The Cassandra Complex

“The people who sit back and do nothing don’t go down in history at all,” Lisa pointed out. “Their anonymity remains inviolable—but people who make mistakes are always remembered. I don’t think Morgan needs to worry about losing the credit for discovering the Miller Effect, because I can’t believe that there’ll be an eager crowd of alternative claimants. If you and I figure in the story at all, it’ll probably be because we’ve fucked up.”

“So who’s too paranoid now?” Arachne wanted to know. She turned left onto London Road before taking the right fork to cut across to Lansdown Road. Her onboard computer censured her for not sticking to the arterial road, but she didn’t even mutter a reply. “Your boss might call this ‘dereliction of duty,’ but we know better, and history will side with us. When the final score is calculated, we’ll be the heroes. Unless, of course, we somehow end up as zombies with the minds of mice. Then we’ll be numbered among the martyrs. Either way, we’ll have done what we could.”

Arachne parked the car behind the derelict church just above the fork where Lansdown Road and Richmond Road diverged. It was nearly a five-minute walk to Morgan’s house, but to go any closer would have risked exposure to the surveillance umbrella.

There was no conspicuous police presence in evidence as Lisa approached the house, but a quick scan of the unmarked cars parked in the street revealed a familiar face: the sergeant who had been in Thomas Sweet’s office reviewing the security tapes on the night of the Mouseworld holocaust. Lisa headed straight for him, and he wound down his window.

“Sergeant Hapgood, isn’t it?” she said.

“Dr. Friema

Her heart lurched slightly before his smile tipped her off to the fact that he meant the MOD. “Worse than that,” she said. “I’m ru

“I heard about you getting darted and carted,” Hapgood said. “Some rent-a-cop sticking his oar in, wasn’t it? As if we didn’t have enough trouble falling over the feet of the Ministry men. Where do they dig these guys up? The Civil Service Senior Citizens’ Club?” He realized his mistake almost immediately and said: “No offense.”

“None taken,” she assured him. “Have you seen Mike today?”

“No. While the suspects are flowing into custody, he’ll be up to his eyes. Did you hear about his ex? He got out before she flipped, but that might not be enough to save him. Ke

“Only slightly,” Lisa replied. “There’ll be plenty of time to be embarrassed about it when we’re not chasing our tails so hard. For now, I’ve got to get through my list of things to do as quickly as I can.”

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Hapgood asked.

“You don’t have to” Lisa said, “but I’d be obliged if you’d walk to the door with me and introduce me formally to the Ministry men. I haven’t met any of them yet except for Smith, and he’s not the one who sent me here.”

“Sure.” Hapgood seemed glad of the opportunity to stretch his legs. “Your new outfit looks okay, by the way—the high street makes the so-called new uniforms look a bit scabby, don’t you think? I’m glad I’m in CID.” His own suit looked brand new, but it was probably trying to pass itself off as something smarter than it really was. Shallow people always choose clothes that reflect their personalities, Lisa thought, even when they don’t realize what they’re giving away.

“It’s a bit flashy for lab wear,” Lisa countered. “But then, I’m not in the lab, am I?”

Hapgood walked her to the front door and waited until it was opened. The man who peered through the gap did indeed look like some ancient reservist recalled to active service because of the emergency.

“Inspector Friema

“Our own forensic staff has gone over the site,” the Ministry man said dubiously.

“The inspector knew Professor Miller. She’s better placed than anyone else to assess what might be missing,” Hapgood said, letting a trace of resentment show. “It’s our investigation too, remember. We’re all supposed to be on the same side.”

Lisa suppressed a smile. “Mr. Smith co-opted me to help him out at Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny,” she said apologetically. “I was with him most of yesterday and last night. This is the first chance I’ve had to get out here.”

The door finally swung open.

“Thanks, Jerry,” Lisa said dismissively.

“You’re welcome,” Hapgood assured her, presumably having taken some small satisfaction in exercising his meager authority upon the invaders from London.

“We’re very busy,” the man from the Ministry informed Lisa as soon as he had reclosed the door.

“That’s all right,” Lisa told him. “I know my way around. That’s the whole point of my being here. I won’t get in your way. You’ll hardly know I’m here.”

It would have been a good deal easier to follow Morgan’s instructions if she’d had his study to herself, but that, inevitably, was where the majority of the Ministry men were busy. There were three of them. She had to make a show of prowling around, studying the dust patterns on the desk where Morgan’s oldest surviving PC had stood for thirty-some years and pushing objects back and forth to expose similar traces on the unevenly cluttered shelves. Eventually she convinced herself that the operatives engaged in methodically copying wafers and sequins into their own equipment were so used to her presence that they had stopped paying attention to what she was doing, and it was at that point that she began to look for what she actually wanted.

Morgan had never set aside his twentieth-century habits. He had always taken it for granted that although burglars would plunder electronic-storage devices with alacrity, because they were so easily portable, they would never bother with books. He wasn’t vandal enough to to make a safe by cutting the centers out of the pages of a book, no matter how disposable the text might be, but he regarded the space within a reference book’s spine as the kind of repository that no one would ever think to investigate.

In order to get the wafer out, Lisa had not only to pick up volume M-Zof Morgan’s Webster’s New International Dictionary, but to let the pages fall open far enough to get her fingers into the opened crack. The cut between her thumb and finger hadn’t bothered her for some time, but the maneuver tested the flexibility of the sealant to the limit. She had to fight hard to maintain the appearance of a purely fortuitous movement. Fortunately, none of the Ministry men paid the slightest heed. The youngest of them was forty-five and the oldest must have been eight or ten years older than Lisa, but that didn’t prevent their deciding, consciously or unconsciously, that she was too old to be worth looking at.

When the wafer was safely lodged in a hidden pocket, Lisa continued her charade, dutifully pretending that she really was making a mental list of missing objects. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that Judith Ke