Meadows laughed.

“I think you’re less naÏve than you suggest,” he said. “And Brian is certainly less nervous than he pretends. Now let’s see . . .” He tapped a couple of keys. Spreadsheets blossomed on his monitor like ripening fruit. “Your burn-rate’s quite high,” he concluded after a moment. He raised his hands, palms upward, and mimicked the way Kearney had looked from one to the other. “No money,” he said, “no research. We need fresh capital. And a move like this—as long as we thought it was good for the science—would expand our opportunities, not limit them.”

“Who’s ‘ we’?” said Kearney.

“You aren’t listening. Brian would have his own department. That would be part of the package. He wonders if you work hard enough, Michael. He’s worried about his idea.”

“I think you’re getting ready to dump us. Here’s some advice. Don’t try it.”

Meadows examined his hands.

“You’re being paranoid, Michael.”

“Imagine that,” Kearney said.

Valentine Sprake turned away from the darkening view and walked in a jerky, hurried fashion across the room, as if he had seen, out there in the marshes, something which surprised him. He leaned over Meadows’s desk, picked up the coffee pot and drank its contents directly from the spout. “Last week,” he said to Meadows, “I learned that Urizen was back among us, and His name is Old England. We are all adrift on the sea of time and space here. Think about that too.” He stalked out of the office with his hands folded on his chest.

Meadows looked amused.

“Who is that, Kearney?”

“Don’t ask,” said Kearney absently. On the way out he said: “And keep off Brian’s back.”

“I can’t protect the two of you forever,” Meadows called after him. That was when Kearney knew Meadows had already sold them to Sony.

Lightweight separators in pastel colours were used to create privacy inside MVC-Kaplan’s otherwise featureless tent of bolted glass. The first thing Kearney saw outside Meadows’s workspace was the shadow of the Shrander, projected somehow from inside the building onto one of these. It was life-size, a little blurred and diffuse at first, then hardening and sharpening and turning slowly on its own axis like a chrysalis hanging in a hedge. As it turned, there was a kind of rustling noise he hadn’t heard for twenty years; a smell he still recognised. He felt his whole body go cold and rigid with fear. He backed away from it a few steps, then ran back into the office, where he hauled Meadows over the glass desk by the front of his suit and hit him hard, three or four times in succession, on the right cheekbone.

“Christ,” said Meadows in a thick voice. “Ah.”

Kearney pulled him all the way over the desk, across the floor and out of the door. At the same time the lift arrived and Sprake got out.

“I saw it, I saw it,” Kearney said.

Sprake showed his teeth. “It’s not here now.”