“You could get the Imperial Secret Service on to it,” I suggested.
“I could if they weren’t all mindless gangsters,” he retorted. “We executed most of them yesterday. Trying to stage a coup. And,” he returned to what was obviously the main difficulty, “I don’t like the way it all seems to hang on this Knarros. You have to go through him for the eldest boy, even if it is on another world. What if he’s untrustworthy or someone does him in?”
“Blame the stupidity of your late ruler,” I said.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said. The fact that the password was Babylon still made my back creep. “I’ve faxed the list to Jeffros. Let him put people to work on it and tell him to let me know if you need my help.”
“I’m bound to,” he said. “This is a stupid over-secretive mess!”
I rang off, sighing. “He’s going to want me to find Babylon for him. I can see it coming.”
“You can’t do that!” Stan said sharply.
“I think we’re talking about two different things, Stan,” I said. “Or at least I hope we are. Mind turning that music down? I’ve got a headache.”
I drove to Bristol the next day with a passenger. I had not meant to go so soon, in spite of Stan’s nagging. It seemed to me that I had earned a day with my feet up. But my neighbour rang my doorbell just at the point where I had drunk enough of the wine to quench my headache.
Andrew Connick is a strange fellow, an inventor. Unlike the unfortunate Derek Mallory, Andrew has succeeded in pushing his creations out of his head into reality, and he holds several dozen patents, all for very useful gadgets. My favourite coffee-pot is one of them. Andrew gave it me to test. Like me, he lives alone – in one of the only two other houses in Weavers End, which is bigger and fancier than mine; it has a large garden with a pond in it, which I sometimes envy him for, until I think of all the digging and weeding Andrew has to do. The third house in Weavers End contains the Gibbs family: Mrs Gibbs cleans my house, her daughter cleans Andrew’s. Mrs Gibbs tells me her daughter says Andrew Connick is a very strange man. And I believe her – though I also believe that Mrs Gibbs tells Andrew that her mother says Rupert Venables is pretty strange too.
He was standing on my doorstep looking as if he was not sure why he was there. “Hello, Andrew,” I said. “Come on in.” I supposed Stan would have the sense to keep quiet, even though choral music was blasting out around me.
“I’ll not come in,” he said, in his distrait, Nordic way. Actually I believe him to be Scottish, but I think of him as Nordic because he has that bleached, handsome head and those large bones I always associate with Scandinavians. He is very tall. I am just under six feet and he towered over me, looking uncertain. “No, I’ll not enter,” he said. “I just came to ask you to give me a lift tomorrow.”
“Car broken down again?” I said. My heart sank. The last two occasions Andrew’s car had failed him, between Christmas and New Year, I had clocked up over six hundred miles shuttling Andrew and various spare parts between here and Cambridge – and Ely and Huntingdon and St Neots, not to speak of Peterborough and King’s Lynn.
“Aye,” he said. “It won’t be moving.”
My heart rebelled against more shuttling. I had earned a rest. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m not going to be here tomorrow. I’ve got to go to Bristol.”
He was silent, with his large pale eyes on the distance above my head, evidently thinking. After a while he said, “I’ll come to Bristol then.”
I had a mad feeling that if I had said I was going to drive to Carlisle, Edinburgh or Canterbury he would have agreed to come to any of those places too. “It’s quite a way,” I said, in a last-ditch effort to dissuade him. “I’m making an early start.”
He thought about that too. “I can be ready by six.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, I didn’t mean that early!” I said, giving in. “Let’s say eight-thirty, shall we?”
“I’ll be there,” he said, and left.
So I found myself committed to driving to Bristol. “Are you coming with me?” I asked Stan. “Or do you think you might frighten Andrew?”
There was one of Stan’s unhappy pauses. Then he said, “I don’t think I can, lad. I seem to be confined to your house.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “Where else have you tried to go?”
“Beyond the garden gate. Past your barn at the back. I couldn’t manage either direction,” he said.
I was annoyed. It had been a tiring few days. “What’s the good of having a ghostly adviser, if you can’t be around to advise me?” I demanded. “I was relying on your opinion about this girl.”
“Then stand on your own feet for a change!” his voice retorted. “It’s what Them Up There seem to want you to do.”
I knew I had hurt his feelings. He did not speak to me again that night, and I heard not a word from him in the morning, not even when I arranged for him a floating stack of CDs, each one magically programmed to hop in or out of the CD player when he gave it the word. I was proud of that magic. And I considered it thoughtful too. So I was offended in my turn. I went out to my car in chilly silence and found Andrew waiting beside it.
Andrew is actually a good passenger. He does not make conversation, or talk about other motorists, or make nervous comments on how fast I drive (which is fast). He just sits there. This sometimes gets unnerving. When I got particularly unnerved – the first time was two-thirds of the way round the M25 – I asked him about his latest invention. And he told me, in his deceptively slow and meditative way, which nevertheless described the thing – he called it a “swing-ratchet” – so accurately that I could probably have done drawings and patented it myself. Then he stopped talking.
Some way down the M4, I became unnerved again. But I felt it was my turn to tell him something. Usually when I drive him anywhere I tell him about any software problem I have lately run into. Very often he has set me on the right lines just with one of his slow, wandering responses. This time, however, my problems had been something of a deep secret. There did not seem to be any way to talk about them. Or was there? In a world tending Naywards like ours, no one is going to suspect you are talking about a collapsing Empire three universes away.
“Tell me,” I said, “what would you think if you found the password you needed to access someone else’s program was a sort of secret codeword the programmer shouldn’t really have thought of using in that way? I mean, suppose the password was something silly like Humpty-Dumpty to a very serious program – say, something about genetics – and you knew that Humpty-Dumpty was actually a codeword for something equally serious – say, classified military information. What would you think? Would you put it down to coincidence, or what?”
Andrew said ruminatively, “I’m told there is no such thing as coincidence.”
I was told that too and, what is more, told it as a Magid, which made it very significant. But it seemed to me that Andrew was just uttering a platitude. I was disappointed.
He said, “Is there no chance the user of the password hacked into the other classified material?”
I said, “Well, it’s always possible,” to cover up what I was really talking about, and added, “but it’s unlikely to many decimal places. Virtually impossible, in fact.”
“If it’s that unlikely,” Andrew meditated, “then I reckon you have to go back in time,