He turned away, towards the house that promised shelter. Then he turned back to Newcomen. He grabbed the front of his coat and pulled him down until they were face to face.

“You know something? You used to be brilliant. The whole country from sea to shining sea. You did some really shitty things, but you also gave us miracles. You built rockets that went to the yebani Moon. There are spaceships you launched that are out of contact with the Earth because they’re simply too far away. You cured diseases, you made movies, you invented and thought and created your way to most of the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. You were giants. You made our music and you wrote our books. You had Lincoln and King and Feynman. The world lived and breathed you, whether they liked it or not.

“Then along came Reconstruction, and you started going backwards. Pif and me beating you to the Grand Unified Theory, two kids with nothing more sophisticated than pen and paper, was just a symptom. You were ruined long before that. Reconstruction meant you gave up being daring. That’s what I resent the most: that you let me down before I was even born.”

He released Newcomen, and batted out the creases on his chest. “The Freezone are here now. We’re going to do what you don’t have the yajtza to do any more. I just want my Lucy to be part of it too. I promised her. I promised her, and I’m not going to let her down.”

23

Petrovitch kicked the bedstead. “Come on. Breakfast.”

Newcomen’s face emerged from inside his sleeping bag, lying on the bare mattress. “What?” He blinked and squinted as the single naked bulb above his bed grew in luminescence.

“Breakfast, I said. Recommended calorie intake is around ten thousand for an Arctic environment, so unless you like snacking on bars of butter, I’d shift your arse into the kitchen.”

“What time is it?”

“What am I? Your wristwatch?” Petrovitch kicked the bed again. “Use your link. That’s what someone who belongs to the Freezone does.”

Newcomen rolled around in his bag, wriggling like a great grey maggot. Eventually a hand appeared at the neckline and worried the zip down a fraction.

“I don’t belong, though. Do I?”

“And yet you have a link. There’s a riddle to start the day with.” Petrovitch left him there and went back to the stove. His frying pans were heating up nicely, and one advantage of seeing in the infrared was that he could tell precisely how hot they were.

He retrieved a cardboard box from the fridge – a massive American thing that looked like a chrome coffin – and opened it up. If the store had got his order wrong, he was going to look a complete mudak.

But here were strips of bacon and minute steaks, a tray of a dozen eggs, a block of lard, a loop of blood pudding, hash browns, links of pink sausages, and at the bottom, a tin of corned beef with its own key.

He became absorbed in the ritual of making, banging a battered enamel coffee pot on to a spare ring and feeding more wood to the ever-hungry furnace. Soon, things were frying, and the smell drifted out into the hall and down the corridor.

Newcomen staggered through and slumped at the kitchen table. “So what time is it?”

“Six thirteen. We have a lot to eat and a long way to go. Six hundred k. North.” Petrovitch opened enough cupboards to track down two plates and some cutlery, which he dealt out on to the work surface. “And a full day’s work ahead of us.”

“We don’t even know what we’re going to find when we get to wherever it is.”

“Deadhorse. Of course we don’t. That’s why we’re going. We can do only so much remotely. We can look from the sky, we can listen and measure and track and record. But we have to be there, too. Do you think Alan and Jessica would have responded to a couple of messages left on their usual dropboxes? Considering his parents are desperate for them to stop bumping uglies?”

“Oh please. I haven’t even got a cup of coffee yet.”

“Yeah, sorry about the poor service. We don’t have a woman in the house to do the cooking for us.”

“Just, just.” Newcomen rested his forehead on the warm pine tabletop. “Don’t start.”

“Hah,” said Petrovitch triumphantly. He started banging the heavy iron skillets around to free the food within them. “Make yourself useful and find some mugs.”

Newcomen dragged himself from his chair and started opening doors. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any milk.”

“I don’t have any sugar, more to the point. I’ll cope, and so will you.”

Using a metal slice, he started to divide the food more or less equally between them. Newcomen found two china mugs and reached for the coffee pot. Petrovitch slapped his outstretched hand with the slice.

“Ow.”

“The coffee inside is boiling. Any reason why the handle is going to be any colder?” He threw an oven mitt at him and carried on lifting and turning.

By the time he’d finished, the plates were piled high and it was barely possible to carry them the short distance to the table.

Newcomen drew his knife and fork towards him. “Am I going to be allowed to eat this without a lecture about the decadence of my country or a list of my own personal faults?”

“Yeah, okay. Though ‘my own personal’ is tautologous.” Petrovitch twirled his fork through his fingers and back again to his grip. “Dig in while it’s hot.”

“I hate you,” said Newcomen.

“I don’t care.” He stabbed a sausage and held it on the tines while he ate first one end, then the other.

“And there’s no oh-jay.”

“Yeah, I never heard Armstrong or Aldrin refusing to take that one small step because they didn’t have juice for breakfast.” Petrovitch picked up a hash brown, and regretted not ordering mushrooms. “You’ve fallen so far, so fast.”

Newcomen jabbed across the table with his knife. “I thought you said you weren’t going to lecture me.”

“So I did. Prijatnovo appetita.”

Petrovitch worked his way through his food methodically, one ear to the news reports from around the world that his agents had selected. Each one came with a commentary from Freezone analysts, whether they could confirm or debunk it, and if the Freezone collective was involved in any way. They had virtual fingers in lots of the pies, from co-ordinating food distribution in Mindoro to transparent accounting in Namibia. The naked newswires poured into his head, with a slew of additional information: blogs, pictures, biographies, historical background and future trends.

He felt compelled to keep himself informed, especially at a time like this. It was a truism that the one connecting fact that linked together everything he was doing could appear half a world away. He wasn’t the only one watching, reading, collating and sifting, but he was a link in the chain: too much information was being generated for any one man to know, but he wanted to try.

Nothing from China yet. The US press was silent on his whereabouts, and the FBI’s Most Wanted list didn’t feature either him or Newcomen. Amsterdam spot prices for crude were up: he dug a little further and found a supply problem. The Alaskan pipeline hadn’t restarted pumping yet. Maybe another week, while the technicians and mechanics replaced circuits and reprogrammed computers.

So there was something to look into. Hardly anyone worried about the price of crude oil any more, since most people didn’t burn it in their cars. But as a chemical precursor, it was vital. He passed a message back to the data miners and stuck a priority flag on it.

He looked down: his stomach was as full as his head.

“Okay. I’ll go and turn the turbines over, and you see to the washing-up.”

Newcomen was halfway through his food and slowing. “Where’s the dishwasher?”