Arcadia

44

When Jack More left, Oldmanter sat alone, his mind turning over the little he had learned. It was certainly most unfortunate. The loss of Angela Meerson was a great setback. He had known of her for more than half a century, and had spotted her when she was still young. He had seen the extraordinary potential there, but also noticed the lack of discipline. He had doubted then whether he could bring out the best in her, especially when her abilities had been artificially enhanced. The intervention, which he had paid for, had worked well but had made her even more ungovernable. Once he had made an approach to recruit her, but she had refused absolutely. His reputation, for once, had been a disadvantage.

Instead, she had gone from second-rate organisations to third-rate ones, always creating some dispute and walking out, on one occasion resigning before she had even arrived to take up her position. Maybe she was a genius, but most people had long since concluded that she would never deliver anything of worth, that she would be one of the might-have-beens of science.

Perhaps so; but Oldmanter, whose success rested mainly on his attention to detail, tracked her erratic progress until she ended up in Hanslip’s outfit. A poor end indeed. Hanslip was never better than mediocre. He lacked the skill, the vision, the determination ever to create anything more than a minor operation. Only his vanity was larger than average.

Yet, somehow, he had allowed Meerson to flourish. He had left her alone and slowly news of her efforts began to be picked up by Oldmanter’s vast intelligence operation. The work on energy transmission, the early experiments. The theoretical underpinnings. They never got hold of much fine detail, but gathered enough to guess that something truly interesting was taking place on the island of Mull. Then Hanslip himself had approached and explained exactly what Meerson had done. He wanted a partnership, and thought his possession of the technology would match Oldmanter’s resources.

Hardly. Oldmanter had no partners, no collaborators. Hanslip’s audacity on its own was enough to merit a sharp lesson to remind the world who was truly in charge. Hanslip would, one way or another, hand over the technology. He would take what he was given in return, and that might not be much.

Still, what the man laid out was breathtaking in its ambition. Much of science now was dedicated to squeezing out extra resources, finding marginal improvements and efficiencies. Man could not go to the stars. Several centuries of effort and human ingenuity had got nowhere. Space was just too big, and no one wanted to set off on a journey so that their great-great-grandchildren could reap the dubious reward of life on some dead lump of rock a billion miles away.

On top of that, the idiots of the early period of exploration had filled near space with so much debris that they had created a new asteroid belt, all but impossible to get through. Mankind locked itself onto its own planet through sheer untidiness. Meanwhile, nothing stopped the constant expansion of humanity. Wars slowed things down a bit every now and then. Starvation, mass executions, birth control, all had been tried and had failed. As the amount of space to live in shrank, as the earth became exhausted, so the population continued to grow; now there were more than thirty billion people crammed onto a world which only supported and fed them through the constant, never-ending efforts of the elite, who organised and controlled everything with efficiency in mind. It had to be like that, otherwise chaos and collapse would result. Often enough programmes had been advanced to eliminate the useless population; sometimes they were even put into effect. They never worked. All that happened was that discontent rose, the renegades attracted more sympathisers and civil unrest increased to the point that the rulers’ control threatened to slip.

As Hanslip explained it, Meerson had swept all of this away with a simple question — why squeeze out more from what we have? Why not just get more of everything? She opened up a vista of infinity and eternity. Billions of years and billions of universes there for the taking. Even Oldmanter, used to vast power, could not have imagined something of such grandeur. Now that she had done so, he knew that he alone could make proper use of it. He wanted it, and so he decided to take it.

Besides, so his reasoning went, what if it fell into the wrong hands? There were millions of renegades in the world, whose appetite for destruction was insatiable. He had argued long and often that they should be dealt with once and for all, but still they flourished like weeds, and few really seemed to care. They were the ones who removed themselves and criticised from the sidelines, doubting and scorning the efforts of their superiors, exploiting every disaster or failing in order to undermine the well-being of the world’s society. They were the ones behind the riots, the terrorism, the strikes, the ones who sabotaged the factories to make some self-destructive point about liberty and freedom. As if people really wanted to be free and hungry.

What if they got hold of this technology? What if they withheld access to it until their demands were met? Worse still, what if they spread their stupidity like some virus across the universes? This discovery needed to be kept in the right hands. Colonists would have to be screened for obedience. If that was done, then Oldmanter could see in his mind the immense possibilities of world after world, each with vast untapped resources, trading with each other through channels which his organisation would control and tax. Each would specialise, each would produce efficiently and in unlimited quantities. But only if they were ruled by the best, and only if the populations did as they were told. Keeping control would be hard. Security would be the hardest task of all, and would require a huge investment.

He wished to give a last, great gift to humanity. He had worked and schemed for years, decades, to maintain order, to ensure that even those who could not see or understand their best interests were nonetheless governed by them. Sometimes, in councils and meetings, he operated through persuasion. At other times, with rivals and the masses, he used more direct methods.

He did not always get his way, of course not. But he was rarely defeated for ever. Thirty years ago he had proposed to end the toleration of renegades and dissidents. A single and thorough policy of elimination to dispose of people who produced little, contributed less and consumed far too much administrative time. For the benefit of the majority, the minority would have to go. He was defeated; one of his rare reverses. Now he wished to revisit the issue. All critics and dissidents would have to be removed before this new opportunity could be exploited safely, otherwise nothing would happen. There would be objections, proposals to amend his plans, claims that others should have their say.

When reports came in that Angela’s programme was getting close to the testing phase, Oldmanter had started to manoeuvre his way into winning control of the technology and found, to his surprise, that it was barely necessary. Hanslip actually came to him, dropping hints and proposals, talking of other interested parties, rival bidders. Well, let him convince himself of his genius at negotiation, if it pleased him and made him more malleable. The only thing that mattered was the result, and that was slowly dropping into his lap. He submitted to endless meetings but eventually lost patience and summoned Lucien Grange.

‘Go to Mull and wrap this one up, if you please. I can’t stand listening to that man any more.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Everything. The entire institute. That way we can hide what we are really interested in until we are ready. I don’t want the World Council demanding a say in how it is developed. I want to be sure that by the time anyone hears about it, it will be too late to challenge me. There’s a woman there called Meerson. You may remember her. Steer clear but make sure you secure her services, willingly given or not. She’s vital. Keep her team, get rid of everyone else.’

‘What about the terms? You’ve been talking about a fifty — fifty split. Is that still the case?’

‘Certainly not. Give Hanslip nothing if you can; that will teach him not to waste my time. You have the information needed to access the computers; copy the relevant documentation, get legal possession, then kick him out.’

That was the last anyone heard of Lucien Grange, apart from a brief message a week later saying that he had acquired the data and would be back the following day. The next thing Oldmanter knew was that there had been an almighty power surge across northern Europe that had caused chaos. In the outrage and confusion that followed, none had been more outraged and confused than Hanslip, who put out a furious demand with surprising speed that the people responsible be caught and punished immediately. Curious. Oldmanter tried to get hold of Grange to see what was going on but — nothing. He did not reply to messages, could not be tracked, and when Oldmanter asked Hanslip’s institute, he was told only that Grange had left the island of Mull and was no longer their responsibility. After that his calls went unanswered.

The tracking devices suggested that Grange had not left the island but, at the same time, there was no evidence he was still on it. They had simply stopped functioning, which could not happen. That made no sense, so Oldmanter sent some people to keep the island under surveillance. They picked up More leaving and hurrying south. More then confirmed that Angela was missing, and that data had been lost. So he watched, and saw More go to the Retreat. It didn’t take much investigation to work out why. He was going to contact Angela Meerson’s child, the result of the enhancement Oldmanter had organised for her eighteen years ago.

Oldmanter had only the faintest outline of what it meant, but he had enough to realise it was time to take command of the situation. He announced that Hanslip was a suspect in the power surge case, hinted strongly that he was in league with terrorist renegades and demanded that he surrender control of his institute. He gave him three hours to comply and mobilised his troops, which he placed at the disposal of the world community to eradicate the danger that had suddenly sprouted in their midst. What if, he said to his colleagues on the Council who contacted him, the attack on northern Europe was merely the first in a wave of attacks? A trial run before the real assault began?

At the same time he put out an alert for Jack More as the link between the institute and the terrorists. He had uncovered a monstrous plot of treachery and vowed to take the lead in punishing those responsible. If anyone had doubted the need to wipe out the Retreats, surely this hideous crime should sweep such qualms aside once and for all.