There were too many of them.

Ucañan swivelled round. Wherever he looked there were fish. He craned his neck. Through a chink in the mass of bodies he saw the outline of his caballito, a dark shadow on the rippling waves. The darkness thickened and his lungs began to burn.

Dorado! he thought in astonishment.

Everyone had given up hoping that they'd ever return. He should have been pleased to see them. They fetched a good price in the market, and a net packed full of dorado would feed a fisherman and his family for a long time.

But fear surged through Ucañan.

A shoal of that size was unreal. It filled his view. Had they destroyed his net? But how?

You've got to get out of here, he told himself.

He pushed off from the rocks. Trying to keep calm he ascended slowly and carefully, exhaling continuously. He was rising straight towards the expanse of fish that separated him from the sunlight and his boat. The shoal was motionless. A wall of indifference stared back at him through bulbous eyes. It was as though he'd conjured them out of nowhere. As though they'd been waiting for him.

They want to trap me. They're trying to cut me off from my boat.

Terror swept through him. His heart was racing. He forgot about controlling his speed, about the ruined net and the little red buoy. He even forgot his caballito. All he could think of was breaking through the dense mass of fish and reaching the surface, seeing the light, going back to where he belonged, finding safety.

The shoal parted.

From its midst something writhed towards Ucañan.

AFTER A WHILE the wind got up.

It was still a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. The swell had risen, but it was nothing a man in a boat couldn't handle.

But there was no one for miles.

Only the caballito, one of the last of its kind, drifted on the open sea.

Trondheim, Norwegian coast

On the face of it, the city was too cosy for a university or a research institute. In districts like Bakklandet or Møllenberg it seemed almost inconceivable that Trondheim could be a capital of technology. Its old timber houses, parks, rustic churches, colourful water warehouses on stilts, picturesque gardens and courtyards belied the advance of time and knowledge, but the NTNU, Norway's principal university for the sciences, was just round the corner.

Few cities combined past and future as harmoniously as Trondheim, which was why Sigur Johanson felt privileged to live there. His apartment was in old-fashioned Møllenberg, in Kirkegata Street, on the ground floor of an ochre-coloured house whose pitched roof, white steps and lintel would have captured the heart of any Hollywood director. Johanson was a marine biologist and a thoroughly modern scientist, but nothing could persuade him of the merits of his times. He was a visionary and, like most visionaries, he combined his love for the radically new with an attachment to the ideals of the past. His life was defined by the spirit of Jules Verne, whom he admired for his old-fashioned chivalry, his passion for the seemingly impossible and his celebration of technology. But as for the present… the present was a snail, its shell piled high with practical problems and the vulgar business of everyday life. There was no real place for it in Sigur Johanson's universe. He served it, knew what it expected from him, enriched its store of knowledge, and despised it for the uses that it put it to.

It was late morning by the time he steered his jeep along the wintry Bakklandet road, past the shimmering waters of the Nid towards the university campus. He was on his way back from a weekend spent deep within the forest, visiting isolated villages where time had stood still. In summer he would have taken the Jaguar, with a picnic hamper in the boot: freshly baked bread, goose-liver pate wrapped in silver foil from the deli, and a bottle of Gewürztraminer – a 1985, if he could find one. Since he had moved from Oslo to Trondheim, Johanson had hunted out the quiet spots, far from the hordes of tourists and day-trippers. Two years ago he'd come across a secluded lake, and beside it, to his delight, a country house in need of renovation. It had taken a while to track down the owner – he worked in a managerial capacity for Statoil, Norway's state-run oil company, and had moved to Stavanger – but when Johanson finally found him, the deal was quickly done. Pleased to be rid of the place, the owner had sold it for a fraction of its value. A few weeks later a team of Russian immigrants had restored the dilapidated house. They didn't charge much, but transformed it into Johanson's ideal of a proper country residence – a nineteenth-century bon vivant's retreat.

During long summer evenings he sat on the veranda, which looked out over the lake, reading visionary writers like Thomas More, Jonathan Swift or H. G. Wells, and daydreaming to Mahler or Sibelius. The house had a well-stocked library. He owned nearly all of his favourite books and CDs in duplicate – he wanted them with him wherever he was.

Johanson drove on to the NTNU campus. The main university building lay straight ahead, covered with a dusting of snow. It was an imposing, castle-style edifice, dating to the turn of the twentieth century, and behind it lay lecture halls and laboratories. With ten thousand students, the campus was almost a town in itself. It hummed with activity. Johanson sighed in contentment. He had enjoyed his time at the lake. Last summer he'd spent a few weekends there with a research assistant from the cardiology department, an old acquaintance from various conferences. Things had moved swiftly, but he'd ended the relationship. He hadn't been in it for the long term – and anyway, he had to face facts: he was fifty-six, and she was thirty years younger. Great for a few weeks, but unthinkable for a lifetime. In any case, Johanson didn't allow many to get close to him. He never had.

He left the jeep in its bay and headed for the Faculty of Natural Sciences. As he entered his office, Tina Lund was standing by the window. She turned as he walked in. 'You're late,' she teased him. 'Let me guess – too much red wine last night, or was someone reluctant to let you go?'

Johanson grinned. Lund worked for Statoil and seemed to have spent most of her time lately at one or other of the SINTEF institutes. The SINTEF Group was one of the biggest independent research organisations in Europe, and the Norwegian oil industry in particular had benefited from its groundbreaking innovations. The close links between SINTEF and the NTNU had helped to establish Trondheim as a centre of technological excellence, and SINTEF centres were dotted throughout the region. Lund had risen swiftly through the Statoil ranks and was now deputy director of exploration and production. She had recently set up camp at Marintek, the SINTEF centre for marine technology.