by Tom Holt
“What, and miss all the fun of finding out the mysterious secret?”
“Yes.”
Paul nodded. “You bet. I don’t like all this weird stuff. On the other hand, I need the job.”
“Same here. If I went home and told them I’d jacked it in, they’d go mad. You know, scenes and melodrama. Give me the weirdness any day.”
Quietly, Paul blessed the thin girl’s parents for their attitude; because if she threw in her job, that’d be that, he’d probably never see her again. Mysterious swords and things with claws didn’t exactly appeal to him as integral parts of the working environment, but he was damned if he was going to let them come between him and a girl who’d actually smiled at him, twice. “Looks like we’re stuck here, then,” he said cheerfully. “Oh well. There’s probably a perfectly simple explanation,” he added.
“Really? Such as?”
He shrugged. “Just because I can’t figure it out doesn’t mean it’s not blindingly obvious.”
“I can’t figure it out either.”
“Well,” he conceded, “maybe it’s not that simple. But there’s got to be an explanation. We’ll probably laugh ourselves silly when we hear what it is.”
Clearly she didn’t think so. “Well,” she said, “I suppose we’d better get on with some work.”
“I guess,” Paul replied. “Talking of which, it may just be my imagination, but I think we’re getting close to the end of this. I mean, when was the last time Julie showed up with a new batch of this garbage?”
She thought for a moment. “Just after Friday lunchtime.”
“That’s right. When we started, it was coming in at about hourly intervals. It’s definitely slowing up.”
“You could be right.” She looked away for a moment. “Look,” she said, “I know I’m like hopelessly slow at this. If you could do some of my pile—”
“Sure,” Paul said. He was afraid he’d sounded too eager. “If you don’t mind, I mean. After all, it’s a really stupid boring job; the sooner we get it finished, the sooner they’ll give us something else that’s not quite so boring.”
“Or something worse.”
He shook his head. “Define worse.”
“You’re right. Here,” she went on, shoving a snowdrift of spreadsheets across the desk at him, “you do this lot, all right?”
He nodded. “Thanks.”
“What for?”
“Oh, well.” He couldn’t say, “Thanks for not being quite so snotty and horrible, you’ve no idea how much it means to me.” “Well, it helps pass the time,” he said lamely.
By now, he could shuffle and sort the spreadsheets without having to apply his mind at all. Today, that was something of a mixed blessing. Somehow he had the idea that if he thought too hard about her apparent change of attitude and its implications, it could ruin everything; he wanted to white-noise the thoughts out of his mind, but the spreadsheets didn’t cut it any more. He finished his pile almost without noticing, and when he looked up, she’d finished too. In fact, she was grinning.
“Beat you,” she said.
“You cheated.”
“Did not.”
“Did.”
Another of those moments was starting to form; but then the door opened and Julie came in. She wasn’t carrying any bales of computer paper, Paul noticed, as he cursed her abominable timing.
“You’ve finished that lot, then,” she said, with no apparent surprise. “Right, Mr Tanner’s got another job he wants you to do for him.”
“Oh, right,” Paul said (and he was thinking, She knew we’d finished; how did she know that?). “What is it?”
“Oh, nothing very exciting,” Julie sighed, sweeping up the sorted piles. “I’ll take these up to Mr Tanner, and then I’ll bring it down for you.”
“Right,” Paul said. “Can I give you a hand?”
“I can manage, thanks,” Julie said, with a hint of disapproval. “I’ll be back in two ticks.”
A tick turned out to be three minutes long. When she came back, she had two large green pocket files, which she placed on the desk and opened. “Right,” she said. “This is a whole lot of aerial photographs of some place or other. He wants you to look at them, and if you see anywhere that looks like it might be a bauxite deposit, you’re to draw a ring round it in green marker pen. All right?”
“A what?” the girl asked.
“Bauxite deposit. Now there’s no rush, just make sure you do a nice, thorough job.”
“But hang on,” Paul said. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t got the faintest idea what a bauxite deposit looks like. In fact, I don’t even know what bauxite is.”
Julie sighed. “Nor me,” she said, and left the room.
Paul and the girl looked at each other for a moment or so.
“Bauxite,” she said.
Paul nodded. “What the hell is bauxite?” he said.
“Actually,” the girl answered, “I know about bauxite. It’s a naturally occurring mineral mostly used as feed for the manufacture of alumina via a wet chemical caustic leach method commonly known as the Bayer process. Mostly it comes from Australia, though other significant producers include Papua New Guinea and Jamaica. We did a school project,” she explained, “when I was twelve. I know a lot of stuff like that,” she added, with a hint of sadness.
“Oh,” Paul said. “Right, we might as well take a look at these pictures. Australia, did you say?”
She nodded. “And Papua New Guinea and Jamaica.”
“Fine. So we can forget about any bird’s-eye views of Southampton, for a start.” He opened the file, and pulled out a sheaf of large black and white prints. They didn’t even look particularly like landscapes. “You know,” he went on, “this is a bit more like it. Bauxite, I mean. It’s, like, something concrete.”
“No, it’s not,” the girl told him. “Concrete is an artificial amalgam of sand and cement, widely used in the construction of—”
“Concrete,” Paul said, “as opposed to nebulous and wishy-washy. What I mean is, mineral deposits and stuff, that sounds like a proper business. You know, industry, high finance, capitalism.”
“You mean boring.”
Paul nodded. “Boring and non-weird. I mean, bauxite. It’s a whole different kettle of fish from claw-marks and swords in stones, isn’t it?”
She wiped her nose on her cuff, and frowned. “Could be,” she said.
“Bound to be; unless, of course, what the swords are stuck into are bauxite nuggets,” he added. “It could be a smuggling thing; you know, getting them past Customs disguised as tacky tourist souvenirs.” She was looking underwhelmed. “You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“It’s a bit unlikely, I grant you. Still—”
“Let’s look at the pictures, shall we?”
Not only did the pictures look quite unlike anything, let alone bits of countryside, they were all practically identical. With a certain degree of imagination, you could just about talk yourself into believing they might represent tracts of featureless desert. “I can’t believe there’s anywhere on earth that looks like this,” the girl said.
“That’s assuming it is,” Paul said. “On Earth, I mean. Could be satellite snaps of the Moon, or some asteroid.” She shrugged. “Or someone forgot to take the lens cap off. Anyway, I can’t see how we’re supposed to tell what’s under all that.”
“Agreed. When you did your project, you didn’t happen to have anything in it about what the stuff actually looks like, did you?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He chose a print at random, and stared at it for a moment or so. “Completely hopeless,” he said. “It’s just—”
“We could look it up on the Internet,” the girl interrupted. “There’s bound to be something. Probably pictures of lumps of bauxite. At least we’d know what colour it is, that’d be something.”
“Good idea,” Paul said enthusiastically. “Hang on, though, we haven’t got a computer.”
&
nbsp; “No, but there’s one in the back of reception that nobody ever uses; you know, on the desk next to the table where they frank the letters. I’ll nip down there and see what I can find out, shall I?”
“All right. I’d better stay here, in case Julie comes back. It wouldn’t look too good if she found the place empty.”
“Fine. If she asks where I’ve got to, say I’ve gone for a pee or something.” She stopped, her hand on the door handle. “Well anyway,” she said, “this is better than sorting those stupid bloody printouts.”
Left alone with nothing to do, Paul picked out a couple of prints and gazed at them for a while. Staring at them for very long made his head ache, and he’d just made up his mind not to bother any more, and tell Julie when she came by next that he’d scanned the lot, sorry, no bauxite anywhere, when he felt an odd prickling sensation in his finger, where it was resting on the surface of the photograph. The nearest thing to it that he’d felt before was the uncomfortable burning itch you get in a patch of skin you scalded an hour or so earlier. He took his hand away, and the tingling stopped immediately. At first he assumed it was an allergic reaction to the chemicals that had been used to develop the picture; but that couldn’t be right, or it wouldn’t have stopped so promptly when he took his hand away. Feeling extremely foolish, he stretched out his finger and, somewhat unwillingly, touched the photo again. Nothing. No tingle, no anything except the smooth, slightly soapy texture of the print.
Coincidence, he thought; just an itchy finger, and I happened to be touching the picture at the time. Then he caught sight of the very faint smear his fingertip had left on the surface the first time. A vague memory drifted into his mind of something he’d seen in a TV documentary years ago, something to do with hazel twigs and eccentric old men running about in fields. He touched the fingerprint, and the tingling came back. He took his finger away; the tingling stopped. Touch; tingle. Away; stop. He tried prodding other parts of the photo, but there was no reaction. It was that one place, and no other, but the effect was exactly the same each time.
Surely not, he thought; but he was sure he wasn’t imagining the prickly feeling. He tried a couple of different pictures, but none of them affected him at all. Crazy. With a shrug, he opened the desk drawer and scrabbled about until he found a green marker pen. He’d already considered drawing a few green rings at random, just to show willing, and if he was going to do that, well, the fingerprint was as good a place as any. He uncapped the pen and drew a green circle around the smudge. Vaguely he recalled that the nutty old men with hazel twigs called it dowsing or scrying, and the TV show had reckoned there was something to it, so it wasn’t that far-fetched. Of course, even if what he was doing really was dowsing (or scrying), there was absolutely no reason to suppose that what he’d located was bauxite; it could just as easily be water, or a buried electricity cable, or a rusty old sardine can, like the ones he’d seen metal-detector freaks fishing out of muddy river banks in the grey light of sunset.
He put the picture to one side and tried a few others, tracing his fingertip over the surface in what he hoped was a methodical grid pattern. He was doing this (and not so much as a twinge, or a single pin or needle) when the thin girl came back in.
“What are you doing?” she said.
He thought about telling her, and decided not to; with so much residual loopiness on every side, he didn’t really want to introduce any more of his own making, just in case she decided she’d had enough, and ran screaming from the building. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “Just wiping off a bit of dust. How’d you get on with the computer?”
She sat down. “No luck,” she said. “Actually, their computers are pretty weird. I mean, they aren’t Windows or anything like that, or even Unix or Mac; it’s some other system I’ve never seen before. There isn’t even a mouse. To be honest,” she went on, “I haven’t got a clue how it works. I sat there for ages trying to figure it out, but hitting the keys didn’t seem to do anything; I thought it’d frozen or something. But then I was sitting there staring at the screen, wondering what to do, and suddenly these menus dropped down, with all the open files and launch browser things on them; and—well, this is going to sound a bit strange, but as soon as I looked at something and thought, I wonder what that one does, there it was on the screen, just like—” She stopped abruptly, and Paul guessed she’d been about to use the M word, but shied away from it at the last moment. “Just like that,” she said. “Anyhow, once I stopped trying to figure out how it worked and simply got on with it, I didn’t have any trouble at all.”
This didn’t mean a great deal to Paul, who firmly believed that all computers worked by magic, and not the sort of magic that was safe to have around the house, at that. For all he knew, the system she’d just described was a vintage trilby as far as Silicon Valley was concerned. “So did you get on the Net?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I was just about to when Susie the office junior came up behind me and said was I going to be long, because she needed to use the computer. So I left her to it and came back here. Waste of time and effort, really,” she added. “Though, for what it’s worth, someone in this place is a Tolkien geek, because I opened one file by accident and it was all in those funny curly made-up letters the sad people use for writing Elvish—you know, the letters that look like little fronds of broccoli. There were pages of the stuff.”
“Oh,” Paul said. “You’re sure that’s what it was? I mean, it wasn’t Russian or something.”
“I know what Russian looks like,” she replied with a frown.
“Okay,” Paul said. “Well, I’m sure you’re right. I mean, the people who’re into all that stuff do some really weird things, like translating the Bible into Klingon. And it’s not like this outfit is staffed entirely by unimpeachably sane people.”
She nodded. “Why have you drawn a little green circle on this photo?” she asked.
“What? Oh, that one.” He shrugged. “I thought I’d better do one or two, just to prove we’ve actually looked at the stupid things. Otherwise they might think we’ve just shoved them from one side of the desk to the other without bothering.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough,” she said. “After all, it can’t do any harm to humour them. Actually, I was wondering if this is just something they’ve dreamed up to try and get rid of us. First they tried to freak us out with the claw-marks, and now they’ve given us this absolutely ludicrous job to do. It might even explain the swords, come to think of it.”
“Sure,” Paul agreed. “Only why would they want to do that? They’ve only just hired us.”
“That’s right,” she replied. “And they’ve realised they’ve hired a couple of totally unsuitable people, and they’re trying to make us quit. Probably if they fired us out of hand, they’d have to pay us compensation or redundancy or something. But if we just leave of our own accord, it won’t cost them any money.”
That came as close to making sense as anything Paul had heard since the first time he’d passed through the front door. “Bastards,” he said. “Trying to cheat us like that. And playing games with our heads into the bargain.”
The thin girl nodded cynically. “Employers,” she said.
“Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect them to do. Well, they can forget that. If they’re trying to get rid of me, I’m definitely staying.”
“Great!” Paul said. “I mean, yes, me too. Can’t let them shove us around like that.” He leaned back in his chair, as though this constituted an act of defiance. “Right,” he said. “So what do we do now?”
“Well, definitely not look at their stupid photos,” she replied. “Of all the bloody nerve, thinking we’re idiotic enough to be fooled by something like that.”
“I agree,” Paul said. “So what’ll we do instead?”
The thin girl looked round the room. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s going to get pretty boring just sitting here.”
Paul thought for a moment. “We could play Battleshi
ps,” he said.
She looked at him as though he’d just suggested a spot of bear-baiting. “Battleships?”
He nodded. “It’s a game,” he said. “All you need is two bits of paper and two pencils.” He explained the rules. She didn’t seem keen.
“Sounds a bit too macho-militaristic to me,” she said, “blowing up ships and stuff. I happen to think war is barbaric and wrong.”
That seemed to rule out Battleships; and Hangman probably wouldn’t go down too well, either. “Tell you what,” Paul suggested, “how about Find the Bauxite?”
She looked at him. “What?”
“It’s like Battleships,” he said, “only—well, we pretend we’re two Third World relief agencies, and we’ve got to locate valuable mineral resources in an undeveloped Third World country before the rich multinational mining cartels get their hands on them and start exploiting them in an ecologically disastrous fashion. Here.”
He went back into the desk drawer and found a pack of tracing paper he’d noticed earlier. He took out two sheets and quickly drew a grid pattern on both of them with a ruler. “We put the grid over one of these dumb photographs each, and you’ve got to call out where you think my bauxite mines are, and so on.”
“That’s silly.”
“Yes.”
She hesitated for a long time; then, quite suddenly, she smiled. “All right,” she said. “And if Julie or anybody comes in, it’ll look like we’re working, and they won’t have an excuse to fire us. Yes, that sounds like it might be fun.” She frowned slightly, then grabbed a photograph from the folder. “I’ll start,” she said.
They marked up their grids in pencil and the thin girl called out the first set of coordinates. Paul checked them by running his finger down the page, and suddenly there it was again; that odd tingling sensation. He pulled his hand away sharply.
“Well?” she said eagerly.
Sure enough, the square she’d called out was one of the ones he’d marked. “Spot on,” he said. “You’re good at this.”
She nodded. “Your go,” she said.
Paul drew a blank; and then the girl chose another square. Once again, Paul ran his fingertip down the page; once again, as soon as he touched the square she’d nominated, it was like a mild electric shock. “Two in a row,” he said. “You are good at this.”