'Wait!' I cried out.

'What?'

'I can't concentrate with all those people—!'

Landen looked round the empty bedroom.

'What people?'

'Those people,' I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, 'the ones reading us.'

Landen stared at me and raised an eyebrow. I felt stupid, relaxed and gave out a nervous giggle.

'Sorry. I've been living inside fiction for too long; sometimes I get this weird feeling that you, me and everything else are just, well, characters in a book or something.'

'Plainly, that is ridiculous.'

'I know, I know. I'm sorry. Where were we?'

'Just here.'

32

Area 21: The Elan

FREEDOM OF |||||||| ACT

A STEP CLOSER, ANNOUNCES MR ||||||||

Open government came one step closer yesterday with the announcement that Mr |||||| would lend his weight to the Freedom of ||||||| Act. The act, which aims to bring once top-||||| information from ||||||||||||| into hands of the

|||||||, was halted as a 'great leap forward' by Mr ||||||||||||, the Departmnt of |||||||||||||||'s senior ||||||||||||. The chief opponent to the draft bill, Mr |||||||||||, gave his assurance that 'as long as my name is |||||||||||| I won't allow this ||||||||||| to be passed'.

Article in The |||||||||| newspaper, |||||||||||||||| July 19|||||

'So, what's the plan?' asked Bowden as we drove towards the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It was about ten in the morning, and we were travelling in Bowden's Welsh-built Griffin Sportina with Millon de Floss and Stig in the back seat. Behind us was a convoy of ten lorries, all loaded with banned Danish books.

'Well,' I said, 'ever thought it odd that Parliament just roll over and do anything that Kaine asks?'

'I've given up even trying to understand Parliament,' said Bowden.

'They're all snivelling toadies,' put in Millon.

'If you even need a government,' added Stig, 'you are a life form flawed beyond redemption.'

'I was confused, too,' I continued. 'A government wholly agreeable to the worst excesses of Kaine could mean only one thing: some form of short-range mind control wielded by unscrupulous power brokers.'

'Now that's my kind of theory!' exclaimed Millon excitedly.

'I couldn't figure it out at first, but then when I was up at Goliathopolis I felt it myself. A sort of mind- numbing go-with-the-flow feeling when I just wanted to follow the path of least resistance, no matter how pointless, or wrong. I had seen its effect at the Evade the Question Time TV show, too — the front row were eating out of Kaine's hand, no matter what he said.'

'So what's the connection?'

'I felt it again in Mycroft's lab. It was only when Landen made a sarcastic comment that I twigged. The ovinator. We all thought the 'ovine' part of it was to do with eggs, but it's not. It's to do with sheep. The ovinator transmits sub-alpha brain waves that inhibit free will and instil sheep-like tendencies into the minds of anyone close by. It can be tuned to the user so they are unaffected; it's possible that Goliath may have developed a long-range version called the Ovitron and an anti-serum. Mycroft thinks he probably invented it to transmit public health messages, but he can't remember. Goliath get hold of it, Stricknene gives it to Kaine -bingo. Parliament do everything Kaine asks. The only reason Formby is still anti-Yorrick is because he refuses to go anywhere near him.'

There was silence in the car.

'What can we do about it?'

'Mycroft's working on an ovi-negator that should cancel it out, but we carry on with our plans as before. The Elan — and win the Superhoop.'

'Even I'm finding this hard to believe,' murmured Millon, 'and that's a first for me.'

'How does it get us out of England?' asked Bowden.

I patted the briefcase that was sitting on my lap.

'With the ovinator on our side, no one will want to oppose.us.'

'I'm not sure that's morally acceptable,' said Bowden. 'I mean, doesn't that make us as bad as Kaine?'

'I think we should stop and talk this through,' added Millon.

'It's one thing making up stories about mind control experiments, but quite another actually using them.'

I opened the briefcase and switched the ovinator on.

'Who's with me to go to the Elan, guys?'

'Well, all right, then,' conceded Bowden, 'I guess I'm with you on this.'

'Millon?'

'I'll do whatever Bowden does.'

'It really does work, doesn't it?' observed Stig, giving a short snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.

Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the ovinator in the briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.

'What are in those trucks?' asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.

'You don't need to look in the trucks,' I told him.

'We don't need to look in the trucks,' echoed the border guard.

'We can go through unimpeded.'

'You can go through unimpeded.'

'You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.'

'I'm definitely going to be nicer to my girlfriend . . . Move along.'

He waved us through and we drove across the demilitarised zone to the Welsh border guards, who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safe-keeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llandrindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border but I switched on the ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best option.

Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way with a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhaydr the countryside became more rugged, the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse

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