Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

The Professor led them through the cafeteria, where trestle tables and chairs were folded and stacked away to clear the greatest space possible. Here, someone had been playing — making snow-angels, by lying down on the thick frost and moving their arms to make wing-shapes. Richard admired the care that had been taken. The silhouettes — three of them, with different wings, as if writing something in semaphore — matched Cleaver's tubby frame, but Richard couldn't imagine why he had worked so hard on something so childish. Leech had said he didn't employ frivolous people.

If anything, it was colder indoors than out. Richard felt sharp little chest-pains when he inhaled as if he were flash-freezing his alveoli. His exposed face was numb. He worried that if he were to touch his moustache, half would snap off.

They were admitted to the main laboratory. A coffee percolator was frosted up, its jug full of frothy brown solid. On a shelf stood a goldfish bowl, ice bulging over the rim. A startled fish was trapped in the miniature arctic. Richard wondered if it was still alive — like those dinosaurs they found in the 1950s. Here, the floor had been walked over many times, turned to orange slush and frozen again, giving it a rough moon-surface texture. Evidently, this was where the Professor lived.

Richard idly fumbled open a ringbinder that lay on a desk, and pressed his mitten to brittle blue paper.

"Paws off," snapped Cleaver, snatching the file away and hugging it. "That's tip-top secwet."

"Not from me," insisted Leech, holding out his hand. "I sign the cheques, remember. You work for me."

If Derek Leech signed his own cheques, Richard would be surprised.

"My letter of wesignation is in the post," said Cleaver. He blinked furiously when he spoke, as if simultaneously translating in Morse. Rhotacism made him sound childish. How cruel was it to give a speech impediment a technical name that sufferers couldn't properly pronounce? "I handed it to the postman personally. I think he twied to deliver it to you outside. Vewy dedicated, the Post Office. Not snow, nor hail, and so on and so forth."

Leech looked sternly at the babbling little man.

"In that case, you'd better hand over all your materials and leave this facility. Under the circumstances, the severance package will not be generous."

Cleaver wagged a shaking hand at his former employer, not looking him in the eye. His blinks and twitches shook his whole body. He was laughing.

"In my letter," he continued, "I explain fully that this facility has declared independence from your organization. Indeed, fwom all Earthly authowity. There are pwecedents. I've also witten to the Pwime Minister and the Met Office."

Leech wasn't used to this sort of talk from minions. Normally, Richard would have relished the Great Enchanter's discomfort. But it wasn't clear where his own — or, indeed, anybody's — best interests were in Ice Station Sutton Mallet.

"Mr Leech, I know," said Cleaver, "not that we've ever met. I imagine you thought you had more important things to be bothewing with than poor old Clever Dick Cleaver's weather wesearch. Jive music and porn and so forth. I hear you've started a holiday company. Fun in the sun and all that. Jolly good show. Soon you'll be able to open bobsled runs on the Costa Bwava. I'm not surprised you've shown your face now. I expected it and I'm glad you're here. You, I had planned for. No, the face I don't know… don't know at all… is yours."

Cleaver turned to Richard.

"Richard Jeperson," he introduced himself. "I'm from…"

"… the Diogenes Club!" said Cleaver, viciously. "Yes, yes, yes, of course. I see the gleam. The wighteous gleam. Know it of old. The insuffewability. Is that fwightful Miss Cathewina Kaye still alive?"

"Catriona," corrected Richard. "Yes."

Currently, Catriona Kaye was Acting Chairman of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club. She had not sought the position. After the death of Edwin Winthrop, her partner in many things, no one else had been qualified. Richard was not yet ready to leave active service, and had a nagging feeling he wouldn't be suited to the Ruling Cabal anyway. There was talk of reorganizing — «modernizing» — the Club and some of their rivals in Whitehall were bleating about «accountability» and "payment by results". If it weren't arcanely self-financing, the Club would have been dissolved or absorbed long ago.

"If it weren't for Cathewina Kaye, and a disservice she did me many many years ago, I might have taken a diffewent path. You know about this, Mr Jeperson?"

A penny, long-teetering at the lip of a precipice, dropped — in slow motion, setting memory mechanisms ticking with each turn.

"Richard Cleaver? Clever Dick. You called yourself Clever Dick. That's who you are!"

"That's who I was… until that w-woman came along. She hates people like me… like both of you, pwobably… she only likes people who are n-normal. People who can't do anything. You know what I mean. Normal."

He drew out the word, with contempt. Richard remembered a time — at school, as a young man — when he might have given the word such a knife-twist. Like Dick Cleaver, he had manifested a Talent early. While Cleaver demonstrated excess brain capacity, Richard showed excess feeling. Insights did not always make him happy. Ironically, it was Catriona — not his father or Edwin Winthrop — who most helped him cope with his Talent, to connect with people rather than become estranged. Without her, he might be a stuttering, r-dropping maniac.

"It was never about who you were, Cleaver," said Richard, trying to be kind. "It was about what you did."

Fury boiled behind Cleaver's eyes.

"I didn't do anything! We were the Splendid Six, and she took us apart, one by one, working in secwet with your dwatted Diogenes Club. We were heroes… Blackfist, Lord Piltdown, the Blue Stweak… and sh-she made us small, twied to make us normal. I'm the last of us, you know. The Splendid One. The Bwightest Boy in the World. The others are all dead."

Cleaver was coming up to pensionable age, but he was as frozen inside as his goldfish — still eleven, and poisonous.

"If I suffered a speech impediment like yours, I'd avoid words like 'dratted'," commented Leech. "All this ancient history is fascinating, I'm sure. I know who you used to be, Professor. I don't hire anyone without knowing everything about them first. But I don't see what it has to do with all this… this cold business."

A sly look crept into Cleaver's eye. An I-know-a-secret-you're-not-going-to-like look.

"I wather think I've pwoved my point, Mr Leech. You've wead my book, The Coming Ice AgeV

"I had someone read it and summarize the findings for me," said Leech, offhandedly. "Very convincing, very alarming. It's why you were head-hunted — at a salary three times what you got at the Met — to head my weather research program."

What exactly had Derek Leech been doing here? Scientific weather control? For reasons which were now all too plain, Richard did not like the notion of a Great Enchanter with command over the elements.

"I employ the best, and you were the best man for this job. What you did as a schoolboy was irrelevant. I didn't even care that you were mad."

Clever Dick Cleaver sputtered.

"Sorry to be blunt, pal, but you are. I can show you the psych reports. Your insanity should not have hindered your ability to fulfil your contract. Quite the contrary. Derek Leech International has a policy of easing the lot of the mentally ill by finding them suitable positions. We consider it our social service remit, repaying a community that has given us so much."

Richard knew all about that. Myra Lark, acknowledged leader in field of shaping minds to suit the requirements of government and industry, was on Leech's staff. Some jobs you really had to be mad to take. Dr Lark's, for instance.