Read Arcadia for Free Online Page B

that he stabilised at about ten per cent overweight: enough to give him a more solid look without requiring frequent adjustments to the heart. Not for him either the dandyish ways of the modern or the austerity of scientific garb; he preferred the carefully crumpled look, harking back six decades to his youth when such things were briefly fashionable.
    He never talked loudly, but suffered no opposition. Anyone who annoyed him would soon enough find their assistants taken away, their budget cut. All done with a smile designed to make his victim feel somehow grateful the punishment hadn’t been worse.
    Part of his authority lay in ensuring that everything ran smoothly, so any sort of crisis damaged him; certainly, his appearance now caused a shiver of alarm to pass through the little meeting. He looked shaken; whatever had happened, they knew the moment he walked in that it was going to be bad.
    ‘Forgive me for disturbing your beauty sleep,’ he said. ‘Three hours ago a serious power surge caused electricity supplies in northern Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland to fail for 0.6 of a second.’
    Jack looked around him, wondering what it meant. Everyone else went suddenly still.
    ‘How much of a surge?’ one asked.
    ‘We’re still trying to get the precise figures.’
    ‘You are going to tell us it originated with us.’
    Hanslip nodded. ‘I am going to tell you exactly that. The official analysis is not yet in, but I am sure it came from here. Needless to say, I have already sent out a report denying it was anything to do with us, and demanding an apology from whoever was responsible.’
    ‘That’s one hell of a lot of power,’ a young man remarked, afterhe had goggled at the figures on the paper Hanslip handed round. He must have been fairly new, or he would have known Hanslip did not approve of any sort of swearing. ‘Are you sure it was us? How could it have happened?’
    ‘I am sure it was us. Otherwise I would not have disturbed your rest. As for what caused it, that will be your job. There is no need to find out who caused it. That, I fear, is obvious already.’
    Hanslip’s concern communicated itself to the rest of the meeting. ‘Time,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time.’ But bureaucracies move in their own stately way, however urgent the situation. The main result of the meeting was to form a committee. Several committees, in fact; one to analyse the data to find out what the power was used for, another to investigate how someone had managed to bypass some of the most sophisticated security systems on the planet. A third took charge of destroying all evidence implicating their institute. The checks necessary to establish that their troublesome star mathematician had indeed vanished were quickly enough performed.
    ‘A moment, Mr More,’ Hanslip said as the meeting broke up. Jack had not said a word throughout the discussion, nor had anyone else even looked at him. ‘I imagine you are wondering what you are doing here?’
    ‘Yes, but I decided that you would tell me soon enough, and would ignore anything I asked until you were ready.’
    ‘Well judged. I may need your assistance. The closure of this facility and all of us landing in jail is one of the better options open to us at the moment. A rapid and unorthodox response may be called for. That is your department.’
    ‘What exactly is so bad about a power surge?’
    Hanslip peered at him scornfully. ‘It blacked out a billion people, many of whom will have had panic attacks. There will undoubtedly have been many suicides and murders as a result of the chaos. We know of two airliners which crashed because all controls and backups shut down simultaneously. The death toll already is more than two thousand and rising. More to the point,our authority rests on the efficient management of society. It is a very serious disaster, and someone is going to be blamed for it.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘There will be a search for those