A dozen minutes passed, a dozen more, an hour, and the light had gone out of the windows, gone long into the corners and edges of the room, making shadows of the beds, and shadows of the hung linens.
— We are for each other, said Grieve. How fine that is, how perfect. Do you know that my father was an adviser once to the king of Siam? He learned all the king's secrets, and then controlled the king like a puppet. He does so still today. That's where we're going after the clouds come.
— It's not even called Siam anymore, said James. But do you know where we're going? Will we leave the rest and go, just you and I somewhere?
— Let me have at least one secret, she said, and they left the room and the bed, leaving it unmade, one unmade bed in the midst of thirty.
And, of course, the birds all fell immediately from the sky. Afterwards one would exclaim often relating a new observation to this long-ago occurrence; it was in that day that all the birds fell from the sky. Here and there in the street you would see them, lying in long rows sometimes, their having toppled off a telephone line or out the eaves of six companionable neighboring houses. Of course, none of us could hear then, so it was not so much the sound of the birds that we missed, but the sight of them, their fluttering at the corners of sight, their taking up happily all the little incidences, all the little portions of architecture, making use of tree branches, of far-flung high places where no one else could go. There is a feeling things have when use is not being put where it might. Shall I say the world soon bore this feeling? Yes, the world bore this feeling like a loose scarf that flaps insolently against one's perhaps too frivolously jacketed shoulder.
And so as evening came, James sat with Stark, and Stark spoke of intentions. He gave James documents and journal entries to memorize, the which he would, after James's perfunctory nod, immediately destroy in the fireplace. Grieve stayed in the room, roaming about from one side to the other, coming over at times to rub James's shoulder or whisper some comment in her father's ear. It seemed to James that she wanted to remain close to him in all the hours to come. He thought then of her room, and of how happy he had been to find it. He wondered if they would ever have the chance to lie together there. For, on the day they emerged, would they not try to leave the country? Indeed, it didn't make very much sense to James that Stark had stayed in the country if everything had already been set in motion. Why not leave now, while it would be easy? After the inevitable disasters, nothing would be certain, least of all travel out of the country.
Supper was brought them by a servant, the man who had told James the truth, whom James had wronged. He did not look the man in the eye. He felt embarrassed, and also did not want the man to be found out. Why did the man help me? he wondered.
The material that James held mnemonically was Stark's contraband body of work, his revolutionary writings on what he called The Starkian Play, the act of altering history with a monumental object lesson.
The volume of the writings was large, perhaps six hundred pages of somewhat technical theoretical writings. Ordinarily, James would have given himself far longer to memorize the work, but he knew he was equal to the task of committing it in one night. There was a fear among mnemonists, a fear of stretching the mind to the point where it would actually be broken by stress. It was a fact in chess playing. In certain exhibitions, a grand master would play twenty or thirty games at once, keeping his eyes closed, keeping all the pieces on all the boards separate in his mind, and making in turn his move on each board. Soviet Russia had banned these simultaneous blindfold exhibitions because they shortened the careers of great players.
The door opened. The servant entered again, carrying a tray with a pot of tea, two cups, a tiny milk pitcher, and a plate of sugar cubes.
James looked up from his work and realized he was almost done. The pile at his side had vanished. He closed his eyes and could see the trailing strands of all the books, all the papers. It was a feeling like flying to carry oneself off along these strings of thought and memory and see in long parades of swirling letters all the words, all the pages. He felt confident. He had it all. But there was an odd feeling too. He was preserving the work of a lunatic, of someone who, if the danger was real, would turn out to be one of the most reviled men in history. Did Stark even realize that? Did he expect the world to preserve him and raise him up? If the truth was ever known, he would be vilified, harried from nation to nation. Who would take him in?
— Stark, asked James. What is the plan for when we come out of the bunker?
Stark chuckled to himself.
— Wondering about that, are you? he said.
He went back to the letter that he was in the middle of writing.
— Really, said James. Is there a plan?
— Of course there's a plan. Have you read Boulinard's Strategem?
James confessed that he had not.
— Well, Boulinard was a medieval French priest. His writings were discovered only in the last fifteen years. It turns out that in the fourteenth century he had come up on his own with a body of work dealing with probability and chance that exceeds not only the work which had been done up until that time but, in fact, all the work done in the centuries since. He's thought of by academics and scientists as probably the smartest human being who ever lived. The discovery of his work was a revelation and spurred a small sort of scientific leap. He's thought of as the founder of modern probability theory, even though his work is in some ways enormously experimental and recent.
Grieve put down the magazine she was reading and came over.
— Where was the work hiding? she asked.
— He wrote it in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, working it into the design so that his writing was imperceptible unless you knew what you were looking for. Once you did you could see that the pages of the Bible were lined with other pages, page after page that he had written. The three Bibles lined with this work had been in a vault unlooked at, save when the occasional high-ranking priest or medieval researcher wanted to look at a sample of original illuminated manuscript.
— How could they look at it and not know? asked Grieve. If it's probability, that's math. Don't the numbers look odd in the midst of the scripts and figures?
Stark went over to a bookshelf, looked for a moment, and pulled down a large volume. He brought it over and laid it flat on the desk, open to a page somewhere in the middle. It was a facsimile of one of Boulinard's Bibles. James looked carefully at the ornament all around the page. At first he couldn't make out anything, but then the figures, the numbers began to appear.
— It's like looking at a carpet, he said.
— The point, continued Stark, is that Boulinard also wrote about plots and strategies. He organized a system that might be used in the creation of conspiracies and coups, and outlined general precepts and guidelines for the administration of such a system. One of those precepts, James, is that, in general though not always, someone who doesn't need to know sensitive information should not be given sensitive information. You will find out where we are going when we go there. Just be glad you are to be saved.