Europe at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

smile dim a fraction.
    “Good,” he said. “Good. Well, shall we...?”
    “Yes,” I said, turning towards the stairs with a great deal more confidence than I felt. “Let’s.”
    The stairs at the Science Faculty were one of the spookiest things I had ever seen. Like the building itself, they seemed to be supported by some arcane and counterintuitive engineering trick rather than by more reliable bricks and mortar, but that wasn’t what scared me about them. Every step was an inch-thick slab of glass. Edge-on, they were an emerald green colour, but when you were standing on them they were completely clear and very nearly invisible. Walking on them was like ascending slowly, step by step, into thin air, and I didn’t like it at all.
    There was no handrail, either, although someone had stuck gummed paper tape on each step to show the unwary where each one was. Somehow, this made it even worse, following a kinked line of brown tape that seemed to float on nothing.
    I got myself up the stairs by concentrating on the Dean of the Science Faculty beside me. He was about five years older than me, and he had the clean, well-exercised look of a man who plays a lot of team sports and is rarely on the losing side. His hair was thick and brown and curly and touched a little with grey at the temples, his clothes discreetly expensive-looking. He radiated masculine bonhomie like a nicely bedded-in coal fire.
    Thankfully, above the foyer level the building became considerably less alarming. On the first floor were corridors and offices and common rooms, and it was easy to imagine stout support pillars holding everything up. Even the stairs were of the more mundane type, the kind you could actually see.
    “While you’re here, I thought we might clear the air a little,” he said as we walked.
    “Oh?”
    “There needs to be an attitude of trust between us all, I think you’ll agree.”
    “Oh, absolutely.”
    “We can’t rebuild if we’re constantly seeing conspiracy theories under every stone.”
    “Callum,” I said, “I’m trying to get us all out of here. I couldn’t care less about rebuilding.”
    He glanced at me. “People will want to stay,” he said. “Their homes are here.”
    “If they want to stay, great. Good for them. But we’re only one bad Winter away from starving.”
    We both fell silent for a little while, thinking about the most recent bad Winter. I resisted the urge to ask him just where that had sat on the Penman-Walworth Scale. Callum opened a door and led me into a small office. Not his – his was higher up in the building – but a spare room, bare of personal touches. Just a table and a couple of chairs and an oddly-shaped window looking down onto the plaza. I went over to the window and looked out; Callum sprawled in one of the chairs.
    I said, “I put in a request four months ago, in writing, for copies of your Faculty records, and so far I’ve had no reply.” I heard him snort dismissively, behind me, and I said, “These things are important, Callum. We still don’t know half the things the Old Board did, and we’re not going to find out any time soon if the records are full of holes.”
    “I’ll see your request is complied with,” he said. “But you didn’t come all this way just to poke me about records.”
    I said, “Someone here’s running a still.”
    He burst out laughing. “What?”
    I turned from the window. “Someone here’s running a still and distributing whisky around the School. It’s not bad, actually. Whoever it is has had a lot of practice.”
    He was still laughing. “Oh, for –”
    “And drugs. Pep pills, mostly. Some of the work gangs have been caught with them.”
    He stopped laughing and looked levelly at me. “And your proof that these things originate here is...?” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “You have none.”
    “It’s science stuff, Callum,” I said. “I don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to make an educated guess where it’s