So, in a bad mood that only a sense of irrelevance can bring on, Jack wandered through the building until he came to the office which had once been his own. In fact, he had shared it with six others, all undercover operators. These were wilder, less disciplined, more irreverent, less enamoured of rules. They knew how to keep their opinions to themselves, and made fun of the authorities behind their backs even as they served them loyally. They had to understand those they lived with, and often enough came to sympathise with them. Their job was to catch subversives; frequently they ended up protecting them as well.
He spent an hour in there, talking about old times, asking after old acquaintances before getting down to business. He needed a favour, he said. A missing woman. Nothing official. No public announcements, no broadcasts of the have-you-seen-this-woman variety. Discreet. Not a word.
‘Urgent?’
‘Very.’
‘Explanation?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
They did not query, bargain, set conditions. Of course they would help. Jack handed over Angela’s basic information – all identifying qualities, numbers and back history, financial information, health data.
‘Photo?’
He handed it over.
‘Cute.’
‘She’s seventy-eight, and a psychomathematician.’
‘Ah. A nutter.’
‘So it seems, but a very intelligent one. During her training she never once scored less than 99.9 per cent on any exam. Also extravagant, emotional and high-risk. She has never held a job for more than two years, until she ended up in this institute on Mull, where she has been placated and perhaps sedated enough to function.’
‘Criminal activities?’
‘None that we know of. No history of violence beyond once threatening her employer with a broken bottle, although, from what I know of him, that might well have been entirely justifiable. She’s gone missing, and she won’t be easily found. There may be a connection to renegade groupings. Retreats. Leave that to me. Don’t go near them or alarm them. I do want the current inventory of people in Retreats near here, though.’
‘Why?’
‘Just in case something strikes me.’
‘Then you might as well do the work yourself. You know where the files are. Most haven’t even been touched since you left.’
*
He read carefully for four hours, both the dossier on Emily Strang and the reports on the Retreat where she was registered. It was routine stuff, for the most part. The Retreat was about thirty years old, a breakaway from another one because of internal faction fighting. They probably split into warring fragments, he thought, over the best way of baking bread or something like that. Few Retreats lasted for very long before they broke into pieces over some minor dispute. It was one reason why they were tolerated – you see what freedom of expression gets you? Chaos. You want to be like these people, wasting your energies in pointless argument over trivia?
What this one did was not mentioned, as any activities the inmates were likely to indulge in were, almost by definition, pointless. The only question was whether they were dangerous in any way. In this case the answer was no. No more needed to be said, which was a pity; it would have been useful to have had some idea of their internal philosophy before he approached.
The inmates were the usual collection of misfits. Some had been born in Retreats and scarcely knew what they were missing; others had gone there of their own accord after some display of egotistical individuality – refusing drugs, venturing opinions, discontent or semi-criminal activity. To Jack’s practised eye, none seemed either remarkable or difficult to deal with. Merely people who thought their opinion was better than the collective wisdom of the best scientific minds on the planet. The nominal head, Sylvia Glass, was a woman with the prospect of a great career in administration until, one day, she simply walked out when disciplined for singing to herself. A few others had been promising scientists or managers. All had rebelled and been isolated and barred from contact with others in case they spread the infection.
As for Emily Strang, the record was much too simple to be convincing. If she was indeed the daughter of Angela Meerson, then someone had evidently doctored the records very carefully. She appeared as the child of two renegades, flagged as unremarkable but – and this was the interesting bit – given the highest rating at the assessment all infants were subjected to at the age of six weeks. It was, so they said, an infallible way of determining intelligence and future usefulness to society. Emily was assessed at level one, which would ordinarily have meant instant accept ance into the elite training system. She would have been taken off and put into special schools, given every comfort and resource to develop her mind and skills. Jack had been assessed at level six and he knew – because he had looked – that even Hanslip himself had been assigned only level two status. But there she was in a Retreat, and nothing in the dossier suggested this was in any way remarkable.
Jack finished reading in the comfort of his room, as he had decided that he would stay in the sort of accommodation suitable to his new rank, just to see what it was like. The journey from the police headquarters through the filthy streets, never-ending in their squalor, took nearly an hour, until he got to the heavily guarded outer perimeter of the compound and was allowed through after a detailed check of his credentials. They worked flawlessly.
The room he was given was grand. He was impressed; he had never been in such a place before. The luxury was extraordinary. He could go out into the open, under the huge glass dome which stretched as far as he could see, and breathe in the carefully filtered and cleaned air almost as though it was natural. He could walk without protection and have no fear of being shot or kidnapped. There wasn’t even any overhead surveillance. The security guards were placed discreetly so they wouldn’t be seen, and there were no billboards or loudspeakers to encourage loyalty and effort. There was grass, and a tree. Most wouldn’t care for trees, but they symbolised space and luxury and safety. There was a lot to be said for making it into the elite. He wasn’t sure whether the security was to protect the guests or to make sure that the outside world had no idea how well their masters lived.
He ordered a meal, showered and relaxed. He decided against signalling his intentions of going to the National Depository, just in case someone was listening in, and finished his evening by reading about the place instead.
The chances of finding anything in there without specialised knowledge was minimal. It only existed because of a dispute between various committees of scientists; one wanted to destroy all records of the past entirely on the grounds of redundancy, the other wished to preserve them for the same reason that plants were preserved, in case future generations found a use for the information.
When all libraries and archives and museums had been forcibly closed eighty years ago, their contents had been transferred to a single building twenty miles long, four wide and twelve storeys high. It had been promoted as a demonstration of how much the government cared about the cultural heritage of the world, while the real reason was to keep it under guard. It was said to contain every piece of paper, every book, every painting or print that still existed in what had been known as the British Isles. Almost no one wanted to go there, only a few renegades, and even they were now banned from the place. Many thought that keeping it was a waste of resources and wanted to burn the Depository to the ground. No doubt in due course that would happen. It would be easy to set a fire, blame it on terrorists and sweep them all up. There had been a proposal to do just that a few years ago; the plans had been laid out and Jack and his comrades had even been sent off for training in how to round up so many people quickly and efficiently. The internment camps were prepared, courts readied to give them mass trials and find them guilty.
It had all faded away, as the more cynical of his comrades said it would. Budget cuts and lack of interest, a game of politics won and lost. In the last few months, though, it had suddenly been revived;
this time, some said, the authorities were serious.
25
Once both Chang and More had been dispatched, Hanslip walked slowly up to his private viewing platform, which gave him a clear panorama of his domain, and considered his options. Doing nothing and simply hoping for the best was not one of them. Sooner or later, the source of the power surge would be traced. There was also a certainty that, sooner or later, someone would start looking for Lucien Grange.
The four hundred acres of the institute stretching to the water’s edge; the tower blocks of accommodation where his employees lived entirely protected from the outside world; the antennae on top of the bare, useless mountains which monitored everything that approached in case of attack; the missile sites to guard against anything unauthorised that might come near. All belonged to him. Nothing so grand, he thought. Not like some other places he had visited.
The island of Mull was exile, pure and simple, but being out of the way has its uses. He was a lesser baron of scientific research and now he had his own fortress. He had spent the last fifteen years building this place and the last five hiding what it was doing from the outside world. He would never be Newton or Einstein. He might, though, be the person under whom such a figure flourished. Besides, it wasn’t Einstein who built the bomb.
For years he had schemed and manoeuvred: taking Angela when Oldmanter decided the experiment to enhance her abilities had rendered her useless; providing a safe environment for her to work, finding the money and the people. He was nearly there, had almost got to the point where he had a technology so powerful that he could command whatever resources he needed. With it would come power as well; a place on the World Council, the supreme body of technocrats and scientists which exercised authority over the entire globe. It would be his by right, if he delivered this opportunity to a society which needed it so badly. He might even challenge Oldmanter himself; the old man’s day was done, and it was time his power was transferred to someone with new ideas.
Then a programme of colonisation, moving the world’s surplus population to universes cleared of inhabitants. There would be no limit on expansion or on resources. He did not know yet how to do this; initially, he had thought of finding worlds sufficiently distant that they were uninhabited, but this had proven difficult; so far they had managed to access only one world, and he was hoping that Angela would come up with both an explanation and a solution. In the meantime, he had considered accessing a world so far in the past that humanity had not yet developed, but going back two hundred thousand years presented its own problems because of the amount of energy required.
That was why he had contacted Emily Strang. He knew nothing of history, and he had persuaded her to teach him. He had kept it secret, as he had no desire to have any public connection to a renegade, but had found the encounters useful.
They would talk for an hour or two every month and she was deliberately provocative, asking him questions designed to make him argue rather than simply state conclusions.
‘Why should the world be organised efficiently as a first priority?’
‘If the government of the world is so benevolent, why does it need such vast armies to keep people under control?’
‘What do you mean by a happy life, anyway? Merely more goods and services?’
‘Why do you think this society will last for ever? I can tell you of many that have destroyed themselves through their own violence. For example …’
She had even written a paper for him on the subject. Total extinction would require possession of the means of destruction and the willingness to use them. The best examples were the various crises which erupted during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union challenged each other with nuclear weapons. At any stage, an accident or a misinterpreted piece of evidence could have set off a chain reaction of consequences.
Hanslip had been sufficiently intrigued to run his own checks. He had ordered a computer simulation to see whether or not what Emily said was true. The world had indeed come close to disaster but the simulation suggested that tipping it over the edge would not have been easy. Change events, and very rapidly history returns to its proper path. It would take a very large shift indeed to significantly alter the course of history.
The more he thought about it, the more he was repelled by the very idea. Even if not strictly aimed at real people, it involved a level of violence that he could not readily contemplate. There was, he was sure, a better way which would turn up in due course, one which did not involve wholesale destruction. He rejected the concept as both unworthy and impractical, and stowed her report and his thoughts away.
It had been a fascinating period of speculation, but now it was over. Angela had ruined it. Hanslip had tried desperately to keep her focused, but to no avail. He had tried to dismiss her concerns, but knew her too well to do so without reservation. Then Jack More had mentioned that Chang hadn’t been worried, almost as if he knew the machine worked. It concerned him. He needed to check all the possibilities.
It took over a day before he found what he was afraid of. Every scrap of paper in Angela’s room, every piece of data that remained on the computers – not much, as she had done a good job of erasing it – was brought to his office, and Hanslip settled down to read through every last syllable. It was a measure of his thoroughness that he noticed the sliver of information when he read it, for it consisted only of four names, with a tick beside one of them. Gunter. That was all.
It meant nothing until he checked the lists of employees. First the scientists, then the administrators, then the support staff and finally everyone else who came and went. The only reference he could find to anyone called Gunter was to a cleaner who had walked off the job some six months ago. Curiously, the records suggested he had vanished while on the island; there was a flaw in the security system so that his last journey from Mull back to the mainland hadn’t been logged. This had caused – Hanslip now remembered – an enquiry into the monitoring systems, which had revealed no errors or malfunctions.
Now here was a piece of paper in Angela’s room with his name on it. It took six hours of interviews to get to the bottom of it, and by the end Hanslip was exhausted, worried and deeply angry.
The third technician he had brought to his office had told him everything he needed to know, after being subjected to the most severe threats. Angela, he said in a trembling voice, almost choking in fear, had conducted experiments on her own without registering them or having them approved and certainly without notifying anyone. She had brooked no interference or criticism and had refused to listen to any objections. She had selected someone from the ancillary staff who had no family or connections and who would not be missed. She had drugged him and transmitted him in her machine to see what happened.
It was getting worse and worse. ‘Did this man know what was happening to him?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What did she think she was doing?’
‘She wanted proof that her theories were correct. The idea was to transmit him a week back and a few yards away to see if he turned up in our universe or vanished. The settings were all done wrong, though. It was an accident. He was never seen again, but she got Chang to search the records and he found a possible match in the 1890s. It took some time, but Chang thought he might have become a priest deep in the Pyrenees. Angela packed him off to find out – without official permission or clearance – six months ago. Chang found the man’s grave and tested the bones. They were a perfect match. The bones were really old. Do you want to see his report?’
‘He wrote a report as well? No one thought of giving it to me?’
The man nodded nervously and handed over some sheets of paper. Hanslip warned him of dire consequences if he said so much as a word to anyone else, waited until the door was shut, took a deep breath and began to read.
*
By the time he finished reading, his strategy for coping with the nightmare Angela had concocted for him was in tatters, as
were his dreams for the future. He spent hours going through the evidence and could find no hole in it. The conclusion was unavoidable: bones, as the man said, did not lie. The cleaner had indeed ended up in the late nineteenth century, had died there and been buried there. Angela had been right. She had single-handedly overturned all the laws of physics and demonstrated that the multiple universe theory, accepted convention for nearly two hundred years, was wrong. Time travel – true time travel, not a transition to a copy – was possible. Hanslip thought carefully, then took every scrap of paper referring to the missing cleaner and incinerated them. The last thing he needed was more evidence of illegality if a search was ever made.
Why had she not said anything about this? Presumably because she thought that the experiment on the cleaner would have been used against her. Which it would have been, until Hanslip himself had disposed of Oldmanter’s most trusted aide in the same way. Although maybe she had been going to tell him; she had made an appointment, saying it was vital and urgent, the day before she vanished. Just before she’d come across Grange, in fact.
That made him stop and think. Surely that was the answer, then, to the Devil’s Handwriting? Not some bizarre and incomprehensible act of deceit; rather it must have been Grange. A further hour’s work in what remained of the computer’s records confirmed this one as well. Grange had not come to sign a collaboration agreement but to steal it. He had broken into the computer system and helped himself. He had then gone on to offer terms he knew Hanslip could not accept.
The machine was too dangerous to use, and the data to operate it or build another one was out there, somewhere. It might be found by anyone unless More managed to fulfil his orders to the letter. If Hanslip had realised how much depended on More’s success, he would never have sent him alone. The loyalty requirement built into his contract was immensely strong, but nothing was unbreakable.