Nothing But Blue Skies (24 page)

Neville clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘Don't you just hate it when that happens?' he said.

‘Oh, I never liked him much. He had enormously bony knees, even as a small boy. Not his fault, of course; then again, having green eyes and freckles isn't really ever anyone's
fault
. It's what you do with them once you've got them that matters.' Gordon sighed, and breathed out slowly through his nose. ‘Any particular reason why you never got married?'

Neville considered for a moment. ‘I think mostly,' he said, ‘it was the way all the women I asked either changed the subject or burst out laughing. The first two dozen times you just shrug it off, but after that it starts getting to you. Mind you, I'm probably over-sensitive.'

‘No, no.' Gordon shook his head. ‘Sensitive is good. Apparently. Though I think there must be a knack to it. Every time I tried being sensitive, I was just told to shut up.'

‘Maybe there's different kinds,' Neville speculated. ‘Like - oh, I don't know, direct and alternating current. Maybe you were just using the wrong one at the time.'

Gordon shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows?' he said. ‘Anyway, it makes no odds, because I'm through with all that stuff now. Particularly,' he added, tightening his face into a frown, ‘if we can't find a way out of this bloody building. Do you realise we've been walking for nearly two hours and we haven't even come across a staircase yet?'

Neville looked puzzled. ‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning this building must be
huge
. The size of a small town. Practically visible from orbit. How many buildings that size do you think you can hide away in a small country like Britain before somebody notices?'

‘Hadn't thought about it like that,' Neville admitted. ‘Of course, it could be dug into something or disguised as something. Like in that James Bond film, where they built the underground hideout inside a volcano.'

‘You think we're inside a volcano?'

‘No, of course not. Why did you think I meant that?'

‘I don't know, you're the one who's supposed to have a third bloody eye. For all I know, you can see waves of infrared radiating out of the magma core.'

‘I don't think so,' Neville replied. ‘I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed something like that over the last six months or so.'

‘Really? In Shepherds Bush?'

‘Well, obviously not in Shepherds Bush, no. But anywhere. I went to Hawaii once, you know.'

‘It was just a thought,' Gordon said. ‘Not that I believe in all this garbage you keep spouting, you understand.' He hesitated. ‘It's just that if by some disgustingly improbable chance there is a grain of truth buried under all the bullshit, now would be a very good time indeed to dig it out.'

Neville smirked. ‘I knew you'd believe me, sooner or later.'

‘Now just a—'

‘Unfortunately,' Neville went on, ‘all I can see with my third eye right now is lots and lots more of these blasted corridors. '

‘That's all.'

‘Well, not quite all. I can also see several thousand lines of computer code, about a million phone messages, the repeat of this lunchtime's
Home and Away
and the shipping forecast in seventeen languages.'

‘Ah.'

Neville nodded sadly. ‘In case you were fretting, by the way, Marilyn is thinking seriously about moving back in with Donald, and there's force three winds expected off Rockall. Funny,' he added, ‘I haven't thought about the weather in ages. It used to be the only thing I ever did think about.'

‘Really.' Gordon clicked his tongue. ‘Somehow,' he said, ‘that doesn't surprise me. Look, concentrate on that forecast. Can you tell where it's coming from? Which direction?'

‘Not really. Why?'

‘Because we know where it's broadcast from, idiot. We can use it to navigate by, like using the stars. At least we'll know whether we're going round in circles or not.'

Neville looked impressed. ‘That's not a bad idea,' he said. ‘All right, shut up for a moment and I'll see what I can do.'

Neville concentrating was a fairly awesome sight, especially if you happened to like a little broad comedy with your awe. Hours spent in meetings with producers had left Gordon with an almost superhuman ability not to burst out laughing at inconvenient moments, but he had to call on all his hard-won skills to keep a straight face on this occasion. Neville's face, by contrast, was about as straight as a country lane. At times his mental agony made him look like a constipated sword-swallower; at other times he beamed with an almost spiritual joy, eyes tightly shut, as if an archangel had come to him in a vision and given him Drew Barrymore's phone number. Since Neville's face was pretty damn funny at the best of times, the sight of Neville pulling funny faces was almost more than Gordon could bear, and would have been classed as an act of war in a Trappist monastery.

‘Got it,' he said. ‘It's pink. Problem is, there's about six different pink ones, and it's a bitch trying to tell them apart. This way.'

Gordon frowned. ‘What, you mean through the wall?'

‘You know,' Neville sighed, ‘with a sense of humour like yours, I'm surprised you didn't make your career in light entertainment rather than weather. There's all sorts of things you could have done in light entertainment - changed fuses, held things for people, made the tea. No, I don't mean through the wall, I mean in this general direction. I suggest that we go back down the corridor till we find a turning that goes that way, and follow it. All right?'

As Gordon had suspected all along, the building was playing games with them. When they'd been coming up the corridor, there had been scores of turnings off, leading in every conceivable direction. Now that they were heading back, the corridor ran straight as a Roman road without any turnings whatsoever. How the building managed to do this, Gordon could only speculate. The likeliest explanation was that it was a living, breathing creature. That was an intriguing concept in itself; maybe it had started off the size of a garden shed and grown, with the help of regular watering and tanker-loads of Baby Bio, into the best-of-show-winning monstrosity they were now trapped inside. If so, the potential of the discovery was staggering; so much so that Gordon promised himself that if ever he got out of this mess he'd pack in broadcasting, buy a strip of land somewhere and plant a crop of late-flowering maisonettes.

‘This one'll do,' Neville said, jerking him out of his dreams of avarice and pointing down a spur leading off the main corridor. ‘Keep your eyes open for one going sharp left.'

‘What? Oh, yes, will do.' A thought occurred to him, and he slowed down. ‘Neville,' he said, ‘I just want to make the point that I'm only letting you lead the way because nobody, not even you, could make a worse mess of it than I've been doing. It's absolutely not because I really believe you've actually got a third eye. Is that clear?'

Neville sighed. ‘As crystal. Secretly, though, I know you believe. You just can't face admitting it to yourself. Actually,' he went on, ‘faith is an amazingly broad, flexible thing. For instance there's a small religious community somewhere in North Wales that believes that when we die, we'll be reunited on the other side with all the used paper hankies we've discarded over the years. If they can believe something like that, it's not going to kill you to believe in something as mild and inoffensive as a dragon. Hell's teeth, people have been believing in them for thousands of years; it's only this last century or so we've come over all snotty and decided there couldn't possibly be such thing . . . Hello.' He stopped dead in his tracks. ‘What's this?'

‘It's a fire door,' Gordon said. ‘What about it?'

‘Yes, but what's it doing here? We've been yomping down these damned corridors for hours, and this is the first fire door we've seen.' He took a step back and looked the door over carefully. ‘It's like the old riddle,' he said. ‘When is a fire door not a fire door? When it's a trap.'

Now that Neville mentioned it, Gordon did start to wonder about that. One fire door on its own is a bit like a single curtain hook or a lone whitebait. But, since Neville had made the observation and Neville was a nutcase who believed in dragons, he dismissed it as trivial. ‘Don't be so damned melodramatic,' he said. ‘This is a government building. You don't have traps in government buildings. You don't
need
traps in government buildings. Open the damned door and let's get going.'

‘You open it.'

‘You're the leader.'

‘Oh, I am, am I? Then I'm ordering you to open that door.'

‘Get stuffed.'

Neville frowned. ‘That's a bad attitude,' he said. ‘When Captain Kirk tells the little guy in the red pullover to open a door, he doesn't get spoken to like that.' He thought for a moment. ‘Okay,' he added, ‘bad example. But I still think you should open the door.'

‘You think so? Fine.' Gordon took a step backwards, too. ‘I'll open the door. Just give me a moment to catch my breath.'

Neville grinned. ‘You're scared,' he said.

‘Of course I'm scared.' Gordon replied irritably. ‘I'm so scared I can hardly keep my bowels clenched. I'm scared of men in black uniforms with guns, I'm scared of lunatics who want to start a new world war, I'm scared of nutters who want to sacrifice me to the Queen and the Duke of Kent, I'm scared of maniacs who kidnap me and tie me up and make me listen to talking goldfish and I'm scared of dying of starvation in an endless maze of corridors. About the only thing on earth I'm not scared of,' he added, ‘is this door. I just need a second or two to focus, that's all.'

Neville counted to five under his breath. ‘Ready yet?'

‘Nearly. If you want to go on ahead, I'll catch you up.'

‘If it's any help,' Neville said, ‘I can see a damn' great pink line going straight through this door. This is definitely the direction we want to be headed in.'

‘Hey. Just now, you were the one saying this door's a trap.'

‘That was before you started acting so scared of it.'

‘I'm ready,' Gordon said. ‘Here goes.'

He went back five or six paces, started running and burst his way through the door like a rugby forward. The door swung open. Nothing happened.

‘Told you,' he said, leaning against the wall and breathing heavily. ‘Perfectly safe. Don't know what all the fuss was about, really.'

Neville walked through the door and came to a halt beside him. ‘Nor me,' he said. ‘You know, we'd better get a grip on ourselves, or we'll never get out of here. Now then, where's that damned pink line got to?'

Gordon shook his head. ‘Does it really have to be pink?' he asked. ‘The Yellow Brick Road was bad enough, but entrusting my life to the ability of a known basket case to follow an imaginary pink trail - dammit, it's worse than finding your way round the Barbican.'

‘Almost that bad, I'll admit,' Neville replied. ‘This way.'

They'd gone no more than a couple of hundred yards when they came to another fire door. They stopped.

‘Properly speaking,' Gordon said, ‘this should make me feel better.'

‘Yes,' Neville agreed.

‘Your turn.'

‘It's not a question of whose turn it is. This isn't a children's party, we're trying to escape.'

‘All right. Now open the door.'

‘
You
open the frigging door.'

‘Why should I?'

‘Because you're braver than me.'

Put like that, there wasn't much Gordon could say. Trying to look as if he did this sort of thing every day of the week (which he did; there were seven fire doors between the lift and his office) he gave it a fairly robust shove with the heel of his left hand and walked through. Nothing happened.

‘It's okay,' he said, breathing out through his nose. ‘It's a fire door. Well, what are you standing about for?'

Neville had the grace to look slightly ashamed of himself. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Keep straight on down the corridor. We'll need to take a left at some point, but there's no hurry.'

The third, fourth and fifth fire doors turned out to be as prosaic as the first pair. They hardly noticed the sixth. They were so relaxed about the seventh that they almost walked straight into it, remembering just in time the tiresome formality of opening it first. When they reached the eighth, Neville muttered ‘Fire door' under his breath and Gordon replied ‘Yup,' as he shoved it open without slowing down or breaking step.

The ninth fire door was locked.

‘Bugger,' Gordon observed.

‘We could try and break it down,' Neville suggested optimistically. ‘You could take a really long run-up and shoulder-charge it. Big, hefty bloke like you—'

‘Has enough on his plate right now without a dislocated shoulder.' Gordon kicked at the door in a half-hearted way; it scarcely budged. ‘I ask you,' he said. ‘What sort of idiot locks a fire door? Damn' thing shouldn't even have a lock on it in the first place.'

Neville sighed. ‘You know what this means,' he said. ‘We'll have to go back.'

‘Oh
no
,' Gordon whined. ‘All that way—'

‘You got a better idea?'

Gordon shrugged his shoulders. ‘No,' he admitted.

‘Well, then. If I'm remembering this right, there was a left-hand branch about two hundred yards before we got to the first door. If we take that, we might be able to work our way along parallel to this. No guarantees there's even a corridor there, but I don't see as how we've got much choice.'