“Shut up, Dirk,” said Richard, “let the poor man talk, will you?”
Dirk made a slight, apologetic bow.
“Quite so,” said Reg. “Well, the truth is that for many weeks, months even, I have not used the time machine at all, because I had the oddest feeling that someone or something was trying to make me do it. It started as the very faintest urge, and then it seemed to come at me in stronger and stronger waves. It was extremely disturbing. I had to fight it very hard indeed because it was trying to make me do something I actually wanted to do. I don't think I would have realised that it was something outside of me creating this pressure and not just my own wishes asserting themselves if it wasn't for the fact that I was so wary of allowing myself to do any such thing. As soon as I began to realise that it was something else trying to invade me things got really bad and the furniture began to fly about. Quite damaged my little Georgian writing desk. Look at the marks on the —”
“Is that what you were afraid of last night, upstairs?” asked Richard.
“Oh yes,” said Reg in a hushed voice, “most terribly afraid. But it was only that rather nice horse, so that was all right. I expect it just wandered in when I was out getting some powder to cover up my suntan.”
“Oh?” said Dirk, “And where did you go for that?” he asked. “I can't think of many chemists that a horse would be likely to visit.”
“Oh, there's a planet off in what's known here as the Pleiades where the dust is exactly the right —”
“You went,” said Dirk in a whisper, “to another planet? To get face powder?”
“Oh, it's no distance,” said Reg cheerfully. “You see, the actual distance between two points in the whole of the space/time continuum is almost infinitely smaller than the apparent distance between adjacent orbits of an electron. Really, it's a lot less far than the chemist, and there's no waiting about at the till. I never have the right change, do you? Go for the quantum jump is always my preference. Except of course that you then get all the trouble with the telephone. Nothing's ever that easy, is it?”
He looked bothered for a moment.
“I think you may be right in what I think you're thinking, though,” he added quietly.
“Which is?”
“That I went through a rather elaborate bit of business to achieve a very small result. Cheering up a little girl, charming, delightful and sad though she was, doesn't seem to be enough explanation for — well, it was a fairly major operation in time-engineering, now that I come to face up to it. There's no doubt that it would have been simpler to compliment her on her dress. Maybe the… ghost — we are talking of a ghost here, aren't we?”
“I think we are, yes,” said Dirk slowly.
“A ghost?” said Richard, “Now come on —”
“Wait!” said Dirk, abruptly. “Please continue,” he said to Reg.
“It's possible that the… ghost caught me off my guard. I was fighting so strenuously against doing one thing that it easily tripped me into another —”
“And now?”
“Oh, it's gone completely. The ghost left me last night.”
“And where, we wonder,” said Dirk, turning his gaze on Richard, “did it go?”
“No, please,” said Richard, “not this. I'm not even sure I've agreed we're talking about time machines yet, and now suddenly it's ghosts?”
“So what was it,” hissed Dirk, “that got into you to make you climb the wall?”
“Well, you suggested that I was under post-hypnotic suggestion from someone —”
“I did not! I demonstrated the power of post-hypnotic suggestion to you. But I believe that hypnosis and possession work in very, very similar ways. You can be made to do all kinds of absurd things, and will then cheerfully invent the most transparent rationalisations to explain them to yourself. But — you cannot be made to do something that runs against the fundamental grain of your character. You will fight. You will resist!”
Richard remembered then the sense of relief with which he had impulsively replaced the tape in Susan's machine last night. It had been the end of a struggle which he had suddenly won. With the sense of another struggle that he was now losing he sighed and related this to the others.
“Exactly!” exclaimed Dirk. “You wouldn't do it! Now we're getting somewhere! You see, hypnosis works best when the subject has some fundamental sympathy with what he or she is being asked to do. Find the right subject for your task and the hypnosis can take a very, very deep hold indeed. And I believe the same to be true of possession. So. What do we have? “We have a ghost that wants something done and is looking for the right person to take possession of to do that for him. Professor —”
“Reg —” said Reg.
“Reg — may I ask you something that may be terribly personal? I will understand perfectly if you don't want to answer, but I will just keep pestering you until you do. Just my methods, you see. You said there was something that you found to be a terrible temptation to you. That you wanted to do but would not allow yourself, and that the ghost was trying to make you do? Please. This may be difficult for you, but I think it would be very helpful if you would tell us what it is.”
“I will not tell you.”
“You must understand how important —”
“I'll show you instead,” said Reg.
Silhouetted in the gates of St Cedd's stood a large figure carrying a large heavy black nylon bag. The figure was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, the voice that asked the porter if Professor Chronotis was currently in his room was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, the ears that heard the porter say he was buggered if he knew because the phone seemed to be on the blink again was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, but the spirit that gazed out of his eyes was his no longer.
He had surrendered himself completely. All doubt, disparity and confusion had ceased.
A new mind had him in full possession.
The spirit that was not Michael Wenton-Weakes surveyed the college which lay before it, to which it had grown accustomed in the last few frustrating, infuriating weeks.
Weeks! Mere microsecond blinks.
Although the spirit — the ghost — that now inhabited Michael Wenton-Weakes' body had known long periods of near oblivion, sometimes even for centuries at a stretch, the time for which it had wandered the earth was such that it seemed only minutes ago that the creatures which had erected these walls had arrived. Most of his personal eternity — not really eternity, but a few billion years could easily seem like it — had been spent wandering across interminable mud, wading through ceaseless seas, watching with stunned horror when the slimy things with legs suddenly had begun to crawl from those rotting seas — and here they were, suddenly walking around as if they owned the place and complaining about the phones.
Deep in a dark and silent part of himself he knew that he was now mad, had been driven mad almost immediately after the accident by the knowledge of what he had done and of the existence he faced, by the memories of his fellows who had died and who for a while had haunted him even as he had haunted the Earth. He knew that what he now had been driven to would have revolted the self he only infinitesimally remembered, but that it was the only way for him to end the ceaseless nightmare in which each second of billions of years had been worse than the previous one.
He hefted the bag and started to walk.
CHAPTER 29
Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name.
It was a gentle, persistent rain, not the heavy slashing which would come later in the year, in the hot season. It formed a fine dripping mist through which the occasional shaft of sunlight would break, be softened and pass through on its way towards the wet bark of a calvaria tree on which it would settle and glisten. Sometimes it would do this next to a butterfly or a tiny motionless sparkling lizard, and then the effect would be almost unbearable.
Away up in the high canopy of the trees an utterly extraordinary thought
would suddenly strike a bird, and it would go flapping wildly through the branches and settle at last in a different and altogether better tree where it would sit and consider things again more calmly until the same thought came along and struck it again, or it was time to eat.
The air was full of scents — the light fragrance of flowers, and the heavy odour of the sodden mulch with which the floor of the forest was carpeted.
Confusions of roots tangled through the mulch, moss grew on them, insects crawled.
In a space in the forest, on an empty patch of wet ground between a circle of craning trees, appeared quietly and without fuss a plain white door. After a few seconds it opened a little way with a slight squeak. A tall thin man looked out, looked around, blinked in surprise, and quietly pulled the door closed again.
A few seconds later the door opened again and Reg looked out.
“It's real,” he said, “I promise you. Come out and see for yourself.”
Walking out into the forest, he turned and beckoned the other two to follow him.
Dirk stepped boldly through, seemed disconcerted for about the length of time it takes to blink twice, and then announced that he saw exactly how it worked, that it was obviously to do with the unreal numbers that lay between minimum quantum distances and defined the fractal contours of the enfolded Universe and he was only astonished at himself for not having thought of it himself.
“Like the catflap,” said Richard from the doorway behind him.
“Er, yes, quite so,” said Dirk, taking off his spectacles and leaning against a tree wiping them, “you spotted of course that I was lying. A perfectly natural reflex in the circumstances as I think you'll agree. Perfectly natural.” He squinted slightly and put his spectacles back on. They began to mist up again almost immediately.
“Astounding,” he admitted.
Richard stepped through more hesitantly and stood rocking for a moment with one foot still on the floor in Reg's room and the other on the wet earth of the forest. Then he stepped forward and committed himself fully. His lungs instantly filled with the heady vapours and his mind with the wonder of the place. He turned and looked at the doorway through which he had walked. It was still a perfectly ordinary door frame with a perfectly ordinary little white door swinging open in it, but it was standing free in the open forest, and through it could clearly be seen the room he had just stepped out of.
He walked wonderingly round the back of the door, testing each foot on the muddy ground, not so much for fear of slipping as for fear that it might simply not be there. From behind it was just a perfectly ordinary open door frame, such as you might fail to find in any perfectly ordinary rain forest. He walked through the door from behind, and looking back again could once more see, as if he had just stepped out of them again, the college rooms of Professor Urban Chronotis of St Cedd's College, Cambridge, which must be thousands of miles away. Thousands? Where were they?
He peered off through the trees and thought he caught a slight shimmer in the distance, between the trees.
“Is that the sea?” he asked.
“You can see it a little more clearly from up here,” called Reg, who had walked on a little way up a slippery incline and was now leaning, puffing, against a tree. He pointed.
The other two followed him up, pulling themselves noisily through the branches and causing a lot of cawing and complaining from unseen birds high above.
“The Pacific?” asked Dirk.
“The Indian Ocean,” said Reg.
Dirk wiped his glasses again and had another look.
“Ah, yes, of course,” he said.
“Not Madagascar?” said Richard. “I've been there —”
“Have you?” said Reg. “One of the most beautiful and astonishing places on Earth, and one that is also full of the most appalling… temptations for me. No.”
His voice trembled slightly, and he cleared his throat.
“No,” he continued, “Madagascar is — let me see, which direction are we — where's the sun? Yes. That way. Westish. Madagascar is about five hundred miles roughly west of here. The island of Reunion lies roughly in-between.”
“Er, what's the place called?” said Dirk suddenly, rapping his knuckles on the tree and frightening a lizard. “Place where that stamp comes from, er — Mauritius.”
“Stamp?” said Reg.
“Yes, you must know,” said Dirk, “very famous stamp. Can't remember anything about it, but it comes from here. Mauritius. Famous for its very remarkable stamp, all brown and smudged and you could buy Blenheim Palace with it. Or am I thinking of British Guiana?”
“Only you,” said Richard, “know what you are thinking of.”
“Is it Mauritius?”
“It is,” said Reg, “it is Mauritius.”
“But you don't collect stamps?”
“No.”
“What on earth's that?” said Richard suddenly, but Dirk carried on with his thought to Reg, “Pity, you could get some nice first-day covers, couldn't you?”
Reg shrugged. “Not really interested,” he said.
Richard slithered back down the slope behind them.
“So what's the great attraction here?” said Dirk. “It's not, I have to confess, what I was expecting. Very nice in its way, of course, all this nature, but I'm a city boy myself, I'm afraid.” He cleaned his glasses once again and pushed them back up his nose.
He started backwards at what he saw, and heard a strange little chuckle from Reg. Just in front of the door back into Reg's room, the most extraordinary confrontation was taking place.
A large cross bird was looking at Richard and Richard was looking at a large cross bird. Richard was looking at the bird as if it was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen in his life, and the bird was looking at Richard as if defying him to find its beak even remotely funny.
Once it had satisfied itself that Richard did not intend to laugh, the bird regarded him instead with a sort of grim irritable tolerance and wondered if he was just going to stand there or actually do something useful and feed it. It padded a couple of steps back and a couple of steps to the side and then just a single step forward again, on great waddling yellow feet. It then looked at him again, impatiently, and squarked an impatient squark. The bird then bent forward and scraped its great absurd red beak across the ground as if to give Richard the idea that this might be a good area to look for things to give it to eat.
“It eats the nuts of the calvaria tree,” called out Reg to Richard.
The big bird looked sharply up at Reg in annoyance, as if to say that it was perfectly clear to any idiot what it ate. It then looked back at Richard once more and stuck its head on one side as if it had suddenly been struck by the thought that perhaps it was an idiot it had to deal with, and that it might need to reconsider its strategy accordingly.
“There are one or two on the ground behind you,” called Reg softly.
In a trance of astonishment Richard turned awkwardly and saw one or two large nuts lying on the ground. He bent and picked one up, glancing up at Reg, who gave him a reassuring nod. Tentatively Richard held the thing out to the bird, which leant forward and pecked it sharply from between his fingers. Then, because Richard's hand was still stretched out, the bird knocked it irritably aside with its beak.
Once Richard had withdrawn to a respectful distance, it stretched its neck up, closed its large yellow eyes and seemed to gargle gracelessly as it shook the nut down its neck into its maw. It appeared then to be at least partially satisfied. Whereas before it had been a cross dodo, it was at least now a cross, fed dodo, which was probably about as much as it could hope for in this life.
It made a slow, waddling, on-the-spot turn and padded back into the forest whence it had come, as if defying Richard to find the little tuft of curly feathers stuck up on top of its backside even remotely funny.
“I only come to look,” said Reg in a small voice, and glancing at him Dirk was discomfited to see that the old man's eyes were br
imming with tears which he quickly brushed away. “Really, it is not for me to interfere —”
Richard came scurrying breathlessly up to them.
“Was that a dodo?” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” said Reg, “one of only three left at this time. The year is 1676. They will all be dead within four years, and after that no one will ever see them again. Come,” he said, “let us go.”
Behind the stoutly locked outer door in the corner staircase in the Second Court of St Cedd's College, where only a millisecond earlier there had been a slight flicker as the inner door departed, there was another slight flicker as the inner door now returned.
Walking through the dark evening towards it the large figure of Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up at the corner windows. If any slight flicker had been visible, it would have gone unnoticed in the dim dancing firelight that spilled from the window.
The figure then looked up into the darkness of the sky, looking for what it knew to be there though there was not the slightest chance of seeing it, even on a clear night which this was not. The orbits of Earth were now so cluttered with pieces of junk and debris that one more item among them — even such a large one as this was — would pass perpetually unnoticed. Indeed, it had done so, though its influence had from time to time exerted itself. From time to time. When the waves had been strong. Not for nearly two hundred years had they been so strong as now they were again.
And all at last was now in place. The perfect carrier had been found.
The perfect carrier moved his footsteps onwards through the court.
The Professor himself had seemed the perfect choice at first, but that attempt had ended in frustration, fury, and then — inspiration! Bring a Monk to Earth! They were designed to believe anything, to be completely malleable. It could be suborned to undertake the task with the greatest of ease.
Unfortunately, however, this one had proved to be completely hopeless. Getting it to believe something was very easy. Getting it to continue to believe the same thing for more than five minutes at a time had proved to be an even more impossible task than that of getting the Professor to do what he fundamentally wanted to do but wouldn't allow himself.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Page 21