The Demon Headmaster and The Prime Minister’s Brain (6 page)

When the ground began to turn under her feet, Dinah was too surprised to do anything.
She did not have time to shout to the others or jump backwards to safety.
All she could do was concentrate on not toppling over.
Clutching the handle of her suitcase with one hand and gripping the S-7’s case with the other, she was whirled round, away from the sunshine, away from the open air, away from the other members of SPLAT into—total darkness.

It snapped round her as though the lid of a box had slammed shut.
She was standing in a completely strange place and she could not even see her clenched hands in front of her or her feet on the floor below.

Automatically, she put her suitcase down and felt behind her, trying to push at the door she had come through.
But the wall on this side was lined with metal and the door fitted so perfectly that she could not even find the cracks at its edges.

Keep calm,
she kept muttering to herself.
Don’t panic.
She couldn’t have been brought all this way just to be shut up in the dark.
There must be a reason for it.
Something must be going to happen.
Mustn’t it?

But she knew that she could not stay in control of herself for ever.
She could not have been there for more than a minute, but already the darkness was straining her eyes and she was beginning to breathe faster.
Something must happen soon.
It must, it must …

And then it did.
Suddenly, in front of her, a tiny green light appeared, floating in the blackness.
She could not tell whether it was near to her or far away.
It was out of the reach of her hand when she stretched towards it, but beyond that she had no way of telling, nothing to measure it against in the blackness.
It just hovered, staying in the same place but vibrating constantly as though it changed shape all the time.
But it was either too small or too far away for Dinah to make out the shapes properly.

Then she heard the mechanical voice that had spoken to her when she was outside.

‘
You May Advance Towards The Light.
’

She shuddered.
The sensible part of her mind knew very well that the voice was made by a machine.
In fact she knew she could do the same thing with her S-7 if she loaded the right instructions.
But—it was hard not to think of that jerky, inhuman voice as the voice of the Computer Director himself.
She imagined his mouth opening and shutting like the mouth of a robot, while his pebbly glasses gleamed above.

‘
Please Advance Towards The Light
,’ the voice said.

It was hard not to be terrified at the thought of stepping forward into—nothing.
But there were no other choices.
Dinah bent down to pick up her suitcase and then began to shuffle forward, very slowly, step by step, feeling the ground in front of her with her feet before each move.

Both her hands were full, so that she could not reach out to feel whether there were walls on either side.
The floor was covered with something soft, like carpet, so that her footsteps made no noise.
Cautiously, she coughed once or twice to see if she could tell by the sound what sort of place she was in.
She had an impression of walls close to her on both sides, as though she were in a long, straight corridor, but she could not be certain.
The only thing she could be certain of was the green light hanging in the air in front of her.
With her eyes fixed on it, she shuffled closer, inch by inch.

And slowly, very slowly, it grew larger as she got closer, until she could see that it was made up of tiny, shifting, snaking green lines of light.
Like the lines on a computer screen.
Something about those lines made her move faster, trying to get near enough to see them plainly.
Her quick walk changed to a trot and then a stumbling, awkward run as the lines came clearer and clearer and larger and larger and she
recognized
them.

She really was looking through the darkness at a computer screen.
And there, dancing across it, winding and shifting and writhing, were the familiar patterns of not one octopus, but
two.
Two beautiful, complicated octopuses of green light, hovering in the darkness of the Sentinel Tower.
Dinah was panting by the time she got close to the screen.

‘
Stop Now
,’ the mechanical voice said suddenly.

Dinah put down the box and the suitcase, reached out with one hand to touch the glass of the screen in front of her and then ran her fingers down it to see if there was a keyboard below.

That was the last thing she remembered properly.
After that, the beautiful, shifting lines of light held her fast, so that she was not aware of anything else around her.
She could only see their twirling and twisting and turning and …

Octopus -s-s-s-s!

It could have been a minute later that she came back to herself or it could have been five hours.
She had no way of telling.
But suddenly the octopus patterns vanished and she realized that she could see.

She was standing in a lift, in a glare of light, with a blank, dead screen in front of her where the octopuses had been.
At her feet were her suitcase and the S-7.
Behind her, the lift doors were open and from the room beyond came a faint hum of voices.

I’m here,
Dinah thought.
Wherever
here
was.
The air was cool and damp and when she glanced over her shoulder she had a quick picture of a hard, bright room.
The windowless walls were covered in white plastic and lined with shiny metal cabinets all the way round.
And the whole large room was full of people.
Full of strangers.
Dinah picked up her belongings, swallowed hard and turned round to face them.

They were sitting with their backs to her, in rows of separate desks, and for a moment she had an impression of inhuman neatness and order.
All the desks were identical—white-topped, with shiny metal legs.
They were ranged in perfectly straight lines, with the gaps between them as regular as though they had been measured in millimetres.
On each desk stood an S-7 computer and in front of each desk was a gleaming white-and-metal chair.
Sitting in the chairs were dozens and dozens of children dressed in identical spotless white lab coats, their backs hunched as they leaned over the desks.
The Brains.

For a second Dinah stood nervously in the lift, remembering Ian’s jokey description of them.
Perhaps, if she moved or spoke, they would turn and look at her with identical faces, white teeth and metal glasses gleaming under high, curved foreheads.
She stared at their backs, gathering her courage, and then stepped out of the lift.
The soles of her shoes clacked on the hard, bright floor outside and at once every head in the room moved as the Brains turned to look at her.

The bright, mechanical tidiness was completely shattered.
Every face was different—and they were all looking hard at her, some smiling and some just inquisitive.
There were boys and girls from sixteen or seventeen right down to eight or nine.
Some of them had dark hair, some of them had fair hair, some were ginger and some were mousy.
There were plaits and curls and spikes and crew-cuts and fringes.
And the clothes which showed at the necks of the lab coats were just as varied—a hotch-potch of colours and shapes.
They ranged from plain school uniform to the height of fashion.
Everyone was different—and Dinah found herself grinning round at them all.

Before she could move any further or say anything, one of the girls stood up and launched towards her with her hands held out.

‘Oh how lovely to see you I’m Camilla Jefferies and I wondered who was going to come and sit in this desk next to me because it’s the only empty one and I thought perhaps there was no one else—’

She was the most beautiful girl Dinah had ever seen.
One of the oldest there, tall and willowy with smooth pink and white skin.
A great cascade of curling chestnut hair fell down over her shoulders, almost to her waist, and a flood of words tumbled from her lips as though she never needed to breathe.

‘—look here’s your desk next to mine and this is my brother Robert behind you and Bess on the other side of you—’

Meekly Dinah let herself be ushered across to the empty desk and helped into the white lab coat that was hanging over the back of the chair.
Then she sat down and nodded at Robert and Bess.

Bess seemed to be the youngest person there.
She was shy and nervous, and she was clutching a teddy bear on her lap.
‘Hello,’ she whispered, smiling up at Dinah.

‘Hello,’ Robert said quietly from behind.
He looked very much like Camilla only younger.
About the same age as Dinah.
But he was as silent as his sister was talkative and he did not say anything else, just looked shrewdly at Dinah before he bent over his desk again.

‘—have you brought your S-7 oh good well you plug it in here let me show you—’

With a stream of instructions, Camilla got Dinah settled into her desk and then leaned back with a happy sigh.

‘Oh isn’t this
nice
we’re really here and settled and everyone’s friendly and it’s going to be really fun isn’t it—’

‘Hrmph!’
came from Robert.

Bess gave a pale, polite smile and clutched harder at her teddy bear.
‘It seems all right so far,’ she murmured.

Dinah knew what they meant.
Nothing bad had happened yet, but still, at the back of her mind, was the niggle that had been troubling her for weeks.
The feeling that there was something
wrong
about the final—about the whole competition.
But she could not think of any way to start explaining it.
So she just smiled back at Bess and waited to see what would happen now.

She did not have to wait long.
Almost as soon as she was settled the mechanical voice rang out over the room.

‘
The Computer Director Is Approaching.
Please Stand And Be Silent.
’

Even Camilla stopped talking, and everyone stood very quietly, facing the front.
There was a faint hissing sound from behind them.
Dinah decided that was the lift coming back.
Then, sharply, making them all jump, the sound of feet in hard shoes stepping out of the lift and walking across the floor.

A double line of men in white coats marched briskly up the room keeping perfectly in step with each other, not looking to the right or to the left.
When they reached the front of the room, they spread out in an exact straight line, facing the desks, four of them on one side and four on the other.

In the centre, dominating the whole room, they left a space.

I
won’t look behind,
Dinah thought sternly.
I
won’t.
Glancing from one side to the other, out of the corners of her eyes, she saw that Camilla and Bess were staring ahead in the same stubborn way.
They were too well-behaved to gawp over their shoulders, but they were full of curiosity.
They were waiting, the men at the front were waiting, the whole room was waiting for the Computer Director to appear.

Then, from the entrance of the lift, a voice spoke.
Very sharp and precise.

‘Good morning.’

Dinah stiffened.
That voice!
She could not believe that she had heard right, but now she did not
dare
look round.

‘Now that you have all arrived,’ the voice said crisply, ‘we shall start work without wasting any further time.’

Footsteps sounded as the owner of the voice began to walk up between the desks.
Dinah hung her head so that her plaits fell on either side of her face, hiding it from anyone walking by.

No,
she was thinking frantically,
no, no, no, it can’t be true.
She was nervous and anxious and excited and because of that she must have made a mistake about the Computer Director’s voice.
She
must
have made a mistake.

But, all the same, she could have sworn that the voice she had just heard was the same as a voice she knew only too well.
One that she had good reason to fear.

The voice of the Demon Headmaster.