He took off his back-pack and lowered it carefully to the ground, as though it contained something breakable and highly explosive. He untied the heavy restraining straps, one by one, and carefully lifted out his latest creation. It wasn’t in the least aesthetic, a brutally functional transparent cube containing rapidly moving parts, with a living cat’s head jammed on the top. Wires sprouted from shaved points on its skull. The cube was an intricate clock-work mechanism, in which all the swiftly moving pieces were made of solid light and shaped energy, blazing fiercely with more colours than the human eye could cope with. The movements alone could make your brain hurt if you looked at them too long, as they rotated through more than three spatial dimensions. The cube ticked and tocked, but not regularly. It raced and paused and speeded up again, like a clock driven mad by seeing too much of the wrong kind of Time. Erik had put a lot of work into crafting the world’s first far-seeing computer, and he was very proud of it. He patted the living cat head fondly, and it hissed and spat at him. Its unblinking slit-pupilled eyes were full of rage. Its thoughts enlarged and expanded through its intimate connection with the computer; it knew what had been done to it but was helpless to do anything about it. Natasha watched Erik make small, careful changes to the control panel on one side of the cube and turned up her aristocratic nose.

“Even by your standards, that is a seriously ugly object. Are you sure this . . . thing, will do what it’s supposed to?”

“Of course,” said Erik, bristling at the implied slight on his abilities. “The computer augments the cat’s natural psychic abilities, and together they can See and Hear whatever is going on for miles in every direction. They can even peek a short way into the Past and the Future. Theoretically. Ignore the spitting and the hissing and the occasional squalling; the cat’s head will do what I want, when I want it to. I plugged a wire directly into its little catty pleasure/pain centre, and a few volts can give it unbearable pain or incredible pleasure. I am its god. Though I still can’t get it to purr for me.” He leered at Natasha. “Think of it: absolute pleasure, at the touch of a button. I could perform a similar operation on you if you wanted. If you asked me nicely.”

“And leave the button in your hands?” said Natasha. “I think not. Ask your cat what’s happening down in the tunnels.”