Unobstructed

"I wrote the requirement myself, in numbered clauses, on a legal pad: a blank vertical surface, minimum two metres by two, unobstructed. Then I went looking for one in the most watched building in the country."

I walked that terminal for a long time, holding a paper cup of cold coffee, and at no point in the whole of it did I have the smallest idea what I would have said to anybody who stopped me and asked what I was doing.

Because what I was doing, in the plainest possible terms, was looking for a wall.

And I had written the specification for it myself, which was the part I could not get away from. I had sat at my own desk with a legal pad and a biro in my hand and I had set the whole thing out in numbered clauses, in the passive voice, because the passive voice was where I went to hide—and then I had screwed the sheet into a ball and thrown it at a bin and missed. And I could still see every line of it.

Orientation: device to be directed at a blank vertical surface, minimum 2m x 2m, unobstructed.

Two metres by two. Unobstructed. Blank.

I had assumed that would be the easy part. In among everything else—the cameras, and the crowds, and the possibility that the thing was dead, and the rather worse possibility that using it was the very act which would tell somebody where I was—the actual physical requirement of a bit of empty wall had seemed like a triviality, and I had not given it thirty seconds of honest thought while I was sitting in that plastic chair working myself up to the decision.

And then I got up and went looking, and there was not one. Not anywhere. Not in the whole of that enormous building.

Every wall in that airport was doing something, and I had never once registered it in a lifetime of walking through the places. There was no such thing as a blank wall in an airport, because a blank wall was money lying on the ground—and so every square metre of every vertical surface in that terminal had something bolted to it, or printed on it, or shining out of it. Advertisements the size of a bus. Screens running the arrivals, and then the departures, and then an advertisement, and then the arrivals again. Signage, and maps, and fire equipment in red cabinets with glass fronts, and extinguishers, and hose reels, and defibrillators, and emergency lighting. Skirting, and cable trunking, and those long shallow ducts that run at knee height and turn out on inspection to contain the entire nervous system of the building.

And where there was nothing bolted to a wall, there was glass. Whole faces of that place were glass, floor to roof, looking out over the aprons and the aircraft and the flat brown suburbs going away to the horizon—which is very fine, and I have always liked it, and it was of no earthly use to me whatever, because I could not point a device at a window.

Or could I? I stood in front of one of them for some considerable time wondering precisely that, with a cold coffee in my hand and a bag on my shoulder and my own reflection standing out there in front of me looking dreadful. And I could not answer it, and there was nobody to ask, and if I got it wrong the consequences were not going to be of the kind a man recovers from by apologising.

So: not glass. A wall. A proper one, plaster or plasterboard or whatever it is they line these places with, blank, and big, and with nobody standing in front of it.

I tried the toilets first, and I was not proud of it.

The gents by gate twenty-four was enormous, and it was busy, and it smelled of that industrial floral chemical they use, and I stood at a basin washing my hands for a great deal longer than my hands required and looked at the room behind me in the mirror.

The cubicles had partitions, and that was fatal. They were not walls at all; they were panels, hung off a rail, with a gap of about eight inches underneath them and another gap up at the top, and the largest continuous surface in any one of them was perhaps a metre and a half across and had a coat hook screwed into it and a laminated notice about hand hygiene.

Two metres by two. Unobstructed.

And even if it had been big enough, there was a simpler and considerably worse objection, and it arrived while I was still standing there with the tap running. A portal was not a hole in the world that appeared politely and kept itself to itself. I had seen one. I had stood four feet from one in a cold meeting room with a chair wedged under the door handle, and it had thrown its impossible colours right across that room and up the walls and over the ceiling, and it had filled the entire space with a light that came from nowhere and belonged to nothing.

And a lavatory cubicle had a gap of eight inches underneath the door.

I stood at that basin and looked at my own face and understood exactly how it would go. Somebody at the urinals would glance down, and would see a light of a colour that has no name coming out from under a cubicle door, and moving. And whatever happened after that would happen extremely quickly, and it would happen to me, and there would be nothing left inside the cubicle to explain it with, because I would be gone.

I dried my hands and left.

And after that I simply walked, and this is the part I have the greatest difficulty setting down, because I do not believe I have ever in my life done anything that made me feel quite so completely like a lunatic.

I walked the length of that concourse and back again looking at walls. I looked at them the way I would have looked at a floor plan in a meeting, and I caught myself doing it and could not make myself stop. I would come round a corner and my eyes would go straight up to the junction of wall and ceiling, hunting for a camera; and then down the vertical face, hunting for a clear run of it; and then along the floor, assessing the traffic. And then I would move on—past a family eating chips out of a cardboard box, past a man asleep across three seats with his shoes off and his hands folded on his chest, past a girl of about nineteen crying into a telephone by a pillar and doing her level best to make it look as though she was not.

And every so often I would stop, and stand, and look at some particular patch of wall for slightly too long. And then I would become aware that I was a man on his own in an airport standing perfectly still and staring at nothing at all, and I would set off again with my heart going.

The prayer room had a wall. I saw it through the door as I went past: a proper one, plain, more than large enough, with nothing bolted to it anywhere. There was also a woman in there, sitting very still with her head bowed, and I went past without breaking my stride and did not look back, and I am not going to set down here what I thought about myself for having considered it even for the length of a footstep.

There was a fire door at the end of one of the piers with an excellent wall beside it, and a sign on it explaining that an alarm would sound.

And there was a lift lobby, tucked in behind a bookshop, which was almost exactly right. A large blank wall. No shops, no signage, nobody in it at all. And two cameras in the ceiling, one at each end, black hemispheres, looking at nothing whatever in the patient way those things do—and I stood underneath them for a moment and then turned round and walked back out.

The cameras were what was breaking me, and they were breaking me on entirely professional grounds.

Because I could count them. That was the whole trouble with them. I could see them—dozens, scores of them, once I had begun to look—and if I could see that many with no training and no equipment and a headache coming on, then I had no basis whatever for estimating how many I could not see. That was not a paranoid position. That was simply the arithmetic. When the observed sample is that large, it tells a man nothing at all about the unobserved population except that it is very probably bigger.

So I could not clear a single location in that building. Not one. I could stand in a place and establish that there was no camera pointing at it that I could find—and that is a different statement, and a very much weaker one, and I have spent my entire working life standing in rooms explaining to people that it is a different statement and a very much weaker one, and being sighed at for my trouble.

There was no safe place. There was only a range of unsafe ones, and I was going to have to select the least unsafe of them, on incomplete information, and then live with whatever came of it.

Which, I suppose, is what everybody does about everything, all the time. It had simply never been put to me quite so plainly before.

I found it right down at the far end, past the last gate on the pier, where the terminal stopped being a place for passengers and began quietly turning into the back of a building.

The shops ran out. The seating ran out. The carpet gave up and became a hard floor, and the ceiling came down by about a metre, and the lighting changed—from that panelled shadowless glare into a run of tubes, one of which had gone altogether and one of which was going, ticking away up there and flickering, so that everything underneath it moved very slightly all of the time. There was a lavatory with a folding yellow sign in front of it that said CLOSED FOR CLEANING, and a green fire exit sign above a door, and past all of that there was a corridor that turned to the left and went nowhere that anybody had any reason to go.

I came round the corner into it, and I stopped, because there was nobody there.

That was the first thing about it and I had not expected it to affect me the way it did. There was actually, genuinely nobody there. After all that time in a building with thousands of people moving through it in every direction at once, I turned one corner and the noise dropped away by half and there was not one single human being in front of me.

There were three vending machines standing against one side, with their compressors running—that low irregular hum they make, cycling on and cycling off—and there was a cleaner's trolley abandoned about ten metres up the passage, with a mop standing in the bucket and a spray bottle balanced on the handle, exactly as somebody had left it when they walked away to do something else.

And on the other side, running the whole length of that corridor, there was a wall.

Painted plasterboard, scuffed along at knee height where the trolleys had been going past it for years, with a long grey smear across it where something had been dragged. No advertisement. No screen. No fire cabinet, no hose reel, no extinguisher, no signage of any description whatsoever for about four metres.

Blank, and unobstructed, and a very great deal more than two metres by two.

I stood in that corridor and looked at that wall and something went through me that I have never been able to name properly since. It was not relief and it was not fear, and the nearest I have ever got to it is that it was recognition.

I went up and down it twice.

I looked at the ceiling and I could not find a camera, which does not mean that there was not one. There were cable trays running along up there, and a smoke detector, and a sprinkler head, and one of those little round grey things that could have been a light sensor or could have been absolutely anything at all—and I looked at that for a long time and could not decide about it, and in the end I made a judgement. And my judgement was that this was a service corridor at the back end of a pier, and that nobody had ever thought it worth the money to watch it.

That judgement was made by a frightened man who wanted the answer to be yes. I knew that while I was making it. I made it anyway.

The trolley bothered me a great deal more than the ceiling did, and I stood and looked at it for some time—because a trolley left standing in a corridor with a wet mop in the bucket meant that somebody had been there recently and that somebody was coming back, and I had no way of knowing whether that meant four minutes or forty. And I could not afford to wait and find out, because I had a flight, and because I had already been in that corridor long enough that a man coming round the corner and finding me standing there doing nothing at all would have been a problem in itself.

So I did the arithmetic, in a service corridor in Melbourne Airport, with a cold coffee in one hand.

If somebody came round that corner while the wall was open, they would see a thing that no human being on this earth has any framework whatever for seeing, and they would react in one of about three ways, and not one of those three ended well for me. If somebody came round that corner while I was standing beside a perfectly ordinary painted wall, they would see a bloke on his own with a backpack, looking at nothing, and they would assume that he was waiting for somebody, and they would walk straight past him.

The whole of the exposure was concentrated in the seconds during which the thing was open. Everything before it and everything after it was survivable.

Which meant that the answer was to make it short. Open it, confirm it, close it. Do not go through. Do not stand there gaping at the impossible with my mouth open, which is precisely what I had done the first time, and which had cost me the better part of half an hour of my life and had very nearly cost me a great deal more than that.

Ten seconds. That was the plan, and I was rather pleased with it, and I have not been able to think about it since without a certain amount of embarrassment.

I put the coffee cup down on top of a vending machine, and then I picked it straight back up again and dropped it in a bin, because an abandoned cup standing on a vending machine in an empty corridor was exactly the sort of thing that would make a cleaner stop and look about.

Then I took the bag off my shoulder and set it down between my feet, and I put my hand into my right trouser pocket, and I took out my own Portal Key.

And I stood there with it lying in my open palm, in a service corridor in Melbourne Airport, under a flickering strip light, with three vending machines humming away behind me and a mop standing in a bucket ten metres up the passage.

It was warm. It had gone cold in the X-ray machine and it had come back to blood heat since, from my leg, from being carried about all morning—and I turned it over once under that light and there was still no gleam anywhere on the surface of it for my eye to take hold of, and my stomach did the thing it always did when I looked at it properly.

And then I remembered the blood.

I had forgotten. That is the honest truth of it, and I was not proud of it either. I had spent the better part of an hour planning the thing—the wall, and the cameras, and the trolley, and the ten seconds—and I had built the whole of it up in my head like a piece of work I was going to be assessed on, and I had left out the one detail that had actually frightened me the first time. The device did not simply open when a man pressed it. It took something first.

I turned my right hand over and looked at the pad of my thumb.

The mark was still there. A hard little brown point, no bigger than a full stop, sitting dead in the middle of the whorl. It had not scabbed and it had not faded and it had not gone anywhere at all in the days since that meeting room. It was simply in me now, stamped into my own fingerprint, and I had not made myself look at it properly since the morning I first found it.

And the thing lying in my other hand was going to want another one.

I could not have told you how long I stood in that corridor. Long enough for the light overhead to flicker several times. Long enough for one of the vending machines to cycle off and then cycle back on again. Long enough that I began to be able to hear my own pulse in all that quiet.

Every sensible instinct I had was standing up and objecting in the strongest possible terms. I was about to open a hole in the fabric of the world, deliberately, inside a secured Commonwealth facility, in a building with more cameras in it than the entire suburb I grew up in, with a flight to catch that I could not afford to miss—and with no way of knowing whether the thing would even work, or whether it would light up a pin on a map in a room somewhere, or whether it would close behind me and leave me standing in the dust.

And underneath all of that, quieter than any of it, sat the only argument that had ever really mattered, and it had been in me since I sat down in that plastic chair by the gate.

I had never checked.

I had bled for a thing, and posted a thing, and frightened my brother, and lied to a friend who had never lied to me—and I had built the whole of the last four days on top of an assumption, and I had never once gone back and put my hand on it to see whether it would hold.

So I set my teeth, and I braced my whole arm for it, and I put my thumb down on the indent.

And I pressed.

And nothing happened to me at all.

There was no needle. There was no sting. There was no hard clean point driven up into the meat of my thumb, and no bead of blood coming up out of the whorl, and no bright cold shock going through me. There was simply my thumb, resting on a small smooth indentation in a grey object, and no pain whatever, and after about a second I understood that I was standing in a corridor with my eyes screwed shut and my shoulders up around my ears, braced against something that was not coming.

I opened my eyes.

The thing sat in my palm exactly as it had been sitting there before. No mark on it. No moisture. Nothing.

And it took me a moment—it took me longer than it should have taken me—to understand why.

It had not asked me for anything, because it did not need to ask me for anything. It had already had what it wanted. It had taken that from me in a cold meeting room on the fourth floor of a government building, out of a thumb I had put down on it without knowing what I was agreeing to, and the transaction had been completed at that moment and had never needed to be repeated.

It knew me. That was all. It had known me since the first time, and it was going to go on knowing me, and it was never going to have to ask again.

And I stood there in that corridor with a perfectly clean thumb and understood, with an absolutely sickening clarity, that I had spent four days thinking of myself as a man who was carrying a device.

And then the wall of that corridor stopped existing.