somewhere. Well?”
“He’s dead all right,” Call-me-Bill said, and the sweat on his forehead sparkled like dew in long grass. “I told you, he went into the chamber and he didn’t—”
“You sent him somewhere,” Theo repeated, “and you need me to get him back.”
Call-me-Bill’s head lifted, stayed still for a moment, then dropped back; up-down, up-down twice, as if someone was controlling it with strings. “Mattie told you.”
“No, I figured it out for myself. You see, I—” He stopped, trying to think of the right words. “I had reason to believe Pieter was still alive.”
Now the unseen puppeteer swivelled Call-me-Bill’s head sharply round to the right; a bit too sharply. Any more, and it could easily have come off. “What? What do you mean?”
“I talked to him.”
Call-me-Bill was breathing deeply in and out through his nose. “When?”
“Today.”
“Where?”
“Ah. Long story.” He tossed a mental coin, which came down and balanced delicately on its rim. So he had to make a conscious decision. “The term YouSpace mean anything to you?”
There was a long silence. Then Call-me-Bill actually grinned. “We weren’t going to call it that,” he said. “In fact, I thought we’d decided, but Pieter always was a stubborn bastard. He’d thought up the name, you see, and once he’d set his heart on it—Yes,” he went on. “You could say that.”
“Your niece doesn’t know about it.”
“Not under that name,” Call-me-Bill replied. “But she knows about it all right. Question is, how do you—”
“Another long story,” Theo cut him off. “But I saw Pieter van Goyen in YouSpace earlier today. Very much alive.”
Call-me-Bill leaned forward to sink his face into his hands, lost his balance and sort of toppled-come-slid off the desk. He stood up, looked down at the desk as though he was more hurt than angry, and sat down again. “There you are, then.”
“He’s dead,” Theo said. “I watched him die.”
Call-me-Bill’s mouth dropped open, and the colour drained from his face, as though someone had turned a stopcock and Essence of Pink had come squirting out of the overflow. “Are you serious? You saw—”
Theo nodded. “He was disintegrated by bug-eyed monsters with ray guns,” he said. He paused, then added, “Do you believe me?”
“Oh yes,” Call-me-Bill said, his mouth moving awkwardly, as if he’d just had an injection at the dentist’s. “Default setting 3, Alien Planet.” He lifted his head, and Theo could see he was close to tears. “What happened?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I’d met Pieter and we’d just started to talk when these aliens burst in and shot him. They were just about to shoot me when I did the doughnut thing and escaped.”
“Doughnut thing?”
The dropping penny sounded like a brass cannon falling down a mineshaft. “You know, the way you get out in a hurry. You don’t know, do you?”
“Never been in there,” Call-me-Bill replied. “I don’t know how.”
“Ah.” Theo smiled at him, just to be annoying. “Well, it was pretty unambiguous. He just sort of—”
He broke off, as if fingers were tightening around his throat. It had just occurred to him; Pieter had been alive, and the man he’d seen disintegrated had been the real thing. They looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” Call-me-Bill said at last. “I know you two were close.”
“Yes. You too?”
Call-me-Bill sighed. “He taught me when I was an undergraduate,” he said. “Amazing man. Of course, I wasn’t what you’d call his prize pupil. I only got in because my dad built them a new library. But Pieter – I don’t know, we just sort of hit it off. And then, after I got chucked out for being useless, we sort of stayed in touch. He used to send me postcards.”
“Postcards.”
Call-me-Bill grinned. “Picture postcards,” he said. “Niagara Falls. I think he must’ve bought a big box of them, because they were always the same one. I don’t think he ever went there, though. Anyhow, he’d write dear Bill and then best wishes from Pieter, and leave the rest blank.”
Theo could imagine Pieter doing that; wanted to stay in touch but didn’t have anything in particular to say. He tried not to remember the look on Pieter’s face when the plasma hit him.
“Anyhow,” Call-me-Bill said with an effort, “about five years ago I got a call from him. It was basically, hi Bill, how are you, and can you let me have a billion dollars? I said I haven’t got a billion dollars and he said well, how much have you got, and that’s how it started.”
“What started?”
Call-me-Bill sighed. “Now that,” he said, “is a