"Hold it for a minute, please." He peers at something on the screen again, twisting a couple of dials and adjusting a vernier scale. Then he lifts a hinged lid covering the front of the Memex and begins to type rapidly on a stenographer's keyboard. Paper tape spools out and over into a slot behind the keyboard. He inspects it for a moment, then reaches over to a panel and pulls out two organ stops. There's a bright flash and a click, and he closes the lid over the keyboard with a look of satisfaction. "Saved."

(The Memex is an electromechanical hypertext machine, running on microfiche: it's fiddly, slow, lacks storage capacity, and needs a lot of maintenance. I once asked him why he stuck with it; he grunted something about Van Eck radiation and changed the subject.)

"Now, Robert. What did you think of the elephant?"

"Never got to see it." I shake my head. "I said I—"

"Oh dear." Angleton looks mildly irritated: I shiver.

"That's what I came to tell you; I've just finished filing an R60 and Iris told me to sign off sick for the week. I killed a bystander by accident. It's a real fuck-up."

"So you didn't see the white elephant."

I do a double take. "Boss? Hello? Major FATACC incident while carrying out the primary assignment! What's so important about a museum piece?"

"Harrumph." He reaches out and flicks a switch: the Memex screen goes dark. "I thought it was high past time you were briefed on the Squadron."

"The Squadron? That would be 666 Squadron RAF, right? I looked them up on the web—they were deactivated in 1964, weren't they?"

Angleton's thin smile tells me exactly what he thinks of the world wide web.

"Not exactly. They were just redeployed in support of a higher mission."

I remember the blue-glowing instrument panel lighting up the hangar from behind canvas screens, and shudder. "What kind of . . . ?"

"They're part of the contingency planning for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, boy." He looks momentarily annoyed, as if the impending end of the world as we know it is a minor inconvenience. "Bystanders," he murmurs: "Whatever will they think of next?"

"The white elephant," I prompt, but I'm too late.

"Never mind that now, boy, you can go back and look at it later." He looks at me, concern and irritation wrinkling his face further, and this time he's actually looking, studying me with those merciless washed-out eyes as if I'm a sample on a dissection tray: "Hmm. If Iris told you to take the rest of the week off, I suppose you ought to do as she says. A bystander, eh? What was a bystander doing there?"

"She was a volunteer at the museum—she was bringing us tea."