Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [3]
People had called Maddox a genius at various times in his career and he had always enjoyed it, but now, looking back, he wondered if sometimes they had been mentally inserting adjectives before they got to the noun. What might those adjectives have been? he wondered in a rare moment of introspection. But then he shook his head and the moment passed. Not relevant to the project, he decided and passed his tricorder over another set of connections. The word “relevant” featured very largely in Maddox’s vocabulary, which was why Emil Vaslovik’s habit of uttering non sequiturs was so galling to him.
“I said, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ “
“I heard you the first time,” Maddox said, resting his back against the console. “But what does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Vaslovik said, more than a trace of amusement in his voice. “I was just looking out the window and watching the storm clouds gather. It made me think of the opening line to a novel called Paul Clifford. It’s rather famous … well, infamous, actually.
” ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ ” Vaslovik recited. ” ‘The rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.’ ” He stopped and regarded Maddox, who had once again pushed himself up out of the console.
Maddox, who rarely held strong opinions about anything literary, said, “That … that’s terrible.”
Vaslovik chuckled. “Leaves a bad taste in your mouth, doesn’t it? The author’s name was Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Wrote reams of stuff just like that back in the nineteenth century. Became so famous for sheer badness that some literary society used to hold a contest in his honor. The object was to compose the worst opening sentence for a novel.”
Maddox regarded the old man carefully to make sure he wasn’t kidding. Vaslovik had a peculiar sense of humor, but Maddox could see that he wasn’t joking about this. “Why would they do that?” Maddox asked. “What value is there in writing a bad sentence?”
Vaslovik shrugged, but his eyes glittered merrily. “Don’t really know. It was the twentieth century. Who knows why they did anything? Self-awareness—or even enlightened self-interest—didn’t seem to be part of their makeup. I expect it just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Maddox rechecked his tricorder readings, mostly to give himself another minute or two before he had to crawl back into the bowels of the console. “And this has exactly what to do with me being waist-deep in isolinear chips and EPS conduits?”
“It’s a dark and stormy night despite the fact that the planet is protected by a weather control grid,” Vaslovik explained. “Maybe the problem you’re trying to track down has nothing to do with anything inside the lab. Maybe it has something to do with the weather.”
Maddox looked out the window. Vaslovik was right; it was dark despite being almost an hour before sunset. Like most people who had lived most of their lives on Federation worlds, Maddox was at once fascinated and intimidated by the idea of a real storm, the kind where lightning and wind could damage buildings, people and things.
The climate over much of Galor IV was generally quite moderate; it was one of the reasons why the Daystrom Institute of Technology had situated the Annex there, but violent weather was not entirely unknown, necessitating the weather control grid. There were too many delicate, intricately planned experiments taking place at any one time to risk a stray lightning bolt our-turning