been friendlier. “That’s extremely kind of you,” he said, “but honestly, I’m fine. I don’t want to give a bad impression if Mr Negative comes by.”
“He won’t mind. Trust me.”
The last thing in the world he was prepared to do. On the other hand, he didn’t really want to force the issue any further, and she had a grimly determined look in her eye that suggested physical force was definitely an option. “Thanks,” he said, and stood up. “I’ll do the same for you some time.”
She smiled, surged past him and sat in the chair. “Or if you don’t like doughnuts,” she said, “there’s always the apple turnovers.”
He nodded. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said, and withdrew.
The hell with it, he thought, as he finished his coffee in the deserted kitchen. Pieter’s bottle.
He’d found a cup laid out for him on the kitchen table, along with a plate of doughnuts and another of apple turnovers. The coffee was freshly made, with milk, sugar and cream all within arm’s reach. Who the hell had put them there he had no idea.
Pieter sent me here, he told himself; and Pieter was my old tutor and my friend. He fixed me up with this – he paused to clarify his thoughts – this extremely strange but basically not-too-bad job, and he left me the bottle. Oh yes, and it was supposed to be fun. Dangerous (Mr Nordstrom weltering in blood on the lobby floor) but a good laugh nevertheless. All right. Enough of the fooling around. Let’s do it.
Down the long staircase, therefore, to the wine cellar. He turned on the light, and saw that the entire floor had been carefully swept, so that not a speck of dust remained anywhere. He thought about that for a while, then shrugged and put it out of his mind. His bottle was exactly where he’d left it, label uppermost, as far as he could tell untouched. He lifted it out, pocketed it and swiftly withdrew, taking care to turn out the light.
He went back to his room, to find the door had been replaced (not repaired; the paint was dry) and he had a new chair, of the same pattern but a slightly lighter colour wood. Wedging it under the handle didn’t inspire quite the same level of confidence as it had done previously, but it was the best he could do. He sat down on the bed, put the bottle on the pillow and took out the manila envelope. Zero hour.
Presumably his subconscious mind had been chewing over the last line of the calculation while his conscious mind had been occupied with fending off Matasuntha and fretting itself stupid with vanishing bloodstains and similar trivia; he sailed through it with contemptuous ease, and there it suddenly was, on the paper in front of him, in his own abysmal handwriting. The formula; the key; the bomb. He stared at it, the way you sometimes stare at a familiar word that’s suddenly stopped making sense. Then, with a sort of well-here-goes-nothing shrug, he picked up the bottle and carefully measured its length and width with his trusty Vernier caliper.
Well now, he said to himself, as he wrote the numbers and symbols out again; if H = 30.17 and D = 8.72, then according to the formula –
Part Two
Message In A Bottle
He was standing under the broad canopy of a beech tree. It was a sensible place to be, because it offered the only shade for miles around, the sky was blue and the sun was very hot. He was surrounded on all sides by an ocean of ripe grain – wheat or barley, he couldn’t be sure and he didn’t really give a damn. He was holding the bottle in his right hand, which was visible. The clothes he was wearing were quite definitely not the ones he’d had on a moment or so before; in fact, he couldn’t remember ever having seen them, or anything like them, except on the covers of the sort of books he didn’t read; books with dragons and elves and heroes with swords and people whose names were split up with unexplained apostrophes. Not in Kansas any more. Um. So far, the only sound had been the jabbering of song thrushes and the distant cawing of rooks. Now he heard, far away and intermittent, the vaguely comforting drone of an aircraft. He looked up, and saw a white vapour trail, marking the passage of an airliner. He found it