Small World Read Free

caper, and onward he must go, driven by curiosity and perverse excitement.
    When the news was over, Roger fled to his cellar hideaway. His mother had given over the cellar to him when he was fifteen. She had been downstairs but twice in the entire thirty years she’d lived in the house. The last time she peeked into the cellar it was a dank cement dungeon festooned with cobwebs and smelling of mildew and mouse poop. When Roger had asked for a place of his own, she took it to mean something in the nature of a clubhouse, crude and masculine and littered with comic books and overflowing ashtrays. She had been rather proud of her tolerant motherhood when she consented.
    It had become much more than a rec room. The stairs were lit, as they always had been, by a single low-wattage bulb suspended by its own wiring from the ceiling. From the landing at the top of the stairs, the cellar looked much as it had fifteen years ago. Beyond the dim circle of light thrown by the dusty old fixture was a plywood partition. Roger had painted it a dingy brown to encourage the general impression of gloom and decay. He had hung a sturdy door at the darkest end and installed a good lock, to which he alone possessed the key. On the door, he had long ago hand-stenciled the legend Fortress of Solitude.
    Beyond that first partition, he had put up a second. One side was lined with unfinished floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They held Roger’s collection of science fiction pulps, and his models of the Enterprise , a shuttlecraft, and a Klingon raider. Between the two partitions was the room that Roger thought of as his study.
    He had furnished the room with ratty garage-sale furniture: a monstrous chair that leaked stuffing from the wounds in its tobacco-scented horsehair upholstery; a thickly painted and chipped end table; a standing lamp ugly enough to paralyze anyone foolish enough to look directly at it. His mother had contributed an orange hassock that she had once stored her confession magazines in. A melted patch of its vinyl skin had been scabbed over in adhesive tape after she absently rested a hot sheet of brownies on it while changing the television channel one day. Roger had put it to work storing the kind of books she didn’t know
    he read.
    Roger had constructed his workshop on the other side of the second partition. It was remarkably and curiously furnished, mostly at the unwitting expense of the taxpayer. There were a number of locked cupboards containing interesting items, including Roger’s contraband wardrobe.
    Behind one door was Roger’s home-made computer, powered by a free and illegal tap into a neighborhood transformer, and connected by an equally illicit telephone patch to the bulk of the government’s computer network and to half the ba'nk computers in California. It would have been easy to tap the banks’ computers, but it was Roger’s conviction that it was also an easy way to get caught. It wasn’t conscience, but the odds, that made him prefer alternative financing for his researches.
    He was not by profession a thief. It had been a surprise to discover that by nature, at least, he was not unequipped to be one. It made life interesting, and fun, as it had not been for a long time.
    He settled down to work, suppressing the impulse to take out the painting and admire his own genius. A good beginning was only that: a point of departure. He was not about to slack off now. Not when he was just getting to the fun part.
    Fun and work were much the same coin to Roger. He had earned his coin, all his adult life, working for the government. He had been employed in a series of projects of a classified nature. They were, in fact, but one project, several times sacrificed on the altars of minor democratic idols, only to rise again under new initials, with a deft shuffle of personnel and plant, as soon as it was politic.
    As a consequence of these periodic shut-downs, Roger had experienced corresponding periods of unemployment. He