A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  Besides, Ben was busy. Yes, he’d come into the office too, but I suspect it was only so he could use the phone; he’d had it tied up most of the time that he’d been there, talking to Annelise. I thought he was making progress; he’d certainly groveled quite spectacularly. It remained to be seen whether she was stupid enough to let him back into her life.

  Ingrid and I were actually sharing the break room and comparing notes, as she too was working on the problem of extracting a finite subset of stars. Last night I’d had to wait until she took off her horned hat before she got sane enough to appreciate what Ben had pulled off. Well, I’m not sure “sane” was the right word; she’d wanted to start working on the problem immediately, but she fell asleep with her fingers covered in stars. Nobody had been getting between her and the bar.

  This morning, for once, she hadn’t been singing in the shower. More like tiptoeing carefully under the shower and complaining that the noise of water droplets hitting her forehead deafened her. I smirked, but quietly; if I hadn’t been handicapped by Lensky’s interference I would probably have been feeling the same way now.

  We agreed that experimentation would be better done at Allandale House, where Dr. Verrick had responsibility for damage to the building, than in our shabby apartment building where the landlord was already looking at us sideways. So she drove us over to campus; one good thing about Sunday morning, there was plenty of parking space.

  We were in the break room, rather than skulking in our individual offices, because Lensky had brought in another sack of pastries and neither of us trusted the other alone with them. Selecting subsets of stars wasn’t as draining as all those teleportation experiments had been, but it was only prudent to make sure we had enough fuel to do the job right.

  Upper Crust’s marzipan pockets and cheese Danishes are some fine fuel. It was close to heresy to couple them with break room coffee, but we had no alternative.

  No, not drinking coffee was not an option. It wasn’t even noon yet.

  Walking to the Drag for some decent coffee, on the other hand, was beginning to look more and more attractive. Ingrid had already suggested I should go. I’d suggested that she could go. It appeared that nobody was going anywhere while there was still a marzipan pocket on the tray.

  Ingrid’s approach was more sophisticated than mine, involving ultrafilters on a compact Hausdorff space; I was more comfortable with simple point set theory. It remained to be seen which, if either, approach would work best. At present we were both still shaking clusters of stars off our fingers.

  Outside the break room, Ben slammed the phone back on its cradle. Perhaps that was why he refused to get a cell phone; you can’t really hang up on someone satisfactorily with one.

  Immediately after he did that, the phone began ringing again. “Oh, for the love of Riemann!” Ben exclaimed. We heard him galloping down the stairs.

  “This girl has really gotten under his skin,” Ingrid commented. She twisted her wrists and fingers and skimmed off a huge clump of stars. Possibly her Hausdorff space hadn’t been compact.

  “I just hope he hasn’t put her off working here. Do you realize we actually had a receptionist who wouldn’t get a nervous breakdown around us? I was looking forward to making Dr. Verrick keep his promise to hire her.” I lost my focus on rigorous selection and got stars all over my own fingers.

  “Isn’t anybody going to answer that phone? It’s driving me crazy.”

  “Well, I don’t want to listen to Annelise complaining about Ben, do you?”

  The insistent ringing stopped just long enough for us to draw breath, then started again. I made a preemptive strike on the last marzipan pocket and took it with me to the desk at the head of the stairs. “Center for Applied Topology, how may I direct your call?”

  “It’s about time,” said an angry voice. A male voice. A vaguely familiar male voice. “I’ve been trying to get through all morning. Put me through to Brad Lensky.”

  We don’t have a switchboard. We don’t even have an answering machine. I set the phone down and walked over to Jimmy’s office. “Lensky! For you.”

  As he came out, I remembered where I’d heard that voice before. It had been only yesterday, and the owner had been saying, “Give it back now, and nobody gets hurt.”

  While holding a gun to Annelise’s head.

  We really couldn’t blame her, I thought, if she had decided to shake the dust of this place off her shoes and never return.

  While thinking that, I turned sideways and walked through the wall to the Research Division. There was an extension to the office phone in there, so that in the absence of a receptionist – in other words, the usual situation – anyone working in there could answer the phone without shimmying back and forth from one side of the wall to the other.

  I eased the receiver off carefully and put it to my ear.

  “No, I’m telling you how it’s going to work,” Crowson snarled. “You’re going to leave that external hard drive on a bench at Mayfield Park. The one on the south side of the main lily pond. You have fifteen minutes to deposit it there. I’ll collect it when I’m ready, take it away and verify that it’s the right one. Then I’ll let the little girl go and tell you where to pick her up.”

  There was a click and the buzzing noise of the dial tone, and through the wall I could hear Lensky swearing. Probably in Polish, as there seemed to be a lot of consonants involved.

  “Jimmy, do you have another external hard drive here?”

  By the time I got back to the public side, Jimmy DiGrazio was giving Lensky a hard drive. Of course, he didn’t know what the stakes were.

  I did.

  “Lensky! You’re not going to give him a blank drive!”

  He stared at me, wild-eyed. “What choice do I have?”

  “Jimmy, don’t give it to him. Crowson wants the real drive, the one with his data on it, in exchange for Linda. His niece,” I amplified. “She’s eleven years old. Lensky, you can’t have thought this through. If Crowson finds out you’ve cheated him, what happens to Linda?”

  “Oh, I’ve thought,” Lensky said grimly. That little vein at his left temple was jumping again. “What do you think happens to Linda if I hand over our only bargaining chip and let him walk away with it? Do you think we’d ever see her again? I’m going to capture him when he comes to collect the hard drive and then offer to trade him for Linda. Whatever parts of him are left when he sees the wisdom of agreeing.”

  “Make a copy?” Jimmy suggested.

  “We don’t have time. I have to be there in fifteen minutes.” He glanced at his watch. “Thirteen minutes, now.” He headed for the stairs; I followed him, with Jimmy and Ingrid on my heels.

  “Okay, not a bad idea. We’ll come too.”

  “I don’t need that kind of help.”

  “You have no idea what kind of help you might need.”

  “Leave me alone! Haven’t you done enough damage already?” He was out of the building and running for his car, while I fought back angry tears. It was Ben, not I, who’d been blabbering about the hard drive last night. But right now he probably despised all of us equally.

  “Where’s he going?” Ingrid asked.

  “Mayfield Park.”

  “Well, he can’t stop us going there too. It’s a public place. Anybody know it well enough to teleport there? No? Come on; I’ll drive.”

  Jimmy had his phone out as we piled into Ingrid’s car.

  “Who are you calling? The cops?”

  “I thought we could use Annelise and Ben too.”

  “Ben doesn’t have a cell phone.”

  Jimmy smirked. “No, but Annelise does.”

  “They won’t be – “

  Well, actually, they were together; he was right about that.

  Love. I guess I just don’t understand it.

  In any event, the two of them would probably get to Mayfield Park only minutes behind us. Well, several minutes. Possibly more. Ingrid was displaying a remarkably cavalier atti
tude towards red lights, stop signs, one-way streets and other polite suggestions of the traffic cops.

  “Ingrid! We won’t get there in time if we get a ticket.”

  “We won’t,” she said without taking her eyes off the road. “They can’t see us. I’m using Camouflage.”

  Un-, as far as I knew, -calibrated. She was wearing great galloping clusters of stars all over her arms and hands.

  So to others’ view, we weren’t there and neither was a rolling half-block of street and parked cars. That seemed like a great way to get hit by a truck. Fortunately, on Sunday morning the streets around the university weren’t crowded. I heard some screaming now and then, and saw a few people pointing, but the closest we came to a collision was an intimate encounter with a stop sign that did no good to Ingrid’s side view mirror and paint job.

  She couldn’t have driven better, or more recklessly, if she’d still been wearing her horned helmet. I decided there was no point in worrying about sudden death; it would happen or it wouldn’t. Instead, I concentrated on feeding Mr. M. scraps of the marzipan pocket that had still been in my hand when we left the building. There hadn’t been time to give him coffee; I just hoped that sugar would have an equally energizing effect.

  Chapter 22

  The room was dark and smelled bad. Well, it was really the people in it who smelled bad. They’d been in the back of that truck for days, then one night they were hurried out of the truck and up those strange stairs made of metal twisted like taffy into fancy designs, and into this room with no lights, inside or outside. There was a bathroom, but by now it smelled just as bad as everything else. She had made the circuit of the room when they were first herded in here, reaching up the walls as high as she could, so she knew that the room probably did have windows. They were just boarded up with plywood. Maybe people outside would see the plywood – on the inside of the windows – and realize that something was wrong here.

  More likely the plywood was covered up, to the people who might look in, by pretend curtains. And most likely nobody would care anyway. In her brief life she had already learned that most people didn’t care, didn’t want to know, got angry if you asked them to quit looking the other way. There was no good reason to suppose that anything would be different in this new place.

  There was one comfort about being stinky and dirty: nothing was going to happen to them right away. When They wanted to do whatever they did, the first step was always to wash one of them and hand out clean clothes. Then the clean person went away and did not come back. They said “gone to a good home,” but she didn’t believe that for a minute. Anybody who had really gone to a good place, wouldn’t they make the good people come back and let the rest of them out of this room?

  She went back to her project, twisting a coin between one corner of a sheet of plywood and the wall it was nailed to. She did that until her fingers hurt, then rested and started again. Only, today her fingers hurt all the time, so she had a different rule: twist the coin fifty times, put it back in her pocket and rub her hands for a count of a hundred, then start twisting again. The coin was moving farther than it used to, this one corner of plywood was coming loose. She thought. That might make it easier to get the second corner loose.

  Of course she had no way to reach the top corners, so this was probably pointless. But you never knew. Maybe if the bottom two corners were loose from the wall, it would be possible to twist the whole sheet of plywood, or jiggle it loose, or something. Maybe, if she got that far, she could get one of the others to stop crying and help her.

  There was a noise at the door and her hand jerked, but she didn’t drop the coin. She slid it into the pocket of her shorts and tried to look as if she was just leaning against the wall, as filthy and dispirited as the rest of them.

  It wasn’t hard.

  The door opened just a crack, just enough to let one of Them shove a slender girl inside. The new girl stumbled, went down to her knees and jumped back up again, shouting in Inglés. “You can’t do this! My uncle is going to kill you!”

  The new girl was wrong, of course. Lupe had already learned that They could do anything they liked. But it was probably going to be worse for this one, because she had fair hair, which They liked, and because she already smelled good and had nice clothes.

  Lupe could understand the Inglés a little, enough to follow orders, but she had never spoken the language. Now she approached the fair-haired girl and tried to warn her in Spanish. “You are clean… I am sorry. That means they will take you next.”

  It was a nice Sunday morning and Mayfield Park was so popular, there was no place to park. Lensky’s rental car had snagged the last space.

  I was out of the car as soon as Ingrid slowed down in the parking lot. Dodging around strolling families, I got to the central lily pond just in time to see Lensky walking away from the bench on which he’d placed the empty hard drive. How had the man expected to trap Crowson with no backup? Lucky for him we’d disobeyed his instructions to stay put.

  This called for Ingrid’s specialty: telekinesis. I defined a non-metric space overlapping the Euclidean space of the real world, narrowed my eyes and nudged the hard drive a little way along the bench. There was a sudden tornado of grackles, cackling and flapping in a black spiral from sky to ground, and when they dispersed the Master of Ravens was there. I couldn’t see where Lensky had gone. As Crowson reached for the hard drive I tugged on it mentally and it floated off the bench, away from him, over the central mass of plants and flowers in the middle of the shallow pond, where it stalled out. I could feel it getting harder to move, as though it had suddenly become a great deal heavier…. Or as though an opposing force was trying to bring it back to where Lensky had left it. This wasn’t good enough; the relevant word for the pond was shallow. Crowson could easily wade out to grab the hard drive.

  I stuck one hand in my pocket and applied the force of more stars to my transformation.

  A flock of grackles swooped down on the hard drive and I felt the pull of the opposing force getting stronger, enough to balance out my best effort even with the augmentation of the stars.

  Well, Crowson wasn’t the only one who could wade into the pool… but why bother, when I could get there faster with a single word? “Brouwer,” I said, and I was standing in several inches of water among plants and flowers and – oh, hell. That thick, shiny black ribbon wasn’t a vine; it was the midsection of the largest cottonmouth water moccasin I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t happy about being stepped on.

  Water moccasins are bad-tempered and can strike with unbelievable speed. A normal person wouldn’t have been able to splash out of range in time to escape being bitten. That thought just flashed through my mind as I grabbed the hard drive and said “Brouwer” again.

  The instantaneous jump got me safely out of the pond. Unfortunately, I’d been looking across the pond at Crowson when I spoke, so that was where I teleported to. He grabbed me and pulled me back against him. I hung onto the hard drive. The water moccasin sliced through the water, heading for us.

  And Mr. M. shimmied out of my belt and threw himself on the venomous snake with a shrill cry of rage.

  “Hojotoho Lia!” Ingrid’s voice cut through the clamor of an increasingly upset crowd of onlookers. She was on the far side of the pond, where I’d been standing a moment earlier. The grackles swooped down between us, aiming their cawing fury at her.

  Not a good move. Ingrid was still mad at them over the incident of the Grackle Poop in the Oleanders. I could just see the bright points of stars flying from her fingertips and attacking the grackles, turning bird after bird into a clump of black feathers that hung in the air for a moment before floating gently down to the water’s surface.

  A harsh cry from the sidelines indicated that the Mayfield Park peacocks had joined the fight, though on whose side was anybody’s guess.

  Crowson distracted me from my aesthetic appreciation of Ingrid’s grackle slaughter and Mr. M.’s epic battle with the cottonmouth. A
hard round thing being poked into your side by a man who was last seen waving a gun will have that effect. He dragged me backwards away from the pool, step by step, and I didn’t dare fight him. “Everybody back off if you want her to live!” he shouted over the cacophony of peacocks, grackles, and screaming onlookers.

  I couldn’t see who he was shouting at. I hoped it was Lensky. I hoped Lensky had a better plan than trading my life for Linda’s, but I couldn’t think what it might be. Nor could I think of an algorithm that would put me and the hard drive a nice safe distance from Crowson and his gun. If I teleported myself back across the pond while he was hanging onto me, he and the gun would come with me. He might be too surprised to shoot.

  Or he might be surprised into shooting.

  I didn’t really want to take that bet.

  At this point Mr. M. and the cottonmouth took center stage again. The water snake had already tried twisting around to bite his attacker, and I hoped chomping down on Mr. M.’s steel scales had hurt its mouth. There were dents and scratches on the prosthetic body, but the cottonmouth evidently hadn’t been able to turn sharply enough to get its fangs into Mr. M.’s head and short neck, the only parts that might have been vulnerable to its venomous bite. Then it had dived under the water, but apparently that hadn’t incommoded Mr. M. either. Now it reared up out of the pond and came right at us. Probably it was just trying to escape the mini-monster gnawing on its spine and squealing a war cry, but I was terrified. You try looking into the eyes of a seriously pissed off giant cottonmouth!

  Crowson must have felt the same way, because the pressure of the gun against my side abruptly lifted. There was an extremely loud noise, the cottonmouth’s softball-sized head exploded, and something knocked into us and threw both Crowson and me to the ground. The hard drive spilled out of my arms and I dived after it.