TWENTY

YOU NOW HAVE ONE CHOICE.

You . . . I’m coming down the hill in the dark, the lights from the town below sparkling like reflections on water. The dog, Planck, won’t go any further up: it’s as if he senses a presence there that I’m not aware of. He doesn’t seem to like this space for exactly the reason I do like it. He can’t stand the . . . The what? The history? The ghosts? Nothing surprises me any more. So we’re walking down. Away from the old, shadowy gateposts; away from the crumbling grey stone wall. When I’m up here, I imagine people walking or travelling on horseback in a time when there were no cars; and I sense that there wouldn’t have been that buzz you get now: the buzz of electricity being generated and used, and car engines, and pop music. But I’ll go where the dog wants to go; it’s easier that way. And I’m pleased with myself, pleased that I can give up control like this. But being pleased with myself won’t do. I should be nothing with myself. I want the void. Idiot: I can’t want the void. I have to let it come to me. I have to let it slowly envelop me when I’m not thinking anything.

Now I know what thoughts look like, thinking is more difficult, anyway.

The dog really does want to get out of here. We’re almost running now on the icy, hard mud. Frost. No good for plants; that’s what my mother used to say. And Christmas is coming, of course. As we reach the bottom of the hill, I see the lights in closeup: hundreds of white, tasteful stars hanging over the road, all within reach. The tree by the roundabout is strung with lights as well. What does Christmas mean now? Not really more or less than it did before. Lura’s a vegetarian, but she will force us both to celebrate. She likes rituals. Our tree is up, but we haven’t decorated it yet. Lura doesn’t want stars and tinsel: she wants to decorate the tree with black holes, wormholes and quarks. She wants to drape it in the fabric of space-time. I laughed when she told me this. I said I’d see what I could find in the shops. At least I go to the shops now. I go to the shops and I walk the dog. And nothing awful has happened yet. It’s better than being locked in the house all the time.

Console?

It comes up. There’s only one milky image in the middle of the screen: a blurred view of lots of green leaves. I ask it to close the image down and it does.

Who am I?

I am Saul Burlem.

Thank God. Where am I?

Walking along Fore Street. I’m walking along Fore Street, but Planck wants to turn left, past the cheese shop, and then right, towards home. He can’t want to go home already. No, he doesn’t. He trots right past our front door and onwards, his muzzle like an arrow pointing down towards the space where the walls meet the pavement. Ah, now here’s my second-favourite place in town.

Where am I?

I’m standing here while the dog sniffs some weeds growing out of the pavement. Yes, here’s the space I like. It really is a space, an absence, enclosed with four walls. Various signs have gone up lately explaining that this is a building site belonging to blah blah, and telling you the various bad things that will happen if you trespass in it. It spoils the effect somewhat. It was better before the signs went up. An empty space, enclosed by walls: a house with no rooms and no roof and a carpet of pinkish Devon earth. I like that. It reminds me of my favourite place in town: the castle. The castle is the same kind of thing – walls enclosing nothingness. I have a postcard of the castle above my desk. It’s an aerial view, probably taken from one of the helicopters that are always throbbing in the air on clear days. You look down on it and it’s like a grey stone ring left discarded on a hillside, ripped, perhaps, from a giant’s finger. And you can go to visit it as well: you can pay money to go into a circle of empty space with some walls around it. I love it. You look at this empty space, fenced off, made special, and you think: ‘What am I supposed to be looking at here? Are the walls there to keep the nothingness in, or the town out?’

And now, bizarrely, I know exactly how stone is constructed. But I still don’t know who made the spaces. Who invented absence? Who chooses to celebrate it here? Of course, people don’t know they’re celebrating absence (although they should; they really should). They think they’re visiting something, something tangible – but it just isn’t there any more. They think that by visiting an empty space enclosed by walls, they can travel through time. And I know about that, too.

Why won’t Burlem think of the name of the town he’s in?

Where am I?

Now I’ve crossed the road, and I’m standing outside the church, the church we go to every evening, just in case. We don’t pray, but what we do is perhaps a sort of prayer. We walk in and then out again, just in case. I’ve never known exactly what sort of church it is, even though I’m inside it every night. I assumed it must be C of E or Catholic, but it doesn’t actually have a name: it’s not Saint Anything’s. But every Thursday evening happy people come here in home-made clothes and do something cheerful inside. Well, they always seem cheerful when they come out. I think they go door-to-door in the evenings they’re not here, selling something invisible, like hope or salvation. Lura obtained the keys and no one minds that we go in there every night. Do I believe in what they do in there? Yes. I have to, now. But I wonder if they’d still believe, if they knew what I know.

Where do I live?

St Augustine’s Road.

But I know where that is: it’s his boarded-up house. Why doesn’t he think of his address here?

Where am I now?

Walking up the hill where the road sweeps around like a question mark and you can get run over, if you’re not careful. There’s a sign at the top – Torquay – and an arrow pointing right.

So he’s near Torquay; but I don’t even know where that is. It’s not enough.

What happened to make me leave my house?

Oh. Where to begin this story. Why am I thinking about this now? The dog snuffles onwards, up through the market square, but I’m not seeing that any more. I’m seeing . . . What? How far back does my mind want to go? I see scenes on fast-forward: the first one is, predictably, that paper I gave in Greenwich on the curse of Mr Y. Lura was there. The Project Starlight men were there, too. Of course, I had no idea who any of them were then. The only truly innocent member of the audience was Ariel Manto, and she was the one I kept looking at: the girl with the tight grey jumper and the red hair. I remember Lura walking away afterwards, going back to join the Lahiri group without saying anything. Then I see myself drinking too much with Ariel, fantasising about making love to her and then – the horror, the horror – realising she probably would go to bed with me. I left, of course, before I had the chance to actually go through with it.

Then a couple of weeks later, or maybe a bit more: an e-mail from Lura. She is/was a scientist. She was at the same university as Lahiri. But she’d seen the title of my paper and been intrigued. She enjoyed it. She wanted to meet me.

And I was thinking: two chances of sex in a month?

And then realising that, as usual, one of them is (potentially) a student, and the other is too old.

Or: I’m too old. That’s the main thing. And I know that they can’t really want me; not now. Although Dani did. Bland Dani wanted me. That was the last time: me, shirtless, with my grey chest hair shining awkwardly under the fluorescent office lights, and Bland Dani, the weakest of all the MA students, saying ‘I want to see you’, with her dull eyes pointing at my trousers. Of course, when she said ‘you’, she meant my cock. Why is it that women do that? ‘I want you inside me.’ No. You just want my cock, and you may as well ignore the large lump of flesh attached to it, the man who has a brain that will never be ‘inside you’, and that you’ll never understand. It was supposed to be a tutorial. I suggested blindfolding her, not because it turns me on but because I didn’t want her to see me. It ended badly, of course. What’s wrong with not seeing? Then it’s all in the mind, and perhaps not even against the university regulations. But she threatened to report me anyway when I (literally) stopped seeing her. I didn’t even desire her: she looked like a slab of melting butter.

I arranged to meet Lura at a café in a gallery in London. What she said almost floored me. She owned a copy of The End of Mr Y; perhaps the only known copy: the one in Germany. That’s actually why she’d come to hear my paper. The book had been her father’s. He had been one of the first scientists involved in the theory of quantum mechanics, she explained. She clearly didn’t want to talk about him very much, but she outlined the basics: that he had been a contemporary of Erwin Schrödinger and Nils Bohr, but had refused to follow many European Jewish physicists to America to work on the atom bomb and other, similarly diabolical projects. Instead he stayed in his university and continued constructing his earth-shattering theory – details of which are now lost. The week before he was sent to the concentration camp, he had written a note in his diary about The End of Mr Y. He was very excited to have ordered it from London and believed it to be one of very few remaining copies. One of his last diary entries talked about the possible ‘Curse of Mr Y’. Lura had been shocked, she said – but also intrigued – to see the title of my paper. She said she hadn’t ever come across that phrase before, except in her father’s diary.

She explained all this to me without changing her facial expression once. But she kept running her hand through her hair, and pausing for a long time between parts of the story. Then, when our coffees arrived, she gave up on the hair and started on the handle of the cup, moving it back and forth and pushing her thin finger through the hole.

‘So that’s it,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d like to know some of the history of the book; or, at least, that particular copy.’

‘I’m very grateful,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much for taking the time to come and meet me.’

Her eyes looked as though she was going to smile, but she didn’t.

‘The book was important to my father,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I simply asked, ‘Have you read it?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘But I know it’s important – after all, people keep trying to buy it from me.’

‘But you won’t sell?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

She sighed. ‘Much as I hate that book, I can’t sell it. I haven’t sold any of my father’s books. Plus, I don’t particularly like the people who are trying to buy it. They’ve become a little threatening lately. But they can’t do anything about a book in a bank vault. Perhaps they’re planning a heist?’ Now she did smile. ‘Well, I shouldn’t think they’ll have much luck.’

‘Who are they?’

She shrugged, and sipped from her café crème. ‘Americans.’ There was a long pause. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I expect you’d like to see it, wouldn’t you?’

‘Really?’ I must have sounded like a little boy excited over someone else’s collection of rare comics. But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘I mean . . .’

‘Of course. It will be of some intellectual value to you. I can see that. My father would have approved, and I think that’s a good enough reason.’

‘Has anyone else seen it?’

‘No. I’ve looked at it briefly, but I couldn’t touch it . . .’

‘Why not?’

She looked at the table. There was a minute speck of Demerara sugar by her saucer and she squashed it with her finger. Then she looked up at me again and laughed weakly.

‘Family superstition?’ Her laugh shrank into a sigh. ‘I’m a scientist, and of course I know that Hitler killed my father, not some cursed book. But even so . . . It was the day after he received it that they got him. The last thing he did as a free man was to put that book in a bank vault.’

We talked a little more. She explained that she was going out to Germany the following month and invited me for a long weekend. Of course, I wanted to go: to see the book, to touch the book. But I made some polite objections – would she want all those memories brought up again? Would she want some stranger intruding on her family business, etc., etc. – and she politely rebuffed them all, as I’d known she would. So I went. It was the first week of term and I welcomed getting away from all the admin and e-mails and meetings for a few days. I tend to work when I’m at home, and I am terrible at taking holidays. We spent the Thursday evening watching an absurd play, and then we went to the bank vault on the Friday. It was supposed to be summer, but the air was grey and damp, and everything around me seemed as though it was being slowly smothered by everything else. When I had the book in my hands, she looked at the floor and almost immediately said, ‘I want you to take it. Take it away from here.’

‘You’re selling it?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Just take it away.’

We had a sad kind of sex on the last night I spent with her. There was a mundane inevitability about it, like flu in winter. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. She hated the book and she’d given it to me. I wasn’t even sure whether or not she wanted it back. I didn’t really understand anything about what was happening, but I didn’t question any of it. I needed that book: I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

Then came the strange events that I wrote off at the time as a kind of self-undermining parapraxis. First, I forgot to pack the book; then I forgot to collect my bag from the carousel in the airport. Somehow I did get home without misplacing it. That afternoon I had to attend a university event at the cathedral – but it passed in no time. I sat next to my research student, Ariel Manto, and I think I even managed to flirt with her a little (harmless, harmless). Then I made my excuses and rushed home. I sat there in my ancient conservatory, and, as the sun set and then rose again outside, I finished the book. Afterwards I couldn’t sleep, so I drank a vintage bottle of wine and wept several times, just because of the utter beauty of the experience: of holding the book, of being able to read it at last. No one bothered me and all I could hear was birdsong.

And I immediately resolved to make up the mixture from the book and try going to the Troposphere myself. I did some fast, blurred research, and found out that I could buy some Carbo-veg in the right potency from a shop in Brighton. I drove there and back that afternoon and, after taking some holy water from St Thomas’s, had my first experience in the Troposphere that night. Most of what I can remember of my first few experiences is a blur. I remember travelling through the tunnel, so familiar to me now, and arriving in what appeared to me to be a nostalgic-postcard version of nineteenth-century London, full of dark slums and fog and abandoned hansom cabs. And I explored, of course, and started understanding some of the rules of this place. I tried Pedesis on the milkman. I attempted – and failed – to enter the mind of the university’s vice chancellor.

I got the first e-mail on the Saturday evening. It seemed to be from a university student at Yale, despite the Yahoo e-mail address, asking me if I would be willing to enter into e-mail correspondence about The End of Mr Y. I politely declined. The e-mail was poorly written, and my own students take up enough of my time. I thought it was a coincidence that this person had got in touch just as I had obtained the book, but at the time I thought it was genuine. The second e-mail came on the Sunday, at roughly the same time of day.

Please forgive this intrusion. I am the director of Project Starlight, a significant interdisciplinary study into the activities and potentials of the Human mind. We have been recently studying a method outline in the book The End of Mr Y. Or, I should say my predecessor was doing this? Since I have taken over this study I am interested in pursuing this study but unfortunately all our systems have gone down and I have lost everything . . . including the instructions for making the formula. This also explains why I am using a Hotmail account right now! Our systems will not be running again for another week but I do need that formula ASAP. Since you own a copy of the book I hope you will not mind sparing a few minutes to write it up for us.

I called Lura on Monday.

‘Project Starlight?’ she repeated, after I had explained.

‘Yes.’

‘They’re the people who offered to buy the book from me.’

‘Do you know anything about them?’

She paused. ‘Well, I did check them out.’

‘And?’

‘Project Starlight closed almost a year ago. There is no Project Starlight any more.’

‘What is – or was – it?’

Now she sighed. ‘It was a highly classified American project. I found out about it through a friend of a friend – a physicist at MIT. He had only heard rumours about the project – that it had started as a simple telepathy study and then mutated into something else. He mentioned a highly secretive desert facility, remote viewing, staring at goats, and the quest for the “ultimate weapon”. He said he’d heard that something catastrophic had caused the study to close down, and warned me not to get involved in asking any questions about it. It certainly sounded sinister.’

‘So if the project is closed, why are people going around saying they’re a part of it?’

‘I don’t know. I think I already said that they soon became threatening.’

‘And how do they know I have the book?’ I didn’t ask if she’d told them.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

I paused. ‘Do you think they are actually dangerous?’

‘I really have no idea. Do you know why they want the book? I assume you’ve read it by now?’

‘Yes. I’ve read it.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘I have no idea why they’d want it.’

Why was I lying? Of course I knew they wanted the formula, and I also knew why: because it worked. All I could conjecture was that these people were some kind of breakaway group who had been given the formula but never knew what it contained. And I was already familiar with the sensation of needing to go back into the Troposphere. Imagine needing it and not being able to go there? I imagined something of what a drug addict might feel.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘Lura, I really think . . .’

‘What?’

‘I think I should return the book to you now. I think it should go back in the bank vault, where they can’t get it.’

‘But if there’s nothing in it that they’d find useful . . . ?’

‘I think it should go back,’ I said.

After our conversation finished, I walked into the conservatory and looked at my own reflection in the glass. It was dark outside and I could only see a couple of stars, hanging in the sky like a half-hearted attempt at decoration. An American classified study. Goat-staring. The ultimate weapon. That sounded military to me. I walked back into the house and picked up the book. Of course I would send it back to Lura; I’d do it tomorrow. But I also knew that the men from Project Starlight – or people like them – would get it in the end. And then what would happen? My mind filled with unpleasant thoughts of world domination and thought-control. If a repressive regime – or any regime – got hold of this mixture, then . . . What? I found I could imagine exactly what such an ‘ultimate weapon’ would look like. I sent back an e-mail to the Hotmail address given by the last correspondent, saying that although I had seen the book, it was already on its way back to its owner in Germany. I apologised and assured him that he must be mistaken: there was no recipe in the book. And I put it on the table, ready to go.

But I didn’t really want to post it. What if it got lost? Damaged? On the other hand, I had no time to go to London to meet Lura to hand it over in person until the weekend. And would she even want to see it? Perhaps she’d suggest sending it straight to the bank and asking them to put it in the vault. There were too many possibilities and I’d had no more e-mails. I did nothing. I spent the Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings, including Max Truman’s annual Health and Safety presentation – compulsory; although Ariel Manto simply didn’t go. I’ve always quite enjoyed Max’s eccentric annual presentations. This one was entitled ‘When Things Go Wrong’. It was a tongue-in-cheek history of the old railway tunnel under campus, ending with a dramatic account of its collapse in 1974. Max had obtained lots of PowerPoint slides of gruesome images of the Newton Building crumbling and people running around looking confused. He made various connections between the collapse of the university and the collapse of student – staff relations in the mid-70s. While the tunnel was collapsing, he said, some demonstrating students had stormed the Registry and were busy drinking the vice chancellor’s port. We learned that our own building had been constructed in 1975 – right over the newly reinforced tunnel. Max told us that there was still a maintenance route into the tunnel from our building. We needed to know this, he said, so we could take the necessary precautions. At this point, Mary asked what the necessary precautions would be.

‘Just don’t fall into it,’ said Max.

‘How would we fall into it?’ she said.

‘Well, you can’t,’ he said. ‘But new Health and Safety advice says I have to warn you about it, anyway.’

‘But it’s been there for almost thirty years,’ said someone else. ‘And no one’s fallen into it yet . . .’

‘Where is it?’ asked Mary.

‘Photocopying room,’ said Max. ‘Next to the machine.’

‘You mean that sort of hatch thing that we all stand on every time we do any photocopying?’ said Lisa Hobbes.

‘Yep.’

‘So we could actually fall into it?’

‘No, don’t be daft. This isn’t Alice in bloody Wonderland. It’s well secured.’

‘What’s it like in the tunnel?’ asked Laura, the creative writing tutor.

‘Don’t even think about it, Laura,’ said Mary.

‘What?’ she said. ‘I think we should go down there and investigate.’

Everyone groaned.

‘OK, OK. I’m only joking.’

Laura had been in trouble the previous year for sending all her students on some kind of psychogeographical project in which they’d had to use maps of Berlin in order to walk around the city centre. Three of them had ended up walking along the motorway and were arrested.

While the questions and answers continued, I simply sat there thinking about the Troposphere. I thought I already had a fairly good idea of how it worked. In fact, I hadn’t got too much sleep in the preceding few days because of it, and while the others kept on talking about the railway tunnel, and whether or not Laura was going to lead a search party down the hatch, my eyes started to close. I dreamed of a world in which everyone had access to everyone else’s minds, until some government recruited men in deep blue uniforms to go around and brainwash everyone so they didn’t know how to do it any more. When I woke up, everyone had gone. It was a good thing: I’d been sweating in my sleep and my shirt was almost wet through. Even though I was on my own, I had a profound sense of being watched.

I knew I had to give the book back to Lura, so I went straight home to ring her to arrange it for the weekend. As I drove through the heavy rush-hour traffic, I wondered if it might be better to burn the book altogether, or at least destroy the page with the recipe on it.

But I am a professor of English literature. I couldn’t destroy a book if my life depended on it. At least, that’s what I thought then.

I got the last parking space on my street and walked the last twenty yards to my house. Then I went inside and considered what I had to do. I had it all planned out by then. My idea was that I’d remove the page with the instructions on it – but I certainly wasn’t going to destroy it. I planned to keep it or hide it . . . I wasn’t sure quite what I was going to do with it. Perhaps it was clear to me that I would have to destroy it at some point, but for then I thought removing it would be enough. I’d remove the page, give the book back to Lura, and then feign ignorance if she ever asked me about it.

It was at exactly the moment that I had opened the book to the correct page that I saw the car headlights sweep up outside. Then I heard the steady throb of a diesel engine, and I simply assumed someone had called a taxi. But I was jumpy and noticing everything, so I went to the window to look, still holding the book in my hands. And then I saw them: the two blond men I’d last seen when I gave my paper in Greenwich. They were trying to find somewhere to park in my street.

They wanted the book. It was them.

And worse: one of them was driving – looking for somewhere to park – but the other one? Well, he seemed to be asleep.

I couldn’t think quickly enough. If one of them was in the Troposphere, then he was one or two jumps away from my mind and everything I knew about The End of Mr Y. I looked at the book and quickly ripped the page from it. My thoughts almost collapsed then, but what I did next took on the clarity and focus of a bullet-point list. I had to leave the book behind, but I’d take the page with me. By the time I’d decided that, I’d already folded up the page and put it in my shoe. By the time I’d done that I realised I had to get away before the men either came in here and beat me up or – worse – jumped into my mind and took my knowledge, anyway. They were still trying to park. I hid the book behind the piano; then I grabbed my coat, wallet and keys, and left via the back door. Over the neighbours’ fence, through their garden, down their driveway and into my car. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The conscious man didn’t even look over when the car door slammed. I imagined a car chase, but no one looked at me as I drove past. And I drove – faster than I’ve ever driven – to the university. My thoughts were racing ahead of me at a speed I’ve never experienced before. And in the jumble of strategy, fear and conjecture, one thought stood out. I realised that I would be the target of those men for as long as I had my memories. It wouldn’t matter if I destroyed The End of Mr Y. It wouldn’t matter if I shredded the page concealed in my shoe. If they could get into my mind, they could get the instructions for making the mixture, just as Mr Y had learnt the secrets of Will Hardy’s ghost show. It would be as simple as that. They couldn’t get it from Lura, who hadn’t read the book. But as long as I remained alive and sane, they could get it from me.

As I parked in the Russell car park, I felt much as though I had just been given a life sentence. When I’d been a teenager, I’d fantasised about the life of a tragic hero. I’d thought there would be some sort of glamour in being Hamlet, or Lear. But now I could see death at the end; I could see it with more certainty than I could see tomorrow. I remembered a dissertation that I’d marked a couple of years before. In it, the student argued that American eighties and nineties gangster films are postmodern tragedies. He spent a lot of time on one detail: that no one in these gangster films ever escapes. In our society – connected up with bits and bytes – you can never become entirely anonymous. At that moment I realised that the Project Starlight men would track me down, wherever I went, and take what I knew. They were going to rape my mind, and there was nothing I could do about it. I also realised that I had one slim chance of preventing this. I could disappear now. But I didn’t have much time. They’d come here next: I knew that.

It was too dangerous to wait for empirical evidence of what they were going to do. I had to work from a priori assumptions, namely:

– The men wanted my knowledge of the ingredients for the mixture.
– The men could get my knowledge in three different ways:
– Torture
– Pedesis
– Taking the sheet of paper from me by force.

I reasoned that I could eat the paper, or not give in to torture, but

I could do nothing about Pedesis. What I knew of the logic of the Troposphere suggested that, in order to get into my mind, the man in the Troposphere would only have to jump into the mind of someone near me, or likely to see me, and then, at the moment this other person saw me, make the final jump into my mind and all my knowledge and memories. In theory, the sleeping man could simply get into the mind of his colleague and send him to see me.

So I couldn’t let anyone see me. Once in my office, I closed the blinds and the curtains and locked the door. I hadn’t smoked for twenty years, but when I saw that Ariel had left a box of cigarettes on her desk I took one out and lit it. I pleaded with myself to find some way out of this situation. Where could I go where no one would see me? My mind filled with images of roads and shopping centres and supermarkets. On a usual day, how many people would see me? Hundreds? Thousands? Everywhere I cast my mind, I saw these blobs of flesh-and-consciousness; the detail that is always left off any map. Even if I got back in my car and drove, I would travel past people. I wondered why I had even come to the university; why I had chosen as my hiding place a room with my name on the door, a room whose details can be found on the university Web site, which also contains handy maps: how to get to the English and American Studies Building from anywhere on campus; how to get to the campus by road, rail, air, Eurostar and ferry. I smoked and paced. I felt safe at the university. That was it: that was why I had gone there. But only because there are always so many people there. You never feel alone at the university, and, usually, in dangerous situations you want to be around people. Not this time.

Three or four minutes passed. I heard laughter moving down the corridor: Max and the others, no doubt, coming back from the bar. It didn’t matter that I’d locked the external doors; now they were bound to be unlocked. I looked at the heavy paperweight on my desk. Perhaps I could stop them with force? No. You can’t use force against remote telepathy. I urged myself to think faster. Should I destroy the page from my shoe? I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. Why had I not driven away to somewhere random when I had the chance? My thoughts pushed and shoved each other like desperate Christmas shoppers, and I reminded myself that I had only two decisions to make: what I should do with the page; and where to go next. Before I knew what I was doing, I had reached up to the very top shelf for the fourth volume of Zoonomia. I used to hide money in books a long time ago, when I was a research student and my front door was almost as flimsy as a curtain and anyone could open it with a credit card. I reasoned that thieves aren’t interested in books, and anyway, books are bulky. If you were a petty thief, you wouldn’t be able to transport a thousand or so books. So you’d ignore them: you wouldn’t select, say, ten to steal. You’d ignore them all and focus on the VCR and the microwave. For that reason, I’ve always hidden things in random books. I’ve hidden love letters, pornography, credit cards . . . Would this work now? These Project Starlight men did clearly know the value of books. Ah, I thought, but this is where the university will help me. I can hide the page and lock the door, and no stranger is going to be able to come and look through my things. And even if someone did manage to do that, the book they want wouldn’t seem to be here.

And then I thought, ‘How long am I going to be away?’

I had no idea.

But at least I would be carrying only one copy of the information I had: the copy in my mind. And, although I knew I’d be too much of a coward, I could always kill myself if the men got too close. That was my theoretical last resort. I got a chair to stand on to relieve myself of the second copy of the information I held: the page in my shoe.

Perhaps it was stupid of me; perhaps I hadn’t thought it through – but I could not imagine anyone going through all the books on my shelf and shaking them until a mysterious page fell out. I thought that, by doing this, I was preserving an important page of an important book. Why Zoonomia? I wasn’t sure exactly, but something in my mind told me this was the right book. Ariel Manto wouldn’t be using it: I’d told her not to. And who else would be interested in Zoonomia? I inserted the page somewhere in the middle of Volume IV and replaced it on the shelf.

I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it anyway rather than destroy the page. Was this my fatal flaw? And perhaps I thought that anyone who knew Zoonomia – an academic, definitely – and who also had the wherewithal to make the connection between the page and the book . . . Well, good luck to them. Perhaps that’s how I justified it to myself. Knowing what I know now, I would never have left the page behind. But I can’t get it now. All I can hope is that it’s been destroyed.

So the next thing I had to do was disappear. But how to disappear in a building full of people in a university campus full of people in a world full of people? Where could I go? Where could I go that no one else would go? Where could I be unseen?

The railway tunnel.

In two minutes I was out of my office and in the photocopying room, with the door locked behind me. It was surprisingly easy to lift the hatch, now I knew it was there. I had no torch; just a small keyring light. But it was enough for me to see a thin metallic ladder. Had I lost my mind? I wasn’t at all sure. But, as I lowered myself into the gloom below, and carefully replaced the hatch above my head, I heard the sound of furious banging, and a male, American voice shouting ‘Professor Burlem!’ They were at my office door across the corridor. But I was gone. No one had seen me go into the photocopying room. I felt as though I’d broken some loop; some chain of seeing and cause and effect. If I didn’t emerge, no one would ever know where I was. If no one could see me, did I even exist?

The tunnel was dark and cold, with a persistent drip, drip, drip noise. It was much bigger than I had imagined – but then, of course, a railway tunnel is big: big enough for two trains to go through. It was too dark to see any detail, but I got the impression of size from the way sound travelled through the space. I walked in a direction I believed to be south, towards the underneath of the Newton Building. My feet crunched on something that felt like gravel, but I couldn’t see beneath my feet. I used the wall to guide myself, and hoped that I was moving far enough away from the Project Starlight men that the sleeping one wouldn’t simply chance on me in the Troposphere. I imagined something like a dawn raid: if the men knew I was at the university, could the sleeping one just burst into all the dwellings in the Troposphere until he found mine? This was the thought that bothered me as I walked further into the tunnel. I already knew that so much about telemancy and Pedesis had to do with proximity. But then again, there’d be so many consciousnesses here on campus, and the men couldn’t even be sure I was anywhere near here. I didn’t know what to do next. As if some vengeful god had decided to play a trick on me, the next thing that happened was that I came to a halt before what felt like a pile of bricks and rubble. I knew I would have to clear a path to get through to the exit. Did I want to get to the exit? I sunk to the floor and began to think about what I would do next.

Ah. Enough reminiscing. There’s the church. I’ll tie Planck up outside.

I’m . . .

Oh, fuck. That’s it. I’m out in the Troposphere: bounced out by Burlem going into the church. So Adam was right about that, then.