“It could be arranged.”
They picked up Ashley, who was waiting for them at a prearranged street corner. He wished Mary a very good morning and inquired meticulously after her health, and Jack smiled to himself. Quite unlike Mary, Ashley was dead impressed with his new Allegro, and since he had memorized all the chassis numbers of every British car built between the years 1956 and 1985, he could proudly announce that the car came off the production line at Long-bridge on September 10, 1979.
“Really?” said Jack, amazed at Ashley’s ability to recall utterly pointless facts. “How do you remember all this stuff?”
“Very easily,” he replied with a shrug. “Humans rely on a pattern of charged neurons to build up a picture that is revived by association. If the memory is not recalled now and again, it fades—if it is retained at all. Our memory works quite differently. Every image, fact or sound is translated to binary notation and then stored in molecular on/off gates within the liquid interior of our bodies. Since each teaspoon of rambosia vitae contains more molecular gates than there are visible stars, the extent of our memory is extraordinarily large. Best of all, we can erase what we don’t need. Important memories are stored near our core, but the boring stuff migrates to the extremities. If we run out of memory, we simply reformat an arm.”
“You best be careful not to delete the wrong arm,” said Jack with a smile.
“Even if I did,” replied Ashley without seeing the joke, “I’d be okay—I’ve got my core memories backed up at home in a jar.”
They pulled up outside the Shiplake industrial estate office a few minutes later.
“I’ll have a word with the site manager,” said Mary, and she climbed out of the car. Jack and Ashley sat there in silence for a while, Jack thinking about how he was going to pass the psychological appraisal that he’d arranged for that afternoon. He’d only have to outline a typical case to a police shrink to be branded B-4: “unfit for duty on mental grounds.”
Ashley, on the other hand, had no particular worries—few Rambosians ever did. He was amusing himself by calculating the cube root to eight decimal places of every number under a million, and when he’d done that, he said, “Sergeant Mary is very attractive in a pink, fleshy, hairy, forgetful sort of way.”
“I never thought of Mary as hairy,” admitted Jack.
“Oh, it’s strictly relative,” said Ashley, whose own skin was totally hairless, pliant and shiny, a bit like a transparent beach ball.
“Do you think she’s really over this Arnold chap?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t seem to be able to understand no and she doesn’t seem to be able to stop wanting to tell him.”
“It all sounds very complicated,” said the alien. “Where I come from, we just agree to a mutual memory erasure, and neither of us knows we’ve even met. In fact, it’s possible to fall in love with someone you once hated—several thousand times.”
“Ash,” said Jack, unable to contain his curiosity any longer.
“Yes?”
“How do aliens… do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know. It. Thing. Have babies.”
“We don’t have babies. Humans have babies.”
“You know what I mean—reproduce.”
“We swap egg and sperm sacs,” he said matter-of-factly and without the slightest trace of embarrassment. “We can do it by mail if we wish, and the sacs will keep in a dry airing cupboard for anything up to nine centuries—it’s very convenient.”
“It must be,” replied Jack.
“What about you?” asked Ashley. “How do mammals propagate?”
As Jack told him, the few features Ashley did have scrunched into the vague semblance of a frown. When Jack had finished, Ashley gave out a laugh that was something very like the noise a squeaky toy makes when someone heavy sits on it, and he said, “Get out of here! What utter nonsense—you think I was hatched yesterday?”
“It’s true.”
“It is?” replied Ashley, his eyes opening wide in a mixture of wonderment and shock. “And the baby comes out where?”
Luckily, Mary had returned to the car.
“Rented to a company named Three Monkeys Trading. A ‘Mr. Guy Gorilla’ signed a three-year contract eighteen months ago.”
“Much traffic?”
“For all he’s seen of them, he said, it might as well be the Tooth Fairy who leased it.”
“It won’t be her,” said Jack after giving the matter some thought. “She’s doing four years in Holloway over that regrettable incident with the pliers.”
“What do you want to do?” asked Mary.
“We’ll take a look.”
They drove on into the industrial estate. Unit sixteen was sandwiched between a cut-price carpet showroom and a motorcycle-repair specialist. The windows were grimy and unwashed, and even up close it was difficult to see inside. Jack consulted the entry-code numbers Tarquin had jotted down and punched them into the keypad. There was a soft click and a buzz, and the door swung open.
They stepped into the gloom, and Jack hit the switch. The strip lights flickered on to reveal a lot of not very much at all. The unit was deserted apart from a Dumpster full of rubbish.
“If this is used as a distribution warehouse, they’re a bit low on stock,” murmured Jack.
“But they were here,” replied Mary, showing him a couple of rolled oats that had been trodden into the dust on the floor, “so Tarquin wasn’t lying.”
“Does this mean anything?” asked Ashley, who had been poking in the Dumpster.
“No, that’s just a bathtub—to wash in, you know?”
“I know what a bathtub is for,” said Ashley, “but why would anyone want to throw away a perfectly good one?”
“People do that sort of thing all the time.”
“Can we take it?”
“No.”
“Look at this, Jack,” said Mary, who had also been looking in the Dumpster.
“A sink?”
“No—empty porridge-oat bags.”
Mary handed Jack a Bart-Mart plastic bag with “1Kg Value Porridge Oats” printed on the side. Jack looked into the Dumpster, which held hundreds of similar bags. Either there had been a big shipment or someone had been doing this for a while. Next to the Dumpster was a trestle table laid out with empty plastic bags and rolls of tape, presumably for repacking the rolled oats to disguise provenance.
Suddenly a shadow fell across the open door, and a deep baritone boomed, “Everyone turn around really slowly.”
They all slowly turned to look at the newcomer. He was a fully grown brown bear dressed in a well-tailored three-piece tweed suit. He was wearing a trilby hat, had a shiny gold watch chain dangling from his waistcoat, and white spats covered the top of his shoeless feet. And he was holding a gun.
“Police,” said Jack. “DCI Spratt of the NCD.”
“ID?”
Jack very carefully retrieved it from his pocket and passed it across.
The bear looked at the card, raised an eyebrow and lowered his gun. His small brown eyes flicked among them. “Then you must be Officers Mary and Ashley. Which one of you is the alien?”
“That would be me,” replied Ashley, putting up his hand.
“Right,” said the bear, returning the weapon to an elegantly tooled shoulder holster.
“Who are you?” asked Jack.
“Sorry about the weaponry,” said the bear without answering or even appearing to hear him, “but I don’t know who to trust these days. Since the bile tappers got active in the area, we members of the phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Carnivora, family Ursidae are not going to take any chances.” He walked over to the Dumpster and looked in. “Hmm,” he said.
“It’s a bathtub,” remarked Ashley. “They’re used for washing in.”
The bear looked at Jack. “Is he for real?”
“I’m afraid so. Again: Who are you?”
The bear took a calling card from a large wallet and handed it to Jack. “The name’s Craps, Vincent Craps. Folks call me Vinnie.”