Europe at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

much that she was thinking of setting up a bakery of her own. I promised to mention it to Rossiter. I didn’t tell her that our stocks of flour were very low, and that if this year’s cereal crops failed – a not unusual occurrence – we would all be in big trouble. Another reason to be in a hurry to get out of here. As if I needed another one.
    Hundreds of cyclists, bundled up like myself, were pedalling in an unhurried fashion along University Avenue. I joined them, pulling my cap down low and bending over the handlebars so nobody would recognise me and start shouting stupid questions about when the Old Board were going to go on trial. I hated it when that happened.
    It was fifteen miles, as the crow flew, from my Residence to Science City. The most direct route was University Avenue, which was so straight it could have been laid out by the aforementioned crow. Unfortunately, it ran up several steep hills, and I wasn’t nearly fit enough to tackle all of them and still have a meeting afterwards, so I turned off University Avenue after a couple of miles and cycled through The Park.
    Here there were fewer cyclists. I sat up in my seat and pushed up the brim of my cap. Now that exertion had generated some heat in my body, the day seemed merely crisp, rather than mind-numbingly cold. Dozens of people were fishing from the banks of West Lake, and I silently wished them luck. I’d tried that myself; there was nothing larger than algae in West Lake, and there was a quiet research project going on to see if we could eat that.
    The Campus was made up of four hundred Schools, scattered over an area about two hundred miles across and surrounded by mountains. Opinions differed over whether we sat in the bottom of the caldera of an ancient supervolcano, which was a charming thought, or the crater of a colossal prehistoric meteor strike, but to be honest nobody was thinking very hard about those theories at the moment.
    School 1 was the administrative heart of the Campus. It was situated in the northeast, within sight of the Mountains, and it was the site of almost all the Faculty buildings. These had all been built two hundred years ago, when the Campus was founded, and they all looked roughly alike – austere stone blocks faced with many windows and roofed with copper. The earliest Residences looked much the same, but later ones, built as the population grew, were in a progression of more modern styles, although the Revolution had left many of them damaged and in some cases entirely uninhabitable.
    Science City was different. It sat at the edge of School 1 like a colossal parasitic growth. It had originally just been the Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Engineering Faculties, buildings not unlike the others in the School, but down the years it had spread and grown and added more Faculties in a confusion of architectures, and now it was just what its nickname suggested, a little city, some of whose buildings were twenty or thirty stories tall, and dominated by the glass and steel spike of the Architects’ Tower. You could see it from miles away, rising out of the rich wooded land beside the River. It was a horrible place to visit; the paved plazas between the buildings were sterile and echoey and the wind blew through them all the time. I hated it.
    The people who ran Science City – and there was a very real sense that it was actually a separate entity, rather than part of the School or indeed part of the Campus – had returned the favour by making it quite difficult for me to visit. For all official meetings, I had to put in a request weeks in advance, and there was never any guarantee that those requests would be granted. If I turned up unannounced, I always seemed to attract the attention of one or more Students, who would accompany me everywhere while engaging me in pleasant conversation about the weather or Student politics until I wanted to punch them.
    I wasn’t sure quite what to make of this, so I hadn’t done