The total was fifty-six… No!… fifty-seven… five plus seven… twelve… one plus two… three… the faces changed so fast! The supermarket, the subway, Christmas shopping, she was on the up escalator, how many were coming down? Four customers in line at the corner grocery, two at the dry cleaners… Did she get them all? The three men who empty the trash cans every Thursday… No, wait: six shoppers at the corner store… that totaled what?—the people who read the news on television—
Eventually she would reach that final number… The hair stylist and shampoo girl at the salon—Why couldn’t she keep track?… she’d have to start over: her father, Mary, Lucy, Jason: four… and Betty: five… Doctor Rosen’s three patients and her dentist’s patients—
—and ultimately when she saw that final, conclusive number—Oh! a snapshot of her girl scout troop—If only she could use the calculator… she’d have to start all over: her father, Mary, Lucy—
—that final number would—the boys on the high school football team—faces sped by—the thirty-three hundred seventy-two students pictured in her graduating glass photo—start again: her father, Mary—
—would seal—her college roommate Virginia and her parents—and Virginia’s brother’s girlfriend—and her parents—and—
—her fate—the paperboy—and his—
… She’d better go back: her father—
THE LIONS IN THE DESERT
by David Langford
Born in 1953 in South Wales, David Langford now lives in Reading, Berkshire, presumably in a fortified compound to protect himself from angry mobs who have read his monthly fanzine, Ansible. Ansible is two pages of teeny-tiny print packing in lots and lots of news and gossip of the science fiction and fantasy scene. As much of it is presented with a sharply biting wit, many of those mentioned in Ansible would rather their names not have appeared there.
Recently Langford has published a collection of his parodies, The Dragonhikers’ Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two, a collection of his funny/critical science fiction writings, Let’s Hear It For the Deaf Man, and says: “Necronomicon Press should be doing a booklet of tasteless Langford stories this spring or summer. My suggested title was A Second Cartographic Survey of Yuggoth, but from the way they ignore this proposal I think they’re trying to tell me something.”
There is, however, a serious side to Langford’s writing, as you’re about to see.
“…further information on the elusive topic of polymorphism is said by some sources to be held in the restricted library of the Jasper Trant Bequest (Oxford, England).”
“How shall one catch the lions in the desert?” said young Keith Ramsey in his riddling voice, as he poured hot water into the unavoidable instant coffee.
After a week of nights on the job with him, I knew enough to smile guardedly. Serious proposals of expeditions, nets, traps, or bait were not required. Despite his round pink face and general air of being about sixteen, Keith was a mathematics D.Phil. (or nearly so) and had already decided to educate me in some of the running jokes of mathematicians. It could be interesting, in an obsessive way. The answers to the riddle were many and manifold.
“I thought of a topological method,” he said. “See, a lion is topologically equivalent to a doughnut…”
“What?”
“Well, approximately. A solid with a hole through it—the digestive tract, you know. Now if we translate the desert into four-dimensioned space, it becomes possible to knot the lion by a continuous topological deformation, which would leave it helpless to escape!”
I have no higher mathematics, but dire puns were allowed, “parallel lions” and the like. “Er, geometrically the desert is approximately a plane,” I suggested. “With the lions on it. Simply hijack the plane, and…”
He groaned dutifully, and we both drank the awful coffee supplied by the Trant to its loyal security force. Keith had converted his to the usual syrup with four spoonfuls of sugar. After all my care in dosing the sugar bowl, I was pleased that he took the correct measure.
“Deformation,” he said again, with what might have been a shiver. “You know, Bob, I wish they hadn’t shown us that picture. For me it’s night-watchman stuff or the dole, but every time I put on this wretched imitation policeman rig, I can feel things crawling all over my grave.”
“I never feel things like that—I’m too sensible. The original Man Who Could Not Shudder. But I sort of know what you mean. It reminded me of that bit in Jekyll and Hyde, if you ever read it…?”
He looked into the half-drunk coffee and sniffed; then snapped his skinny fingers. “Oh, ugh, yes. The awful Mr Hyde walking right over the kid in the street. Crunch, crunch, flat against the cobbles. Thank you very much for reminding me. Yes, I suppose it was like that.”
“They say down at the Welsh Pony that the turnover of guards here is pretty high for a cushy job like this. I have the impression they last about six weeks, on average. Funny, really.”
“Hilarious, mate. Look, what do you think happened to that bloke last year?”
“Maybe he opened one of the forbidden books,” I offered. “A hell of a thing when even a trusty pair like us gets told to keep clear of Area C.”
A gray man in a gray suit had hired me on behalf of the Trant Trustees. Amazingly little was said about career prospects, union representation or even—the part I was naturally curious about—the precise nature of what the two night guards actually guarded. Books were said to enter into it.
Instead: “I should warn you, Mr Ames, that certain people are intensely interested in the Trant Bequest. Last year, just outside the… that is, outside Area C, one of your predecessors was found like this. His colleague was not found at all.” He showed me a photograph without apparently caring to glance at it himself. The spread-eagled remains did not slot handily into anyone’s definition of how a corpse should look. Someone had, as Keith would have put it, tried bloody hard to translate him into two-dimensioned space.
“How shall one catch the lions in the desert?” he repeated, now badly slurred. The sugar treatment had taken longer than I had expected. “The method of the Sieve of Eratosthenes is to make an exhaustive list of all the objects in the desert and to cross off all the ones which on examination prove… prove not to be… To cross off…” Abandoning thought experiment number umpty-tum, he slumped to the table, head on arms, dribbling slightly over the sleeve of his nice navy-blue uniform. I thought of hauling him across to his bunk, but didn’t want to jog him back into wakefulness. With any luck he’d reach the morning with nothing worse than a touch of cramp. I rather liked young Keith: some day, maybe, he’d make a fine maths tutor with his games and jokes. If he could rouse interest in a dull pragmatist like me…
Certain people are intensely interested in the Jasper Trant Bequest. I am one of them. I slotted my special disk into the sensor-control PC and moved quietly out of the room.
Area A of the big house on Walton Street is mostly an impressive front hall, crusted with marble, chilled by a patterned quarry-tile floor too good (the Trustee said) to cover up with carpeting. Maggie, the black, shiny and very nearly spherical receptionist, reigns here from nine to five, Monday to Saturday—grumbling about the feeble electric fan-heater, nodding to the daily Trustee delegation, repelling any and all doomed enquiries for a reader’s card. I had yet to research the turnover time of Maggie’s job. The “guardroom” and a small, unreconstructed Victorian lavatory complete Area A.