other in a deadlock, with pieces captured and escape routes blocked.
Unwin knelt beside Moore and shook him. The old clerk mumbled in his sleep but did not waken.
Outside, the elephants were moving again; one of them sent up an aggrieved lament. Unwin moved around the beds, thinking to hide beneath one of them, but he stubbed his foot against a tin bucket and sent it clattering over the floor, strewing coal briquettes in a wide arc.
The door opened, and one of the Rooks came into the room. It was Jasper: left boot smaller than the right. He looked at Unwin, looked at the toppled bucket, then blinked once and closed the door behind him. He went to the phonograph and shut it off.
Unwin stepped over the coal, upsetting a stack of books in the process. He mumbled an apology and quickly began to gather them, blowing coal dust off the covers as he set them in a pile.
Jasper reached into his coat and withdrew a pocketwatch, checked the time, and put the watch away. His hand came back with a pistol in it. Even with the gun in his hand, Jasper seemed only vaguely interested in the fact that Unwin was there.
Unwin set the last few books into place and stood up. He thought of his own pistol, still in his desk drawer in Room 2919, but knew it would not have been of any help to him. Pith surely carried a pistol, and he had not even bothered to draw.
Talk. He had read that in the Manual somewhere. When all seems lost, start talking, keep talking. People do not kill people they think have something useful to say.
“Is it true?” Unwin said. “Seventeen years without a minute of sleep?”
Jasper’s face was a dull mask, his eyes green stones. He raised the pistol, pointing it at Unwin’s heart.
What would the shot feel like? Like a hole punch, Unwin thought, when it punctured a small stack of pages. He took a step toward the gun and said, “That’s a tiredness beyond tiredness. Everything must seem like a dream.” He glanced at the pair of identical beds at the back of the room. “When was the last time you even bothered to try?”
Jasper blinked again, and Unwin waited for the blast.
It did not come. “I wonder how it happened,” Unwin said. “Did you even want the operation? Or was that Hoffmann’s idea? He needed the two of you to be in different places at the same time, I suppose. But he didn’t know how much he was cutting. You weren’t really two people to begin with. There was a time when you could see each other’s dreams, hear each other’s thoughts. But they were the same dreams, the same thoughts.”
He was guessing now, imagining a role for them in the earlier days of Caligari’s carnival: those boys Cleo Greenwood had described, clothed in a single wide coat and set on a double stool, put onstage to sing a duet, maybe. He must have come close to the truth, because Jasper slowly lowered his pistol.
“One plus one does not equal one,” Jasper said.
“No,” Unwin agreed. “That man you have there, Edwin Moore, is a lot like me. Or I’m a lot like him, maybe. We don’t know each other very well, but I understand him, I think. We were both clerks once. So you see why I had to come looking for him.”
Jasper seemed to consider this.
“I’m going to carry him out of here,” Unwin said. “I won’t ask you to help me. I won’t ask you to open the door. I won’t even ask you not to shoot me, but if you don’t, I’ll take it to mean that you understand, and I’ll thank you for that.”
Unwin lifted Moore by the arms. Taking care not to upset any of the books or to look at Jasper, Unwin dragged the man slowly toward the door. There he set Moore down and picked up his umbrella. It was shaking in his hands.
Just then the door opened and Josiah came in, still carrying his clipboard. He did not take his hat off, did not even blink. He looked at Unwin, looked at Moore, and looked at his brother. Then he set his clipboard on the table and whispered something in Jasper’s ear.
The fire in the coal stove brightened, and Unwin felt the room grow suddenly hotter. Moore began to mumble in his sleep. The muscles of his skinny arms convulsed, and he slid back to