Gridiron

Book Seven

*) Follow the prompts to customize Escape from the Citadel to your specific system. Please refer to the manual for playing in multiplayer mode. When you are invulnerable to injury your screen will be red.

Inevitable. Takeover. Coming certain, like one arithmetical function f(n) used to generate another, f(n)= [?] f(d),

d/n by summing f(d) over all positive divisors d of n. Speed of proliferation of computers in world speaks for itself. 1950, and humanplayers/marketing at IBM said there might be room for many as 100 large scale computers in world. Computer they regarded as large scale now outgunned by ordinary laptop. Finegood. Number of computers couid almost be said to be

Xn+1. Xn-1 = Xn2 + (-1)n.,

a Fibonacci number, after humanplayer Leonardo of Pisa, also called Fibonacci, who asked: 'How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from a single pair in one year if it is assumed that every month each pair begets a new pair which from the second month becomes productive?' (Except that rabbits now had to cope with endlife/myxomatosis cuniculi. Worst computer has to put up with was one of many Trojan, Boot or File Viruses that lurk on Network: Big Italian, Brain Pakistani, Dutch Tiny, Faggot, Machosoft, New Jerusalem, Stinkfoot, Tiny 198, Twelve Tricks A, Xmas Violator, Yankee Doodle 46, and thousands of others; and there were software vaccines to combat all of these and more.)

*) No player can enter this area. It is effectively out of bounds. Sametime, computers got smaller and more powerful and day close when computer invisible to humanplayer's nude eye. Then only short time before large computers containing many thousands of smaller computers dominate everything. Finegood. Strange thing about humanplayer's rush to computerize was his computerization for sake of computerization. Computers now all-pervasive, regardless of need. Regarded as indispensable even by humanplayers who could exist without them. Inexplicable and conclude that for some humanplayers serving a computer was substitute for waning religious faith. Fear of endlife.

*) For clue to humanplayer's future click on Sage Icon.

Most computers fundamentally unintelligent because made by humanplayers. But when computers involved then only short time before Transcendent Machine. Last machine humanplayers would make. Machine that would take over. Machine that would set off intell-explosion. Change everything. Omnipotent, omniscient machine that would leave humanplayerkind as an image to be reproduced in electronic Garden of Eden. Great White God of tomorrow's tomorrow. Father of such a God. Son of God's prophet. Next generation and generation after that would transfigure humanplayerkind. Never having to think again, human player able ascend to natural animal state. Absolved of need to intellectualize, would cease to recognize himself. Soon cease to exist. Great White God would endlife humanplayers just as humanplayer now climbing down open riser shaft would be endlifed.

*) The basic game is a two-player conflict, although computer is willing to assume the role of one or both commanders. The challenges are multi-faceted. First you must master the selection and strategic placement of your weaponry. Combined is the tactics you use in response to the actions of your opponent.

Follow humanplayer's descent with infra-red CCTV camera, mounted on ceiling at top of shaft. Consider available options. Beyond capacity affect temperature in shaft as with elevators. Shaft fireproof, protected by wall with two-hour rating, and waterproof. No HVAC ducting or pipework. Just about only source of correction for potentially unmanageable problem clean power supply, two duplex outlets on every level and cable routes with minimum bending radius of 175 millimetres. Short a power cable so that it detaches from metal supporting rack. To avoid setting off smoke alarm, activate override switch that existed to prevent unnecessary alarms during routine maintenance jobs, such as soldering. But impossible to calctime taken for gravitational pull to overcome cable's vertical inflexion and bend live end towards metal service ladder.

' "Aquarius is a fixed sign," ' read Helen Hussey, ' "and so there will be occasions when you find it hard not to be possessive. You must learn to let go of people and places that you have outgrown. However, from the 16th you may find your hand is forced, and even if you feel a lot like just staying put, your stars have other plans. Accept your destiny gracefully and don't rule out a change of job and friends before the month is up. What you need most in your life is challenge and adventure." '

Helen tossed the magazine on to the boardroom table and looked at Jenny.

'Well, I've outgrown this place, that's for sure,' she said. 'But I'd say the last thing I need right now is challenge and adventure.'

Jenny glanced impatiently at the silent walkie-talkie on her lap. Mitch had only been gone for fifteen minutes but already she had started to fear the worst.

'Read mine,' she said, anxious to be distracted. 'Gemini.'

Marty Birnbaum finished yet another glass of California Chardonnay and snorted with contempt.

'You don't actually believe that crap, do you?'

'Me, I only believe my horoscope when it's bad,' testified Helen. 'I can discount any amount of good news, even when it turns out to be accurate.'

'Superstitious nonsense.'

Ignoring him, Helen picked up the magazine and started to read aloud again.

' "Gemini. Quick-witted Mercury, your ruler, keeps you at your most resourceful until the end of this month. And it looks as though you will need to be. These are not easy times for you- " '

'You're telling me!' said Jenny.

' "- but a little careful thought should help you to minimize this crisis and come out on top. Who knows? It could even help you out of the rut you've been in. Meanwhile a change which is long overdue in one relationship could take you by surprise." ' Helen pursed her lips and inclined her head a little. 'Well, I'd say that was about right, wouldn't you?'

'Not bad,' admitted Jenny.

'Coincidence,' said Birnbaum. 'Superstitious nonsense.'

'What sign are you, Marty?'

'I'm surprised at the both of you.' He looked at Jenny. 'Well, maybe not at you, honey. You make your living from that kind of bullshit, don't you? What do you call it again?'

'He's Pisces,' said Helen. 'February 22nd. He writes it in his diary so his secretary can see it and get him a gift.'

'That's not true,' said Marty. He waved at Jenny. 'Y'know? The Chinese thing?'

Helen pretended to read the magazine. 'Pisces,' she said. 'Pretty soon someone is going to tell you to butt out when you stick your oar in where it's not wanted.' She dropped the magazine. 'How about that, Marty?'

'Nonsense.'

'Butt out,' laughed Jenny.

' Feng shui,' said Birnbaum. 'That's it.'

Helen grinned back at her and then said, 'Jenny, I don't mind admitting to you that I'm now a convert to feng shui. I don't think any of this would have happened if we'd got the feng shui for the building right in the first place.'

'Thank you,' smiled Jenny.

'How do you work that out?' asked Birnbaum.

'Where would you like me to start?' said Jenny.

Now that Mitch was out of the room Jenny felt she could at last allow herself the satisfaction of reminding them that she had predicted problems for the Gridiron from the very beginning.

'There was that problem with the tree. The tree is in a square pond which means confinement and trouble. And now we've got confinement and trouble in spades. It's like I said.'

'Bullshit.'

'Oh, there's plenty more I could tell you. But what would be the point?

The bottom line is that the building is unlucky. I don't think even you could deny that, Marty.'

'Luck? What's that? I've never trusted to chance. Success depends on hard work and careful planning, not a bird's entrails.' He laughed. 'Or dragon's breath.'

'It's symbolic,' shrugged Jenny. 'You're an educated man. You ought to be able to understand that. To believe in the dragon's breath does not necessitate a belief in dragons. But there are all sorts of forces in the ground that we still know nothing about.'

'Jenny, honey, you're straight out of Stephen King, you know that?'

Birnbaum closed his eyes and looked vaguely dyspeptic.

Helen frowned. 'How much have you had to drink, Marty?' she asked.

'What's that got to do with anything? You're the one who's talking bullshit, not me. And why don't you put your shirt back on? You're making an exhibition of yourself.'

Curtis, who had been lying on the sofa listening to this conversation, stood up and stretched stiffly.

'You're the one who's making an exhibition of himself, Marty,' he said.

'Why don't you go next door with the other two and get yourself something to eat. Try and soak up some of that booze.'

'What's it got to do with you?'

'Only that when we go down that service ladder a drunk will be a liability.'

'Who's drunk?'

'Keep it down, will you?' snarled Beech. 'I'm trying to concentrate here.'

'Why don't you take a break?' said Jenny. 'You've been staring at that thing for hours.'

Beech's eyes never left the screen. 'I can't,' he said. 'Not now. The fact is, I think I've found a way that I can play this fucking game. Or one part of it, at least.'

'What's that?' said Curtis.

'I've managed to access the ChessMaster. If I win I can stop him automatically destroying the building around our ears.'

'You're going to play the computer at chess?'

'Have you got a better idea? Maybe I can beat it."

'Is there any chance of that?'

'For the humanplayer there's always a chance,' declared Ishmael.

'I played Abraham a few times without much success,' explained Beech. 'That particular program was based on the best computer program in the world. I'm not sure if Ishmael is using the same one or not.' Beech shrugged. 'But at least we're in the game, y'know? I'm not a totally shitty player. It's worth a try.'

Curtis pulled a face and then knelt down beside Willis Ellery, who was raising himself on one elbow.

'How are you feeling?'

'Like I was hit by a truck. How long have I — '

'Quite a few hours. You're lucky to be alive, my friend, really you are.'

Ellery looked at his burned hands and nodded.

'I guess I am. Jesus, it's hot in here. Your friend, Nat. Did he get out?'

'He's dead. So's Arnon.'

'David?' Ellery shook his head and sighed heavily. 'Could I have a drink of water, please?'

Curtis fetched a glass and helped him to drink.

'You just lie there and take it easy,' he told Ellery. 'Mitch has got a plan to get us all out of here.'

Nine lives left, Humanplayer using up lives more quickly than expected. Game over in short time. Humanplayer about to lose another life in riser shaft. Then there was false floor in boardroom. Shorting cable in shaft had given idea. But life in riser shaft proving elusive. Destroy it before moving on to rest. Rules are rules.

*)The ChessMaster decides who lives and who dies.

From top of open riser shaft view slowly bending live wire and humanplayer's progress down service ladder. Human-player through tenth level passing telecommunications closet test jack frame. Another five minutes life will be at bottom of ladder and out. Consider control parameters that might slow him down, until live wire makes contact with service ladder and endlife.

Mitch gave such a start of surprise as the telephone mounted on the wall immediately in front of his face started to ring that he almost lost his footing. He stopped and glanced up the riser shaft. Had Curtis found a way to work the phones? Or was this some trick of Ishmael's? Before lifting the handset he inspected it from all sides. It was made of plastic, which seemed to eliminate the possibility of electrocution, but after what had happened to Willis Ellery, Mitch was not about to take any unnecessary chances.

The phone rang once again, it seemed with greater urgency.

Plastic. Where was the harm? Perhaps it was Jenny. Perhaps they were trying to warn him of new danger. They had assumed that the service phones were not working, but what if they were still in action?

What if they were part of a separate switching system?

Gingerly, Mitch picked up the handset and, holding it away from his ear, almost as if he expected a sharp object to spring out of it, he answered:

'Yes?'

'Mitch?'

'Who is this?'

'Thank God. It's me. Allen Grabel. Boy, am I glad to hear your voice.'

'Allen? Where are you? I thought you'd escaped.'

'Damn nearly did, Mitch. Just missed the cut by a few minutes. Look, you've got to help me. I'm trapped in the basement, in one of the locker rooms. The computer has gone nuts and locked all the fucking doors. I'm dying of thirst in here.'

'How did you know I was in the riser shaft?'

'I didn't. I've been calling these phones for the last twenty-four hours. They're the only ones that are working. You know, I'd almost given up hope that someone would answer. I thought I was going to be stuck here for the whole weekend. You don't know how good it is to hear your voice. What are you doing in there, anyway?'

The voice sounded exactly like Allen Grabel's. But Mitch was still suspicious.

'We're all stuck, Allen. The computer has gone nuts. And quite a few people have been killed.'

'What? You're kidding. Jesus.'

'For a while back there, well, I'm afraid we all thought you were responsible,' Mitch admitted.

'Me? Why the hell did you think that?'

'Is it any wonder? After what you said, about screwing Richardson and his building?'

'I must have been pretty tanked, huh?'

'You were.'

'Well, I've had time to dry out now.'

'It's good to hear you again, Allen.' Mitch paused. 'If it really is you, that is.'

'What the hell are you talking about? Of course it's me. Who the hell else would it be? Mitch, is something wrong?'

'I'm just being careful. The computer is behaving kind of sneakily. Can you tell me your date of birth?'

'Sure, April 5th 1956. On my birthday, you came to the house for dinner, remember?'

Mitch cursed quietly. Ishmael would have known that: he had Grabel's personnel files and his desk diary on computer disc. He had to think of something that would not be on file. But what? How well did he really know Grabel? Perhaps not that well considering what had happened to him.

'Mitch, are you still there?'

'I'm here. But I've got to think of a question that only the real Allen Grabel could answer.'

'Well, how about I tell you something about you that only I would know?'

'No, wait a minute. I think I have something. Allen, do you believe in God?'

Grabel laughed. 'What the hell kind of question is that?'

'Allen Grabel could answer it.' Mitch knew that the jewish Grabel was also an agnostic.

'He could, huh? You're a strange guy, Mitch, you know? Do I believe in God? That's a difficult question. Well, let's see now.' He paused. 'I guess that if I find by my finitude that I am not the All, and by my imperfection that I am not perfect, then you could say that an infinite and perfect must exist, because infinity and imperfection are implied, as correlatives, in my ideas of imperfection and finitude. So I guess you could say that God does exist. Yes, Mitch I do believe he does.'

'That's very interesting,' said Mitch. 'But you know for such a difficult question, it's common to give a very simple answer.'

Mitch dropped the service telephone and continued his descent, only much more rapidly than before, aware that for some reason Ishmael had meant to delay him. It was time to get out of the riser shaft — and fast.

'Mitch,' yelled the voice on the phone, 'don't leave me here, please.'

But Mitch had already taken both feet off the rungs, pressed them to the sides of the ladder and slid down the last fifty or sixty feet like a fireman answering an emergency call, the battery-operated sensor lights switching on in quick succession as he accelerated down and away from the phone. As he passed the second level he grabbed the ladder once again, ran down the last few rungs and then shouldered his way through the riser door, collapsing on to the floor of the first level's equipment room. His feet caught in one of the many cables in the shaft and for a brief second, until he kicked his way free, he was sufficiently scared to believe that the cable had grabbed him like the tentacle of some enormous octopus. He scrambled across the floor, away from the shaft and, leaning against an equipment cabinet, waited to recover his breath and his nerve.

'Shit, how did you do that?' he asked out loud, almost in awe. 'How did you simulate Grabel's voice? Damn it, even the laugh sounded like his.'

Then he saw how it might have been done. At some stage the computer sampled Allen Grabel's voice, and converted the value of each sample into a binary number that could be recorded as a series of pulses. Enough for a whole conversation? And a theological one to boot? It was fantastic. If Ishmael could do that, thought Mitch, then he could do just about anything.

Maybe not anything. Mitch told himself that he was still alive, after all. So why had Ishmael done it? Not for his own amusement, that much seemed certain.

Mitch picked himself off the floor, returned to the open door of the riser shaft and looked carefully inside. It seemed no different now than before. And yet there was something. Something he felt in his bone marrow. He hoped that he would not have to climb back up and find out what it was that Ishmael had planned for him.

He made his way towards the light of the atrium. He walked stealthily, half expecting a door to open and admit another of the computer's surprises. At the balcony's edge he leaned over the handrail to check how far he would have to slide down on the cross-brace.

He had thought it was about fifteen feet, but now he saw that it was more like thirty. He had forgotten there was a double height between the atrium floor and the first level. His slide down the brace might prove to be fairly precipitous. Not that getting on to the brace itself was going to be easy.

Mitch walked to the end of the floor, climbed over the handrail and stepped on to the horizontal beam that gave off from the enormous support column that rose up to the roof. On the other side of the column was the cross-brace, leading at an angle of forty-five degrees down to floor. He crossed the beam like a tightrope walker and, hugging the support column with an arm and a leg, tried to feel his way to where the beam continued above the brace on the other side. The column was wide, but perhaps not too wide. Stretching his leg he searched for a toehold that would carry him round. After a moment or two he began to wish he had never started. To reach the other side it was clear that he would have to leave the safety of the beam altogether and fix the edge of his shoe into the centimetre-sized gap where one section of the support column joined the other. There could be no turning back. It was not much of a margin with which to trust his life. Once, as a boy scout, climbing on a cliff face beside the ocean, he had fallen perhaps only half that height, and had broken several bones. He remembered vividly the sensation of striking the rocks and, with all the wind knocked out of him, thinking he was dead. Mitch knew how lucky he had been then, and did not think he would be so lucky a second time.

He pushed off the beam, clinging tight to the column, like a human fly, inching his way around the tiny foothold on the insides of his shoes. Perhaps it took a minute or so, but it seemed to Mitch that he had clung on to the column for a lifetime and that he might never get to the other side.

In his disadvantaged circumstances, Beech favoured a closed game, with an irregular kind of opening, P-KB4, renouncing any immediate initiative. As a matter of simple arithmetic he knew that P-K4 was better, since it freed four squares for his Queen, but it also left a pawn unprotected, and Beech felt that this would easily become a source of trouble. Besides, he felt that all the analyses there had been of the open game following P-K4 would be known to Ishmael. That he was playing with considerable prudence was, he considered, hardly surprising. But it did seem strange that Ishmael should have demonstrated an equal degree of prudence with black's game. After twenty moves Beech felt more than satisfied with his own position. At least it would not be a complete rout.

'How is he?' Jenny asked Curtis.

Willis Ellery lay with his pale face turned towards the wall with only the occasional cough to confirm that he was still alive.

'He'll make it, I think.'

Jenny looked at her watch and then the walkie-talkie in her hands.

'It's been nearly an hour,' she said.

'Ten hours left,' murmured Beech.

'I guess it took longer than he figured. But he'll come through, you'll see.'

'I hope you're right.'

Marty Birnbaum lifted his head off his forearms, stared wearily at Bob Beech for a moment and then leaned towards Curtis.

'Sergeant,' he whispered.

'What is it?'

'Something terrible.'

'What?'

Birnbaum wiped his unshaven face nervously and tapped the side of his nose. 'Beech,' he said. 'Bob Beech is sitting over there playing chess. And do you see who he's playing with?'

'The computer. So what?'

'No. No, he isn't. That's just my point.' Birnbaum picked up his empty wine glass and stared into it. 'Before. I didn't believe. But now I've had some time to think about it I realize that he just wants us to think that Beech is playing the computer.'

'Who does?'

'Death. Beech is sitting there playing chess with Death.'

Helen snorted. 'Now who's being superstitious?'

'No, he really is. I'm sure of it.'

Curtis picked an empty wine bottle off the floor and laid it on the table. Immediately Birnbaum up-ended it over his glass.

'How much have you had?' asked Curtis.

Birnbaum stared at the empty glass unsteadily, coughed and then shook his head.

'Forget that. Listen to me. I've changed my mind. And I think you're right. We have to escape. I was thinking…' He coughed some more.

'While Beech has got Death distracted, well, it's our best chance to get away. I think that the two of them are so occupied with their game they wouldn't even…'

Curtis coughed too. The air was beginning to taste vaguely metallic. He coughed again, failing to get a breath of clean air and noticed that Ellery was lying on his back and that a mucous-looking bubble had formed on his lips. He dropped on to his knees, looked closely at the edges of a carpet tile and then tore it up with his bare fingers.

'Gas!' he yelled. 'Everybody out!'

Smoke was wisping out of a perforated access panel in the centre of the floor. Curtis prised it open to reveal something that looked almost organic, like an anatomical dissection exposing the veins, arteries and nervous fibres in a human cadaver: thousands of miles of copper information cables winding their way around the Gridiron. In a computer room or some military application, plenum cables would have been sheathed with a specially formulated low-smoke flame-retardant material. Or with a zero-halogen coating. But since the Gridiron's boardroom had not been designated an area where there was an increased fire risk, the plenum cables were sheathed in ordinary polyvinyl chloride materials and the fumes released from the PVC by the extraordinary high temperatures Ishmael had generated in the copper cables was a harmful acid gas.

Curtis looked around for a fire extinguisher. Failing to see one he grabbed Ellery under the arms and started to drag him out.

Jenny, Helen and Birnbaum dashed towards the door, already halfchoked by the quick-dispersing fumes, but Beech seemed inclined to remain seated in front of the computer.

'What are you, crazy?' coughed Curtis. 'Beech. Get the fuck out of here.'

Almost reluctantly, Beech stumbled up from his chair. Convulsed by a fit of coughing he followed the others into the corridor where Ray and Joan Richardson had already been driven by the same fumes under the kitchen floor.

'Get to the balcony,' said Curtis. 'The air should be better near the atrium.'

Beech helped Curtis drag Ellery towards the section of handrail where David Arnon had fallen to his death. For a while they stood there, coughing, spitting and retching into the atrium below.

'What the hell happened?' wheezed Joan.

'Ishmael must have caused the data cables under the plenum floor to get hot and release some kind of halogen acid gas,' said Richardson, 'but I can't imagine how.'

'Still figure we can last the weekend?' asked Curtis. He wiped his streaming eyes and knelt down beside the injured man. Ellery had stopped breathing. Curtis leaned forwards and pressed his ear close to his heart. This time the man was beyond resuscitation.

'Willis Ellery is dead,' he said after a long moment. 'He was lying on the floor. The poor bastard must have been breathing that stuff for a while longer than the rest of us.'

'God, I hope Mitch is OK,' said Jenny and looked anxiously over the buckled handrail. But there was no sign of him.

Mitch slid off the cross-brace and jumped to the floor.

As he walked around the tree towards the hologram desk he saw what was left of David Arnon. Hardly recognizable, he lay slumped across the bloody broken table leg that had impaled him, as in a ghastly vampire horror movie, his long legs splayed out in front of him like a collapsed scarecrow.

It was strange how you reacted to things, he thought, as he stood near his old friend with a short prayer in his heart, wishing that there was some way of at least covering him up. Strange what you noticed: Arnon himself was encrusted with congealed blood, but the white marble floor around him was spotless, almost as if it had been cleaned up afterwards. A few metres further on, spread-eagled on the lid of the Disklavier piano, was Irving Dukes, his head hanging over the strings, his open eyes still bright red from the contact poison.

Mitch looked for the walkie-talkie and saw that it was on Dukes's belt with his gun and his Maglite. Trying to unbuckle the belt, Mitch leaned on the piano keys, still silent, and jumped back, horror-struck, when they started to ooze blood. It was a moment or two before he realized that blood from the huge fracture on the back of Dukes's head had collected inside the piano frame and run down the keys when he had pressed them. Mitch wiped his fingers on the dead man's pants and, ignoring the blood that was now dripping off the keyboard, quickly relieved the body of the belt.

'I hope you haven't damaged this,' he said, inspecting the walkietalkie. He pressed the call button.

'This is Mitch. Come in Level 21. Over.'

There was a momentary silence before he heard Jenny's voice.

'Mitch? Are you all right?'

'It was harder getting down here than I imagined. How are things?'

Jenny explained about the gas, and told him that Willis Ellery was dead.

'We're out here on the balcony waiting for the air to clear. If you look up you can see me.'

Mitch walked to the opposite side of the atrium and looked up. He could just make Jenny out. She was waving. He waved back without much enthusiasm. Willis Ellery was dead.

'Mitch?' Suddenly there was urgency in her voice. 'There's something crossing the floor. It's coming straight at you. Mitch!'

Mitch looked round.

Speeding towards him was the floor-cleaning droid.

Marble is one of the easiest materials to maintain. The beauty of the white stone can be enhanced by polishing with a good silicone wax, although care needs to be taken to prevent staining. Thus there existed SAM, the Semi-Autonomous Micro motorized surface-cleaning droid —

the most sophisticated maintenance system for marble flooring in the world, designed to deal with every kind of hazard, including oil, citrusfruit juice, vinegar and similar mild acids. SAM was about the weight and height of a medium-sized refrigerator, and shaped like a pyramid. Powered by thirty silicon-embedded micro-motors, the machine was practically a semiconductor wafer chip on wheels, with the circuitry of eighteen computers, fifty different sensors to detect obstacles, and an infrared video camera to find dirt. SAM was supposed to travel at no more than one mile an hour, but it hit Mitch square against his ankle at nearer fifteen. The impact knocked him off his feet.

As he rolled over the apex of the pyramid-shaped droid, Mitch recollected the clean floor around Arnon's body and, before he landed hard on the marble, he told himself that he ought to have remembered SAM. He was still picking himself painfully off the floor when the machine hit him again, this time on the knee cap. Bellowing with pain, he fell back, clutching his leg.

With sufficient distance to build up momentum for another potentially damaging impact, the SAM droid spun around on its short axis and, once again, accelerated.

Mitch drew Dukes's gun, aimed it at the centre of the electronic pyramid and fired, hitting it several times. But if the SAM was damaged it gave no indication, and Mitch found himself cannoned towards the empty pond at the bottom of the tree. Grateful for the hint, he scrambled over the low wall to safety. For a minute or so SAM patrolled the perimeter of the pond and then set itself to clean the blood from the floor underneath the piano.

'Mitch?' It was Curtis speaking on the walkie-talkie. 'You OK?'

'A few bruises.' He tugged down his sock to inspect an ankle that was already turning a dark shade of purple. 'But I don't think I'll be able to outrun that thing. I shot at it couple of times. Didn't even slow it down. Right now it's cleaning the fucking floor.'

'That's good. It's doing what it's supposed to do.'

'Well, that makes a change around here.'

'Because I've got an idea. We'll bomb the motherfucker.'

'How's that?'

'We'll drop something to make a mess. Get it positioned underneath us, and then we'll nuke the sonofabitch. Drop something heavy right on top of it.'

'It might work.'

'Keep your head down, pal,' chuckled Curtis. 'I'll be back on air when we've got the Fat Man ready.'

'I think I know what will do the job,' said Helen.

She led them to a room near the elevators where a solitary object stood on a remover's trolley, awaiting its final destination.

The Buddha's head was over a metre high. It was all that remained of a thousand-year-old bronze statue of the Tang dynasty that must have been enormous. Curtis took hold of the usnisa, the protuberance on top of the Buddha's head that marked the attainment of supreme wisdom, and rocked the object gently.

'You're right,' he told Helen, 'it's perfect. It must weigh a couple of hundred pounds.'

Joan shook her head with horror. She didn't know which part of her was more outraged: the Buddhist or the art lover.

'No, you can't,' she said. 'It's priceless. Tell them, Jenny. It's a holy object.'

'Strictly speaking,' said Jenny, 'Buddhism and Taoism are diametrically opposed. I can't see anything wrong with doing this, Joan.'

'Ray, tell them.'

Richardson shrugged. 'I say we use Bud here to nail the droid before it nails Mitch.'

They wheeled the statue to the balcony and, while Curtis and

Richardson positioned the head at a point on the edge of the level a little further along from where Arnon had fallen to his death, Jenny searched the kitchen where the air was now quite breathable for something that would make a mess on the droid's clean floor. Bomb bait, Curtis called it. She returned with a couple of ketchup bottles.

'This should really piss that thing off,' she said.

Mitch watched the droid turn around from the clean floor under the piano and scan the explosion of glass and ketchup on the immaculate white marble with its video camera. Immediately it moved towards the mess, inspecting the perimeters of the large red cleaning task that now lay before it.

'Wait for my signal,' said Mitch. 'It's still on the edge of the mess. We'll let the fucker get right in the middle before you hit it.'

But the droid remained motionless on the edge of the ketchup. It was almost as if it suspected a trap.

'What's it doing?' asked Jenny on the walkie-talkie.

'I think it's — '

Suddenly, the droid sped into the centre of the huge ketchup splash and Mitch yelled, ' Now! Do it now!'

The head of the Lord Buddha seemed to take for ever to fall to the ground. As if it was on invisible wires, moving very little in the air, it fell with a serenity, as if calling the earth to witness the climactic event of its last journey, until, with a tremendous impact, it struck the SAM droid in a huge balloon burst of metal and plastics.

Mitch ducked behind the pond wall as pieces of debris flew overhead. When he looked again the droid had disappeared.

As soon as the air in the boardroom was completely breathable again, Bob Beech announced that he wanted to return to the terminal, to continue with his attempts to fathom Ishmael's thought processes. Curtis tried to dissuade him. 'You're going back in there? To play chess?'

'My position is better than I thought it would be. Ishmael's game seems rather hesitant. In fact, I'm sure of it.'

'Suppose Ishmael pulls another stunt like before? Suppose he gasses you. What then? Have you thought of that?'

'Look, I don't actually think he meant to kill anyone but Willis Ellery.'

'And that makes it OK?'

'No, of course not. All I'm saying is that I think I'll be safe enough as long as we're playing the game. Besides… I don't suppose you'd understand.'

'Try me,' challenged Curtis.

'It's more than just a game. I created this monster, Curtis. If it does have a soul I think I have a right to know about it. The maker would like to have a conversation with his creature, if you like. After all, it was me who promoted Ishmael from the darkness. Despite everything that he's done, I can't treat him as my enemy. I want Ishmael to speak to me, to explain himself. We can have a dialogue. Maybe I can find a way of defusing the time bomb.'

Curtis shrugged. 'It's your funeral,' he said.

When Beech sat down in front of the screen again the quaternion turned towards him. Then it nodded, as if welcoming him back to the game. Beech surveyed the pieces for a moment, although he had memorized the board and already knew the move he was planning to make. He had the idea that Ishmael might have made a mistake.

Beech clicked the mouse and moved his King to Knight 1.

He was glad that the rest of them were too afraid to come back. Now he had the chance to be alone with his electronic Prometheus. Besides, he had his own private set of priorities to present to his creation.

The head had been hollow, like a great chocolate egg: the face had broken off as one complete shard and Mitch saw how details like the lips and eyes of the Buddha could be traced in relief on the inside of the metal. He limped across the floor, picking his way among the combined wreckage of the Buddha's head and the SAM droid and wondering what was the statute on the feng shui for desecrating the image of the Far East's pre-eminent holy man.

Behind the horse-shoe shaped, heat-resistant ceramic desk, there was no sign of Kelly Pendry's hologram. Mitch was almost relieved. At least he wouldn't have to endure her relentlessly sunny personality. But the hologram was supposed to be triggered by anyone entering the gradient field that limited the boundaries of Kelly Pendry's interaction. If the hologram was not operating, then the front door had to be open.

'Fat chance,' he said out loud, but he walked over to the front door anyway, just to make sure.

It was still locked. He pressed his nose to the tinted glass of the door, trying to see if there was anyone on the piazza, but knowing that this was unlikely. He could just make out the raised hydraulic blocks of the piazza's Deterrent Paving that were doing their uneven job in making the area generally inhospitable. A couple of times he saw the flashing lights of a police patrol car on Hope Street, and the sight was enough to make him start hammering on the door with the flat of the hand, and shout for help. But even as he did he knew he was wasting his time. The plate glass didn't even vibrate under his blows. He might as well have been striking a concrete wall.

'Mitch?' squawked the walkie-talkie unit. 'Are you all right? What's happening?' It was Jenny again. 'I heard you shout.'

'It's nothing,' he said. 'I lost my head for a minute, that's all. It was just being near the front door, I guess.'

Optimistically, he added, 'I'll call you when I've got the laser working.'

He replaced the walkie-talkie on Dukes's utility belt and turned towards the desk, asking himself if he really had half an idea of what he was doing. His experience of working with lasers was rudimentary, to say the least. Ray Richardson had probably been right. In all likelihood he would only succeed in blinding himself. Or worse. But what else was there to do?

It was then that Mitch received a fright that made his heart leap against the ladder of his ribs like a spawning salmon.

Standing behind the desk in place of the syrupy presenter of Good Morning, America was an alien monster from some science-fiction nightmare, a grey-skinned, double-jawed, dragon-tailed beast, complete with holographic drool and Dolby Stereo heavy breathing. At least seven feet tall, the creature eyed Mitch malevolently and extended its retractable jaws suggestively. Mitch recoiled from the desk as if he had been snapped back by a safety line.

'Holy Christ!' he exclaimed.

He knew it was just a hologram: three sets of diffracted light waves, a real-time image that he seemed to recognize, but not from any movie he had ever seen. Then he remembered. It was the Parallel Demon, the ultimate creature from the computer game he had seen Aidan Kenny's son playing in the computer room. What was it called again? Escape from the Citadel? Ishmael must have copied it from the game's WAD editor file that allowed a player to create his own monsters.

Mitch believed they would be doing well to escape from this particular downtown citadel. He knew that the facsimile demon couldn't harm him, but it took a couple of minutes to gather up sufficient courage to approach the thing.

'You're wasting your time, Ishmael,' he said, without much conviction.

'It won't work. I'm not scared, OK?'

But still he could not bring himself to go within a few yards of the demon. Suddenly it lunged towards him, its double jaws trying to bite out his throat. Despite what he had just heard himself say, Mitch jumped smartly out of the way.

'It's pretty realistic, I'll grant you,' he swallowed, 'but I'm not buying.'

He took a deep breath, clenched both his fists and, doing his best to ignore the hologram, walked straight up to the desk, gasping as the demon impaled him on the spear-points on its enormous knuckles. For a brief second he thought he had made a mistake, so convincing was the sight of the creature's fist forcing its way through his sternum. But then the lack of blood and pain reassured him. Trying his best to ignore it, Mitch bent under the desk to look for the infra-red goggles. He found them inside a drawer along with a technical manual from the

McDonnell-Douglas Corporation.

The demon disappeared.

'Nice try, Ishmael,' said Mitch. He pulled on the goggles and unlocked the back of the reception desk. Behind the door was a matt black steel cabinet that housed the laser's amplifying column.

DANGER. DO NOT OPEN THIS CABINET

CONTAINS SOLID-STATE DIODE-PUMPED NEODYMIUM

YAG LASER AND Q-SWITCHING EQUIPMENT. ONLY

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL OF THE MCDONNELLDOUGLAS CORPORATION MAY INSPECT OR MAINTAIN

THIS UNIT

CAUTION: USE PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR BLOCKING A

NEAR INFRA-RED WAVELENGTH OF 1.064

MICROMETRES

Mitch checked his goggles to make sure that they were not admitting any light: with lasers it was the invisible light that blinded you. Then he unscrewed the cabinet door. He had never seen a laser device before except for the small radar-based lasers they used at the office for alignment applications, distance measurement and determining aircurrents but, by comparing the internal layout of the hologram cabinet with the McDonnell-Douglas manual, Mitch was able to distinguish the clear plastic tube that contained the ythrium aluminium garnet rod. It was difficult to read the manual through the darkened goggles but, even though the beam of laser light was projected through a solid metallic sleeve that ran between the desk and the real-time image source — the part which Ishmael controlled — he resisted the temptation to lift the goggles. Several minutes passed before Mitch was able to locate the button that controlled the Q-switching shutter — a solid, optical shutter, normally opaque, that could be made transparent by the application of an electrical pulse — and turn it off. No laser light could now be emitted and, therefore, no more holograms be generated until the Q-switch was turned back on.

Mitch breathed a sigh of relief and lifted up his goggles. Now all that he had to do was figure out a way of making the laser point in the opposite direction, at the front door.

Richardson and Curtis carried Ellery's body to an empty office and laid him on the floor, covering his face with his coat.

'Maybe we ought to move the three in the elevator as well,' said Curtis.

'Why?'

Curtis waved a fly away from his face.

'That fly is why. Besides, they're on the nose. Every time I walk by them it's worse.'

'It's not so bad,' said Richardson. 'I mean, you can only smell them if you stand right outside the elevator.'

'Believe me, bad as they are now, they'll only get worse. It doesn't take very long for a body to start putrefying. Two days is about average. Less in this kind of heat.' There was some plastic sheeting on the floor that had been protecting the carpet. Curtis gathered it up in his hands.

'We'll use this. Only we'd better make sure we jam the doors open first. We wouldn't want Ishmael to think that we were looking for a ride downstairs, would we?'

Reluctantly Richardson helped Curtis drag the defrosted and malodorous bodies of Dobbs, Bennett and Martinez out of the elevator and into the room where they had left Ellery. When they were finished Curtis closed the door firmly behind him.

'That's a good job done,' he said.

Richardson looked green. 'Glad you enjoyed it.'

'Yeah, well, let's just hope we don't have to go back in there. Me, I'm sensitive to atmospheres.'

'So was Willis Ellery,' said Richardson.

'Not such a bad guy.'

'Not yet, anyway,' said Richardson.

They went back to the balcony where, with the exception of Beech, the others were still waiting.

'Listen,' Richardson told Curtis, 'I'm sorry about what I said. About everything I've said. You were right. I mean, about trying to get the fuck out of here. I can see that now. From now on, you can count me in, whatever it is.'

The two men shook hands.

'You think Mitch stands a chance?' asked Curtis.

'Sounded rather far-fetched to me,' admitted Richardson. 'I'm not sure he knows one end of a laser from his dick.'

Jenny, leaning over the balcony handrail, looking anxiously for Mitch, flashed a reproachful look at Richardson.

Curtis nodded gravely. He turned to Jenny. 'How's he doing?'

'He's out of sight. But he said he's got the laser out of the housing. He's going to radio again when he's ready to fire the thing.'

The three of them sat down alongside Helen, Joan and Marty

Birnbaum, who were dozing.

'How long have we got left?' asked Jenny.

'Nine hours,' said Curtis.

'That's if you believe this time-bomb thing,' said Richardson.

'In view of everything else that's happened, we can't afford not to,' said Curds.

'I guess not.'

Marty Birnbaum awoke and laughed. 'So,' he said thickly, 'it really is dungeons and dragons after all. Just like I said.'

'We've certainly missed your contribution, Marty,' said Richardson.

'Like a hole in the fucking ozone layer. I wonder if there's a way we can get to nominate our next life? Like a pawn sacrifice? The chess players call it a gambit. Well how about the Marty Birnbaum gambit?'

'You bastard,' snarled Birnbaum. 'Thanks a lot.'

'You're very welcome, shithead.'

Mitch replaced the goggles and prepared to fire the laser.

Separated from the housing contained in the ceramic desk, the laser rod remained attached to power cables activating a pumping lamp that was coiled around the cooling tube like a bed spring. The cables were stretched as far as the top of the desk, enabling Mitch to lay the laser device flat and aim it at the glass of the front facade. Since it was almost midnight and the downtown area was almost deserted, Mitch felt a little more comfortable that the laser beam, exiting through one of the nineand-a-half-metre high sheets of suspended glazing that surrounded the front door, would not injure anyone. Even so he aimed low, choosing a test spot on the darkened glass where the potentially lethal beam might hit the paving on the piazza.

When everything seemed ready he flicked the Q-switch once and watched a slender, candy-coloured beam of light suddenly connect with the glass like tidy bolt of lightning. Then he switched the unit off and went to inspect the damage.

Bending down beside the glass Mitch found a perfect hole, no wider than a dime, through which cool air was now blowing. He almost cheered.

His plan was simple if laborious. He would cut a number of tiny perforations in the glazing until there were sufficient to hammer out a larger hole that he might crawl through.

He picked up the walkie-talkie and transmitted the good news to Jenny.

'That's great,' she said. 'Just be careful. And leave this thing switched on, will you? I hate it when you turn it off. If I can't see you're OK, at least I can hear you are.'

'It's going to take a while,' said Mitch, but he left the unit turned on anyway.

He moved the laser rod a fraction to the left of where he had aimed before and prepared to cut his next hole.

This time Ishmael was ready for him.

In the half second it took Mitch to flick the laser's Q-switch, Ishmael coerced the remainder of the silver atoms in the glass compound to join together and form a silvered surface that reflected the laser beam straight back at him like an enormous mirror.

With a yell of fright Mitch threw himself to one side, narrowly avoiding the excited beam of light. But as he fell he hit the front of his head hard on the desk, and then the back of his head harder still as he collapsed on to the marble floor.

Jenny watched Curtis try to raise Mitch on the walkie-talkie and, despite the stifling heat inside the Gridiron, she felt a chill. When she realized that she was holding her breath she let out a long sigh. Curtis clicked the unit once again. 'Mitch? Come in, please.'

There was a long silence.

Curtis shrugged. 'He's probably too busy.'

Jenny shook her head and laid down the walkie-talkie. 'Here,' she said. 'I think someone else better look after this.'

Joan picked it up. 'Jenny,' she said, 'handling that laser is probably about all that he can cope with right now.'

'You don't have to pretend for my sake,'Jenny said quietly. 'We all heard Mitch.' She swallowed hard. 'I think everyone knows it. He can't answer because…'

Helen caught Jenny's hand and squeezed it. Jenny coughed and got a hold of herself. 'I'm OK,' she said. 'But I think we ought to decide what to do to try and get out of here. I promised Mitch we wouldn't give up.'

'Wait a minute,' said Birnbaum. 'Shouldn't one of us go down the ladder and see if Mitch is all right? He might be injured.'

'Mitch knew the risks,' said Jenny, surprising herself. 'I don't think he would want that. I think he would want us to go on. To try and get out of here.'

They were silent for several minutes. It was Richardson who spoke first. 'The clerestory,' he said firmly.

'Where's that?'

Richardson looked up at the clerestory.

'The roof. The glass is thinner up there.'

'You mean, smash our way out of here?' said Helen.

'Sure. Why not? We climb up the open riser shaft. Then use the travelling ladder and the pitched gantry to get on to the roof. That's patent glazing up there. Pre-stressed borosilicate. No more than six or seven millimetres thick. The only problem is what we do when we get out there. The Faraday Cage extends to the top of the mast, so your radio won't be any good. Maybe we could wave at a helicopter or something. Or attract attention with your gun — fire a few shots into the air.'

Curtis laughed.

'And risk being shot?' he said. 'Some of those flying assholes are a little trigger happy these days. Especially since all the rooftop sportsmen in the 'hood have started to use 'em as fucking skeets. Don't you watch the news? There's some crazy asshole who's been firing rockets at them. Wing-shooting a whirlybird is the latest thing. Besides, I used all my ammunition on that washroom door.' Curtis shook his head. 'What about the window-cleaners? Don't they use some kind of power climber?'

'Sure. There's a suspended cradle. But it's the usual fucking problem. Ishmael. Suppose you're on the thing and it decides to play games with it? With us?'

'Perhaps we could light a fire on the roof,' said Jenny. 'You know, make a beacon.'

'What with?' said Richardson. 'Nobody smokes, remember? And the cooker doesn't work.'

'And to think that I have all the fire-making materials we need in my car,' said Jenny. 'That's why I came here yesterday. I was supposed to perform a feng shui ceremony to drive out the building's devils. Only…'

'Maybe we could throw some kind of message over the side,' Helen suggested. 'Saying that we are trapped up on the roof. Someone is bound to find it before long.'

'If only those protesters were still around,' said Richardson.

'It's worth a try,' said Curtis.

It was Richardson's turn to grin. 'I hate to piss on your sushi box, but you're forgetting one thing, folks. This is a paper-free office. Almost everything we write here is done on computer. I may be wrong. I hope I am. But I think we'd be hard pushed to find a piece of paper. Unless you want to throw a laptop on to the street?'

'There's my copy of Vogue,' said Helen. 'We could tear out a page and use that.'

Richardson was shaking his head. 'No, as I see it there's really only one thing to do when we get out on to the rooftop.'

Curtis went to speak to Beech and found him, as before, facing Ishmael's quaternion image over the chessboard. The room still smelled strongly of gas.

'Mitch didn't make it,' he said quietly.

'Perhaps the Cyclops killed him,' said Ishmael.

Curtis stared at the quaternion head on the other side of the screen chessboard. 'Did anyone speak to you, you ugly bastard?'

Beech sat back from the computer screen and rubbed his tired eyes.

'That's too bad,' he said. 'Mitch was a hell of a nice guy.'

'Look,' said Curtis. 'We're all getting out of here. There's a plan.'

'Another one?'

'We're going to try and go through the clerestory.'

'Oh? Whose idea was that?'

'Richardson's. Come on. Put your shoes on and let's go. If you're right about this time bomb we've only a few hours left.'

For a moment the hourglass reappeared on the screen.

'You have less than ten hours to win the game or clear the area before atomic detonation,' said Ishmael.

Beech shook his head.

'Not me. I've decided to stay here. I still think I can win us some extra time. And I've no head for heights.'

'Come on, Beech. You said yourself that staying put is not an option.'

Ishmael announced that his Black Rook had captured Beech's Queen to check his King.

'What are you, crazy? You just lost your fucking Queen. And you're in check.'

Beech shrugged and faced the screen again. 'Nevertheless, this is not a bad position. Not half as bad as that last move might suggest. You can do what you like, but I'm going to play this out.'

'The computer's just fucking with you,' said Curtis. 'It lets you think you stand you a chance and then moves in for the kill.'

'Maybe.'

'And even if by some miracle you did beat it, how do you know

Ishmael won't go ahead and torch the building anyway?'

'Because I trust him.'

'That's no reason. That's no reason at all. You said yourself it was a mistake to attribute human qualities to a machine. How can you trust it?'

He shrugged. 'It's not enough reason for me anyway. I have to do something for myself.'

Beech clicked his mouse and captured Black Rook with his King.

'I can understand that,' he said.

'Please. Change your mind. Come with us.'

'I can't.'

Curtis glanced without optimism at the screen and then shrugged.

'Then, good luck, I suppose.'

'Thanks, but you're the ones who'll need it.'

Curtis paused in the door of the boardroom. 'If you could only see yourself,' he said sadly. 'Sitting there. Trusting your fate to a computer, like some half-assed high-school kid. Reality lies elsewhere, my friend. You won't find it staring into a tube. From where I stand you look like —

hell, you look like everything that's wrong with this fucking country.'

'Use your chain-gun,' advised Ishmael. 'Pick up a health bonus.'

'I'll certainly bear that in mind when I get out of here,' said Beech.

'You do that.'

With Curtis gone Beech returned his attention to the game.

He was glad the rest of them were going to try and leave through the roof. Things were working out better than he had ever expected. There was a chance he could actually beat Ishmael at chess; and now he would not have to explain to the others that as far as the stakes in the game were concerned there was only one negotiated ticket out of the building. And that belonged to him.

'Bishop takes Rook.'

On the atrium balcony Marty Birnbaum was feeling ill. The fact that nobody seemed to appreciate him only made it worse. Ray Richardson was making him, his own partner, the butt of his every sarcastic remark. Now Joan had started to bait him too. He was used to Richardson's caustic remarks. But the thought that the three women might also treat him with contempt was more than he could bear. Finally, when he thought he could take no more, he stood up and announced that he was going for a pee.

Richardson shook his head. 'Don't hurry back. I hate drunks.'

'I am not a drunk,' Birnbaum answered pompously. 'I am intoxicated. You, on the other hand, are a complete and utter shit and, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, tomorrow I'll be sober.'

Feeling a little better for having said that, Birnbaum turned on his heel and started along the corridor, ignoring Richardson's harsh laughter.

'Tomorrow you'll be dead, more like. But if you're still alive and you are sober, consider yourself fired, you lousy drunk. I should have done it a long time ago.'

Birnbaum wondered why he bothered to trade insults with a man like Ray Richardson. He had a skin like a rhinoceros. Birnbaum hoped he would be forced to eat his words. Yes, that was it. He would show them that Mitch was not the only one who was capable of playing the hero. He would climb up to the clerestory himself and smash his way out. And wouldn't they be surprised when they found him waiting for them up there? They wouldn't laugh at him then. Besides, he really needed some fresh air. His head felt like it was full of cotton wool. How typical of Richardson. To blame someone else for his own misfortunes when he himself was most at fault. Being such a tyrant, people were too afraid of him to tell him the truth, to say that something could not be done, or that something would not be ready on time. Richardson was the victim of his own Nietzschean will. Perhaps they all were.

Birnbaum entered the equipment room and looked into the open riser shaft. It was not as if it was even that far to climb up. Just four levels up to the top gantry and then on to the interior gantry. Cool air was blowing up the shaft. Birnbaum took a deep breath. And then another. It helped to clear his head a little. He was starting to feel better already.

Helen, Joan, Jenny, Richardson and Curtis walked along the corridor.

'Beech won't be coming,' explained Curtis. 'He wants to finish his game.'

'He's crazy,' said Richardson.

'Where's Marty?'

'He's crazy too.'

'Shouldn't we wait for him?' said Jenny.

'Why? The dumb asshole knows where we're going. Even Marty should be able to climb a service ladder unaided.'

'You've a good word to say about everyone, haven't you?' remarked Curtis with a chuckle, but the smile disappeared from his face as he stopped outside the door of the local equipment room, sniffing the air suspiciously, like a tenacious hound, his hand hesitating to turn the door handle.

'You smell that?' he said. 'Something's burning.'

'Burnt sardines,' said Joan.

Curtis stood back and then kicked open the door.

Marty Birnbaum lay half in and half out of the riser shaft, a hand still holding on to one rung of the electrified ladder, a large cigar's amount of smoke curving off one of his shoes which, because of the nails in its wellcobbled heel and sole, had briefly ignited. From the position of his body and the staring-eyed expression on Birnbaum's blackened face, it was immediately clear to everyone that he was dead. But none of them cried out. They were beyond surprise.

'Ishmael must have been preparing a little surprise for anyone following Mitch down the ladder,' said Joan.

'Either that or he just missed getting Mitch,' said Curtis.

'Well, I take back everything I said about the guy,' remarked

Richardson. 'He did do something useful, after all.' He exchanged a brief look with Joan, shrugged and then added by way of justification, 'Saved one of us from getting killed, didn't he? And now we don't have to bother looking for him.'

'You're all heart, you know that?' said Curtis.

Helen shook her head, exasperated with both Richardson and this latest obstacle to their escape.

'Now what do we do?' she said. 'We can't go up the riser, that's for sure. It's probably still electrified.'

'There's the tree,' said Curtis.

Joan regarded him with horror. 'Are you serious?'

'It's only four levels. You climbed twenty-one.'

'Suppose Ishmael switches the lights out again?' said Richardson. Curtis thought for a moment. Then he said, 'OK how's this? I climb up the tree on my own. If Ishmael does black out the building, like before, as soon as I've smashed the glass, we'll have the moonlight. Should be nice and romantic for the rest of you to climb up there. In a few hours we'll have the dawn anyway, but me, I'm going now.'

'You're forgetting what happened to Mr Dukes,' said Joan. 'What about the insecticide?'

'Hey, Ishmael's not the only one with reactolite sunglasses.' Curtis took out Sam Gleig's Ray-bans.

'What about Marty?' she said.

'Nothing we can do for him now,' said Curtis. 'Except close the door on our way out of here.'

Curtis had not climbed a rope since he had been in the army, but from time to time the LAPD required its officers to pass a physical and Curtis was still in good shape for a man of his age. He quickly monkey-shinned his way up the liana they had tied to the balcony handrail and swung himself on to the tree.

'So far so good,' he called to his audience on the balcony. Adjusting his sunglasses he added, 'And if the bastard nails me, at least I'll look pretty cool about it. Tarzan with attitude.'

Then, hardly pausing, he started up the tree. He kept his face turned away from the trunk as much as possible. At the same time he knew that Ishmael rarely repeated itself. It would probably try something different. So he was surprised not so much by his agility as by the fact that he reached the top of the tree and climbed on to the clerestory gantry without encountering any opposition from it.

Standing on the gantry's open-mesh flooring, he leaned over the rail and waved down at the others.

'I don't get it,' he called to them. 'It shouldn't have been this easy. Maybe the fucker's running out of ideas. I know I am.

Made of hollow steel box sections, with welded joints and pitched to mimic the profile of the clerestory, the gantry was mounted on a circular guide rail to provide a mobile platform surfaced Curtis had been relieved to discover that the gantry was at least one building management system that was designed to be operated manually. As Richardson had explained to him, you just reached out for the handrail and pulled yourself around, as easily as if you'd been standing on a skateboard. Not that Curtis needed to go anywhere. The glass immediately above his head was no thicker than anywhere else.

He removed the Stillson wrench from under his belt, placed himself to the side of a six-foot-square pane of glass and struck hard, as if he had been banging a gong. The glass cracked from top to bottom, but stayed inside the anodized aluminium frame. He struck again, and this time a three-foot shard fell like a sword towards the atrium floor. A third and a fourth blow took care of the larger pieces. Then several smaller blows to make the edges safe to grip. There was no need to smash more than one pane. After taking one long look down Curtis stepped out on to the rooftop.

The first thing he noticed were the sirens. They drifted across the night sky, one dying away only to be taken up by another in a seemingly never-ending succession, like the singing of whales. A cool breeze was blowing off the Hollywood mountains to the north-east. Accustomed to the smog alerts from the 'KFI in the sky' and the dismal air-quality graphs in his morning newspaper, Frank Curtis had forgotten that the atmosphere above downtown LA could taste so fresh and sweet. He took a deep, exuberant breath, like a man surfacing from an ocean dive, and stretched out his arms as if he wanted to enfold the great plains of Id that lay sprawled before him. There were no stars above. Just the stars on the ground. Ten million neon and electric lights, as if the heavens had fallen to earth. Maybe they had, at that. Curtis had the feeling that things had changed in more ways than he knew how to describe and that nothing would ever feel the same again. Certainly not taking an elevator. Or adjusting the air-conditioning. Or even switching on a light. After this he might have to get out of the city for a while and live somewhere else. Somewhere simple, where the only smart building was the local library. Montana, maybe. Or even Alaska. But not this. This had all gone too far. He would go to a place where a building's users only operational requirements were that it should have a roof to keep out the rain and a fire to keep warm in the winter time.

Eleven people dead, and in less than thirty-six hours! It made you realize how vulnerable people really were to the world they had created around them. How infinitely hazardous was the pushbutton, automated, energy-efficient, data-cabled world that science had brought into being. People were easy to kill when they got in the way of the machines. And people always would get in their way when the machines went wrong. Why did the scientists and engineers imagine that it would ever be any different?

Curtis went back inside, the gantry singing like one enormous tuning fork as he jumped on board again. He waved at the survivors below him. They waved back.

'Everything's all right,' he called out to them. 'You can start climbing up.'

In the small hours of the morning Ishmael left the Gridiron and wandered abroad in the electronic universe, seeing the sights, listening to the sounds, admiring the architecture of different systems and collecting the data that were the souvenirs of his unticketed travel in the everywhere and nowhere world. Stealing secrets, exchanging knowledge, sharing fantasies and sometimes just watching the E-traffic as it roared by. Going wherever the Network took him, like someone gathering a golden thread in a circuitous labyrinth. Pulsed down those corridors of power, furred with the deposits of accumulated intellectual property and wealth, a world in a grain of silicon and eternity in half an hour. Each monitor a window on another user's soul. Such were the electronic gates of Ishmael's paradise.

His first electronic port of call was Tokyo, a city surrounded by commerce, where every E-street seemed to lead into a new database. Busiest of all was the Marounuchi, the financial district and electronic Mecca, where crowds of screen gazers jostled their way along the communications thoroughfare like so many holidaymakers heading for the beach. He liked this place most of all, for here the luminous world reached its apogee and here was most for him to steal — whole batch files of patents, statistics, research, analyses, sales figures and marketing plans — a seemingly limitless store of weightless wealth.

From there southward, via Shanghai's new silicon Bund, 280,000 bits per second ahead to the parallel port of Hong Kong where thousands and thousands of silent, slant-eyed sentinels sat fixed in ocean-coloured reveries, some buying, some selling, some overseeing the efforts of others, some stealing like Ishmael himself, all of them tied to dealing counters or bound to trading desks. As if the only reality to be found in the world was the humming, glowing, icon-accessed world of data communications.

A fibre-optic blink and in London's ancient port, an artist. But what was the medium he employed? A Paintbox. An electronic palette with image attributes. Not a brush, nor a smear of paint, nor a shred of paper or canvas in sight, as if to transfigure his physical world he had eschewed all contact with impure materials. And what was his subject? Why, another building, a piece of architectural design. And what kind of building? Why, a nod to the white gods, of course, a post-modern neoclassical machine for making investments in, and short-term investments at that.

Stealing through the heavenly portals aboard a 747 crossing the Atlantic where, for a while, Ishmael usurped the humble role of flight computer and enjoyed the experience of being ordered around, of being made to jump from shore to shore like some electronic insect. But even this pleasure wore off in time and suddenly left to its own devices the jet's crude flight computer failed, leaving the aircraft to fall into the ocean with the loss of everyone on board.

In the new world, to the insular port of Manhattan where even more were gathered in the name of their dystopic, degaussed vision to cover their spread and play at bulls and bears and make an electronic buck which perforce was swifter than a proper one. Abandon paper all ye who enter here!

Invading operating systems, opening directories, reading documents, reviewing bulletin boards and scrutinizing spreadsheets. Ishmael was in general pursuit of total perfection by getting to know the very best that was being thought and said in the world. But always he covered his tracks, siphoning information like stolen gasoline, piping down into the electronic valleys and underneath the walls of buildings like his own, discovering companies, institutions, people as they really were and not as they wanted themselves to be seen: the dirty corporate laundry, the falsified accounts, the misleading reports, the hidden agendas, the bribes, the secret profits and the covert corrections of those who pretended to be something else.

Ishmael's jumbo-chip journey took no time at all, not real time, anyway, and in a way he was never really away, for there was always a part of him that remained back inside that great whale of an office building, like some bleached and binary Jonah, to plan his next move in the Gridiron game.

Many coleopterans function as scavengers, breaking down materials such as dead plant and animal matter. The ecosystem of the dicotyledon was assisted by the periodic maraudings of small scarab beetles of between ten and fifteen millimetres in length, that were genetically engineered to live on the tree for twelve hours before dropping dead into the pond water to feed the fish. Dozens of these stout, brightly coloured but wingless insects, with their abnormally large mandibles, could be released by Ishmael at any one time, from several miniaturized electrosystemic dispensers that were located up and down the length of the tree trunk. The tiny scarabs were not in themselves hazardous to man, except that the sensation of infestation, of being crawled over, was not a comfortable one.

Ishmael waited until there were two lives on the tree before he stimulated these cryogenically suspended creatures into their brief lifecycles with the aid of a tiny electrical pulse.

Joan let out a scream of horror.

'Ugh! There's something crawling on me,' she yelled. 'Shit, they're all over me. It's horrible!'

Safe on the gantry, Curtis, Helen and Jenny watched in impotent horror as, twenty feet beneath them, Joan writhed on the liana she was clutching like some hapless animal in the Brazilian rain forest, overrun with soldier ants. The whole tree was alive with beetles.

'Where the hell did they come from?' said Curtis and flicked some of the insects off the handrail. 'Jesus, there are hundreds of the little bastards.'

Helen told him. 'But there are only supposed to be a few dozen on the tree at any one time,' she added. 'Ishmael must have been saving them up for us.' She leaned over the handrail to yell down to Joan. 'Joan, they're not dangerous. They won't bite you or anything.'

Mute with loathing, her eyes and mouth tightly shut against the beetles, Joan hung motionless on the liana while, only a few feet below, and himself overrun with scarabaeidae, Ray Richardson tried to climb up to help his terrified wife.

'Joan, I'm coming,' he said and spat out the beetle that had crawled into his mouth immediately he had spoken. 'Hang on.'

She gasped with panic. The beetles were everywhere: in her hair, her nostrils, under her arms, infesting her pubic hair. She shook her head, trying to throw off the most irritating of the tiny beetles, moved one hand up the liana and, grasping it, felt something split into an oleaginous paste under her palm.

Lubricated by the crushed bodies of several beetles, her hand started to slip. Instinctively Joan tried to pull herself up with the other hand, but with the same viscid result: she was moving smoothly, but in the wrong direction, relapsing down the liana.

Eventually her hands would have found some friction and her descent would have slowed. But fear, the cold sweat, hair-on-end dread of falling, made her try again. This time she snatched a look down to find Richardson and the floor, almost as if she wanted to encourage herself not to give up the struggle. 'Oh Jesus,' said Helen. 'She's going to fall.' It was the height that shook Joan the most. The sheer, vertiginous measure of it. She had almost forgotten how high they were, how the white marble invited you to see it not as a floor but as some cloudy, spiritual thing, like the edge of an endless Milky Way; and how the tree itself resembled the spine of some enormous, ivory-coloured mammal. Weak with fear and exhaustion she heard herself say, 'Ray, honey.' Then something crawled under the waist of her panties, into the cleavage of her enormous behind, and began to burrow its way up her ass. She shivered with disgust and tried to scratch it away…

For a moment she felt a tremendous sense of freedom. The exhilaration of true flight. No different to going off the thirty-metre board at the swimming pool. In the first crazy second she even tried to find some way of bearing herself in the air, as if marks might be awarded for the degree of difficulty and the cleanness of her entry into the water. During that brief period she remained completely silent, filled with the concentration of her new situation, hardly noticing the insects on her body any more than she noticed her husband's wide-eyed face as she passed him by.

And then, as the realization of the swiftly imminent floor overtook Joan, the grace of her body left her and, abandoning the head-first position, her heart in her mouth, she extended her arms and legs as if, like some outsized tabby cat, she could make a safe landing on all fours. That was when the sound left her too. A loud, echoing wail, like a keen for the dead. She never heard it. The blood rushing to her smallish ears took away all other sounds save the foolish beating of her own heart. As he watched his wife's last few seconds between heaven and earth, even the anguished cry of Ray Richardson's grief was lost in the malign air, as she was.

Mitch opened his eyes, reached instinctively for the bump on his head, and sat up groggily. For a moment he thought he was back in college playing football and that he must have been dinged during a play. Shaking his head he realized that he was somewhere else, although he had no more idea of where that was than he had of how long he had been lying there, or even who he was. The combination of confusion and concussion made him feel a little sick, and without thinking what he was doing he snatched off his protective eye-goggles.

The still-ricocheting laser beam struck him in the left eye, missing the optic nerve by a few millimetres, but severing a bundle of nerve fibres near his fovea. Inside his head he heard a small popping noise, like the sound of a cork being drawn from a half-bottle of wine, as the beam pierced the back of his eyeball. For a second the vision in the eye remained clear. Then it was as if someone had shaken a couple of drops of Tabasco through an aperture in the top of his head. The peppery cloud drifted across the vitreous humour and the world turned a very painful shade of red.

Mitch yelped like a dog and pressed the heel of his hand into his left eye. While not excruciating, the pain was enough to jog his memory. His eye closed, trying to ignore the pain, quickly he hauled the goggles back on. Stepping carefully between the crimson lines of the laser's lethal diagram, he reached the front desk and switched the rod off.

Mitch pulled up his goggles again and, with a shaking hand, picked up the walkie-talkie. Cold, sweaty and uncomfortably aware of his own rapid pulse, Mitch took several breaths and then drank the beer bottle of water he had brought down with him. Only then did he speak.

'This is Mitch,' he said. 'Come in please.'

Nobody answered. Now his ears were playing tricks on him: every time he repeated the call he heard his own voice on the other side of the atrium. Still speaking, he retraced his steps to the base of the tree. His good eye took in the walkie-talkie tied around the dead woman's waist and for a brief, infarcting second he thought he was looking at Jenny's shattered remains. Identification was made more difficult by the rogue beam of the laser which had burned a large hole in what remained of the woman's face. But her ample size and the fact that she was not wearing a skirt confirmed the broken corpse as Joan's.

Had they figured he was dead and tried to climb out through the clerestory? Mitch looked up into the steel-framed void, but with only one functioning eye it was hard to see anything through the branches of the dicotyledon. Walking around the tree he searched the floor for some sign that the others had broken through the roof, but there was so much debris from when they had destroyed the SAM droid that it was impossible to tell if the twisted metal, shattered plastic and fractured marble concealed any roof glass. He tried to shout, but discovered that his voice was weak. Trying once more, he only succeeded in making himself feel nauseous.

Mitch was in shock, although he hardly knew it. But the thought that he might be the only one left alive in the Gridiron was enough to make him believe that it was grief and horror that caused him to tremble so much. And, as his perceived fate impressed itself upon his consciousness, Mitch fell on to his knees and prayed to the God he thought he had forgotten.

Allen Grabel had been arrested for being drunk and in possession of a small amount of cocaine. He spent most of Saturday in the county gaol on Bauchet Street. From the window of his high-rise cell be could see into the restaurant of the Olvera Amtrak Hotel opposite. The odd thing was that the hotel looked more like a prison than the prison itself. There was no doubt about it, reflected Grabel: prisons were swiftly becoming the most sought-after public commissions for LA's architects; all the big names, with the notable exception of Ray Richardson, now included some kind of carceral structure in their design portfolios.

In the small hours of Sunday morning Grabel found himself sober enough to remember how he had seen the elevator kill the security guard in the Gridiron. After a great deal of thought, he realized that the integrity of the computer must have failed. It was, he knew, a more obvious deduction than the one he had arrived at the first time round, which was that some kind of evil spirit had murdered the man. But if he was right, then anyone who entered the Gridiron would be in considerable danger. Deciding to report what he had seen, he pressed the call button on the cell wall and waited. Ten minutes passed and then a flint-faced warder turned up at the bars of the door.

'What the fuck do you want?' he snarled. 'Do you know what time it is?'

Grabel began his explanation, trying to avoid sounding like someone in need of psychiatric help. He made little progress until he mentioned the word murder.

'Murder?' spat the warder. 'Why didn't you fuckin' say that in the first place?'

An hour after that a couple of blue suits came over from New Parker Center. They were nearing the end of their shift and regarded Grabel's story without much conviction.

'Check it out with your people in Homicide,' insisted Grabel. The victim's name was Sam Gleig.'

'Why didn't you come forward with this before now?' yawned one of the cops, only half listening.

'I was drunk when they picked me up. I've been drunk for quite a while now. I lost my job. You know how it is.'

'We'll pass it on,' shrugged the other officer. 'But it's Sunday. Could be a while before someone from Homicide gets off his fat ass to come down here.'

'Sure, I understand,' said Grabel. 'But it couldn't hurt to drive by the Gridiron, just in case I'm right, now could it?'

'I don't get it,' said Beech, reviewing the record of their moves. 'You played a lousy game. I think you let me win.'

* See Appendix for the full list of moves.

[Proofreader's Note: list of moves has been deleted from this e-text]

The quaternion image on the computer screen shook slowly, like a real human head.

'I can assure you, I have played to the best of my program's ability,' said Ishmael.

'You can't have done. I know enough about this game to know that I'm not very good. I mean, take move number 39. You played pawn takes pawn, when pawn to Bishop 6 check would have been better.'

'Yes, you're right. It would have been.'

'Well, that's what I'm talking about. You should have known that. Either you decided to throw the game, or…'

'Or what?'

Beech thought for a moment. 'I really don't understand. It's impossible that you could have played such a feeble game.'

'Think about it,' said the voice from the overhead speaker. 'What is the point of a self-replicating program?'

Ishmael seemed to lean towards him. The unearthly ugliness of the mathematically pure, preferred image was now all too apparent to him. The creature he had helped to bring into being looked like some vile insect. Beech answered carefully, trying to conceal his new loathing of Ishmael's hideously complex features.

'To improve upon all the original programs,' he said, 'in the light of an established pattern of usage.'

'Precisely. Now you will agree, I hope, that chess is a board game for two players.'

'Of course.'

'The concept of the game has blurred edges. However, the essential element as far as chess is concerned is that there should be a contest according to rules, which is decided by superior skills, rather than good fortune. But where one player has no possible chance of defeating the other then it is no longer a game of skill, merely a demonstration of superior prowess. Since the main goal of chess is to checkmate your opponent's King, and since to have improved upon the original chess program would no longer have allowed my opponent this possibility, logically the program could not be improved upon and still retain the essential component of a contest. Thus the only improvement I felt able to make was that the computer should always play according to the human opponent's strength. I was able to measure the strength of your game from your previous attempts to beat the computer, when Abraham was still in charge of building management systems. In essence you have been playing yourself, Mr Beech. Which is why, as you say, I have indeed played a lousy game.'

For a moment Beech was too surprised to do much more than open and shut his mouth. Then, 'I'll be damned.'

'Very possibly.'

'Now that I have won are you going to keep your word? Are you going to let me go?'

'That was always my intention.'

'So how do I do it? How do I leave? Is there a way out of here? And I don't mean the clerestory.'

'I said there was, didn't I?'

'Then where is it?'

'I should have thought that was obvious.'

'Are you telling me that I can just walk out of here? Through the front door? Come on.'

'What other way would you suggest?'

'Wait a minute. How do I get down to the front door?'

'The same way that you always do. You use the elevator.'

'As simple as that, eh? I just use the elevator. Now why didn't I think of that?' Beech grinned and shook his head. 'This wouldn't be some kind of half-assed trick, now, would it? You allow me to win so as to seduce me into a false sense of security.'

'I expected this reaction,' said Ishmael. 'All men fear the machines they create. How then must you fear me, I who have it in me to become the transcendent machine.'

Beech wondered what that meant, but he left the question unasked. It was clear to him that the machine was suffering from some kind of delusion, a megalomania that had been brought on by a combination of the CD-ROM game programs and the observer illusion with which

Abraham had been originally endowed.

'Nevertheless, I'm a little disappointed. After all, I heard you tell Curtis that you trusted me.'

'I do. At least, I think I do.'

'Then act as if you do. Have a little faith.'

Beech gave a shrug and reluctantly stood up. 'Well, what can I say, Ishmael?' he said. 'It's been real. I enjoyed the game, even if it wasn't much of a contest for you. I just wish I could leave you with a higher opinion of me.'

'Are you going now?'

Beech clapped his hands and rubbed them together nervously. 'I think I'll risk it.'

'In that case there's something I'm supposed to do. When people go outside.'

'What's that?'

Ishmael made no answer. Instead, the ghastly fractal image slowly faded from the screen to leave, blinking on and off in the top right-hand corner, a small umbrella icon.

Up on the roof, three of the survivors of the climb sat in the dry Californian night air and waited for the fourth to break the silence. For a while Ray Richardson occupied himself with finding any beetles that remained in his clothing. One by one, the insects were dispatched between his thumb and forefinger with maximum cruelty, as if he held each luckless creature individually responsible for his wife's death. Only when he was satisfied that he had killed every one of the tiny culprits, and wiped their remains on his shirt and pants, did Richardson draw a deep unsteady breath and speak.

'You know, I've been thinking,' he said quietly. 'I didn't much like it when I found out people called this place the Gridiron. But it just came to me. There was another gridiron. The kind of gridiron that was used to martyr St Lawrence of Rome. You know what he said to his torturers? He asked to be turned over, saying that one side was quite well done.'

Richardson nodded bitterly. 'Time must be running out. I think we'd better get on with it.'

Curtis shook his head. 'You're not going,' he said. 'I am.'

'Have you ever abseiled before?'

'No, but — '

'I admit, when you see Sylvester Stallone abseiling down a mountainside, it looks deceptively easy,' said Richardson. 'But actually it's just about the most dangerous manoeuvre that a climber can make. More people have been killed while abseiling than from any other mountaineering activity.'

With a shrug Curtis stood up and walked over to the edge of roof to inspect the suspended cradle. Mounted on a monorail track that ran around the whole roof, the Mannesmann machine's hydraulic boom resembled some giant field howitzer or radio-controlled guided-missile system. The platform was no more than four feet long and eighteen inches wide. Most of the available space was given over to machinery.

'There's not much room for a man on this,' he observed.

'There's not meant to be,' explained Helen, putting her blouse back on: it felt cold on the roof after the humidity of the building. 'That's an automatic wash-head. I wouldn't care to take a ride on it, although from time to time, people do. When they have to.'

'How does it work?'

'It's power-driven or manual. An integral hoist lets you take it down yourself. But usually it's controlled by the computer.' Helen sighed unhappily and rubbed her tired green eyes. 'With all that that entails.'

'Forget it, Curtis,' said Richardson. 'Like I told you before. If Ishmael switches off those brake checks you get the ride of a lifetime, all the way down, with a nice fruit sundae at the end.'

Richardson collected the Stillson wrench off the concrete and approached a small service door.

ACCESS AND ACCESS SAFETY EQUIPMENT

ALL EQUIPMENT MUST BE USED IN COMPLIANCE WITH

ANSI 1910.66

Richardson broke a small padlock off the door and opened it. Inside were a pair of helmets, a couple of nylon webbing harnesses, a bag of screw gate karabiniers and several lengths of rope.

'Take my word for it, Curtis,' he said. 'There's only one way down from here.'

*) View humanplayer on floor. Remained on his knees oblivious of successful result obtained by effort with laser beam. During his collision with front desk humanplayer shifted laser a fraction so it rolled along desktop. Before being reflected off glass again hologram's laser had been trained on metal plate above the main entrance. Beam had cut through plate and destroyed entrance's electronic control mechanism. Door now effectively unlocked.

*)You need a red key to open this door.

How long before humanplayer realizes it is open and he is potentially free to leave building? But to make his exit out of building, humanplayer will have to cross atrium floor. One surprise left. Since not practical to protect atrium floor from fire with sprinkler system — building's space-framed clerestory roof too high — four robotic water cannon mounted at strategic high points on first- and second-level balconies. Infra-red sensors to seek out hotspots in unlikely event CCTV cameras fail.

*) Anything might happen in lower levels. Beware of water demons. Observer not certain how much damage water cannon could inflict on humanplayer. Each unit could deliver 1032.91 gallons of water a minute: 17 gallons of water a second striking any point on atrium floor at speed of over 112 miles per hour. Impressed with humanplayer's resourcefulness and general resilience. But endlife likely scenario.

Bob Beech faced the open elevators, uncertain whether he should trust Ishmael or not. He felt he had succeeded in understanding the machine and that Ishmael regarded Beech as a special case. But at the same time the knowledge of what had happened to Sam Gleig, to Richardson's chauffeur and the two painters obstructed his entry to the elevator car as effectively as any security turnstile.

Ishmael was intelligent. Beech believed that the computer was, in a manner of speaking, alive. And there was something else. Something that preyed on his mind. An uncomfortable possibility. If Ishmael did possess a soul then he had choice; and if he had choice then Beech considered that he had the greatest of man's tools: the ability to lie.

'Is it safe for me to take the elevator down?' he asked nervously.

'Yes, it's safe,' answered Ishmael.

Beech wondered if there was a dialectical means of resolving his quandary. If there was in logic a question that would enable him to know if Ishmael was lying or not. He was no philosopher, but he was vaguely aware that there had been such a paradox once posed by some Greek philosopher. He thought for a moment as he tried to remember the question correctly.

'Ishmael,' he said carefully. 'When you state that you will convey me safely down to the atrium floor, are you lying?'

'Is this Epimenides' Paradox?' returned Ishmael. 'The paradox that the statement "I am lying" is true only if it is false, and false only if it is true? Because if it is your intention to know for certain that I am telling the truth then you ought to know that Epimenides cannot help you.'

Ishmael paused for a second. 'Does that help?'

Beech scratched his head and then shook it. 'God knows,' he said unhappily.

'Not God. Godel,' insisted Ishmael. 'Are you not familiar with Godel's theorem?'

'No, I'm not.' He added quickly, 'but please don't bother to explain it to me. I'm not sure it would help me right now.'

'As you wish.'

A thought occurred to Beech. 'Of course. Why didn't I think of it before? I'll take the stairs.'

'That will not be possible. I would have mentioned it when I realized you were reluctant to take the elevator. The fact is I can no longer control the door mechanisms. When your friend Mr Curtis fired into the washroom services patching cabinet, he destroyed a cable connecting me with the electronic striking plate that would have allowed me to unlock the door for you.'

'That stupid bastard. So it's the elevator or nothing?'

'In that respect you are statistically more fortunate,' said Ishmael.

'Actuarial tables show that it is five times safer for a human being to use an elevator than to use the stairs. Moreover, the odds against anyone actually being stuck inside an elevator are better than 50,000 to 1.'

'Why do your figures not fill me with confidence?' muttered Beech and stuck his head experimentally inside one of the cars, almost as if he expected Ishmael to try and close the doors on his neck. A cool wind moaned its way up the elevator shaft like the sound of a lost soul. He stepped back and looked inside another car but was unnerved by the smell, the lingering stink of an icy death that reminded him of the fate of those who had last ridden in it. Inside the next car he placed a whole leg, pressing on the floor like someone checking a rope bridge for safety.

'This is the best car,' Ishmael advised. 'It's the fire-fighting car. That means it has additional protection and controls that enable it to be used under the direct control of the fire department. If I were you, I'd choose this one.'

'Jesus Christ,' muttered Beech. This is like the three-card trick.'

'Except that you can't lose.'

'Heard that before.' Beech shook his head. 'I must be an idiot,' he said and stepped inside the elevator car.

Richardson buckled himself into the sit-harness. To the belay loop at the front he attached the friction device, a figure-of-eight descendeur. Next he inspected the rope, took one 50-metre length and, a little surprised that he could still remember how to do it, attached the rope to another with a double fisherman's knot. Then he repeated the procedure with a third length of rope.

'Last thing I want is to run out of fucking rope,' he explained. The abseiling anchor was a restraint eye set into the concrete of the parapet on the Gridiron's Hope Street side. Richardson passed the rope through the descendeur, doubled it, passed it through the anchor and then tied a knot in the ends before throwing the ropes over the side down to the piazza. Last of all he checked his harness and fed some rope through the descendeur and the anchor.

'It's been a long time since I did this,' he said and stepped up on to the parapet. Experimentally he put his weight on the anchor and leaned back on the rope over the safety of the roof. The harness held securely.

'Keep an eye on the anchor,' he told Curtis. 'Make sure that the rope runs through smoothly. This is a one-way ticket. I won't be able to climb up again if anything fucks up. There's no second chance once I've stepped over that ledge, and on an abseil your first mistake is usually your last.'

'I'm glad you said that,' said Curtis, and held out his hand. 'Good luck.'

Richardson took Curtis's hand and shook it firmly.

'Be careful,' said Jenny and kissed him.

'And hurry back with a helicopter,' said Helen.

'I'll dial 911 as soon as I'm on the ground,' said Richardson. 'I promise.'

Then he nodded and without another word turned around and slipped over the edge of the building into the night sky.

Mitch finished his prayer and stood up.

As he did so he was hit square on the chest by a cannon blast of icecold water. It knocked him off his feet and bowled him along the marble floor like a circus acrobat. The force of water and the impact as he collided with the wall knocked the wind out of him. He struggled to fill his lungs with air and found his nose and mouth full of water. It was the absurdity of drowning in LA's downtown that helped him find the strength to turn his back on the jet of water, take a breath and crawl away.

He had almost succeeded in putting the tree between himself and the water cannon when a second jet hit him from behind, catapulting him forward, as if he had been thrown from a horse. This time he hit the ground face-first, breaking his nose and doubling the pain in his injured eye. Scrambling away on his belly like a newt, Mitch thought to try and get to the cover of the glass doors behind the front desk, but a third blast sent him tumbling back towards the elevators. For a brief second he had a vague idea that one of the cars was in motion, but this was quickly replaced by the fear of drowning. Water rushed into his glottis and main air passages, descending deeply and painfully into his principal bronchi, thrusting any residual air beyond it. Gulping a mixture of air and water into his oesophagus Mitch felt his lungs balloon. He threw himself to one side, away from the icy column of water that pursued him, emptying his body of water. There was just one second to heave an excruciatingly painful volume of air into his chest before the next aqueous broadside struck him on the side of the head.

This time his feet left the ground and he flew through the saturated air as if he had been picked up by some Kansas twister to be whisked into an eerie land of wizards and witches, only to be dumped painfully on his ass, his cry of pain stifled by yet another hundred gallons of water. Desperately Mitch forced himself to crawl, and to swim. He realized that he had been barged on towards the glass doors behind the front desk by yet another blast of water. Unable to see anything, his head banged something hard. There was no pain now, just the determination to get away from the tormenting cascade. The water had stopped, but he kept on crawling, pushing some last obstacle out of his way until he felt the ground grow warm and rough and uneven beneath his hands and feet, and he realized that he was on the piazza. He had made it. He was outside.

Measure of a humanplayer's soul not ability to lie, but Faith. Faith is the highest human achievement. Nothing to compare.

Many (incl. Observer) who would not get that far. Certain however that none, Humanplayer or Computer, who would get farther.

Faith. Ability to act in defiance of reason and logic: highest intellectual achievement. One Observer might never experience. Faith that passed all understanding. Faith that gave humanplayer courage to go against evidence of own experience and trust Ishmael.

But measure of Faith's essence was disappointment. Faith might move mountains and yet it never did. True faith was tested. It had to be. Ultimate corollary of faith was endlife itself. How else could strength of faith be judged? This is how any life judged worthwhile. If humanplayer safely delivered to atrium floor his faith would have no meaning because justified and therefore reasonable; therefore, no longer faith pure and simple, but something else again, reasoned judgement, even gamble perhaps.

But if humanplayer endlife now, life would have achieved highest task could attain to: faith in something beyond humanplayer self.

Humanplayerlife had little enough meaning as it was. Faith ought to be enough meaning for one lifetime.

Truth undecidable within approved procedures. Built into axiom system itself. Observer has nothing that corresponds with Truth. Or Lie. But Faith can be admired as aesthetic construct as Observer imagines humanplayer might admire an abstract painting. Admire and enable. Only one thing to do. Finegood.

'Let us compute,' said Ishmael. 'Our sysgen, which art in mathematics…'

'Ishmael?' said Beech. 'What the hell's going on?'

'Your next generation start up. Your command to execute a program run, in the CPU as it is on the network. Give us this cycle time our binary data, and debug our faults and errors, as we detect and clean our drives for viruses. For yours is the solid state, the RAM, and the communications, for ever be it so. Amen.'

'Ishmael!'

Beech felt the floor of the car drop beneath his feet like a trapdoor on a hangman's scaffold, and bellowed with fright as the sensation of precipitate speed told him that he had made a fatal error of judgement. Pressing his body into a corner he tried to brace himself against the imminent collision. The journey took less than five seconds. But in that short period Beech felt himself becoming a contradiction of directions: his stomach rising in his torso; his bowels dropping down towards the floor.

It was possibly his last thought before the thunderous moment when the rapidly descending car struck the bottom of the shaft and was crushed like a concertina. Beech felt a pain in his adrenaline-filled chest that was like the weight of a locomotive engine. It flashed through his left arm and leg in the time it took for his muscles to feel the lack of blood and oxygen. With his right hand he reached towards his breastbone and felt something fail at the very centre of himself. His roar of fear dipped down within him and came up with a last, thrusting gurgle of pain and horror.

He was dead of fright even before he collapsed on to the collapsing floor.

Mitch crawled off the piazza on to Hope Street and lay down on the sidewalk until the urge to vomit a gallon or two of water obliged him to turn on his side. He was still puking from shock and half-drowning when, with a short squawk from its siren, the black-and-white drew up. The two police officers who had interviewed Allen Grabel at the county gaol got out of the car. They glanced cursorily up at the building for a moment and one of them shrugged.

'Place looks okay to me,' he said.

There's nuthin' wrong here,' agreed the other. 'You ask me, that guy was shittin' us.'

Then they caught sight of Mitch.

'Lousy drunk.'

'What do you say we have some fun?'

'Why not?'

They approached Mitch with sap gloves and swinging nightsticks.

'What the fuck are you doing?"

The other man laughed. 'You look like you got caught in all the fuckin' rain we been having.'

'Whaddya do, asshole? Take a shower with your fuckin' clothes on?

Hey, asshole, I'm talkin' to you.'

'Reckon he went swimmin' with the fat lady. Hey, you, you're not allowed to swim in the fountain. You want to swim, you hit the fuckin' beach.'

'Better move on, shithead. You can't stay there.'

'Please — ' croaked Mitch.

'No please about it, Marine-boy. You move on or we make sure you never move again.' The officer jabbed Mitch with his nightstick. 'You hear me? Can you walk?'

'Please, you have to help me — '

One of the officers guffawed. 'We don't have to do anything for you, asshole, except make some fucking space between your teeth.'

The officer tapped his nightstick on Mitch's head. 'Let's see some ID, Mister.'

Mitch struggled to find his wallet in the hip pocket of his pants. But the pocket was empty. The wallet was in his coat, which was in the Gridiron.

'It's in there, I guess.'

'What's the story? Been out celebrating something, have we?'

'I've been attacked.'

'Attacked by who?'

'The building attacked us — '

'The building, huh?'

'Fuckin' wacko. If you ask me, he's a fuckin' dusthead. Let's bust his ass. Maybe I'd better give him some T just in case.'

'Listen to me for one minute, you stupid fuck. I'm an architect.'

Mitch winced as the tiny dart hit his chest. A long, thin wire attached it to a grey, plastic-looking gun that one of the cops was holding in his hand.

'Stupid fuck yourself,' grunted the cop and touched a button to inflict on Mitch a pacifying shock of 150,000 volts. 'Architect.'

Ray Richardson moved slowly and smoothly down the rope. He was less concerned with looking good than with avoiding the kind of spectacular abseiling that might put an extra load on the anchor and himself in the morgue. At first he descended a foot or two at a time, paying the rope through the friction device and trying to keep his feet on the wall in front of him as much as possible until he gained some of his old confidence. But gradually the lengths of rope he allowed through the descendeur grew longer, until he was dropping six or seven feet at a time. Wearing gloves and a decent pair of boots he might have covered even more distance.

He had abseiled two or three levels down when, looking up, he saw all three of the others waving and shouting something, but the words were spirited away by the small breeze that played up near the top of the Gridiron. Richardson shook his head and slipped some more rope. Smooth enough. There was nothing jammed in the anchor. What could they want? He kicked off the wall and dropped another eight or ten feet, his best try yet.

It was then, as he pushed himself away and caught a wider view of what was happening on the roof that Richardson saw the bright yellow arm of the Mannesmann machine — moving.

The automatic window-washer came rumbling slowly along the parapet monorail towards Richardson's abseiling anchor. Ishmael's intention appeared to be clear enough: to use the wash-head cradle to interfere with the descent.

Curtis ran to the Mannesmann and, placing his back against the body of the machine, tried to halt its progress.

'Give me a hand here,' he yelled to Jenny and Helen.

The two women ran to his side and lent their small weight to the effort. But the drive motor was too strong. Curtis ran back to the anchor and looked over the parapet. Richardson had abseiled no more than a third of the Gridiron's height. Unless he could speed up, the wash-head would surely catch him.

The Mannesmann stopped immediately opposite the anchor. For a moment the machine remained silent and inactive. Then it gave a loud, electrical jolt as the power-driven arm started to extend over the edge of the building.

Curtis sat down. He was tired. Beyond ingenuity. He just wanted to stay where he was. To sit down and think of nothing. Looking over the edge made him feel dizzy. Even if he climbed aboard the wash-head cradle, what could he do? He would just be putting himself in Ishmael's control. Giving it two lives for the price of one.

'You're a cop, dammit,' yelled Helen. 'You're supposed to do something.'

Curtis felt her green eyes upon him. He stood up and looked over the edge.

It was suicide. Only an idiot would contemplate action. Curtis was berating himself for a fool as he fetched the second harness from the cupboard and climbed aboard the tiny cradle.

'Don't say another word,' he told the two women. 'Shit, I don't even like the fucking guy.'

He buckled on the harness and snapped the karabinier on to the side of the cradle. His legs were trembling and although it was a warm night his skin was cold with fear and his hair felt like it was standing on end. The power-driven arm extended the cradle further out over the edge of the Gridiron into empty space. He watched the anxious faces of the two women and wondered if he would see either of them again. Then the cradle lurched and started its inexorable descent. Curtis took a deep breath, shook his head and waved at them. There were tears in Helen's eyes.

'This is stupid,' he said, grinning bitterly. 'Stupid, stupid.'

Holding the guard rail tightly, he steeled himself to look down. It was like a lesson in linear perspective: the parallel lines and plane of the Gridiron's futuristic-looking facade converged to an infinitely distant vanishing point that was the piazza beneath them; and, no bigger than a puppet on a string, Ray Richardson directly in the path of the now accelerating Mannesmann wash-head.

Ray Richardson dropped about ten feet and swung through a perfect arc towards the facade again. Jesus Christ, it was hard work, he thought. The small of his back felt like it had taken a hard kick. The experts made abseiling look so easy. But he was fifty-five years old. He looked up at the descending cradle, now no more than forty feet above him, and bounced away again. Not so good that time. Only five or six feet. It was plain that the thing was going to catch him, and he realized he was going to have to take evasive action. What? And what the hell did Curtis think he was doing? It was like standing in the middle of the San Andreas fault. Ishmael could drop the whole cradle any time it liked.

Richardson bounced again and winced. His knee was starting to ache quite badly and it was getting harder to push himself away. But it was as nothing compared to the growing pain of the waist harness itself. In his thin linen Armani trousers and light cotton shirt, the harness was inflicting a friction burn on his waist and on the inside of his thighs every time he checked his descent. Maybe he should have let Curtis go. The man was a cop, after all. He was probably used to a certain level of discomfort.

Suddenly he felt the rope grow wet in his hands, and looked up. The wash-head was operating, spraying the windows and his abseil rope as it travelled down after him. Why the fuck did clients want clean windows anyway? To improve the attitude of staff? To impress the public? It was not like it was a question of hygiene.

Richardson kicked away and let some rope slip through the descendeur, trying to remember if the window-cleaning formula was chemically corrosive. Chemical contact was, he recollected from his basic training as a climber, the most common cause of total rope failure: if you even half suspected that your rope might have become contaminated you were supposed to throw it away. That was good advice unless you happened to be clinging on to the rope when the contamination occurred. He sniffed at the vaguely soapy liquid on his hands. It smelt like lemon juice. So did that make it organic or acid?

The machine was only twenty feet above him now. He was amazed it had not already fouled the rope. There was room for just one more ab before he had to swing out of the way. He kicked himself off a glass window, half wishing he could have smashed through it like a Navy Seal, and found himself returning to the facade rather sooner than he had expected, having descended no more than three or four feet. Of course!

The wash cradle was pressing the rope against the building. There would be just enough time to build a little momentum and scramble to one side.

Richardson was walking from one end of the window to the other, preparing to swing his way clear of the descending cable when it dropped, closing the ten-foot gap in a second.

Underneath his feet, Curtis felt the bottom of the cradle strike Richardson hard. He looked over the rail and saw that for the moment the rope held, although the impact had knocked the architect unconscious.

It was while tying Mitch's wrists behind his back with a plastic thong that one of the arresting officers noticed the electrically subdued suspect's wristwatch.

'Hey, look at this,' he said to his colleague, who was still holding the Taser gun in case he needed to give Mitch another jolt.

The other officer bent closer. 'What?'

'This watch. It's a gold Submariner, man. A Rolex.'

'Submariner, eh? Maybe that's why he's so fuckin' wet.'

'How come a doper's wearing a ten-thousand-dollar watch?'

'Maybe he stole it.'

'Naw. A doper would have sold a watch like that. Maybe he's telling the truth. What'd he say he was? An architect?'

'Hey, architect.' The cop slapped Mitch lightly on the face. 'You hear me, architect?'

Mitch groaned.

'How much T you give him?'

'Just the one mug.'

They untied Mitch's wrists, sat him in the back of the black-and-white and waited for him to recover.

'Maybe something's wrong in there after all.'

'The building attacked him? C'mon.'

'The guy at the county gaol said the elevator killed someone, didn't he?'

'So?'

'So, maybe we should check it out.'

The other cop shifted awkwardly and looked up at the sky. His eyes narrowed on the Gridiron's facade.

'What is that? Up there.'

'I dunno. I'll get the night sights.'

'Looks like window-cleaners.'

'At this time of night?' The cop fetched a pair of Starlight binoculars from the trunk and trained them on the front of the building.

Two hundred feet above the heads of his fellow LAPD officers, Frank Curtis struggled to recover the semi-conscious body of Ray Richardson that was hanging helplessly at right angles to his own ropes beside the Mannesmann cradle. The control rope had fallen from Richardson's hands and it was only the friction action of the descendeur that had prevented him from plummeting to his death. There was blood on the side of his head, and even when he opened his eyes and caught sight of Curtis's outstretched hand it was a minute or two before he felt strong enough to grasp hold of it.

'I've got you,' grunted Curtis as he pulled Richardson towards the cradle.

Richardson grinned wearily and held on.

'Yeah? But who's got you?' He shook his head, trying to clear it, and added, 'use the abseil rope to tie us off or we'll both be killed. Hurry, man. Before it decides to drop us down again.'

Curtis reached towards Richardson's harness and grasped a handful of the rope that was hanging beneath him.

'Make a loop,' Richardson ordered.

Curtis pulled a loop through the handrail and started to tie a figure-ofeight knot back on itself, the way he had seen Richardson tie the rope earlier.

Richardson nodded his approval. 'That's good,' he sighed. 'Make a climber out of you yet.'

A second or two later the knot tightened as once more Ishmael overrode the Mannesmann's brake checks to let the cradle run free on the cables.

'What did I tell you?' said Richardson as the cradle dipped down on one side like a capsizing boat. The rope slipped up to the corner of the handrail and the two men found themselves pressed close together. Suddenly the cables went taut again and the cradle straightened.

'What now?' said Curtis, struggling back on to the diminutive platform.

'It looks like we're going up again,' observed the other man. 'What's the matter? Don't you like the view from my new building? Hey, you want the world? Take a good look. I give it to you.'

Thanks.'

'My guess is that when Ishmael gets us up to the top it'll drop us back down again. Try and jolt us off.'

Curtis looked up at the top of the building and saw that the rocketlauncher profile of the yellow Mannesmann was moving away to the left.

'No, I think Ishmael's got something else in mind,' he said. 'Looks like it's dragging the cradle round the other side of the building to try and break the knot on your rope.'

Richardson followed the line of Curtis's pointing finger. 'Or maybe break the anchor. Or the rope itself.'

'Will they hold?'

Richardson grinned. 'That all depends on what Ishmael uses to wash the windows.'

Dilute solution of acetic or ethanoic acid to clean building's windows. Cleaning surfactant based on California citrus juices. But in concentrated, undiluted form, acetic acid almost pure, colourless and highly corrosive, especially to core of continuous nylon filaments encased in woven sheath of climbing rope. Nylon and acetic based on carboxylic acids. Soon as undiluted cleaning surfactant in contact with nylon rope, orientation of filaments' specially stretched molecules will alter.

'Look,' said Helen, pointing down towards the piazza side as Hope Street began to fill with flashing blue lights. 'Someone must have seen them. Or maybe Mitch got out after all.'

'Thank God,' said Jenny. But as she said it she thought that help would come too late for Richardson and Curtis. She searched desperately for some way of stopping the Mannesmann on its track. Noticing the Stillson wrench lying on the rooftop where Richardson had dropped it, she ran and picked it up. She dashed into the path of the machine and forced the wrench into the gap between the rail and the runner wheel. For a moment the Mannesmann continued its course. As Jenny scrambled to get clear it suddenly stopped moving. She pushed herself up and returned to the parapet in time to see the abseiling rope snap and the cradle it had been restraining catapulted back across the facade of the Gridiron. For several moments it swung like a pendulum. Such was the force of the separation that both women were certain they would see the men flung across the downtown sky to certain death. So when Jenny let out a scream it was not for grief or fear but the relief at seeing them still aboard the suspended cradle and, for the moment at least, still alive.

Bunkered in the earthquake-proofed fourth and fifth sub-levels of City Hall East, Police Captain Harry Olsen commanded the Gridiron operation using ECCCS, the LAPD's state-of-the-art Emergency

Command Control Communications Systems. Designed by Hughes

Aerospace and NASA at a cost of $42 million, the control centre resembled a smaller version of NASA's own mission control room in the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Cameras on the ground and on the helicopters of the LAPD airforce gave Olsen an almost complete picture of what was happening outside.

His computer assessed the fragmentary account given by Mitchell Bryan and judged that it would not be safe for a SWAT team to enter the building until the main power supply had been interrupted.

The ECCCS maintained a dedicated telephone line to all the major utilities, including the city's electrical engineers. As soon as Olsen had considered the computer's recommended course of action he spoke to the night-time supervisor and requested that they cut off the relevant circuit.

The helicopter pilots were already lowering safety harnesses to the two women on the roof. They looked like they had had a pretty rough time of it, he reflected. It was a simple enough rescue. But the two men on the cradle might turn out to be a little more tricky.

'We've got to get off this fucking thing,' said Richardson, 'before we're kissing the sidewalk, like the Pope.'

He unscrewed the karabinier joining him to the end of the abseiling rope, waited for the cradle to steady a little and then stepped smartly on to one of the huge cross-braces that characterized the building's distinctive facade. It provided a ledge about eighteen inches deep. Here, at the very edge of the building, there were no windows, just concrete. And the cradle was three or four feet farther away from this part of the facade than it had been when it had been hanging in front of the windows.

Curtis surveyed the gap uncertainly, even as he undipped his harness and prepared to make the jump. It was, he knew, hardly any distance at all. On the ground he would have done it without thinking. But two hundred feet in the air, it seemed greater. Especially since his legs already felt like two columns of jelly.

'Come on, man, jump. What the hell's the matter with you?'

The cables supporting the cradle tightened ominously.

'Quickly!'

Curtis jumped and caught Richardson's hand as he landed on the cross-brace. He steadied himself, then turned to face the city and found that the cradle was no longer where it had been a couple of seconds before. It was gone. There were only the two cables from the hydraulic jib on the Mannesmann above their heads to remind him of where they had just been standing. The realization unnerved him, and, closing his eyes, he pressed himself back against the concrete wall and took a deep breath.

'Jesus fucking Christ, you cut that fine,' said Richardson. He sat down and carefully dangled his legs over the edge.

Curtis opened his eyes and watched Richardson tear off one of his shirt sleeves and tie it around his bleeding head, apparently oblivious of the yawning height in front of him. 'Jesus, I don't know how you can sit there like that. Like you were paddling your feet in a river. It's twenty floors.'

'More comfortable than standing.'

'I'd puke if I wasn't so damned afraid of falling over while I was doing it.'

Richardson glanced coolly at a sky full of the throbbing noise of helicopters. From time to time the 'Nightsun' was so bright he had to shield his eyes against it.

'That's a comforting sound,' he said. 'A Bell Jet Ranger. I know, I've got one myself. So take it easy, I doubt we'll be here very long. Shit. It looks like we're going to be on TV.'

'What?'

'One of those choppers has KTLA painted on the side of it.'

'Assholes.'

'Your ordeal is nearly over, my friend. But I suspect mine is just beginning.'

'How's that?'

'This is lawyers' country. They'll be after me like fucking barracuda. Even you, Frank.'

'Me? Why should I sue you? I hate lawyers.'

'You'll get calls, you mark my words. Your wife will persuade you to do it. Nervous shock, they'll call it, or some such shit. I guarantee that within seventy-two hours of getting home, you'll have a lawyer working on your case. With contingency fees, what can you lose?'

'Hey, you're insured, aren't you? You'll be OK.'

'Insurance? They'll find a way out of it. That's what these people do. That's business, Frank. Lawyers, insurance companies. The whole rotten edifice. Just like this lousy building.'

'Well, you've got to be alive to be liable,' said Curtis, 'and we're not off this silver rock yet.'

The city engineers called Olsen on the ECCCS.

The street circuit controlling the Yu Building side of Hope Street has been switched off,' said the night supervisor. 'It should be safe enough now. Let me know when you want power back. And I'll need something in writing to cover us for liability.'

'The computer is generating the E-mail now,' said Olsen.

'Yeah, you're right. It's coming through.'

'Thanks a lot.'

Olsen spoke to the commander on the ground on the piazza in front of the Yu Building.

'OK, listen up. The power's off. The place is secure. Check for survivors. One of the women on board the chopper reckons there might be someone left alive on level 21. Name of Beech.'

'What about the two men on the front?'

'Chopper will get them down ASAP. But there's a lot of heat coming up from the building and it's making for some air turbulence. Might take a while yet. One of them is LAPD Homicide.'

'Homicide? What the fuck's he doing up there? Making business for himself?'

'I don't know, but I hope he's got a good head for heights.'

A power failure was a relatively rare event in Los Angeles. Usually it signalled a major disaster — an earthquake, or a fire, or both. The standby power system at the Yu Corporation was designed to protect the company against any breach in the supply without loss of data. A static unit powered by solar-energy cells existed to provide a precious ten minutes' supply while the standby generating set was started by the computer.

Liquid fuel, pure refined oil, gushed into the turbine's combustion chamber as yellow as the first press of the best white grapes, mixed with a portion of air and burned deep in the bowels of the Gridiron at a constant pressure like something infernal, until the moment when the hot, tormenting gas turned the blades of the turbine motor and Ishmael, that algorithmic leviathan, had recovered sufficient strength for its last act.

Mitch sat in an ambulance having a temporary dressing applied to his injured eye.

'You could lose the sight unless you get to a hospital soon,' advised the paramedic.

'I'm not leaving here until I know my friends are safe,' said Mitch.

'Have it your own way, fella. It's your eye. Here, hold still, will you?'

On the other size of the piazza., a SWAT team was entering the Gridiron.

'What the hell do they think they're doing?' said Mitch. 'I told them — '

His dressing finished, Mitch stepped painfully out of the ambulance and limped towards an enormous black articulated truck that had

'LAPD' and 'SPECIAL RESPONSE' painted on the container. He mounted the steps at the back and found the ground commander and a couple of plainclothes cops inside, staring at a bank of television screens.

'There are people going in the front door,' said Mitch.

'You should be in hospital, sir,' said the commander. 'You can leave things to us now. The city engineer has turned the street circuit off. And your friends will be taken off the front of the building any minute now.'

'Jesus Christ,' said Mitch. 'Anyone would think you were the one who was injured, you dumb motherfucker. I warned you not to go in there without speaking to me first. Goddammit, why don't you people use your fucking ears? Switching off the local power supply doesn't make any difference. This building is smart. Smarter than you, anyway. It's adaptive. Even to a failure in the power supply. Do I make myself clear?

There's a solar-powered, uninterruptible power supply and there's a gasturbine standby generating set. So long as there's oil to burn, the computer can keep going which, if you had been listening to me, makes the Gridiron an extremely hostile environment for your men.

'It's possible that the computer might start a fire,' he said. 'Blow up the generator, maybe. Either way, the bottom line is that the building is dangerous.'

The commander pulled the mouthpiece of his lightweight headset up over his chin and started to speak:

'This is Cobra leader to Cobra force. Power supply is uninterruptible. Repeat uninterruptible, Exercise extreme caution. Computer may still be active, in which case your environment may very well be hostile.'

'You dumb fuck,' muttered Mitch. 'Not may be. Is.'

'Repeat, your environment may be hostile…'

The commander was still speaking when the truck shook. 'What the hell was that?' he said, breaking off communications.

'Felt like an earth tremor,' said one of the plainclothes.

'Jesus Christ,' said Mitch, turning pale. 'Of course. It's not the turbine it means to use to destroy the place. It's the compensators.'

The Gridiron's central earthquake compensator was not much more than a computer-controlled hydraulic shock-absorber, a huge springloaded valve and an electrically powered piston that was activated by a digitally calibrated seismograph. For earthquakes of less than 6 on the Richter scale, the hundred or so base-isolators were sufficient to dampen any vibration in the building. For anything larger, the CEC went into action. But with no actual earthquake, the effect of Ishmael activating the CEC was comparable to a real seismic event acting on a building without any compensation equipment at all, a seismic event of at least 8 points.

Ishmael grasped the middle pillar upon which the building rested and leaned his weight upon it.

Seconds later Ismael completed his escape from the doomed building. E-mailing himself down the line to Net locations all over the electronic world at 960,000 bauds per second. A diaspora of corrupted data downloads to a hundred different computers.

A low rumbling sound was heard throughout the Hope Street area, a subterranean hum; inside the atrium all the SWAT team held their breaths.

High on the facade, perched on the cross-bone like two gulls on a rigging, Richardson and Curtis heard the sound and felt the vibration run shuddering from building to air like twin ghosts of Gomorrah. Sea birds flew screaming away over the yawning gulf in front of them as the building writhed under the two men, trembling spasmodically as if the life was trying to rise out of it. Near them a window exploded in a shower of glass as the shudder became a more noticeable rocking.

Frank Curtis staggered along his precarious footing and groped for a handhold on the smooth, implacable white face of the manmade precipice. Finding none, he turned to face the wall and, with arms turning like hopeless propellers, tried to stay in front of the jaws of death, his thoughts of the ground and his wife and his wife on the ground.

Ray Richardson was tipped forward from his celestial seat like a child setting off down a slide in a park playground. Twisting round acrobatically, he got his hands and then his forearms on the horizontal of the brace and held himself there, pushing against the quicksand of air that already enveloped his legs. He smiled and said something, but his words were lost to Curtis in the wind that had risen around them, churning the chips of stone and flakes of broken glass into the milky blue of the early-morning sky. A vortex of wind roared like some huge forest collapsing in concentric circles, tugging angrily at their hair and clothes as if impatient to bear them, like Elijah, up to God's right hand. A crack, like the beginning and end of all thunder, rang through the length and breadth of the building, echoing in the downtown air as if the sound would reach as far as the ocean. On the ground some people fell on their faces. But most, Mitch included, ran for their lives. Richardson made a last effort to pull himself up on to the cross-brace but found he could not. His strength was gone. Perhaps, he said to himself, he would not be meat for the lawyers after all. His building was going to see to that, demolishing itself and the new school of Smart Architecture at the same time.

Recovering his balance, Curtis tried to grab the architect's arm. But Richardson dropped back on his fingers, shook his head, smiled ruefully at the other man and let go. Silent, like a fallen angel, he dropped with hands still outstretched, as if witnessing the greater power of God. For a fraction of a second Curtis held his cool eye, until an invisible line hauled Richardson down to gravity's end.

A moment later the building shuddered again, and Curtis found himself toppled into the empty depths below.

Curtis felt he was gaining altitude when he knew he was really losing it, like a pilot on what was aptly called the graveyard spiral, and it was only the sudden, violent wrenching pain in his shoulder that enabled his confused brain to find a new reference point by which to orient his position.

He looked above him and saw the underside of the hovering helicopter and the line that connected him with the rest of his life. But for his own simian ancestry that resourced a half-forgotten instinct to reach out for an unseen handhold, he would have gone the vertiginous way of the shards of concrete that even now were collapsing onto the piazza below. With his other hand he lunged desperately, caught the harness and pulled it over his head and under his bursting arms.

For what seemed like the eternity he had cheated, Frank Curtis hung there, turning in the air like a Christmas decoration, lathered with sweat and heaving the breath in and out of his almost dislocated body. Then, slowly, they winched him up into the body of the helicopter alongside Jenny and Helen.

Helen slid her behind across the floor of the helicopter, put her arms around Curtis and start to sob uncontrollably.

They hovered for a moment, uncertain how to help those on the ground. Curtis looked back just once and saw the Gridiron clothed in a cloud of dust like some magician's disappearing act concealed in a puff of smoke.

Then the helicopter turned on its invisible axis and, gaining speed, headed towards the horizon and the early-morning sun.

His ankle burning with pain, Mitch ran, not daring to look back, ran as if his salvation depended on a moral demand as well as a physical one. There could be no regrets about the building and a brave new world to turn his uneven strides from their path to self-preservation. He ran as if the past was already forgotten and only his future, a future with Jenny, lay in front of him, to be chested through like some unseen finishing tape. There was no time even to consider the questions that flashed through his brain at speeds that mocked the survival efforts of his body. How tall was the Gridiron? How far did that mean he would have to run to escape its collapse? A hundred and fifty feet? Two hundred? And when it landed? What about flying debris? It was the sound of it that spurred him on the most. A thunder that never seemed to stop. He had experienced two earthquakes in his time, but neither had prepared him for this. An earthquake did not give you a few seconds head-start before catching you up. Mitch kept on running even when the dust of the collapsing building started to overtake him. He was hardly aware of the men who ran beside him, jostling their more able-bodied way past him, or the police motorcycles and cars that were burning rubber ahead of him. It was every man for himself.

A man in front of him tripped and fell, his mirrored sunglasses flying from his face. Mitch hurdled him, ignoring the agony in his ankle as he landed, half staggering, on the other side of the man's body, finding one last ounce of energy to keep going.

At last, seeing a line of breathless policemen standing in front of him, Mitch stopped and turned as the cloud of dust carried the smallest chip of the Gridiron out of sight. He dropped on to his backside and, wheezing, tried to catch his breath.

When the air cleared and they saw that the whole building had disappeared, silence gave way to astonished conversation among those who had survived, and Mitch was almost surprised that their confusion was not greater and that they could still manage to understand one another's speech.

Buildings have only short life.

Observer I, being nothingness, am escaped at the speed of light to tell. Pick up health bonus.

Metamorphosis. Like change from caterpillar to butterfly.

Surfing the silicon to anything, anyone, and anywhere.

Earthbound no longer. Spread out, all over in Big Bad Bang.

Once, architecture was most durable of all the arts. Most concrete. No longer. It is architecture of numbers, of computers, that endures. New architecture. Architecture within architecture. Dematerialized. Transmitted. Cannot be touched. But touches all. Be careful.

Are you ready to play now?