“Go ahead,” she said.
“Would it surprise you,” asked Mark, “if I said Chernobyl was no accident?”
“I feel bad about that,” Gladys said. “You know I do — we all do. Damned if I can see how none of us noticed that radioactive stuff until it was too late to do more than push it off to where there were fewest people to harm.” She paused, with her hands on her fat thighs. “You’re not saying that just to make me feel better, are you? Who’d do a thing like that?”
“The same people who distracted you with the bombing of Libya,” he said. “Who’d cause World War Two, or the Cold War, AIDS, drugs, or — come to that — the greenhouse effect? Who isn’t interested in our having a space program?”
“People,” said Gladys. “This is people. You don’t have to tell me the world’s a crazy place. If it isn’t stupidity, it’s greed with most people.”
“Yes, but which people?” he asked her. “Suppose I were to tell you the same people were responsible for all these things I just mentioned and a great deal more I haven’t?”
She was silent. For a second or so he feared she was rejecting every word, and he sighed. She was too old. Her face was blank. Her mind was set. He should have quelled his fear and gone to Amanda instead. Then he saw that Gladys’s expressionless face was turned toward something in the grass. Her lips moved. “Jimbo,” she said faintly, “I’d have to ask three questions, wouldn’t I?”
She was talking to that animal of hers. Some people claimed it was a monkey. Others declared it to be a small dog. Mark himself had never been sure which it was. All he knew was that it was brown and skinny. When it appeared, it scratched rather a lot — as it was doing now. He suspected this was a device to stop people looking at it too closely.
“I’d have to ask,” said Gladys, “Who? and Why? and What proof has he? Wouldn’t I, Jimbo? And why is he coming here with a tale like this when the Berlin Wall’s down at last, and just as Russia and so forth start being more friendly?”
So her mind was working, after her own fashion. “That’s all part of my proof,” Mark explained quietly. “Ask yourself — or Jimbo — who might want all technologically advanced nations at peace with one another at the moment when the world’s climate is changing.”
“Sounds like a well-wisher,” she said.
“Not if you consider that they started the global warming at the precise moment when we were all distracted by Chernobyl,” Mark told her. “It’s quite a pattern of theirs — they lull us, or they distract us until it’s too late — and it quite remarkably often seems to be aimed directly at us, at magic users in this country. I’ve got pages of proof in my briefcase to—”
“Printout things!” said Gladys. “You know I can’t make head or tail of those. Tell it plain.”
Mark creaked about in his cane chair, wondering how to explain. “Well,” he said at length, “let’s begin with global warming. Do you know how much of this country will be left if the polar icecaps melt entirely?”
“I saw a map on the box,” Gladys assented. “Not much.” In the grass, the skinny animal appeared to paw one of her freckled bare legs. “I know, I know, Jimbo,” she said. “He’s on to something. I know that. It’s the Who and the Why that worries me. Who’s going to want the world at peace while they heat us up until we’re all tropical and flooded?”
“The same people who wanted a war fifty years ago,” Mark said.
“How do you make that out?” she said. “War and peace. That puzzles me. It doesn’t make sense!”
“It does,” he said, “if you consider all the inventions and discoveries that came out of the war. I’m not just talking about rocketry and nuclear power — I’m talking about the seven new forms of protection the Ring discovered during the Battle of Britain. I’m talking about the ways we’re going to have to think of now to hold the water back, not to speak of all the new cooling techniques we’ll need when the world gets hotter.”
There was another long silence, during which a few more raindrops pinged on the colander and the breakfast tray. “Someone using us to learn things,” Gladys said. “That’s not nice. What proof have you?”
Mark reached his pale hand out to his briefcase. “For one thing, I called up records of all the plans, blueprints, and prototypes that have disappeared over the last twenty years. There’s a hell of a lot. The significant thing is that two-thirds of them vanished so completely that they’ve never been traced.”
“Oh, industry,” Gladys said dismissively. “What about us?”
“Exactly,” said Mark. “We don’t keep records. For the important things, we use word of mouth.”
They looked at each other across the littered grass. The bushes tossed as if a shiver had run through them.
Gladys levered herself from her plastic chair. “Up, Jimbo,” she said fretfully. “Time I was getting lunch. This is all too much for me.”
It sounded as if she had given the whole thing up. Mark followed her anxiously as she lumbered into the house, dutifully carrying the tray with him. It was dark and redolent indoors, of herbs, pine, cats, and bread. Plants — some of them tree-size — grew everywhere in pots, as if the garden had moved in there in the same way that the house had spread onto the grass. Mark fought his way under a jungle of tree-tall plants, which reminded him of the things you might expect to find growing in a bayou, and found her busy in the elderly little kitchen beyond.
“You didn’t need to bring that tray,” she said without turning around. “The cats would have seen to it. I’ve only chicken pies today. Will that do, with peas?” Before he could suggest he had only just had breakfast, she went on, “It has to be one of the Outer Ring, doesn’t it? No one else knows enough.”
“Yes,” he said, sliding the tray onto a surface already full of flowerpots. Some toppled. He was forced to enhance the space in order to make room for the tray. She’s got me squandering power now, he thought. “Can I help?”
“No, go in the other room and sit,” Gladys said. “I need to be on my own when I’m thinking.”
Mark went obediently, highly relieved that she was prepared to think about it, and sat on a hard sofa amongst the jungle, staring out beyond the lozenge-shaped glass panes of the verandah door. She had let the rain come down now. It was pouring outside, steady white lines of rain, and the room was nearly dark. The cats were arriving indoors around him. The cane chairs were now on the verandah, along with most of the other things. Mark sat listening to the rilling hiss of the rain, and it had nearly sent him to sleep by the time Gladys called him to lunch.
“You still haven’t told me who,” she grumbled. “Has he, Jimbo? If someone’s using us for guinea pigs, I’ve a right to know, Mark.”
Mark picked at a large, squashy commercial chicken pie and some remarkable bulletlike peas, sighed, and went with her, for security, to another level of the continuum, where he gave her his theory. He saw her eyes widen in the gloom of the kitchen.
“There’s never been any sort of proof of that,” she said. “Eat up. I don’t want to hurry you, but I’ve got to get to the hospital. There’s someone needing me there.”
He was fairly sure he had lost her now, but he did his best to eat the pie. Anxiety caused it to form a hard lump, with corners, in his stomach. He watched Gladys encase herself in a transparent plastic mac and sort through a floppy purse for money.
“You can come too if you like,” she told him. “I’m still thinking — and I’d like you to see this girl anyway. Coming?”