I forced a smile, feverishly looking for a way to turn his offer down.
“I understand, Geoff,” I looked down, pulling on the lapel of my jacket. “But this is a gift from my Mommy!”
Knockout! He could not dispute that argument and tried to hide his embarrassment under a business-like tone: “Do you already know what our company develops?” That was Mr. Polak’s first question.
“Equipment for sewage factories?” I ventured to suggest.
“Not only that, not only that!” he jumped up in indignation. “The application of modified micro-organisms will open up a new era in the progress of civilization!”
And Mr. Polak poured down on me streams of strategic information about market conditions and future developments in this field.
I desperately tried to extract the nitty-gritty about the firm and my future responsibilities from the torrent of words. Why was he telling me all that stuff? I came here to earn, not to donate money!
“Do you understand now?” he smiled encouragingly, sipping his coffee.
“I do,” I nodded stupidly. “But at this moment you are working on a gas generator.”
“Yes,” he did not deny the obvious.
I struggled with a desire to run away without explanation—absolutely everything annoyed me about the place. And I wanted to have a heart-to-heart with Quarters…
We began fine-tuning my work schedule: it was not supposed to interfere with my studies. Polak was surprised to learn that my classes ended at midnight twice a week.
“What program are you taking at the university?”
“Alchemy and the art of dark magic.”
“Uh…”
I waited patiently—which one of my skills would he question? I swear I was ready to cast the Odo Aurum spell on the spot!
“Have you been engaged in research and development previously?” Mr. Polak asked cautiously.
In my opinion, the boss began catching on to whom he was speaking.
“Yes,” I nodded, “I have a patent in the engineering field.”
“Right, they told me…”
’Why did you ask then?’
He clapped his hands: “Well, let’s try to get down to business.”
“Let’s try” was an apropos phrase in this context.
Polak gave me a sketch made by hand, and ordered to transfer it to a Whatman paper. Then he left, probably going back to nap in some other place. First of all, I dragged one of the drawing boards to the window, mercilessly hitting a desk cluttered with pots of violets. The secretaries, pointedly clanking their heels, moved the pots to another windowsill.
For two hours I transferred the sketch in fine lines and then went to a familiar pub to have a showdown with Quarters. That malicious serpent! To draw his friend into this…
“Ron, who did you send me to, you bastard?!”
A guilty expression appeared on Quarters’ face: “Tom, I’ve got a cousin working there, and she is crazy about Polak. Be a sport and give them a hand!”
“Redhead or brunette?”
“She usually wears curls. Listen, they’ve been breaking their backs for two years with zero result. My uncle will fire them soon.”
“What do I have to do with that? I would have to spend a year just to delve into the topic! What could I do that they haven’t done already?”
Quarters rolled his eyes: “Had they done anything, the situation would have been different! Have you met Johan?”
I tensed up: “What, is he worse than…?”
“Yes, he is—I don’t have the words! My uncle had hired stars of academic science for the firm. Think for yourself: who can get carried away by breeding shitty mold, except for a white mage? They do breed mold there! But they haven’t been able to make a working device. Polak chatters, Johan writes articles, and an alchemist of theirs, Carl, raises a fuss: ‘Give me ideas!’ Tom, do you remember how you excelled at the seminars? Do the same with them—make them run!”
“How can I excel in white magic? I am an alchemist! Those two fields have almost no connection.”
“Well, bring this thought up to them. Tom, I’ll pay you from my own pocket!”
“Two hundred.”
“Agreed.”
“Per month.”
“Agreed!”
I realized that I made a bad bargain. As a bonus, I managed to shake out of Quarters his understanding of the problem. Ron knew nothing and didn’t care to learn about the improved microorganisms. The company was formed two years ago in the wake of new developments, promising, according to experts, fantastic profits. The work was funded by Ron’s uncle who owned a sewage disposal factory and was an extremely pragmatic and meticulous guy. Well-versed in profit generation, he knew little about employing academic nerds. How he managed to maintain patience for two years was incomprehensible, but Quarters was aware that BioKin had ignominiously failed tests more than once. If I knew then what the failed tests meant…
Well, becoming a killjoy for the staff was not complicated, and no one would cope with the task better than a dark magician. It remained unclear whether the firm’s goal was feasible at all; people from the academy like to work on the undoable! I feared the work would be such that I wouldn’t want to put it in my resume, but two hundred crowns from Quarters were guaranteed to me anyway.
Better to take the money up front…
Captain Baer was busy creating a network of agents, a task that would take years, not months, and certainly not days. Locomotive believed that he was the only one in the office engaged in real work.
The whole of Redstone’s NZAMIPS searched for the mysterious sorcerer by the sweat of their brows. For heaven’s sake, who did he do harm to? The chief of the division saw the heart of the problem and pondered: if a mean trick on the “cleaners” and the capitol’s raid on the regional NZAMIPS were cover-up operations, what would be the next move of the enemies? What would have to occur after the media stirred up the townsfolk with chilling stories of the supernatural frenzy in the neighborhood? Half of NZAMIPS higher-ups would immediately lose their jobs, but that would happen on the surface. Following the onset of panic, a muddy wave of forgotten customs and strange superstitions—superstitions that the state had been eradicating since the time of the Inquisition—would flow from the cracks. And somebody hoped to ride that wave.
Mysticism! The word that decent people do not say. An echo of primitive times, when people were ruled by Fear with a capital “F”, great and comprehensive Fear, Fear consisting of many small fears: fear of the elements, crop failures, animals and neighbors, and most importantly, fear of creatures from the other world. A multitude of false gods awaited unwary minds on the back streets of memory, captivating them by the beauty of rituals and enticing by promises of love; but, whatever their adherents alleged, they brought only more fear into the world. It didn’t matter what people asked of ancient magic; they could get what they wanted just by chance, if they were fortunate, but the beggars always paid for the asking. It seemed that by now people had become more reasonable and forgotten their silly belief in fairy tales. But logical magic was inaccessible to all and was not omnipotent, and, therefore, again and again under different pretexts people returned to a naive belief in miracles.
That is, the belief is naive in the beginning. Captain Baer caught one such wave that coincided with the abolition of the Inquisition: under sweet moans about love and goodness, latter-day priests reveled in the power, demanded offerings, and then dragon tears, unbridled orgies and human sacrifices took their turn. The troops hesitated to enter the city, whose residents declared the foundation of Heaven on Earth; a couple months later, the same troops were engaged in the removal of forty thousand corpses, fighting off the few surviving monsters (who, typically, ate only human flesh). The ruins of Nintark remained inhabitable…