He took another deep breath and slumped facedown on the table.
“Don’t tell anyone I told you that. We’re really just meant to nod and say things like ‘Aha’ and ‘Go on’ and ‘How does that make you feel?’ It would have helped me a lot more if Spike had told me he baked novelty cakes rather than killed the undead. And no, it doesn’t make you nuts—as you suggest, it might actually be true.”
Damn. He partially believed me.
“Before I worked here,” he said with another sigh, “I would certainly have thought you dangerously delusional, but the SpecOps standards of reality are pretty broad. Here’s an example: I had Captain Henshaw of the Odd Squad in here yesterday. But it wasn’t our Captain Henshaw, it was Captain HenshawF76+, apparently on an important trade delegation from Reality-F76+, where everything is pretty much identical to here—only everyone has two heads.”
“That’s a bigger and more bizarre claim than the BookWorld?”
“Not really, because HenshawF76+ actually had two heads.”
“Did he argue with himself? I always wondered about that.”
“Quite a lot actually— that’s why he came to see me. But there they were. Two heads. So, you see, what you say might actually be true. Might not be. But might. There you have it. NUT-3.”
It wasn’t going well. I had lose that extra ranking. NUT-4 or nothing.
“I have something else I need to share,” I said.
“Yes?” replied Dr. Chumley from where he was still resting facedown on the table.
“Yes. I . . . think I’m pregnant with an elephant.”
“An elephant?” he asked, lifting his face from the table to stare at me.
“Yes—foisted on me by an overamorous server at Greggs.”
He shook his head sadly. “Now I know you’re trying to pull a fast one. Everyone uses the ‘pregnant with an elephant’ gambit to be downranked. I think Victor Analogy used it first.”
He smiled triumphantly and pulled the pad of certificates toward him again.
“You’re a NUT-3, my girl, and nothing you can say will change my mind.”
“What about the fact that I think my mother was a snail named Andrew?”
“ NUT-3,” he said firmly, and continued to write.
“That I have a dodo named Pickwick, who is the oldest in existence?”
“Perfectly plausible,” he replied.
“How about the fact that my son would have been given the job of ChronoGuard director general due to his expert handling of Asteroid HR-6984 that hasn’t happened?”
Dr. Chumley looked up at me and smiled. “Listen,” he said, “if you give me any more of that ‘pretending to be mad’ act, I’ll disregard all that BookWorld stuff and you’ll be upgraded back to a NUT-2.”
Blast. Foiled.
“Okay then,” I said, and sat quietly while Dr. Chumley filled out the form. I was just wondering—in vain—what else I could to lessen the fact that I might not be mad enough to run SpecOps when I noticed that the previous certificate had Detective Smalls’s name on it, and by expertly reading upside down—a skill I’d advise to anyone working in a wheezing bureaucracy—I saw that she had indeed been listed as NUT-4. She must have thought up something really wacky. Smart, young, driven, insane— the SpecOps job was almost hers. I was just thinking about whether I could function under Smalls’s leadership when Dr. Chumley stopped and stared at me.