Morgan Walshaw sat next to him, resting his hands on the table, face blank.

"Why am I here?" Greg asked stoically.

"Because we have a problem," said Julia. "Someone is trying to wreck Event Horizon's future."

He received the distinct impression she was enjoying his discomfiture.

"You see, Greg," she said, "Dr. Ranasfari has succeeded in developing a viable room-temperature giga-conductor for us."

Greg looked at her sharply. "You're kidding!"

He remembered some Royal Engineering Corps officers he'd been stationed with once had talked about the stuff. A panacea, they'd called it. The answer to the energy shortage, to carbon dioxide pollution. Every university and kombinate in the world had its own research team working on giga-conductors before the Credit Crash. Then there were innumerable mega-budget military programmes; a giga-conductor would have produced a whole new generation of weapons.

"Told you he was a genius, boy. Edison of the age. Dedicated, too; it took him over a decade of solid grind to crack."

"Quiet, please, Grandpa. It's a tremendous breakthrough, Greg, its energy storage density is phenomenal. It will replace every other form of power-storage system in existence; gear, cars, ships, planes, airships, spaceplanes, they'll all use it. And it's cheap, clean, and relatively easy to produce. Our whole way of life will be altered, it's a revolution equal to the introduction of the steam engine."

"And Event Horizon holds the patent," Philip chuckled savagely. "We're going to wipe the floor with the opposition. A Custer and the Indians massacre. I'll make damn sure of that when I introduce the stuff on the market."

Greg took another look at the mass of fibre-optic cables leading out of the plinth, trying to work out the NN core's bit rate. "You're still running Event Horizon," he said. All Philip Evans's talk about arranging for trustees he had confidence in, and the flash of cunning at the time, came flooding back to him.

"Damn right I am, boy. There are no trustees, never were, the nominees are all Zurich fronts. Event Horizon is my life. No individual in the world can run a company better than me. I'm talking fifty years' worth of accumulated experience. There's no substitute for that. It's the efficiency of dictatorship. A group of trustees would be worse than useless, lawyers and airhead accountants; they'd never push the giga-conductor with the kind of vigour necessary to effect a complete domination of the market. Discussion groups, reports, delays for consultation. What a load of crap. Event Horizon run by a committee would shrivel up and die an ignominious death. This is the perfect solution."