by Tom Holt
Paul felt angry and slightly sick, but all he said was, “Yes.”
“Fine,” the voice replied. “In which case, I’ll cut along and leave you to your bauxite scans. Nice little venture, that. I’m glad you took my advice. What this firm needs is diversification, if it’s going to make it through the twenty—first century.”
The voice faded away, until the chair was empty. At once, Paul swung round in his chair, but the two old men and the door they’d come in through weren’t there any more. He stood up, then remembered he couldn’t move his feet, and sat down again. Then he saw something, and clicked his tongue in annoyance: a long, ragged claw-mark, right in the middle of his beautiful polished desktop. He jabbed petulantly at the buzzer, and the goblin appeared.
“Get rid of this, will you?” he snapped.
The goblin sighed. “Sorry,” she said, “but the houses are all gone under the sea, the dancers are all gone under the hill, and the earliest they can manage is Friday. I can cover it up with something in the meanwhile, if you like.”
Paul shook his head. “No, that’s all right,” he muttered irritably. “Make sure nobody leaves the building, I’m going out for lunch. That rather nice little Uzbek place round the corner—”
“Sorry,” said the goblin sadly, “but I’m afraid you can’t. Would you like me to get you a sandwich or something?”
Paul tried to drag his left foot off the floor, but he couldn’t shift it. “No, thanks,” he snapped. “I’ve got a tin of pilchards here somewhere, if only—”
He sat up. His alarm was warbling spitefully. It was a quarter past seven, Tuesday, and he had to get up and go to work. No more than six feet away, the sword in its idiotic stone loomed over him like a drill sergeant. Even the recollection that he’d be seeing Sophie again in an hour and three-quarters didn’t do much to cheer him up. And as for the day ahead—Yesterday afternoon, they’d reported to Mr Tanner’s office, as ordered. He’d grinned at them (that, presumably, explained why Paul’s dream had been haunted by goblins) and told them he had a little job he wanted them to do. “Well,” he’d added with a snicker, “two jobs.” First, there was this stack of spreadsheets; they needed photocopying, and then stapling together ready for Friday afternoon’s partners’ meeting. After they’d done that, they were to go down to the strongroom in the basement. It was in an awful mess, he’d told them; deeds and securities and documents all out of their files and drawers and boxes jumbled about, and half the stuff listed in the register didn’t seem to be there. “Do a stock-take, make an inventory, get it all sorted out and filed away neatly; and you’d better bring along an old, tatty pullover or something, because it’s a bit dusty and dirty down there, not to mention perishing cold, this time of year.”
Paul had an old, tatty pullover, which also happened to be his best, smartest pullover. He hoped Mr Tanner had been exaggerating, but he doubted it. Dust made him sneeze, and the cold gave him headaches. What fun.
Yes, he thought, but today I’m going to see the girl I love; and as he dressed and shaved, he wondered what it could possibly be like to see the girl he loved every day of the week, not just Monday to Friday; to see her lying beside him in bed when he woke up, and crunching her breakfast toast, and hanging out underwear to dry on the radiators, and cursing because she was going to be late, and she couldn’t find her keys. What on earth would that be like, he wondered; and for the life of him he couldn’t imagine it. It was more distant and surreal than his dream, or any number of goblin eyes and swords in stones; it belonged to another dimension, a world where things were different, somewhere most people managed to end up, but which he’d never be able to reach. He fished out his pullover from the drawer under the bed, and stuffed it in a plastic carrier.
§
One explanation for the greatest mystery of all is as follows.
Twenty thousand years ago, before the first walls were built at Jericho and the ancestors of mankind still lived in hut circles, patiently chipping at flints with stubs of reindeer horn, the photocopier manufacturers and the suppliers of office stationery lived at peace with one another, each considering the other’s needs and adapting their wares accordingly. But then a great wrong was done by one against the other, so that for ever after, from age to age, each strove to thwart the other’s designs; and since then, even though the cause of the feud has long since been forgotten, the hatred between them has grown ingrained, past all reconciliation. This deadly quarrel, more bitter even than the wars of the software lords of the South–West against the Dark Lord of Seattle, accounts for the fact that no standard-format spreadsheet will fit the bed of a standard-format office photocopier, and generations of hapless office juniors, secretaries and trainees have had to do the best they can with scissors, Pritt Sticks and Scotch tape.
“Are these the same ones we sorted into piles,” Paul speculated, as he nibbled Sellotape with his teeth, “or is this a different batch of meaningless drivel?”
Sophie shrugged her thin shoulders wearily. “No idea,” she said. “Does it matter?”
“No, not really.” They’d spent all morning in the photocopier room, and there was still a heartbreakingly thick wodge left in the folder still to do. “Bugger,” he added, “that red light’s come on again. Can you remember what we did the last time?”
“That’s the paper feed, isn’t it?”
“I thought it was the toner.”
He sighed. “You’re probably right. My brain switched off about an hour ago.” Paul pulled open the little plastic panel in the side of the machine and poked about with the stub end of a pencil; it had done the job, either the time before last or the time before that, though he had no idea why. “All right,” he said, “try that.”
The machine wheezed into action. The brightly green-shining slider thing got halfway through its stroke, and froze.
“It’s eating the paper again,” Sophie growled.
That wasn’t good. Once the machine had got its rollers on a sheet of paper, it tended to cling on, like a dog refusing to let go of the stick it’s just retrieved, and its grip was far greater than the tensile strength of ninety-gram copy paper. Extracting the tiny pulped slips that stayed behind after a jammed sheet had been yanked out by brute force would have taxed the skill and patience of a brain surgeon.
“There’s got to be something you can pull off or unscrew,” Paul said, “so you can get at the paper feed from the side.”
Sophie looked at him. “Don’t you dare unscrew any thing,” she said grimly. “If you start fiddling with it, that’ll be it.”
Harsh words; but fair. Paul knew perfectly well that the elves hadn’t blessed him with the knack of taking things to bits and putting them back together again. Even changing the fuse in a plug was a dark and terrible adventure, as far as he was concerned. “How about bashing it?” he said.
“I don’t think that would help.”
“I suppose not,” he sighed. “Still—”
“There,” she interrupted, holding up a crumpled, blackened but unshredded sheet of paper. “Got it.”
“Bloody hell. How did you manage that?”
“By going at it nice and steady,” Sophie replied, with more than a hint of smugness, “instead of trying to fight it to the death.” She shook her head. “Men,” she said. “If they can’t bash it over the head with a club, they’re completely helpless. All right, try it now.”
Paul riffled the paper and put it back in the feed tray, then hit the button. The slider slid back, graunched its gears a couple of times, and froze. Three red lights that hadn’t flashed before started flashing.
“Fuck,” Sophie shouted, and she belted the machine’s steel flank with her balled fist. The three red lights went out, and the slider purred smoothly into its ordained course. The copied page fed smoothly out the other side, still faintly warm.
“Don’t say anything,” Sophie warned him. It sounded like good advice. He took it.
They managed to get a dozen sheets copied befo
re the machine broke down again. This time, however, it was apparent that they were way past the point where nice-and-steady or a shrewdly placed right cross could do any good. Not only were all the red lights flashing at once, two green lights and an amber one they hadn’t even known was there were strobing frantically, and the thing was beeping like a small, agonised rodent in a trap. Paul felt that the only humane thing would be to shoot it.
“Having trouble?”
How long Mr Suslowicz had been standing there in the doorway, they didn’t know. Sophie jumped as though she’d just been stung by a bee.
“Temperamental beast,” Mr Suslowicz said. “I keep telling the others we ought to upgrade, get a new one, but they won’t hear of it. Mind if I take a look?”
Paul got smartly out of the way, and Mr Suslowicz knelt down beside the machine, like a vet attending to a sick calf. He didn’t seem to be doing anything; just kneeling and listening. His head nodded from time to time, and once or twice he clicked his tongue, as if in sympathy. Then he gave the machine a gentle tap—more of a reassuring pat than a thump—and stood up. The beeping stopped, and the lights went out. “Try it now,” he said.
A perfect copy, unwrinkled, unsmudged, oozed smoothly out from between the rollers.
“What was the problem?” Paul ventured to ask.
Mr Suslowicz shrugged. “Search me,” he said, “I don’t know the first thing about these gadgets. But it always used to work on an old Datsun I used to have, years ago, so I guessed it might be worth a try. Have either of you two seen the long stapler?”
Paul nodded. “Actually, we were going to use it for putting these together, after we’ve finished copying.”
“That’s all right,” Mr Suslowicz said. “I only want it for a moment.”
Paul nodded. “It’s just there,” he said, “on the table, next to the—” He frowned. “It was there a minute ago,” he said.
Mr Suslowicz grinned. “Elusive little tinker, isn’t it?” he said. “Not to worry. If I manage to track it down, I’ll drop it back to you here after I’ve finished with it. OK?”
After he’d gone, and the machine had churned out a dozen or so faultless copies, Sophie said, “That was just like in that film, with Robert Redford.”
“What film?”
“Where he’s this man who can talk to horses,” she replied. “It was like he was listening to what it was saying.”
“Robert Redford?”
“No, him; Mr Suslowicz. It was like the machine was telling him what was wrong with it. Don’t gawp at me like that,” she added. “I know it sounds nutty, but that’s what he reminded me of.”
Paul shrugged. “Talking to horses is one thing,” he said, “but you’d need to be able to sweet-talk an Army mule to get any joy out of this heap of junk. I don’t need to listen to it to know what it’s thinking. It doesn’t like me, simple as that.”
Whatever it was Mr Suslowicz had done, it seemed to have worked. Apart from one torn page (for old time’s sake, Paul assumed) the device polished off the rest of the copying without a hitch. That just left them with the relatively straightforward job of cutting and sticky-taping the rest of the copies up together, collating them and stapling them into bundles.
“We need that long stapler,” Sophie pointed out.
Paul nodded. “I’ll go and see if I can find it,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of Captain Oates taking a stroll through the permafrost.
To his surprise, he didn’t have far to look. He’d decided to make a detour by way of the coffee room; and when he opened the cupboard where the sugar lived, there it was.
“How did it get in there?” Sophie asked, when he’d told her about his mission.
“Oh, you know what it’s like,” he replied. “You put something down in this place, next minute it’s gone and it doesn’t turn up for weeks. Probably a spatio-temporal anomaly or a vergence in the Force.”
“Or people taking stuff and not putting it back when they’ve finished with it,” Sophie said disapprovingly.
“Possibly,” Paul replied sceptically, “but maybe a trifle far-fetched. Sod, it’s out of staples.”
He refilled it from a box on the shelf. It was a cumbersome thing, ancient and grouchy, with a spring that appeared to have a distinct appetite for human flesh. He handled it warily, and got away with nothing worse than a slight graze. “It’s five to one,” he observed. “We might as well leave the sorting and stapling till after lunch.”
It was all in the way he said it, and he hadn’t intended for it to come out that way, but there was no mistaking the assumption; namely, that they were going to go out of the office and have lunch together, like they’d done the day before. It was another moment.
“All right,” Sophie said, after a brief hesitation.
(“Simple as that, Paul thought. Maybe that’s how it happens, for everybody else.)”
They went, by mutual unspoken agreement, to the same sandwich bar. As they stood in the queue, Paul did a spot of mental arithmetic, figuring out how long it’d take him to walk home from the office to Kentish Town for the next week, and said, “What’re you having?”
“That’s all right,” she said.
“No, but you paid for me yesterday.”
She looked at him. “You haven’t got any money,” she said.
He ought to have shrunk by six inches or so, but he didn’t. “True,” he admitted.
“Well, then.”
He didn’t know what to say. “That’s very—”
“Yes. Coffee and a ham roll, wasn’t it?”
Paul nodded. Some explanation, he felt, was necessary; or at least some assurance that he wasn’t just a fortune-hunting gigolo, battening on to her as a source of free carbohydrates and nothing more. But he knew he wasn’t capable of putting stuff like that into words without making things a whole lot worse, so for once he did the sensible thing and gave up. “Thanks,” he said.
“That’s all right.”
In a way, it felt as though all his adult life—ever since he’d realised that girls weren’t irrelevant alien creatures who only cared about inane trifles like hair-toggles and glittery nail varnish (instead of vitally important things, such as making balsa-wood aeroplanes and painting 1⁄72 scale model soldiers) but were in fact beautiful, terrifying alien creatures who never seemed to notice he was there—all his life, he’d been pulling and heaving at a door that led into an enchanted garden, and quite suddenly he’d noticed that in fact it opened inwards and all he had to do was push gently with the tips of his fingers. It would have been nice, he couldn’t help thinking, if someone had told him about this, but maybe that was what Darwin had in mind when he talked about natural selection. After all, Paul reasoned, you wouldn’t want idiots like him splashing about in the shallow end of the gene pool, with their inflatable armbands and polystyrene floats.
That said, he hadn’t got a clue what he was supposed to do next. Presumably at some point he was going to have to say something toe-curlingly embarrassing, and if that went okay there’d be kissing and, well, stuff like that. Obviously he was all for that, just as he’d always really fancied owning a big yacht and sailing it single-handed to New Zealand. Now that he was at least part of the way along, he had the unpleasant feeling that his yacht was an open boat, and he was adrift in it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, he assured himself—after all, it couldn’t be too difficult, could it? He considered his relatives; Uncle Trevor and Cousin Darren and Cousin Lorna’s husband Eric, men with the personal charm of dustbins and just enough intelligence between the three of them to power a traffic light, and yet they’d all contrived to attract, woo, bed and marry females, often not in that order. If they could do it, so could a lawnmower or an answering machine or a tin-opener or a small rock; and so, by implication, could he. In theory.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Sophie said.
Paul looked up, startled. “Sorry,” he said, “I was miles away.” She was frowning at him slightly,
and he remembered those occasions on which she’d appeared to have read his mind. He guessed this wasn’t one of them, because she hadn’t thrown the ham roll at him. “I was just thinking,” he said, “about those spreadsheets.”
“Oh.” Maybe there was a tiny spark of disappointment in her voice. “What about them?”
“Well.” Absolutely; what about them? “That theory of yours, about them trying to get rid of us. What we’ve been doing this morning seems very like what you were saying; you know, giving us horrible, pointless jobs to do so that we’ll leave, and they won’t have to fire us.”
She shrugged. “I’m not so sure about that any more,” she said. “Like, now I come to think of it, it’s just the sort of thing I’ve seen people doing in my dad’s office. I mean, someone’s got to do it, and the partners aren’t going to muck about with scissors and Sellotape.”
Paul scented a possible change of subject, and pounced on it gladly. “What does your dad do, then?” he asked.
“Oh, he’s an accountant,” she sighed. “It’s a family business, him and Uncle Joe and Uncle Steve. He really wanted me to go into it, but I told him, no way.” She made it sound like her father had been nagging away at her for years to join him in sailing down Niagara Falls in a barrel. Exactly why sorting spreadsheets and copying them for J.W. Wells was so much better than doing pretty much the same sort of thing for her father and uncles he wasn’t quite sure, but no doubt there was a reason. “How about you?” she went on, with a certain degree of effort. “What does your father do?”
“He used to be something to do with double glazing,” Paul replied. “But he retired early, and he and mum moved to Florida.”