“Like the Alexandria manuscripts?”
“Well, yes, I would suppose so—although grabbing all those manuscripts and books was inspired entirely by a sordid profit motive. We could just as easily have copied them. Some of them we did; but the originals themselves represented a tremendous sum of money. I would hate to tell you what Harvard paid us for those manuscripts. Although, when you think of it,” Spencer said, reflectively, “I’m not sure they weren’t worth every cent of it. It called for the closest planning and split-second co-ordinating and we used every man we had. For, you see, we couldn’t grab the stuff until it was on the verge of burning. We couldn’t deprive even so much as a single person of the chance of even glancing at a single manuscript. We can’t lift a thing until it’s lost. That’s an iron-bound rule.
“Now, you take the Ely tapestry. We waited for years, going back and checking, until we were quite sure that it was finally lost. We knew it was going to be lost, you understand. But we couldn’t touch it until it was lost for good. Then we h’isted it.” He waved a hand. “I talk too much. I am boring you.”
“Mr. Spencer, sir,” protested Cabell, “talk like yours could never bore me. This is something I have dreamed of. I can’t tell you how happy …”
Spencer raised a hand to stop him. “Not so fast. You aren’t hired yet.”
“But Mr. Jensen down in Personnel …”
“I know what Jensen said. But the final word is mine.”
“What have I done wrong?” asked Cabell.
“You have done nothing wrong. Come back this afternoon.”
“But, Mr. Spencer, if only you could tell me …”
“I want to think about you. See me after lunch.”
Cabell unfolded upward from his chair and he was ill at ease.
“That man who was in ahead of me …”
“Yes. What about him?”
“He seemed quite angry, sir. As if he might be thinking of making trouble for you.”
Spencer said angrily. “And that’s none of your damn business!”
Cabell stood his ground. “I was only going to say, sir, that I recognized him.”
“So?”
“If he did try to cause you trouble, sir, it might be worth your while to investigate his association with a stripper down at the Golden Hour. Her name is Silver Starr.”
Spencer stared at Cabell without saying anything.
The man edged toward the door.
He put out his hand to grasp the knob, then turned back to Spencer. “Perhaps that’s not actually her name, but it’s fine for advertising—Silver Starr at the Golden Hour. The Golden Hour is located at …”
“Mr. Cabell,” Spencer said, “I’ve been at the Golden Hour.”
The impudent punk! What did he figure he was doing—buying his way in?
He sat quietly for a moment after Cabell had gone out, cooling down a bit, wondering about the man. There had been something about him that had been disturbing. That look in his eyes, for one thing. And the awkwardness and shyness didn’t ring quite true. As if it had been an act of some sort. But why, in the name of God, should anyone put on such an act when it would be quite clearly to his disadvantage?
You’re psycho, Spencer told himself. You’re getting so you jump at every shadow, sight a lurking figure behind every bush.
Two down, he thought, and another one to see—that is, if more had not piled into the office and were out there waiting for him.
He reached out his hand to press the buzzer. But before his finger touched it, the back door of the office suddenly burst open. A wild-eyed man came stumbling through it. He had something white and wriggly clutched within his arms. He dumped the white and wriggly thing on Hallock Spencer’s desk and unhappily stepped back.
It was a rabbit—a white rabbit with a great pink ribbon tied around its neck in a fancy bow.
Spencer glanced up, startled, at the man who’d brought the rabbit.
“Ackermann,” he shouted. “For Chrissake, Ackermann, what is the matter with you? It isn’t Easter yet!”
Ackermann worked his mouth in a painful manner and his Adam’s apple went bobbing up and down. But he made no words come out.
“Come on, man! What is it?”
Ackermann got his voice back. “It’s Nickerson!” he blurted.
“O.K., so Nickerson brought a rabbit back …”
“He didn’t bring it back, sir. It came all by itself!”
“And Nickerson?”
Ackermann shook his head. “There was just the rabbit.”
Spencer had started to get up from the chair. Now he sat back down again, harder than intended.
“There’s an envelope, sir, tied to the rabbit’s bow.”
“So I see,” said Spencer, absently. But he felt the coldness running through him.
The rabbit hoisted itself around until it was face to face with Spencer. It flapped an ear, wiggled its pink nose at him, put its head carefully to one side and lifted a deliberate hind leg to scratch a flea.
He pivoted in his chair and watched the operator sidle through the door. Three men lost in the last ten days. And now there was a fourth.
But this time, at least, he’d got back the carrier. The rabbit had brought back the carrier. Any living thing, once the mechanism had been rigged, by its very presence would have brought back the carrier. It need not be a man.
But Nickerson! Nickerson was one of the best there were. If a man could not depend on Nickerson, there was no one that he could.
He turned back to the desk and reached for the rabbit. It didn’t try to get away. He slipped out the folded sheet of paper and broke the blob of sealing wax. The paper was so stiff and heavy that it crackled as he smoothed it.
The ink was dead black and the script cramped. No fountain pen, thought Spencer—nothing but a goose quill.
The letter was addressed to him. It said:
Dear Haclass="underline" I have no logical excuse and I’ll attempt no explanation. I have found a sense of springtime and cannot compel myself to leave it. You have your carrier and that is better than any of the others ever did for you. The rabbit will not mind. A rabbit knows no time. Be kind to him—for he is no coarse, wild hare of the briery fields, but a loving pet. Nick.
Inadequate, thought Spencer, staring at the note, with the scrawly black more like a cabalistic pattern than a communication.
He had found a sense of springtime. What did he mean by that? A springtime of the heart? A springtime of the spirit? That might well be it, for Nickerson had gone to Italy in the early Renaissance. A springtime of the spirit and the sense of great beginnings. And perhaps that wasn’t all of it. Would there be as well a certain sense of spiritual security in that smaller world—a world that tinkered with no time, that reached toward no stars?
The buzzer sounded softly.
Spencer tipped up the lever on the intercom. “Yes, Miss Crane?”
“Mr. Garside on the phone.”
The rabbit was nibbling at the phone cord. Spencer pushed him to one side. “Yes, Chris.”
The gray, clipped voice said: “Hal, what’s with you and Ravenholt? He gave me a bad half hour.”
“It was Project God.”
“Yes, he told me that. He threatened to raise a howl about the ethics of our magazine project.”
“He can’t do that,” protested Spencer. “He’d have no grounds at all. That one is clean. It has the green light from Legal and from Ethics and the review board gave its blessing. It’s simply historical reporting. Eyewitness from the battle of Gettysburg, fashion notes on the spot from the time of Queen Victoria—it’s the biggest thing we’ve tackled. Its promotional value alone, aside from the money we’ll make …”
“Yes, I know,” said Garside, tiredly. “All of that is true. But I don’t want to get into a hassle with anyone—particularly not with Ravenholt. We have too many irons in the fire right now for anything unfavorable to pop. And Ravenholt can be a terribly dirty fighter.”