was crawl into bed and sleep. It was good, he tried in vain not to admit to himself, to have an excuse for not going there and following up the clue about Max. For one thing, it was fairly obvious it had to be a trap of one sort; it couldn’t be more obvious if there were signs all over the stairs down to the wine cellar reading This Way To The Trap and Trap 50 metres. That wasn’t enough to stop him following up the clue, but it did make him feel a bit of a fool. True, it was very boring sitting behind the desk all day with nothing to do, and he’d never really learned how to cope with boredom, which made him feel like he was being nibbled to death by tiny invisible ants eating his brain, a millionth of a gramme at a time. Given the choice between boredom and the only trap on Earth obvious enough to be visible from orbit, however, boredom wasn’t so bad. And it gave him time to think the same agonising thoughts about his siblings, over and over and over again, which he wouldn’t have had an opportunity to do if he’d been busy.
On the third day, Matasuntha brought him a sandwich around noon. She looked tired and irritable and she was covered in dust. “Eat,” she grunted, and slammed the plate down on the desk.
“Thanks,” he replied. “Keeping busy?”
For a moment he thought she was going to hit him. Then she climbed into a smile. “Cleaning the wine cellar,” she said. “It’s filthy down there.”
The wine cellar. Where else? “That’s a big job. It’s huge.”
“Yes.” The smile held, like a pressurised cabin at fifty thousand feet. “You’ve been down there, then?”
“Couple of times.”
“Well, you’ll know how dirty it is.”
“Quite. But at least you can always find what you’re looking for.” He smiled back at her. “Thanks to the inventory on the computer, I mean.”
“That needs updating,” she said. “My next job.”
“Ah.”
“You should count yourself lucky,” she went on, gazing into his eyes like a cat at a mouse hole. “Sitting up here behind this nice clean desk while I’m down there, rummaging about among all those dusty old bottles.”
He tried to do a nonchalant shrug. It came out as the sort of gesture you’d expect from a giant centipede trying to pass itself off as human. “Swap jobs if you like,” he said. “You do the desk, I’ll muck out the cellar.”
“Sweet of you, but we’d better stick to the rota. Otherwise Bill won’t like it.”
When she’d gone, he realised he was sweating. Not, he was reasonably confident, that there was any immediate cause for concern. Thousands, tens of thousands of bottles; it’d take her weeks to pull each one out and look at the label. Time, though, was definitely on her side. Call-me-Bill could strand him here on the desk for weeks, months even, while Matasuntha fumbled about among the grime and the cobwebs. The sensible thing, therefore, would be to retrieve the bottle and find another hiding place; but he wasn’t sure that’d be wise. He wouldn’t put it past them to be staking the cellar out during his off hours, expecting him to do just that. What he really ought to do, he told himself gloomily, was go back into YouSpace, find out about Max, and then give them the stupid bottle and put them out of their misery. It’d be the humane thing to do (it’d be unfortunate if Matasuntha caught something nasty down there in all the dirt and grime, and her quest was clearly having a bad effect on her temper) and it’d mean he could stop worrying and get on with his life. As for the whole trap thing, he wasn’t so sure about that any more. Not a trap as such; more likely some gag or practical joke Pieter had set up for him, under the bizarre impression that YouSpace was fun. A door with a bucketful of soot balanced on top of it, or something equally sophisticated. Get it over with, he told himself.
At a quarter to midnight, when the end was in sight and he could hear the mattress on his bed calling to him like a phantom lover, Mr Nordstrom came in. He was wearing full evening dress, the effect of which was spoilt rather by the torn trouser knees and the missing left sleeve. His hair, however, was neatly combed, and he appeared to be perfectly