"If it weren't for Cathewina Kaye, and a disservice she did me many many years ago, I might have taken a diffewent path. You know about this, Mr Jeperson?"
A penny, long-teetering at the lip of a precipice, dropped — in slow motion, setting memory mechanisms ticking with each turn.
"Richard Cleaver? Clever Dick. You called yourself Clever Dick. That's who you are!"
"That's who I was… until that w-woman came along. She hates people like me… like both of you, pwobably… she only likes people who are n-normal. People who can't do anything. You know what I mean. Normal."
He drew out the word, with contempt. Richard remembered a time — at school, as a young man — when he might have given the word such a knife-twist. Like Dick Cleaver, he had manifested a Talent early. While Cleaver demonstrated excess brain capacity, Richard showed excess feeling. Insights did not always make him happy. Ironically, it was Catriona — not his father or Edwin Winthrop — who most helped him cope with his Talent, to connect with people rather than become estranged. Without her, he might be a stuttering, r-dropping maniac.
"It was never about who you were, Cleaver," said Richard, trying to be kind. "It was about what you did."
Fury boiled behind Cleaver's eyes.
"I didn't do anything! We were the Splendid Six, and she took us apart, one by one, working in secwet with your dwatted Diogenes Club. We were heroes… Blackfist, Lord Piltdown, the Blue Stweak… and sh-she made us small, twied to make us normal. I'm the last of us, you know. The Splendid One. The Bwightest Boy in the World. The others are all dead."
Cleaver was coming up to pensionable age, but he was as frozen inside as his goldfish — still eleven, and poisonous.
"If I suffered a speech impediment like yours, I'd avoid words like 'dratted'," commented Leech. "All this ancient history is fascinating, I'm sure. I know who you used to be, Professor. I don't hire anyone without knowing everything about them first. But I don't see what it has to do with all this… this cold business."
A sly look crept into Cleaver's eye. An I-know-a-secret-you're-not-going-to-like look.
"I wather think I've pwoved my point, Mr Leech. You've wead my book, The Coming Ice AgeV
"I had someone read it and summarize the findings for me," said Leech, offhandedly. "Very convincing, very alarming. It's why you were head-hunted — at a salary three times what you got at the Met — to head my weather research program."
What exactly had Derek Leech been doing here? Scientific weather control? For reasons which were now all too plain, Richard did not like the notion of a Great Enchanter with command over the elements.
"I employ the best, and you were the best man for this job. What you did as a schoolboy was irrelevant. I didn't even care that you were mad."
Clever Dick Cleaver sputtered.
"Sorry to be blunt, pal, but you are. I can show you the psych reports. Your insanity should not have hindered your ability to fulfil your contract. Quite the contrary. Derek Leech International has a policy of easing the lot of the mentally ill by finding them suitable positions. We consider it our social service remit, repaying a community that has given us so much."
Richard knew all about that. Myra Lark, acknowledged leader in field of shaping minds to suit the requirements of government and industry, was on Leech's staff. Some jobs you really had to be mad to take. Dr Lark's, for instance.
"Your book convinced me it could happen. World Cooling. And only drastic action can forestall the catastrophe. With the full resources of DLI at your disposal, I was expecting happier results. Not this… this big fridge."
Cleaver smiled again.
"If you'd actually wead my book, you wouldn't be so surprised. Tell him, Jeperson."
Leech looked at Richard, awaiting enlightenment.
"Professor Cleaver writes that an imminent ice age will lead to world-wide societal collapse and, in all probability, the extinction of the human race."
"Yes, and…?"
"He does not write that this would be a bad thing."
Realization dawned in Leech's eyes. Cleaver grinned broadly, showing white dentures with odd, cheap blue settings.
Derek Leech had given his weather control project to someone who wanted winter to come and freeze everything solid. Isidore Persano and his worm would be proud.
"What about the snowmen?" Leech asked.
"I was wondewing when you'd get to them. The snowmen. Yes. I'm not alone in this. I have fwiends. One fwiend, mainly. One big fwiend. I call her the Cold. You can call her the End."
IV
He was supposed to park outside the Post Office Tower and wait for the other recruits. One of the group would have further instructions and, he was promised, petrol money. Jamie was off to the Winter War.
Now he'd (provisionally) taken the Queen's Shilling, he wondered whether the Diogenes Club just wanted him as a handy, unpaid chauffeur, ferrying cannon fodder about. Dad wouldn't have thought a lot of that. Still, Jamie only wanted to dip a toe in the waters. He was leery about the shadow life. The Shade Legacy hadn't always been happy, as Mum would tell him at the drop of a black fedora with razors in the brim. At the moment, he was more interested in Transhumance — especially if they could find a better, preferably celibate drummer… and a new bass-player, a decent PA and enough songs to bump up their set to an hour without reprises. Vron had been promising new lyrics for weeks, but said the bloody heat made it hard to get into the proper mood. Perhaps he should scrub Transhumance and look for a new band.
The GPO Tower, a needle bristling with dish-arrays, looked like a leftover design from Stingray. The revolving restaurant at the summit, opened by Wedgy Benn and Billy Butlin, stopped turning in 1971, after an explosion the public thought was down to the Angry Brigade. Jamie knew the truth. His father's last «exploit» before enforced retirement had been the final defeat of his long-time enemies, the Dynamite Boys. The Tower was taken over by the now-octogenarian Boys, who planned to use the transmitters to send a coded signal to activate the lizard stems of every human brain in the Greater London area and turn folks into enraged animals. Dad stopped them by setting off their own bombs.
Jamie found a parking space in the thin shadow of the tower, which shifted within minutes. Inside the van, stale air began to boil again. Even with the windows down, there was no relief.
"Gather, darkness," he muttered. He hadn't Dad's knack with shadows, but he could at least whip up some healthy gloom. The sky was cloudless, but a meagre cloud shadow formed around the van. It was too much effort to maintain, and he let it go. In revenge, the sun got hotter.
"Jamie Chambers," said a girl.
He looked out at her. She was dressed for veldt or desert: leather open-toe sandals, fawn culottes, baggy safari jacket, utility belt with pouches, burnt orange sunglasses the size of saucers, leopard-pattern headscarf, Australian bush hat. In a summer when Zenith the Albino sported a nut-brown suntan, her exposed lower face, forearms and calves were pale to the point of colourlessness. People always said Jamie — as instinctively nocturnal as his father — should get out in the sun more, but this girl made him look like an advert for Air Malta. He would have guessed she was about his own age.
"Call me Gene," she said. "I know your aunt Jenny. And your mother, a bit. We worked together a long time ago, when she was Kentish Glory."
Mum had stopped wearing a moth-mask and film-winged leotards decades before Jamie was born. Gene was much older than nineteen.