The Better Mousetrap (9 page)

‘I see-one of yours?’

“Fraid so. Started off as something I had to deal with to get the simulations up and running, turned into a bit of a hobby. In fact, I only just missed out on the Nobel prize the year before I in twenty years’ time. Pipped to the post by a very clever old bloke from Malaysia-would you believe he’s managed to calculate the square root of—’ He hesitated. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Better not go into that, might be letting the cat out of the bag. Anyway. Yes, I like to dabble a bit here and there. I got algorhythm, you might say.’ He frowned. ‘Sorry, what were we—? Oh yes. People in the trade. Point is, they’re bloody hard to plot. They keep nipping in and out of alternative realities and post-sequential subordinate time-lines and all sorts of aggravating stuff like that. Makes tracking them a bit like catching a gnat with a butterfly net. And the bottom line is, lots more sums to do. Which means lots more work, which in turn calls for—’

He didn’t say lots more money, because it wasn’t necessary. Mr Sprague pulled a sad face. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he said.

Frank shifted uncomfortably. ‘Would twenty per cent be really greedy?’ he said. ‘Only, I’ll probably have to invent a whole new methodology for calibrating the self-cancelling resonances, plus I’ll need to do all the calculations in base eight and base twelve as well as base ten, because of the-because of a lot of stuff that I’d better not tell you about, because if it gets discovered before the next US presidential election, there’s likely to be this sort of global-holocaust thing, so you’re just going to have to—’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Agreed,’ said Mr Sprague; and then he added, ‘Base eight?’

‘You really do need to forget I said that. Just think,’ Frank added, with rather more cunning than he’d have credited himself with, ‘of all the insurance claims there’d be if Plymouth got wiped off the map by a cryo-molecular bomb.’

‘Cryo—’ Mr Sprague’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Fine. Fifteen per cent, then. After all,’ he added, with a mild shudder, ‘it’s not as though I have a choice.’

‘Not if the poor woman’s already dead,’ Frank said sympathetically. ‘Forces your hand rather, I can see that. And I promise, it really is just because of the extra calculations. I mean, for the run-of-the-mill jobs, I’ve always considered ten per cent is more than fair. Anyhow, there it is. Sorry.’

Mr Sprague sighed. ‘It’s a deal, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll look forward to—’ He stopped. He’d just noticed something. ‘No dog today, then?’

Frank nodded. ‘Actually,’ he said, lowering his voice to a whisper, ‘I think I may have given the wretched thing the slip.’

‘Oh. You mean-I thought you liked—’

‘Me?’ Frank shook his head industriously. ‘Not a bit of it. Don’t like dogs, and as a general rule dogs don’t like me. Usually it’s ears back and deep growling as soon as they clap eyes on me. Which is fine,’ he added. ‘Nothing harder than trying to be friends with someone you can’t stand just because they happen to like you, and even more so with bloody dogs. Mind you, he’s wandered off before, and just when I think it’s safe and I can carry on with my life, I go through the Door and there he is, curled up on the other side and waiting for me, you know, the way they do.’

Mr Sprague grinned unpleasantly. ‘You’ll miss him,’ he said.

‘No chance,’ Frank said quickly. ‘Doglessness means not having to go around with a pocketful of plastic bags, not to mention eating food that hasn’t got a wet, snuffly nose in it. You know what? For the first time in ages, I feel like I really have a future.’

Mr Sprague nodded. ‘You more than most people. Several, in fact.’

Frank smiled bleakly. ‘Time-travel jokes,’ he said. ‘When I retire, I’m going to put them all in a book, provided there’s still enough rainforest left to provide that much paper. Anyhow, mustn’t keep you, I know you’re a busy man. Although,’ he added, grinning faintly, ‘by the time I meet you again, this little chat won’t have happened, so I needn’t feel quite so guilty about it. Be seeing—’

‘Hold on,’ Mr Sprague said, frowning as an unpleasant thought occurred to him. ‘What you just said. Does that mean well, does it mean there’s great chunks of my life, when I’m talking to you, or working on cases that you end up making never happen …’ His mouth was unaccountably dry, though he did his best not to let it show. ‘What I mean is, what happens to them? And what about the man who’s talking to you right now? Do I get, well, rewound or something, and then recorded over after you’ve—?’

Frank beamed at him. ‘You know,’ he said cheerfully, ‘you always ask me that. Cheerio.’

The Door opened in a red-brick wall in a dusty courtyard shaded from the oppressive sun by an ancient fig tree. It disturbed the concentration of a big stocky man with a long grey beard as he sat under the tree sketching a design for some sort of machine. He looked up, recognised Frank Carpenter and

nodded.

‘How’s it coming?’ Frank said, in a somewhat archaic dialect of Italian, although of course the words had been modern English when he framed them in his mind. One of the things he loved about the Door was its attention to detail.

‘Bloody thing,’ the man replied. ‘I mean, birds don’t have this problem. They just hop off the edge of the nest and it happens. They don’t have to give themselves headaches figuring out surface-to-weight ratios.’ As he spoke, he was doodling a man’s head in the margin. ‘The way I see it, if God had meant us to fly he’d have given us—’

‘Imagination,’ Frank said. ‘And a pair of opposable thumbs. Stick at it and you’ll get there in the end, you’ll see.’

The man glanced down at his piece of paper, then looked up. There was a faint gleam of cunning behind his eyes. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you know all about this stuff, where you come from.’

‘When I come from,’ Frank corrected him. ‘And yes, we know, but I don’t, if you follow me. Specialisation, it’s the curse of our age. Whereas your lot-we have a saying, in my time: Renaissance man. Means a man who can do pretty much anything if he sets his mind to it.’

The grey-bearded man muttered something vulgar, crumpled up the sheet of paper and threw it away. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘One little hint wouldn’t kill you.’

‘Not me, maybe.’ Frank sighed. He didn’t like saying no to people, particularly those he’d admired for as long as he could remember. ‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘If I told you, it’d be cheating. You’d miss out on the wonderful sense of achievement that you only get from doing it all yourself.’

‘Fine. As opposed to missing out on a hundred thousand Florentine ducats.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Thir— twenty per cent of which could be yours,’ he said, ‘if only you didn’t have such fine principles.’

Frank shook his head. ‘You’ll get there in the end,’ he said.

The grey-bearded man said something which the Door translated perfectly, which was a pity. Frank shrugged, and watched him stomp off in a huff. When he was out of sight, he picked up the discarded ball of paper and smoothed it out. It was, of course, horribly tempting; and what harm could it do?

He looked at it again, sighed, and dropped it. He’d read the book and seen the film (though he didn’t think it was quite as bad as everybody made out). The last thing he wanted to do was be responsible for a sequel.

He settled himself down under the shade of the fig tree, looked round to make sure he was alone, and flipped open the cover of his palmtop. Nowhere and nowhen quite like fifteenth-century Tuscany, he always reckoned, for doing really heavy maths. It was the clean air, or the scent of the lavender, or something. He pressed a button and the screen began to glow.

Cheating, Frank thought. It could be so easy. It could be something as simple as taking this perfectly ordinary Kawaguchiya XPK-36 back to a computer-hardware manufacturer in, say, 2005 and letting them salivate over it for a minute or two before naming his price. Thirty years’ difference; close enough in time that the potential buyer would realise what it was and, eventually, be able to figure out how it worked and how to copy it. But thirty years in the electronics biz is the same sort of gap that separates-well, the space shuttle and Leonardo da Vinci. One little act of betrayal and he could have, if not all the money in the world, then at least a substantial proportion of it. But even his poxy little Kawaguchiya palmtop (last year’s model; practically an antique) had enough computing power to run the simulation that’d show him how catastrophically disastrous that move would be. Cryo-molecular bombs would be coloured lights and candy floss compared with what’d happen if a turn-ofthe-century caveman got his hands on post-Enlightenment technology. Which was why it was so essential, he reckoned, that the Door either stayed hidden in a very deep, dark place, or else came to live with just the right sort of person. Someone with principles, yes; but principles in moderation. The thought of the utter carnage that would result from the Door falling into the moist little hands of an idealist, someone who Only Wanted To Make The World A Better Place, was enough to melt your brain until it started dribbling out of your ears.

Frank Carpenter was realistic about his own intellect, talent and worth, but he couldn’t help feeling that he met the Door’s ownership criteria fairly well: moderately bright while being intelligent enough to know that a great many people were cleverer than he was, selfish enough to have a vested interest in keeping it secret and safe, shallow enough not to be tempted to use it for the betterment of mankind, and with just enough traces of decency clinging to the bottom of the barrel to care about the consequences.

He read through the dead girl’s biographical information for the fourth time, and set about the ticklish job of reducing it all to numbers. It was maths, sure enough: no insight or intuition required. You read the words and translated them into figures, as simple and scientific as that. But he couldn’t help feeling there was a little bit more to it and that, for some reason he couldn’t quite understand, it wasn’t something that just anybody with a postgraduate degree and a calculator could do. Even though he’d proved the formulae over and over again, to the point where he was completely satisfied that they were right and they worked, this stage of the job always struck him as a cross between number-crunching and playing pinball with a blindfold on.

Frank concentrated. Maths was one of the few things he could actually concentrate on. It hooked his mind in a way that mere words or events somehow never could. Gradually, the shapes began to form; lines intersected like a worm-eaten Underground map, clusters formed and clotted, paths bifurcated, ran parallel and rejoined. What he hadn’t told George Sprague was that he’d failed to get his Nobel prize because, compared to him, the judges had only just mastered the six-times table. The silly thing was, he was entirely self-taught. Dad belonged to the nine-ten-lots school of numeracy, and at the progressive school that Mum had insisted on sending him to maths was even more optional than all the other subjects. Indeed, there were moments during his occasional outbreaks of self-doubt when he wondered whether it was really the Door doing all these clever sums, the way it translated languages and sometimes supplied him with memories of relevant historical and geographical data that he knew for a fact he’d never learned. It was possible, but he doubted it. Three-in-the-morning thinking, and even he knew better than to pay it much attention.

He stopped. The numbers—

Frank thought about it for a moment, then went back and did the last three sets of equations again, this time in base eight. It made no difference. He frowned. The numbers—

Yes, of course it sounded ridiculous, when he tried to put it into words. Nevertheless. The numbers simply weren’t working. It was as though someone had switched off the gravity, and suddenly everything was in free fall, without mass or density; as though all the numbers had suddenly become interchangeable, with six having the same value as nine.

Frank sighed. Magic, of course. It wasn’t a subject that had ever interested him much, mostly because it refused to obey the laws of mathematics. Dad had told him the stuff came in two basic sorts, Effective and Practical; the difference being that when a Practical magician turned a policeman into a frog, the result was a genuine frog, whereas if an Effective magician did the same trick, what you got was a policeman who believed he was a frog, a belief shared with everybody else in the world. Generally speaking, both types got the job done efficiently enough for the file to be closed and an invoice sent, which was all the bosses cared about. One of the few differences was that maths took no notice of Effective magic, while Practical messed it up good and proper. Faced with an instance of Practical magic, maths was a wheel spinning in mud, unable to grip.

Which put him in an awkward position. If he couldn’t do the maths, he couldn’t run the simulations; in which case, he couldn’t accept the assignment. That would mean going back to George Sprague and breaking it to him that this time he was going to have to pay out on a claim, something that he had an almost religious objection to doing. And Frank liked George Sprague. He was the closest thing Frank had to-well, a friend. It’d be the first time he’d failed. He really didn’t want to do it.

But if he couldn’t run the simulation— Deep inside his mind, something small and rather ugly woke up. Thinking about it later, Frank couldn’t help personifying it as the little bit of goblin he’d apparently inherited from his father’s side of the family. Go on, it whispered, and its voice was soft and appealing. What harm could it possibly do?

Frank shivered. It was a phrase he’d taught himself to react to, the way a woodland animal reacts to the sound of a breaking twig.

Besides, the voice went on, it’s not as though you’d be doing it for yourself. You know you aren’t in this for the money, not really. Do it for good old George. Your pal.

Yes, but—

He tried to get a grip. He tried to concentrate on the fact that he’d beaten George up from ten to fifteen per cent on this job, so it stood to reason that if he took the risk, it’d be because of the money, because of greed. It almost worked.