While the questions and answers continued, I simply sat there thinking about the Troposphere. I thought I already had a fairly good idea of how it worked. In fact, I hadn't got too much sleep in the preceding few days because of it, and while the others kept on talking about the railway tunnel and whether or not Laura was going to lead a search party down the hatch, my eyes started to close. I dreamed of a world in which everyone had access to everyone else's minds, until some government recruited men in deep blue uniforms to go around and brainwash everyone so they didn't know how to do it anymore. When I woke up, everyone had gone. It was a good thing: I'd been sweating in my sleep and my shirt was almost wet through. Even though I was on my own, I had a profound sense of being watched. I knew I had to give the book back to Lura, so I went straight home to ring her to arrange it for the weekend. As I drove through the heavy rush-hour traffic I wondered if it might be better to burn the book altogether, or at least destroy the page with the recipe on it.
But I am a professor of English literature. I couldn't destroy a book if my life depended on it. At least, that's what I thought then.
I got the last parking space on my street and walked the last twenty yards to my house. Then I went inside and considered what I had to do. I had it all planned out by then. My idea was that I'd remove the page with the instructions on it—but I certainly wasn't going to destroy it. I planned to keep it or hide it....I wasn't sure quite what I was going to do with it. Perhaps it was clear to me that I would have to destroy it at some point, but for then I thought removing it would be enough. I'd remove the page, give the book back to Lura, and then feign ignorance if she ever asked me about it.
It was at exactly the moment that I had opened the book to the correct page that I saw the car headlights sweep up outside. Then I heard the steady throb of a diesel engine, and I simply assumed someone had called a taxi. But I was jumpy and noticing everything, so I went to the window to look, still holding the book in my hands. And then I saw them: the two blond men I'd last seen when I gave my paper in Greenwich. They were trying to find somewhere to park in my street.
They wanted the book. It was them.
And worse: One of them was driving—looking for somewhere to park—but the other one? Well, he seemed to be asleep.
I couldn't think quickly enough. If one of them was in the Troposphere, then he was one or two jumps away from my mind and everything I knew about The End of Mr. Y. I looked at the book and quickly ripped the page from it. My thoughts almost collapsed then, but what I did next took on the clarity and focus of a bullet-point list. I had to leave the book behind but I'd take the page with me. By the time I'd decided that, I'd already folded up the page and put it in my shoe. By the time I'd done that I realized I had to get away before the men either came in here and beat me up or—worse—jumped into my mind and took my knowledge, anyway. They were still trying to park. I hid the book behind the piano; then I grabbed my coat, wallet, and keys and left via the back door. Over the neighbors' fence, through their garden, down their driveway, and into my car. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The conscious man didn't even look over when the car door slammed. I imagined a car chase, but no one looked at me as I drove past. And I drove—faster than I've ever driven—to the university. My thoughts were racing ahead of me at a speed I've never experienced before. And in the jumble of strategy, fear, and conjecture, one thought stood out. I realized that I would be the target of those men for as long as I had my memories. It wouldn't matter if I destroyed The End of Mr. Y. It wouldn't matter if I shredded the page concealed in my shoe. If they could get into my mind, they could get the instructions for making the mixture, just as Mr. Y had learnt the secrets of Will Hardy's Ghost Show. It would be as simple as that. They couldn't get it from Lura, who hadn't read the book. But as long as I remained alive and sane, they could get it from me.
As I parked in the Russell car park I felt much as though I had just been given a life sentence. When I'd been a teenager I'd fantasized about the life of a tragic hero. I'd thought there would be some sort of glamour in being Hamlet, or Lear. But now I could see death at the end; I could see it with more certainty than I could see tomorrow. I remembered a dissertation that I'd marked a couple of years before. In it, the student argued that American eighties and nineties gangster films are postmodern tragedies. He spent a lot of time on one detaiclass="underline" that no one in these gangster films ever escapes. In our society—connected up with bits and bytes—you can never become entirely anonymous. At that moment I realized that the Project Starlight men would track me down, wherever I went, and take what I knew. They were going to rape my mind, and there was nothing I could do about it. I also realized that I had one slim chance of preventing this. I could disappear now. But I didn't have much time. They'd come here next: I knew that.
It was too dangerous to wait for empirical evidence of what they were going to do. I had to work from a priori assumptions, namely:
–The men wanted my knowledge of the ingredients for the mixture.
–The men could get my knowledge in three different ways:
–Torture
–Pedesis
–Taking the sheet of paper from me by force
I reasoned that I could eat the paper, or not give in to torture, but I could do nothing about Pedesis. What I knew of the logic of the Troposphere suggested that in order to get into my mind the man in the Troposphere would only have to jump into the mind of someone near me, or likely to see me, and then, at the moment this other person saw me, make the final jump into my mind and all my knowledge and memories. In theory, the sleeping man could simply get into the mind of his colleague and send him to see me.
So I couldn't let anyone see me. Once in my office I closed the blinds and the curtains and locked the door. I hadn't smoked for twenty years, but when I saw that Ariel had left a box of cigarettes on her desk I took one out and lit it. I pleaded with myself to find some way out of this situation. Where could I go where no one would see me? My mind filled with images of roads and shopping centers and supermarkets. On a usual day, how many people would see me? Hundreds? Thousands? Everywhere I cast my mind I saw these blobs of flesh-and-consciousness; the detail that is always left off any map. Even if I got back in my car and drove, I would travel past people. I wondered why I had even come to the university; why I had chosen as my hiding place a room with my name on the door, a room whose details can be found on the university Web site, which also contains handy maps: how to get to the English and American Studies Building from anywhere on campus; how to get to the campus by road, rail, air, Eurostar, and ferry. I smoked and paced. I felt safe at the university. That was it: that was why I had gone there. But only because there are always so many people there. You never feel alone at the university, and, usually, in dangerous situations you want to be around people. Not this time.
Three or four minutes passed. I heard laughter moving down the corridor: Max and the others, no doubt, coming back from the bar. It didn't matter that I'd locked the external doors; now they were bound to be unlocked. I looked at the heavy paperweight on my desk. Perhaps I could stop them with force? No. You can't use force against remote telepathy. I urged myself to think faster. Should I destroy the page from my shoe? I couldn't. I couldn't do it. Why had I not driven away to somewhere random when I had the chance? My thoughts pushed and shoved each other like desperate Christmas shoppers, and I reminded myself that I had only two decisions to make: what I should do with the page; and where to go next. Before I knew what I was doing I had reached up to the very top shelf for the fourth volume of Zoonomia. I used to hide money in books a long time ago when I was a research student and my front door was almost as flimsy as a curtain and anyone could open it with a credit card. I reasoned that thieves aren't interested in books, and anyway, books are bulky. If you were a petty thief you wouldn't be able to transport a thousand or so books. So you'd ignore them: You wouldn't select, say, ten to steal. You'd ignore them all and focus on the VCR and the microwave. For that reason I've always hidden things in random books. I've hidden love letters, pornography, credit cards.... Would this work now? These Project Starlight men did clearly know the value of books. Ah, I thought, but this is where the university will help me. I can hide the page and lock the door and no stranger is going to be able to come and look through my things. And even if someone did manage to do that, the book they want wouldn't seem to be here.