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The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint. It said:
Hexwood Farm
Wednesday 3 March 1993
Dear Sector Controller,
We though we better send to you in Regional straight off. We got a right problem here. This fool clerk, calls hisself Harrison Scudmore, he went and started one of these old machines running, the one with all the Reigner seals on it, says he overrode the computers to do it. When we say a few words about that, he turns round and says he was bored, he only wanted to make the best all-time football team, you know King Arthur in goal, Julius Ceasar for striker, Napoleon midfield, only this team is for real, he found out this machine can do that, which it do. Trouble is we don’t have the tools nor the training to get the thing turned off, nor we can’t see where the power’s coming from, the thing’s got afield like you wouldn’t believe and it won’t let us out of the place. Much obliged if you could send a trained operative at your earliest convenience.
Yours truly
W. Madden
Foreman Rayner Hexwood Maintenance
(European Division)
PS He says he’s had it running more than a month now.
Sector Controller Borasus stared at the letter and wondered if it was a hoax. W. Madden had not known enough about the Reigner Organisation to send his letter through the proper channels. Only the fact that he had marked his little brown envelope URGENT!!! had caused it to arrive in the Head Office of Albion Sector at all. It was stamped all over with queries from branch offices and had been at least two weeks on the way.
Controller Borasus shuddered slightly. A machine with Reigner seals! If this was not a hoax, it was liable to be very bad news. “It must be someone’s idea of a joke,” he said to his Secretary. “Don’t they have something called April Fools’ Day on Earth?”
“It’s not April there yet,” his Secretary pointed out dubiously. “If you recollect, sir, the date on which you are due to attend their American conference – tomorrow, sir – is 20 March.”
“Then maybe the joker mistimed his letter,” Controller Borasus said hopefully. As a devout man who believed in the Divine Balance perpetually adjusted by the Reigners, and himself as the Reigners’ vicar on Albion, he had a strong feeling that nothing could possibly go really wrong. “What is this Hexwood Farm thing of theirs?”
His Secretary as usual had all the facts. “A library and reference complex,” he answered, “concealed beneath a housing estate not far from London. I have it marked on my screen as one of our older installations. It’s been there a good twelve hundred years, and there’s never been any kind of trouble there before, sir.”
Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax. “Put me through to the place at once.”
His Secretary looked up the codes and punched in the symbols. The Controller’s screen lit with a spatter of expanding lights. It was not unlike what you see when you press your fingers into your eyes.
“Whatever’s that?” said the Controller.
“I don’t know, sir. I’ll try again.” The Secretary cancelled the call and punched the code once more. And again after that. Each time the screen filled with a new flux of expanding shapes. On the Secretary’s third attempt, the coloured rings began spreading off the viewscreen and rippling gently outwards across the panelled wall of the office.
Controller Borasus leant across and broke the connection, fast. The ripples spread a little more, then faded. The Controller did not like the look of it at all. With a cold, growing certainty that everything was not all right after all, he waited until the screen and the wall at last seemed back to normal and commanded, “Get me Earth Head Office.” He could hear that his voice was half an octave higher than usual. He coughed and added, “Runcorn, or whatever the place is called. Tell them I want an explanation at once.”
To his relief, things seemed quite normal this time. Runcorn came up on the screen, looking entirely as it should, in the person of a Junior Executive with beautifully groomed hair and a smart suit, who seemed very startled to see the narrow, august face of the Sector Controller staring out of the screen at him, and even more startled when the Controller asked to speak to the Area Director instantly. “Certainly, Controller. I believe Sir John has just arrived. I’ll put you through—”
“Before you do,” Controller Borasus interrupted, “tell me what you know about Hexwood Farm.”
“Hexwood Farm!” The Junior Executive looked nonplussed. “Er – you mean – Is this one of our information retrieval centres you have in mind, Controller? I think one of them is called something like that.”
“And do you know a maintenance foreman called W. Madden?” demanded the Controller.
“Not personally, Controller,” said the Junior Executive. It was clear that if anyone else had asked him this question, the Junior Executive would have been very disdainful indeed. He said cautiously, “A fine body of men, Maintenance. They do an excellent job servicing all our offworld machinery and supplies, but of course, naturally, Controller, I get into work some hours after they’ve—”
“Put me through to Sir John,” sighed the Controller.
Sir John Bedford was as surprised as his Junior Executive. But after Controller Borasus had asked only a few questions, a slow horror began to creep across Sir John’s healthy businessman’s face.
“Hexwood Farm is not considered very important,” he said uneasily. “It’s all history and archives there. Of course that does mean that it holds a number of classified records – it has all the early stuff about why the Reigner Organisation keeps itself secret here on Earth – how the population of Earth arrived here as deported convicts and exiled malcontents, and so forth – and I believe there is a certain amount of obsolete machinery stored there too – but I can’t see how our clerk would be able to tamper with any of that. We run it through just the one clerk, you see, and he’s pretty poor stuff, only in the Grade K information bracket—”
“And Grade K means?” asked Controller Borasus.
“It means he’ll have been told that Rayner Hexwood International is actually an intergalactic firm,” Sir John explained, “but that should be absolutely all he knows – probably less than Maintenance, who are also Grade K. Maintenance pick up a thing or two in the course of their work. That’s unavoidable. They visit every secret installation once a month to make sure everything stays in working order, and to supply the stass-stores with food and so forth, and I suspect quite a few of them know far more than they’ve been told, but they’ve been carefully tested for loyalty. None of them would play a joke like this.”
Sir John, Controller Borasus decided,
