The Dates Don’t Line Up

Frau Vesper found it on the fourth morning, and she found it because she was the only person in the room who thought a date was a fact and not a decoration.

She came into the Mäusewerk with two files and put them side by side and did not say good morning.

“Sit down,” she said, “all of you, and look at these two numbers, and tell me what is wrong with them.”

Kappa looked at it. Dobbel looked at it. The supervisor looked at it and said, “I don’t —” and then stopped, because he had got it.

“Thirty-one years,” Kappa said.

“Thirty-one years,” said Frau Vesper.

Year

Schutzprogramm K — first issue year 11

Nebelmäuse — first report, anywhere on the

station

year 42

“The protection started thirty-one years before anybody saw a single ghost mouse.”

“Yes.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No,” said Frau Vesper. “It is wrong. Those are different words and you will find the second one much more useful.”

Mirell had the two files in her hands and was holding them the way you hold something you have been waiting four days for.

“This is the crack,” she said. “This is where the case opens. Say the two possibilities out loud, Kappa, because they are both true-shaped and only one of them is true.”

Kappa thought very hard.

“One,” Kappa said. “Somebody in year eleven knew the Nebelmäuse were coming. Thirty- one years early.”

“Which would mean?”

“Somebody made them. Or somebody let them in on purpose.”

“Good. Horrible, and a good thought, and almost certainly wrong, because it needs a villain with a plan and a plan needs a budget and we have a file with no budget. Two?”

And Kappa said the true one without knowing it was the true one, which is how most true things get said.

“Two. The protection wasn’t written about the Nebelmäuse at all. It was written about something else, in year eleven. And then the Nebelmäuse turned up in year forty-two and — and it just fitted them in. Like a form that only has four boxes.”

Mirell Kawa put the files down.

“That is it,” she said. “That is exactly it, and you are twelve, and I am going to put that in the report with your name on it.”

“But then what was it written about?” said Dobbel.

“In year eleven? What happened in year eleven?”

Frau Vesper had been waiting for this for four days the way other people wait for birthdays.

“In year eleven,” she said, “Section Nine failed. The whole lower section. There is one page about it in the Archive and the page is a summary of a report that is not in the Archive, which in thirty-one years I have asked about eleven times.”

“Failed how?”

“It does not say. It says — ” and here even Frau Vesper’s flat voice did something — “it says: Section Nine was restored to service by duplication.”

The word sat in the middle of the table.

“Duplication,” said Mirell.

“Duplication.”

“Not repair. Not rebuild.”

“No,” said Frau Vesper. “They did not fix Section Nine. They copied it.”

And three decks down in the Lower Vents, where nobody was listening yet, forty-one mice were now walking on their heels.