A Borrowed Man

by Gene Wolfe

  “I do, and I wish that I could talk to a few of the people who worked with him.”

  Mahala raised her hand, and Georges said, “She thinks she can locate some for you. Want her to try?”

  “Yes, indeed! Please do, Mahala.” I stopped again to think. “I’ve never seen one of these expensive financial news bulletins, Georges, but you seem to know quite a bit about them.”

  “I used to subscribe to a couple. This was back when.”

  “I won’t ask when that was. Wouldn’t it take years to build up a substantial list of subscribers? I’m asking because from what Colette said, her father appears to have done it quickly.”

  “Depends. Say that the guy putting it out was a financial journalist who’d been reporting two or three nights a week on some news show. If he’d made right-on predictions there, he might get eight or ten thousand subscribers for his first bulletin.”

  “What if he himself had made profitable investments?”

  “If he was a big investor—we’re talking millions—sure. If he had the rep, that would do it. Want to tell me what’s up?”

  I shook my head. “It’s still too nebulous. I think I’m getting closer, but … no. Not yet, and perhaps not ever. I’m about finished. Have you got anything we need to talk about?”

  “Mahala wasn’t through in the lab, and now she’s going to be looking for the father’s old pals from work. I’ve about finished searching the master bedroom. I’d like to suggest we check out the mysterious ground car as soon as we get back to the house. Are we still hoping to find a few guns?”

  “Yes. For listening devices, cards, and weapons, in that order. Have you noticed the trees over there? On the horizon?”

  Georges hadn’t. He stood up to look, saluting this new planet’s white sun.

  I said it again, “On the horizon.”

  “You’re right. Those are treetops, and there’s a little white cloud over them. There’s an island over there. The cloud’s not very big, so the island’s not very big either.”

  “Agreed. We’ve been here for a while, and we haven’t seen anything much bigger than insects. Certainly nothing bigger than mice. Or at least I haven’t. What about you two?”

  Georges shook his head.

  “I think this is an island, too, and not very large. If so, it’s unlikely to have large animals. Of course, I may be wrong on either point, which is why I’d like you to keep looking.”

  Mahala got up and started down the beach, motioning for us to stay put.

  Georges said, “She’s heard something. She has good ears, that girl.”

  I got up and went after her. She motioned for me to stay back.

  Pretty soon, I heard what Mahala’d been hearing; it sounded like a big kettledrum being beaten in a regular, monotonous rhythm. Boom! Biddy-boom! Biddy-boom, boom, BOOM!

  After that, I was out in front and thinking what a jerk I was. Georges was three or four meters behind me, with Mahala right behind him.

  We smelled smoke, and Mahala wanted to go back. In a whisper I told her she could go back to the door if she wanted to, or go through it into the house. She shook her head and held Georges’s arm. It meant where he was going, she was going.

  He whispered, “I’m sticking with Mr. Smithe. You go on back, honey. Finish searching the lab.”

  It was no go. She stuck with Georges.

  We went quite a way farther before we saw them, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen or even heard of.

  13

  RENTED IN OWENBRIGHT

  Except for their tails, faces, and fangs, they looked more like people than I would have expected, but they must have been forty or fifty centimeters over two meters tall, with arms, legs, and necks not much bigger than broomsticks. My first impression was of four eyes, two widely spaced and two narrowly. All the eyes were small and may not really have been eyes at all.

  So many thoughts flashed through my mind when I saw those creatures that I know I cannot possibly give them all here. For one thing, it would probably take me days to write them all down. For another—I guess this is the important one—I know I could not remember them all. I will try to give some idea, though, of the ones that have stuck with me. I cannot even make a stab at getting them in order. They came too fast for that.

  One was that I wanted to call them aliens, only I realized that they were not; that we were the aliens there. They looked weird to me, but we would have looked weird to them if they had seen us. (I did not know then that they were about to.)

  Another was that we were watching some kind of ceremony. I could not even guess what it was about, they could have been getting in touch with God, or calling up the spirits of their dead, or making them stay dead, or maybe swearing in a new mayor. Only it was probably something else, something I would never have understood even if they had tried to explain it.

  Another was that I was glad we had never found any guns, because if we had we might have ended up shooting two or three of them, and we had no more business shooting them than a burglar has shooting the owner of the house he is robbing.

  Here is one that hit me hard, although I cannot say why. It was that Colette’s father had probably seen them and they had probably seen him. Maybe he had made friends with them, but maybe they had been enemies; and it would be good to know that but I could not think of any way I could find it out.

  Maybe that had something to do with his being gone so long that his kids had thought he was probably dead. That had been a mistake; he was really just off doing something that had taken him quite a while. That mistake may have been at the root of all the problems. I thought of that, too.

  One more and I will quit. It was that they did not live here on this island. That could be wrong, but somehow I did not think it was. I was pretty sure the island was small, and there were an awful lot of them. This was a sacred place, a place they went to for secret ceremonies. It meant that if we could just pull back and go home, we could probably come back later and find nobody here.

  They had lit a circle of smoky fires. One was standing in the center with his arms above his head. Another held something long and black up against his chest and seemed to be listening to the other end. Eight or ten were beating the ground—two clubs each. Georges, Mahala, and I watched them for a few seconds before one saw us and pointed. The rest jumped up, and a two-headed spear spun past my ear, missing me by about one and a half fingers.

  We ran like three rabbits, me holding the book in one hand; and I must have waved it pretty much at the door without realizing it. That is the only way to explain what happened next, which was that Georges grabbed the handle and jerked it open. I dove through, and he and Mahala got in some way, because they were there when I looked around and stood up. They were panting worse even than I was.

  (Right here I would like to stop and explain how the door worked; it took me a while to work it out, but there was nothing complicated about it. Each side had its own locking mechanism. The front, facing the house, was controlled by a chip in the front of the book; and the back, toward the jungle, by a chip in the back of the book. Unlock the front, and the front lever worked—you could press it down, open the door, and go in. The door would lock behind you. Unlock the back, and you could go out. The side you had unlocked remained unlocked for about two minutes. To go in and come out, you had to have two cards, or the book, or something else like that. Why do it that way? I think I know, but I’ll leave it up to you to figure out.)

  The door was shut, and Georges was holding the handle to keep anybody on the other side from pushing it down. He stayed right there holding it while Mahala and I rummaged around in the lab for some way of securing a door that swung away from us. Eventually Mahala found a tool chest, and we settled on big pliers with toothed jaws that would clamp and hold the handle. When they were tight on it, we locked them down, then taped the whole lashup to the door. After that, we sealed the door with tape, too—that was at Mahala’s insistence.

  While we were taping, I s
aid, “Did they try to come through? You would have felt them trying to push down the handle.”

  Georges shook his head.

  “Then I doubt that they will.”

  “That makes you a lot more confident than it does me. What would you say to a drink?”

  “No. And go away.”

  “Well, I’d like one.” He turned to Mahala. “What about you, honey?”

  She shook her head, then pantomimed writing on her left palm and showed us her empty hands.

  “No drink,” Georges said, “but she dropped her pad. Shall I go back in and look for it? We’ll have to pull off all that tape.”

  I said I did not think that would be necessary. “There must be paper in here somewhere, and pens, too.”

  “Fine. I’d still like a drink. Okay if I ask the ’bot?”

  We asked, but not before I had opened the door to the other room and showed him the reactor. “This is a Westhaus M-9,” he told me. “That’s a standard setup. This one’s probably five or six years old. In here”—he tapped the metal shell—“you’ve got uranium. There has to be enough for a reaction. That’s what you want, but you’ve got to control it. You do that with carbon rods. The carbon rods damp it down. Lower the rods and there’s less reaction, which means less heat. Are you following this?”

  I nodded.

  “Raise them, and you get more reaction and more heat. This here”—he pointed to a black box—“is a controller. You’re powering a generator. If that’s not putting out as much juice as you need, the controller raises all the rods a little, which gives you hotter steam and more steam. That should fix things. If it doesn’t, the controller sounds an alarm.”

  I nodded again, listening hard and not even trying to hide my interest.

  “What probably happened is that your uranium’s getting exhausted. It wears out eventually, then you’ve got spent uranium; but for a long time the controller can compensate for depletion by raising the rods.”

  “Wouldn’t they wear out, too?” I asked.

  “Good question! Yes, they do. They’re soaking up radiation, and eventually they get saturated. The operator has to watch out for that.” Georges walked to the screen and said, “Got any hot spots?”

  NONE appeared on the screen, and it said, “Everything normal.”

  “Show the heat surface.”

  An almost level plane appeared on the screen, slowly revolving and turning over. It was dotted with yellow numbers.

  “That’s heat throughout the reactor,” Georges said. “The hills are hot, the valleys cooler. You want it pretty flat, but there’s no advantage in having it perfectly flat. This looks all right.”

  I studied it.

  Georges lowered his voice and stepped away from the screen. “Those numbers tell you where each rod is. Let’s say you come into this room and there’s an error message on the screen saying you’ve got uneven heat. You look at the heat surface and there’s a steep hill marked number five. Say that you already knew number five rod was close to saturated. You tell the screen to pull and replace number five. Only on some setups, that’s all automatic. Your screen will pull and replace number five, then tell you it did it.”

  I said, “He can’t have spent much time in here, so I imagine that’s what we’ve got.”

  “You’re probably right. What would you say to that drink now?”

  “In a minute. What would happen if there were no more fresh rods?”

  “That could be bad.” Georges rubbed his jaw. “Alarms would sound, to start with. The screen would try to shut down the reactor, putting all the rods in all the way. That would work for a while, at least in most cases. As far as I know it’s never actually happened.”

  “Perhaps we should make sure there’s a good supply of them before we go. Will the screen have that information?”

  “Sure.” Georges stepped over to a narrow black cabinet. “But we can check them for ourselves, too.” He opened the cabinet door, revealing the round, dark ends of the carbon rods. “Don’t worry about these. They’re new rods, not hot and about as dangerous as the lead in a pencil.”

  “Eighteen.” I had counted them.

  “More than enough. I can’t tell you how long those should last—I don’t know that much about this system. But I’d think it’s at least three years’ worth, probably a lot more.”

  Downstairs, the maid ’bot showed us into a room I had never seen before, a cozy private bar off the dining room. Mahala and I had changed our minds by then. Each of us got a glass of white wine.

  Georges made himself a stiff Scotch and soda. “You’re not worrying a whole lot about those scarecrows coming in after us, are you?”

  I confessed I was not.

  “Fine, I’ll bite. Why not?”

  “In the first place, Colette’s father wasn’t. If he had been, he would have had that side locked. He didn’t, or if he did, I have no idea how he did it.” I had not realized then that the book had unlocked it.

  “Another card, probably. Show it that card, and it locks from both sides instead of unlocking.”

  “Maybe, but if that’s it, we haven’t found it. We’ll keep looking. Listening devices, cards, and weapons. I said that before.”

  “You still think this house is bugged?”

  “Actually, I don’t. It’s probably clean, since there were three of us looking for them in three different rooms and none of us found anything. But if there are listening devices or hidden cameras, it’s important that we find them. Would you like me to justify our searching for cards, too?”

  “Sure. Let’s hear it.”

  “As I said, I’m not greatly worried that the islanders will follow us through that door. To begin with, because they haven’t tried to—not in all the time that we were looking for tools, taping up, and so forth. In addition, because it doesn’t seem to have concerned Colette’s father, as I said a moment ago. And lastly, because they would be stepping from their native planet onto a planet of somewhat higher gravity. I can easily see them falling down after a step or two and being unable to get up. I might do exactly that if I were set down on a new planet with more gravity than Earth. So might you.”

  “Right.” Georges looked skeptical. “What does that have to do with cards?”

  I sat down on one of the red-leather bar stools. “If there really are two cards, someone else may find the other one and go in there. That could be bad for half a dozen reasons; I’m not going to get into all of them. If there are two cards, I want us to have them both.”

  Georges nodded.

  “The card I used to open the front door will open the hangar, too. I can guarantee that. It will probably open the garage as well, but it may not—we have yet to try it. The ground cars may require other cards, however.”

  “Usually there’s a combination lock for the doors,” Georges told me. “Once you’re in, you can do everything by verbal commands or pushing buttons. You don’t have to carry a car card. I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

  “I’m afraid there’s a great deal that I don’t know. Couldn’t there be locked cabinets or boxes in here that require different cards?”

  “Sure, but what about the safe? It didn’t take a card. I saw it when we were up there, and there was a combination lock, one of the tough ones with thirty-six buttons.”

  “Yes, I know. Colette’s father was a wealthy man, Georges. Have you ever owned a house?”

  Georges sipped his Scotch and soda. “What does that have to with cards?”

  “Didn’t you have money hidden somewhere in the house? Something for an emergency?”

  “No,” Georges said, “but I suppose a lot of people do.”

  “So do I.” I pointed at the liquor cabinet. “That wasn’t locked when we came in, but I’d be willing to bet that it has a lock, and that it was kept locked when there were human servants.”

  When Georges had finished his drink, Mahala got busy on the screen in the dining room and Georges and I went out to the mysterious ground
car. First he tried the doors; I said, “When you lock one, you lock them all. Somebody told me that once.”

  He grinned. “Only when it’s raining, but they’re all locked. Come here and I’ll show you something.”

  I came. The sky was as lovely a blue as that of the other world, if not better; our own yellow star, the star we call Sol, shone brightly.

  “Some models have other locks.” Georges pointed to a row of buttons just above the door handle. “But I’d guess that more than half have these single-row five-button jobs. See the letters? It’s A, B, C, D, and E. The driver can change the code if he wants to. Lots of people think you’ve got to use a five-letter code, C, A, B, E, D, or something, but that’s not true. Four letters will work and so will three. Let’s say the guy calls his wife Babe.” He pushed buttons and tried the door again. It was still locked.

  I asked, “How are we going to get in? Break a window?”

  “Nah, I can get into any ground car in under an hour. Ninety percent in under half an hour. That’s without damaging the car or rocking it. If you break a window or rock the ground car it’ll holler for help, only you can’t hear it. About the time you’re getting in it, the cop’s getting out of his. A five-button lock like this gives you a thousand combinations, but most people use less than a hundred.”

  “And you know them?” It seemed pretty unlikely, and I was already wondering how he knew them—if he did.

  “Sure. Initials are out for nearly everybody. Like yours are E. A. S. You’ve got the E and the A, but you don’t have the S. So no. If you’ve got kids, D, A, D or maybe D, A, D, E, E. I can look into your ground car and tell if you’ve got kids. I always try D, E, A, D, too. Undertakers use that a lot, and maybe somebody inherited the money. Real estate guy? Try D, E, E, D. Most people stick to simple stuff. E, A, E, A—something like that. When you buy a new ground car, it has some simple code that the whole dealership uses, like D, C, B, A or even A, B, C. That way, everybody who works there can open every car they’ve got.”