Max took hold of the small object, remained still for a moment – nothing happened – then slid it along the table.

‘Oh, yeah.’ The young man picked it up. ‘This is great. Fantastic specimen. You’d think it was made yesterday instead of—’

Zajac growled.

‘Oh. Er … Sorry. It’s a graphene flake.’

‘What’s a graphene flake?’

With a blush: ‘Graphene was the miracle material of the twenty-first century. They called it a metamaterial, effectively a two-dimensional solid.’

To a roomful of Pilots, this was quaint, unimpressive stuff.

‘Get on with,’ said Max. ‘What use is a flake of material?’

‘Oh, didn’t I …? It’s a memory flake, almost indestructible. Data storage device. No one’s used anything like this for five hundred years.’ And, with a wondering look: ‘If there’s any data on here, it would be like a message from the past, wouldn’t it?’

Zajac looked at Max.

‘Your doing?’

‘No, sir.’

Jed wondered if everyone was as confused as he was.

SIXTY

EARTH, 2033 AD

So here it was: Los Angeles. White-top freeways, crowded and stinking, and sun-glitter everywhere. The airport pick-up had no air-con, and the hot draught did little to help the seven passengers breathe. No one talked to the driver. Two British couples started comparing cynical notes, popping up local news sites on their qPads and pointing out the lack of international reportage. One of them muttered about parochialism. Lucas stared out the window as if he spoke no English, only occasionally glancing at the driver whose frown deepened by the mile.

They pulled up by the awning over the hotel entrance. The driver got out first, to unload the luggage from the side compartment. Lucas, whose bag came out last, slipped the driver a ten-dollar coin. Perhaps the tip-your-service-provider meme kept cash in existence here; back home, it was cultural inertia.

As the pick-up bus pulled away, Lucas scanned the sky and busy road before looking back at the entrance. There was a doorman, but he was helping one of the couples. Lucas might not be a trained spy or criminal, and he had flown on his passport because he had no idea how one might get a forgery; but he had been to the States before, and knew there was something unknown to the urban culture, a blind spot that might allow him to slip surveillance.

It was called walking; or perhaps he was relying too much on perceived gross differences. But so much of the city area was devoid of footpaths, designed only to be driven through.

His bag could be worn as a backpack, and after he had left the immediate environs of the hotel, he adjusted the strapping and slipped it over his shoulders, then tightened it up without breaking stride. As he walked, he thought back to the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and his sojourn in England before the First World War. It was G.H. Hardy in Cambridge, renowned in the mathematical world, who had spotted the self-educated genius – had Ramunajan been a painter, he would have been called a primitive – and brought him over from southern India.

For about a mile, Lucas continued in the absence of a path or track. In England one walks on the pavement; in the States pavement is for driving on. He could imagine the British couples making snotty remarks. Finally he was back on a real pavement – sidewalk – passing a row of single-storey businesses.

One of the things about Ramanujan – Lucas resumed his meditation – was his vegetarianism. Him and Gandhi both, Lucas recalled. The thing was, Edwardian cooking had no notion of balanced meatless diets: between the lack of nourishment, the damp cold, and his customary lack of exercise, Ramanujan’s health plummeted; and back in India he suffered a grim and painful death at the edge of thirty-two.

Now Lucas was in a residential area, the streets laid out in a geometric grid with empty sidewalks. It was mid-morning and the place looked empty. Again, there was the contrast to every other country he had been in: the rectilinear layout, streets labelled by numbers rather than names: practical yet subtly oppressive. Perhaps that was due to his sense of enemies watching from everywhere, because arrival in the States usually perked him up, straightening his spine as he resonated with a sense of confidence and self-determination so lacking in his usual life.

His colleague Arne did have confidence: strapping and muscular, strictly vegetarian, fond of the occasional lager but a fanatic about physical conditioning. He had a second dan black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and had previously competed in powerlifting, while these days his strength training consisted mostly of exercises from India, traditionally used by wrestlers: yoga-like, strenuous callisthenics called dands and bethaks. Once, he had demonstrated the movements in the Imperial bar, to the joy of his colleagues, Lucas included.

Bethaks, it turned out, were deep knee-bends, while dands were cat-lick push-ups that looked like the motion of a tireless male porn star – ‘He’s forgotten to put a woman underneath him,’ Jim had said – after which they had given Arne a new name: Captain Carpet Shagger.

In Edwardian Cambridge, where Town and Gown remained disparate, the well-off took a four-hour walk every afternoon, while impoverished working men spent the same amount of time walking to and from their jobs – and their wives would make the same journey in the middle of the day, fetching lunch to their husbands. It was a contrast to the self-taught mathematical genius who remained shut up in his rooms to work amid gloomy days and dark unlit nights, with Cambridge blacked out in case of Zeppelin attack.

Arne followed a Hindu-inspired lifestyle that gave him enormous vitality; poor Ramanujan had dwindled to skin and bones for the same reason.

When he reached the next shopping area, Lucas went into a diner and ordered steak and eggs, OJ and coffee. Ongoing free refills of juice and coffee: another difference from home. He took alternating sips from glass and cup as he powered up his qPad and checked the route to Caltech. The jet lag was catching up with him, but if he could stay awake for a full Californian day, he would avoid the danger of checking into a hotel where they might ask for ID. Or was that paranoid thinking?

They deleted data from Palo Alto and LongWatch.

Secure systems both. From the Chinese astrophysics community, there had been no mention of a triple gamma-ray burster event, no joining in with international discussion. Perhaps that absence meant their systems, too, had fallen victim to worms.

When the steak and eggs came, Lucas slathered ketchup over everything, and ate. It was a taste explosion, just wonderful.

While eating, he revisited his material on Gus Calzonni. In interviews, her tone was occasionally sarcastic, with comments that Lucas found funny. Since Ramanujan died back in 1920 or whenever, he read, mathematicians and scientists have been raiding his work for good stuff. He had this intuition, you see, like nobody else. Without partition theory and modular forms, I would never have discovered mu-space. Of course, that meant disproving string theory, also inspired by Ramanujan’s theorems, but them’s the breaks, string-kiddies.

Perhaps this was why so much dispute remained about the nature of mu-space: physically real continuum or mathematical device.

‘It better be sodding real.’ He realized a waitress was looking at him. ‘Sorry.’

‘Hey, no problem.’

A few seconds later, the waitress was behind the counter with her colleague, stage-whispering: ‘Oh, I just love his accent.’

Lucas rubbed his face and shut down his qPad.

Night-time in Pasadena was orange, with palm-trees. A profusion of sodium-vapour streetlamps, warm un-English air, a sense of un-European space between buildings that would have been austere without the advertising. It was not the darkness that Lucas had envisioned creeping through like a ninja; but he could see that no one was lying in wait, no black-garbed snatch team ready to truss him up and remove him from the everyday world.