It was a small cold room, with a retro-medical decor of cracked white tiles and large, complex overhead lighting. Straps confined the client to a stainless steel table; there were tubes in many of his orifices. They had run the wire up into his brain, and by moving it about drew from him a few warm, puppylike yips and yaps, also some twitching of the limbs. No one expected much. It was a calibration period. Every so often the wire jockey leaned back from the green felt eyepieces of his equipment and massaged the small of his back. He was tired, and he wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Meanwhile the client, a New Man with the characteristic shock of bright red hair, tried out fresh expressions each time the wire moved.

He was naked, had suffered a brief convulsion and was secreting a wide range of pheromones. He seemed eager to please. He would laugh vaguely, then wince. Or his eyes would turn up as if he was trying to look into his own head and he would say, in a tired voice he had copied from some old film: ‘My face is a mess tonight.’

‘We should call an operator,’ the wire jockey suggested. ‘Then whatever this alien knows we know it too.’

The agents looked at one another.

‘So you organise that,’ one of them said.

No one wanted an operator. It would be an admission of failure. While they were talking, they cast nervous glances at the fourth person in the room.

This woman had a fuck-off way of moving achievable only by the heavily tailored. Her white-blond hair was cropped to nothing much. She was statuesque and a frank air of sexual boredom surrounded her, as if she had come down here because there was nothing else to do in the dog hours of a Friday night. Her career had begun a year or two before, under the auspices of Lens Aschemann, SiteCrime’s late, legendary investigator. Though she had never been more than his assistant, she remained in the building even after his death in the Saudade event site. Rumour had it she was connected, but no one knew who to; and on the present occasion none of the agents understood why she was in the basement with them. They were happy enough to defer to her; but they didn’t like the amused way she stared into the bright light and polluted air above the client’s head, so they were relieved when after an hour she got a dial-up.

‘Send my car to the front,’ she said. Then, to the agents: ‘Boys, we must do this again. No, I mean it.’

She was halfway out of the building when the client broke his straps and sat up. At the same time everyone heard a soft voice in the holding cell say:

‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’