Big fish, p.20
Big Fish, page 20
"I suppose so," Paston conceded.
"Then go back to the hotel, all of you. From here on there's nothing I can't do alone."
Bucky folded his arms. "No. We want to see."
"Bucky, there's not going to be anything to see but a bunch of fake smoke detectors in a storeroom. Didn't you read the order sheet? They only shipped them here two days ago."
"Wonderful," Paston said. "I was a little nervous about what might be in there. Do we go around to the back of this building, too?"
Altmeyer sighed. "This lock probably belonged to Disraeli." He took out his wallet, selected his plastic Automobile Club card, slipped it between the door and the jamb, and opened the door.
"The lights are on," Rachel whispered. "Suppose there's a janitor?"
"Then he'll be able to tell us where the lecture is. If they let a janitor in, this isn't the place we're looking for," said Altmeyer.
"If there is a janitor," said Bucky, "his ears aren't much use to him. Maybe these people leave a few lights on in the hallway to keep from breaking their necks on the way to the laboratory. That's why the sun never sets."
They closed the door behind them and studied the place, listening for a sound. Slowly, Altmeyer moved forward, and the old wooden floor creaked under his feet. The others moved to both sides of him to avoid the spot that had made the noise.
"That looks like an office down at the end of the hall," said Paston.
"Then it's not what we need," said Rachel. "There's only one way this makes sense. They pay astronomical leases to have their stores near universities. If they just needed an office they could go anywhere. This is a physics building."
Altmeyer nodded. "Look for a way to the basement. The lab we want should be in the cellar."
"How do you know?" said Bucky.
"They all work by jamming together a bunch of uranium or plutonium or something with a plain old explosive, don't they?" He tried a door, then slipped his plastic card in beside the lock and opened it. "That part I know about. They'd want to store detonators and explosives below ground level." He frowned and closed the door, then moved to the next one. "And who knows what else they need? If it's water, power, heat, drainage, the lines and pipes are all down there."
Paston stared down the hallway. "It should be in the back, just like it was in the other building. They didn't deliver coal by bringing it in through the parlor."
"That's the spirit, Arthur," said Bucky. "It's an honor to be in the presence of a genuine antiquity."
"Antiquary."
Rachel was already turning the corner at the end of the hallway. "This has to be it." The sign in red on the door said
HAZARDOUS APPARATUS. AUTHORISED PERSONS WITH THE PROPER PROTECTIVE APPAREL W^ILL BE ADMITTED W^ITH THE PRIOR APPROVAL OF THE UNIVERSITY PROVOST.
Altmeyer examined the lock. "They must have a better class of burglars than we do. Most of ours would have this lock open before they could read all that."
"This is a university, after all," said Bucky. "Or I guess it isn't, but it's in the neighborhood."
Altmeyer opened the door, and found a light switch. Before them was a steep stairway leading downward. "Wonderful. I'm beginning to feel that I know these people. We are about
to see the world's only supply of genuine Ashita Sleeping-Tite Smoke Sentinels."
They reached the bottom of the stairs and found themselves in another narrow hallway, with a door on each side. The walls were white and plain, with no woodwork, and the floors were dark green linoleum. Both of the doors had the same hazardous apparatus sign on them, and beside each was a bracket with a red fire extinguisher.
Altmeyer opened the first door, and they all entered slowly. The room had four gleaming stainless steel tables. On them, in orderly rows, lay black metal boxes like suitcases, some of them long and narrow, and others not much larger than attache cases.
"What do you think all that is?" asked Paston.
"I don't know," Altmeyer said. "Maybe it's portable electronic equipment of some kind. They sometimes box it up like that."
"Of course," said Bucky. "It's their traveling atomic bomb factory. They probably just shipped it in after the smoke detectors got here." He stepped to the table and flipped the latches on the nearest case, opened it, then moved quickly to the next one.
"What's wrong?" said Rachel.
"They're empty. There's nothing in them but foam rubber padding."
Altmeyer opened two more cases and said, "These are empty, too, but the spaces for whatever goes into them are all sort of chunky and square. They probably are for lab equipment of some kind. It doesn't matter. Let's—"
"Wait," said Rachel. She was standing beside the next table, where one of the long, narrow cases lay open. "This one is strange. The shape of the hollow part is different."
The others gathered around her and examined it. "That is odd," said Paston.
"It's like a fossil," said Bucky. "It looks like the imprint of a big fish. There's the tail, and it even has a dorsal fin."
Altmeyer's face seemed to harden. He turned and moved
across the hallway to the other door. He fumbled with his plastic card for a moment, then pushed the door open. As he turned on the light, the others heard him say, quietly, "Shit."
When Rachel reached him, he was walking around the room, staring closely at the clutter on the counters and tables. There were small silver screwdrivers and soldering irons and voltmeters with tangled red and black leads. Some of the counters had big black boxes with dials and meters on them. Rachel said, "It looks like a television repair shop. What a mess."
Altmeyer turned and looked at her. He pointed at one table, where there were four stainless steel cubes that seemed to be hned with circuitry on their inner surfaces. "These look like they fit into the small suitcases. You can't beat them for convenience." Then he walked to the other end of the shop. "These are the ones that ought to turn the profit, though. They're not for the peasant revolutionary with holes in his pants. You need to have a military airplane to deliver them."
There was a row of six long, thin, gleaming silver shapes lying on the table in padded wooden frames. Rachel moved closer. "They're sort of—beautiful, almost. Bucky was right. They're like big fish."
Altmeyer called, "Bucky, Arthur. Look everywhere for anything with writing on it, and put it in your pockets."
"What do I do?" asked Rachel. "We still haven't found the uranium. These are all empty shells."
"Get the fire extinguishers off the walls and set them in the corner, and after that, herd Bucky and Arthur out. Take them down to Russell Square." He opened a cabinet beneath the sink and began pulling out metal cans and reading the labels. "And you said this place was a mess. Look at all the nice petroleum products they have for keeping their equipment free of dust and corrosion."
Rachel returned with the two fire extinguishers from the hallway and said, "Is this the smartest thing we can do? I mean, you just reminded us that there will be high explosives and detonators, and what about radioactivity?"
Altmeyer shrugged. "If you hear a bunch of explosions, it was a lousy idea. I haven't found anything that looks like any explosive I ever saw, so I'm assuming they haven't gotten to the tricky parts yet. I'll try for enough delay to get out of here anyway."
"So what am I supposed to do if you're wrong?"
Altmeyer pushed a wooden desk up to the wall and began pouring clear Hquid onto it, then piled the drawers beside it and doused them. The sharp smell reached Rachel, and it reminded her of lighter fluid. Finally, Altmeyer said, "I guess if you run out of ideas, the best thing to do is sell all our land. It just occurred to me that at the moment we are the only thing that's holding up a hell of a crash in the value of real estate. You might invest the money in Ashita."
She rushed to him and hugged him, hard. She pressed her face into his chest and said, "I'll go up to Oregon and marry Raymond and live in the woods. Every day we'll tell the livestock what a good sense of humor you had at the end."
"Thanks, baby," said Altmeyer. "I don't have any good last words, but I'll give you something that's worth more: Ray wears a moneybelt."
She stopped at the door. "Altmeyer, there's something I want you to know. I think we're going to—"
"Please get out," he said. "Those two won't know enough to leave unless you tell them."
Altmeyer worked in the basement until he was sure he'd gathered everything that would burn. Then he ran up the stairs and found the room Arthur had called an office. There was a long oak counter, and behind it an old desk, and rows of books on shelves. He pushed the desk to the wall, moved four chairs around it, then threw armloads of books under them, above them, around them, and soaked the pile with the cleaning fluid he'd brought with him.
In the opposite corner of the room he found a row of filing cabinets and emptied three drawersful of papers around the oak counter, leaving the wooden drawers where they fell.
He rushed back into the hallway and up the stairs, then studied the place. The walls looked old enough to hide thick, ancient timbers that would catch in seconds, but he couldn't count on that. The basement laboratory looked as though it had been built by firemen. He moved from room to room opening doors until he found one that looked right. It was another office with a wooden desk, wooden cabinets, and a disorderly array of books and papers. He built another pile in the corner, then stopped for a moment to think. This room was at the back of the building. The first office was near the center, above the room in the basement. There had to be another near the front.
As he went down the hallway, he followed a vague, imaginary blueprint of the house to find the spot. It was an old-fashioned paneled sliding door that reminded him of his grandmother's dining room. When he slid the door open, he smiled. He could tell from the shelves that it had been a large linen closet at some time, and the row of brass hooks told him that it had probably been converted to a cloak room. Now it was filled with cardboard cartons someone had used to store books and papers.
Altmeyer lifted one of the boxes and dumped it on the floor. A cascade of magazines appeared at his feet: Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Vogue. As he looked down at them, he fought the urge to wonder about the person who owned them.
He closed his eyes and scanned his imaginary map of the house. It had to be done quickly. For all he knew, the place might have a storage tank for heating oil, or a laboratory full of ether. He began by setting a match to the pile of magazines. As the first layer blackened and curled, it sent a flame up the side of the cardboard carton above it.
Altmeyer ran to the room at the other end of the hallway and lit the pile of papers and furniture, then dashed to the stairs. The next one had to be the basement. When he reached the room, he tossed the match from about eight feet away, and the fumes of the fluid went up with a flash. He glanced inside to see flames licking the wall and spreading along the
floor to eat up a row of droplets he'd spilled when he'd tossed the first can onto the pile.
He turned and scrambled up the cellar stairs, taking three steps at a time. When he reached the office, he lit the pile of papers in the corner first, then tossed a burning file folder onto the long counter. The flames flickered along the stream of cleaning fluid on the counter top and engulfed the desk beyond it.
He turned and sprinted down the hall to the front door, then pulled it open with an easy and deliberate movement that kept his face turned downward. As he shpped out into the cool damp night, he heard a crackling sound somewhere behind him.
Altmeyer kept his hands in his coat pockets, his eyes toward the pavement, and his shoulders hunched forward slightly as he walked quickly down Malet Street. In seconds he was one of a hundred men walking along at about the same pace in the neighborhood, but as Altmeyer walked, he took deep breaths and counted his steps.
When he turned the corner of Montague Place, he glanced at his watch. It was only nine fifteen. He imagined the fires he'd set. By now the one on the ground floor would be going well enough to bring some of the interior walls into it. Had he left all of the doors in both hallways open? He'd remembered to do that so whatever draft could be gotten in a closed building would help it along. Now it was a kind of race. If enough of the building were in flames before the firemen got there, the most they could do was keep it under control and wreck the place doing it.
As he approached Russell Square, he met Rachel, Bucky, and Arthur. Bucky shook his hand and said quietly, "You didn't explode."
"Neither did you."
"I wasn't scheduled to. What do you want to do now?"
"The tube station is right over there," said Altmeyer. "Two stops on the Piccadilly Line and you're at Covent Garden. Fifteen minutes after that you can be asleep."
"Asleep?"
"Sure. If you don't explode."
"Stop being difficult," said Rachel. "You know none of us can just go off and pretend it's over. We have to know what happens, don't we?"
Altmeyer sighed. "It would take an orangutan about two seconds to figure out it's arson. I set fires everyplace but the water pipes. One of the things about arsonists is they hang around to watch."
Paston patted Altmeyer's shoulder. "They'll be looking for a solitary man. If we go together, you can watch them arresting a few."
"Look," said Altmeyer. "We don't know a lot about what's in that building, or what happens when it burns. This is my wife here, not Wing Commander Smathers of the Royal Airborne Horse Marines. All this bravery is starting to get on my nerves."
"You know we have to be there to see who else shows up," said Rachel. "It's easier with four people."
"It is unless you think you have to save the world alone," said Bucky.
Altmeyer snorted. "Save the world? Is that what you think? I'm just looking for some deadbeats. I was planning to hang around until I saw somebody get out of a cab and slip into the crowd without paying. If I thought we were saving the world, I'd get ruthless."
Altmeyer tilted his head and stared across the Square, then turned it to the other side. "Listen," he said. At first the sound might have been a variation in the constant traffic two blocks away on Tottenham Court Road. Then the siren seemed to rise in intensity. It was a rhythmic, pulsing, high-pitched signal that seemed gradually to overwhelm all other noises as it approached. "That's a disappointment, but I suppose I should have expected it. If they weren't efficient, there wouldn't be so many old buildings."
"Is that what fire trucks sound like here?" said Bucky.
"That's it," said Paston. "During the war—"
Rachel interrupted. "Do you think there was enough time?"
"I couldn't tell," said Altmeyer. "There's a lot of old wood that's been varnished a hundred times, but there's a lot of brick."
Across the Square they could see people coming from the direction of the tube station. As each appeared on the sidewalk, he started to walk quickly, than slowed his pace and seemed to stare into the sky and listen. After a few had stopped, others gathered around them, and a small crowd began to collect behind. One of the first to stop, a man in a trenchcoat, sidestepped a few paces and stopped under a streetlamp. Rachel could see his bright green felt hat moving from side to side. Then he raised his arm and pointed. Rachel turned her head to follow the line of his arm. Above the top of the looming university building she could see a reddish glow that seemed to brighten and waver as she watched. "Look at the sky," she said. "You must have done an adequate job."
The man in the green hat began to walk toward the glow. Before he had taken three steps, a young couple passed under the streetlamp where he had been and trotted to catch up. Then others followed, and soon there was a steady stream of people moving toward the fire.
The sirens seemed louder and slower, and the tone fuller and deeper now, and Rachel decided the trucks must be off the larger thoroughfares and converging on Malet Street.
The front door of a building off to their left swung open and young people began pouring into the street, some clutching jackets, books, hats. Some came down the steps, then stopped to thrust their arms into their coat sleeves before drifting forward, while others strode with long, purposeful steps across the street. All held their faces to the sky, gazing up at the glow that drew them toward itself.
"Maybe we'd better go look for our boy," said Bucky. "There's going to be a hell of a crowd."
Altmeyer began to walk. "He probably won't be there right away. If I owned a bomb factory, I wouldn't spend much time in the neighborhood. Look for somebody who arrives in his own car and might be able to afford a serious investment."
As they walked, three young men ran past them. The one who came nearest to Paston muttered, "Pardon, sir. Lovely fire." The three men disappeared around the corner just as the first of the sirens stopped.
Just past the corner they met the first knot of people, a group who stood with their arms folded or leaned against the post box or the large tree beside it and exchanged observations on the nature of the fire. "Looks like chemicals to me. See that bright yellow? It's sulphur burning." Another said, "It's plain old paper and wood. I hope that's where the bursar's ledgers are stored." There was a girl's voice. "It's just a science building."
They made their way through the crowd, Altmeyer first, then Rachel, Paston, and Bucky. In the center of the street the firemen were running to haul hoses to a tall red fireplug. Bucky said, "We should have sabotaged that."
Altmeyer leaned close to him and said, "I didn't know what it was."
They reached the ring of people around the two fire trucks, where one harried policeman was trying to take control. "Stay back, please," he called. "Give these gentlemen a bit more of the street, please." He held his arms out in a sweeping motion to indicate an invisible police cordon moving toward them.
