by Gene Wolfe
“Try me.”
“I won’t, but I can show you something good right now. See that table out on the patio? What do you say we eat out there? Yesterday the rain kept us inside all day. I don’t know about you and Mahala, but I’d like to go out and get a breath of fresh air.”
It took a few seconds for Georges to nod; but he did, and when he looked at Mahala and touched his ear I knew that he was all over it. We took our cups and plates out and told the maid ’bot to carry out the rest of the food. Then Georges said, “This ought to be safe. Going to tell us about it now?”
“Absolutely not. In order to be believed, I’ve got to take you both into those rooms. How much do you know about electronics?”
He shook his head. “Very little, actually.”
“Small nuclear reactors?”
“Enough to build one, maybe. Not enough to improve what we’ve apparently got.”
That came as a surprise, and I had to take a moment to digest it. “You could run one? Operate it?”
He nodded. “And make simple repairs. That was what I did when I got out of the university. I fixed them. It was interesting for the first year or so, then I got bored with it. Eventually I quit and went to—what do you want to know?”
“I want to show you one, and get you to tell me a little about it. Teach me.” I smiled. “Just a quick course.”
“I’ll be happy to. They’re very safe, really. There are all sorts of safety devices built into them to prevent them from overheating.”
“It won’t explode?”
“Not the way you’re thinking. Not if it’s a standard model—they’re not bombs. When a commercial reactor goes out of control, it overheats and there’s a steam explosion. No mushroom cloud and nothing like the power of a nuclear bomb.” Georges paused. “I see I’ve lost you.”
“I’m afraid you’re quite correct. I didn’t know about the steam.”
Georges sipped iced kafe. “Something like ninety-seven percent of all reactors power generators. They heat water in a sealed system, and the steam drives a turbine. Clear?”
“I think so.”
“When one goes out of control—somebody’s got to disable several safety devices for this to happen—it heats up, getting hotter and hotter. Steam pressure builds. There’s a relief valve, of course, but for an explosion we’ve got to assume that valve’s failed somehow. Meantime, the boiler’s weakened by all that heat coming off the reactor, so you get a steam explosion. I’ve never seen this happen, you understand. Only seen film.”
“No nuclear explosion?”
“Right. If you’re lucky, the steam explosion wrecks the reactor so that it quits overheating. If you’re not, it continues to heat up. That starts fires and melts steel, everything collapses, and inside the collapse you’ve got a loose collection of radioactive material. Dangerous but not catastrophic.”
My mind was so full of thoughts that I wanted to stand up and pace.
Georges grinned. “Want to show me what’s got you so interested, Mr. Smithe?”
“I do, only not now.” I took a deep breath. “There are two things we absolutely have to find. You can guess the first pretty easily.”
“No, I can’t. Not unless you mean the woman who owns this house.”
“Two things we have to find before we can find her. The first one is a card that will open those doors. Imagine yourself in the place of Colette’s father—of Conrad Coldbrook, Senior. You’ve put something, or found something, enormously valuable behind one of those doors. Would you have just one card for it?”
“Wait up! Are you saying you’ve been in there without a card?”
I nodded. “What about that second card? Would you do without one?”
Georges considered. “I might, but probably not.”
“Why not?”
“All right, I might lose one, or one might quit working. Quit if I got it near a strong magnetic field, for example. I’ve told you I don’t know a lot about electronics, and I don’t. But a friend who did told me once that would wipe a card. It’s what hotels do. Do you know about that?”
“No. Please tell me.”
“They give you a card when you rent a room, and they like to get it back when you check out. If they do, they wipe it. They send a signal that recodes the door, and they can recode your card to whatever room they want. A strong field wipes, a varying field recodes. They don’t need a backup card because they can code any card they’ve wiped to open that door. In general, a private person had better have a spare.”
I thanked him.
“Wait up. I said the father probably wouldn’t do that. I said it because I’ve seen his lab. My guess is that he coded his card himself, and some screen will have a record of the coding. If his card were wiped or lost, he could code another. Or maybe he could wipe the doors and recode them, then code himself a new card, like the hotels. That way, if somebody found his old card, it wouldn’t work.”
I sighed. “This morning we’re going to search the house for a couple of things. One is the spare card, if it exists. Colette’s father probably had a card on him when he died. If he did, she will have gotten it and the people who took her will have it now. The second is a weapon, or weapons. Her father must have had some, and we may need them. We’ll take missile pistols or ordinary pistols, and hunting weapons might be even better. Anything that we can find.”
Mahala held up her pad: BIG HOUSE.
I nodded. “It is. I’ve been thinking about that, and it seems to me Colette’s father would hide things—we’ll assume that he had things to hide—in one of three places, places nobody else was likely to spend much time in. I’d like you to take the laboratory upstairs, Mahala; I’ll show you where it is. I searched it superficially when I was here with Colette, but I found nothing. Will you look? A card or weapons. Possibly the coding for a card, or a means to code cards.”
She stood up and gestured. Georges said, “Do you want her to go now?”
“No. She should know where you and I are. I’d like you to look for the master bedroom. It’s probably on the ground floor, but it could be on the second. Will you do that, and search it thoroughly?”
He nodded.
“I’ll be searching the library. That’s on the ground floor on the other side of the house.” I pointed. “This patio is on the south side, and that’s where the sunroom is. The library’s on the other side, the north side. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d hide weapons in there, but it’s possible. Behind the books and disks, under the floor, or whatever. On the other hand, it would be the perfect place to hide a card, or that’s how it seems to me.”
“Hollowing out a book is an old, old trick.” Georges rose. “You just cut the center out of a lot of pages. If it’s a big book you might easily put a missile pistol in there. Are you sure he had physical books? You don’t see those much anymore.”
I stood, too. “Colette told me once that all the books in the library had been pulled off their shelves. That may not actually have happened, and to tell the truth I don’t believe it did. But I don’t think she’d have said it unless it was possible to do it.” I said “to tell the truth,” only I was not; not the whole truth, which was that I had been in the library and seen her father’s books when Colette and I had come.
Now I went back, and I must have pulled down thirty or forty books before it hit me. At first I was mad at myself for being so stupid, but after that I had to laugh. Right! That second card was hidden in the library, exactly like I had thought it might be. Only I was the one who had hidden it there.
Toward the back of the room, there was a freestanding bookcase a little more than half full of books with plastic bindings. I went to it and pulled out Murder on Mars.
What I wanted next might be in the kitchen or it might not. I went back there wanting to ask the ’bot, but it was off somewhere. So I poked around in the cabinets and eventually found what I wanted in the broom closet, small but powerful and, according to a built-in meter, all charged up and ready to go.
After trying it out to make sure it worked, I dropped it into a pocket.
Georges was making enough noise that I had no trouble finding him and the master bedroom. He looked at me as I came in and said, “Nothing.”
I motioned for him to follow me and led him to the lift tube. Up in the fourth-floor lab, I asked Mahala to do me a favor, if she could. “Find a site where people advertise for domestics. Make it a blind ad with a box number, if you can. We want an experienced housekeeper, and we want to see references. Salary negotiable. Can you do that?”
She gave me a confident nod and handed me a sheaf of papers before she went to the screen. I read the first two or three, riffled through the rest—there were a dozen or so—saw they were all pretty much alike, and put them in my pocket.
Georges had found a spare chair. “You don’t want to talk.”
“You’re right. Right now I’ve got too much to think about.” I had started pacing up and down, passing the book from hand to hand.
“Fine. I’ll leave you alone.”
It took me two or three minutes, but I finally got it. Colette had mentioned emeralds when she told me about her brother bringing her the book.
Mahala stood and pointed to the screen.
Georges said, “She means she’s done. I doubt you’ll get any answers today. Tomorrow there might be some. Want to tell me why you want to hire a housekeeper?”
I said, “No,” and motioned for both of them to come with me.
Let me admit right here that what I was doing was dumb. If I had good sense I would have gone up there alone first and tried it out before I got Georges and Mahala; the trouble was that I had felt certain I had the whole works figured out. But by the time I stood in front of that door holding Murder on Mars, I was trying to think of what I would say when the door would not open.
First the back. Something clicked, but the door would not open. Then the spine, which got me nothing. Then the front cover.
That brought another soft click, but I could not be sure I had not imagined it. I felt like throwing myself against that steel door hard enough to break my shoulder, but I shoved down the handle and gave the door a good hard push instead.
It swung back, and I walked in and took a deep breath; the wrench was still bad enough to make me feel sick, but I guess I was a little bit used to it by then. I filled my lungs with that air, and wow! Home was good, sure it was—but this was magic and I could have floated away. I had not motioned for Georges and Mahala to follow; I knew what I was going to do if they did and what I was going to do if they did not. I had both those all worked out, and the book had done the trick, and I was on cloud nine.
Behind me, one of them gasped. I still have no idea which it was. I turned around to see whether both of them had come in, and told Georges to shut the door.
“You’re going to want to have a look around,” I told them. “Do it, but don’t go so far you get lost. I’m going to climb that rock face. Maybe I can spot a good place for us to talk.”
Although climbing was easier than it would have been on Earth, I climbed slowly, stopping pretty often to look around. Also, I was trying to spare Junior’s shirt and wondering if his pants would fit me. Whether his shoes would, as far as that was concerned. There had been six or eight pairs in his closet.
After ten or fifteen minutes, I reached that dark hole in the rocks I had noticed before. I took a good look at it, and one of the first things I noticed was that you did not have to climb like I had to get to it. There was a steep little path off to one side. Another was there were no bones or anything like that around the entrance. Sure, it still might have been the den of some animal, but now that seemed less likely.
When I got back down as far as the hole, I took the path the rest of the way. Maybe Georges or Mahala noticed; I do not know.
If Georges had, he did not say anything about it, just asked what I’d seen.
“Over that way,” I pointed, “I could catch glimpses of what looked like water and some white stuff that might be a beach. Let’s go over and have a look.”
He nodded, grinning. “Good news! There’s water here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”
“There has to be.” I pointed again, up this time. “That’s a blue sky. Must I tell you what makes the sky blue?”
Mahala giggled, and Georges said, “Water vapor, isn’t it?”
“Correct.” I started walking. “On Mars the sky’s red with dust. There’s water on Mars, but not much—or anyway not much left. Probably it would be better to say it like that. Earth still has a great deal, because Earth has more gravity.” I have already said how I feel about the way I have to talk, and I felt that way more than ever just then. I said, “Do I sound like a professor?”
Behind me, Georges said, “You sure do. I was starting to wonder if you really were one.”
“I’m not, and I wish to God I could learn how to stop sounding like one. We’re on an alien planet, an Earth-type planet of another star system. Had you already figured that out?”
“I wasn’t sure.” After a moment Georges added, “You know, I feel lighter here.”
“In the book—Did I leave that behind? How stupid can I be?”
Georges said, “Mahala picked it up,” and she tapped my shoulder and handed it to me.
I thanked her. “I remember now—I laid it down to climb the rocks. Maybe we should leave it behind, in the house somewhere.”
“That house can’t have a door that opens on another planet.” I heard Georges gulp. “Much less on a planet in another system.”
“It does,” I told him. “It will have as long as the circuitry that connects our world with this one runs. Now where should we hold our meeting?” We had reached a rocky beach.
After a couple of false starts, Georges and Mahala sat side by side on a driftwood log and I rolled another into position and sat down on that. “First question, and this is an important one. While you were searching, did either one of you find a camera or a listening device, or anything that might be one?”
Mahala shook her head. Georges said, “No. Nothing. How about you, Mr. Smithe?”
It had been no dice for me, too, and I told them so. “The people who kidnapped Colette brought her here. I know that, because I know it was she whom we heard speak, then scream, when I opened the door. While she was here, she may have left some sort of note—some clue that might tell us where they were taking her. Did you find anything like that?”
Mahala shook her head again. Georges said, “It seems to me they did, if they left that ground car. There could be a note in the ground car, and there ought to be things that will tell us where it came from. The license plate, registration card, and so forth.”
“You’re right. As soon as we get back to the house, we’ll look; but while we’re here I want to tell you about this.” I held the book up. “Colette had it when I met her. She told me it was found in her father’s safe when it was opened after his death. She said it was the only thing in there.”
Georges said, “But you’re not sure she was telling you the truth?”
“Correct, I’m not. Perhaps you can imagine yourself opening a safe that belonged to your late father. Might you not find things either too important or too personal to reveal to a new acquaintance?”
They nodded, Mahala reluctantly.
“One of the things I want to do while we’re in New Delphi is to find the person who opened that safe for her and ask him or her what was in it when it was opened. A screen ought to give us a city directory. We’ll talk to all the locksmiths listed. With luck, we may locate the right person.”
Georges said, “You want to talk to a housekeeper, too—or do you really want to hire one?”
I shook my head. “I want to talk to the one who used to work here. After Mrs. Coldbrook died, her husband hired several human servants. I haven’t been able to find out just how many there were, but it would appear there were at least three. My guess is that they had a cook, a maid, and a housekeeper.” I waited f
or Georges to speak, wondering how much ultraviolet there was in the white sunlight, and grateful for the steady breeze that ruffled the glowing sapphire waves.
“You think the housekeeper will know something that may help you.”
“Correct. It might be any servant, of course. But a housekeeper is apt to know more than a maid or a cook—or so I imagine. Almost certainly, a housekeeper will know who fired her.”
Georges shrugged. “I can’t see how that’ll help you.”
“It may help me learn who’s taken Colette; if I knew that, I’d have a better chance of guessing where they’ve taken her. I hope so, at least. Have you anything more valuable to suggest? Believe me, I’ll listen; and if we can do both, we’ll do both.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“Good. Here’s my next question. I’m going by what Colette told me about her father, Conrad Coldbrook, Senior. She called him brilliant and a minor executive. He held executive positions, apparently, in several different companies here, not keeping any of those positions for more than one or two years. I don’t know whether he was fired or quit.”
Georges nodded.
“Then he stopped working for other people. He began publishing a financial news bulletin—a tip sheet. I don’t know much about those, but apparently their readers pay a good deal of money to receive them.”
Georges nodded again. “A couple of hundred at least. Sometimes a thousand or more. Whether they’re worth the money…” He shrugged. “You tell me.”
“I can’t. All I know is that Colette told me he had thousands of subscribers, and it sounded as though they brought him a considerable amount of money every year.” I paused to think. “Electronic publication, of course, so his costs must have been next to nothing.”
“Well, look at it. Say five hundred a year, and we’ll be conservative and say he had two thousand subscribers. That’s half a million coming in every year. A year of that would set you, or Mahala and me, up for life.”
I was thinking. “I wish I knew whether he quit those jobs or resigned.”
“Pretty often they call a guy in and tell him they’re letting him quit, but if he doesn’t they’re going to fire him. Naturally he quits, and that muddies the water—you know what I mean?”