Inside Job by Connie Willis

Author:Connie Willis [Willis, Connie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Subterranean Press

7

“In the highest confidence there is always

a flavor of doubt—a feeling, half instinctive

and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel

may have something up his sleeve.”

— H.L. Mencken —

After Kildy left, I called up a computer-hacker friend of mine and put him to work on the problem and then phoned a guy I knew in the English department at UCLA.

“Inquiries about Mencken?” he said. “Not that I know of, Rob. You might try the journalism department.”

The guy at the journalism department said, “Who?” and, when I explained, suggested I call Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

And what had I been thinking? Kildy said Ariaura had started doing Mencken in Seattle. I needed to be checking there, or in Salem or—where had she gone after that? Sedona. I spent the rest of the day (and evening) calling bookstores and reference librarians in all three places. Five of them responded “Who?” and all of them asked me how to spell ‘Mencken,’ which might or might not mean they hadn’t heard the name lately, and only seven of the thirty bookstores stocked any books on him. Half of those were the latest Mencken biography, which for an excited moment I thought might have answered the question, “Why Mencken?”—the title of it was Skeptic and Prophet—but it had only been out two weeks. None of the bookstores could give me any information on orders or recent purchases, and the public libraries couldn’t give me any information at all.

I tried their electronic card catalogues, but they only showed currently checked-out books. I called up the L.A. Public Library’s catalogue. It showed four Mencken titles checked out, all from the Beverly Hills branch.

“Which looks promising,” I told Kildy when she came in the next morning.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “I’m the one who checked them out, to compare the transcripts against.” She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her designer tote. “I need to talk to you about the transcripts. I found something interesting. I know,” she said, anticipating my objection, “you said all it proved was that Ariaura—”

“Or whoever’s feeding this stuff to her.”

She acknowledged that with a nod, “—all it proved was that whoever was doing it was reading Mencken, and I agree, but you’d expect her to quote him back verbatim, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Randall Mars’s Lincoln and his “Four-

score and seven…”

“But she doesn’t. Look, here’s what she said when we asked him about William Jennings Bryan: ‘Bryan! I don’t even want to hear that mangey old mountebank’s name mentioned. That scoundrel had a malignant hatred of science and sense.’”

“And he didn’t say that?”

“Yes and no. Mencken called him a ‘walking malignancy’ and said he was ‘mangey and fleabitten’ and had ‘an almost pathological hatred of all learning.’ And the rest of the answers, and the things she said at the seminars, are like that, too.”

“So she mixed and matched his phrases,” I said, but what she’d found was disturbing. Someone trying to pull off an

impersonation would stick to the script, since any deviations from Mencken’s actual words could be used as proof it wasn’t him.

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