Faust Among Equals

by Tom Holt

  ‘I see,’ said George. ‘A water pistol.’

  ‘Holy water,’ Lundqvist repeated. ‘Dead and exorcised in one shot. We call it one-stop termination. You ain’t going nowhere.’

  ‘How terribly clever.’ George’s face had on its patient, let’s-humour-the-child expression, the very same one that had haunted Lundqvist’s childhood nightmares. It meant, ‘Kurt, I’m going to make you look an absolute plonker in front of the whole school,’ and it had never once failed to deliver. Lundqvist quickly reviewed the situation in his mind and decided that for the first and last time, George was simply bluffing.

  ‘So,’ George said, ‘you reckon you can just cold-bloodedly pull the trigger and blow my brains out, is that it?’

  ‘Yup. ’

  The expression blossomed into a smile of tender contempt. ‘Not unless you take the safety catch off first you can’t,’ he said.

  In the split second it took Lundqvist to check, see that the safety catch was indeed off, and start squeezing off the shot, George had taken the reminder of his candy floss, stuck it up the barrel of the gun and kicked Lundqvist savagely in the nuts. With a howl that was five-per-cent pain and ninety-five-per-cent frustrated rage, Lundqvist slowly doubled up and sagged on to the ground.

  ‘Never mind, Kurt,’ said George, not unkindly, as he stepped over his fallen assailant. ‘One of these days you’ll get something right, just you wait and see.’

  Then he stepped through the door and closed it behind him.

  Thanks to his abstemious lifestyle and peak physical condition it took Lundqvist maybe a total of three minutes to recover sufficiently to haul himself up on to his feet, totter wildly and fall flat on his face, banging his forehead painfully on a sharp stone. Which only goes to show; had he ruined his health with alcohol, rich foods and dissipation he’d never have been fit enough to get beaten up in the first place.

  Once he’d managed to get his legs working again, he pulled the candy-floss stick out of the muzzle of his gun, kicked open the emergency exit door, and burst through.

  Circumstances alter cases. None of that hyper-cautious catlike stealth one associates with the covert operations pro - flattening oneself against walls, darting in and out of shadows and leaping round corners in a copybook FBI crouch. As soon as he was through the door, he simply ran as fast as he could down the tunnel, firing wildly into the darkness and shouting, ‘You bastard, I’m gonna rip your frigging lungs out!’ at the top of his voice.

  Which is why he didn’t notice the pillar; not, at least, until it connected with his chin.

  Thirty seconds later, Lucky George emerged from behind the pillar, prodded Lundqvist’s head with his foot to make sure he was indeed fast asleep, bent down, picked up the pistol and slipped it in his pocket. A more punctilious man would have written out a receipt, but George was in a hurry.

  A length of parcel string and a few Boy Scout knots later, he stood up, looked both ways along the tunnel, switched on Lundqvist’s torch (which the silly man had forgotten all about in his excitement) and strolled on up the tunnel, whistling.

  Four hundred yards or so later, he came to a T-junction. There were helpful signs painted on the wall, thus:HELL →

  ←DAMNATION

  ←ADMINISTRATION

  Synonyms, George thought, but never mind. He turned left.

  Three hundred yards brought him to a lift. Why walk, he said to himself, when you can ride?

  The trick is, not to go down.

  The doors slid open, revealing the usual selection of buttons, labelled:PENTHOUSE

  CENTRAL ADMIN

  ACCOUNTS

  CAFETERIA

  BOILER ROOM

  MEZZANINE

  GROUND

  HELL FIRE

  DAMNATION

  FILE STORE

  The red light was on opposite GROUND. As for the rest; CAFETERIA sounded nice, MEZZANINE was anybody’s guess, and FILE STORE sent a shiver oscillating through his central nervous system. He was about to press CAFETERIA when something inside him coughed discreetly and whispered, Try the boiler room.

  George rationalised. Well, why not? The words conjured up a picture of a big, noisy, dark jungle of pipes and machines, the sort of place you could hide in for ages with no chance of anybody finding you; a good place to pause, regroup and work out what to do next.

  George wasn’t convinced. What the devil do I want to go to the boiler room for? Sounds absolutely awful. He reached out to prod CAFETERIA, but his finger froze, a few thousandths of an inch away from contact.

  Try the boiler room.

  The philosopher Socrates, so tradition has it, played host to an inner voice, accustomed to telling him what to do in moments of indecision. History tells us that Socrates was found guilty on trumped-up charges and executed by poison, but maybe we don’t have all the facts. Maybe, a nanosecond before drinking the hemlock, Socrates asked his inner voice What the fuck have you gone and got me into, peanut-brain? and the inner voice explained it all in words of one syllable, allowing the great philosopher to die with a huge cocky grin frozen all over his face.

  Maybe there’s a coffee machine in the boiler room.

  He lowered his finger and pressed the appropriate button, closing the lift door.

  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

  Blessed are the jammy bastards, for they shall see God without an appointment.

  It was dark in the boiler room, as he’d predicted. It was also very quiet, and very cold. All the surfaces were thick with dust. All in all, Lucky George decided, he’d been in more convivial graves. Which was, incidentally, true.

  There were pipes, just as in his mental picture, and machines. Enormous machines, painted matt black enamel with heavy solid brass fittings, very old-fashioned, high quality looking. No plastic anywhere; steel, brass and the occasional glass cover, white enamel dial, engraved brass control panel. None of the machines appeared to be switched on. The place had the look of a major vintage traction engine rally five minutes after the beer tent has opened.

  George had been wandering about for perhaps ten minutes or so (not that Time seemed a particularly useful concept in a place like this, like an umbrella at the bottom of the sea) when he thought he heard a tiny, distant screaming noise, like a very small, fast lathe. He walked towards it.

  It was a long walk. The place was, he realised, absolutely huge, and full of these enormous, silent pieces of hardware; each one, he noticed curiously, apparently different. He hadn’t the faintest idea what any of them were. Ah, but if only he could get in here with a small crane and a fleet of big lorries, there was an absolute fortune in scrap value alone.

  If wishes were pantechnicons, beggars would invest heavily in offshore roll-up unit trusts. George dismissed the thought from his mind, because the light and the noise were getting closer. Still a hell of a long way away, though. George’s feet were beginning to hurt.

  Scree-ee-ee-eee. Pause. Scree-ee-yoww-ee. Unmistakable sound of cutting metal. Someone was making something.

  Screee-ee-ee

  Screeeeee-ee-yowwww-eee

  Screee-eeeee

  ‘Bugger!’

  A minuscule voice, ever so far away. George stopped dead in his tracks and listened, but all he could hear was the sound of the lathe, like the shriek of an hysterical elf.

  Blessed are the bone idle, for they shall stand and watch other people working.

  George walked on towards the noise.

  Had Links Jotapian been there, instead of lying on his back sleeping the sleep of the mildly concussed, he’d have witnessed a near perfect exhibition of the art of getting out of being tied up without cutting your wrists on the string.

  Having woken up, assessed the position and sworn a lot, Lundqvist used his feet to back himself up against the wall. No help there; the sides were smooth as glass, so no useful rocky outcrops to saw through the rope on.

  String professionally tight, so no percentage in curling the hands up small in the
hope of slipping them through.

  Never mind. The seasoned campaigner anticipates this sort of thing. On the back of Lundqvist’s trouser belt was a thing like a big plastic button. In fact, this was a snap-on cover, easily flicked off with the fingernails, underneath which was a tiny sliver of scalpel blade fixed lengthways into the belt on a rivet. Nothing easier than to fray the rope up against that a few times and then gently ease it apart.

  Cheating? In the trade, they call it materiel superiority.

  A little later Lundqvist stood up, marshalled his limbs into some semblance of discipline and trudged up the corridor. He knew without being told that he was on a hiding to nothing. He was lost, unarmed, punch-drunk and thoroughly demoralised. High time he retired, made way for all those up and coming youngsters who were the hope of the profession for the years to come.

  Absolutely. Just as soon as he’d found Lucky bloody George and disembowelled him with his bare hands, he’d pack the whole thing in, buy a little bungalow somewhere and grow lupins. Until then, the idea of giving up was unthinkable. It would be like going on a round-the-world cruise knowing you’d left the oven on.

  In due course he came to a lift.

  PENTHOUSE

  CENTRAL ADMIN

  ACCOUNTS

  CAFETERIA

  BOILER ROOM

  MEZZANINE

  GROUND

  HELL FIRE

  DAMNATION

  FILE STORE

  A likely story. You don’t get presented with the Academy of Elite Forces’ coveted Gold Silencer Award three years in succession (‘First of all I’d like to thank my victims, without whom . . .’) unless you can recognise a supernaturally induced hologram when you see one. If the wretched thing had had TRAP over the door in three-foot-high neon letters, it couldn’t have been more obvious.

  On the other hand, what the hell? He walked in, pressed a button at random, and folded his arms.

  Screee-eee-eeeeee-ee-clunk.

  ‘Anybody home?’

  George waited for a moment, listening to his voice echoing around the galleries of silent ironmongery until it was soaked up in the dust-insulated vastness. If there was anybody there, they were either lying in wait, too engrossed in what they were doing to hear, or listening to something on headphones.

  Well, if they were lying in wait, they’d had plenty of opportunities by now. He walked on.

  Scree-eee-ee-scrinklescrinklescrinkle.

  ‘Oh sod!’

  The light suddenly vanished, blocked out by the bulk of an enormous machine. Slowly, feeling his intestines practising left-hand clove hitches, George edged round the machine, and suddenly saw . . .

  A workbench, illuminated by a low, brilliant lamp, throwing out the special brand of extra white, hard light that you need if you’re dealing with tolerances of fractions of a millimetre. Around the bench were racks of tools - George assumed they were tools; most of them he’d never seen anything like before, even in the sort of dreams that would have had Freud under a cold shower in three seconds flat - but he knew they were tools. They had that worn, shiny, reliable look, that says I know what I’m doing even if you don’t. Mounted in the centre of the bench was this really weird lathe; it wasn’t big, but it seemed to ooze power, as if once you’d worked out how to use it you could make absolutely anything at all on it. And, George realised, it was transparent. In fact, that was where the light was coming from, not the poxy 100-watt bulb in the anglepoise. Light was seeping out from it in all directions, as through a window or the crack under a door. Light from where, you really didn’t want to know.

  Behind the bench was a man; short, round, wearing a brown overall and a cap with a few wisps of untidy grey hair curling out under its brim like Russian vine, his face consisting of a nosetip and a mouth huddled in the shelter of an enormous pair of thick-lensed spectacles. In one hand, he held a Vernier caliper, while with the other he was scratching his neck, just behind the ear.

  ‘Hullo, George,’ the man said. ‘You found your way here all right, then.’

  George nodded. Never seen this guy before in my life, he thought. Something funny here.

  He glanced down at the lathe. In the jaws of the chuck he could see a tiny, er, thing, a component, a bit out of something; minute, hard, shiny with the magnificent hard gleam of newly turned steel, that beautiful clarity of tone that makes polished silver look like fog. Whatever it was, it had been machined to perfection. It seemed to sing in the lathe.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ said the man.

  ‘Problem?’

  The man nodded. ‘Taken too much off, haven’t I? Useless. Have to start again.’ He opened the chuck, lifted the thing out and tossed it contemptuously into the scrap bucket under the bench. ‘Me own fault,’ he said, grinning. ‘In too much of a rush, as per usual.’

  ‘Been doing it long?’

  ‘Twenty-three years,’ the man replied, ‘not a big job, really.’ Already, he had a new blank of material in the jaws and was winding the chuck. ‘Don’t suppose it’ll take me much longer to turn up another one.’

  ‘I . . .’ George began, and then stopped. ‘What was it?’ he asked.

  The man looked up from his work. ‘Ratchet collar for the main inner bearing,’ he replied. ‘Fits on the main driveshaft, stops the auto-index from getting out of synch.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘’Cos,’ the man went on, smiling, ‘if that gets out of sequence, your whole locator drive’s up the spout, and you’ll be having Wednesdays for Tuesdays and Sundays midweek.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The man nodded. ‘It’s a good life if you don’t weaken,’ he added, and measured something.

  ‘Sorry,’ George said, ‘am I disturbing you, because . . .’

  The man shook his head. ‘Glad of the company,’ he replied. ‘Gets a bit lonely up here, fiddlearsing about all day long. You getting on all right?’

  ‘I suppose so. Can I hold anything, or pass you things?’

  ‘If you like.’ The man scribed a line with an invisibly thin scriber. ‘Four hundred yards got to come off that,’ he said. ‘Should be all right so long as we go nice and steady.’ He stooped down and began rummaging in a box.

  ‘Four hundred yards.’

  The man nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Bloody fine tolerances, bugger all margin of error.’

  Something clicked in George’s mind. It wasn’t Time that was weird here, it was Scale. Everything here was much, much bigger than it looked, but the immensity of the place created its own unique perspectives. He’d probably been standing here for five years already.

  ‘Look at the bloody mess this place is in,’ the man said, waving vaguely. ‘The time I waste, looking for things. Soon as I’ve done this job, I’ve got to have a bloody good tidy-up.’

  George licked his lips, which were suddenly dry. ‘Excuse me asking,’ he said, ‘but who exactly are you?’

  The man looked up. ‘Me?’ he said. George nodded. With a flick of his finger, the man switched on the lathe. Thousands of feet below, George just knew, the faint, scarcely perceptible noise it made was midsummer thunder.

  ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘the job description is General Operative (Dilapidations).’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Bit of a mouthful,’ the man said.

  George nodded. ‘Usually abbreviated, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘Right.’ George took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time,’ he said.

  General Operative (Dilapidations), better known by the handy acronym.

  Lundqvist stopped dead in his tracks. He could feel the point needle-sharp against the skin of his neck; that particularly vulnerable spot between the collar bones.

  ‘G’day,’ said the angel.

  Lundqvist thought about edging backwards, but knew that the point would follow him. Angel or no angel, this guy knew his trade.

  At least, Lundqvist realised, I know where I am now.

/>   ‘I thought,’ he said, looking down the runway of fine blued steel that ran from his neck to the angel’s hand, ‘you people were supposed to be equipped with flaming swords.’

  The angel gave him a look. ‘Stone the crows, sport,’ he said. ‘What d’you think this is, a flamin’ letter opener?’

  ‘Hi, God,’ said Lucky George.

  ‘Could you just pass me that file?’ God replied. ‘Not that one, the little Swiss job with the red handle. Ta.’

  George looked down the rack, saw something like an extra-thin hair with the appropriate coloured handle, and passed it over. God pushed his glasses back up his nose, closed one eye and swept the file feather-light over the surface of the metal.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘Pressed too hard. Look, bloody great graunch-marks all over the thing. Have to stone it all off and start again.’ He sighed, and reached for an atom-thin whet-stone. ‘I must be having one of those days,’ he said.

  George replaced the file in the rack. ‘Dilapidations?’ he asked.

  The man nodded. ‘That means fixing things,’ he said. ‘It’s what I mostly do these days. You made it, they said to me, you damn well fix it when it plays up. Fair enough, I suppose. Means I can put in a few mods here and there, whenever I see something I can improve.’ He pointed at the component in the chuck. ‘Like this, frinstance.’

  George smiled weakly. ‘You did say what it was,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Pretty simple, really,’ God replied. ‘Time, right? Your basic seven-day week revolves on a central spindle. Each day is indexed into position by a lifting hand driving a ratchet, and then it’s locked in place by a spring-loaded pawl locating in a groove, see? Absolutely basic design.’

  George nodded helplessly. Somehow or other, he understood, vaguely.

  The man shook his head. ‘Bloody awful,’ he said. ‘Makes me ashamed every time I think of it. All it needs is for the bearing the cylinder rides on to wear a bit, and the whole thing grinds to a halt.’