Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel Read online

  She gave him a look as he reached for the mouse.

  “What? Are you going to find them with your special man-powers?”

  He backed off, hands spread to mean he meant no offence.

  “Don’t bother with the files,” he said. “Just show me.”

  Kathy gave a couple more experimental clicks and then gave up with a growl of irritation.

  “I don’t know where to start. It’s like when you… when a man goes bald.”

  “I wouldn’t know owt about that,” said Rod, running a hand through his hair.

  “When you go bald, Rod, it won’t be full head of hair one day and bald the next. It’ll be a hair here, a hair there. And that’s how it’s been. Pens, paper, patient notes. They go walkies all the time. And then it’s a trolley. And then, one day, in a place where you’d swear there was a cleaning cupboard or an alcove, there’s just a blank wall. Nothing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say people were missing too.”

  “Really?”

  She laughed but without humour. “Mostly agency staff. They come one day and don’t come back the next. I mean, all areas of the NHS have a high turnover of staff and they don’t have to deal with geriatric dhosterata, impossible human-Venislarn hybrids or previously uncatalogued parasites that are resistant to all known medicines.”

  He nodded. “But have people gone missing?”

  Kathy gave it some thought. “We would have noticed, wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t we?”

  His phone buzzed in his pocket.

  “Could you rustle up a list of people who have worked here? All the people who have worked here?”

  “Is this Rod asking me or the consular mission?” she said. “We haven’t reported this as a problem or anything…”

  “And a map of the restricted ward. The whole hospital if you can.”

  He answered his phone. “Campbell.”

  He didn’t get an opportunity to speak further for a full forty seconds and that small opportunity allowed him to ask, “And by ‘soulless dried up witch-bitch’ you mean…? Uh-huh.”

  Twenty seconds more ranting, then Rod asked, “And the ‘psycho mystic-my-arse creepy-Dumbledore fucker’ is…?”

  Nina ranted on although Rod could tell she had peaked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m still here. With Dr Kaur. Yes, the one with the… Yes. That’s fine, you come over and tell me what Vivian and Professor Omar have done to you and then – yes, apart from the obvious. Okay. Bye.”

  Kathy Kaur was looking at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Dr Kaur. The one with the…?” she asked.

  “With the, um, excellent chances of getting invited to interview on Thursday.”

  “Smooth, Campbell. So smooth.”

  In the Vault beneath Birmingham Library, something emerged from the mouth of the Berry Mound vase of multiplication. At first it appeared to be a bubble, a milky mirror-coated bubble, like cloudy mercury, but the image it held was not a reflection; it was a distorted view of the Vault, looking out and across to the furthest wall. The bubble seemed to weigh nothing in Morag’s hands but as it grew, it threatened to engulf her arms and she hurriedly put the vase down on a shelf.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Cattress.

  “I don’t know,” said Morag and thought quickly. “It makes a copy of whatever’s in the vase. You put a hole in it.”

  “That’s not a hole,” said Cattress, waving wildly at the vast bubble.

  “A hole’s not a thing,” she said and then understood. “You put a hole in it. And now when we look in the vase we’d see…”

  “Whatever was on the other side.”

  The expanding mass was not a mirror. It was not a distorted view of what was on the other side. The bubble was a copy of the world, ballooning out like a tumour.

  “This is bad,” she said.

  “I don’t like it,” said Cattress in a tone of voice straight out of childhood.

  The copy-universe folded round and enveloped the vase.

  “Oh, crap,” said Morag.

  A distinct and separate tumorous bubble began to form on the side of the first. The vase was making a copy of the world, a copy that had a copy of the world in it. Tumours upon tumours…

  Nina took the train out to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The vast hospital complex brushed up against Birmingham University on one side and eclipsed the site of an ancient Roman fort on another. It was home to all the services that a major NHS hospital provided plus the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, which received all British military personnel injured in action around the world. It also, unbeknownst to the public, contained the restricted ward that dealt with those infected or injured by the Venislarn and those Venislarn who demanded earthly medical attention.

  Nina wasn’t a fan of hospitals. They were mazes, specifically designed to confuse her. And they smelled of old people. Nina wasn’t against the concept of old people but, in her experience, they were casually annoying, daytime-TV-watching, fun-sucking vampires. Funpires.

  The upper floors of the hospital split into three lozenge-shaped towers, identical in floor plan so as to confuse the unwary visitor. Nina only made three wrong turns before she found herself on the eighth floor standing in front of the security doors to ward 829, the restricted ward. The security guard wore the simple uniform of ordinary hospital security, but Nina could see the bulge of a concealed firearm underneath the front of his jumper. He inspected her pass and then allowed her to swipe herself inside.

  The great curving sweep of the restricted ward corridor formed a single loop. Many of the side wards and rooms were locked and, she knew, would not even open to her electronic pass. The restricted ward was containment for an array of alien diseases and parasites and more than a few hosts who were now beyond even the broadest definition of human. Although she had come here to check up on Rod and vent her spleen at Vivian’s decision to invite Professor Sheikh Omar to interview, Nina as always found herself first drawn to a particular side ward, partway along the anti-clockwise turn of the corridor.

  The door was locked. Nina peered through the little window. There were five beds, all raised up: Joe, Josh, Kyra, Maryam, and Owen. Their eyes were open but there was no flicker of consciousness in any of them. The five of them were the same age as Nina, give or take a year. They had all signed up for a research experiment organised by Birmingham University’s Department of Intertextual Exegesis. None of them had known what they were signing up for but Professor Sheikh Omar had been willing to pay – and even small amounts of money have a certain gravitational effect on young people.

  The experiment involved being shown a series of images – some were inscriptions, some were carved scenes or symbols, some were photographs – while wired up to a pulse monitor and an EEG machine. Nina Seth learned three things that day: she learned that the Venislarn were real, she learned that she had a previously unrecorded Abyssal Rating of ten and she learned that Professor Sheikh Omar was willing to drive five young people out of their minds in his personal pursuit of knowledge. Joe, Josh, Kyra, Maryam, Owen.

  “I have no mouth,” she whispered to them through the glass.

  “Yes, you do, you silly dear,” said a wobbly voice.

  Nina turned. The wrinkled and bent old lady in a quilted housecoat pushed an equally wrinkled and bent finger against Nina’s lips.

  “That’s it there,” she said helpfully.

  “Back off, grandma,” said Nina. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and tried not to swallow any old lady germs. “Where the hell did you spring from?”

  “Oh,” said the old woman with a toffee commercial twinkle, “we came across with the first migration, through the Kolob configuration.”

  “Did you?” said Nina, not listening at all and not caring a jot. “Well, shall we get you back there?”

  “Oh, we can’t go back,” said the old dear. “The stars are gone and the path is lost.”

  “I’m sure we can try.” Nina took he
r by the shoulders and turned her round, hopefully steering her back to her bed or to someone who she could dump the wrinkled old baggage with.

  Rod watched as Kathy drew another tentative circle on the large-scale plan of the eighth floor.

  “I’m fairly sure that there was a room there.”

  “Are you sure, or aren’t you?” said Rod.

  She looked pained. “Well, yes, I am sure but even if a room had vanished, which is a physical impossibility – only according to human concepts or reality, yes I know – but even if it had vanished, it would still be on this plan, wouldn’t it?”

  “Indeed,” said Dr Zondervan, entering the staff break room Rod had commandeered.

  Zondervan was the administrative manager of the restricted ward, effectively boss of the facility and everyone in it. Rod didn’t like him and Rod knew that the root cause of that dislike was nothing other than jealousy. Dr David Zondervan was an accomplished doctor and research scientist but looked as if he had just dropped by after crossing the Antarctic unassisted or abseiling down the cliffs of Dover. He had brains, sculpted good looks and action-man credentials; Rod despised him – and despised him all the more because he knew his animosity was entirely undeserved.

  “We’re seeing you quite a bit round here, aren’t we, Rodney?” asked Zondervan. “First that business last month where you lost your finger –”

  “Part of my finger.”

  “– and now your arm. You must stop sticking body parts where they don’t belong,” he smiled handsomely.

  I bet he’s had his teeth whitened, thought Rod sourly but actually said, “Dr Kaur and I were looking at a possible anomaly in the –”

  “I heard,” said Zondervan. “I’m not sure how Kathy’s confusion is the concern of the consular mission response team.”

  “We encounter time-space anomalies surprisingly often.”

  “I don’t doubt that but Kathy, let me put it to you: a patient comes to you with the belief that rooms in their house have been rearranged or with very poor memory of commonplace things. Your diagnosis?”

  Kathy wasn’t offended or put out by the question.

  “Dementia would be a strong contender,” she answered immediately, “particularly in the elderly. Psychosis is a possibility, or maybe a developed aspect of schizophrenia. Or something affecting the brain directly, such as CJD or a tumorous growth.” She looked at Rod. “There might be a far more mundane explanation for what I’m experiencing, true.”

  “But haven’t others noticed things going missing?” said Rod. He picked up the list of restricted ward staff. “You said that there have been some staff who were here one day and gone the next.”

  “Sounds like any department of the NHS,” said Zondervan.

  “Actually, none of them are listed on that print off,” said Kathy.

  “Is that just a list of current staff?” said Zondervan. “I’m sure we would have noticed if people and rooms just vanished in a puff of smoke. People and spaces can’t just pop in and out of existence.”

  Morag backed further away from the new pocket universe and took out her phone. It was dead. Still dead.

  “Your phone,” she said.

  “What?” said Cattress.

  “Phone. Now.”

  Dazed, he unlocked it and handed it over.

  Even in the Vault there should have been a signal, but the phone said ‘No Network’. She looked up in surprise. In the secondary world, partway down a corridor and backing away from a copy-universe of their own were a red-headed woman and a well-tailored bureaucrat. The other Morag looked her way and their eyes met. Morag recognised the look in the other woman’s eyes; it said, ‘You’re in big trouble now, girl. Big trouble.’

  “Hey!” Morag shouted.

  The other Morag waved her own Cattress’s non-functioning phone. “They’re identical. They’re confusing the network.”

  The other Morag tossed the phone back to Cattress, turned to locate a CCTV camera and waved her arms.

  “Who is that?” said Cattress, looking at the other people.

  “Someone who’s in as much trouble as we are,” said Morag.

  In the shifting visions around the Berry Mound vase, yet another copy of the world was forming.

  Once Nina had gotten her started, the tiny old dear seemed to know where she was going and toddled along the corridor at a high-speed shuffle like a wind-up toy.

  “Oh, it’s all very nice here,” she said, of everything and nothing in particular.

  “Uh-huh,” said Nina. “You probably remember when all this used to be fields, I bet.”

  The old woman stopped to give Nina a shrewd look.

  “I remember further back than that,” she said with a genteel huff. “This one.”

  Nina helped her through the doorway and into a large private room. At the sight of the armchair beside the coffee table in the window, the woman picked up speed and broke into a shuffling sprint.

  “Good,” said Nina. She inspected the notes on the end of the woman’s bed. “Barbara.”

  “Yes, dear?” said the woman, lowering herself snugly into her chair.

  A ripe, faintly rotten smell emanated from a chest-high unit next to a fridge in an alcove. The unit had a screen and keyboard mounted on top and – with a control panel, serving hatch and a hint of industrial innards – appeared to be part photocopier, part vending machine, part mincing machine.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s my little magic stove, that is,” said Barbara. “Anything I want, it makes.”

  “Anything.”

  “Anything.” Barbara shuffled in her cushion, trying to get comfy. “As long as it’s hands or faces.”

  “Hands…?”

  “Or faces,” said Barbara.

  Nina, who was always open to new experiences and held to the principle that it was generally better to press buttons than not, pressed some buttons on the machine. The unit came alive with an expensive-sounding whisper-soft whirr. The screen informed her that Preset C was compiling.

  Whilst not being so rude as to tell Rod to bugger off, Zondervan’s subtle body language made it clear that Rod was in the wrong place and wasting the wrong people’s time.

  “You’re welcome to take those documents if you wish,” said Zondervan, “and, if you do discover something amiss, you’re very welcome to drop in on my office. Door’s open and all that.”

  “No, of course,” said Rod, instantly apologetic. He had monopolised too much of Kathy’s time. “For what it’s worth,” he told her, “I don’t think you’ve got a tumour or mad cow disease or owt.”

  “Nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” she replied.

  Rod patted Zondervan’s arm as he passed him on the way out into the corridor.

  “But keep an eye out, yeah? Sometimes weird mysterious crap turns out to be real mysterious crap.”

  “Will do, bud,” said Zondervan.

  In the gleaming output tray of Barbara’s ‘magic stove’ something was beginning to form, extruded from the space beneath. At first it was a glistening translucence, then white and then, before it had taken on a pinker hue, Nina recognised it as the shape of a human hand.

  “It’s 3D printing a hand, Barbara,” said Nina.

  “I know! Wonderful, isn’t it?” said the old woman.

  “It’s not a plastic hand, is it?”

  “Course not, silly dear. I’ve only had it a few weeks. It was bought for me by… Oh, you know the one.”

  “Which one?”

  “Him. The one in charge. Um.” For a moment, Barbara looked very cross with herself.

  In the corridor, Rod turned back to Zondervan.

  “Oh, and I’m sorry for…”

  He stopped.

  Zondervan wasn’t there. The door to the break room swung slowly closed.

  Rod pushed back inside, down the tiny spur of corridor and found Kathy Kaur gathering up the last of the papers.

  “Yeah, I’m coming,” she said and
then looked at him.

  “Where’s Zondervan?” said Rod.

  “He followed you out.”

  “He did. He was behind me and then…”

  Their gazes met. Kathy laughed.

  “Real funny, Campbell.”

  He shook his head and, because he was out of clever options, turned to the walls to just double-check that David Zondervan hadn’t snuck through a previously unseen door or through the plasterwork itself.

  “You’re not joking?” she said.

  “No,” said Rod.

  “Fuck.”

  He thumped the wall. It was solid.

  “Aye. It really isn’t a tumour or mad cow disease. Unless we’ve both got it.”

  Morag’s world had become a kaleidoscope of, well, worlds. Corridors, doorways and shelves abutted each other at unhelpful angles, new realities encroaching on each other as the Berry Mound vase disgorged fresh worlds with the zeal of an over-eager creator god.

  As she hauled the stunned Cattress down a corridor in what she hoped was the direction of the exit, Morag could not say for certain which universe they were now in. If they had crossed over then the boundary was intangible and these tumour-worlds were not immediately harmful to visitors.

  “You said you were going to raise the alarm,” said Cattress.

  “I am trying,” said Morag, peevishly and dragged him down a side corridor. “It’s just that nothing is where it used to be.”

  “What about the fire sensors?” he suggested, pointing up at the sprinkler outlet on the ceiling.

  “Great,” she said. “Lighter?”

  Cattress stared at her blankly. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Any means of making fire?”

  “Well, no. I assumed that you might.”

  “What? I look like a smoker? You think all Scottish people smoke?”

  “No.” He paused. “But, generalisation though it might be, I was under the impression that in the north, particularly among the working classes…”

  Her glare silenced him.

  Ahead of them, in a world that ran at a thirty degree angle to theirs, a red-headed woman and a long streak of nothing in an expensive suit hurried across a T-junction. The man said, “Now, listen here, my good woman,” and then they were gone from sight.