Overtime. Part 28

Giovanni shrugged again. 'You're right,' he said. 'If I were you I'd call Security and have us thrown in jail.' He picked up a framed photograph of a very pretty girl in an official Blondel European Tour wimple from the Warden's desk. 'Your wife?' he asked.

'No,' said the Chief Warden. 'My, er, niece.' He leaned forward conspiratorially. 'There wouldn't be any chance,' he whispered, 'of, well, going backstage after the show...?'

Having been blown to smithereens by the explosion of the oil storage tanks (caused by one of their own ineptly-placed grenades) the identifiable fragments of Clarenceaux, Mordaunt, Pursuivant and White Herald were collected by a relief team sent from the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes, packed in dry ice and taken directly to the central works depot, where a team of highly qualified and extremely resentful mechanics were ready to begin work.

'I mean,' said the Chief Footwright, taking a handful of toes from a cardboard box and sorting through them for a reasonable match, 'what the h.e.l.l is the point of it all? You spend half an hour getting the right and left legs all nicely balanced, the cornering and the foot wear all sorted out, and then a few days later back it comes, all mangled to c.o.c.k and fit for nothing but the breakers.'

'Hoy!' said Pursuivant. The Lead Vocalist, who had just reconnected his vocal chords, disconnected them again.

The Master Armerer frowned savagely. 'You think you got problems,' he replied, 'you want to try it from this end.' He looked at the mess on the bench in front of him and shook his head sadly. 'The really daft thing about it is the way they try and patch 'em up themselves in the field units.' He placed a spatula under a limp forearm and pointed to it with disgust. 'Just look at that, will you?' he said. 'Talk about a Friday afternoon job. Dunno who fitted that, but he didn't know his elbow from -'

'You can talk,' broke in the Head Technician. 'All you've got to do is get the bits out of a box and bolt them on. Me, I've got to wire the whole lot in. Look at that, for Christ's sake.' He pointed at Clarenceaux's trepanned skull, which lifted its eyes and scowled at him. 'You don't want a nerve specialist for that lot, you want a bleeding plumber. I ask you! Great big lumps of loose solder everywhere, bits held on with crocodile clips, contacts twisted round rusty old nails - it's a wonder the whole lot didn't short out. And they expect the peris.h.i.+ng things to be able to read.' He sighed, adjusted his torque wrench, and went to work on the cervical joint.

'Right,' he continued after a while, 'that'll have to do for now. So long as they don't use it for compet.i.tion stuff or expect it to win any n.o.bel prizes, should be OK for another fifty thousand. Expect it'll get blown up before then, anyway. Close it up, George.'

Fully restored and operational, Clarenceaux had his permitted cup of tea - more to test the hydraulic lines than to restore him after his ordeal; at any rate, they never put sugar in it - donned his regulation fatigues and went to report to his superior.

'Well?' Mountjoy said.

'Well ...' Clarenceaux reported. Mountjoy invited him to expand on that. 'Well, sir,' Clarenceaux continued, choosing his words with care, and (bearing in mind that the portion of his brain that handled such matters had been in a cardboard box in the stockroom half an hour ago) doing better than he expected, 'you could say it was a qualified success. On balance, like.'

'Oh yes?' replied Mountjoy ominously. 'Go on.'

'Well,' Clarenceaux said - his new sweat glands were working fine, he noticed - 'we got there all right -'

'Hardly surprising, considering you had nothing to do with it.'

Since his self-respect had not been replaced (shortage at the supply depot), Clarenceaux ignored that. 'And then,' he went on, 'we found the oil rig, no trouble at all. There was a guard on the gate so we had to use all reasonable and necessary force to get in, and then some other guards came up and tried to grab us, so we, er...'

'Yes?'

'White Herald,' said Clarenceaux - peer-group loyalty is an optional extra on the Popular range - 'had got hold of this hand grenade thing from somewhere, and he chucked it at them.

'Really.'

'Oh yes,' Clarenceaux confirmed. 'Worked a treat so far as reasonable and necessary force was concerned. Trouble was, it blew the rig up. and that's where we, sort of...'

'Yes,' said Mountjoy, 'I think I get the picture. Do you think there were any survivors?'

Clarenceaux thought for a moment. 'Well, not us, for a start,' he said firmly. 'We copped it. h.e.l.l of a bang) it was.'

'So I gathered,' Mountjoy replied. 'But do you think it likely that de Nesle could have survived the explosion? If he was on the rig, I mean?'

Clarenceaux shook his head, an unwise move considering that the bearings were still stiff. 'Can't see how he could have, sir,' he said. 'Like, we'd heard him singing, right, over the tannoy, when we were approaching the rig?'

'So?'

'So,' Clarenceaux continued, 'stands to reason that if he was singing into the tannoy, he must have been in the office building, or near it. And the office building was next to the storage tank. In fact, I seem to remember it was a b.l.o.o.d.y great chunk of the office building took my head off. Don't see how anyone could have survived in there when the tank went up.

'I see.' Mountjoy nodded. 'That's pretty good deduction, Clarenceaux. You thought that up all by yourself, did you?'

Praise was something that Clarenceaux had heard about, even vaguely believed in, like telepathy, but had never previously experienced in the flesh. He glowed slightly. 'Yes, sir,' he replied.

'Thought so,' said Mountjoy. 'That fool of an engineer's gone and fitted you with a Mark IVb instead of a Mark III. Go back to the sick bay and tell him to take it out again at once. Hasn't he heard about the cut-backs?'

As Clarenceaux wandered sadly away, Mountjoy turned himself back up to full illumination and considered the position. If Blondel really had been blown to bits ... But that was a very big if. The wretched man seemed to have the knack of getting out of certain death, the way a really dedicated twelve-year-old always gets out of Sports Day. Personally, he wasn't going to believe it until they brought him Blondel's head on a dish; and even then he'd want indemnity insurance. In short, he wasn't sure, and would inst.i.tute further enquiries. He reached across and switched on the intercom.

'Get me Intelligence,' he said.

A luminous white Land Rover was b.u.mping across the insubstantial waves of the Great North Archive. The pa.s.sengers were not enjoying the experience much.

'If,' grumbled the Chief Warden, 'after all this, he doesn't sing Ma Joie Me Semont, I'll have your guts for braces.'

'He'll sing it,' Giovanni a.s.sured him, taking his hand briefly away from in front of his mouth. 'I was there, I know.'

'He'd better, that's all,' the Warden snarled. 'All right, we're here. Now, what exactly are you looking for?'

'Well,' Giovanni said. 'Actually, we aren't quite sure.'

The Warden stared at him. 'You commit the biggest crime in the Universe, corrupting a Time Warden, and you aren't sure what you're looking for. What are you, tourists?'

'We're looking for someone,' Marco started to say, but Giovanni trod on his foot. Too late.

'Oh yes?' asked the Warden suspiciously. 'Who?'

'Oh, n.o.body you know,' Giovanni said. 'What's that over there?'

The Warden raised his field gla.s.ses. 'Looks like a column of smoke,' he said. 'That's odd, this is all water.'

'Water?' Marco looked out of the window nervously. 'Then why aren't we ...

'Deactivated water,' the Warden told him. 'It's got all the hydrogen and oxygen taken out. Keeps better,' he explained. 'If you gentlemen wouldn't mind, I think I'd better take a look.'

'That's fine,' Giovanni said.

They drove on until they came to the ruins of a stockade.

The surface of the immaterial sea was littered with mangled sc.r.a.ps of iron; the place looked like a battlefield, or the Hayward Gallery. Here and there lay yellow plastic helmets, boots, fragments of office furniture. No corpses, needless to say; anyone who dies in the Archives was never born in the first place.

'It's one of those pirate rigs I was telling you about,' the Warden said. 'Looks like someone got careless.'

'There's somebody over there, look,' Iachimo said, pointing. 'In that rowing boat.'

They drove over, climbed out and stopped the boat with their hands. Inside was a very frightened-looking man in the remains of a pair of overalls. After a while, they were able to get some sense out of him.

'These men,' he said, 'soldiers, guards, something like that. I was on sentry duty. They hit me.'