The inside of the building, the insides of Big Thinks, was the messiest area Richard had seen in Tomorrow Town. Banks of metal cabinets fronted with reels of tape were connected by a spaghetti tangle of wires that wound throughout the building like coloured plastic ivy. Some cabinets had their fronts off, showing masses of circuit boards, valves, and transistors. Surprisingly, the workings of the master brain seemed held together with a great deal of Sellotape, string, and blu-tak. Richard recognised some components well in advance of any on the market, and others that might date back to Marconi or Babbage.

"We've been making adjustments," said Jess-F.

She shifted a cardboard box full of plastic shapes from a swivel chair and let him sit at a desk piled with wired-together television sets. To one side was a paper towel dispenser which coughed out a steady roll of graph paper with lines squiggled on it.

He didn't know which knobs to twiddle.

"Ms Jess-F, could you show me how a typical dispute arbitration is made. Say, the triangle of Zhoule, Buster, and Sue-2."

"That documentation might be hard to find."

"In this futopia of efficiency? I doubt it."

Jess-F nodded to Moana, who scurried off to root through large bins full of scrunched and torn paper.

Vanessa was with Gewell and Zootie, taking a tour of the hydroponics zone, which was where the body of Varno Zhoule had been found. The official story was that Buster (now, Mal-K) had gone to Zhoule's bungalow to kill him but found him not at home. He had taken the Hugo from its display case and searched out the victim-to-be, found him contemplating the green gunk that was made into his favourite pills, and did the deed then and there. It didn't take a computer to decide it was more likely that Zhoule had been killed where the weapon was handy for an annoyed impulse-assassin to reach for, then hovercrafted along with the murder weapon to a public place so some uninvolved zenvol clot could find him. But why ferry the body all that way, with the added risk of being caught?

"Tell you what, Ms Jess-F, let's try BeeTee out on a hypothetical dispute? Put in the setup of Hamlet, and see what the computer thinks would be best for Denmark."

"Big Thinks is not a toy, Mm."

Moana came back waving some sheaves of paper.

Richard looked over it. Jess-F ground her teeth.

Though the top sheet was headed "Input tek: Buster Munro," this was not the triangle dispute documentation. Richard scrolled through the linked print-out. He saw maps of Northern Europe, lists of names and dates, depositions in non-phonetic English, German and Danish, and enough footnotes for a good-sized doctoral thesis. In fact, that was exactly what this was.

"I'm not the first to think of running a hypothetical dispute past the mighty computer," said Richard. "The much-maligned Buster got there before me."

"And wound up recategorised as a zenpass," said Jess-F.

"He tried to get an answer to the Schleswig-Holstein Question, didn't he? Lord Palmerston said only three men in Europe got to the bottom of it—one who forgot, one who died, and one who went mad. It was an insanely complicated argument between Denmark and Germany, over the governance of a couple of border provinces. Buster put the question to Big Thinks as if it were a contemporary dispute, just to see how the computer would have resolved it. What did it suggest, nuclear attack? Is that why all the redecoration? Buster's puzzle blew all the fuses."

Richard found the last page.

The words "forgot died mad" were repeated over and over, in very faint ink. Then some mathematical formulae. Then the printer equivalent of scribble.

"This makes no sense."

He showed it to Jess-F, hoping she could interpret it. He really would have liked Big Thinks to have got to the bottom of the tussle that defeated Bismarck and Metternich and spat out a blindingly simple answer everyone should have seen all along.

"No," she admitted. "It makes no sense at all."

Moana shrugged.

Richard felt a rush of sympathy for Jess-F. This was painful for her.

"BeeTee can't do it," said Richard. "The machine can do sums very fast, but nothing else?"

Jess-F was almost at the point of tears.

"That's not true," she said, with tattered pride. "Big Thinks is the most advanced computer in the world. It can solve any logic problem. Give it the data, and it can deliver accurate weather forecasts, arrange schedules to optimise efficiency of any number of tasks …"

"But throw the illogical at it, and BeeTee just has a good cry."

"It's a machine. It can't cry."

"Or arbitrate love affairs."

Jess-F was in a corner.

"It's not fair," she said, quietly. "It's not BeeTee's fault. It's not my fault. They knew the operational parameters. They just kept insisting it tackle areas outside its remit, extending, tampering, overburdening. My techs have been working all the hours of the day …"

"Kronons, surely?"

"… all the bloody kronons of the day, just trying to get Big Thinks working again. Even after all this, the ridiculous demands keep coming through. Big Thinks, Big Thinks, will I be pretty, will I be rich? Big Thinks, Big Thinks, is there life on other planets?"

Jess-F put her hands over her face.

" 'They'? Who are 'they'?"

"All of them," Jess-F sobbed. "Across all disciplines."

"Who especially?"

"Who else? Varno Zhoule."

"Not any more?"

"No."

She looked out from behind her hands, horrified.

"It wasn't me," she said.

"I know. You're left-handed. Wrong wound pattern. One more question: what did the late Mm Mal-K want from Big Thinks?"

Jess-F gave out an appalled sigh.

"Now, he was cracked. He kept putting in these convoluted specific questions. In the end, they were all about taking over the country. He wanted to run the whole of the United Kingdom like Tomorrow Town."

"The day after tomorrow, the world?"

"He kept putting in plans and strategies for infiltrating vital industries and dedicating them to the cause. He didn't have an army, but he believed Big Thinks could get all the computers in the country on his side. Most of the zenvols thought he was a dreamer, spinning out a best-case scenario at the meetings. But he meant it. He wanted to found a large-scale Technomeritocracy."

"With himself as Beloved Leader?"

"No, that's how mad he was. He wanted Big Thinks to run everything. He was hoping to put BeeTee in charge and let the future happen."

"That's why he wanted Vanessa and me out of the story. We were a threat to his funding. Without the subsidies, the plug is pulled."

"One thing BeeTee can do is keep track of figures. As a community, Tomorrow Town is in the red. Enormously."

"There's no money here, though."

"Of course not. We've spent it. And spent money we don't have. The next monorail from Preston is liable to be crowded with dunning bailiffs."

Richard thought about it. He was rather saddened by the truth. It would have been nice if the future worked. He wondered if Lincoln Steffens had any second thoughts during the Moscow purge trials?

"What threat was Zhoule to Mal-K?" he asked.

Jess-F frowned. "That's the oddest thing. Zhoule was the one who really encouraged Mal-K to work on his coup plans. He did see himself as, what did you call it, 'Beloved Leader.' All his stories were about intellectual supermen taking charge of the world and sorting things out. If anything, he was the visioneer of the tomorrow takeover. And he'd have jumped anything in skirts if femzens wore skirts here."

Richard remembered the quivering Sue-2.

"So we're back to Buster in the conservatory with the Hugo award?"

"I've always said it was him," said Jess-F. "You can't blame him, but he did it."

"We shall see."

Sirens sounded. Moana put her fingers in her ears. Jess-F looked even more stricken.

"That's not a good sign, is it?"

"The fool," said Jess-F. "He's tampered with the master controls. Buster will kill us all. It's the only thing he has left."

Zenvols piled into the communally-owned electric carts parked in a rank to one side of the square. When they proved too heavy for the vehicles, they started throwing each other off. Holes melted in the canopy above the globes. Sizzling drips of molten plastic fell onto screaming tomorrow townies.

The sirens shrilled, urging everyone to panic.

Richard saw Vanessa through the throng.

She was with Zootie. No Gewell.

A one-man hovercraft, burdened with six clinging zenvols, chugged past inch by inch, outpaced by someone on an old-fashioned, non–solar-powered bicycle.

"If the elements reach critical," said Jess-F, "Tomorrow Town will blow up."

A bannerlike strip of paper curled out of a slit in the front of Big Thinks.

"Your computer wants to say goodbye," said Richard.

SURKIT BRAKER NO. 15.

"Not much of a farewell."

Zootie walked between falling drips to the central column, which supported the three globes. He opened a hatch and pulled a switch. The artificial suns went out. Real sunlight came through the holes in the canopy.

"Now that's what computers can do," said Jess-F, elated. "Execute protocols. If this happens, then that order must be given."

The zenvol seemed happier about her computer now.

Richard was grateful for a ditch-digger who could read.

"The body was carried here?" asked Vanessa.

"Not just the body. The murder weapon too. Who lives in that bungalow?"

On a small hill was a bungalow not quite as spacious as Zhoule's, one of the mass of hutches placed between the silver pathways, with a crown of solar panels on the flat roof, and a dish antennae.

"Mm Jor-G," said Moana.

"So you do speak?"

She nodded her head and smiled.

Richard looked at him.

"Nice try with the globes. Should have remembered the circuit-breaker, though. Only diabolical masterminds construct their private estates with in-built self-destruct systems. In the future, as in the past, it's unlikely that town halls will have bombs in the basement ready to go off in the event that the outgoing Mayor wants to take the whole community with him rather than hand over the chain of office."

Gewell didn't say anything.

Vanessa went straight to a shelf and picked up the only award in the display. It was another Hugo.

"Best Fan Editor 1958," she read from the plaque.

The rocketship came away from its base.

"You killed him here," said Richard, "broke your own Hugo, left the bloody rocketship with the body outside. Then, when you'd calmed down a bit, you remembered Zhoule had won the same award. Several, in fact. You sneaked over to his bungalow—no locks, how convenient—and broke one of his Hugos, taking the rocket to complete yours. You made it look as if he were killed with his own award, and you were out of the loop. If only you'd got round to developing the glue of the future and fixed the thing properly, it wouldn't be so obvious. It's plain that, though you've devoted your life to planning out the details of the future, your one essay in the fine art of murder was a rushed botch-up job done on the spur of the moment. You haven't really improved on Cain. At least, Mm Mal-K made the effort with the space suit and the zapper-prod."

"Mm Jor-G," said Jess-F, "why?"

Good question, Richard thought.

After a long pause, Gewell gathered himself and said "Varno was destroying Tomorrow Town. He had so many … so many ideas. Every morning, before breakfast, he had four or five. All the time, constantly. Radio transmitters the size of a pinhead. Cheap infinite energy from tapping the planet's core. Solar-powered personal flying machines. Robots to do everything. Robots to make robots to do everything. An operation to extend human lifespan threefold. Rules and regulations about who was fit to have and raise children, with gonad-block implants to enforce them. Hats that collect the electrical energy of the brain and use it to power a personal headlamp. Non-stop, unrelenting, unstoppable. Ideas, ideas, ideas …"

Richard was frankly astonished by the man's vehemence. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

"But Varno did the easy bit. Once he'd tossed out an idea, it was up to me to make it work. Me or Big Thinks or some other plodding zenvol. And nine out of ten of the ideas didn't work, couldn't ever work. And it was always our fault for not making them work, never his for foisting them off on us. This town would be perfect if it hadn't been for his ideas. And his bloody dreadful spelling. Back in the '50s, who do you think tidied all his stories up so they were publishable? Muggins Gewell. He couldn't write a sentence that scanned, and rather than learn how he decreed the language should be changed. Not just the spelling, he had a plan to go through the dictionary crossing out all the words that were no longer needed, then make it a crime to teach them to children. It was something to do with his old public school. He said he wanted to make gerunds extinct within a generation. But he had these wonderful, wonderful, ghastly, terrible ideas. It'd have made you sick."

"And the medico who wanted to rule the world?"

"Him too. He had ideas."

Gewell was pleading now, hands fists around imaginary bludgeons.

"If only I could have had ideas," he said. "They'd have been good ones."

Richard wondered how they were going to lock Gewell up until the police came.

Richard and Vanessa looked across the Dales. A small vehicle was puttering along a winding, illogical lane that had been laid out not by a computer but by wandering sheep. It wasn't the police, though they were on the way.

"Who do you think this is?" asked Vanessa.

"It'll be Buster. He's bringing the outside to Tomorrow Town. He always was a yesterday man at heart."

A car-horn honked.

Zenvols, some already changed out of their plastic suits, paid attention. Sue-2 was excited, hopeful, fearful. She clung to Moana, who smiled and waved.

Someone cheered. Others joined.

"What is he driving?" asked Vanessa "It looks like a relic from the past."

"For these people, it's deliverance," said Richard. "It's a fish 'n' chip van."

1. Since the Year Dot: Since time immemorial. (find in story)

2. Dalek: A trundling cyborg giant pepperpot featured in the long-running BBC-TV science fiction programme Doctor Who, introduced in 1963. The Daleks' distinctive mechanical voices were much-imitated by British children in the 1960s. Their catch-phrase: "ex-ter-min-ate!" (find in story)

3. The Wilson Government: Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. A Maigret-like, pipe-smoking, raincoated figure, he famously boasted of "the white heat of technology" when summing up British contributions to futuristic projects like the Concorde. At the time of this story, he had been succeeded by the Tory Edward Heath, a laughing yachtsman. (find in story)

4. James Burke and Raymond Baxter: The hosts in the 1960s of BBC-TV's long-running Tomorrow's World, a magazine programme covering the worlds of invention and technology. They were also anchors for UK TV coverage of the moon landings. (find in story)

5. The Sunday colour supplements: A UK publishing phenomenon of the 1960s, magazines included with Sunday newspapers. The pioneering rivals were The Sunday Times and The Observer. (find in story)

6. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The corporation's sound effects department, responsible for Dalek voices and the Doctor Who theme. Their consultants included Pink Floyd and Michael Moorcock. (find in story)

7. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: "I am the God of Hell Fire," rants Arthur on his single "Fire," which was Number One in the UK charts in 1968. An influence on Iron Maiden and other pioneer heavy metal groups, Arthur was also a devoted surrealist-cum-Satanist. He never had another hit, but is still gigging. (find in story)

8. New Scientist: UK weekly magazine, scientific sister publication to the left-leaning political journal New Statesman. (find in story)

9. Arthur C. Clarke: Now Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of Childhood's End, screenwriter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, writer on scientific topics, and Sri Lankan resident. Known in the UK as host of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, a TV series about Fortean phenomena that is twenty years on the template for much X Files–ish fringe documentary programming. (find in story)

10. Auberon Waugh: Crusty conservative commentator, son of the satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh. In the 1960s, his waspish journalism was most often found in The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. (find in story)

11. J. G. Ballard: Major British novelist, a key influence in the so-called New Wave of British sf in the 1960s. (find in story)

12. Varno Zhoule: British s-f author, most prolific in the 1950s, when he published almost exclusively in American magazines. His only novel, The Stars in Their Traces, is a fix-up of stories first seen in Astounding. His "Court Martian" was dramatised on the UK TV series Out of the Unknown in 1963. (find in story)

13. The Diogenes Club: First mentioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in "The Greek Interpreter" and revealed as a government agency by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the Diogenes Club has employed various investigators of the odd and paranormal for over a century. Richard Jeperson and Vanessa have also appeared in "End of the Pier Show" (Dark of the Night, edited by Stephen Jones; also Kim Newman's collection Seven Stars), "You Don"t Have to Be Mad …" (White of the Moon, edited by Stephen Jones; also The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Seven Stars), "The Biafran Bank Manager" (Dark Detectives, edited by Stephen Jones; also Seven Stars), and the forthcoming "Egyptian Avenue" (Embrace the Mutation, edited by Bill Sheehan). (find in story)

14. Gerry Anderson: TV producer famous in collaboration with his wife, Sylvia, for the 1960s technophilic puppet shows Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. His 1970s live-action Space 1999 has not achieved the lasting place in UK pop culture attained by the "supermarionation" shows. (find in story)

15. Valerie Singleton: Presenter of the BBC-TV children's magazine programme Blue Peter. Well-spoken and auntie-like, she famously showed kids how to make things out of household oddments without ever mentioning a brand name (a co-host who once said "Biro" instead of "ball-point pen" was nearly fired). (find in story)

16. Smarties: Chocolate discs inside shells of various colours, available from Rowntree & Company in cardboard tubes. Still a staple "sweet" (i.e., candy) in the UK; similar to M&Ms. (find in story)

17. The Tomorrow Town Alphabet: Q and X are replaced by KW and KS; the vestigial C exists only in CH and is otherwise replaced by K or S. E.g.: "The kwik brown foks jumped over the layzee dog." (find in story)

18. The Man in the White Suit: Film directed by Alexander Mackendrick, starring Alec Guinness. An inventor develops a fabric that never wears out or gets dirty, and the clothing industry tries to keep it off the market. (find in story)

19. "Can't even beat as it sweeps as it cleans": The UK slogan for Hoover vacuum cleaners in the 1970s was "it beats as it sweeps as it cleans." (find in story)

20. Michelin Man: Cheery advertising mascot of the tire company, he consists of white bloated tires. (find in story)

21. The Schleswig-Holstein Question: Bane of any schoolboy studying O-level European history in 1975. It's a key plot point in George Macdonald Fraser's novel Royal Flash. O levels -- tricky exams taken at 16. A levels— trickier exams taken at 18. Both superseded by GCSE exams, which those of us who have O and A levels think of as worthless bits of paper any clot can get, like American high school diplomas. (find in story)

22. Muggins: A sap, a patsy. (find in story)