“Good evening,” Hutchman said uncertainly. “I’m looking for accommodation, and I saw your sign…”

“Oh, yes?” The woman sounded surprised to hear that she had a sign. The boy eyed Hutchman warily from the folds of her skirt.

“Have you any rooms to let?” Hutchman looked beyond her into the dimly-lit hall, with its brown linoleum and dark stairway ascending into alien upper reaches of the house, and wished he could go home.

“We have a room, but my husband usually attends to the letting and he isn’t here right now.”

“That’s all right,” Hutchman said with relief. “I’ll try elsewhere.”

“I think it should be all right, though. Mr. Atwood will be home shortly.” She stood aside and gestured for him to enter. Hutchman went in. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet and there was a strong smell of floral air freshener.

“How long did you want to stay?” Mrs. Atwood asked.

“Until… .” Hutchman checked himself. “A couple of weeks or so.” He went upstairs to view the room which, predictably, was on the top floor. It was small but clean, and the bed had two mattresses, which suggested it could be comfortable if a trifle high. He inquired and found that he could have full board, consisting of three meals a day, and that Mrs. Atwood would take care of his laundry for a small extra charge. “This looks fine,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “I’ll take the room.”

“I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable here.” Mrs. Atwood touched her hair. “All my boys are very comfortable.”

Hutchman smiled. “I’ll bring up my case.”

There was a sound outside on the landing, and the small boy came into the room carrying Hutchman’s case.

“Geoffrey! You shouldn’t have… .” Mrs. Atwood turned to Hutchman. “He isn’t very well, you know. Asthma.”

“It’s empty,” Geoffrey asserted, nonchalantly swinging the case into the bed. “I can carry an empty case all right, Mum.”

“Ah” Hutchman met Mrs. Atwood’s eyes. “It isn’t completely empty, but most of my stuff is down in the car.”

She nodded. “Do you mind paying something in advance?”

“Of course not.” Hutchman separated three five-pound notes from the roll without taking it out of his pocket and handed them to her. As soon as she had gone he locked the door, noting with surprise that the key was bent. It was a slim, uncomplicated affair with a long shaft which in the region of the bend had a bluish tinge as though the metal had been heated and bent on purpose. Shaking his head in bafflement, Hutchman threw his jacket on the bed and walked around the little room, fighting off the homesickness which had begun to grip him again. He opened the room’s only window with difficulty and put his head out. The night air was raw, making him dizzy, producing a sensation curiously similar to that in a dream of flying. His head seemed to be dissociated from his body, hovering high in the darkness close to unfamiliar arrangements of gutters and pipes, slates and sills. All around and below him lighted windows glowed, some with drawn blinds or curtains, others affording glimpses into appalling, meaningless rooms. This physical situation — his head drifting disembodied and unseen, close to the walls of a canyon of nightmare — was no stranger than the matrix of horror his life had become. He knelt that way for a long time, until the cold had eaten into his bones and he was shivering violently, then closed the window and went to bed.

The room was to be his home for the next week, and already he wondered how he could possibly survive.

Ed Montefiore was young enough to have begun his working life in computers; old enough to have risen to the top of his nameless section of the Ministry of Defence.

The fact that he was known — as far as anybody in his position could be known — as a computer wizard was a matter of economics rather than specialized aptitude. He had an instinct, a talent, a gift which enabled him to fix any kind of machine. It did not matter if the particular design was new to him, it did not even matter if he was unaware of the machine’s purpose — if it was broken, he could lay his hands on it, commune with the ghosts of the men who had built that machine and all the others like it, and discover what was wrong. When Montefiore had found the fault he would correct it easily and quickly if he was in the mood to do so, at other times he would simply explain what needed to be done, then walk away satisfied. He had not been exercising his special ability for very long when he ceased physical repair work altogether. There was more money in finding and diagnosing faults than in putting them right.

And of all the fields in which his talents could be applied the computer business, Montefiore saw, was going to be the most lucrative. He spent several years troubleshooting for major consultancies, jetting across the world at an hour’s notice, curing computers or linked groups of computers of illnesses the resident engineering teams had been unable to deal with, accumulating money, and living like a prince between assignments.

It was just when the life was beginning to pall on him that the Ministry made its first oblique approaches concerning the MENTOR project. As an individual, Montefiore was repelled by the idea of a vast computer complex which held in its multiple-data banks every item of information — military, social, financial, criminal, industrial — which the government needed for the control of the country’s affairs. But as a man with a wild talent which demanded a new dimension of challenge he was able to throw himself into the project without reservation. He had no interest in the design or manufacturing work — MENTOR’s components were relatively conventional and became remarkable only in aggregate — but keeping the huge discrete body in coordinated good health had brought something like fulfilment. It had also brought him promotion, responsibility, and a certain kind of power. No human brain could absorb more than a minute fraction of the data stored by MENTOR but Montefiore was the only man with unlimited access, and he understood how to be selective. He knew everything that was worth knowing.

The item of knowledge uppermost in his mind, as he stood at the window of his office, was that something very big was happening. An hour earlier the Minister’s secretary had phoned in person with a simple message — Montefiore was to remain in his office until further contacted. There was nothing too unusual about the communication itself, but it had come through on the red telephone. Montefiore had once calculated that if his red telephone ever rang the odds would be that ICBMs would soon be climbing through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. McKenzie’s words had put his mind at ease to a certain extent. They had, however, left him with a sense of foreboding.

Montefiore was of medium height, with thick muscular shoulders, and a boyish face. His chin was small, but with a set which denoted determination rather than weakness. He surveyed himself in the mirror above the white-painted fireplace and gloomily resolved to drink less beer for a few weeks, then began to wonder if the ringing of the red telephone had presaged the end of his, and everybody’s, beer-drinking days. He went back to the window and was frowning down at the slow-moving tops of buses when his secretary came through on the intercom and announced that Mr. McKenzie and Brigadier Finch were on their way in. Finch was head of a small group of men whose official title was the Strategic Advisory Committee and who, among other things, were empowered to advise on the pressing of certain buttons. Montefiore was not even supposed to know of Finch’s connection with the SAC, and the pang of dismay the Brigadier’s name inspired made him wish he had preserved his ignorance.

The two men silently entered the room carrying metal-rimmed briefcases, shook hands with minimal formality. Both were “clients” of MENTOR’s unique information service and were well known to Montefiore. They invariably treated him with extreme courtesy but their very correctness always served to remind him that all the magics of his electronic cabal were powerless against the class barrier. He had a lower middle-class background, theirs was upper middle-class, and nothing was changed by the fact that nobody spoke of those things in the Britain of the Cockney emancipation. McKenzie, tall and florid, pointed at the randomizer switch on Montefiore’s desk. Montefiore nodded and moved the switch, activating an electronic device which would prevent even an ordinary telephone from functioning properly within its field. No recordings could be made of anything that was about to be said.