my good fellow. Very well, come along with me. But don’t think—” and he sent me an arch look—“you can make a habit of it.” I raised one eyebrow, something I’d trained myself to do as a kid when I was a big fan of Commander Spock. That was before real starflight, of course. As Vermeer slid out from behind his desk on a prosthesis, I saw that he’d lost both his legs, presumably in the Venezuelan conflict. Nothing I could do about that, alas. But I had larger fish to fry than a simple limited if brutal armed drone conflict. I followed him to a lift and we rose one floor. He let me into a humidity-controlled sealed room, and directed a functionary to open a vault. The Mars documents remained inside their triple-layer packaging. Even so, the Director drew on a pair of long transparent gloves, fitting them snugly under the turn-ups of his trousers, and wrapped his nose and eyes in a white surgical mask. He handed me a medical kit. “Put these on. We can’t risk damaging precious heirlooms with our breath and bodily aerosols.”
I was already fitted out with antiviral plugs deep inside my nostrils, but I put on mask and gloves and watched in terror as he slid open the containers and placed them carefully on the table. I reached cautiously for the documents, and the Director blocked my hand.
“Strictly hands-off, Professor! Look but do not touch.”
The functionary, a bored fellow some inches shorter and stouter than I, waited with his eyes out of focus, probably watching some Flix drivel. I took the neuronic whip out of my pocket and buzzed the Director to sleep. His head fell forward and hit the table. The functionary gave his boss an astonished look, but by that time I was beside him and cold-cocked him with the whip’s butt. I kicked out of my KT-26 joggers, dragged off his clothes, struggled into them over my own, got my feet stuck in the arms of his numbered Demons football team sweater-trousers. I shoved, had them in place, tugged the shoes back on—I needed something sturdier than a pair of foot mittens. I heaved both men well clear, piled up a stoichiometric mixture of powdered iron oxide and aluminum, and set fire to it with the enhanced lighter. It went up with an explosive huff, and the hot blue blaze evaporated the death-laden logs and started to melt the top of the steel table.
The Director was stirring. I ran to the door, flung it wide. “Fire, fire!” I screamed, and ran to the elevator. “Quick, the treasures!” The polished cedar doors of the old lift creaked open. It was empty. Offices were opening, faces gaping. I flung myself in, hit the ground floor button, breathed deeply as the elevator descended, stepped forth slowly in a dignified manner, paused to retrieve my backpack. Shouts and bells broke out in earnest behind me.
As I skipped light-heartedly down the gray steps and onto the grass, something fast and heavy slammed into my upper back, flung me forward on my face. I rolled, twisted, came up in a crouch, but the Director’s prosthetic had pulled away out of reach. His face was livid with fury. I grabbed at my bruised neck. The rolls of toilet paper had saved me from having my spine ruptured, but I still felt as if I’d been kicked by a horse. Three fat guards tore down the steps, batons raised. I could have killed the lot of them, but my job here was to keep a low profile (ha!) and save lives. A lot of lives. Millions of lives. Mission accomplished.
I sighed and held my hands away from my body. It’s a shame you can’t loop back into your own immediate history or I’d have seen a dozen later versions of me popping up from the gathering crowd, coming to my rescue. Nope, it just didn’t work that way. Maybe Moira—
Through gritted teeth, she was saying in my inload, “Damn it, Bobby, are you all right? Your vitals look okay. Hang on, I’ll be with you in a—”
They hauled me inside again and this time the lift took us down into the basement.
“On my way,” Moira told me. Then, in a softer tone, she said, “Bobby, honey, you done good. Real good. Nine million lives spared. Oh man. When I spring you, we are going to have a party, baby.”
§
“You are the worst kind of terrorist,” Director Vermeer told me in a chill, shaking voice. “In a matter of seconds you destroyed not lives but the very meaning of lives, the certified historical foundation that—”
“So the Martian logs are entirely destroyed?” I tried to rise; two overweight but chunky-muscled guards held me down. At least the functionary I’d stripped of his outer garments wasn’t in the room. His pilfered clothing had been taken away and I suppose returned to him, or maybe held for some kind of forensic examination. I’d expected the place to be swarming with firefighters, ladders, gushing hoses, media cameras. No such thing. Evidently the vault room’s internal fire protection systems had done the job, but not in time.
“Entirely incinerated, you barbarian.”
“Thank dog for that!”
“And blasphemous mockery on top of this devastation, ‘Professor’ Chop.” I could hear the inverted commas. “Oh yes, I wasted no time checking your absurd alibi. The University in Suva has no record of you, no faith exists called Chronosophy, nor is there any Albert M.—”
I chopped him off. “True. I had to deceive you to gain access to those festering Martian plague vectors. You have no idea how lucky you are, Director. How lucky the entire world is.”
“What fresh nonsense is this?”
“In two days’ time you’d have—“ There was a knock at the door of the curator’s office, a long narrow room decorated with holograms of flaring galaxies, rotating, peeling, multiplying nucleic acids, two lions mating rather terrifyingly again and again in a loop, and other detritus of Installations and Exhibitions past. A woman with a floral skirt down to her wrists said apologetically, “Pardon me, Director, but there’s a police Inspector here to speak to the, the prisoner.”
My heart sank. I looked up gloomily, and Moira, in full police uniform worn upside down, but with a peaked cap covering her short red hair, said, “Good afternoon, Director. With your permission, I’d like to speak to this man in private for a moment. Then we’ll be taking him across to Police Headquarters where he will be charged with this heinous offense.” She was carrying my backpack.
“Very well, Inspector. I hope to hear a full accounting in due course. This arson is the most egregious—”
My wife shepherded him to the door, and shooed out the guards with him. “Please take a seat, Mr.... What should I call you?” she said for the sake of the Library staff milling on the other side of the closing door. It clicked shut.
“I think you could call me ‘Bobby,’ honey. Delighted to see you, but how do we proceed from here? We can’t just stroll out and take a tram to the Botanic Gardens.”
“The machine’s out the back. No sense mucking around.”
“Who did you clobber, by the way?”
“Some poor cow downstairs. Had to drag her into the loo to get her uniform off her. She’s trussed up in one of their quaint cubicles. Someone’s bound to find her, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Moira was hyper, on the verge of babbling; she always gets that way when she’s pulled off some amazing exploit.
“Okay, sweetie.” I stood up, groaning, and she marched me toward the door in a stern and professional gait. “Lay on, MacDuff.”
The lift took us back to the ground floor, where the director hovered, literally. “We have transport waiting at the back entrance,” Moira told him. “Let’s keep this as low profile as possible, no sense getting people hysterical. The brain drain is under sedation, he’ll give me no trouble.”
