‘He should be back in the next couple of days, Greg,’ Trudy says.
‘Well, as soon as he is, I want Juster as a top priority.’ He turns round to his underling, staring gloomily at the dusk, and claps him on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, Howard. Just can’t do it. Still, I appreciate your initiative. Next time maybe we’ll be able to come to an arrangement. But in the meantime let’s not have any more disparagement of the textbook, all right? Textbook’s on your side. It’s like a map. Stray from the map, take a wrong turn, you’re in Injun territory, friend. Those kids’ll smell it on you in a second and they will take you out, Howard. They will take you out.’ He hits him a hearty giddy-up slap on the arm. ‘Now, why don’t you get yourself on home? Little lady must be wondering where you are.’
Howard is so demoralized that he almost leaves without asking the very question he came in for. Then in the doorway it returns to him. ‘Finian Ó Dálaigh’s back,’ he says, in a warbling burlesque of nonchalance.
The Automator relinquishes the window, still aglow. ‘He sure is. See the size of the stone they took out of him? Doctor said it was the biggest one he’d ever seen. I’ll tell you what, though, Finian Ó Dálaigh could have a cannonball in there, still wouldn’t keep him away from that blackboard. He’s a Seabrook man through and through.’
Howard shakes his head in wordless admiration, then, as if in afterthought, ‘So, will Aurelie McIntyre be coming back this side of Christmas, or…?’
‘Haven’t spoken to her about it yet, Howard, she’s still on holiday to the best of my knowledge. That business at the Hop seems to have shaken her up quite a bit. She asked to extend her break. I agreed. I was just happy she didn’t file for trauma.’
‘So she’s still away?’ Howard leaping for this unexpected lifeline.
‘I believe so, yes. Apparently what happened was that her fiancé sprung a surprise cruise on her. When she called me they’d just pulled into the Seychelles.’
The universe silently crumbles around Howard. ‘Her fiancé?’ he repeats, barely audible even to himself.
‘Yes, he’d popped the question just the night before. Sounds like quite a production. Woman like that, guess you’d better be ready to spend some money.’ He chuckles to himself. ‘Not that he’s short of it, by the sounds of it. You know him, Howard? Clongowes man, played on their Cup team in his day. Working up in Accenture, doing pretty well, year or two younger than yourself?’
‘No, I haven’t met him,’ the dust of Howard’s dreams swirling round him, clogging his throat.
‘Anyhow, now that Finian’s back there’s no real need for her here,’ the Automator continues somewhere in the distance. ‘She might come back, do a couple of hours here and there, extracurricular stuff, the environment, so forth. More likely she’ll go back into banking, that’s where I’d put my money. That’s where most people put their money, am I right?’ He shakes his head. ‘Boy oh boy, though. The size of that gallstone. Try teaching with one of those rattling around your spleen, Howard. But he kept soldiering on. I practically had to strap him down to get him to the hospital…’
Howard makes his exit from the office with small, agonized steps, as if it is he who has just emerged from Intensive Care, wound still gaping in his side.
‘So what are you going to do on your date, Skippy?’
‘I don’t know… maybe play frisbee for a while, before it gets dark? And then watch a DVD or something?’
‘That is the wrong answer,’ Mario says severely. ‘There is only one reason you are going to this house, and that is for full sex with a girl. Do you think the Italian national team of 1982 stopped to play frisbee on their way to winning the World Cup? Do you think Einstein took a break to watch a DVD when he was inventing his famous theory of relatives?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I will tell you, they didn’t. Focus on your objective. Full hardcore sex. Frisbee or whatever can come after that.’
‘I can’t believe you’re going to her house,’ Dennis says. ‘It just seems wrong somehow.’
‘Well, she asked me.’
‘I know that, it’s just, you know, you, and her – it just, doesn’t it seem wrong somehow?’ addressing this to the others. ‘Like sort of implausible?’
‘Maybe a tiny bit,’ Geoff concedes.
‘Like, what about Carl?’
‘What does Carl have to do with it?’
‘Hmm, well, he practically put you in a coma just for sending her some gay Japanese poem. What do you think he’ll do if he finds out you’ve gone to her house? He’ll rip your head off.’
‘That’s true.’ Geoff frowns. ‘He probably will rip your head off, Skip.’
‘He’ll rip your head off and piss down your neckhole,’ Dennis elaborates. ‘And then he’ll get physical.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with him,’ Skippy says. ‘Anyway, how would he even know about it?’ At this Dennis, who has spent much of the day asking people whether this whole Skippy and Lori thing doesn’t seem really weird, and how it must be a real slap in the face for Carl, clams up abruptly and then goes off to look for Ruprecht.
Ever since his irradiation on the night of the experiment, Dennis has thrown himself into his new-found admiration of and support for Ruprecht with a gusto that those who know him find almost eerie. He fetches Ruprecht doughnuts when they are working late in the lab, he listens to Ruprecht’s long rambles about maths – he even tows the line in Quartet rehearsals, playing only the notes he is told to, Ruprecht having edited these down by about half.
He has also played a key role in the attempt to smuggle the pod into the girls’ school. This afternoon, Niall’s sister came through with the map of St Brigid’s, and now the plan – which Ruprecht has codenamed ‘Operation Condor’, in preference, thanks all the same, to Mario’s ‘Operation Mound’, and Dennis’s ‘Operation Immaculate Penetration’ – shifts into the next gear.
By the looks of it, getting into the girls’ school will be only marginally less difficult than accessing the higher dimensions. The main gates close at five, leaving only a pedestrian entrance that leads right by the window of the gatekeeper’s lodge, home to an infamously vigilant janitor named Brody and also to Brody’s small but bloodthirsty dog, Nipper. Anyone eluding these two will find the front entrance to the school building locked, and the back entrance taking him into the administrative area, comprising the Dean of Boarders’ office, the Principal’s office, the Secretariat and the Prefects’ Lounge – the lion’s den, in short.
‘The only realistic point of entry,’ Dennis says, ‘is here, via the fire escape.’ He points to the symbol on the map demarcating the iron staircase. ‘The window at the top brings you directly into the nuns’ quarters. From there, it’s a matter of getting from the second storey to the basement on the other side of the school, while avoiding the nuns, booby-traps set to maim trespassers, hockey-stick-wielding prefects, and so forth. Then all we have to do is get into the locked room with the burial mound under it, reassemble the pod inside, run a lead back over the wall to hook us up to the Cosmic Energy Compressor, and open the portal, this time making sure we get everything on film. Next stop, the Nobel Prize.’
‘No more school for us,’ Mario says. ‘We will become global celebrities.’
‘Well, I will,’ Ruprecht amends.
‘Do you think it’ll work?’ Skippy says.
Ruprecht does: since that night in the basement, he’s become a total convert to the mysterious power of ancient burial mounds. ‘I’ve been reading up on them on the Internet, and scientifically speaking, there are all sorts of strange phenomena attached to them that have yet to be explained. It’s an unconventional approach, I know. But as Professor Tamashi says, “Science is the realm of the formerly impossible.” ’