16

The head archivist, E. Everard Linkletter, was tickled to see the Weeder. He polished his eyeglasses with the tip of his tie and fitted them back over his eyes. “Always a pleasure to see one of my old boys,” he chirped. Linkletter, who had the delicate bone structure of a bird and eyes that watered at the hint of an emotion, lifted a mountain of dossiers off his desk and set them down on the floor. “Pull over a chair. I’ll get us some Darjeeling. Things haven’t been the same since we lost you. You had a way with computers, didn’t you? Oh, dear, which of these buttons do you think connects me with the woman who claims to be my secretary?” He tried them one after the other, shouting, “Anybody home?” at each stop until he found signs of life. “Tea for two, two for tea,” he called. He looked at the Weeder and rolled his head from side to side in satisfaction. “You haven’t decayed as much as you might have,” he said.

“You never change,” the Weeder said, but Linkletter swatted away the compliment as if it were an insect. “I’m feeling very short and very fat today,” he said morosely. He pouted as if the words themselves had a bad taste. “And very old—too old, too old. You know what they say about old age? Old age, they say, is not for sissies. Well, I’m not sure where that leaves me. My sight’s going. My hearing’s going. My lower back, my knees have long since gone. My digestion is reasonable if I don’t drink too much. But who wants to go through what’s left of life not drinking too much? Tell me what you are up to these days, Silas?”

The Weeder offered up one of his sheepish grins. “This is not the kind of shop where you want to ask that sort of question.”

Linkletter sighed. “Don’t I know it. The only thing that keeps me chained to my desk is my appetite for the pension I get in two years, three months and twelve days.”

He pulled a fresh pack of menthol cigarettes from a desk drawer, slid the cellophane wrapper off it and placed it on the blotter halfway between himself and his guest. “I don’t remember if you smoke,” he remarked.

The Weeder said he didn’t and never had.

“Neither do I anymore,” Linkletter said with sudden enthusiasm. “But my victory over the weed is meaningless if there is no temptation. In order to feel superior to cigarettes you have to lust after them.” Linkletter swiveled impatiently toward his intercom and stabbed at a button. “Where, where, where in God’s name is my tea?” he cried plaintively.

“Tea,” an aggravated voice replied, “requires boiling water. Boiling water requires the application of heat. The application of heat requires time.”

Turning back to the Weeder, Linkletter spread his hands in embarrassment. “You would think they were bringing it all the way from India,” he said. “Well, now, to what whim of wind do I owe the pleasure of your calling at my port?”

“I was passing through,” the Weeder said. “I thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

“Old time’s sake, that sort of thing?”

“Old time’s sake,” the Weeder agreed.

“There’s nothing you’re looking for? No tidbit of information you want to get your hands on without going through channels?”

“Now that you mention it—”

Linkletter sighed again; it came across as a long drawn-out comment on the human condition. “I have not been a Company archivist for twenty-two years, eighteen months and eighteen days—and head archivist for the last eighteen years, seven months and no days—for nothing, my young friend.”

The Weeder leaned toward Linkletter. “Have you ever come across a reference to something called Kabir?”

“Are you thinking of applying there for a teaching position?” Linkletter asked with a small guttural laugh that sounded like a hiccup. “I’m not sure you speak the language.”

“What language would that be?” the Weeder wanted to know.

“Persian, some Kurdish, some Arabic, various strains of Turkic. You are talking about Amir Kabir College, formerly the Polytechnic College of Tehran University. As a matter of fact, the Company has been keeping rather close tabs on this particular institute of quote unquote higher learning for some time now. The dossier would take you a week to speed-read through.”

“What’s so special about Amir Kabir College?”

“Why, it’s a nuclear research center—the only one in Iran. That’s what’s special. It houses a five-megawatt research reactor,” Linkletter added. “If my memory serves me, and I will be the first to concede that it almost always does, the reactor has a fuel load of five kilograms of enriched uranium, which is enough to construct a nuclear weapon if the ayatollahs can get the technology right. Which so far, thanks to God, they have shown no signs of doing.” Linkletter lowered his head as if he intended to butt it against something. “Amir Kabir College is crossfiled under the heading ‘Islamic bomb.’ You see what I am driving at?”

In the Weeder’s experience there was a magical moment when you were working out any puzzle—it came when a single piece fitted in that suddenly allowed you to see the entire picture. This was such a moment. He saw what Linkletter was driving at, all right, and more. He saw what Wanamaker was up to. He saw what Stufftingle was all about. He saw why American nationals wouldn’t be warned. In his mind’s eye he saw the Nagasaki-type bomb and the Nagasaki-type explosion, and the mushroom cloud spiraling up into the sky over Amir Kabir College in Tehran.

“I’ll bet,” the Weeder told Linkletter, “the ayatollahs have lasers to separate weapons-grade uranium from ordinary uranium.”

“As a matter of fact,” Linkletter said, “there is a school of Company thought which holds that the four lasers supposedly stolen from France in 1978 wound up in Tehran.”

“At Amir Kabir College?”

“It would be the logical home for them.”

Linkletter, pouting, depressed the button on his intercom again. “Tea,” he cried in desperation, “should not be beyond the capacity of the Company to produce in a period of time that has some relation to when the request was made.”

“Feel free,” the secretary retorted, “to dispense with my services when you judge they are no longer useful. Get someone else to run your errands. If you can.”

Smiling blandly, the archivist nodded to himself as if he had confirmed something he already knew. “The secretarial instinct,” he informed the Weeder, “is being bred out of the species. What, I put it to you, is this world coming to?” He eyed the Weeder with something akin to physical desire. “Why did you ask me about Kabir? What do you know that we don’t?”

“I know,” the Weeder said quietly, “that the world is not centered.”

The archivist nodded grimly. “If you ask me, it may even be upside down.”