What's close? she wanted to ask him. What? What? What? But the question would only anger him. He knew no better than she. He only sensed there was something.
Then, suddenly, he stopped and turned and almost ran outside into the corridor again. "There!" he said, exultant, and she watched him pace out the distance from the end of the corridor to the doorway. Fifteen paces. He went inside and did the same. Twelve. Only twelve!
She saw at once. The mirror. The mirror was a door. A way through.
He went to it at once, looking for a catch, a way of releasing it, but there was nothing. Frustrated, he pulled books down from the shelf and knocked at the wall behind them. It was brick, solid brick.
For a moment he stood before the mirror, staring into it. Then he laughed. "Of course!"
He turned and pointed it out to her. "Level with the top of the mirror. That row of books opposite. Look, Meg. Tell me what you see."
She went across and looked. They were novels. Famous novels. Ulysses, Nostromo, Tess of the D'LJrbervilks, Vanity Fair, Howard's End, Bleak House, Daniel Martin, Orlando, and several others. She turned back to him and frowned. "I don't understand, Ben. What am I looking for?"
"It's a cryptogram. Look at the order. The first letter of the titles."
She looked, doing as he said. D.A.E.H.R.E.V.O.N.O.T. T.U.B. Then she understood. It was mirrored. You had to reverse the letters.
He laughed, ahead of her, and reached up to find the button.
With a faint hiss of escaping air the mirror sprang free. Beyond it was a room. Ben shone his lamp inside. It seemed like a smaller version of "the library, the walls covered with books. But in its center, taking up most of the available floor space, was a desk.
He shone his lamp over the desk's surface, picking out four objects. A letter knife, an ink block, a framed photograph, and a large folio-sized journal. The light rested on the last of these for some while, then moved upward, searching the end wall.
Meg came alongside him. "What are you looking for?"
"A window. There must have been a window."
"Why? If he really wanted to keep this room a secret, having no window onto the outside would be the best way, surely?"
He looked at her, then nodded. But she, watching him, was surprised that he hadn't seen it for himself. It was as if, now that he'd found it, he was transfixed by his discovery. She shone her lamp into his face.
"Meg. . . ." He pushed her hand away.
She moved past him, into the room, then turned back, facing him.
"Here." She handed him the journal, knowing, even before he confirmed it, who it belonged to. Augustus. There was a space for it on the shelf on her father's study, among the others there. She recognized the tooled black leather of its cover.
Ben opened it. He turned a page, then smiled and looked up at her.
"Am I right?" she asked.
In answer he turned the book and showed her the page. She laughed uneasily, shocked, then looked back up at him. It was a picture of Ben. An almost perfect portrait of him. And underneath, in Ben's own handwriting, were a name and a date.
Augustus Shepherd. Anno Domini 2120.
"But that's you. Your handwriting."
He shook his head. "No. But it's a clue. We're getting close, Meg. Very close now."
BETH SHEPHERD set the two bags down on the kitchen table, then went to the garden door and undid the top catch. Pushing the top half back, she leaned out and called to the children.
"Ben! Meg! I'm back!"
She went inside again and busied herself, filling the cupboards from the bags. Only when she had finished did she go to the door again and, releasing the bottom catch, go out into the rose garden.
There was no sign of them. Perhaps they're indoors, she thought. But then they would have heard her, surely? She called again, moving out through the gate until she stood at the top of the lower garden that sloped down to the bay. She put her hand up to her eyes, searching the sunlit meadows for a sign of them.
"Strange. . . ." she muttered, then turned and went back inside. She knew she was back quite early, but they usually came when she called, knowing she would have brought something special for each of them.
She took the two gifts from her handbag and set them on the table. An old-fashioned paper book for Ben—one he had specifically asked for—on sensory deprivation. And for Meg a tiny Han ivory. A delicately carved globe.
Beth smiled to herself, then went down the steps and into the relative darkness of the dining room.
"Ben? Meg? Are you there?"
She stopped at the bottom of the steps and listened. Strange. Very strange. Where could they be? Ben had said nothing about going into town. In any case, it was only a little after twelve. They weren't due to finish their lessons for another twenty minutes.
Curious, she went upstairs and searched the rooms. Nothing. Not even a note on Ben's computer.
She went out and put her hand up to her brow a second time, searching the meadows more thoroughly this time. Then she remembered Peng Yu-wei. The android tutor had a special location unit. She could trace where they were by pinpointing him on Hal's map.
Relieved, she went back upstairs, into Hal's study, and called the map up onto the screen. She waited a moment for the signal to appear somewhere on the grid, then leaned forward to key the search sequence again, thinking she must have made a mistake. But no. There was no trace.
Beth felt her stomach flip over. "Gods. . ."
She ran down the stairs and out again.
"Ben! Meg! Where are you?"
The meadows were silent, empty. A light breeze stirred the waters of the bay. She looked. Of course, the bay. She set off down the slope, forcing herself not to run, telling herself again and again that it was all right; that her fears were unfounded. They were sensible children. And anyway, Peng Yu-wei was with them.
Where the lawn ended she stopped and looked out across the bay, scanning the water for any sign of life. Then she turned and eased herself over the lip, clambered down the old wooden steps set into the clay wall, and ran across toward the jetty.
It was gone. The rowboat was gone.
Where? She couldn't understand it. Where? Then, almost peripherally, she noticed something. Off to the far left of her, jutting from the water, revealed by' the ebb of the tide.
She climbed up again, then ran along the shoreline until she was standing at the nearest point to it. It lay there, fifteen, maybe twenty ch'i from the shore, part embedded in the mud-bank, part covered .by the receding water. She knew what it was at once. And knew, for a certainty, that Ben had done this to it.
The android lay unnaturally in the water, almost sitting up, one shoulder, part of its upper arm, and the side of its head projecting above the surface. It did not float, as a corpse would float, but rested there, solid and heavy, its torn clothing flapping about it like weeds.
Poor thing, she might have said another time, but now any sympathy she had for the machine was swamped by her fears for her children.
She looked up sharply, her eyes going immediately to the far shore and to the house on the crest above the cove. They had been forbidden. But that would not stop Ben. No. The sight of Peng Yu-wei in the water told her that.
She turned, her throat constricted now, her heart pounding in her breast, and began to run back up the slope toward the cottage. And as she ran her voice hissed from her, heavy with anxiety and pain.
"Gods, let them be safe! Please gods let them be safe!"
BEN SAT at the desk, reading from the journal. Meg stood behind him, at his shoulder, holding the lamp steady above the page, following Ben's finger as it moved from right to left, up and down the columns of ciphers.
Ben had explained it to her. He had shown her how the frontispiece illustration was the key to it. In the illustration a man sat by a fireplace, reading a newspaper, his face obscured, the scene reflected at an angle in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Using the magnifying glass he had found in the left-hand drawer, Ben had shown her how the print of the reflected newspaper was subtly different from the one the man held. Those differences formed the basis of the cipher. She understood that—even the parts about the governing rules that made the cipher change—but her mind was too slow, too inflexible, to hold and use what she had been shown.