34. Upon Them Hath the Light Shined

Mateo was left in his not-really cell for a week, at least without trips to the lab. At first he thought this was Tineye’s idea of petty revenge for telling him to eat it, but then decided it wasn’t. For one thing, the jerkwad was at least a lot more into his job than his personal feelings, and he probably didn’t have time to mess with Mateo. That, and if he was messing with Mateo, he’d’ve done a better job.

It also wasn’t really fair to say he was totally left inside. A couple sneaker guys offered him a trip outdoors. And it was a real offer, too. It came with an offer of smokes. Prisoners didn’t get smokes. That was probably considered pretty hardcore back then. Now. Whatever. Plus, they explained that they were only escorting him for security, and grilled him about the US in a normal person way all the way down the hall.

He kept his answers as safe as possible, sticking to old types of food from dad’s side of the family, plus the standard old our-ladies-are-hotter-and-our-drivers-are-worse you do whenever you meet someone from a different country. They liked that. So did he.

Now he had a chance to look at the place without that stupid sack, too. It was a gloomy place, but like his not-cell, it’d been fancy at some point. Maybe still gloomy, though. At some point somebody’d overhauled it with cells that looked a lot older than a couple years, which didn’t exactly help.

“What’d this place used to be?”

“020? It was an insane asylum for chaps with shell-shock from the Great War. Made it come in handy as a place to put spies, this go-around.”

“Huh, that’s wild,” said Mateo, silently thanking heaven that he didn’t know that on the front end. He was pretty sure he’d seen a horror movie with that plot. And that was before you threw time travel into the mix.

“What was it before that?”

“A big posh house. What, couldn’t you tell?”

“Yeah, ok, fair.”

He’d been planning on looking around when he got outside, but he wound up just stopping dead and looking up at the sky. It was gray, but bright backlit gray that made his eyes water. He didn’t look around for a long time.

When he finally did, he took a minute, getting his bearings. The world was so dang big, sky and driveway and the wired-up stone wall and what looked like woods (might’ve been a band of trees) and green ground. It was so damn beautiful.

It took him probably ten minutes to remember the sneaker guys were there. They didn’t seem to mind, they were getting paid to stand around and chat with each other and chain smoke, which looked to be their idea of a perfect morning. He went over and shot the breeze with them.

They gave him a hard time about standing around looking at stuff like a cow, at least as well as he could tell through the accents, but it was all in good fun.

Accents reminded him. Maybe they’d answer. “Hey guys, where’d I come down?”

“Cotswolds, wasn’t it?” one of them said to his buddy.

“Oh yuh, where they towk lk thas.” They both laughed. Mateo did too. He was feeling a little drunk.

“Yeah, that’d be it! I couldn’t even understand everything they said. Pretty place, though.”

“Ah, that’d be why you got in trouble!” More laughing, probably because they were bored and getting to goof off.

Turned out England cold was a different kind of cold than Minnesota Driftless cold. Minnesota cold in the middle of winter stayed outside your coat if it was a good one. England cold was humid and got under whatever you were wearing and sucked all the heat out. He’d taken it for granted his Minnesota self could out-tough any Brit in the winter, but he started shivering real bad before they did. Dang, he wished he had something other than this sweater. Maybe there was some army surplus around here, but surplus didn’t really look to be a problem for them. Eventually he got so cold he had to bail and go back inside (stupid inside) but they at least took him to their mess in a part of the building he’d never seen before.

They poured tea in those coffee mugs down him, too. He always figured that was just a joke Americans made, but no, they liked tea more than Southerners. The fact that they didn’t put ice in it was just fine with him today. And they didn’t even ask, they just figured he wanted seconds like people wanted seconds of air. If ol’ Tineye ever changed his style, he’d probably teaboard people.

***

He got another trip to the lab the next — he checked his diy calendar — Monday. He didn’t make the sneaker guy who turned up wait, either. He was going out of his mind to know if the reading punchcards with light idea had any chance of working back now.

He didn’t need to ask. Nigel was still wearing a big coat like he’d just arrived, and he could barely hold off telling him until sneaker guy was gone.

Then he bounded across the lab like he was jet-propelled.

“Mateo! Mateo! It really should work! I was cleared to suggest it to a meeting of computer scientists last week, I was at HQ, and they all thought it was an extremely useful idea. The amount of detail you had was amazing! It needs some ironing out, and we’ll involve you in that, of course, and —“

“Woah woah woah. Seriously? It might work without having to overhaul everything?”

“Not all our computers, but some of them! This could speed up our codebreaking!”

Mateo couldn’t help grinning like an idiot, Nigel’s mood was just about as infectious as one of these stupid past colds. “You’re kidding me, man! You’re yanking my chain!”

“No! Really! We might have something very very important here!”

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