Advanced Mythology (16 page)

Word of the leak hadn’t spread through the company yet. On his way out, people said goodnight to him in exactly the same friendly way they’d said good morning. Keith made for the elevators, eager to get home so he could do some serious thinking in private.

“Look, you’re wanted, man,” Cary, the keyliner, gave Keith a poke in the ribs. Following his glance, Keith spotted Paul Meier standing in the doorway of his office. The executive beckoned him over and pulled him just inside, out of earshot of passersby.

“How bad is it?” Keith asked.

“I won’t lie,” Paul said frankly. “The brass is upset. We’ve got a meeting with them in the morning. Go home and try to think of anything you can about the man you saw. If you see him again, call me right away.” He gave Keith a small slip of paper. “Here’s my cell phone number and my home number. I know it’s not your fault, but I’m not the one you have to convince.”

“Paul, I swear …”

“Forget it. Go home.” Paul slapped him on the back. “We’ll defend your honor in the morning.”

* * *

“Yo?” Dunn called from the main bedroom when Keith opened the door of the Crash Site. “Who’s there?”

“Me,” Keith called back. The apartment door opened into a small area wider than a corridor yet narrower than a foyer. The building was old, so the most generous dimension of any room was its height. The apartment had graciously high ceilings framed with mahogany-stained molding and white plastered walls. Their simplicity appealed to Keith not only for their elegance but as being less difficult to keep clean, a real consideration with three twenty-something men in residence.

The apartment was a sprawl of rooms, most of which had come to be used for other purposes than those for which they’d been built. To the left of the foyer were the small living and dining rooms, the latter of which overlooked the street. Beyond it lay the kitchen and a small room that used to be a scullery or maid’s quarters. Pat, who needed to practice his lines at all hours, lived there. To the right was the one and only bathroom, tiled and possessed of an enormous claw-foot tub an elephant could swim in, and thick-walled white-enameled sink and toilet that looked as though they had been made by Fisher-Price for a life-size dollhouse. Beyond the bathroom, Dunn’s and Keith’s rooms were back to back. Keith’s, the smallest habitable bedroom, had originally been a nursery, which had become a walk-in closet. Dunn had set it up for use as a home office, until Keith had pleaded for shelter. Now all the computer equipment was crowded into the master bedroom, but the prior arrangement meant Keith had a jack for the house telephone and modem lines already installed when he moved in. His furniture, bed, desk and dresser, left him with almost no room to walk, so unless he was working on his computer or sleeping, he spent little time in the bedroom. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but it was better than most alternatives, and the three men knew each other well enough to avoid stepping on one another’s toes.

Dunn emerged from his room, strutting like a symphony conductor. “Just so you know, I am The Man. I have debugged ten and a half million lines of code, and it is beautiful.”

“Congratulations,” Keith said. He hooked the strap of his briefcase over the back of a chair, shifted a pile of unfolded laundry, and threw himself on the couch. “That is a heck of a lot of hard work.”

Dunn looked at him with eyebrows raised high on his forehead. “That’s not the level of enthusiasm I’m looking for, but I’ll take it. Sit down and have some cold Chinese takeout and tell me what’s bugging
you.
”

Keith told him the story of the man who approached him with the confidential ad layout, without going into details about the product. “I don’t know where he got the ad from. It’s impossible that anyone could have seen it. Nobody outside the agency or the client has. It’d be all over the Net if word had gotten out.” The full force of that thought hit him, and he paled. “Or it could be. Oh, my God.”

“Does PDQ send any of their ads by e-mail?” Dunn asked.

“Well, yeah. All the time. It saves them a lot of time and messenger fees. But they use a very sophisticated encryption program. It’s supposed to be foolproof. It cost them thousands.”

“Money can’t promise smarts.” Dunn’s smooth forehead wrinkled into three horizontal bars. “Encryption’s only any good if your hacker’s smarter than the other guy’s hacker. Sounds like maybe someone’s running a capture program on your agency’s line. Have you ever heard of Carnivore? It’s a program that the CIA uses for scanning people’s e-mail and the Internet.
Supposedly
they’re looking for specific keywords. Supposedly it’s meant to help stop crime. And supposedly they’re getting approval from the Department of Justice before they go any further and read the mail.
Supposedly.
Probably some hacker already has something bigger out there, bigger and meaner, that can read anything, even heavily encrypted files. Tell your boss. He’ll want to know their secured system isn’t.”

“I’ll tell them,” Keith said. “But if they didn’t want to leak it to the public, what did the guy want?”

“Who knows?” Dunn asked. “Is Gadfly hostile-takeover material?”

“It
shouldn’t
be. I don’t really know what their financing is like.”

“Maybe this guy is just poised to swoop down on the company when it goes public,” Dunn said. “Ask me how I know. We’ve had all kinds of feelers from people who want to talk to us when we’re successful, not all of them nice.”

“I have no idea,” Keith said. “All we’re doing is helping them with their publicity. PDQ has never had a problem like this before, not one where so much money was at stake.”

“The world is changing, my man. Maybe they should ask Uhuru Enterprises to write them a new program. Hint, hint.”

“Thanks,” Keith said, turning toward his own room. “I hope they don’t just shoot the messenger. Are you online?” he asked, glancing back.

Dunn picked up a white carton of almond chicken. He gestured at Keith with a pair of chopsticks. “All yours.”

It was a relief to shut the door between himself and the rest of the world. Keith hit the computer’s ON button. He threw his briefcase into a corner and flopped on the bed as the screen hummed to life. The icons scattered themselves over the picture of Diane that he used as his wallpaper. He hoped he had a message from her or Holl. He felt like writing to someone about what had happened to him, and then realized he didn’t even want to think about it.

The small mail icon in the bottom of his browser screen showed a dozen messages. Half were junk mail, as usual, but one was from Diane. He brightened. It looked like a nice long letter. He could really use a good love letter to take his mind off his miserable day. Underneath it was a short message from Hollow Tree. Keith reached for the mouse. If he read that one first and got it out of the way, he’d have all evening to enjoy Diane’s note and compose a reply.

Just as he clicked on it, the lights flickered. Keith looked up, hoping the power wouldn’t go out. The landlord claimed the building had been rewired within the last two years, but the electric company had brownouts and blackouts all the time. He glanced back at his screen. It had frozen up. The cheerful home page of his Internet Service Provider didn’t respond no matter how frantically he moved the mouse.

Keith swore and rebooted the machine. The roommates had surge protectors and battery backups on every computer in the house. Power outages should not affect them. When his opening screen finally appeared, he dragged the cursor over to where the e-mail icon ought to be. It wasn’t there.

That was unusual but not unheard of. Keith checked the “recycling bin,” but it was empty. Oh, well, the icon was only a shortcut. He opened the program menu and chose the mail program. Frustrated, he waited for it to come up. Keith felt as if he was waiting forever for the modem to engage. Finally, he decided it wasn’t going to. He smacked the desk with both hands. Diane’s message was stuck in limbo and he wanted it out! He tried closing and opening the program, clicking all the on-screen buttons, but nothing helped.

He went out to find Dunn.

The programmer shook his head. “Sounds like the program got corrupted. You say you had a brownout?” he asked, standing up from his computer. His array of equipment wouldn’t have shamed NASA, with multiple screens and every gadget known to technology-loving mankind.

“Just for a moment,” Keith said. He trailed after Dunn, who marched purposefully in and took over Keith’s basic computer setup. His long hands flew over the keyboard like a concert pianist’s.

Dunn let out a short exclamation as the screen went blank, then the opening logos came up.

“You’ve got gremlins. The program’s toast. We’ll have to reinstall your e-mail. Where’s the disk?”

Keith started flipping through the CD-ROMs in his storage case, then stopped. He ran his hands through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “At my mom’s,” he said.

“That’s okay. I’ve got the basic browser. We can get you online to download it all over. That’s not all bad: you can get the latest version. I don’t need the modem for a while.”

“How long will that take?” Keith asked.

“Oh, an hour or so.”

Keith had a horrible thought and leaned over his roommate’s shoulder. “What about my mail?”

Dunn shook his head. “Did you have it backed up?”

Keith groaned. “No. But there was a letter from Diane in there!”

“Sorry. It’s gone.” Dunn was genuinely sympathetic.

“Oh, well,” Keith tried to put the best face on it. “She prefers a real phone call anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” Dunn said. He used his own disk to get Keith on line to the download site, then went back to his own work.

Keith flopped back on his bed, watching the progress monitor on the screen while he dialed the phone. He didn’t think his rotten mood was one he ought to share, but the moment Diane answered, he felt the tensions of the day melting
into a warm pool of contentment.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. He caught a glimpse of the sappy smile he was wearing in the mirror over his dresser. He stuck his tongue out at his reflection. So he was in love. So what if it made him look goofy? It was the best thing in his life.

***

Chapter 14

The next morning Keith found himself on one side of the long conference table with the top staff of PDQ on the other. Jason Allen and his executives from both the creative and client sides of the agency interrogated him like a prisoner under the lights, asking him to repeat details of his encounter with the man in the park over and over again. He had wanted to get the attention of the brass, but not like this! The group was split regarding how much culpability he bore for the meeting.

Some of them who remembered him for accepting the industry award on their behalf for the Judge Yeast account were inclined to think he was innocent. Most of the others were clear that they thought he had something to do with the man choosing him out of all the people who worked for the agency. Keith felt as though he’d walked into another argument between the Progressives and the Conservatives, with the Conservatives demanding bombastic punishments for an alleged error. But this was no minor error. The loss of the Gadfly account—Doris!—meant hundreds of thousands of dollars, something the vice president of accounts kept bringing up with agonizing monotony. Paul and Doug sat flanking Keith, for which he was grateful. The error, if it was one, could have an impact on their careers, too. Dorothy, on Paul’s other side, held herself as erect as a queen. She was as much on trial here as Keith was.

Keith kept trying to defend himself. “Look, all I was doing was studying.…”

The vice president of accounts interrupted him. “What were you doing out there anyhow?”

“The weather was good, and I just wanted to get away.…”

“What if you were needed during that time?” one of the women from the client side demanded.

“Ellen,” Paul said, stepping in as he had several times during the last hour and a half. “Keith’s entitled to a lunch hour. He has a cell phone. Dorothy and I both have the number. That’s not the issue.”

“And who else had that number?” the executive asked, glaring at him.

“Lots of people.” Keith shook his head. “Look, check my phone records. No one called me.…”

“They could have arranged ahead of time,” said an angry man from Media. “Just like they arranged to get a copy of a confidential document!”

“That had nothing to do with me!” Keith exclaimed.

Paul patted the air with his hands, trying to bring the volume down. “Keith is not our problem. Whoever actually let the ad out is our problem. Keith brought this to us as soon as he could.”

“We’re going to have to tell the client,” W. Jason Allen said, leveling a grim gaze at them all. He reserved a special glare for Keith. “You! Do not talk to anyone outside this office, do you understand me?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Paul said.

“He hasn’t done anything wrong, Jason,” Dorothy said, jumping in to shield her protégé. Keith shot her a grateful glance, but she wasn’t looking at him.

By the time the meeting came to an end, the group was still split. Like the juries in the television lawyer shows, they seemed to avoid or meet his eyes depending on whether they thought he was guilty. Keith followed Dorothy, keeping quiet until they were in her office. The brass filed past the door, looking in curiously, as though, Keith thought, they were hoping to catch him handing over agency secrets to some guy in a trench coat and fedora.

“Thanks for defending me,” he said.

Dorothy’s jaw was set. “Don’t thank me now. If I get canned because I brought you in, I’ll gitcha.”

Keith bowed his head. “If I’m guilty I’ll let the boom fall, but I didn’t do anything!”

Dorothy looked over her shoulder. “Go on, get out of here for a while. They don’t want to see you while they think about what they’re going to say to the client. If I’m scared, they’re feeling it double. Triple. Go on.”

She didn’t sit down until Keith picked up his briefcase and jacket and left the room.

* * *

When the door slammed behind him Keith felt as though it might as well be for the very last time. He felt as alone as if he were the last man alive. He looked up and down LaSalle Street. Where should he go? Everybody on the sidewalk was walking quickly and purposefully. They all had places to go, people to see. Nobody wanted him where he was supposed to see, and he wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone. At that moment, that was what he wanted more than anything else on Earth. He fingered the small cell phone in his pocket.
Off limits,
he thought sadly. He started walking north, trying to stifle his gloomy mood, but it hung on. He would have loved to have called Diane or Holl or his parents, or anyone, but the executives would be probably fire him if he dared approach any human being or reasonable facsimile thereof.

An idea struck him. He stopped in his tracks, grinning with relief. He
did
have somebody that he could talk to, maybe, and not at all human, or even close. Scanning the skies, he picked up the pace.

* * *

“One for lunch?” the hostess at the 95th Floor restaurant asked.

“Um, yeah,” Keith said, and turned on all the charm he possessed. “Is there one right next to the window? I’ll wait if I have to.”

The woman consulted a plastic-coated floor plan daubed with grease pencil. “No problem. I’ve got a very nice table. Please come with me.”

Keith rubbernecked as he followed her. It had been a while since he’d been to the top of the John Hancock Building. He couldn’t have asked for better weather. A few fluffy clouds floated around to the west, but over the lake the sky was clear, bright blue. He settled in at the table with its vertigo-inducing view, and thought hard about being visible. He hoped that they could hear him.

The waiter had already delivered his Coca-Cola by the time they arrived.

Sun behind clouds,
the air sprites sent as a message to his mind. Keith studied the filmy white beings dancing on the air just outside the window. Each was no larger than a cat. Their slender, winged bodies were nearly translucent, tapering away to wisps where feet might have been on a ground-bound creature. He tried to figure out which was the one he had met first, but decided that what details set them apart to one another just escaped his powers of observation. The large eyes in their otherwise featureless faces regarded him with sympathy.

“Yeah, I feel a little gloomy,” Keith admitted. “Things have been rough at work.”

A picture of a box with his picture on the lid opening appeared in his mind. “Reveal what I’m talking about, huh?” He tried to organize his thoughts like a slide show, giving them a series of pictures of his job at PDQ: Playing with the prototype of the Origami, working with a laughing Dorothy, leaning over a layout of the “One of Everything” ad, the faces of the people he was working with, especially Paul, then the strange, narrow-faced man and the ad copy in his hand. That last image was burned into Keith’s memory as if with a branding iron. He’d never forget the shock of the moment, and wondered if there was any way he could have handled it better. The sprites hung on air currents outside the window, dancing like kites. He never knew just how much they could understand, but they sent back parts of the images, including a large image of the vice president’s angry face to show they knew one of the things that was troubling him.

“You’re right. That is what’s bothering me. I know I’m not responsible for the leak. Everything was going so well, too,” Keith said. “If they pull the ad, I don’t know what I’ll do. I was so happy I managed to get the invitation incorporated into it. If they let it pass it will go all around the world! Every creature that can read it will know they’re invited. I just hope that I don’t miss anyone. Holl, you remember him?”

Holl’s face appeared in his mind, blond hair flying, cheeks, and ear-tips red with excitement and cold, brow furrowed with worry. Keith recognized the image from their balloon ascent, more than a year before. “Right. He sends his greetings. I wrote up what I wanted to say and his people translated it for me. It looks kind of pretty. Maybe English looks like that to people who read a different alphabet, but I doubt it. As long as people see it. That’s the important thing.”

The sprites sent pictures of billboards, murals from the sides of buildings and a streamer pulled through the air by a skywriter. Keith grinned. “You guys want my job? You’d probably tick off fewer people than I’m doing.”

Sun behind clouds,
the sprites said very positively.

“You don’t think so, huh?” Keith paused and glanced around to make sure no one was watching him, “Any news on other magical beings?”

The small white creatures began to dance excitedly on the air, describing figure-eights and Immelmann turns. In his mind, Keith saw a two-legged shadow stride across a twilit landscape. At first he wondered why they were sending him pictures of a human being, until the figure passed a water tower. In proportion, it seemed no higher than a beach umbrella.

“Cool,” Keith breathed, just as the waitress plumped his plate down in front of him. The woman, about his own age, gave him a very puzzled look. Behind her, the sprites fled. “Um, I mean, thanks. I’m really hungry.”

She gave him another odd glance, disgorged a ketchup bottle from her apron pocket, and stalked away. The sprites returned at once. Keith attacked his sandwich and fries with gusto.

“’Scuse me while I eat,” he whispered, behind the cover of his glass of soda. “I never thought I’d be hungry again. A giant? You saw a giant around
here
?”

He almost got dizzy as the perspective of the image in his head zoomed out and out, until he was looking down at the Earth from miles up. The sprites commanded the air all the way up to the top of the atmosphere, possibly higher. The view in his mind’s eye tilted to the right. He saw a broad stripe, a highway. It centered itself in his vision, then scrolled up as his point of view traveled south then east at speed. It took him a while to recognize landmarks. Then, he reconstructed the whole map in his memory.

“Near
Madison
?”
he squawked, then shrank down in his chair as the waitress came up.

“Everything all right here?” she asked, with the sort of expression that suggested
she
didn’t think so.

Keith gave her an apologetic grin. “Yup. Thanks.” Wow, he thought. A giant in Wisconsin. Maybe Paul Bunyan was down from Minnesota visiting the Dells.… Nah.

Outside the window, the sprites danced in the sky. Shaking his head in wonder, Keith ate his lunch. Nothing cheers you up like knowing you aren’t the only person on the planet Earth, he thought.

He paid the tut-tutting server and prepared to leave. Over her head, birdlike eyes offered him a kindly farewell.

“Thanks,” Keith thought at them, hoping they understood. “Keep me posted if you see anyone else. Nice to see you.”

The image of a setting sun appeared in his mind. Keith enjoyed it most of the way toward the elevator, when a hand reached out and caught his wrist.
The spy!
he thought, alarmed.

Worse than that, it was Mr. Allen from the agency. It was a shock to see the face he’d just been thinking about appear right in front of him.

“Hey, Keith,” the executive said. He was seated at a table for four with three other men, all in expensive designer suits that must have cost thousands each. Keith felt underdressed in his off-the-rack best. “This is Keith Doyle. We’ve just brought him on as a copywriter.”

“Hello, sir,” Keith said nervously. “Um, gentlemen.” He pointed back toward his table. “I was just …”

Allen gave a humorous glance to his companions, then addressed Keith.

“I saw you talking to the birds out there. Lake gulls?”

“Something like that,” Keith said. They must have watched his animated conversation with the sprites. They must think he was crazy. He felt his cheeks burn. “I just talk to them when I have something on my mind. I hope that’s okay. They’re not human, after all.”

“Oh, sure,” Allen said with a genial nod. He leaned back and crossed his long legs. Gadfly must not have been too upset about the revelation of the ad leak. “And do they ever talk back?”

Keith paused for a moment, wondering what the man would do if he told him the truth.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, trying not to grin all over his face. “All the time.”

On the way out of the Hancock Center, he passed a woman with long black hair and armfuls of shopping bags staring up the side of the building with a fascinated, wondering expression on her face. She must be a tourist, Keith thought. He followed her rapt gaze, taking in the crossed girders and high tower just visible on the roof. It was a pretty impressive sight, all right.

* * *

Mr. Collier leaned out into the waiting room. His face brightened when he saw Keith.

“I thought it was you. Come on back. I was going to get a Coke. Want one?”

“Thanks,” Keith said. He followed the man to his office and waited patiently for him to finish the motions of hospitality.

“So, what can I do for you?”

Keith brought the photos out. He’d arranged the stack carefully. The best one of Enoch, the one with the least dour expression, was on top. He slid it across to Mr. Collier. “I thought you might like to see the man your daughter wants to marry. This is Enoch.”

Mr. Collier took the picture, and leaned back in his chair, relaxed. “Hey, he was a cute kid. Marcy’s been so cagey about bringing him up here I was afraid he was deformed or something. When was this taken, when he was about ten?”

“No.” Keith glanced at the fancy leather-bound desk calendar. “About two weeks ago. I’ve been kind of busy or I would have brought them in sooner.”

The chair lurched forward and Mr. Collier sat up. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? My daughter’s dating
a child
?
This is … disgusting.”

“He’s not a child, sir. I swear. He’s one of the Little Folk. An elf. I know Marcy told you. You should have believed her, sir. She’s telling the truth.”

No time for the easy build-up. Keith fished through the collection and found the good picture of the pair side-by-side and cheek-to-cheek. It was a tender moment, full of warmth, trust and, yes, passion. Snapping the shutter had been such an invasion of privacy at that moment he’d almost been ashamed to do it, but it was a good shot. Without saying anything, he passed the picture across the desk. Mr. Collier saw his daughter, noticed her expression, and started to push it away. To give him credit, he stopped at the last moment, to study Enoch’s face. It was not a child’s face in that instance, but mature and very loving. Marcy’s father’s brows went down, then way up. Keith knew he’d spotted the ears. You couldn’t miss them. His hands began to shake. The shock must have hit him hard.