"But in the meantime a question mark hangs over introducing the giga-conductor cell."

"Yes, unfortunately. A Ministry of Defence team from Boscombe Down has already arrived to review our fault-analysis data."

"What has happened to the Merlin? Is it a total breakdown?" Greg asked.

"It looks like it. The propulsion system has shut down, and the communication link has been severed. It won't even respond to signals directed at its omnidirectional antenna."

"Could its state have occurred by transmitting a rogue set of instructions, ordering it to shut down?"

"Indeed," Ranasfari agreed. "Providing you had the correct codes."

"Which, presumably, are stored here in the Institute's memory cores."

"Yes."

"And are they isolated from the Event Horizon datanet?"

"No."

"So the attack could be an attempt to discredit Event Horizon's giga-conductor, which at the very least would delay military funding of your production lines, giving your rivals an opportunity to make up lost ground."

"That is certainly a theoretical possibility." The shadowy overtones of worry were lifting from Dr. Ranasfari's mind. "I congratulate you, Mr. Mandel."

Greg felt a weight of relief lifting. "I'd like to be kept informed of your progress on analysing the Merlin failure."

"Certainly."

"And if you can't find anything concrete may I suggest chartering an inter-orbit tug to recover it."

"I doubt the expense would be authorised."

"Mission planning will cost nothing. And if I don't come up with any positive leads I'll press Philip Evans to cough up the money."

"I'm sure someone as persuasive as yourself will have no trouble. Good day, Mr. Mandel." Dr. Ranasfari exited with what might have been the ghost of a smile on his mouth.

Gabriel gave him a slow laconic clap, the sound echoing hollowly in the empty gallery, Her eyes were still closed. "I am impressed. That was one of the slickest pieces of seduction I've seen for many a year. Poor Eleanor couldn't have stood a chance."

Greg ignored the crack. "Simple logic. You want wholehearted co-operation, get them on your side. And empathy does have its uses. Like charm, some of us have it."

He slouched on the journalists' seats next to her, letting the foam below the black imitation leather mould itself to his buttocks, and stretched his legs out. Beyond the glass, dismay seemed to be tightening its grip.

"How goes it with Ranasfari's team?"

"Total washout." Her eyes fluttered open. "If you interviewed every one of them all you'd find is a couple who've got a nice racket flogging off Event Horizon equipment and five synthoheads. You were right, Morgan Walshaw knows how to handle security."

"Has to be either the Ministry of Defence, or a mole, then."

"Shaping up that way," she agreed. "So what now?"

"Elimination. My intuition says the Merlin failure and the blitz are related in some way. At the moment the only way I can reconcile the two is if the attack on Philip Evans was intended to divert his attention while the Merlin was hashed up to discredit the giga-conductor."

"That's pretty tenuous, Greg. A few giga-conductor cells which may or may not have failed aren't going to bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt. The breakdown could've been some kind of freak overspill from the attack on the NN core. That would be a connection of sorts."

"No, the Merlin breakdown wasn't an accident."

Gabriel didn't respond. At least she never questioned his intuition.

"Can you see the result of the failure analysis?" he asked.

"Sorry. Too far in the future from where we are."

"Well, not to worry, we'll find out in due course. It might all turn out to be empty hypothesis, Lord knows psi intuition isn't stone-scripted. But I'd put a great deal of money on that connection. I'll decide for sure after we've interviewed the NN core team. Walshaw should have reeled them in by the day after tomorrow. By the way, what can you see of Ranasfari?"

"Oh, God." She let out a long contemptuous breath. "Definitely a contender for the world's most boring human being. He just doesn't have any interests outside his professional work, I'm sure it can't be healthy."

"Leaves him open to blackmail?"

"I shouldn't think so. What could you possibly corrupt him with? In any case, he doesn't do anything remotely incriminating for the next few days, make that a week. And you've already cleared him."

"True." He pushed all the suspicions emanating from intuition out of his mind, cancelling the gland secretions, trying to sketch in a wholly logical course on the resultant virgin whiteness. "I want to take you to Wilholm and meet Philip Evans sometime."

"What for this time?"

"Two things. Give the staff the once-over to see if they knew about the NN core. And see if there's going to be another attack on him. If there is, it would mean I'm wrong about the opposition aiming at the giga-conductor. We'd be back to vengeance, Kendric di Girolamo, and the mole."

"Makes sense. When?"

"Tomorrow afternoon. I'm busy in the morning."

"So you are."

He couldn't tell whether her carefully neutral tone was disguising anger or amusement. Her mind gave the impression of total indifference. A balance of the two, perhaps?

"Will Julia be at Wilholm in the afternoon?" he asked.

A broad smile spread across Gabriel's chubby face. "You know, I do believe she will."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ninety per cent of England's road network had been abandoned in the PSP decade; the energy crunch put paid to most private travel, and the incendiary sun steadily deliquesced the tarmac to a worthless residue. A pre-Warming style maintenance programme was out of the question, economically unfeasible, environmentally unsound. Motorways and critical link roads were kept open, but the rest was left to waste away. People who could afford cars bought them configured to cope with the rough terrain. The A47 was one of the roads the PSP was forced to refurbish; it was an essential transport artery between Peterborough and the A1, and the PSP desperately needed the goods which the city manufactured. It meant that the A47's traffic levels were high, and most of the vehicles commercial. Driving down it was a new experience for Eleanor; she began to realise how different England's city life had become from the pastoral existence of the countryside and smaller market towns. It was almost as though the country was developing a split personality. Of course, the gulf was more pronounced here than anywhere else.

Peterborough struck her as a tripartite Babylon, the old, the new, and the water-bound condemned by adverse circumstances to live with each other, rival siblings cooped up in the same house. It sat on the shore of the gigantic salt quagmire which used to be the most fertile soil basin in all of Europe. The Lincolnshire Fens were originally marshes, drained over centuries to provide a rich black loam which could grow any crop imaginable. They were perfectly flat, like Holland; on clear days you could see for forty or fifty kilometres over them, so some of Oakham's refugees had told her. The trouble was, the Fens' average height above sea level was two metres; in some places, like the Isle of Ely, they were actually below sea level. When the Antarctic ice melted they never stood a chance.

Peterborough absorbed nearly two-thirds of the population displaced by the rising water; the city had no choice, it was hemmed in between the new sludge to the east and a shabby band of tent towns on the high ground to the west. None of the refugees was going to move; they had lost their homes, they had found a functioning urban administration, and they were through with running, so they sat and waited for government to get off its arse and do something. The three attempts the PSP mounted to disperse them ended in riots. So the Party was left with no choice. They poured money into permanent accommodation projects, as well as allowing in foreign investment to ease the load on the Treasury, and as a result it became one of the most prosperous cities in England. Huge housing estates mushroomed to serve vast industrial precincts, a crazy mismatch of developments sprawling venomously over the green belt. A deep-water port was built above the drowned cathedral; dredgers reopened the Nene, gouging out a new laser-straight channel directly into the Wash.