The Lonely Whelk (17 page)

“
It actually gets kind of
boring after a while,” John said. “Quin gets the really fun part.
He’s going to find out if it will take us to any locations we don’t
know about.”

“
How does he do
that?”

“
Classified.” John
shrugged. “But for the rest of today, you’ll follow me around some
more. Tomorrow morning you can help Naytiri, et al. do some math,
and then you can spend the rest of the day on this. I’ll also have
some files delivered to your office with all of the original tests
done on the Door.”

“
I get an
office?”

“
Of course!” John replied.
“You’re standing in it!”

Clyde was feeling a little tense after the
incident in the Door Room. Rock had explained the meaning and
implications of a red Door, and although Clyde felt that their
security procedures were actually quite good – compared to their
security features in other areas, at least – it still made him feel
a bit anxious. Rock had then taken time to show Clyde all of the
different features of the Security Room, and then left him in
charge of watching the screens. This was an easy enough job, but as
Ivanna the Bard said,
Easy is only as valuable as its outcome,
as is difficulty.

The screens splayed out in front of him like
the many-faceted gaze of a mitleed fly gazing into the bowels of a
rhinoraffe. Each screen showed a different room. Sometimes there
were many screens showing the same room from all angles; the Door
Room was a prime example of this.

The outside screens flipped from one room to
another, all displaying labs with nothing very interesting going
on. The center bank of screens showed the Door Room from many
angles. The layer of screens in the middle varied from outdoor
scenes to the secretary’s front desk to a large kitchen to a zoo to
a few dark rooms. Clyde leaned in to peer at the screen showing the
zoo; this screen flipped from one animal cage to another. The
animals were very strange, unlike any he had ever seen. They must
be from other planets, he assumed. Some had highly
technologically-advanced cages, which he presumed provided
different mixtures of elements in the air.

He had just turned his gaze back to the Door
Room when his comm buzzed.

“
Clyde,” Rock said. “John
just fired a young man named Boris. He is leaving the Door Room
now. Please keep your eye on him and ensure that he leaves the
building.”

Clyde gulped. This was a nearly impossible
task, given that he had not yet completely learned the layout of
the building. This meant that he couldn’t be sure which cameras
mapped to what screens.

“
Use the blueprint on the
table,” Rock’s voice continued to crackle over the comm, apparently
reading his mind, “to figure out what route he should take. You
will see small numbers associated to the cameras. Those numbers are
on the edges of the screens.”

“
Got it,” Clyde replied,
running over to the table with the blueprint. The blueprint was a
book about a hundred pages thick. He picked it up and flipped
through; the Door Room, according to the Index, was on page 12.
Door Room to elevator, he assumed, and then out the front. It
shouldn’t be too hard. Unless he went back to his office
first.

“
What is his office
number?” Clyde asked.

“
3359,” Rock replied, “and
remember to turn off the comm when you’re not using it. I can hear
you breathing.”

“
Yessir.” Clyde looked down
at the Comm. Which button was it? The white one, the green one, or
the gold one? He frowned and hit the green one. He flipped through
the book for a few minutes and figured out a good route that Boris
should be taking: cameras 77, 342, 333, 56, 558, 0044, 23, and
1002. Plus the elevator camera: 5.

He looked up at the screen. Boris was in the
hallway outside the Door Room talking on his phone. Clyde glanced
at his notepad – the next screen was 342. Boris began to wander
slowly down the hallway; he was talking animatedly, waving his free
hand around, and looking quite irritated. He got in the elevator –
camera 5. Clyde moved his eyes to camera 0044. This was the ground
floor camera where he should come out. He waited.

“
Clyde?” Rock’s voice
emanated from the comm. “The secretary says he hasn’t showed up
yet.”

“
He’s in the elevator,”
Clyde said, hitting a button on the comm without taking his eyes
off the screen.

“
Great,” Rock replied. “He
is not authorized to go back to his office. Don’t let him get
away.”

“
Yessir.”

Clyde looked back at camera 5. Boris was
gone, and had not appeared on 0044. He looked around frantically.
Where had Boris gone? There he was: camera 1222… what floor was
that?

He ran to the blueprints.

“
Rock,” he said. “Boris is
on camera 1222, which is...” He flipped the pages
rapidly.

“
That’s not good,” Rock
replied. He was breathing heavily. “He’s gone towards the
high-level offices – John and Quin’s floor. Check cameras 37, 47,
and 60–69.”

Clyde spun around and gazed at the numbers.
Boris was in 37.

“
Thirty-seven,” Clyde
stated.

Rock didn’t respond.

Boris reappeared on screen 60.

“
Rock?” Clyde asked. He
didn’t hear anything. He could feel his heart rate going up. This
was very stressful.

Boris was now on 63, and appeared to be
fiddling with a doorknob. He looked over his shoulder anxiously. A
moment later, he opened the lock and vanished into the dark.

One of the dark screens blazed to life.
Boris was in an office with a massive desk shaped like a turtle
with a disk on its back. He was rifling through the desk drawers.
What could he be looking for? He flicked his eyes across the other
screens. It was hard to watch one specific screen and pay attention
to all the others at the same time, given that there were probably
several hundred over the entire wall. He finally found screen 1002,
which was the one with the secretary. Bob was frowning and flicking
a little red light on and off. Clyde wondered if that was some sort
of signal. There were three people at the desk: a woman wearing an
atrocious wig, a giant, terrifying man, and a thin spidery man.

Where was Rock?

“
Rock?” Clyde asked
anxiously. He pushed the buttons. There weren’t enough staff.
Someone needed to deal with the people at the front desk and
someone needed to deal with Boris. Either that or they needed to
lock down and deal with the problems one at a time. If Rock could
send some of the other members of the security staff over, then
this wouldn’t be an issue. Unless all of the other security were
trapped together with Rock.

“
Rock, where are you?” he
said, hitting the button. “Secure building, now!”

To his horror, he saw that he had hit the
gold button and a moment later he heard his own voice echoing
through the loudspeaker system of the Globe: “Secure building,
now!”

Kaia stood in the middle of the Door Room,
trying desperately to take in all of the details flooding in from
all directions while John stood talking to Professor Backriver. She
had just acclimated to the noise and begun tuning out the
conversations that were interfering with John’s when a voice came
over the loudspeaker. It said quite clearly: “Secure building,
now.”

John let out a loud sigh. “Well, that wasn’t
Rock.” He grinned. “This is turning into an interesting first day
for you, isn’t it? Watch.”

A hush fell over the room just as the
message ended. Then the sounds flared back up, roaring through the
room like a wave – people talking, discussing, making up rumors
about what the message meant. Professor Backriver didn’t even say
goodbye; he headed towards the nearest Door and was gone. The next
moment, people from other planets went home – just like that. It
was the strangest thing Kaia had ever seen. One minute, there were
hundreds of people milling about the massive room. The next moment,
they seemed to disappear as they stepped through the Doors, just
popping out of existence like bubbles: Pop! Pop! Pop!

Then the scientists began to disappear. A
few of the white-smocked clowder went through the Doors, but most
of them gathered up their papers and headed straight for the exit.
In less than a minute, the room was nearly empty.

“
Everyone is trying to
leave the building,” Quin informed them, bursting in, “and we have
a suspicious group of conspiracists entering through the front.
Rock is stuck in the permanent hospital wing. He’s being held
captive by Mad Jack.”

“
Mad Jack?” Kaia
asked.

“
We have a bunch of people
here who have just crossed over the line into insanity,” John
replied. “He’ll be fine, but this is an inconvenient time to be
trapped. Was that Clyde?”

“
Yeah,” Quin replied.
“Doesn’t know how to use his comm.”

“
Are we really shutting
down?” Kaia asked.

“
I think we should,” Quin
replied. “Then we can solve our problems one at a time.”

“
Who are these
conspiracists?” John asked.

“
We don’t know. They were
harassing Bob, and he recognized one as a known assassin. They are
now swimming upstream, as everyone in the building is trying to
leave and they are trying to enter, so it should take them longer
than usual to get here. That said, it will probably make it easier
for them to get to their destination unnoticed,” Quin replied. His
voice seemed to echo in the now mostly empty room. “Since we’re
going into lockdown, you should handle this room. I’ll talk Clyde
through the process.”

“
Okay,” John replied.
“We’ll send the emissary notes through each Door, and then we can
regroup.”

“
Great.” A moment later,
Quin was gone.

“
How does he do that?” Kaia
asked. “It’s like he just disappears.”

“
He’s got training in the
ancient art of Stealth,” John said. “And he can do it while
sprinting.”

“
Stealth, like from the
Kramandu Mountains on the Edge?” Kaia asked, her eyes widening.
“That’s seriously impressive.”

“
Yes it is. He actually
taught it for a couple of years.”

“
Him? Teaching?”

John grinned. “I imagine his classes
consisted of him telling his students to ‘do as I do’ and then
disappearing.”

Kaia laughed.

“
Okay,” John said. “Enough
fun. I don’t believe in fun! To work!”

“
To work!” Kaia repeated.
She then looked at John expectantly.

“
What? I said, ‘to work!’“
John exclaimed. He frowned. “Oh. I have to tell you what to do.” He
paused. “Just follow me around, I guess. To the
printer!”

He ran off, with Kaia close at his heels. At
one end of the room a partial office had been set up. It had filing
cabinets, four really old computers, and a giant printer. John
began to maneuver through the folders in one of the filing
cabinets. He pulled out a document which read “Emergency
Procedures.”

“
This is what we send to
the governments on the other sides of the Doors when we have a
security breach,” John explained. “It just says, ‘It’s no big deal,
but we don’t want to cause any interplanetary issues, so please
keep your people away from the Door until we say otherwise.’ Here,
make three hundred copies.”

“
Three hundred!” Kaia
repeated with surprise.

“
Yep.” John grinned.
“Welcome to being an intern. Also, each one needs to be rolled and
placed into a canister.” He hit a series of buttons on a wall panel
next to the computers. A section of the wall slid up, revealing a
contraption that looked vaguely like a wine holder with three
hundred very small bottles of wine.

“
Those are the canisters?”
Kaia confirmed.

“
Yes. Now start copying. We
have probably less than five minutes to deal with this. I’m going
to go do a once-around to make sure we don’t have any stragglers
who didn’t go back through their Door.” John ran off.

Kaia grinned. Copying was definitely an
intern’s job, but adding a high-level emergency and a super tight
deadline definitely made it less dull. The copy machine began
spitting out copies of the document. One after another (after
another after another after another after another), she grabbed the
copy, rolled it up, stuffed it in a canister, and dropped it on the
floor next to her feet. Each made a clanging noise as it hit the
floor, and after a moment, she was doing them so fast the noise
didn’t seem to stop.

“
Okay,” John said,
reappearing behind her. “I’m going to start sticking these through
the Doors. Let me know when you get all of them done, and I’ll
teach you how to send them through.”

“
Can’t you just throw
them?” Kaia asked.

“
Dear me,” John replied,
gathering up an armload. “I never would have expected that kind of
question from you. Cognitive mathematics, my dear, cognitive
mathematics.”

He disappeared. Kaia frowned and began to
calculate.

“
No calculating!” John
yelled from the other side of the room. “It’s slowing you
down.”

“
I’m just trying to figure
it out!” Kaia yelled back.