• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1650 0

interrupted when Mortimer — who was quietly going about his own mysterious business — contrived to fall through the Arctic ice cap in a snowmobile. He ended up at the bottom of the ocean. There wasn’t a submarine near enough to reach him before the damaged vehicle imploded, and it would have taken more than the combined might of half a dozen planetary civilizations to keep Emily Marchant from repaying the debt she thought she owed her favorite father figure. If there hadn’t been a state-of-the-art Jovian atmosphere diver way out of its usual stamping ground, he’d have been fish food, but there was — and she broadcast the rescue to everybody in the universe. Mortimer didn’t know that his heart-to-heart with a snowmobile driver was being overheard by anyone, let alone the whole damn world, so he just let it all out. It was maudlin and toe curlingly cute — like one of those ancient kid-trapped-in-a-well race-against-time melodramas — but the audience loved it.

“It was quite a publicity coup, in its way, all the more so because Julius Ngomi had known Mortimer since he — Mortimer, that is, not Julius — was a little boy. But that’s all it was: a publicity thing. A great big heart-warming show. It changed the mood of the conference but it didn’t help the contending parties to settle any of the real issues, and may even have prevented us from knuckling down to serious business — with the ultimate effect that the important issues remain unsettled to this day. If Emily Marchant is behind this present pantomime, and it runs according to the same script, it might turn out to be the nine-day-wonder rescue story to end all nine-day-wonder rescue stories — but it’s not going to help at all.”

“Emily has nothing to do with this,” Mortimer Gray said, quietly.

I could see that Lowenthal had made a big mistake. Mortimer didn’t appreciate the way he’d told the story, but Lowenthal would probably have got away with the “maudlin” and the “toe curlingly cute” if he hadn’t turned his sarcasm on Emily Marchant. Even I could tell that Emily was a subject about which Mortimer Gray was exceedingly touchy — and I could tell, too, that whatever chance Lowenthal had had of being let in on the current results of Gray’s ruminations had just gone up in smoke. I wondered, briefly, whether that might be partly my fault for setting such a bad example, but I realized soon enough that there might be another reason for Mortimer to keep silent. If he had guessed who was behind our kidnapping, he had to ask himself very seriously whose side he was on — and so far as I knew, there might be a million reasons why he didn’t want to be seen to be taking Michael Lowenthal’s or Niamh Horne’s. Or Adam Zimmerman’s. Or, of course, mine.

“So who has?” said Niamh Horne, impatiently.

“I’m not sure,” was Mortimer Gray’s exceedingly careful reply, so measured you’d have needed a nanometer to appreciate its precision. “I imagine that they’ll tell us, when they want us to know. In the meantime, it might be best to take what Mr. Tamlin says, about the need to prevent a war, very seriously indeed.”

“That would be easier to do,” Niamh Horne opined, “if this whole business weren’t such a farce. The tape they fed us during the supposed emergency aboard Child of Fortune was bad enough, but building a set to persuade us that we’re aboard the lost Ark is even worse.”

“Is it a set?” Lowenthal was quick to ask. “Did you see anything out there to prove that we’re not on the lost Ark?”

“No,” the cyborganizer admitted. “But I wasn’t able to get out of the corridor. Alice seems to be bedded down in a cell even smaller than ours, and there’s no sign of any companion. If the indicators on the locks can be trusted, we’re sealed in an airtight compartment surrounded by vacuum. What does that imply?”

“It might imply that our captors are a little short of vital commodities like heat and atmosphere,” Gray put in. “Or that they love playing games. Or both. Did you ever read a twentieth-century philosopher called Huizinga, Mr. Zimmerman?”

Adam Zimmerman looked slightly surprised, but Davida had