The world of 2165 needed co-ordinators to link the liaison officers from different broad fields. Natasha was a trained nexus officer who became curious about Building 297.
All her enquiries reached a blank wall . . . literally. Nobody seemed to know what went on inside the tall glass and concrete tower. An important security project of some sort . . . but what?
At last she found a way to enter the building nobody understood only to find a project that had gone unbelievably wrong. The original purpose of Building 297 had long since been forgotten. The operators no longer directed the research in the bleak laboratories, they were in the grip of an unknown power.
The menace in the sinister tower had reached a crucial stage. It threatened to leak through the concrete and engulf the city . . . perhaps far more than the city. Natasha had to understand the incredible new force, to escape from its citadel and rouse the sceptical, complacent population before it was too late.
The arrival of the Stranger offered her a terrible choice. Was he her one hope as a potential ally, or had he in some way engineered the menace in the tower?
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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SHE sat, smiling quietly to herself, in the whispering corner of the refreshment bar. She called it the Whispering Corner because of the discovery that she had made, quite accidentally on her first visit just over three months ago. In that particular angle of the mirrored refreshment room it was possible to pick up the subdued conversations of patrons on the far side. Her glass was empty and Natasha rose with a pleasing rustle of shapely, young, nylon-sheathed legs and moved towards the bar. The man dispensing the frothing coffee-coloured, coffee-flavoured stimulant had an expression on his face which gave way under the pressure of a professional smile. Natasha put a half-noble on the bar and took the recharged glass with a smile almost as professional as the barman’s. Between the counter and ‘whispering corner’ was a coin operated colour organ. She looked thoughtfully at the titles behind their plasto-glass cover. Delski’s Seventeenth might be worth seeing again. It had been playing when she first came to the bar. There was a kind of welcome about it. A coin, another half-noble, fell with the ineffectual lightness of die-stamped aluminium inside the colour organ. Things moved automatically. She went back to whispering corner, leant her head back against the soft texture of teased-out plastic upholstery, and opened round, bright, intelligent green eyes at the ceiling. Delski’s Seventeenth was moving in anguine contortions across the ceiling. Snakes of rainbow light writhed in a fantastic, two-dimensional dance; voices, girlish, teenage voices, filtered through her absorption. She lowered her eyes casually, unconcernedly. On the far side of the bar three giggling teenagers in outlandish fashions were casting covert glances in her direction and with something akin to a mild shock, Natasha realised that they were discussing her. Surely, prompted something low down and close to the innermost core of absolute honesty, that’s what you’ve been waiting for? As she turned her head a little to follow the patterns on the ceiling, the voices rose and fell, coming and going like unknown and nameless servants in the palace of some ancient despot.
“She’s a nexus officer, I tell you!”
“Well, what’s that then?”
“She’s only a third-class one, you can see by the insignia.”
“I should think she’s only just out of training, this is prob’ly her first post.”
The words were lost in giggling.
“What is a ‘nexus officer,’ then?” The least intelligent of the three voices was repeating its question with a reiterative insistence that brooked no denial.
“I don’t know. They don’t seem to do anything. Our economics lecturer said they were probably the biggest single Government expense. Nobody except another nexus officer could justify their function at all.”
“I thought they were supposed to keep scientists informed of progress in different fields.”
The voice had the absolute precision and self-assurance which only teenagers have: the certainty that can only come before knowledge.
“I think the whole thing’s pointless. I mean, the scientists are getting on wtih the job, what do we want people in between for?”
“They’re worse than that!”
“How do you mean?”
“They’re sort of in between people in between them!”
There was more giggling.
“I don’t like her hair.”
“No, it’s old-fashioned. That style went out weeks ago!”
“Those little bits above the ears!”
“And that colour’s out, too!”
“I suppose she must have started the organ then?”
“Oh that old Delski’s Seventeenth; it was in fashion with the dodo bird!”
There was general giggling. Natasha looked up at the ceiling trying desperately to stop listening, but the whispers were too near—inexorable. The coffee-coloured liquid seemed suddenly to have lost its flavour. The Delski Seventeenth was lacking in purpose. She got up with startling suddenness and glared angrily at the three whispering girls. The middle one, a scrawny redhead with an impudent face, grimaced at her and put her tongue out. Natasha strode towards the door and slammed it behind her with a force that rocked the chromium and neon of the decor.
They criticised her Delski, and they criticised her hair—that was ordinary cattiness; it meant nothing; but her job! She looked down at the insignia on her costume—was it tarnishing already? Had those silver bars begun to oxydise? She rubbed a sleeve over the insignia, an ‘N’ surmounting three vertical bars: Nexus Officer, third class. She remembered. She remembered how she had felt six weeks ago, or was it seven—she did a swift mental calculation. Graduation day at the Liaison College. She had thought it would never come! Seven weeks ago life had seemed superb, full of promise, full of raison d’etre, full of Purpose with a capital P. She had never until that moment supposed that anyone doubted the importance of the nexus officer’s role.
To her it had all seemed so obvious. As specialisation increased so it became impossible for any individual mind to co-ordinate knowledge as a totality. Synchronisers and liaison officers became increasingly important, as specialists advanced further and further into their own chosen fields. The world of 2165 needed co-ordinators to link the liaison officers from the different broad fields. Nexus officers linked the coordinators. Why hadn’t it been obvious to the three giggling teenagers? She stepped from the smooth, paved surface of the little inlet which housed the refreshment bar and ten small shops. The pavement crawled past at little more than a mile an hour. She stood on it and balanced herself against the gentle motion. The movement of the pavement on its accurately mounted precision rollers brought just the faintest breath of air to her face. Purpose? She looked down and wondered if the pavement was ever troubled by thoughts of purpose. If I were the pavement, thought Natasha. I would be content; I would be fulfilling my destiny. I am not a pavement, and when they ask me my purpose I cannot say that I am for people to walk on. I cannot say that I carry them where they want to go. She tapped her dainty foot in its silver plastic shoe, against the slowly moving conveyor belt beneath. Twenty million of us, she thought, twenty million of us in London alone. She mounted the next pavement outwards on her right. The speed stepped up to a brisk four miles an hour. She stepped to the right again, now the wind was more than a breeze. She was moving at a good cycling pace. In her present mood of self-analysis the office seemed the obvious place. There with her files, her reference books, and the visiphone directories that could connect her at the flick of a microfilm button with any other nexus officer in the world, she felt she would find the purpose which she had temporarily lost. The almost ludicrous question which the uninspired bar butterfly had asked echoed in Natasha’s mind. Did it matter whether science was co-ordinated or not? Why couldn’t they get on with their own jobs? At one time she would have thought the question was too stupid to deserve an answer, and yet the more she thought about it the more she sensed an air of profundity far beyond the concept of the giggling girl who had given birth to the doubts. She looked up as the pavement reached a swivel intersection. In the distance along the skyline she saw the teeth of a great city, plasto glass, beryllium, concrete and steel, teeth raking up to bite the sky, a hungry city, an insatiable city. The roundabout carried her across the intersection and she stepped to the slower lane. Her office was scarcely five minutes ahead now, on this route. With strangely disturbed eyes, eyes that reflected the doubt that had been growing in her mind since her experience in the whispering corner, she glanced down side streets into which she had rarely looked before.
“What am I looking for?” she asked herself.
“Purpose,” came a gruff answer from deep down in her subconscious. “You’re looking for purpose, Natasha.”
At the end of a long intersection she noticed a surprisingly tall glass-and-concrete tower.
It occurred to her that she must have seen that tower before and yet, for some unaccountable reason, it was forcing itself upon her attention now with a persistence, a sinister persistence, that she had not experienced previously. The tower seemed to be attracting and repelling with almost perfectly balanced contradiction. Curiosity, the most valuable weapon in the mind of a nexus officer, was drawing her in the direction of the gaunt, forbidding-looking edifice. Just as curiosity sought to lead her to make a closer inspection of the tower, a kind of loathing, a hatred born of fear, urged her strongly in the opposite direction. Even at the speed of the slower pavement the tower was only in view for a matter of seconds. Yet, so powerful was the ambivalence of Natasha’s emotional reaction to it, even those few seconds came close to exhausting her physically and mentally. Curiosity won. At the next intersection Natasha performed a neat ‘U’ turn on the roundabout and travelled back to the point from which she had first spotted the building. The feeling that there was something vaguely sinister about that tall glass-and-concrete tower, increased as she approached.
She stepped down, like a reluctant fairy princess in a thousand-year-old epic, and as her feet left the last of the moving pavements she shuddered involuntarily. There were no doors at pavement level. She walked round a blank, forbidding security fence. Its old fashioned out-tilting, barbed-wire top looked as though it might have been there since the Twentieth Century. The building itself had the look of the late nineteen hundreds in every line, She reached the fourth side of the rectangular security fence. In twentieth century, faded lettering she read:
BUILDING 297.
KEEP OUT.
The words must have been painted by a hand that had been dead for a century. She walked round again, looking up at the tall, forbidding austerity of the glass and concrete. Now that she was no longer moving there was a strange, breathless sonorousness in this particular pedestrian precinct. As she strained her ears to pick up some faint murmur of sound from the weird building she thought she could detect a faint, regular mechanical noise, but whatever it was, was too vague to be analysed. On the shaded side of Building 297 Natasha noticed that occasional lights were flashing, behind the dust-grimed upper windows. She stood, hands on hips, feet slightly braced, looking up at the half lights behind the large, grimy old panes.
Something else moved behind the glass, and the nexus officer gave a little gasp of surprise. There was a face, one of the oldest, palest faces she had ever seen. It was fifty feet and more above her head, but their eyes met for an instant and then the tense, ancient features vanished with disconcerting suddenness …
Routine Enquiry
NATASHA stood. . .
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