And stopped, dumbfounded.
`Hey skip, skip!' he yelled. `Hey, skip, you know what? The fall, it must have done something to me, it's cured my speech impediment, listen, I can say esses and everything...'
His colleague, lodged high in the shattered rafters, sighed wearily.
`That's because you're dead, idiot,' he explained.
`Oh. Hey, what a bummer, the first time in my life I can
speak properly and I'm dead. You're sure I'm dead, Keith?' `Believe me.'
`And that's what's cured my ...?'
`Dead men don't lisp, old son. Well known fact. Don't worry about it, though, they just reincarnate us back into new bodies. Any old new bodies,' he added bitterly. `I know. I've been there.'
`You have?,
'Sure.' He indicated his own body, what was left of it. `You think I chose this?' he complained. `Arms like bloody coathangers, but do they listen?'
By now, Lundqvist had landed. He opened his eyes and assessed the situation.
`Help,' he said.
There was a scuffling noise down below. `Is that you, Mr Lundqvist?'
`Yeah. Links?'
`Right here, Mr Lundqvist.'
`Marvellous. Help me out of this tree, will you?' `Tree?'
`Yes. This tree here.'
`The thorn tree, you mean?'
`That's the one, Links. Try hurrying, will you?' `Coming right up, Mr Lundqvist.'
Links Jotapian scrambled to his feet and looked around.
Lesson Three had been all about using your initiative and improvising material out of unlikely objects found in the vicinity. He found the page and followed the relevant line with his finger.
Under combat conditions, he read, a makeshift ladder may sometimes be improvised out of a broken segment of helicopter rotor blade, using only a Bowie knife and three feet of stout cord. Full instructions are given in Lesson Twelve ...
`Mr Lundqvist?'
`Yes?'
`You still there, Mr Lundqvist?'
`Reckon so, Links.'
`Do you think I'm ready for Lesson Twelve yet? Only I remember what you said about not taking the lessons out of sequence, because each one led naturally on from the previous, and...'
`Rules were made to be broken, Links. Right, listen carefully.'
Right. Fade out on Lundqvist, cut to ...
... Two seagulls, black drifting shapes against a velvet sky, circling before coming in down on the glide and pitching on the remains of the roof.
`Anybody home?'
Helen of Troy stopped and looked up. She had been rubbing at the cushions of the Chesterfield, trying to get the blood out with half a lemon steeped in vinegar.
`Larry?'
`We're on the roof. Do you need rescuing?'
Helen considered for a moment. `Not rescuing, no. I could use a little help in here, though.'
`Coming in.'
As the seagulls dropped down through the hole in the roof, the Captain of Spectral Warriors woke up. He had been sleeping peacefully ever since Helen had bashed him on the head with a copy of Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery.
`All right,' he said, staggering to his feet and levelling the Redhawk. `Nobody move or I'll ...'
The barrel of the gun became suddenly heavy, its weight augmented by a perching seagull. By the time it accidentally went off, it was pointed directly at the Captain's left foot.
`Oh my God, the carpet!' Helen wailed. `Look, for pity's sake, just get out of my way before you damage anything else.'
`But .. .
`Out.'
The Captain wilted. It wasn't, he decided, one of his good days. Slowly and painfully he hobbled out of the room and through the front door, and was therefore just in time to be directly under the thorn tree when Links Jotapian's makeshift ladder broke.
`You all right, Mr Lundqvist?'
`Sure, Links. I think something broke my fall...'
('You knew, didn't you, skip? You knew all along, and you pretended...'
`Look, I had no choice, they threatened me...'
`I trusted him, Keith. When he said it was a holiday, I actually trusted him . . . '
`Hey, lads, now come on...'
`Keith, will you tell your friend that when I get reincarnated, I'm putting in for a transfer...)
`Gee, that was lucky, Mr Lundqvist. I guess I didn't use enough cord where it said bind together tightly with cord, only it didn't say exactly how much cord to use, and.. .'
`Never mind.' Lundqvist pulled himself to his feet, looked round and saw Helen framed in the doorway. 'C'mon,' he hissed, `let's get out of here before she has the whole goddamn place done out in rose damask.'
Two or three hours later, Lucky George came by with the Transit to pick them up.
`You've been enjoying yourself, haven't you?' he observed. Helen shrugged.
`So?' she said. `I like nice furniture and things, you know that. George, don't you sometimes think it'd be fun if we had a little place of our own that I could do up and make all nice and -'
`No.,
'You could have your own little study,' she said wistfully, `for all your books and magic stuff and things, and we could -'
`No.I
'Oh.' Helen clicked her tongue. `Never mind,' she said, `it was only a thought.'
`Good.'
`Anyway,' she said, producing a lighter and a can of paraffin, `I think Lundqvist's gone off the kidnapping idea. Curious,' she went on, splashing paraffin, `how anyone could be so dozy. ..'
`You missed a bit.'
`Did I? Oh yes. I mean, kidnapping me. After the last time and all...'
George nodded. `All brains and no intelligence,' he said. `Can I do the setting alight? You know how I love setting light to soft furnishings.'
Helen smiled fondly. `Go on, then. Only George, the labels all said Fire retardant and Specially treated for your safety and peace of mind, do you think they'll ...?
George grinned. `If I say so,' he replied.
THE half-life of Time is notoriously long.
Being neck-deep in boiling shit is the mother of invention, as the chronological technicians say, and some of the things they've tried have been quite staggeringly ingenious, if futile. Sealing toxic temporal waste up in lead-lined cylinders and burying it is completely pass& now; recently the trend has been towards boiling it, sending it back through hairline dimensional faults in the hope of setting up a Moebius effect, or selling it to the gullible citizens of Plato's Republic in big wooden crates marked `Tractor Spares'. These devices have taken small deposits out of circulation; however, in the time it takes to get rid of, say, 4,000 metric tonnes this way, twice as much of the loathsome stuff has built up and is leaking merrily away into the environment, poisoning the fish and causing innocent parties all over the cosmos to seduce their greatgrandmothers and be late for their own funerals.
In desperation, some authorities have been illicitly shipping it out into the future, which doesn't help exactly but at least means that it becomes somebody else's problem.
Unless something is done about it pretty soon, the boffins say, the whole unhappy mess is pretty soon going to go critical and start doing horrible things to the nature of reality. Already,
they report (from the relative security of their nostalgia-lined bunkers), there are rumours of the spontaneous occurrence of the dreaded isotope Overtime.
The only possible solution is recycling. Maddeningly, however, nobody has the faintest idea how to go about it.
Nobody who's been asked, anyway.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
One of the few people not worried sick about the problem is Kurt Lundqvist. His own proposal for getting rid of it (loading it into canisters and dropping it from a great height on SouthEast Asia) having been rejected, he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned his attention to more immediate issues.
Such as nailing Lucky George. Dawn over the outer suburbs of Aspen, Colorado, found him sitting on his porch with the remains of his fifth pint of black
coffee and nothing to show for his pains but a pile of screwed up bits of paper.
He'd tried direct attack. He'd tried abduction. Dammit, what else was there?
Like a dog returning to its own vomit, his mind kept coming full circle back to the idea of hostages. Kidnap one of Lucky George's friends, his instincts shouted at him, and you have Lucky George himself, because the man lives and dies by his friends. The true professional prefers to attack the enemy through his strengths rather than his weaknesses - weaknesses are carefully guarded, strengths are taken for granted - and what George really had going for him, apart from a repertoire of largely meretricious magical effects, was a quite depressingly huge network of friends and acquaintances stretching throughout space and time, but centred on the University of Wittenberg, Class of '88.
For the twelfth time that night, Lundqvist picked up that year's UOW Yearbook and flicked through, hoping that a name would catch his eye.
Martin Luther (Theology).
HRH Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Philosophy, Politics and Economics).
Hieronymus Bosch (Design Studies).
Cristoforo Colombo (Geography).
Leonardo da Vinci (Business Studies).
The sun rose on the Rocky Mountains; and suddenly Lundqvist had the answer. Simple. Of all the friends of Lucky George, who had ultimately achieved the most?
No contest.
He who achieves the most has the most to lose.
Mr Van Appin leant back in his chair and rubbed his chin. Right now, he was beginning to wish he'd never taken Lucky George on as a client in the first place.
Sure, there had been the good times. The patent applications. The intellectual property work. The trial itself, and then the appeal. There had been big money down along the line (it's not every client who pays in genuine functional bottomless purses), not to mention the prestige and the cachet and, of course, the travelling expenses. But you had to take the holistic view; and when the presence of Kurt Lundqvist in one's waiting room at nine o'clock on a Monday morning is taken into account, even a lawyer may be heard to speculate that money isn't everything.
Pure bullshit, of course. It is. But even the Pope has doubts sometimes.
Which reminded him. He flipped the intercom.
`Soma,' he said. `Ask John Paul if he wouldn't mind coming
back at half-past, and show Mr Lundqvist in.'
In Mr Lundqvist came, like Death into the world; sat in the
client's chair and put his feet up on the desk.
`Kurt,' said Van Appin with insincere cheerfulness, `always
a pleasure, how's business?'
`Slow,' Lundqvist growled. `Listen. I need a lawyer.'
Van Appin quivered slightly. `Delighted to help in any way
I can,' he said. `Matrimonial problems?' he hazarded.
`No,' Lundqvist replied, `I need to borrow a lawyer. Not
you, somebody else. You got any?'
Mr Van Appin looked at Lundqvist over his steepled hands.
`When would you be needing him?' he asked.
`1492.'
`I'll see who we've got available.'
He swivelled his chair and tapped a few keys on the
keyboard. The screen flickered.
`Any particular sort of lawyer?,
'Property lawyer.' Lundqvist laughed, a sound like sand
paper on sharkskin. `Little development project I got in mind.' `In 1492?'
Lundqvist shrugged. `Tax reasons,' he explained. `Bit out of your usual line, isn't it?' `It pays to diversify.,
'True.'
Lundqvist leant forward. `One other thing,' he said. `What
we're talking here is utmost good faith stuff. I don't want
anyone to know, you got that? Especially any of your other
clients.'
`Hey, Kurt.' Mr Van Appin gestured his protest. `I got my
ethical position to think of.'
He hesitated. For some reason he was finding it hard to
concentrate on anything apart from the muzzle of the .40
Glock that had suddenly appeared in Lundqvist's hand. `Ethical,' he said slowly, 'schmethical. Hell, Kurt, what are
friends for?'
Lundqvist considered for a while. `Decoys,' he replied.
Imagine ...
You can't, of course. It's impossible. Nobody in the plush suburb of History we call the twentieth century could possibly conceive of the stunning, mind-stripping shock of seeing, for the first time ...
It is 1492. Three tiny wooden shells bob precariously on the meniscus of a blue-grey infinity. High in the rigging, a man
turns, stares, opens his mouth to shout and closes it again. There is, he decides, no tactful way to put this. But he's going to do his best, anyway.
`Hey, skip!'
On the deck below, a short, weary individual looks up from a chessboard and shouts back, `Well?'
`Skip ...I
'What's the matter, Hernan?'
`Skip ...' Hernan bit his tongue. `I spy,' he said, `with my little eye, something beginning with A.'
`You what?'
`With A, skip. I spy it. With my, um, little eye.' Hernan drew in further supplies of air. `It's a game, skip. You've got to guess what it is I've -'
`Have you been at the applejack again? You know it's reserved for the scurvy.'
`Go on, skip, be a sport.'
'Look...'
`Three guesses?'
Columbus sighed. Sixty-one days he'd been cooped up on this floating strawberry-punnet with these idiots. A lesser man, one without his inexhaustible patience, would have blown the ship up by now.
`Albatross.'
`No.,
'Aurora borealis.'
`No. Hey skip, you aren't even trying..
`Okay, okay.' Columbus thought hard. When dealing with morons, he'd learnt the hard way, the trick is to think like a moron. This is no mean accomplishment. `Arquebus,' he said. `Am I right?'
Hernan lifted his eyes and gazed for two seconds at the distant coastline, the one that quite definitely wasn't India, and said to himself, Look, why me, whoever says it first is going to get lynched, they'll know soon enough without me telling
them. `You got it, skip,' he replied. `Oh, and by the way, land ahoy.'
`What did you just say?'
`Land, skip. Ahoy. Just over there on the left.'
`What ahoy? Speak up, you're muttering.'
`Land, skip. L for laundry, A for Amer ... I mean arquebus, N for...'
As Columbus jerked like a shot deer and started capering hysterically up and down the deck, Hernan leant back in the crow's nest, shrugged and found the remains of his apple. He'd been nursing it along, one nibble per day, for a fortnight, saving it for a special occasion. He looked at it and chucked it over the side.
A freak gust of wind carried up to him scraps of the conversation buzzing away below - Roderigo was saying that as soon as they got in he was going to have a roghan ghosh with spicy dall and nan bread, Diego was saying no, make mine a chicken tikka with pilau rice and spoonfuls of mango chutney. The poor fools, Hernan thought. It was going to be bad enough when the crew found out, but that was likely to be nothing compared to the embarrassment that would ensue when the news was broken to their Most Catholic Majesties back in Madrid. Well, no, ma'am, not India as such, in fact more like a clump of hot, scrawny little islands populated by savages with no commercially useful exports of any kind; we were thinking of calling it San Salvador.
Maybe they could just sort of hush the whole thing up. Forget about it. Pretend they got to the edge of the world, turned round and came straight back.
Nah.
Hernan shook his head sadly. Some fool would be bound to let something slip, and then where would they all be?
Anyway. Hernan leant his elbows on the rail of the crow's nest and took a long, hard look. Okay, so it wasn't up to much, but it was a new country. A new continent, maybe. And here he was, the first man ever to set eyes on it.
That was something. Not much perhaps, but something.
Wrong.
Because, at the precise moment when Columbus was ordering the lads to lower a rowing boat and feverishly trying to remember the exchange rate for moidores into rupees, a small, bedraggled man in a Brooks Brothers suit and waders was dragging a rubber dinghy behind some bushes on the seashore and opening a small suitcase.
The man was one Morrie Goldman, and the suitcase contained a portable fax machine with the special digital transtemporal wave shift function.
He looked at his watch. Mr Van Appin had been very insistent that he log in the precise moment of landfall. Having dictated a note into his pocket dictaphone, he switched on the fax and started typing out the message on his laptop word processor.
Not exactly an orthodox assignment, he reflected as he typed. Whizz back through time to the late fifteenth century, go to San Salvador, arriving at such and such a time, send a fax to the Land Registry stating time of arrival, and then clear off. Not perhaps the most complex matter he'd ever handled from a legal standpoint, but the travelling expenses were going to be just out of this world.
From: Maurice Goldman, Messrs Van Appin & Co
To: The Chief Registrar, Central Land Registry
Message: Arrived 3.25p.m. precisely. Please accept this communication as our indefeasible claim of title to the continent edged red on the plan annexed hereto and confirm registration by return of fax.
He paused for a moment. If he was discovering this place, wherever in hell it was (geography wasn't his thing), he supposed he ought to give it a name, if only to enable it to be sufficiently identified.
Newly discovered territory to be known as Goldmannia.
No. You couldn't call a country Goldmannia. It lacked that certain something.
He deleted Goldmannia and typed in Mauretania. No. There was somewhere else called that. Try again. He deleted Mauretania and ...
Nice snappy name. Something that'd look good on the
stamps. The United States of something. Life is all right in
something. The business of something is business. The some
Faust Amongst Equals Tom Holt Page 16