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interference of any kind – but I kept thinking of the thing I had seen in the morgue, the young woman who had been breathing water, and I realised there was no longer any way to tell who had been doing what.
    On one side of Science City there was a long, fairly steep hill running down to the River. I always went back that way because I could freewheel all the way down and then it was a long, but flat, ride out as far as University Avenue, after which it was downhill all the way home.
    I was freewheeling down the hill, thinking about women with gills and men with wings and wondering whether it was possible at all to give the Old Board a fair trial, and the next moment I was rolling along the road, the bike clattering to a halt somewhere ahead of me.
    I came to a stop and lay on my back, breathing hard. My chest hurt, and the back of my head, but I didn’t seem to be seriously injured, so I sat up and looked about me. I couldn’t see anything in the gloom.
    I got up and walked over to the bike. The handlebars were twisted round until they were parallel with the front wheel, which wasn’t so much of a problem. The problem was the rear wheel, which was bent entirely out of true.
    There was no way of fixing it. Not here, anyway. I picked it up and carried it over to the side of the road and dropped it in the long grass. Then I walked slowly back up the hill with my hands stretched out in front of me.
    About fifty feet further uphill, my palms encountered a rope strung taut across the road. I stood where I was for a little while, leaning against it, then I followed it off to one side until I found the tree it was tied to. I stood there thinking for quite a long time.
    Rope boobytraps were some of the least sophisticated, and oddly most-effective, antipersonnel devices in existence. They slowed down the advance of a group of people on bicycles, and if you were lucky you caught some of the unsuspecting vanguard and incapacitated or killed them outright. This one had been strung too low; it had caught me across the chest and bowled me off the bike rather than across the neck, killing me.
    No way to prove who had done it, of course, but it did cross my mind that Callum’s eager Students would know this was my favoured route home.
    I went back to the road and muttered one of Araminta’s favourite swearwords as I started to walk. There was a Residence on the way where I could borrow a bike, but this was still going to take me most of the night.
    “ Cockwomble ,” I said.
     
     
    3
     
    I NCLUDING MYSELF, THE New Board’s Intelligence Faculty comprised thirty-three persons. The thirty-third and newest member of the team was a sulky, slightly bovine young Student in a pair of greasy overalls. She was waiting outside my office when I arrived one morning a couple of days after my meeting with Callum.
    “Lou,” she said by way of introduction. She didn’t bother to get up from her chair, so I didn’t bother to offer to shake hands, and that established our relationship more or less immediately. “Got a message from the Chancellor’s office. Said you wanted to talk to me.”
    Well, at least I couldn’t complain that Rossiter wasted his time. “Did the message say what I wanted?”
    She shook her head as if she neither knew nor cared.
    “Would you like some tea?”
    “Black,” she told me. “Three sugars.”
    I unlocked my office door. “Come on in.”
    We had planned for the Admin Building to fall intact, and that was more or less how it had happened, apart from some smoke damage and the odd bloodstain, so the members of the New Board had been able to pick and choose which offices they wanted to occupy. I hadn’t had that luxury. My less-than-esteemed predecessor had installed secure direct telephone lines, combination-lock cupboards, and safes in the walls, floor and ceiling. It was the office of the Professor Of Intelligence, and I had inherited it.
    I had also inherited the large cat-shaped stain on the floorboards