Un Lun Dun

35. Conversation and Revelation

Maybe it’s me getting it wrong, Deeba thought. Maybe he was saying he worked with RMetS and I got the wrong idea.

She dialed RMetS’s number four times, always losing her nerve and disconnecting. The fifth time, she let it ring. When a man answered, Deeba was pleased to hear herself sound quite calm.

“Can I speak to Professor Lipster please?” She had written down a list of names from the website.

“What’s it regarding?”

“I need some personal information about someone who worked…who I think worked at the society.”

“I can’t possibly—” he said in a bored voice.

“The name’s Unstible,” Deeba said, and to her surprise the man shut up.

“Hold on,” he said, and there were a series of clicks.

“Hello?” a woman said. “This is Rebecca Lipster. I understand you wanted to know about Benjamin Unstible?”

“Yes,” said Deeba. “I want to know what he was working on, please. It’s quite important. I’m trying to find out as much as I can—”

“Look,” Professor Lipster interrupted, very suspiciously. “I can’t discuss this sort of thing. Who am I talking to?”

“I’m his daughter,” Deeba said.

There was a silence. Deeba held her breath. She knew there was a big risk that Lipster would know she was lying. But Deeba had decided that if they’d even heard of Unstible, this was the best chance she had of persuading the meteorologists to hand over any notes he’d left. She got all her lies ready. My dad says he forgot some of his papers. Can I come and pick them up…?

Then something completely unexpected happened.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Professor Lipster said. “Of course I can understand you wanting to know. I’ll tell you whatever I can…and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Deeba’s eyes widened.

“You should be proud of your father, young lady,” Lipster said. “He was working very hard. On the day he…of the accident…Ms. Rawley the Environment minister was coming on an official visit, and your father was very excited to be here. He was always saying what an excellent job she was doing, and he’d been wanting to meet her for weeks. He said he had some questions for her. And she said she was looking forward to meeting him, too.

“Then…well the visit had to be canceled of course, when we found him.”

“What happened?” Deeba said.

Lipster hesitated.

“I’m sure you’ve been told…It was a heart attack, we think. At first we thought there might have been a chemical accident, there was such a strong smell of fumes in the room. But he wasn’t doing anything like that. Just historical research.”

“What sort of thing?” Deeba asked. Her mind was racing.

“The Smog of 1952, he said. What was in it, how much damage it did, that sort of thing. And what was done about it. What was it he was particularly interested in? Wait: I remember.

“It was the Klinneract.”

“The what?” Deeba said.

“From 1956,” Lipster said. “That was the law that really sorted out the problems of the smog.” She repeated herself slowly. “The Clean Air Act.”

“Oh,” said Deeba slowly. “Oh.”

“What else would you like to know?” Lipster said.

“Actually,” Deeba said, “that’s more than I expected to find out.” Lipster was saying something else when Deeba disconnected.

That night, to her father’s surprise, Deeba went outside in a light shower of rain. She wanted to think in the fresh cold air.

“You splashing around?” her father said. “Don’t go far. Stupid thing.” He pointed at her umbrella, with its canopy of red fabric printed with lizards. “I don’t think moisture in the air is reason enough—”

“Yeah yeah, Dad, to overturn society’s taboo against spiked clubs, blah blah.” She kissed him and went out.

She twirled her umbrella, watched it spin off the water in tiny droplets, remembered how Brokkenbroll’s broken umbrellas had protected her.

Deeba went through what she’d found out.

Unstible had been about to meet Rawley the Environment secretary— who might know better than most about dangerous climate and how to fight it— and he had been stopped. By something that stank. Of chemicals. His colleagues at RMetS thought he was dead.

The Smog had found him. He hadn’t managed to hide from it, as he’d told her.

Deeba thought about Elizabeth Rawley, the MP in charge of the environment. Maybe, Deeba thought, she could work out why the Smog had been so anxious to stop Unstible from meeting Rawley. Unstible had obviously thought she could help.

Deeba thought back to when she had last heard anything from Rawley on the news. I can’t remember exactly when, she thought, but I’m sure it wasn’t long ago. Wasn’t Dad saying something about her last night? He likes her, says she’s the only one doing her job. Wasn’t she in the paper? Yes, I’m sure she was…Anyway it doesn’t matter. Why am I worrying about Rawley? I’ll hear something about her soon, surely…

“Oh my gosh,” said Deeba suddenly. She froze her umbrella in midtwirl. She knew why it was hard for her to even think about when she’d last seen Elizabeth Rawley.

“I’ve got the phlegm effect,” she said. “And that means…Rawley’s been in UnLondon.”

There was no Klinneract. Long ago, a few UnLondoners must have mis-heard what had stopped the Smog in London, and spread the inadvertently invented word, and eventually the whole abcity believed in a nonexistent magic weapon. That was how legends started. Then Deeba had been suckered into believing in it. By Unstible.

But if the people at RMetS were right, and Unstible had been killed by the Smog, then it wasn’t Unstible in UnLondon.

So who was it Deeba had met?

And what was that imposter doing?

Something was happening in UnLondon. Something was happening to UnLondon. And none of the UnLondoners knew it.