Wish You Were Here Read Free Page A

than this? What’s the story?’
    Linda shrugged. ‘You’ll see.’
    â€˜Just a little hint?’
    â€˜Let’s see, then.’ Linda sat down on the corner of the editor’s desk. ‘We’ve got a secret nuke installation that’s causing ecological havoc, maybe even bending the fabric of the space/time continuum, and it’s all tied in with the clandestine arms scandal, which means . . .’
    â€˜Huh? What clandestine arms scandal?’
    â€˜This one,’ Linda replied. ‘The big question will be, did the President know about the existence of the second-generation tapes? And then, when we bring in the women’s health issues, not to mention the cute little furry animals angle . . .’
    The editor’s face slumped into a stunned grin, so that he looked like a lemming version of Cortes gazing with a wild surmise at the Grand Canyon. ‘There’s a cute little furry animals angle?’ he breathed.
    â€˜There’s always a cute little furry animals angle,’ Linda replied casually. ‘If not express, then implied. You just gotta look for it, is all.’
    Which was true, the editor admitted, as he recalled Linda’s own stunningly innovative slant on the farm subsidies story. Who else, he asked himself, would have dreamed of leading with a full-page close-up of the cutest little mouse you ever saw, under the screamer: CONDEMNED TO DIE!! (‘ If secret plans now being rushed through Congress are allowed to go ahead, millions of cute furry mice like Wilbert will be ruthlessly exterminated as callous farmers sadistically prepare grain silos for expected megabuck bumper har vests . . .’) He closed his eyes, and grinned. ‘Way to go, Linda,’ he said. ‘I can hardly wait.’
    Linda nodded and stood up; and the editor reflected, not for the first time, that for one person to be so incredibly successful, so stunningly beautiful, so completely integrated and at one with her lifestyle, wasn’t perhaps the way it was supposed to be with human beings. Maybe, he surmised, she’s got this really awful-looking painting in her attic. Or maybe not. If she had, she’d have made a story out of it long since.
    With an ethnic rights angle to it, probably. Not to mention the cute little furry animals.
    Â 
    Ninety feet above the surface of the lake, the duck air-braked, banked sharply and turned.
    Because a part of its mind, unused even after all this time to lightning-fast changes of body, was still being a tiresome old man with a corn-cob pipe, the duck made its way slowly down the sky, taking care not to pull a wing muscle or dislocate an arthritic joint. The rest of its mind used the response-time lag to assess the situation and demand to know, one last time, where the catch was. Too easy, it screamed. Nobody, not even a goddamn Brit, is this daffy. It’s got to be a set-up or something.
    Got to be.
    But, the duck reflected as it lowered its undercarriage and aquaplaned a silvery gash through a reflected mountain, if there’s a catch, buggered if I can see it. Not that I’m in any position to pontificate right now, what with being a duck and all. Stupider creatures than ducks are hard to find, if you leave out the sort of life-form you can comfortably fit on a microscope slide.
    Having gathered its wings in tidily to its sides and preened them with its bill, it turned to face the shore and settled itself down to watch. Any minute now, there was going to be a loud splash.
    Four. Three. Two. One.
    Splash!
    When the kid stopped flying through the air and touched down on the water, he fell through the reflection of a rocky outcrop on the south-western crest of the hills, smashing it into thousands of tiny shards of image. As he struggled to keep his head above water, each shard was further fragmented, making the surface of the lake a mosaic of tiny bits of hillside, each one perfectly mirrored but no longer making up a