Harry Turtledove: The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I hate telephones.

For one thing, they have a habit of waking you up at the most inconvenient times. It was still dark outside when the one on my nightstand went off like a bomb. I groaned and tried to turn off the alarm clock. Since it wasn’t ringing, it laughed at me. The horrible racket from the phone kept right on.

“What time is it, anyhow?” I mumbled. My mouth tasted like something you’d spread on nasturtiums.

“It’s 5:07,” the clock said, still giggling. The horological demon in there was supposed to be friendly, not sappy. I’d thought more than once about getting the controlling cantrip fixed, but twenty-five crowns is twenty-five crowns. On a government salary, you learn to put up with things.

I picked up the receiver. That was the cue for the noise elemental in the base of the phone to shut up, which it did—Ma Bell’s magic, unlike that from a cheap clock company, does exactly what it’s supposed to do, no more, no less.

“Fisher here,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as far underwater as I felt.

“Hello, David. This is Kelly, back in D.St.C.”

You could have fooled me. After the imp in one phone’s mouthpiece relays words through the ether to the one in another phone’s earpiece and the second imp passes them on to you, they hardly sound as if they came from a real person, let alone from anyone in particular. That’s the other reason I hate phones.

But the cursed things have sprouted like toadstools the past ten years, ever since ectoplasmic cloning let the phone company crank out legions of near-identical speaker imps, and since switching spells got sophisticated enough so you could reliably select the imp you wanted from among those legions.

They say they’re going to have an answer to the voice problem real soon. They’ve been saying that since the day after phones were invented. I’ll believe it when I hear it. Some things are even bigger than Ma Bell.

Nondescript voice aside, I was willing to believe this was Charlie Kelly. He’d probably just got to his desk at Environmental Perfection Agency headquarters back in the District of St. Columba, so of course he’d picked up the phone. Three-hour time difference? They don’t think that way in D.St.C. The sun revolves around them, not the other way round. St. Ptolemy of Alexandria has to be the patron of the place, no matter what the Church says.

All this flashed through my mind in as much of a hurry as I could muster at 5:07 on a Tuesday morning. I don’t think I missed a beat—or not more than one, anyhow—before I said, “So what can I do for you this fine day, Charlie?”

The insulating spell on the phone mouthpiece kept me from having to listen to my imp shouting crosscountry to his imp. I waited for his answer: “We have reports that there might a problem in your neck of the woods worth an unofficial look or two.”

“Whereabouts in my neck of the woods?” I asked patiently. Easterners who live in each other’s pockets have no feel for how spread out Angels City really is.

The pause that followed was longer than conversations between phone imps would have required; Charlie had to be checking a map or a report or something. At last he said, “It’s in a place called Chatsworth. That’s just an Angels City district name, isn’t it?” He made it sound as if it were just around the corner from me.

It wasn’t. Sighing, I answered, “It’s up in St. Ferdinand’s Valley, Charlie. That’s about forty, maybe fifty miles from where I am right now.”

“Oh,” he said in a small voice. A fifty-mile circle out from Charlie’s office dragged in at least four provinces. Fifty miles for me won’t even get me out of my barony unless I head straight south, and then I’m only in the one next door. I don’t need to head south very often; the Barony of Orange has its own EPA investigators.

“So what’s going on in Chatsworth?” I asked. “Especially what’s going on that you need to bounce me out of bed?”

“I am sorry about that,” he said, so calmly that I knew he’d known what time it was out here before he called. Which meant it was urgent. Which meant I could start worrying. Which I did. He went on, “We may have a problem with a dump in the hills up there.”

I riffled through my mental files. “That’d be the Devonshire dump, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s the name,” he agreed eagerly—too eagerly. Devonshire’s been giving Angels City on-and-off problems for years. The trouble with magic is, it’s not free. All the good it produces is necessarily balanced by a like amount of evil. Yeah, I know people have understood that since Newton’s day: for every quality, there is an equal and opposite counterquality , and all the math that goes with the law. But mostly it’s a lip-service understanding, along the lines of, as long as I don’t shit in my yard, who cares about next door?

That attitude worked fine—or seemed to—as long as next door meant the wide open spaces. If byproducts of magic blighted a forest or poisoned a stream, so what? You just moved on to the next forest or stream. A hundred years ago, the Confederated Provinces seemed to stretch west forever.

But they don’t. I ought to know; Angels City, of course, sits on the coast of the Peaceful Ocean. We don’t have unlimited unspoiled land and water to exploit any more. And as industrial magic has shown itself ever more capable of marvelous things, its byproducts have turned ever more noxious. You wouldn’t want them coming downstream at you, believe me you wouldn’t. My job is to make sure they don’t.

“What’s gone wrong with Devonshire now?” I asked. The answer I really wanted was nothing . A lot of local industries dispose of waste at Devonshire, and some of the biggest ones are defense firms. By the very nature of things, the byproducts from their spells are more toxic than anybody else’s.

Charlie Kelly said, “We’re not really sure there’s anything wrong, Dave.” That was close to what I wanted to hear, but not close enough. He went on, “Some of the local people”—he didn’t say who—“have been complaining more than usual, though.”

“They have any reason to?” I said. Local people always complain about toxic spell dumps. They don’t like the noise, they don’t like the spells, they don’t like the flies (can’t blame them too much for that; would you want byproducts from dealings with Beelzebub in your back yard?). Most of the time, as Charlie said, nothing is really wrong. But every once in a while…

“That’s what we want you to find out,” he told me.

“Okay,” I answered. Then something he’d said a while before clicked in my head; I hadn’t been awake enough to pay attention to it till now. “What do you mean, you want me to take a quiet look around? Why shouldn’t I go up there with flags flying and cornets blaring?” A formal EPA inspection is worth seeing: two exorcists, a thaumaturge, shamans from the Americas, Mongolia, and Africa, the whole nine yards. Sometimes the incense is a toxic hazard all by itself.

“Because I want you to do it this way.” He sounded harassed. “I’ve been asked to handle this unofficially as long as I can. Why do you think I’m calling you at home? Unless and until you find something really out of line, it would be best for everybody if you kept a low profile. Please, Dave?”

“Okay, Charlie.” I owed Charlie a couple, and he’s a pretty good fellow. “It’s politics, isn’t it?” I made it into a swear word.

“What’s not?” He let it go at that. I didn’t blame him; he had a job he wanted to keep. And telephone imps have ears just like anything else. They can be tormented, tricked, or sometimes bribed into blabbing too much. Phone security systems have come a long way, yeah, but not all the devils are out of them yet.