Agent in Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

estates that spread around Shandon’s own two thousand acres, they kept to themselves as they had been doing for the last forty years. If they ever did mention the collection of experts who had invaded their retreat, it was simply to call them “The Brains.”
    So too the village of Appleton, five miles away from Shandon—it had been there for almost three hundred years and considered everyone arriving later than 1900 as foreigners, acceptable if they provided jobs and much-needed cash (cider and hand-turned table-legs had been floundering long before the present inflation started growing). On that point, the Brains were found wanting. They had their own staff of maintenance men and guards to look after Shandon House. Even the kitchen had special help. Four acres around the place had been walled off—oh, it didn’t look too bad, there were small shrubs to soften it up—but the main entrance now had high iron gates kept locked, and big dogs, and all the rest of that nonsense. And those Brains who lived outside the walls in renovated barns, or farmhouses turned into cottages, might be pleasant and polite when they visited Appleton’s general store: but they didn’t need much household help and they never gave large parties, not even for the government big shots who came visiting from Washington.
    The village agreed with the landed gentry that old Simon Shandon had really lost his mind (and it must have been good at one time: a $300,000,000 fortune testified to that) when he willed his New Jersey estate, complete with enormous endowment, to house this collection of mystery men and women. Institute for Analysis and Evaluation of Strategic Studies: that’s what Simon Shandon had got for all that money. And even if the outside of the house had been preserved—a rambling mansion with over forty rooms, some of them vast—the interior had been chopped up. Rumour also said there was a computer installed in the ballroom. The villagers tried some computing themselves on the costs, shook their heads in defeat, and found it all as meaningless as the Institute’s title. Strategic Studies—what did that mean? Well, who cared? After twelve years of speculation, their curiosity gave way to acceptance. So when Charles Kelso, taking the quickest route back to the city, drove through the village on a bright Saturday afternoon when sensible folks were out hunting in the woods or riding across their meadows, no one gave his red Mustang more than a cursory glance. Those fellows up there at Shandon House came and went at all times: elastic hours and no trade unions. And here was this one, as usual forsaking good country air for smog and sirens.
    But it was not the usual Saturday afternoon for Kelso. True, he had some work to catch up with; true, he sometimes did spend part of the week-end finishing an urgent job, so that the guard at the gatehouse hadn’t seen anything strange when he had checked in that morning. And he was not alone. The computer boys were on to some new assignment, and there were five other research fellows scattered around, including Farkus and Thibault from his own department. But they didn’t spend much time on one another, not even bothering to meet in the dining-hall for lunch, too busy in their own offices for anything except a sandwich at their desks. They hadn’t even coincided in the filing-room at the end of the day’s stint. It was empty when Kelso arrived to leave a folder in the cabinet where work-in-progress was filed if it was considered important enough.
    Maclehose, on duty as security officer of the day, let him into the room through its heavy steel door—he always felt he was walking into a giant safe, a bank vault with cabinets instead of safe-deposit boxes around its walls. Maclehose gave him the right key for Cabinet D and stood chatting about his family—he hoped he’d get away from here by four o’clock, his son’s seventh birthday; pity he hadn’t been able to take today off the chain