Here Comes the Sun (21 page)

Staff moved his feet, and saw directly under them the words
Jeremy Lloyd-Perkins
, shallowly engraved in the soft metal.

‘Who?'

‘Search me,' Ganger replied. ‘I tried looking him up on the computer, but of course the blasted thing was down again. I've got my secretary going through the card-index right now.'

Staff knelt down and ran a finger over the scored marks. ‘So what's he complaining about?' he said.

‘That's what I thought you ought to see,' Ganger replied. ‘Come on.'

The draftsman who designed Form C301 had so many questions of an apparently irrelevant but of course strictly necessary nature to ask that the space left on the form for the actual complaint measured eighty millimetres by twenty. Mr Lloyd-Perkins, however, was gifted with small handwriting. Ganger produced a magnifying glass and held the torch while Staff examined the tiny words.

‘Um,' he said.

‘Exactly,' Ganger replied. ‘It's not looking good, is it?'

Staff got up and brushed gold dust from his knees. ‘I don't suppose it was her fault, though,' he said. ‘You know as well as I do that the sorting office up there is a mess. That's one of the reasons why we sent her there.'

‘Sure,' Ganger replied. ‘That's not the point, really, is it?'

‘It isn't?'

Ganger shook his head, produced a collapsible shooting-stick from his coat pocket, drove its point through the thin gold membrane, and sat down. ‘Of course not,' he replied. ‘Think about it, will you? Here's a mortal nobody's ever heard of, right? From what he says here, I gather that he's a subscriber to Oracle, for the financial news. In other words, he's got a soul equipped with Teletext, but otherwise he's probably just a small-timer. Okay so far?'

Staff nodded.

‘So,' Ganger continued, offering his colleague a peppermint, ‘you don't suppose for one minute that he's in a position to know about the complaints procedure. Even if he does, nobody's going to tell me that somebody who lives in a four-bedroom house in the suburbs of Cardiff can afford this much gold just to complain about a garbled message. No, somebody's put him up to it.'

Staff looked up. ‘One of us, you mean?'

‘Someone in the Service, certainly,' Ganger replied.

‘With a view to implicating you and me, you reckon?'

Ganger nodded. ‘Smart move,' he said. ‘Whoever it was knew there'd have to be an inquiry, and even if she's cleared, it'll still bring the fact that she's a mortal, hired without the authority of a resolution, out into the open. Clever, no?'

Staff nodded, his jaws working slowly and methodically
on the peppermint. ‘I'm not very happy about that,' he said.

‘Me neither.'

‘I think,' Staff continued, his brows lowering, ‘that counts as playing silly-buggers, and I don't reckon we should put up with it.' He shook his head. ‘No,' he went on, ‘that won't do at all. Have you got any idea who . . . ?'

‘'Fraid not,' Ganger replied, standing up and folding the stick away. ‘I'm making discreet enquiries, of course, but that's going to take time. I guess all we can do is be on our guard, and wait and see.'

Staff nodded. ‘I suppose,' he said, ‘sooner or later whoever it is will want to know why nothing's been done about the complaint. I don't suppose he knows it isn't valid.'

‘Maybe not,' Ganger said. ‘It could be that this is just intended as a warning, but I don't think so. It's a bit, well, monumental for that.'

‘I've seen subtler hints,' Staff agreed, as the light from the torch played over the golden prairie all around them. ‘Oh well, thanks for letting me know.'

‘My pleasure,' Ganger said, and grinned. ‘In the meantime, ' he said, ‘I suppose I'd better just get this cleared up. You know, put on microfiche.'

Staff nodded. ‘Right,' he said. ‘And, um, what happens to the original? The hard copy, so to speak?'

Ganger shrugged. ‘Oh, I don't know,' he said with slightly exaggerated carelessness. ‘Bin it, I suppose, or file it away somewhere. Mustn't let the place get cluttered up with piles of redundant old forms, must we?'

On their way out they were passed by a three-mile-long column of container lorries with an escort of soldiers equipped with axes, shovels and heavy-duty gear. As the lead jeep went by the driver raised his arm and gave Ganger a cheery wave.

‘Friend of yours?' Staff asked.

‘Never seen him before in my life,' Ganger replied. ‘Keep in touch.'

 

‘Hey!'

‘What?'

‘Over here.'

‘Ouch!'

Bjorn stood up, stepped over the recumbent guard and ran swiftly across the short patch of open ground between the guardhouse and the hangar door.

It was a long time since he'd been here last, but he was still taken aback by all this security. The laws of departmental entropy dictated that there should be less security, not more, and that what security there still was shouldn't work. Even in his day, the hangar had been protected from the attentions of intruders by a wooden gate kept shut by a bit of wire looped round the gatepost, and a lifesize cardboard cut-out of an Airedale silhouetted against the sky. Actual guards with rifles and steel helmets (he rubbed the side of his hand vigorously until the circulation started to move again) would have been out of the question. It all went to confirm his earlier impression that something was going on around here. He leaned back into the shadow of the door-frame and, having checked to make sure the coast was clear, he fished in his pocket for his penknife.

Nailfile; no. Corkscrew; no. Tweezers; no. Thing for taking stones out of impalas' hooves; no. Ah, here it was; jemmy.

He extracted the blade, inserted it between the door and the hasp of the padlock, and jerked hard. The blade broke.

Astonished, Bjorn picked himself up off the ground and stared at the lock. Admittedly, you wouldn't normally
rely on the metallurgical expertise of the Zambian State Arsenals for anything much more strenuous than opening a letter - an airmail letter, at that - but even so. This padlock was Departmental property. In his experience, a gnat sneezing a mile away should leave it hanging from its shank like a hung-over bat.

His train of thought was derailed by a sound like the Milan rush hour played at full volume on Dolby stereo, and he instinctively ducked. This is serious, he said to himself, covering his ears with his hands. A burglar alarm. A burglar alarm that works.

Something was
definitely
going on around here.

Bjorn burped disgustedly, unslung his axe from behind his back, took two steps backwards and let the padlock have it.

‘Ugh,' said a voice behind him; followed by the sound of a man falling over. Bjorn looked over his shoulder, to see a heavily armed trooper lying at his feet, with a dent in his steel helmet you could store linen in, and the head of Bjorn's axe lying on the ground beside him. The padlock, however, was still there. Bjorn frowned, until his forehead resembled the knee of a pair of unfashionably wide cord trousers. This wasn't the usual sort of Department padlock, the sort that you get free at petrol stations if you stop off to ask the way to the M34 and don't buy anything; this was a
padlock
.

‘Okay, chummy.' Bjorn could feel something cold and hard in the small of his back. ‘Spread 'em, and no funny business.'

He sighed, turned round, picked the trooper up by his lapels, put him in a handily situated dustbin and rammed the lid down hard. Some things, he was relieved to see, didn't change. They may have snazzy new molybdenum steel padlocks; but the sort of men who end up working in Security are still the ones who get chucked out of
Earthquakes because they can't quite make the grade, intellectually speaking.

‘Next time,' he said, not entirely unkindly, ‘you could try holding the rifle with the bit with the hole in it pointing
away
from you.'

He gave the hangar door a final kick, yelped involuntarily, and trudged off into the darkness.

 

‘Down there,' Jane shouted above the roar of the engine, and pointed. The pilot nodded uneasily.

‘I still think . . .' he shouted back.

‘Sorry?'

‘I said, I still . . .'

‘What?'

The pilot scowled. He knew she could hear him, and he was pretty sure she knew he knew. But for the life of him he couldn't think of a way of
proving
she knew he knew she knew. He gave up and decided he'd just fly the plane instead.

‘There,' Jane was yelling in his ear, ‘just by the big lake, can you see? That's it. Go down lower.'

It's not right, the pilot said to himself. We'll get into trouble. I'll get into trouble. I really shouldn't be doing this.

‘Hold her steady,' Jane shouted. ‘I'm going to release the rockets
now
.'

It's really down to what's allowed and what isn't, continued the pilot's train of thought - and as trains of thought go, this one's the Sundays-only 06.34 service from Llanelli, stopping at all stations to Neath; because if the pilot had enough brain to half-fill the cap of the average biro, he'd still be cruising at sixty thousand feet, with the intercom switched firmly off - and this has got to be something that isn't. He tried to communicate his anxiety to his passenger.

‘Are you
sure
you want me to . . . ?'

‘Sorry?'

The pilot swore under his breath and pushed the joystick down. He was going to regret this.

 

Crown Prince Konstantin of Anhalt-Bernberg-Schwerin, enjoying a pleasant drink beside the pool, saw something rather odd reflected in the plush blue water. He sat up and looked skywards over the rim of his Porsche sunglasses.

‘Karl,' he said.

‘Highness?' The footman, impeccable as always in the full dress uniform of an Equerry, Second Class, with crossed mulberry leaves and bar, materialised behind him. The prince noticed that he was trying, very hard but in vain, not to giggle.

‘Karl,' he went on, running a finger lightly over the sabre scar on his left cheek, ‘there is in the sky something not in the ordinary. Are you seeing it also?'

‘
Jawohl
, Highness,' relied the footman. ‘I am seeing it also.'

‘
Sehr gut
,' the Prince replied. You can't be a Prince of the Blood and descended through fifty-nine unbroken generations from Charlemagne without having enough sang-froid to keep champagne chilled in a firestorm. ‘For a moment I thought my eyes on me tricks were playing.' He pushed the sunglasses back to the bridge of his nose, said, ‘That will be all,' and returned to his ski catalogue.

The footman clicked his heels, retreated soundlessly behind a row of mulberry bushes and collapsed into imperfectly muffled laughter, while overhead high-level winds started the long job of breaking up and dispersing an intricate pattern of vapour trails, which read:

 

KONSTANTIN VON ROSSFLEISCH YOU'VE HAD YOUR CHIPS

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes; also their births and marriages, their official engagements, the dates of their more important garden parties, and all the rest of the mind-numbingly interesting information that one finds under such bylines as
Court Circular
in the newspapers with the awkwardly big pages.

Royalty are different from you and me. They don't panic. They don't run to and fro like headless chickens just because they get a warning from heaven telling them they're about to die. For example; the last thought that crossed the Prince's mind, about a seventy-fifth of a second before the bomb concealed in the four-foot-high inflatable rubber swan bobbing on the surface of the pool went off, was: How on earth did they manage to do the apostrophe in YOU'VE?

 

‘In fact,' Jane continued, ‘I don't see why we can't do the same thing right across the board.'

The Dream-Master General chewed a lump out of his moustache and swallowed it. ‘You don't,' he said.

‘No.' Jane sat down, uninvited, on the edge of the desk and reached in her bag for her notebook. ‘I've been giving it some thought, doing a few outline costings, that sort of thing, and really . . .'

Very few people can say three dots and
really
mean them, but Jane could. The Dream-Master General picked up a heavy rubber stamp reading FRAGILE (for use on the dreams of idealists, naturally) and started to peel the rubber bit off the wooden backing.

‘For a start,' Jane continued, ‘this personal hand-delivering of everything. That's out. I mean, it's so inefficient it's positively prehistoric. I gather you've got one guy who has to dress up in a red bathrobe once every year and deliver presents to every child in the known world. Have you any idea what that costs you in overtime?'

‘You don't feel,' said the Dream-Master, in the tone of voice you'd expect from a volcano with indigestion, ‘that it's an essential part of a truly personal service?'

‘No. Another thing that's got to be sorted is the sorting. You've got to face up to the fact that what we're dealing with here is messages, not premium bonds. Fair enough?'

‘So what,' croaked the Dream-Master, ‘do you have in mind?'

‘Computerisation,' Jane replied promptly, ‘and bar codes. It's very easy once you get the hang of it.'

‘I see. In future, everybody's dreams are going to have little patterns of wiggly lines in the bottom right-hand corner, are they?'

‘You can disguise them as railings,' Jane said. ‘Or stationary zebras, or something like that. All you need is a little imagination.'