Chapter 5 5. Airmail

"Will," Lyra called. Her voice was soft, but Will was still startled.She was sitting on the bench next to him, but Will didn't see her at all. "where have you been?" "I found my Fellow! Her name is Dr. Malone. She has a device that can see dust, and she's going to make it talk—" "I didn't see you coming." "You weren't looking," she said. "You must have been thinking of something else. It's good to find you. See, it's easy to fool people, look at me." Two policemen came towards them, a man and a woman, walking at the same pace.They wore summer white shirts, carried walkie-talkies and batons, and looked suspiciously.Before they reached the bench, Lyra stood up and spoke to them.

"Excuse me, can you tell me where the museum is?" she said. "My brother and I were supposed to meet our parents there, but we got lost." The policeman looks at Will.Will suppressed his anger and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, "She's right, we're lost, aren't we silly?" The man laughed, and the policewoman said, "Which museum? It's Ashi Is the Moline Museum [Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK]?" "Yes, that's it," Lyra said.The policewoman told her how to go, and she pretended to listen carefully. Will stood up and said, "Thank you." Then he and Lila left together.They didn't look back. In fact, the two policemen had lost interest in them long ago.

"See?" she said, "If they come to you, I'll send them away. Because they won't find a man with a sister, and I'd better be with you from now on." They turned After turning the corner, she spoke again, with reproach in her tone: "You are not safe by yourself." He said nothing, his heart was beating wildly with rage.They came to a square with a rotunda with a leaden dome surrounded by honey-coloured university buildings and a church, surrounded by garden walls surrounded by broad canopies of trees.The afternoon sun is the warmest, the air is the color of rich golden wine, the leaves are motionless, and even the noise of vehicles is much quieter in this small square.

She finally noticed Will's emotions, so she asked, "What's wrong?" "If you talk to people, you've got their attention," he said in a trembling voice. "You should keep quiet so people ignore you. I've always done it that way, and I know how to do it. And the way you do, you—you expose yourself, you shouldn't.You shouldn't be kidding about it, you're taking it too seriously. " "Do you think so?" she said, her anger also rising. "You think I can't lie? I've lied the best so far, but I didn't lie to you, never, I swear. You're in danger now, and if I didn't just now, you'd be caught Yes. Didn't you notice they were staring at you? Because they were watching you all the time, you were so careless. If you asked my opinion, I think it's you who didn't take it seriously."

"If I'm not serious, what am I still doing here waiting for you? I could run miles away, or out of their sight, and hide in another city. I have my own things to do, and I'll wait." I'm here to help you, don't say I don't take it seriously." "You have to get out of danger." She was annoyed.No one could talk to her that way, she was a nobleman, she was Lyra. "You must escape, or you will never find your father. You did it for yourself, not for me." They were arguing quietly but fiercely, because the square was very quiet, and the pedestrians passing by were very curious.

But when she said this, Will stopped, and he had to lean against the wall of the nearby academy, his face pale. "What do you know about my father?" he asked softly. In the same tone she replied, "I don't know anything, all I know is that you're looking for him. That's what I'm asking." "Ask who?" "Of course it's the alethiometer." It took him a while to remember what she was referring to, and he looked so angry, so suspicious, that she took the alethiometer out of her backpack and said, "Okay, I'll show you." She sat on the stone curb beside the grass in the center of the square, leaned her head on the golden instrument, and began to turn the pointer. Her fingers moved so fast that it was dizzying.When the slender hand swept across the dial, pausing here and there for a moment, she paused for a few seconds, and then she turned the hand rapidly again.Will looked up carefully, but no one was around.A group of tourists looked up at the igloo, and an ice cream vendor pushed a cart down the aisle, but none of them paid any attention to them.

Laila blinked and sighed, as if waking from sleep. "Your mother is ill," she said softly, "but she is safe and there is a lady who is looking after her. You took some letters and ran away. There was another man, I think he was a thief, and you killed him. You looking for your father, and—” "Okay, stop," Will said. "That's enough. You have no right to spy on my life like this. You can't do it anymore. It's just spying." "I know when to stop asking," she said. "The alethiometer is almost human. I know when it's angry, or there's something it doesn't want me to know. I can feel it. But yesterday you came from nowhere. popped out, and I have to ask who you are, or I might not be safe, and I have to. It also said..." Her voice dropped again, "It said you were a murderer, so I thought , well, he's someone you can trust. But I didn't ask much about you before just now. If you don't want me to ask again, I promise I won't. It's not prying, if I don't Anything else, just spying on someone else's words, it won't work. I know it as well as I know my own Oxford."

"You should be asking me, not the thing. Does it say whether my father is alive or dead?" "It didn't say it because I didn't ask." They are all sitting now.Will puts his head in his hands tiredly. "Well," he finally said, "I think we should trust each other." "No problem, I trust you." Will nodded gravely.He was so tired that it was almost impossible to even sleep in this world.Although Lila is not very observant, there is something in his demeanor that strikes her: he is terrified, but he controls his fear, as Iorek Bernison said, we have to , like when I was in the fish bank by the frozen lake.

"And, Will," she added, "I won't sell you out to anyone, I promise." "it is good." "I've betrayed people before, and that was the worst thing I've ever done. I thought I was saving him, but instead I took him to the most dangerous place. I hate myself for it, I hate my stupidity. So , I will be extra careful not to be careless, not to forget things, and not to betray you." He didn't speak.He rubbed his eyes and blinked hard again, trying to wake himself up. "We won't be able to get to that window until a little later," he said. "We can't go through there during the day, and it would be a nuisance if anyone sees us. We can't take that risk. Now we'll have to hang around for hours..."

"I'm hungry," Lyra said. He said, "I got it! We can go to the cinema!" "and then?" "I'll tell you. We can get something to eat there." There is a movie theater in the city center, only ten minutes walk.Will bought two tickets, and bought hot dogs, popcorn, and Coke.They brought their food inside, and as soon as they sat down, the movie started. Laila was fascinated.She had seen slides, but there had never been a movie theater in her world.She wolfs down hot dogs and popcorn and swigs Coke as on-screen characters laugh in surprise or delight.Fortunately, there were many children in the audience, and it was very noisy, so her excitement was not suspicious.Will closed his eyes and fell asleep instantly.

He woke up to the sound of chairs being turned around, people leaving, and blinked in the bright light. It was a quarter past eight on his watch, and Lyra reluctantly left the theater. "It's the best thing I've ever seen in my life," she said, "and I don't know why they didn't invent it in my world. We have something better than yours, but it's better than ours." Anything is fine." Will doesn't remember anything about that movie.It was still bright outside, and the road was very lively. "Would you like to watch another one?" "Yes I do!" They went to another movie theater a few hundred yards from the corner and saw another movie.Lyra curled her feet up in the chair and put her hands on her knees, and Will let his mind go blank.This time it was nearly eleven o'clock when they came out--and that was all the better. Laila was hungry again, so they bought hamburgers from a cart and ate them as they walked, which was new to her. "We all sit down and eat. I've never seen anyone walk and eat before," she told him. "There's so much difference here. Cars, I don't like them. But I like movie theaters and hamburgers , I like it very much. There is also the academician, Dr. Malone, she wants to let the machine express in words, I just learned her plan. I will go to her tomorrow to see how far she has researched, I am sure Can help her. Maybe I can get the Fellows to give her the money she needs. Do you know how my father - Lord Asriel - did it? He played a joke on them..." They were walking on Banbury Road, and she told him how she hid in the wardrobe that night to watch Lord Asriel show the Fellows of Jordan College the severed Stanislaus' Grumman in the vacuum jar. head.Since Will was such a good listener, Lila went on to tell him the rest of the story, from her escape from Mrs. Coulter's apartment to her realization that she had caused Roger's death in the freezing cold of Svalbard. That moment on the cliff.Will made no comment, listening intently and sympathetically.Her tales of hot-air balloon rides, armored bears and witches, and vengeful armies of the Church seemed inferior to his vision of a beautiful, lonely, safe sea city: obviously, that couldn't be true. But eventually they came to the ring road and under the hornbeams, and there wasn't much traffic now: probably no more than one car per minute.The window was there, and Will thought he was smiling, and it was going to be all right. "Wait till there's no car," he said, "now I'm going over." A moment later he was standing on the grass under the hornbeam, and a moment later Lyra followed. They felt at home again, with the vastness of the warm night, the scent of flowers and the sea, and the silence in which they bathed as if in a pleasant spring. Lai stretched and yawned.Will felt a weight lift off his shoulders, he'd been carrying it all day, he didn't notice it was weighing him down, but now he felt lighter. That's when Lyra grabbed his arm, and that's when he heard the voice that made her do it too. On the street not far from the diner, something screamed. Will immediately walked toward the voice, further down the moonlit alley, Lyra following.They turned a few corners and came to the square in front of the stone tower they had seen that morning. At the bottom of the tower, there were more than two dozen children forming a semicircle facing inwards, some with sticks in their hands, and some throwing stones at something caught under the wall.At first Lyra thought it was another child, but from the circle came a terrible shriek that was not human.Children screamed, too, with fear and hatred. Will ran to the group of kids and pulled one aside, a kid around his own age in a striped T-shirt.As he turned, Laila saw white circles around his dark eyes.Then the other kids noticed what was happening and they all stopped to see what was going on.Angelica and her little brother were there, too, with rocks in their hands.All the children's eyes were shining in the moonlight. They fell silent, except for the screeching howl, and then both Will and Lyra saw: it was a tabby, curled up under the tower wall, with its ears broken and its tail drooping.It was the cat, the cat Will had seen on Sunderland Street, who looked like Moxie, and she had led Will to the window. As soon as he saw her, he pushed away the boy who was holding him.The boy was thrown to the ground and got up again, furious, but the other boys pulled him back.Will was already squatting next to the cat. Now she lay in his arms, she hid in his chest, and he held her tighter.He stood facing the children, and for a moment Lyra thought his daemon had finally appeared. "Why are you hurting the cat?" he demanded.They couldn't answer, and they stood there, shaking with Will's rage.They were breathing heavily, clutching sticks and stones, unable to speak. At this time, Angelika's clear voice came: "You are not from here! You are not from Magpie City! You don't know monsters, and you don't know cats. You are different from us!" The boy in the striped T-shirt that Will had knocked down was shaking and ready to fight.If it weren't for the cat in Will's arms, he would have punched Will already, and Will would have liked to.There was an electric current of hatred between the two men, and only violence could carry it to the ground.But the boy was afraid of the cat. "Where are you from?" he asked contemptuously. "It doesn't matter where we come from. If you are afraid of this cat, I will take her. If she portends bad luck to you, she will bring us good luck. Get out of here now." For a moment Will thought their hatred would overcome their fear, and he was about to put the cat on the ground and fight, but then there was a thunderous growl from behind the kids, and they turned to look, Lyra stood there with her hands on the shoulders of a jaguar that opened its mouth and roared, its sharp teeth gleaming white.Even Will, who knew Pantalaimon, was taken aback.This had a dramatic effect on the kids: they turned and fled.A few seconds later the square was empty. Before they left, Lyra was alerted by a growl from Pantalaimon. She looked up at the tower, and she saw someone on the top of the tower looking down from the walls. He was not a child, but a young man with curly hair. people. Half an hour later they were in the apartment above the bistro.Will found a can of condensed milk, and the cat licked it hungrily, and then started licking her wound again.Pantalaimon also turned into a cat out of curiosity, and the tabby cat bristled suspiciously at first, but she soon discovered that whatever Pantalaimon was, he wasn't really a cat, Nor did he pose any threat, so she turned a blind eye to him from then on. Lyra watched Will obsessively tend to the cat, the only animals she ever got close to in her world (besides the armored bear) were working animals of all kinds.Cats are not pets, they are used by Jordan College to catch mice. "I think she's got a broken tail," Will said, "I don't know what to do, maybe it'll get better on its own. I put some honey on her ear, I've seen it somewhere, it's antiseptic of……" That was a real mess.But at least she kept licking, and the wound would get cleaner and cleaner. "Are you sure it's the cat you saw?" she asked. "Oh, yes. If they're all that afraid of cats, there must be very few cats here. She may not be able to find her way back." "They're really crazy," Lyra said. "They're going to kill her. I've never seen a kid like that." "I have seen." He scowled, he didn't want to talk about it.She knew it was best not to ask him, let alone the alethiometer. She was very tired, so she got into bed before long, and fell asleep at once. After a while, the cat curled up and fell asleep, and Will sat on the balcony with a cup of coffee and the green leather pencil case.There was enough light coming in from the window for him to read, and he wanted to see those things. That wasn't as much as he thought.All letters, written in black ink on airmail stationery? Handwritten by someone he so desperately wanted to find.His fingers stroked it over and over again, and he pressed his face to the letter, trying to get closer to his father's essence.Then he began to read the letter. Fairbanks [Fairbanks, a city in central Alaska], Alaska Wednesday, June 19, 1985 My dear - still the usual collection of efficiency and confusion - all supplies were It's in place, except for the physicist, an amiable fool named Nelson, who isn't ready to take a hot air balloon to the top of a mountain - he's busy preparing the transport, and we're bored here.But that meant I had a chance to chat with a guy I met last time, his name was Jack Peterson.Is a gold miner.I found him in a seedy bar, and over the din of a televised baseball game I asked him about the bizarre place.He wouldn't talk there - took me into his room.Over a bottle of Jack Daniels, he talked for a long time—he hadn't met an Eskimo himself, but he had met an Eskimo once, and the Eskimo had met. The guy said it was a passage into the spirit world.They've known this for hundreds of years, and a druggist is said to have been there and brought back a souvenir of some sort—though some never came back.Anyway, old Jack did have a map of the area, and he marked the location of the thing the guy told him about (just in case: 69 degrees 02'11" N, 157 degrees 12'19" W , on Lookout Ridge a mile or two north of the Colville River).Then we chatted about other arctic legends—a Norwegian ship drifting for sixty years without a pilot, and that sort of thing.The archaeologists are a good team, working hard despite their impatience with Nelson and his hot air balloon.None of them had heard of that strange place.So, trust me, I'm going to keep this a secret.Love you both deeply.Johnny. Umiat, Alaska Saturday, June 22, 1985 My dear, Nelson the physicist - I used to call him a gentle fool.So far—not such a man at all, and if I'm not mistaken, he must be looking for that strange place himself.He directed the pause in Fairbanks, believe it or not?He knew that the people in the team would not be willing to wait here unless there was an indisputable reason, such as no transportation, but he personally canceled the reserved vehicle. I discovered this by accident, and I was about to ask him what the hell he was up to when I heard him talking to someone on the radio—describing the strange place as much as I knew, except he didn't know the location.Later I bought him a drink and pretended to be a bluffing soldier, old Arctic, who likes to talk about everything in the universe.I pretended to tease him with the limitations of science - like you must not be able to explain the existence of Bigfoot, etc. - and stared at him closely, and he opened up about that strange place - Eskimos about the soul The legend of the World Passage - invisible and untraceable - is somewhere near Lookout Ridge, believe it or not, that's where we're headed, come to think of it.And then you know, he's woken up, he knows what I mean.But I pretended not to notice and went on telling him stories about witchcraft and Zaire leopards, so I hoped he'd take me for a superstitious stupid soldier.But I was right, Elaine - he was looking for it too.The question is, should I tell him?Love you both - Johnny. Colville Shoals, Same as Lasca Monday, June 24, 1985 Dear--I won't have an opportunity to write to you anytime soon--this is the last town before we go up to Brooks Ridge.The archaeologists are excited about going up the mountain.There's a guy who's convinced he's going to find human habitation earlier than anyone guessed.I asked how early and why he was so convinced.He told me that in one of his previous excavations he had found a carving of a narwhal tooth, and on it he had found - carbon fourteen - an incredible age, beyond previous estimates. , is really unusual.Wouldn't it be strange if they came here through that strange place from another world?As for the physicist Nelson, he's a good friend of mine now—he plays hide and seek with me, insinuates he knows what I know he knows, and so on.I was pretending to be Colonel Perry, a big guy who was in trouble but wasn't in it.But I know he's looking for it because, while he's also a bona fide scientist, his funding is actually from the Department of Defense - and I know the financial code they use.And his so-called weather hot air balloon is not the case at all. I looked inside the gondola - there is a radiation protection suit, it is absolutely true.This is very strange, dear.I will stick to my plan, and after taking the archaeologists to their destination, I will go away for a few days by myself, looking for that strange place.If I were to run into Nelson at Lookout Ridge, I'd be flexible. And: what luck.I met Jack Peterson's friend, the Eskimo Matt Kigalik, whom Jack had told me where to find him, but I hadn't dared to expect him to be there.He told me that the Soviets were also looking for that strange place, earlier this year he met a man on the mountain, he suspected his behavior, watched him secretly for a few days, and he guessed right, it was a Russian spy .That's all he told me, and I think he killed him afterwards.But he described the place to me, it's like a gap in the sky, like a window, through which you can see another world, but it's not easy to find, because the world over there and this side Exactly the same - also stones and moss and all.There was a tall rock shaped like a standing bear.There was a little river about fifty paces behind the rock, and the window was on the north side of the river.The location Jack told me was less accurate - it was closer to 12 degrees north latitude than 11 degrees. Wish me luck, dear.I'll bring you a souvenir from the spirit world.I love you forever - kiss my son - Johnny. Will felt his head buzzing. What his father described was exactly what he himself found under the hornbeam.He also found a window - he even used the same word to describe it!So Will must be heading in the right direction, and it was exactly what the group had been looking for...so it must be dangerous. Will was a baby when his father wrote that letter.Seven years later, that morning in the supermarket, he realizes that his mother is in danger and he must protect her.In the years after that, he gradually realized that the danger existed in her heart, and he wanted to protect her even more. Then, he realized the cruel reality: the fear in her heart was not all, and someone was indeed chasing her—chasing these letters and messages. He didn't know what that meant, but he was genuinely happy to share such an important secret with his father. John Perry and his son Will each discovered this extraordinary thing, and when they met Can talk about it, Dad would be proud of Will following in his footsteps. The night was still and the sea was silent.He folded the letter and put it away, then fell asleep.