He turned off the nearly deserted road at junction ten, on to the A505. There was a new brightly painted green-and-gold sign at the side of the sliproad.
DUXFORD
Event Horizon Astronautics Institute
Freshly torn scraps of kelpboard littered the grass below it, flapping like broken butterflies in the hot dry breeze.
The Astronautics Institute was an all-new construction that'd sprung up out of the ruins of the Imperial War Museum. Armstrong's extremist followers had gleefully set about eradicating the museum's exhibitions and aircraft collection after they’d come to power, calling it a war pornography monument. The cabinet declared that Duxford was to become the National Resource Reclamation Centre, intended as the prestigious mainstay of the PSP's self-sufficiency policy. They said it would dismantle the war machines scrapped under their demilitarisation programme and turn them into useful raw material for industry.
Greg remembered the hundreds of APVs and Challenger IV tanks parked in the Chunnel marshalling yards after he got back from Turkey. All earmarked for Duxford and ignominy.
But all Duxford had ever achieved was to smash up the beautifully restored aircraft displays, and the first few trainloads of redundant Army vehicles. The promised smelters had never materialised, and the dole-labour conscripts had rioted. For eight years the abandoned hammer-mangled wrecks on the runway had snowed rust flakes on to the concrete, oil and hydraulic fluid seeping through the cracks, poisoning the soil. Then after the PSP fell, Philip Evans chose the site to be the foundation of his dream.
The Astronautics Institute had been visible as a gleaming blister on the horizon ever since the Duo passed junction eleven outside Cambridge. After that Greg found himself constantly readjusting his perspective to accommodate the size of the thing. It was huge.
He'd spent a few minutes the previous evening reviewing the data which he'd been given at Wilholm. But it'd completely failed to prepare him for what he was seeing now.
The main building was a five-storey ring of offices, research labs, and engineering shops, eight hundred metres in diameter, presenting a blank wall of green-silvered glass to the outside world. The area it enclosed had been capped by a solar-collector roof, giving the staff a voluminous hangar-like assembly hall for space hardware.
Construction crews were still finishing it off; two motionless cranes stood on opposite sides, piles of scaffolding littered the raw packed limestone surround, ranks of silent contractor vehicles were drawn up across the parking yards. Standard transit containers full of Event Horizon's own cybernetics were stacked outside the assembly hall's sliding doors, waiting to be installed. A saucer-shaped McDonnell Douglas helistat hovered overhead, its five rotors generating an aggressive down-draught as it struggled to maintain its position against the light north-easterly wind. A container was being winched down out of its belly hold, swaying like a pendulum in the gusts. Two more helistats waited high overhead.
Greg could see machinery and gear being moved from their temporary accommodation in patched-up Museum buildings into the Institute. With the bulk of the structure complete, Event Horizon's research, design, and management teams were starting to take up permanent residence.
A ragtag army of scrap merchants had been let loose on the old airport, piling vans and horse-drawn carts high with the twisted shards of metal which were still strewn across the runway and taxi lanes. One of the merchants had modified an old street-cleaning lorry to sweep up the thick stratum of rust, and a dense cloud of orange dust foamed up from its bald tyres as it thundered up and down the concrete strip.
Philip Evans had built his mindchild with an eye to the future. Its proximity to the University colleges had proved subversively addictive, offering finance and top-range research facilities to budget-starved faculties. A move which put the cream of the country's intellect at his disposal.
Physically, the Institute was a totally self-contained complex, taking the concept of centralisation right to its extreme. It could design and fabricate mission hardware ranging from torque-neutralising screwdrivers for orbital riggers right up to the refineries which would latch on to asteroids and leach out the ores, minerals, and metals. Independent and efficient. And with the money the giga-conductor royalties would bring in, Greg realised, quite capable of achieving the space-activist dream: exploiting the solar system's wealth.
It also housed the team which had cracked the giga-conductor. Philip Evans had brought Dr. Ranasfari back to England after the Second Restoration, wanting to keep a tight rein on his Company's resident genius. Setting him up at the Astronautics Institute had been Morgan Walshaw's idea.
With so many recently assembled research and design groups scattered throughout the old museum buildings while they waited for their new facilities to be completed, the place was in a constant state of flux. Ranasfari's team could establish themselves in an office and laboratory unit at the centre and remain unnoticed amongst the flustered crowd. The lost in plain view concept had worked for two years.
"No wonder Evans was so upset when the memox began to affect Event Horizon's profit margin," Greg said as they drew close to the Institute's gates. "How much did this lunatic conceit cost him, for Christ's sake?" The data squirted from Philip Evans's NN core into his cybofax concerning the Institute had only given him generalities, PR gloss. No hard financial facts.
Gabriel answered with a shrug. He sensed a cold trickle of intimidation damping her thought currents.
The Institute was circled by a mushroom ring of ten geodesic spheres housing the satellite uplinks. On the eastern side was a peculiar horn-shaped antenna, unprotected from the elements. It had a temporary look to it. People were walking among the dove-grey Portacabins at its base, ant-size. The damn thing must've been thirty metres high. Scale here something else again.
Greg had a shrewd idea that that was the source of Gabriel's dismay. She'd grasped the Institute at once. With him, the ego-ablating effect was taking time, a slow dawning of his own utter insignificance.
A four-metre chain fence topped by razor-wire marked out the perimeter. There was a smaller fence inside, fine granite chippings between the two. A guard-dog run, or at least some form of hunt animal.
The entrance road was split into five channels, each with a pole barrier. Greg chose number one. The Duo had to pass over ratchet spikes before they got to the red-and-white-striped barrier.
"What does he keep in here?" Gabriel muttered. "Crown jewels?"
"Oh no, something far more valuable than that. Knowledge."
A company bus drew up in lane two, full of sanitised young technical types, all of them wearing pale shirts and neat ties. Greg showed his new Card to the white watchman pillar, and the barrier raised itself obediently.
"But can we get out so easily?" Gabriel asked.
"Your department."
There were three parking yards. He found a space in the first, in the shadow of a big JCB. Gabriel climbed out, twisting her pearls self-consciously. The air was stifling, so Greg slung his leather jacket over his shoulder.
"We don't belong here," Gabriel declared. She'd turned a complete circle, taking in the strange conflation of creaky old buildings, chaotically jumbled wreckage, and new mega-structure with a childlike expression of awe. "You and I. It's not our world." Her mind state verged on depression.
"Don't be such a Luddite," he said.
She gave him a soft, pitying smile. "You don't understand. This place, it has destiny. I can feel it, portent after portent, the weight of them pressing down, suffocating. Future history, eager to be enacted, glories waiting to be born."