Whatever the propagandists at home and in America wrote in the newspapers, much of the continent had remained lawless for years, morality dissolved in the need simply to eat. Women and children sold themselves; the concept of personal property did not apply; gang-rape was a pervasive horror; and entire populations died in genocide years after Hitler, in the Führerbunker beneath the bombed-out Chancellery, took the coward’s way out.
‘It will go better if you help,’ Rupert went on. ‘But I’m willing to use a decoy, if you’re not up to it.’
She felt a downward sweep of blood from her face. She had begun by railing about Alan’s death; now it was turned around, with Rupert Forrester once again about to shift her where he wanted. Pawn to whatever, check and mate; and never mind the sacrifices on the way.
‘Decoy,’ she said, knowing she would, after arguing, give in.
Everything else was detail.
Old Joe (or Big Joe, depending on who you asked) projected high above the court and its lawns – the ensemble shaped like a rectangle fastened to a semicircle, resembling an elongated, round bottomed mediaeval shield – to form the centre of the Birmingham campus. All around was ornate redbrick architecture, including the Poynting Institute, home to the physics department. As for Old Joe, the technical term was campanile, in the Italian renaissance tradition: the world’s tallest free-standing clock tower.
A more obvious place to resurrect Dr Gavriela Wolf would have been Manchester, home to the civilian world’s first electronic computer, thanks to Alan – damn you, Dmitri, if it was you who killed him – but the problem was that AMT’s col leagues knew her already, as Gabrielle Woods. Still, among physics departments, Birmingham was near the top of anybody’s list.
Carl’s headmaster had been reluctant to release him before the end of term, but changed his mind overnight after a phone call instigated by Rupert (its details unknown to Gavriela, but clearly effective), allowing Carl to trip off to Oxford on the train (though it seemed only yesterday he called them choo-choos) where he would stay with Auntie Rosie and Uncle Jack. Or perhaps it was Anna, his own age and pretty, he looked forward to seeing.
From the long enclosed lounge of the Bridge – it spanned the road-like pathway separating Maths from Physics – she scanned the campus while listening to the students behind her: off-colour jokes regarding Poynting’s Balls, referring to the apparatus Poynting had used to determine G (known as Big G), the universal gravitational constant.
A voice muttered: ‘Blighters.’
She turned to see a red-bearded man watching the undergraduates depart. Blue-grey smoke rose from his pipe.
‘Dr Anders,’ said Gavriela. ‘It’s just end-of-term spirits, and I don’t think they realised I was here.’
‘Lewis, please. And you’re right, they didn’t see you, but I’m not sure that’s the point.’ Then he cracked a smile. ‘Mind you, I finished delivering my end-of-year elec-and-mag lecture with the aphorism that every couple has a moment in a field.’ And, with a tweed-shouldered shrug: ‘I take it you understood the Poynting reference?’
‘I knew about E-cross-H already’ – Gavriela meant the Poynting vector that declared the energy propagation of an electromagnetic field – ‘but the gravity apparatus, I only learned about yesterday, reading up on the place.’
‘It’s not the most significant work we’ve done here.’ Anders looked from right to left, checking they were alone, then held his pipe to his chest and stoppered it with his palm, as if closing someone’s ear to prevent them hearing. ‘Radio cavity work and the magnetron, and I was here throughout the war.’
‘Oh,’ said Gavriela.
‘I’ve said nothing to my colleagues, but you’ve appeared overnight, while the department listings and so on make it look as if you’ve been here for ever.’ He put the pipe in his mouth and sucked hard three times, causing it to release a smoke-cloud. ‘Brings back memories.’
Of war work and the need for secrecy. Understood.
The Soviets had detonated an H-bomb last year, but it was the American test four months ago that had fired up reporters everywhere. With its 14-megaton blast catching the crew of a vessel called the Lucky Dragon, nasty indeed, and how about that ship’s name for irony? The Cold War, and the likelihood of its growing hot, was on everybody’s mind.
Perhaps that was why Anders jumped now, seeing the stranger standing fifteen feet away, near the end of the Bridge.
‘It’s OK,’ said Gavriela. ‘He’s friendly.’
‘We keep an Alsatian, my wife and I,’ said Anders. ‘He slobbers over us, but if you’re a stranger, he’ll bite your hand off.’
Gavriela laughed.
‘You’re right. He’s exactly that kind of friendly.’
Him and the other watchdogs.
‘I hope he keeps you safe,’ said Anders.
‘Yes. So do I.’
‘I’ll leave you to it.’
Anders strode away, leaving her in the middle of the Bridge on her own, visible to anyone outside who cared to look up, which was of course the point.
A Judas goat.
Just like you on Molsin, Roger.
One of those strange thoughts that sometimes flitted into her mind then evaporated, sublimating like dry ice to invisible gas. Yet somehow she felt better, despite her conviction that the darkness was somewhere beyond the edge of her ability to see it, like the tiger lurking before he bursts from cover to a sudden end.
His own, the goat’s, or both.
THREE
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Bullies arise everywhere, even in a city-world of infinite wonders: witness this small boy shivering with his back against a wall, confronted by bigger lads. Roger, coming on the group from behind, allowed his inductive energies to grow inside him, eyeballs growing sore with the need to release until the resonance caused the boys to flinch, sensing him at last, picking up the potential for destruction. Then he damped the energies back down as the boys – call them a gang – walked away, all apart from two, including the biggest, less attentive than the others, about to push his fist into the victim’s face.
But his pal grabbed his sleeve, receiving a startled look; then they were summoning a shaky fastpath rotation. ‘He’s a peacekeeper, must be, you moronic—’ The words disappeared as the rotation shut down.
Only the trembling boy, their victim, was left. Roger knelt down beside him.
‘You’ll be OK.’
But the expression in those wide obsidian eyes said that the problem went far beyond the incident Roger had interrupted. This was the boy’s everyday world, not an isolated event.
‘I remember when I was your age,’ Roger continued, still kneeling. ‘Adults seemed to have forgotten what the world was like when they were young. I could never understand that.’
The boy’s eyes widened further.
Dad, I didn’t think I’d use your gifts for this.
Espionageware in Roger’s tu-ring slipped through the defences of the simpler tu-ring that the boy was wearing. The ware accessed everything, including where the boy lived, and his educational record. That history, lased directly onto Roger’s retinas (and after he had waded through the bullshit wording), told of a youngster with quirky imagination, his intellectual potential unfulfilled due to lack of courage and self-discipline.
‘I’m going to tell you something difficult,’ Roger went on. ‘You can deal with these bastards’ – he used the term deliberately, calibrating his perceptions of the boy’s reactive body language – ‘but not straight away, by applying yourself in secret. I mean you practise every day, every single day, and meantime you observe what’s around you, to avoid them, the bigger guys, all right?’
A nod.
The boy’s tu-ring flared, acknowledging receipt of un-asked-for ware.