your fault.”
“Most things are, apparently. What did I do?”
She grinned at him. “Need you ask?”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes.” She pursed her lips. “Apparently, after your fifteen minutes of universal fame they brought in a worldwide ban on whatever it was you were doing. In case any more mountains got blown up, I guess. Which was a total bummer as far as we were concerned, because Bill and I had invested rather a lot of money in the thing Pieter was doing – building this place, for a start – and suddenly it looked like it was all about to go down the toilet.“
“Hang on,” Theo said. “You built a copy of the VV—”
“Not an exact copy,” Matasuntha replied. “More a sort of tribute to it, if you get my meaning.”
“Tribute?”
“We took the ideas we wanted and didn’t pay anybody any money for them. That’s one of the reasons we had to keep it quiet. Also, this international ban thing, after your little accident. Anyhow, it was all coming along quite well, and then Pieter went and died on us, and now we’re screwed. He hadn’t finished doing the mathsy stuff, you see.”
Theo nodded slowly. “So you needed me?”
Matasuntha laughed. “Oh, that was Pieter’s idea. He said, if anything happened to him – and it was a distinct possibility, because this thing we’re doing can be a bit unsafe—”
“As well as a bit illegal.”
“A bit, yes. Anyhow, Pieter said, if anything happens to me, get a hold of Theo Bernstein, he’s a total flake but a bit brilliant. Actually, I think it was some stuff you did that we were paying tribute to.” She gave him a sweet smile, then went on, “Of course, once you’d trashed the big Swiss thing, obviously nobody was going to give you a job selling matches in the street. So Pieter set it up for you to come here if anything happened to him, and then we’d sort of trick you into finishing the mathsy stuff. I’m really not supposed to tell you that,” she added. “Bill’ll be livid if he finds out. But what the hell,” she said, flicking her hair away from her face with intent to cause irrelevant thoughts. “I figure, if we carry on pissing you off like we’ve been doing, you’ll up and leave anyhow, and then we’ll really be screwed. Bill’s my uncle, by the way, in case you were wondering.”
He hadn’t been, but now she mentioned it – no, definitely not. He waved his visible hand towards the huge machines in the corner. “So all this junk—”
“Isn’t for doing the laundry with, no. Again, you’d have to ask Uncle Bill about it, and probably he wouldn’t know, because Pieter saw to all that. What Uncle Bill mostly did was write cheques. He’s got really good at doing that.”
“And Room 9998?”
She pulled a sad face. “That was where it was all set up,” she said. “Of course, when Pieter died we closed it down, stripped out all the gear and crated it up in these enormous lead-lined boxes. It’s all stored in some warehouse right now, until we can get it back up and running. But we had to switch it off, because it was leaking a bit.”
He glared at her. “A bit.”
“More than a little but less than a lot. Uncle Bill’s got a little gadget, if the leak gets too bad it makes this squeaking noise. It’s fine now.”
Theo felt slightly reassured; as a passenger in a plane spinning out of control towards the ground might feel on fastening his seat belt. “A Geiger counter.”
“Whatever. Uncle Bill would know. Anyhow,” she went on, “that’s all there is to it, really. Mr Nordstrom and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz are sort of the financial side of things. We had to bring them in when our cash flow got a tad constipated. You don’t have to worry about them, they’re basically no bother. Nordstrom was in business with Uncle, and Mrs D-W’s a sort of cousin.”
Theo nodded slowly. “And the vanishing?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just now. You vanished.”
“Ah.” She blushed slightly. “I can do that. God only knows how, we certainly don’t. Pieter thought it was maybe something to do with the same effect that did that to your arm, but if you ask me he was just guessing. It’s useful sometimes, when I can control it. But it can be a pain as well. Tends to happen at moments of heightened emotion.” She looked down at her hands. “It makes it hard for me to keep