LITMIR.BIZ

      THE CHAPTER BEFORE THE FIRST

       The Professor Remembers

      IN A VAST AND SPARKLING city, a city at the centre of the universe, one little man remembered something big.

      He was very old, this little man, his full name forgotten over the years. He called himself The Professor. His specialities were numerous and included psychology, criminology, mathematics, history, aerodynamics, zoology and gardening. He also collected beer cans.

      Other than the delivery boy who left his groceries at the back door, The Professor hadn’t seen anyone in at least ten years. It was just as well, since a hair-growing experiment had left him with a head full of long green grass. Also, he didn’t like clothing, so he wore ladies’ snap-front housedresses and rubber flip-flops with white socks. He spent much of his time fiddling in his workshop, feeding the many kittens that popped out of his pockets and looking things up on eBay.

      Today he stood in front of his blackboard—which was covered with mathematical equations—tugging at a dandelion that had poked up through the lawn on his scalp. Suddenly, his eyes widened. He scrawled a few more equations. Yes! He saw it. Right there, in his many calculations.

      A child.

      He stared at the figures dancing across the board, his forehead creased with annoyance. How on earth he could have forgotten that such a thing, such a person, existed, was beyond him. But The Professor simply didn’t like people. Not their company, not their conversation, nada. Anything having to do with people made the roots of his teeth pulse with irritation. And here on his blackboard was proof that a very particular sort of person had been born into a cruel and stupid world filled with cruel and stupid people.

      Frankly, The Professor wanted nothing to do with any of them.

      But facts are facts and The Professor liked to keep his straight. Shaking his head at himself, he sat down at his lab table, pulled his notebook from underneath a large tabby cat and made a few notes. “Approx. once every century or so,” he wrote. “Wall. Usually, but not always, female.”

      After scribbling these notes, The Professor smoothed out a rumpled map. “One lived here,” he muttered to himself, putting a dot on the map, “another here. This one was born there and moved here.” When he finished plotting points, he connected the dots, then took out a protractor to measure the angles between. Lost in thought, he tapped his teeth with his pencil. Something wasn’t quite adding up. Where could this girl be?

      After working for two frustrating hours, he walked over to a filing cabinet, unlocked the bottom drawer and pulled from it what looked like a human hand mounted upright on a black marble stand. The Answer Hand. He did not like to consult The Answer Hand and very rarely did. The

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