James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

“You listening?” The short man raised his voice a notch. “Because if you’re not interested, I’d as soon save my breath.”

“You’re right. I’m all of a sudden uninterested. It’s better if no one knows anyone else. Instead, we’ll use the time to go over the operation.” I didn’t have a clue what Kim thought we were going to do. Not that it mattered. “There are lectures today at the Grand Study Hall. The first one starts at one P.M. Lecture Room Six. We go in and sit.”

“What are we looking for?” The SSD man took out a notebook.

“No notes!” Kim nearly leaped across the table. “You listen, that’s all.”

“Actually,” I said, “that is the interesting part of this whole thing. We don’t know what we’re looking for. Most of the time, the lectures start at four o’clock. Someone needed this one earlier, and we need to figure out why the hurry.”

“Can we take notes when we get in the room, or what?”

“On the lecture? Sure.” I looked at the list from the radio. “If you’re interested in ‘the application of technology to take care of the boiler water and heat net supplementary water through the separate lime softening method,’ or how about ‘the relevance of nanotechnology to self-replicating systems’? I don’t know for sure which one of those we’ll get.”

The short man looked glum. “How long do we have to sit there?”

“Until you’re so bored you think you’re about to die. Then pinch your bottom and sit some more.”

“I don’t like this,” said the other man, the one who hadn’t opened his mouth until now. “We get called in here the day of an operation and then find out no one knows anything about what we’re doing.”

Kim moved around the table and pushed the man so hard he almost fell over. “No one asked you for your opinion, did they? When someone asks, maybe then you can whine. Until then, you do as you’re told.” He turned to the other two. “Same goes for you. I thought that’s what you people did best, followed orders. If you can’t do that, there’s not much left, is there? All right, get out of here. There’s a room down the hall where you can sit around and complain. I’ve got a few things to go over with Inspector O.”

After the three of them left, Kim picked up the phone. “Get Li in here.”

Li stood at the door. “You wanted me?”

“Yeah, come on in. Tell the Inspector what we found out last night.”

“We were going through your file again. There was a piece of paper tucked away that said someone heard you had a stroke.”

“Not so.”

“It says your health is not very good.”

“I’m fine. Better than fine.”

“What was it, then? Something scared you off the mountain into a doctor’s office last year. That’s not like you.”

“It was nothing. Well, maybe it was something. A sign, an omen.”

“That’s what the doctor said?”

“In his own way. He said everybody dies eventually.”

“A doctor said that?” Kim threw up his hands. “I could have told you the same thing. Li could have told you. Some doctor you have. Who needs to hear that from a doctor?”

“How much longer you have?” Li looked a little unsure of how that sounded. “I mean, do you need a glass of water or something?”

“I’m perfectly fine, in the pink of health. Better than either of you, I’ll bet. And you want to know why? When I realized what had happened, I had this sense of ecstasy. I was in my cabin on the mountain, looking out the window at the trees, when all of a sudden my brain shook. And then I got weak; not just weak, it was beyond that, the other side of weak. It was like going through the secret door in the floor of our house when I was young.”

“It sounds like you were stunned, kind of in shock or something. The driver said the ceiling in your place looked kind of low. Maybe you hit your head.” Li was trying to be helpful. This was the Li I remembered from a long time ago, when we first worked together.

“Shock? No, I’d say it was the opposite of shock. Maybe revelation. In that instant, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to wind down like an old clock. I could go all at once, in a moment that I controlled. Not controlled consciously, of course, but something deeper, older, a self within, one that knew more, had seen more, like starlight passing through the earth, a speck of dust on the way to the other side of nowhere, everywhere, boundless.”

“Careful, you’re getting out of breath, O. Sit down. I think you might be hyperventilating.” Kim moved the green chair closer.

“I don’t need a chair.” My eyes must have had a strange gleam in them. Kim looked frightened, as if he wasn’t sure who I was. “Don’t you get it? It means I’m not on a leash. No one owns me.”

“Good. Forget the leash and sit. I’ll get you a glass of water.” He turned to Li. “Do we have a physician around here?”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s only a power surge in the system. I get a little boost of energy once in a while, nothing to worry about.” I felt my blood pressure dropping back to normal. “It’s like stepping on the gas when the transmission is in neutral, that’s all. Probably helps clean the carburetor.”

“Don’t pay attention to him,” Li said. “Mechanical things are not his specialty.”

“Cancel your operation, Kim. The guy with the smirk is from SSD; I’m sure of it.”

“We now classify people according to their smirks?” Kim’s face ran through a dozen expressions. “What about these?”

“You think I’m kidding? If we’re lucky, they’ll leave us twiddling our thumbs and move things to another time. If they really want to make a point, they’ll do something ugly.”

The lecture hall was deserted when we walked in. It wasn’t a big room-maybe twenty chairs-and it was going to be harder to blend in if we ended up with only a lecturer, my team, and three or four SSD operatives. Kim refused to cancel the operation. He said I was afflicted with a fear of shadows, that it was a result of my living too long in a warped environment. That left us at the mercy of SSD. In the best case, SSD might send only one person, but I had a feeling there would be what we always called belts of security-the key agents, then a team watching them, then a team watching them . The Ministry never worked that way, but SSD was in the business of shooting ghosts, or at least tracking them. They needed a lot of people to do that.

I had assumed the room would also have a few students, several academics, a couple of bureaucrats desperately trying to learn new vocabulary that would help them keep their jobs, and the inevitable party types taking notes on what was said and who was there. It was beginning to look like my assumptions were wrong. At 1:10 there was no lecturer and still no one else in the hall. The short man leaned over to me.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong room.”

“You have inside information?” I said. “Maybe you know something the rest of us don’t?”

He sat back and let a faint frown settle around his mouth. The man from SSD had closed his eyes and was resting comfortably. The third man, the one who didn’t say much, was looking at his hands.

The room was still empty at 1:20 when the door opened. “The lecture has been canceled for unavoidable reasons.” A young woman walked to the front of the room. “We have another group coming in at one thirty, so you’ll have to leave.”

“When was it canceled?” I looked at the man from SSD.

The short man was on his feet. “And why didn’t someone bother to come in and tell us before? We’ve been sitting here waiting. Do you think that’s all we have to do?”