The space between the bars was about four unaccommodating inches. I thought hard. I still knew one big thing, but was it needed? “Well, I was just curious,” I imagined myself saying with a slight whine to Gray Suit in the morning. “It’s a fair cop. I don’t suppose, ha ha, there’s any chance you could keep me on? No? Oh well, that’s the luck of the game,” and bye-bye to the Jasper Trant Bequest.
Everyone gets curious after a while. Practically anybody would grow overcome with curiosity in an average time of, say, six weeks. Thus the staff turnover. Thus…
No. I don’t pretend to be an expert on human psychology, but surely sooner or later the Trant would end up hiring someone too loyal or too dull to take a peep, and they’d duly hold down the job for years on end.
For the sake of form I tested the bars—immovable—and went back to learn what I might from the disastrous ledger. It was all blank sheets except for where it had lain open. That page carried a few lines of faded blue-black ink, in the sort of clerkly hand you might expect from Bob Cratchit.
Jasper Trant said in his Last Will and Testament that once as a magistrate of the Oxford courts he saw a shape no man could believe, a thing that crawled from a cell window where no man might pass and left nought behind. All through his life he puzzled over this and sought a proof. Here is his bequest.
Here was what bequest? Was this slender snatch of gossip the root of all those rumors about Trant’s secret lore of shape-shifters and changelings? Something was missing. Or perhaps I had not thought it through. The path seemed clear: wait till morning, own up like a man, and walk out of the building forever. No problem.
It was then that I looked properly at the steel table which supported the book. It was dreadfully like a medical examination couch. Two huge minders always accompanied the Trustee on his morning visit to Area C. Suddenly I was sure that no errant security guard was allowed to say good-bye without being carefully prodded and probed. Which would not do at all.
The Trant Bequest had circulated its own damned rumors, and fed the fires by refusing any access to its worthless collection. Bait.
How shall one catch the lions in the desert? There was one answer that Keith repeated with a tiny sneer because it wasn’t pure maths but mathematical physics. I know even less physics than maths, but swiftly picked up the jeering tone… protective coloration. The theoretical physicist’s answer: Build a securely locked cage in the centre of the desert. Wave mechanics says there is always a tiny but non-zero probability that any particular wave/particle, including a lion, might be in the cage. Wait.
With the long patience of the dead, Jasper Trant had waited.
Shit, I thought, seeing another facet. After six weeks on average, if they hadn’t given way to curiosity, each successive Trant guard would be sacked on some excuse or another, to make way for the testing of the next in line. No one who wanted to infiltrate the Bequest would have to wait for long.
I sighed. Four inches between the bars. This would take time and not be at all comfortable. I could not stay around for a possible medical examination: every instinct screamed against it, and I trust my instincts. The Trant Bequest had nothing more to tell me about myself.
So. Off with that smart uniform. The dull, painful trance of change, writhing to and fro on that death-cold iron floor, in the dark. Bones working as in a dream. Muscle-masses shifting, joints dislocating, rewriting the map of myself. The ribs are one thing; the pelvic and cranial sutures are very much harder work to part and rejoin. It went on and on, until at length I was a grotesque flat parody of the Bob Ames who had entered an eternity before. Even so, it would be a long hard wriggle. By now I must look like…
Well, specifically, like the dead and flattened guard in that photograph. Could he have been—? No, it wouldn’t make sense, there was a real autopsy and everything. But I did examine the bars more closely, in fear of some hidden trap. Then I stood back and glimpsed the trap too obvious to be noticed.
Jasper Trant himself had seen something slip from an Oxford jailhouse cell. Through the bars, no doubt. Bars, no doubt, set just as far apart as those now blocking the Area C door. There was another subtlety here. If this was a snare for people like myself, set by his long-departed curiosity, why the loophole?
Almost I could hear Keith’s voice, the eager voice of the mathematician: Didn’t you read the mention of “proof” in the book? Wasn’t I telling you last night about the austere kind of maths reasoning we call an existence proof? Trant wasn’t collecting for a zoo… he was a mathematician and all his Trustees want is the existence proof. Which they’d certainly have, if after walking in there and triggering the hydraulics you got out through that impossible gap. Don’t you see?
I saw, and was profoundly grateful to Keith for the patterns of reasoning he’d shown me. It was heady stuff, this reason, a shiny and unfamiliar tool. I couldn’t stay and I couldn’t go. Knowledge is power and human ignorance is my safeguard. After the long years’ trek from that damned children’s home in search of more of my kind, whatever kind that might be, I did not propose the betrayal of confirming to these… others… that my own kind existed. Which left me caught, like the lion in the desert who (“Ever heard the psychologist’s method, Keith?”) builds around him, deduction by deduction, the bars of his own intangible cage.
Yes, I owe a great deal to young Keith. Education is a wonderful thing; he taught me how to be a lion. And at the last I remembered one thing that he’d explained to me, sentences falling over each other in his enthusiasm… the technique of reducing a difficulty to a problem that has already been solved. All else then follows. Q.E.D.
It was solved, I think, last year.
Caught in this exact dilemma, what did my anonymous cousin do then? He could escape the cage, but at the cost of leaving the Trustees their proof. I salute him for his splendid piece of misdirection. Then as now, there was a second guard, no doubt asleep back in the control room. No live man could have slipped through those bars after springing the trap, but a dead man, topologically equivalent but stamped and trampled and flattened… In the morning, outside the barred doorway of Area C, there lay an object that might just have been—that to any rational mind must have been—hauled and crushed with brutal force through one narrow space. Hauled from outside the cage. A bizarre and suspicious circumstance, but not one which quite proved anything.
So logic points the way. I’m sorry to be doing this, Keith. I’m truly grateful for all our conversations, and will try to make quite sure that you feel no pain.
TURNING THIRTY
by Lisa Tuttle
Here’s a question you’ll be quizzed on: Name two writers and one editor from this book who were each barred from the same British Science Fiction Society Open Night by Christopher Priest. Are you reading this, Langford? Yes! The correct answer is Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, and Lisa Tuttle! Well, we were grudgingly allowed entry and permitted to buy our own drinks, but we were not to eat anything from the buffet despite having offered to pay. Etchison had two plates anyway. Don’t know about Tuttle.