‘Torm!’ A sharp intake of breath. Alvasund gripped my upper arm.
She pointed across to the northern shore of the inlet. There stood one of the towers, dark and dilapidated, built on the steep slope of the cliff so that it commanded most of the waters. It did not break the skyline.
We looked around in all directions. I soon spotted another of the towers, this one on the southern shore, again overlooking the town but not high enough to stand out against the sky.
Behind us, Ref and the rest of the team were coming up to the deck from below. They too moved to the rail of the boat and gazed up at the surrounding steep walls of the inlet. Between us we had soon counted eight of the towers, looming over the little town like a series of radio masts. The fact that they appeared to have been built low, so they did not rise above the level of the cliffs, gave them a clustered, covert quality that added to the sense of menace.
Ref, through her binoculars, described each of the towers, distinguishing them expertly. She used an alphanumeric identifier, which one of the men noted carefully on his digital pad. He read back each code for confirmation. Some of the towers were cylindrical, tapering towards the top, while others, believed to be from an older period, were square in plan. There was one tower which looked at first sight to be another circular one, but Ref said it was one of the more unusual octagonal buildings. One of the men, standing beside me, said there were known to be only nine of the octagonal towers on Seevl, but all of them were better preserved than the others.
I said nothing about it to Alvasund at that moment, knowing we would have time alone later, but the closer the launch moved us towards the town, and the deeper we penetrated into the inlet, the more I felt the creeping sense of disquiet. The impression that the towers had been put up deliberately to surround or confine the town was one thing, but I was also suffering an all too familiar mental or psychic feeling, a reminder of our frightening experience in the mountains around Ørsknes. It was as if an odourless gas had been released into the narrow inlet around Seevl Town, one that numbed the mind and induced fear.
Alvasund’s hand tightened in mine. I glanced at her face — her jaw was set, the tendons in her neck stood out with strain.
The boat docked. Thankful to have something active to do, we busied ourselves with unloading our baggage and the equipment the team would be using. The modern dock facilities used in Jethra had no equivalent here, so everything had to be carried ashore by hand. No one said anything but there was a new quietness that had fallen on us as a group.
The town was still, almost free of traffic. No one seemed curious about us as we clustered on the quay with our baggage. People walked by slowly, their faces averted, not acknowledging us. The stiff wind had become a light breeze now we were ashore. I was oppressed by the sense of gloom and fearfulness, I felt no interest in our surroundings, and above all I no longer wished to look any further or higher than the ground around me. I was in terror of what lay above, but I did not know what it was.
Ref said that the cars that were planned to rendezvous with us at the dock had not for some reason been sent, and she went to the harbour office to find out what had happened. Eventually she returned, complaining that it was almost impossible to get a cellular signal on this island. We stood indecisively, but a few minutes later two large vehicles did arrive to collect us.
It turned out that because Alvasund and I were travelling together we had been allocated to another Authority-owned property, a small apartment some distance from the central harbour but close to the water. This turned out to be to our advantage. After a long delay the others had to move temporarily into rooms over a bar in the centre of the town. There was supposed to be a larger building available, operated by the Authority, specially built and equipped for a long stay, but neither Ref nor anyone else knew how to find it. The representative from the Authority, supposedly at the dock to greet us, had not appeared. Seevl already seemed to us a place permanently in disarray, running on half power.
The moment we entered our apartment and closed the door behind us, the sensation of dread abruptly lifted. It was so abrupt, so noticeable that we reacted simultaneously to it. It was like the sensation of air pressure being released as a plane descended: a relief, a clearing up, a removal of a background sensation.
We quickly explored the apartment, exclaiming at the sense of new freedom.
‘The building must be shielded,’ Alvasund said, when we had looked into both main rooms and dumped our luggage in the bedroom. ‘After everything else, I wasn’t counting on it. But I was told Authority buildings here were supposed to have been screened. It seems they did it.’
‘What about the others?’
‘They’ll be all right for one night.’
When we had unpacked some of our things we ate the food we had brought. We sat together at the cramped fold-out table in the kitchenette. The window there looked over the water, not far below us. Outside it had started to rain, a mist drifting up the inlet from the direction of the sea. We kept remarking on the feeling of relief inside the apartment, the welcome sense of normality.
Alvasund showed me what she said was the material they were using as a shield against the psychic emissions from the towers. It had been placed hard against each of the windows, but it was also possible to see that it extended to each side, and above and below, an unseen layer concealed within the walls.
Alvasund said the material was some kind of plastic, but the moment I looked at it closely I suddenly realized what it was. It was neither plastic nor conventional glass, but a sort of non-metallic alloy created by fusing a number of polymers with glass crystals. In other words it was BPSG, polymerized borophosphosilicate glass, closely similar to the material I had been working with on Ia. It was made so that it remained transparent, and could be used instead of conventional glass. It was also a powerful transducer of energy. When you touched it there was a feeling of tough resilience, like hard rubber, almost impossible to break or shatter, although it could be moulded.
I looked more closely at the BPSG that had been used in the apartment. I touched it again and peered at it by leaning down so that the light from the sky was refracted through it. I saw a faint web of tell-tale halation, a misting of the transparency. This would be normally undetectable in use, caused by the many layers of molecular mini-circuitry within, and visible only at certain oblique angles. The variant we had been experimenting with on Ia was to enable high-energy waves to be collected, condensed, then amplified. Practical applications were yet to be designed, although we were funded by two major electronics companies. We had been experimenting with polarization of the glass at the time I left.
Ever since the incident at the tower on Goorn the thought had been nagging at me that maybe that kind of glass, suitably polarized and strengthened, could be used to divert, transduce or even block whatever those terrifying emanations might be. Now I realized that someone else, working for the Intercession teams, must have had the same idea.
After we had eaten, and because there was still time before we were supposed to meet up with the others, we lay down on the bed and rested. It was good to be there together, undisturbed, affectionate and relaxed.
Neither of us wanted to leave the apartment, return to the unshielded streets outside, but finally we went in search of the rest of the team. We walked through the narrow streets and alleys of Seevl Town, already gripped by the horrible feeling of psychic dread, but because we knew there would be an escape from it when we returned to the flat we could put up with it.