Wednesday didn’t start much better than Tuesday, and even the feeling of partial success I’d felt four hours before dissolved under the barrage of the alarm’s chimes. I finally dug myself out of sleep and pulled on exercise clothes. I even managed to run over the top of the hill and to the end of the ridge, despite the cold mist that pricked my face like fine needles. Each foot hit the ground like an anvil on the way back.
Breakfast wasn’t much, not with the state of my larder, but I managed with Russian Imperial tea, the rest of the biscuits, and a pear I reclaimed from the cellar. After leaving the dishes in the sink, I showered and dressed, deciding that I was going to be late. The hell with office hours. I needed to add mercy to justice.
I was standing in the foyer when Marie rapped on the door.
“Good morning, Doctor Eschbach. Have you had the chance to—” Marie had her coat off before I had closed the door.
“Good morning, Marie. No, but I will shop this afternoon. Unhappily, the dishes are merely rinsed.”
“A few dishes, that’s not much. You leave me too little to earn my pay. But you had best lay in a goodly supply of staples, Doktor. Do you think that you could run down to town for food in a snowstorm anytime?” Her expression was somewhere between a sniff and a snort.
“I will lay in significant supplies. I promise. But this morning I’ll be working in the study for an hour or two. I hope that doesn’t disturb you.”
“Since I cannot bake or prepare food, there being nothing to prepare, I will finish the kitchen and then, if you do not mind, I will reorder the fruit cellar. It has needed cleaning—a good cleaning—for a long time.” She looked at me and added, “A very long time.” She rolled up the cuffs of her gray long-sleeved blouse. I went into the study and turned on the difference engine.
Adding mercy to justice was far easier said than done, especially with Babbage codes, but when I left at ten-thirty, I had a projected ghost image that felt somewhat softer, with a sense of justice. That had to do, even though it still gave me a chill, knowing that I scarcely measured up to the ideal I’d created. I also wondered if what I felt was merely my imagination or something another person could feel, but I wasn’t about to call Marie in for an opinion.
I almost felt guilty when I disassociated the ghost construct, but how could I fill my study with ghosts of justice in various stages of sensibility? And the ethical issues? I just shook my head, imagining that Carolynne was probably doing worse
than that, were she even watching. Or did she think, or merely quote halfremembered dialogue at me?
When I left for the university, Marie was still in the cellar, mumbling about my various failures. I guess I wasn’t quite Dutch enough for her, or perhaps the cleanliness was the feminine aspect of Dutch culture.
Gray and cold—that was still the weather as I drove down Deacon’s Lane and into Vanderbraak Centre to pick up the paper at Samaha’s. It was more like December than early November, and I hoped that didn’t mean a really long winter.
David—Herr Professor Doktor Doniger—was on me as soon as I reached my box. “Johan, I know you’ve been working hard, but do you suppose you could let Gilda know if you won’t make office hours?”
“No. I haven’t missed a damned office hour all term.”
David swallowed. “It is the policy.”
“Bother the policy.” I left him standing there even as I realized he would probably be scheming to get me back under control. David liked everything under control, and the results would probably be nasty. At that point I didn’t care, but half realized that I would later.
I went up to my office to collect the tests I’d graded so that I could return them.
The wind was blowing again as I walked over to Smythe, although the sky was clearing and showing a coldly cheerful blue. I didn’t feel cheerful.
At eleven o’clock I practically threw the greenbooks at the Environmental Economics class. “Someday, ladies and gentlemen, and I use those terms merely as a courtesy, you will come to understand that there are too many unanticipated crises in life for you to postpone what you can do now until the last possible moment. Life often does not give you those moments. Call this a dress rehearsal for life.”
Of course, they didn’t understand a word of what I meant.
“Sir, how much will this count on our final grade?”
“Is there anyway to obtain some additional credit?”
“Life doesn’t provide extra credit,” I snapped, “and neither do I.” I shouldn’t have snapped, but they didn’t have the Spazi hanging over their heads. Probably half of them didn’t even know who or what the Spazi was.
Somehow I managed to get through the lecture and discussion without snapping or yelling again. That was fine, except Gilda and Constable Gerhardt were both waiting for me back at the department office.
“Constable Gerhardt, this is Doktor Eschbach.”
“Thank you.” He tipped his hat to her and turned to me. “If I could speak with you …”
“Let’s go up to my office,” I suggested.
He nodded, and up we went. I set aside the still-ungraded Environmental Politics papers.
“This business about professor Branston-Hay …”
“What business?”
“His accident, of course.”
“I’m sorry, Constable, but I didn’t know he’d been in an accident. When did it happen?”
The worthy watch functionary gave me one of those looks that tends to signify disbelief before explaining. “His steamer piled into a tree on Hoecht’s Hill late yesterday afternoon. He died before they could get him to the hospital.”
“I didn’t know.”
“The throttle valve jammed open.” Constable Gerhardt spread the fingers of his right hand about a half-centimeter apart. “A bolt about this big jammed in the assembly.”
“Why didn’t he turn the bypass valve?”
“He hit the brakes first, and they failed, corroded lines. By then it was too late. He was probably going too fast and bouncing around too much to reach it. He was driving a Ford, not a Stanley, and on the older models, you have quite a reach.”
My father had always said to buy quality, and Branston-Hay’s example certainly confirmed that wisdom.
Poor Branston-Hay. He’d had to throttle the old black steamer all the way up to climb Hoecht’s Hill, and then the throttle had jammed on the downside. Except it hadn’t been an accident.
“Who was chasing him?” I asked, since it was clear the constable was there to deliver a message from Chief Waetjen.
“Chasing him?”
“Professor Branston-Hay was a careful and methodical man. He was headed home, or at least in the direction of home. Why would he be going so fast?”
“I don’t know, sir. I only know that Chief Waetjen told me to tell you what happened.”
I’d done it for sure. Good stolid Constable Gerhardt would tell Waetjen of my question and, sure as the sun rose, Officer Warbeck would know, and so would vanBecton.
“Thank you.” I rose. “I appreciate the courtesy and the information.”
“I was just letting you know, sir. The chief said you should be told.” The constable rose as he spoke, having done his duty and his inadvertent best to roast my gander.
After that, I wasn’t hungry. So I graded papers for almost two hours, not the smartest thing to do, especially on an empty stomach. And I probably shouldn’t have bothered with my two o’clock, but … you take on obligations, and you become reluctant not to carry them out.
When I dispersed the corrected greenbooks and a sermon similar to the one I had delivered at eleven o’clock, there was just silence, the appalled silence of an entire class that has just realized that Kris Kringle is a myth and that Mother and Father filled the wooden shoes with coal, and they meant it for real.
After class I left the pile of Environmental Politics 2B papers and went shopping at McArdles’, since, as Marie had pointed out, there was nothing to fix, not even for the most industrious and resourceful of Dutch ladies.
Two women in white-trimmed bonnets looked blankly at me as I left the meat counter, but I heard the whispers after I turned toward the flour and corn and oatmeal.
“Doktor Eschbach … say he was once a spy …”
“Once a spy, always a spy—that’s what I say.”
“You know, the foreign woman and him
I didn’t like the term “spy,” but “intelligence agent” was even worse, and as for the other terms … I took a deep breath and put the flour in the cart.
Once I got home, it took five trips to unload. Marie had actually been so resourceful that, when I walked into the kitchen, there was some type of tart-strudel and a pot of barley soup waiting. I didn’t know how she had done it. After the chill of unloading all those packages—they’d filled the trunk and the back seat of the steamer, since I’m sometimes an extremist—I ladled out a bowlful and sat at the kitchen table, letting the spicy steam wreathe my face before each spoonful, trying not to think about vanBecton, Miranda, and poor Gerald. The soup was so good that I almost managed it.
After supper, I sat for awhile in the dimness before I had company.
“At some hours in the night spirits resort … alack, is it not like that I … Oh, look, methinks I saw my cousin’s ghost …” Carolynne made an effort to sit on the corner stool, even if she had a tendency to drift around and through it.
“Your cousin’s ghost. Probably not. Or did you mean the one I created this morning? I felt badly about disassociating him, though.”
“Thou couldst give no help?”
“How can one help something that was not quite alive?”
“And bid me go and hide me with a dead man in his shroud …”
“Wonderful. If I make a better ghost, I’ll then qualify for murder.”
“… that did spit his body upon a rapier’s point … is it not like the horrible conceit of death and night?”
That was another good question—one I really didn’t have a good answer for. Was sleep a form of death? Was Babbage storage of a synthetic ghost sleep or death? “I don’t know. I feel it’s more like sleep, but I couldn’t say why.”
Unlike most people, who, when you say that you “feel” something, pester you to give rational and logical reasons, Carolynne did not. She just gave a faint nod before speaking. “So tedious is this day …”
“Tedious? In a way. On Monday, I warned a man to be careful that he did not suffer an accidental death. On Tuesday, he died in a steamer accident that I do not believe was an accident. I have this feeling that some others are going to try to prove that I created the accident.”
“What storm is this that blows so contrary?”
“Contrary indeed. But that doesn’t really count.” I forced a smile. “From what I hear, you should know about that.”
“… that murdered me. I would forget it fain, but, oh, it presses to my memory like damned guilty deeds to sinners’ minds… . How shall that faith return again to earth?”
Faith? Did I even have faith, or was I believing what I wanted? Hearing what I wanted from a demented ghost who at least seemed to listen when no one else did? When I stopped asking questions, Carolynne was gone.
What could I do, even as the noose was tightening? Listen to a half-sentient ghost as if she were alive?
I had enough of Branston-Hay’s letterhead to compose a couple of letters, since I could use blank second sheets from our own department’s stock; all the second sheets were the same. Sometimes paper helped.
The first letter was to Minister Holmbek, protesting the perversion of the VSU Babbage Center research toward developing “psychic phenomena erasure technologies.” The second one was also to Holmbek, protesting the failure to extend the research contract as blackmail. I wrote it more politely than that, suggesting that “the Center’s disinclination to pursue psychically destructive technologies has resulted in withdrawal of federal funding contrary to the original letter of agreement.”
Branston-Hay hadn’t been that courageous, but his family would rather have him a dead hero than a dead coward, and, besides, it just might keep me alive.
I was running out of time, and at least one of the questions was how Waetjen and Warbeck intended to pin Branston-Hay’s death on me. Maybe I had nuts or something in my car barn the same size as the one that had seized poor Branston-Hay’s throttle.
And then again, maybe I hadn’t, but did now. I set down the memos and rummaged in the desk for one of the flashes that I kept putting in safe places and never finding again. There was one behind the Babbage disk case.
I walked out to the car barn through the freezing drizzle and studied the workbench and bolt bins under the dim overhead light and my flash. Was the bin cover at the end less dusty? I opened it. There were two different sizes of nuts in the last bin, and I never mixed sizes. The larger ones were clearly newer.
I pulled them out and pocketed them, then dusted off all the bin covers and the top of the workbench. That way, there would be nothing to indicate that only one bin had been used. I closed the car barn and walked down the lawn in the darkness toward the tangles of black raspberry thickets. There I pocketed two of the nuts and scattered the rest, well back into the thickets where no one would find them unless they were to uproot the entire yard. If they did that … I shrugged. Nothing would save me then.
I walked slowly back to the house. My gut reaction was to run, but that was
clearly what Warbeck or Waetjen or vanBecton had in mind. Somehow I had to put the light back on them—get suspicions raised about the watch.
I smiled grimly. Perhaps I could plant a rumor or two, get their pot boiling and force them to act hastily. In the meantime, I had a lot to wind up—one hell of a lot.
The first thing I did was polish my prints off the two nuts and put them into the false drawer in the bedroom, the one containing miscellaneous “evidence.”
I needed to get my geese in order, so to speak, because I doubted there was much time left before the rotten grain hit the mill wheel. Part of dealing with a problem lies in how you set things up before everything starts flying, and some of that is hard evidence, and some is how you handle the paperwork—and the truth. I decided that my approach would have to be truthful lying, so to speak.
It was late by the time I had finished and printed all four memoranda. After flicking off the difference engine, I began to reread the copies I had printed.
I studied the first memo. Not so polished as I would have liked, but, given the contents, and its accuracy, I doubted that the press would balk too much.
| FROM: |
Ralston McGuiness |
| TO: |
WLA |
| SUBJECT: |
Psychic Research Budget Reviews |
| DATE: |
October 10, 1993 |
Background
The Budget Review Office has identified more than a dozen concealed university-based psychic research projects, including those which have already been compromised by some form of public disclosure, such as St. Louis …
The majority have been funded under Babbage-related research lines within the Defense Ministry budget …
This research has identified clear potential for implementing deghosting techniques …
Despite public denials, Speaker Hartpence receives regular reports on major projects …
Leaders of virtually all major religious orders, but particularly those of the Anglican-Baptists, the Roman Catholic Church, the Spirit of God, the Unified Congregation of the Holy Spirit, and the Latter Day Saints, have taken positions firmly opposing such research …
International Considerations
Similar psychic research is ongoing in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as reported in both international media and by the Spazi …
To date, Spazi reports (attached) indicate that agents of Japan, Austro-Hungary, and New France have been definitely identified in conjunction with espionage surrounding Columbian psychic research …
Several unsolved murders, including the Vanderbraak State University incident, appear associated with such espionage … clear indications that Speaker Hartpence’s staff has begun efforts to divert inquiries onto either New French sources or even former government personnel …
Recommendations
Since the presidency has no power over the actual composition and disbursement of Defense Ministry funds and since the Speaker has publicly avoided any comment on psychic research, bringing the matter before the national media would probably prove counterproductive at this time. Some media favorable to the Speaker would attribute any exposure of the Speaker’s covert psychic research program to pure political motivations.
Likewise, attempting to meet with the Speaker could also prove counterproductive …
Recommend that you continue to use budgetary analyses and disclosure in areas where a greater public sympathy and understanding exist, and where the Speaker’s policies run counter to that public sympathy, such as the size of naval forces and the need for totally free transoceanic trade …
Also recommend that you avoid any discussions or comments about psychic phenomena and research funding. This one is a loser!
I grinned. While it certainly wasn’t perfect, it had just the right feel. It even sounded like Ralston, and the twist was, of course, that the disclosure of the memorandum would be totally against its contents, which would reinforce its validity with the press. Even the sensationalist videolink reporters would appreciate that.
The second memo I had composed dealt with the upcoming presidential budget review of the Defense Ministry outlays.
| TO: |
GDvB |
| FROM: |
Elrik vanFlaam |
| Budget Controller |
| SUBJECT: |
Psychic Research Budget Reviews |
| DATE: |
October 12, 1993 |
The new Babbage engines being used by the president’s budget examiners have greater integrative capabilities than the earlier models. In addition, the president’s budget task force on program funding distribution now has the capability to cross-index disbursements by program category and amount, and such analyses are proceeding.
A leak from the black side of the budget has also been integrated, which will reveal psychic research disbursements by region. Plotting these against the institutions receiving funds will clearly outline the scope and magnitude of the program.
In view of the Speaker’s avowed disavowal of Defense Ministry research on psychic phenomena, the publication of any such analyses could prove somewhat difficult to reconcile.
The budget controller’s memo was almost innocuous, except for the last line. That was the trick—to make each document as innocuous as possible, but to have the composite paint a damning picture. That way, it also gave the reporters away to claim that they had “discovered” the scandal, rather than having it handed to them.
The third memo, to GH (Gerald Hartpence) from CA (Charles Asquith), apparently just dealt with press office support. Again, the implications were almost totally between the lines.
| TO: |
GH |
| FROM: |
CA |
| SUBJECT: |
Press Support Allocations |
| DATE: |
October 15, 1993 |
As discussed, we have reassigned another press officer to provide logistical and informational support to the psychic research issue …
The new fact sheets showing a comparative decline in all psychic research will be ready shortly, as will a full briefing book …
We should be ready to brief you on the initiative to assume credit for the Japanese initiative …
“Whither goest thou?” asked Carolynne.
“I’ll make these available to the press.”
“Is there no pity sitting in the clouds?”
No pity? “The time is past for pity—that is, if I want to keep my head somewhere close to my body.”
“With treacherous revolt … this shall slay them both …”
“Probably. Except … is a false document which brings out the truth a forgery or a fraud?”
Carolynne looked at me, and I thought I saw tears in her ghostly eyes, and then she was gone. I wished I could have gone to bed, or held her, or something. But I couldn’t do any of those things. Instead, I began to create another false document. Because it was meant to be crude, it didn’t take that long. I even printed it up in the cheap-looking Courier style.
WHY DO THE NEW HEATHEN RAGE AGAINST THE SPIRITS?
The corrupt government in our federal city has conspired to destroy the spirits of our fathers and forefathers. A man is nothing without his spirit. The haughtiest and the mightiest shall find that their possessions and their worldly attributes shall be for naught, and that their wealth shall avail them nothing …
After reading the diatribe of the “Order of Jeremiah” through, I printed ten copies on draft on my cheapest copy paper, addressed the necessary envelopes, then went up to bed and collapsed.