven the Monk. But strange things were beginning to fizz in its brain,as they did from time to time when a piece of data became misaddressedas it passed through its input buffer. But then the Monk began to believe, fitfully and nervously at first,but then with a great searing white flame of belief which overturnedall previous beliefs, including the stupid one about the valley beingpink, that somewhere down in the valley, about a mile from where he wassitting, there would shortly open up a mysterious doorway into astrange and distant world, a doorway through which he might enter. Anastounding idea. Astoundingly enough, however, on this one occasion he was perfectlyright. The horse sensed that something was up. It pricked up its ears and gently shook its head. It had gone into asort of trance looking at the same clump of rocks for so long, and wason the verge of imagining them to be pink itself. It shook its head alittle harder. A slight twitch on the reins, and a prod from the Monk’s heels andthey were off, picking their way carefully down the rocky incline. Theway was difficult. Much of it was loose shale -- loose brown and greyshale, with the occasional brown and green plant clinging to aprecarious existence on it. The Monk noticed this withoutembarrassment. It was an older, wiser Monk now, and had put childishthings behind it. Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were allnatural stages through which one had to pass on the path to trueenlightenment. The sun beat hard on them. The Monk wiped the sweat and dust off itsface and paused, leaning forward on the horse’s neck. It peered downthrough the shimmering heat haze at a large outcrop of rock which stoodout on to the floor of the valley. There, behind that outcrop, waswhere the Monk thought, or rather passionately believed to the core ofits being, the door would appear. It tried to focus more closely, butthe details of the view swam confusingly in the hot rising air. As it sat back in its saddle, and was about to prod the horseonward, it suddenly noticed a rather odd thing. On a flattish wall of rock nearby, in fact so nearby that the Monkwas surprised not to have noticed it before, was a large painting. Thepainting was crudely drawn, though not without a certain stylish sweepof line, and seemed very old, possibly very, very old indeed. The paintwas faded, chipped and patchy, and it was difficult to discern with anyclarity what the picture was. The Monk approached the picture moreclosely. It looked like a primitive hunting scene. The group of purple, multi-limbed creatures were clearly earlyhunters. They carried rough spears, and were in hot pursuit of a largehorned and armoured creature, which appeared to have been wounded inthe hunt already. The colours were now so dim as to be almost non-existent. In fact, all that could be clearly seen was the white of thehunters’ teeth, which seemed to shine with a whiteness whose lustre wasundimmed by the passage of what must have been many thousands of years.In fact they even put the Monk’s own teeth to shame, and he had cleanedthem only that morning. The Monk had seen paintings like this before, but only in picturesor on the TV, never in real life. They were usually to be found incaves where they were protected from the elements, otherwise they wouldnot have survived. The Monk looked more carefully at the immediate environs of the rockwall and noticed that, though not exactly in a cave, it wasnevertheless protected by a large overhang and was well sheltered fromthe wind and rain. Odd, though, that it should have managed to last solong. Odder still that it should appear not to have been discovered.Such cave paintings as there were were all famous and familiar images,but this was not one that he had ever seen before. Perhaps this was a dramatic and historic find he had made. Perhapsif he were to return to the city and announce this discovery he wouldbe welcomed back, given a new motherboard after all and allowed tobelieve -- to believe -- believe what? He paused, blinked, and shookhis head to clear a momentary system error. He pulled himself up short. He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the wayto... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things youdidn’t have a good answer to. Brusquely he tugged the horse’s head round and urged it onward anddownward. Within a few minutes more of tricky manoeuvring they hadreached the valley floor, and he was momentarily disconcerted todiscover that the fine top layer of dust that had settled on the brownparched earth was indeed a very pale brownish pink, particularly on thebanks of the sluggish trickle of mud which was all that remained, inthe hot season, of the river that flowed through the valley when therains came. He dismounted and bent down to feel the pink dust and runit through his fingers. It was very fine and soft and felt pleasant ashe rubbed it on his skin. It was about the same colour, perhaps alittle paler. The horse was looking at him. He realised, a little belatedlyperhaps, that the horse must be extremely thirsty. He was extremelythirsty himself, but had tried to keep his mind off it. He unbuckledthe water flask from the saddle. It was pathetically light. Heunscrewed the top and took one single swig. Then he poured a littleinto his cupped hand and offered it to the horse, who slurped at itgreedily and briefly. The horse looked at him again. The Monk shook his head sadly, resealed the bottle and replaced it.He knew, in that small part of his mind where he kept factual andlogical information, that it would not last much longer, and that,without it, neither would they. It was only his Belief that kept himgoing, currently his Belief in The Door. He brushed the pink dust from his rough habit, and then stoodlooking at the rocky outcrop, a mere hundred yards distant. He lookedat it not without a slight, tiny trepidation. Although the major partof his mind was firm in its eternal and unshakeable Belief that therewould be a Door behind the outcrop, and that the Door would be The Way,yet the tiny part of his brain that understood about the water bottlecould not help but recall past disappointments and sounded a very tinybut jarring note of caution. If he elected not to go and see The Door for himself, then he couldcontinue to believe in it forever. It would be the lodestone of hislife (what little was left of it, said the part of his brain that knewabout the water bottle). If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to the Door and itwasn’t there... what then? The horse whinnied impatiently. The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board ofcircuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was thevery heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whateverthe facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the door was not. He pulled himself together. The Door would be there, and he must nowgo to it, because The Door was The Way. Instead of remounting his horse, he led it. The Way was but a shortway, and he should enter the presence of the Door in humility. He walked, brave and erect, with solemn slowness. He approached therocky outcrop. He reached it. He turned the corner. He looked. The Door was there. The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised. The Monk fell to his knees in awe and bewilderment. So braced was hefor dealing with the disappointment that was habitually his lot that,though he would never know to admit it, he was completely unpreparedfor this. He stared at The Door in sheer, blank system error. It was a door such as he had never seen before. All the doors heknew were great steel-reinforced things, because of all the videorecorders and dishwashers that were kept behind them, plus of courseall the expensive Electric Monks that were needed to believe in it all.This one was simple, wooden and small, about his own size. A Monk-sizedoor, painted white, with a single, slightly dented brass knob slightlyless than halfway up one side. It was set simply in the rock face, withno explanation as to its origin or purpose. Hardly knowing how he dared, the poor startled Monk staggered to hisfeet and, leading his horse, walked nervously forward towards it. Hereached out and touched it. He was so startled when no alarms went offthat he jumped back. He touched it again, more firmly this time. He let his hand drop slowly to the handle -- again, no alarms. Hewaited to be sure, and then he turned it, very, very gently. He felt amechanism release. He held his breath. Nothing. He drew the doortowards him, and it came easily. He looked inside, but the interior wasso dim in contrast with the desert sun outside that he could seenothing. At last, almost dead with wonder, he entered, pulling thehorse in after him. A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of sightaround the next outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust on his face,stood up, stretched his limbs and made his way back towards the door,patting his clothes as he did so.

[::: CHAPTER 6 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:’ The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holdsthat a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best impartedby reading it in a silly voice. He soared and swooped at the wordsuntil they seemed to duck and run for cover. ‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.’ Richard relaxed back into his seat. The words were very, veryfamiliar to him, as they could not help but be to any English graduateof St Cedd’s College, and they settled easily into his mind. The association of the college with Coleridge was taken veryseriously indeed, despite the man’s well-known predilection for certainrecreational pharmaceuticals under the influence of which this, hisgreatest work, was composed, in a dream. The entire manuscript was lodged in the safe-keeping of the collegelibrary, and it was from this itself, on the regular occasion of theColeridge Dinner, that the poem was read. ‘So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’ Richard wondered how long it took. He glanced sideways at his formerDirector of Studies and was disturbed by the sturdy purposefulness ofhis reading posture. The singsong voice irritated him at first, butafter a while it began to lull him instead, and he watched a rivulet ofwax seeping over the edge of a candle that was burning low now andthrowing a guttering light over the carnage of dinner. ‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’ The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself duringthe course of the meal seeped warmly through his veins, and soon hisown mind began to wander, and provoked by Reg’s question earlier in themeal, he wondered what had lately become of his former... was friendthe word? He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events thana person. The idea of him actually having friends as such seemed not somuch unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like the idea ofthe Suez crisis popping out for a bun. Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ washardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculatedabout, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that aserious accident on the motorway might be popular -- everyone slowsdown to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames.Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk. He was rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats.That is to say, there was just the one hat which he habitually wore,but he wore it with a passion that was rare in one so young. The hatwas dark red and round, with a very flat brim, and it appeared to moveas if balanced on gimbals, which ensured its perfect horizontality atall times, however its owner moved his head. As a hat it was aremarkable rather than entirely successful piece of persona!decoration. It would make an elegant adornment, stylish, shapely andflattering, if the wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise. People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he deniedabout himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if nothis own denials, was never entirely clear. The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he’d supposedlyinherited from his mother’s side of the family who he claimed, hadlived at the smarter end of Transylvania. That is to say, he didn’tmake any such claim at all, and said it was the most absurd nonsense.He strenuously denied that there were bats of any kind at all in hisfamily and threatened to sue anybody who put about such maliciousfabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappyleather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which aresupposed to help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them. Hewould allow people to discover him hanging from this machine at allkinds of odd hours of the day, and more particularly of the night,expressly so that he could vigorously deny that it had any significancewhatsoever. By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials ofthe most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myththat he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant,psychosassic vampire bat. What did ‘psychosassic’ mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anythingat all. ‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted...’ Dirk had also been perpetually broke. This would change. It was his room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow calledMander, who, if the truth were known, had probably been speciallyselected by Dirk for his credulity. Steve Mander noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk he wouldtalk in his sleep. Not only that, but the sort of things he would sayin his sleep would be things like, ‘The opening up of trade routes tothe mumble mumble burble was the turning point for the growth of empirein the snore footle mumble. Discuss.’ ‘...like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:’ The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright in bed.This was shortly before prelim exams in the second year, and what Dirkhad just said, or judiciously mumbled, sounded remarkably like a verylikely question in the Economic History paper. Mander quietly got up, crossed over to Dirk’s bed and listened veryhard, but other than a few completely disconnected mumblings aboutSchleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian war, the latter beinglargely directed by Dirk into his pillow, he learned nothing more. News, however, spread -- quietly, discreetly, and like wildfire. ‘And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river.’ For the next month Dirk found himself being constantly wined anddined in the hope that he would sleep very soundly that night anddream-speak a few more exam questions. Remarkably, it seemed that thebetter he was fed, and the finer the vintage of the wine he was givento drink, the less he would tend to sleep facing directly into hispillow. His scheme, therefore, was to exploit his alleged gifts without everactually claiming to have them. In fact he would react to stories abouthis supposed powers with open incredulity, even hostility. ‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!’ Dirk was also, he denied, a clairaudient. He would sometimes humtunes in his sleep that two weeks later would turn out to be a hit forsomeone. Not too difficult to organise, really. In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessaryto support these myths. He was lazy, and essentially what he did wasallow people’s enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him. Thelaziness was essential -- if his supposed feats of the paranormal hadbeen detailed and accurate, then people might have been suspicious andlooked for other explanations. On the other hand, the more vague andambiguous his ‘predictions’ the more other people’s own wishfulthinking would close the credibility gap. Dirk never made much out of it -- at least, he appeared not to. Infact, the benefit to himself, as a student, of being continually winedand dined at other people’s expense was more considerable than anyonewould expect unless they sat down and worked out the figures. And, of course, he never claimed -- in fact, he actively denied --that any of it was even remotely true. He was therefore well placed to execute a very nice and tasty littlescam come the time of finals. ‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’ ‘Good heavens...!’ Reg suddenly seemed to awake with a start fromthe light doze into which he had gently slipped under the influence ofthe wine and the reading, and glanced about himself with blanksurprise, but nothing had changed. Coleridge’s words sang through awarm and contented silence that had settled on the great hall. Afteranother quick frown, Reg settled back into another doze, but this timea slightly more attentive one. ‘A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.’ Dirk allowed himself to be persuaded to make, under hypnosis, a firmprediction about what questions would be set for examination thatsummer. He himself first planted the idea by explaining exactly the sort ofthing that he would never, under any circumstances, be prepared to do,though in many ways he would like to, just to have the chance todisprove his alleged and strongly disavowed abilities. And it was on these grounds, carefully prepared, that he eventuallyagreed -- only because it would once and for all scotch the whole silly-- immensely, tediously silly -- business. He would make hispredictions by means of automatic writing under proper supervision, andthey would then be sealed in an envelope and deposited at the bankuntil after the exams. Then they would be opened to see how accurate they had been afterthe exams. He was, not surprisingly, offered some pretty hefty bribes from apretty hefty number of people to let them see the predictions he hadwritten down, but he was absolutely shocked by the idea. That, he said,would be dishonest... ‘Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ‘twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!’ Then, a short time later, Dirk allowed himself to be seen aroundtown wearing something of a vexed and solemn expression. At first hewaved aside enquiries as to what it was that was bothering him, buteventually he let slip that his mother was going to have to undergosome extremely expensive dental work which, for reasons that he refusedto discuss, would have to be done privately, only there wasn’t themoney. From here, the path downward to accepting donations for his mother’ssupposed medical expenses in return for quick glances at his writtenexam predictions proved to be sufficiently steep and well-oiled for himto be able to slip down it with a minimum of fuss. Then it further transpired that the only dentist who could performthis mysterious dental operation was an East European surgeon nowliving in Malibu, and it was in consequence necessary to increase thelevel of donations rather sharply. He still denied, of course, that his abilities were all that theywere cracked up to be, in fact he denied that they existed at all, andinsisted that he would never have embarked on the exercise at all if itwasn’t to disprove the whole thing -- and also, since other peopleseemed, at their own risk, to have a faith in his abilities that hehimself did not, he was happy to indulge them to the extent of lettingthem pay for his sainted mother’s operation. He could only emerge well from this situation. Or so he thought. ‘And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ The exam papers Dirk produced under hypnosis, by means of automaticwriting, he had, in fact, pieced together simply by doing the sameminimum research that any student taking exams would do, studyingprevious exam papers, and seeing what, if any, patterns emerged, andmaking intelligent guesses about what might come up. He was pretty sureof getting (as anyone would be) a strike rate that was sufficientlyhigh to satisfy the credulous, and sufficiently low for the wholeexercise to look perfectly innocent. As indeed it was. What completely blew him out of the water, and caused a furore whichended with him being driven out of Cambridge in the back of a BlackMaria, was the fact that all the exam papers he sold turned out to bethe same as the papers that were actually set. Exactly. Word for word. To the very comma. ‘Wave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise...’ And that, apart from a flurry of sensational newspaper reports whichexposed him as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the real thing so thatthey could have another round of exposing him as a fraud again and thentrumpeting him as the real thing again, until they got bored and founda nice juicy snooker player to harass instead, was that. In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to timeand had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile thatwants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms intoone that hopes you will lend it some. Dirk’s regular name changessuggested to Richard that he wasn’t alone in being treated like this. He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shininglyalive within the small confines of a university community should haveseemed to fade so much in the light of common day. And he wondered atReg’s asking after him like that, suddenly and out of the blue, in whatseemed altogether too airy and casual a manner. He glanced around him again, at his lightly snoring neighbour, Reg;at little Sarah rapt in silent attention; at the deep hall swathed indarkly glimmering light; at the portraits of old prime ministers andpoets hung high in the darkness with just the odd glint of candlelightgleaming off their teeth; at the Director of English Studies standingreading in his poetry-reading voice; at the book of ‘Kubla Khan’ thatthe Director of English Studies held in his hand; and finally,surreptitiously, at his watch. He settled back again. The voice continued, reading the second, and altogether stranger part of the poem...

[::: CHAPTER 7 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way’s life, and hewas wondering if the rain would hold off for the weekend. The forecasthad said changeable -- a misty night tonight followed by bright butchilly days on Friday and Saturday with maybe a few scattered showerstowards the end of Sunday when everyone would be heading back intotown. Everyone, that is, other than Gordon Way. The weather forecast hadn’t mentioned that, of course, that wasn‘tthe job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been prettymisleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetaryactivity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what hethought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that heshould tackle emotional or work problems with determination andcomplete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he wouldbe dead before the day was out. He turned off the motorway near Cambridge and stopped at a smallfilling station for some petrol, where he sat for a moment, finishingoff a call on his car phone. ‘OK, look, I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said, ‘or maybe latertonight. Or call me. I should be at the cottage in half an hour. Yes, Iknow how important the project is to you. All right, I know howimportant it is, full stop. You want it, I want it. Of course I do. AndI’m not saying that we won’t continue to support it. I’m just sayingit’s expensive and we should look at the whole thing with determinationand complete honesty. Look, why don’t you come out to the cottage, andwe 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 sortthat they use in advertisements, and not just advertisements forMercedes. 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 usualreason, 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 computerhardware when every twelve-year-old in the country had suddenly gotbored with boxes that went bing. His second fortune had been made insoftware instead. As a result of two major pieces of software, one ofwhich was Anthem (the other, more profitable one had never seen thelight of day), WFT-II was the only British software company that couldbe mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies asMicrosoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run along the lines of‘WayForward Technologies, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoftor Lotus...’ but it was a start. WayForward was in there. And he ownedit. He pushed a tape into the slot on the stereo console. It accepted itwith a soft and decorous click, and a moment or two later Ravel’sBoléro floated out of eight perfectly matched speakers with fine-meshed matte-black grilles. The stereo was so smooth and spacious youcould almost sense the whole ice-rink. He tapped his fingers lightly onthe padded rim of the steering wheel. He gazed at the dashboard.Tasteful illuminated figures and tiny, immaculate lights gazed dimlyback at him. After a while he suddenly realised this was a self servicestation 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 smallgrubby kiosk, paid for the petrol, remembered to buy a couple of localmaps, and then stood chatting enthusiastically to the cashier for a fewminutes about the directions the computer industry was likely to takein the following year, suggesting that parallel processing was going tobe the key to really intuitive productivity software, but also stronglydoubting whether artificial intelligence research per se,particularly artificial intelligence research based on the ProLoglanguage, was really going to produce any serious commercially viableproducts in the foreseeable future, at least as far as the office desktop environment was concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier notat 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’vetold it all to the till. If I’d been fifteen minutes the till wouldhave walked away too. Yeah, I’m sure that’s him,’ he would add whenshown a picture of Gordon Way. ‘I only wasn’t sure at first because inthe picture he’s got his mouth closed.’ ‘And you’re absolutely certain you didn’t see anything elsesuspicious?’ the policeman insisted. ‘Nothing that struck you as odd inany way at all?’ ‘No, like I said, it was just an ordinary customer on an ordinarynight, just like any other night.’ The policeman stared at him blankly. ‘Just for the sake ofargument,’ he went on to say, ‘if I were suddenly to do this...’ -- hemade himself go cross-eyed, stuck his tongue out of the corner of hismouth and danced up and down twisting his fingers in his ears -- ‘wouldanything strike you about that?’ ‘Well, er, yeah,’ said the cashier, backing away nervously. ‘I’dthink you’d gone stark raving mad.’ ‘Good,’ said the policeman, putting his notebook away. ‘It’s justthat different people sometimes have a different idea of what “odd”means, you see, sir. If last night was an ordinary night just like anyother night, then I am a pimple on the bottom of the Marquess ofQueensbury’s aunt. We shall be requiring a statement later, sir. Thankyou for your time.’ That was all yet to come. Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled backtowards his car. Standing under the lights in the mist it had gathereda finely beaded coat of matte moisture on it, and looked like -- well,it looked like an extremely expensive Mercedes-Benz. Gordon caughthimself, just for a millisecond, wishing that he had something likethat, but he was now quite adept at fending off that particular line ofthought, which only led off in circles and left him feeling depressedand confused. He patted it in a proprietorial manner, then, walking around it,noticed that the boot wasn’t closed properly and pushed it shut. Itclosed with a good healthy clunk. Well, that made it all worth it,didn’t it? Good healthy clunk like that. Old-fashioned values ofquality and workmanship. He thought of a dozen things he had to talk toSusan about and climbed back into the car, pushing the auto-dial codeon 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 assoon as possible. Maybe.’ Beep. ‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ he said, cradling the phone awkwardlyon his shoulder. ‘Just on my way to the cottage. It’s er, Thursdaynight, and it’s, er... 8.47. Bit misty on the roads. Listen, I havethose people from the States coming over this weekend to thrash out thedistribution on Anthem Version 2.00, handling the promotion, all thatstuff, 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 onthe case. I can ask him, and he says, Oh sure, it’s fine, but half thetime -- shit, that lorry had bright lights, none of these bastard lorrydrivers ever dips them properly, it’s a wonder I don’t end up dead inthe ditch, that would be something, wouldn’t it, leaving your famouslast words on somebody’s answering machine, there’s no reason why theselorries 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 meto that fellow at the Department of the Environment saying we canprovide the technology if he can provide the legislation? It’s for thepublic good, and anyway he owes me a favour plus what’s the point inhaving a CBE if you can’t kick a little ass? You can tell I’ve beentalking to 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 myrabbits? I bought them some maps in the hope that I can persuade themto go on long healthy walks and take their minds off shooting rabbits.I really feel quite sorry for the creatures. I think I should put oneof those signs on my lawn when the Americans are coming, you know, likethey 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 forrabbits to see. That’s secretary Susan at the office not you, ofcourse. ‘Where was I? ‘Oh yes. Richard and Anthem 2.00. Susan, that thing has got to bein beta testing in two weeks. He tells me it’s fine. But every time Isee 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. Peoplewho want their company accounts to sing to them do not want to buy arevolving sofa. Nor do I think he should be turning the erosionpatterns 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 factthat I get anxious at the salaries and computer time it’s eating up.Important long-term research and development it might be, but there isalso the possibility, only a possibility, I’m saying, but neverthelessa possibility which I think we owe it to ourselves fully to evaluateand explore, which is that it’s a lemon. That’s odd, there’s a noisecoming from the boot, I thought I’d just closed it properly. ‘Anyway, the main thing’s Richard. And the point is that there’sonly one person who’s really in a position to know if he’s getting theimportant 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 youreally get on his case? Make him see how important it is? Just makesure he realises that WayForward Technologies is meant to be anexpanding commercial business, not an adventure playground for crunch-heads. That’s the problem with crunch-heads -- they have one great ideathat actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding themfor years while they sit and calculate the topographies of theirnavels. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop and close the bootproperly. Won’t be a moment.’ He put the telephone down on the seat beside him, pulled over on tothe grass verge, and got out. As he went to the boot, it opened, afigure rose out of it, shot him through the chest with both barrels ofa shotgun and then went about its business. Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing tohis astonishment at what happened next.

Chapters 8 and 9

[::: CHAPTER 8 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
‘Come in, dear fellow, come in.’ The door to Reg’s set of rooms in college was up a winding set ofwooden stairs in the corner of Second Court, and was not well lit, orrather it was perfectly well lit when the light was working, but thelight was not working, so the door was not well lit and was,furthermore, locked. Reg was having difficulty in finding the key froma collection which looked like something that a fit Ninja warrior couldhurl through the trunk of a tree. Rooms in the older parts of the college have double doors, likeairlocks, and like airlocks they are fiddly to open. The outer door isa sturdy slab of grey painted oak, with no features other than a verynarrow slit for letters, and a Yale lock, to which suddenly Reg at lastfound 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 thelight switch. For a moment only the dying embers of a fire in the stonegrate threw ghostly red shadows dancing around the room, but thenelectric light flooded it and extinguished the magic. Reg hesitated onthe threshold for a moment, oddly tense, as if wishing to be sure ofsomething before he entered, then bustled in with at least theappearance of cheeriness. It was a large panelled room, which a collection of gently shabbyfurniture contrived to fill quite comfortably. Against the far wallstood a large and battered old mahogany table with fat ugly legs, whichwas laden with books, files, folders and teetering piles of papers.Standing in its own space on the desk, Richard was amused to note, wasactually a battered old abacus. There was a small Regency writing desk standing nearby which mighthave been quite valuable had it not been knocked about so much, also acouple of elegant Georgian chairs, a portentous Victorian bookcase, andso on. It was, in short, a don’s room. It had a don’s framed maps andprints 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 wasprobably the case because a don lived in it. Two doors led out from either end of the opposite wall, and Richardknew from previous visits that one led to a study which looked muchlike a smaller and more intense version of this room -- larger clumpsof books, taller piles of paper in more imminent danger of actuallyfalling, furniture which, however old and valuable, was heavily markedwith myriad rings of hot tea or coffee cups, on many of which theoriginal 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’sbedroom 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 alwaysfeels 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 thequestion. ‘Oh,’ said Reg solemnly. ‘Well, I wish you’d tell me where you gotit. I have endless trouble with them, quite endless. Never found acomfortable 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 witha decanter of port and three glasses. ‘Well, it’s odd you should ask that,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve never saton it.’ ‘Very wise,’ insisted Reg earnestly, ‘very, very wise.’ He wentthrough 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’sstuck 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 thestairs, got it stuck, turned it around any way they could, couldn’t getit any further, and then found, curiously enough, that they couldn’tget it back down again. Now, that should be impossible.’ ‘Odd,’ agreed Reg. ‘I’ve certainly never come across anyirreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Haveyou spoken to any spatial geometricians?’ ‘I did better than that. I called in a neighbour’s kid who used tobe able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a stepand stared at it for over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocablystuck. Admittedly he’s a few years older now and has found out aboutgirls, but it’s got me puzzled.’ ‘Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I’m most interested, but let meknow 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 Idon’t actually have any brandy. Or coffee? Some more wine perhaps?There’s an excellent Margaux I’ve been looking 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. Pleasecarry on, I shall still be able to hear you. Continue to tell me ofyour sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit on mine. Has it beenstuck there for long?’ ‘Oh, only about three weeks,’ said Richard, sitting down. ‘I couldjust saw it up and throw it away, but I can’t believe that there isn’ta logical answer. And it also made me think -- it would be reallyuseful to know before you buy a piece of furniture whether it’sactually going to fit up the stairs or around the corner. So I’vemodelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer -- and so farit just says no way.’ ‘It says what?’ called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle. ‘That it can’t be done. I told it to compute the moves necessary toget the sofa out, and it said there aren’t any. I said “What?” and itsaid there aren’t any. I then asked it, and this is the reallymysterious thing, to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa intoits present position in the first place, and it said that it couldn’thave got there. Not without fundamental restructuring of the walls. So,either there’s something wrong with the fundamental structure of thematter in my walls or,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there’s something wrongwith 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 amonth. Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girlthat 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 hasbeen a bit of a talking point. In fact she’s moved back to her own flatuntil I get it sorted out. She, well...’ He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around the room ina desultory sort of way and ended up in front of the dying fire. Hegave it a bit of a poke and threw on a couple of extra logs to try andward off the chill of the room. ‘She’s Gordon’s sister, in fact,’ he added at last. ‘But they arevery different. I’m not sure she really approves of computers verymuch. And she doesn’t much like his attitude to money. I don’t think Ientirely 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 thesoftware incarnation of the company profitable. It was called Reason,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 manyof the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see therehave already been several programs written that help you to arrive atdecisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts sothat they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawbackwith these is that the decision which all the properly ordered andanalysed 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 allowedyou to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, andonly then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it wasable to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct aplausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises withthe conclusion. ‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able tobuy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely brokeand a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find faultwith 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 boughtup, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward ona very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the otherhand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’verecently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour ofthe Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, thepattern of the algorithms is very clear. ‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over thelast couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy isusing version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reasononly 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 withit. Anyway, when the Pentagon bought everything, they boughteverything. Every scrap of code, every disk, every notebook. I was gladto see the back of it. If indeed we have. I just busy myself with myown projects.’ He poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing here whenhe had so much work on. Gordon was on at him continually about gettingthe new, super version of Anthem ready for taking advantage of theMacintosh II, and he was well behind with it. And as for the proposedmodule for converting incoming Dow Jones stock-market information intoMIDI data in real time, he’d only meant that as a joke, but Gordon, ofcourse, had flipped over the idea and insisted on its beingimplemented. That too was meant to be ready but wasn’t. He suddenlyknew exactly why it was he was here. Well, it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn’t see whyReg had been quite so keen to see him. He picked up a couple of booksfrom the table. The table obviously doubled as a dining table, becausealthough the piles looked as if they had been there for weeks, theabsence of dust immediately around them showed that they had been movedrecently. Maybe, he thought, the need for amiable chit-chat with someonedifferent can become as urgent as any other need when you live in acommunity as enclosed as a Cambridge college was, even nowadays. He wasa likeable old fellow, but it was clear from dinner that many of hiscolleagues found his eccentricities formed rather a rich sustained diet-- particularly when they had so many of their own to contend with. Athought about Susan nagged him, but he was used to that. He flippedthrough the two books he’d picked up. One of them, an elderly one, was an account of the hauntings ofBorley Rectory, the most haunted house in England. Its spine wasgetting raggedy, and the photographic plates were so grey and blurry asto be virtually indistinguishable. A picture he thought must be a verylucky (or faked) shot of a ghostly apparition turned out, when heexamined the caption, to be a portrait of the author. The other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence was aguide to the Greek islands. He thumbed through it idly and a piece ofpaper fell out. ‘Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?’ called out Reg. ‘Or Darjeeling? OrPG Tips? It’s all tea bags anyway, I’m afraid. And none of them veryfresh.’ ‘Darjeeling will do fine,’ replied Richard, stooping to pick up thepiece 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 sothat it had a hurriedly scribbled note on it. The note said, oddlyenough, ‘Regard this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simplehat.’ ‘Sugar?’ ‘Er, what?’ said Richard, startled. He put the book hurriedly backon the pile. ‘Just a tiny joke of mine,’ said Reg cheerily, ‘to see if people arelistening.’ He emerged beaming from the kitchen carrying a small traywith two cups on it, which he hurled suddenly to the floor. The teasplashed over the carpet. One of the cups shattered and the otherbounced under the table. Reg leaned against the door frame, white-facedand staring. A frozen instant of time slid silently by while Richard was toostartled to react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to help. But theold 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 adoctor?’ Reg waved him down. ‘It’s all right,’ he insisted, ‘I’m perfectlywell. Thought I heard, well, a noise that startled me. But it wasnothing. Just overcome with the tea fumes, I expect. Let me just catchmy breath. I think a little, er, port will revive me excellently. Sosorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ He waved in the general directionof the port decanter. Richard hurriedly poured a small glass and gaveit to him. ‘What kind of noise?’ he asked, wondering what on earth could shockhim so much. At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and anextraordinary kind of heavy breathing noise. ‘That...’ whispered Reg. The glass of port lay shattered at hisfeet. 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 upthere?’ he asked, feeling this was a lame question, but one that had tobe asked. ‘No,’ said Reg in a low voice that shocked Richard with the fear itcarried, ‘no one. Nobody that should be there.’ ‘Then...’ Reg was struggling shakily to his feet, but there was suddenly afierce determination about him. ‘I must go up there,’ he said quietly. ‘I must. Please wait for mehere.’ ‘Look, what is this?’ demanded Richard, standing between Reg and thedoorway. ‘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 sayingthis. 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 isfor me to do.’ Richard followed him helplessly through the door into the smallhallway, beyond which lay the tiny kitchen. A dark wooden staircase ledup from here; the steps seemed damaged and scuffed. Reg turned on a light. It was a dim one that hung naked at the topof the stairwell, and he looked up it with grim apprehension. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and walked up two steps. He then turned andfaced 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 notknow if it is something which I have foolishly brought upon myself withmy... my hobbies, or if it is something to which I have fallen aninnocent 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 worsestill, 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 youas being in any way odd, if I appear not to be myself, then you mustleap on me and wrestle me to the ground. Do you understand? You mustprevent me from doing anything I may try to do.’ ‘But how will I know?’ asked an incredulous Richard. ‘Sorry I don’tmean 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 hewas asked. From inside the large untidy room he listened to the soundof the Professor’s tread mounting the stairs one at a time. He mounted them with a heavy deliberation, like the ticking of agreat, 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 theheavy movement and breath that had first so harrowed the Professor. Richard moved quickly to the door but did not open it. The chill ofthe room oppressed and disturbed him. He shook his head to try andshake off the feeling, and then held his breath as the footstepsstarted once again slowly to traverse the two yards of the landing andto pause there again. After only a few seconds, this time Richard heard the long slowsqueak 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 afew slight paces from the door, staring fixedly at it. Once more thefootsteps started to descend the stairs, slowly, deliberately andquietly, until at last they reached the bottom. Then after a fewseconds more the door handle began to rotate. The door opened and Regwalked calmly in. ‘It’s all right, it’s just a horse in the bathroom,’ he saidquietly. Richard leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground. ‘No,’ gasped Reg, ‘no, get off me, let me go, I’m perfectly allright, damn it. It’s just a horse, a perfectly ordinary horse.’ Heshook Richard off with no great difficulty and sat up, puffing andblowing and pushing his hands through his limited hair. Richard stoodover him warily, but with great and mounting embarrassment. He edgedback, and let Reg stand up and sit on a chair. ‘Just a horse,’ said Reg, ‘but, er, thank you for taking me at myword.’ 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’tbe long.’ Richard stared in disbelief. ‘You say there’s a horse in yourbathroom, 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 wasjust a slight turn. These things happen, my dear fellow, don’t upsetyourself about it. Dear me, I’ve known odder things in my time. Many ofthem. Far odder. She’s only a horse, for heaven’s sake. I’ll go and lether out later. Please don’t concern yourself. Let us revive our spiritswith some port.’ ‘But... how did it get in there?’ ‘Well, the bathroom window’s open. I expect she came in throughthat.’ Richard looked at him, not for the first and certainly not for thelast 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 Richardsuddenly. ‘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 believethere’s a horse in your bathroom.’ And brushing aside Reg’s furtherprotestations he went up to look. The bathroom was not large. The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given the ageand nature of the building, was quite probably priceless, but otherwisethe fittings were stark and institutional. There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum on thefloor, a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very elderly stainsand chips in the enamel, and also a small basic basin with a toothbrushand toothpaste in a Duralex beaker standing next to the taps. Screwedinto the probably priceless panelling above the basin was a tin mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted manytimes, and the mirror was stained round the edges with condensation.The lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern. Therewas an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the corner, withan old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which lay some neatly foldedbut 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 kindof way. Richard swayed slightly. The horse stood quite still. After awhile it looked at the cupboard instead. It seemed, if not content,then at least perfectly resigned to being where it was until it was putsomewhere else. It also seemed... what was it? It was bathed in the glow of the moonlight that streamed in throughthe window. The window was open but small and was, besides, on thesecond floor, so the notion that the horse had entered by that routewas 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 it indeed,which was that it was standing in a college bathroom. Maybe that wasall. He reached out, rather tentatively, to pat the creature on its neck.It felt normal -- firm, glossy, it was in good condition. The effect ofthe moonlight on its coat was a little mazy, but everything looks alittle odd by moonlight. The horse shook its mane a little when hetouched it, but didn’t seem to mind too much. After the success of patting it, Richard stroked it a few times andscratched it gently under the jaw. Then he noticed that there wasanother door into the bathroom, in the far corner. He moved cautiouslyaround the horse and approached the other door. He backed up against itand pushed it open tentatively. It just opened into the Professor’s bedroom, a small room clutteredwith books and shoes and a small single bed. This room, too, hadanother door, which opened out on to the landing again. Richard noticed that the floor of the landing was newly scuffed andscratched as the stairs had been, and these marks were consistent withthe idea that the horse had somehow been pushed up the stairs. Hewouldn’t have liked to have had to do it himself, and he would haveliked to have been the horse having it done to him even less, but itwas just about possible. But why? He had one last look at the horse, which had one last lookback at him, and then he returned downstairs. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘You have a horse in your bathroom and I will,after all, have a little port.’ He poured some for himself, and then some for Reg, who was quietlycontemplating the fire and was in need of a refill. ‘Just as well I did put out three glasses after all,’ said Regchattily. ‘I wondered why earlier, and now I remember. ‘You asked if you could bring a friend, but appear not to have doneso. 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 beall right, as I recall. I said I would be charmed, and fully intendedto be. I’d saw the thing up if I were you. Don’t want to sacrifice yourhappiness to a sofa. Or maybe she decided that an evening with your oldtutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilaratingcourse of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would havedone. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hecticsocial 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 hadinsisted that she wanted to come because it would be the only way she’dget to see his face for a few minutes not bathed in the light of acomputer screen, so he had agreed and arranged that he would bring herafter all. Only he had completely forgotten this. He had not picked her up. He said, ‘Can I use your phone, please?’

[::: CHAPTER 9 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do. He was dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There was ahorrific hole in his chest, but the blood that was gobbing out of ithad slowed to a trickle. Otherwise there was no movement from his chestat all, or, indeed, from any other part of him. He looked up, and from side to side, and it became clear to him thatwhatever part of him it was that was moving, it wasn’t any part of hisbody. The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At a fewfeet distant from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in the grass. He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o’clockin the morning, unable to put their mind to rest, but unable to findanything to do with it. He realised that he had just had something of ashock, which might account for his inability to think clearly, butdidn’t account for his ability actually to think at all. In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, ifanything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory orextinction, one thing has never been in doubt -- that you would atleast know the answer when you were dead. Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what hewas meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encounteredbefore. He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to him as the bodythat still lay slowly cooling on the ground, giving up its blood heatin 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, ittook his weight. But then of course he appeared to have no weight thatneeded to be taken. When he bent to touch the ground he could feelnothing save a kind of distant rubbery resistance like the sensationyou 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 historso 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 curledslowly through him. He looked back down at the him, the ghastly, astonished-looking him-thing lying still and mangled on the ground, and his flesh wanted tocreep. Or rather, he wanted flesh that could creep. He wanted flesh. Hewanted body. He had none. A sudden cry of horror escaped from his mouth but was nothing andwent 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 ofwalking, uncertain and, well, insubstantial. The ground felt frailbeneath his feet. The door of the car was still open on the driver’s side, as he hadleft it when he had leaped out to deal with the boot lid, thinking he’donly be two seconds. That was all of two minutes ago now, when he’d been alive. When he’dbeen a person. When he’d thought he was going to be leaping straightback 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 externalrear-view mirror. He looked exactly like himself, albeit like himself after he’d had aterrible fright, which was to be expected, but that was him, that wasnormal. This must be something he was imagining, some horrible kind ofwaking 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 themirror, there was no breath. Perhaps, he thought anxiously to himself,perhaps it was something to do with having heated wing mirrors. Didn’tthis car have heated wing mirrors? Hadn’t the salesman gone on and onabout heated this, electric that, and servo-assisted the other? Maybethey 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 slowlyand gazed again in apprehension at the body lying on the ground behindhim with half its chest blown away. That would certainly satisfy adoctor. The sight would be appalling enough if it was somebody else’sbody, but his own... He was dead. Dead... dead... He tried to make the word tolldramatically in his mind, but it wouldn’t. He was not a film soundtrack, he was just dead. Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he gradually becamedistressed by the expression of asinine stupidity on its face. It was perfectly understandable, of course. It was just such anexpression as somebody who is in the middle of being shot with his ownshotgun by somebody who had been hiding in the boot of his car might beexpected to wear, but he nevertheless disliked the idea that anyonemight find him looking like that. He knelt down beside it in the hope of being able to rearrange hisfeatures into some semblance of dignity, or at least basicintelligence. It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He tried to knead theskin, the sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he couldn’t seem toget a proper grip on it, or on anything. It was like trying to modelplasticine when your arm has gone to sleep, except that instead of hisgrip 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 bloodyblasted impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find himselfthrottling 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 addto the inanely stupefied look of the corpse a twisted-up mouth and asquint. And bruises flowering on its neck. He started to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a strangehowling from deep within whatever this thing he had become was.Clutching his hands to his face, he staggered backwards, retreated tohis car and flung himself into the seat. The seat received him in aloose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the lastfifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basicsherry, but refuses to catch your eye. Could he get himself to a doctor? To avoid facing the absurdity of the idea he grappled violently withthe steering wheel, but his hands slipped through it. He tried towrestle with the automatic transmission shift and ended up thumping itin rage, but not being able properly to grasp or push it. The stereo was still playing light orchestral music into thetelephone, which had been lying on the passenger seat listeningpatiently all this time. He stared at it and realised with a growingfever of excitement that he was still connected to Susan’s telephone-answering machine. It was the type that would simply run and run untilhe hung up. He 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 thewind. ‘Susan, help me! Help me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m dead... I’mdead... I’m dead and... I don’t know what to do...’ He broke downagain, sobbing in desperation, and tried to cling to the phone like ababy 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 managedto push something after all. He had managed to push the button whichdisconnected the call. Feverishly he attempted to grapple the thingagain, but it constantly slipped through his fingers and eventually layimmobile on the seat. He could not touch it. He could not push thebuttons. 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 asterror began to recede into blank desolation. A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing odd -- acar stopped by the wayside. Passing swiftly in the night theirheadlights would probably not have picked out the body lying in thegrass behind the car. They certainly would not have noticed a ghostsitting inside it crying to himself. He didn’t know how long he sat there. He was hardly aware of timepassing, only that it didn’t seem to pass quickly. There was littleexternal stimulus to mark its passage. He didn’t feel cold. In fact hecould almost not remember what cold meant or felt like, he just knewthat it was something he would have expected to feel at this moment. Eventually he stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would have to dosomething, though he didn’t know what. Perhaps he should try and reachhis 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 thenight. Pulling himself together he slipped out of the car, his foot andknee grazing easily through part of the door frame. He went to lookagain 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.