And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over. There were no alternatives to Babel, no scabs. No one else could do what they did. Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.
Still no policemen had appeared by evening. This lack of response baffled them. But soon logistical problems – namely, supplies and accommodation – became the more pressing matters at hand. It was clear now that they were going to be in the tower for quite some time, with no clear end date to their strike. At some point they were going to run out of food.
There was a tiny, rarely used kitchen in the basement, where servants had once lived before the Institute stopped housing its janitorial staff for free. Occasionally scholars ducked downstairs for a snack when working late. A foray into the cabinets produced a decent amount of nonperishables – nuts, preserves, indestructible tea biscuits, and dry oats for porridge. It wasn’t much, but they wouldn’t starve overnight. And they found many, many bottles of wine, left over from years of faculty functions and garden parties.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Professor Craft when Juliana and Meghana proposed bringing the bottles upstairs. ‘Put those back. We need to keep our wits about us.’
‘We need something to pass the time,’ said Meghana. ‘And if we’re going to starve to death, we may as well go out drunk.’
‘They’re not going to starve us to death,’ Robin said. ‘They can’t allow us to die. They can’t hurt us. That’s the point.’
‘Even so,’ said Yusuf. ‘We’ve just declared our intention to break the city. I don’t think we can just wander out for a hot breakfast, do you?’
Nor could they simply poke their heads outside and put in an order to the grocer’s. They had no friends in town, no one who could act as their liaison with the outer world. Professor Craft had a brother in Reading, but there was no way of getting a letter to him, and nor was there a safe way for him to deliver foodstuffs up to the tower. And Professor Chakravarti, it turned out, had a very limited relationship with Hermes – he’d been recruited only after his promotion to junior faculty, after his ties to upper faculty rendered him too risky for deeper involvement – and he knew Hermes only through anonymous letters and drop points. No one else had responded to their beacon. As far as they knew, they were the only ones left.
‘You two didn’t think of this before you broke into the tower and started waving guns around?’ asked Professor Chakravarti.
‘We were a bit distracted,’ said Robin, embarrassed.
‘We – really, we were making it up as we went along,’ said Victoire. ‘And we didn’t have much time.’
‘Planning a revolution is not one of your strong suits.’ Professor Craft sniffed. ‘I shall see what I can do with the oats.’
Very soon a number of other problems arose. Babel was blessed with running water and indoor lavatories, but there was no place to shower. No one had an extra change of clothes, and there were of course no laundering facilities – all of them had their washing done by invisible scouts. Apart from a single cot on the eighth floor, which was used as an unofficial nap space by the graduate fellows, there were no beds, pillows, linens, or anything that might make for comfortable bedding at night except for their own coats.
‘Think of it like this,’ Professor Chakravarti said in a valiant attempt to lift their mood. ‘Who doesn’t dream of living in a library? Is there not a certain romance to our situation? Who among us would balk at a completely unhindered life of the mind?’
No one, it seemed, shared this fantasy.
‘Can’t we just duck out in the evenings?’ asked Juliana. ‘We can sneak out past midnight and be back by morning, no one will notice—’
‘That’s absurd,’ said Robin. ‘This isn’t some kind of – of optional daytime activity—’
‘We’re going to smell,’ said Yusuf. ‘It’ll be disgusting.’
‘Still, we can’t just keep going in and out—’
‘Just once then,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Just for supplies—’
‘Stop it,’ snapped Victoire. ‘Just stop it, all of you, will you? We all chose treason against the Crown. We’ll be uncomfortable for some time yet.’
At half past ten, Meghana ran up from the lobby and breathlessly announced that London was sending a telegram. They crowded around the machine, watching nervously as Professor Chakravarti took down the message and transcribed it. He blinked at it for a moment, then said, ‘They’ve more or less told us to shove it.’
‘What?’ Robin reached for the telegram. ‘There’s nothing else?’
‘PLEASE REOPEN TOWER TO REGULAR BUSINESS STOP,’ read Professor Chakravarti. ‘That’s all it says.’
‘It’s not even signed?’
‘I can only assume it’s coming direct from the Foreign Office,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘They don’t take private messages this late.’
‘There’s no word about Playfair?’ Victoire asked.
‘Just the one line,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That’s it.’
So Parliament had declined to meet their demands – or indeed to take them seriously at all. Perhaps it was silly to hope the strike would produce a response so soon, before the lack of silver had taken effect, but they had hoped at least that Parliament would acknowledge the threat. Did the MPs think this whole thing would blow over on its own? Were they trying to prevent a general panic? Was this why not a single policeman had knocked on the door, why the green outside was as serene and empty as it had ever been?
‘What now?’ Juliana asked.
No one had an answer. They couldn’t help feeling somewhat petulant, like toddlers who’d thrown tantrums but had not been rewarded for their efforts. All that trouble for such a curt response – it all seemed so pathetic.
They lingered around the telegraph machine for a few more moments, hoping it might spring to life with better news – that Parliament was greatly concerned, that they’d called a midnight debate, that crowds of protestors had flooded Trafalgar Square to demand the war be called off. But the needle remained still. One by one they slunk back upstairs, hungry and dispirited.
For the rest of the evening, Robin would occasionally step out onto the rooftop to peer over the city, scanning for any indication of change or unrest. But Oxford remained tranquil, undisturbed. Their pamphlets lay trodden in the street, stuck in grates, flapping pointlessly in the gentle night breeze. No one had even bothered to clean them up.
They had little to say to one another that night as they made their beds among the stacks, huddling under coats and spare gowns. The convivial atmosphere of that afternoon had vanished. They were all suffering the same unspoken, private fear, a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the unforgiving dark.
Magdalen Tower fell the next morning.
None of them had anticipated this. They only worked out afterwards what had happened, after they’d checked the work order ledgers and realized what they could have done to prevent it. Magdalen Tower, the second-tallest building in Oxford, had relied since the eighteenth century on silver-facilitated engineering tricks to support its weight after centuries of soil erosion had eaten at its foundations. Babel scholars did routine maintenance on its supports every six months, once in January and once again in June.
In the hours that followed the disaster, they would learn that it was Professor Playfair who had overseen these biannual reinforcements for the past fifteen years, and whose notes on such procedures were locked in his office, inaccessible to the exiled Babel faculty, who had not even remembered Magdalen Tower’s upcoming appointment. They would find in their letterbox a flurry of messages from the panicked members of the city council who had expected Professor Playfair the previous evening, and who discovered only the next day that he was laid up in hospital, pumped full of laudanum and unconscious. They would learn that one council member had passed the early hours of the morning banging frantically at Babel’s door; only none of them heard or saw him, for the wards kept out all riffraff who might disrupt the scholars inside.