Leech shot him a pitiful look. He was picking through Clever Dick's papers.
"The man couldn't maintain an orderly file if his soul depended on it," he said, in exasperation. "From now on, every scientist or researcher who works for me gets shadowed by two form-fillers and a pen-pusher. What's the use of results if you can't find them?"
"He wasn't working for you," said Richard.
"Oh yes he was," insisted Leech. "He drew his pay-packet and he signed his contract. Derek Leech International owns his results. If this Cold creature is real, then we own her. The Comet has exclusive rights to her story. I could put her in a zoo, hunt her for sport, license her image for T-shirts, or dissect her crystal by crystal to advance the progress of science and be entirely within my legal rights."
"Tell her that."
Leech turned a page and found something. "I just might," he said.
He tore out a sheaf of papers covered in neat little diagrams. Richard thought it might be some form of cipher, then recognized the hexagonal designs as snow crystals. Under each was a scrawl — mirror-written words, not in English.
"Backwards in Latin," mused Leech. "Paranoid little boffin, wouldn't you say? This is Cleaver's Rosetta Stone. Not many words, no subtleties, no syntax at all. But he received instructions. He made and used his Box. He broke the Zero Barrier, and violated the laws of physics."
"All because he could grow snowflakes?"
"Yes, and now I own the process. There might not be applications yet, but things get smaller. Transistorization won't stop at the visible. Imagine: trademarked weather, logos on bacteria, microscopic art, micro-miniaturized assassins…"
"Let's ensure the future of mankind on the planet before you start pestering the patent office, shall we?"
Leech bit down, grinding his teeth hard. Richard thought something had snapped in his mouth.
"You should watch that," he advised.
Leech smiled, showing even, white, perfect gnashers. Richard suspected he had rows of them, eternally renewed — like a shark.
All rooms have ghosts. Acts and feelings and ideas all have residue, sometimes with a half-life of centuries. Richard took his gauntlets off and began to touch things, feeling for the most recent impressions. His fingertips were so numb that the cold shocks were welcome. His sensitivity was more attuned to living people than dead objects, but he could usually read something if he focused. He scraped a brown stain on the wall, and had a hideous flash: Cleaver, with a knife, smiling; a red-haired man in a white coat, gouting from an open throat.
"What is it?" Leech asked.
Richard forced himself to disconnect from the murder. "The staff," he said. "I saw what happened before they were snowmen."
"Where are they, by the way?" asked Leech.
"Wandered off. Didn't seem to be the sorts to listen to reason. I doubt if you can negotiate with them."
The memory flashes floated in his mind, like neon after images. He blinked, and they began to dispel. Cleaver had made four sacrifices to the Cold. McKendrick, Kellett, Bakhtinin, Pouncey.
"Were the staff dead before or after they got snow-coated?" asked Leech.
"Does it matter?"
"If the Professor killed them to give the Cold raw material to make cat's paws, they were just unused machines when she got them. If they were alive when the Cold wrapped them up, she might have interfaced with minds other than Clever Dick's."
Richard didn't approve of Leech's use of «interfaced» as a verb-form, but saw where he was going.
"He killed them first," he confirmed- Leech didn't ask him how he knew. "They aren't even zombies. The dead people are more like armatures. The only traces of personality they have…"
"The hats."
"… were imposed by Professor Cleaver. I think he was trying to be funny. He's not very good at humour. Few solipsists are."
Richard proceeded to the remains of the Box. The Cold had come through this doorway. He doubted it could be used to send her back, even if it were repaired. Banishing was never as easy as conjuring. Sometimes performing a ritual backwards worked, but not in a language with six planes of symmetry. You would always get hexagonal palindromes.
Pressing his palm to a frost patch on the surface of a workbench, he felt the slight bite of the crystals, the pull on skin as he took his hand away. He didn't sense an entity, not even the life he would feel if he put his naked hand against the bark of a giant redwood. Yet the Cold was here.
"When the Cold broke through the Zero Barrier," said Leech, "the Professor's Box blew up. After that, he couldn't make his little tiny ice sculptures, but they still talked. She turned the others into snowmen, but spared him. How could he make her understand he was a sympathizer?"
Richard thought about that. "He persuaded the Cold he was her High Priest," he said. "And she let him live… for a while."
"Cleaver said the Cold was an intelligent form of life," said Leech. "He did not say she was clever. Imagine: you're utterly unique, near-omnipotent and have endured millennia upon millennia. You wake up and the only person who talks to you — the only person you have ever talked to — is Clever Dick Cleaver. What does that give you?"
"A grossly distorted picture of the world?"
"Exactly. Perhaps it's time our Cold Lady heard another voice."
"Voices," said Richard, firmly.
"Yes, of course," said Leech, not meaning it.
Derek Leech was excited, fathoming possibilities, figuring out angles. Letting the Great Enchanter cut a separate deal with the Cold would be a terrible idea. He was entirely too good at negotiating contracts.
"Now," Leech thought out loud, "how did he talk with her?"
Richard remembered the snow angels. He wandered out of the laboratory. Not caring to maintain Cleaver's obsessive little paths, he waded through snow. It drifted over his ankles. From the cafeteria doorway, he looked again at the three angels. They had reminded him of semaphore signals.
"This is how," he said.
Leech had tagged along with him. He saw it at once too.
"See the feet," said Leech. "Not heel-marks, but toe-marks. When kids make snow angels, they lie on their backs. Cleaver lies on his front. You can see where his face fits, like a mould for a mask."
A muffled screech sounded. Back in the laboratory, the Professor was awake.
Richard stepped into the room and knelt by an angel, touching the negative impression of Cleaver's face. He felt nothing. If this had been the connection, it was dead now. The Cold had moved on.
He would have to try outside.
"Leech," he said, "get on your back-pack blower and ring Catriona again. We have to tell her what we're doing, in case it doesn't work. No sense in the next lot making the same mistakes…"
A chill rolled down the corridor.
The doorway was empty. Richard saw a white tangle on the floor. Leech's parka. And another further away. His leggings.
Richard's stomach turned over. He was feeling things now.
"Leech!" he shouted.
Only the Professor responded, rattling his chair and yelling around his gag.
Richard jogged down the corridor, past more of Leech's discarded arctic gear. He turned a corner. The main doors were open. One flapped in the blizzard.
He made it to the doors and took the full force of the wind in his face.
Leech — in a lightweight salmon suit — had walked a few yards away from the building. He stood in the middle of whirling snow, casually undoing his wide orange knit tie.