The two men waited. To his surprise, Cadel found it hard to go on. But he did.

'The Piggotts are buying me a mobile phone for my birthday,' he explained. 'One with a photo function. I was thinking that, with DNA wiring, you could probably turn it into a computer.'

There was a pause. With a little smile, Thaddeus put his gla.s.ses back on. Dr Darkkon screwed up his rubbery face.

'Who could?' he said.

Cadel swallowed.

'Well a you could,' he murmured. 'We could switch phones. I could tell you what kind it is, and you could get another one and turn it into a computer for me. With a mobile capacity, of course,' he added.

'Could I indeed?' Dr Darkkon drawled. 'And why should I do that?'

'Because I need one,' Cadel said. He squeezed his hands into fists, and sat on them. 'I've got an idea,' he continued. 'An idea for making some money. But I need a computer. One of my own.'

'Go on,' said Dr Darkkon. He was clearly waiting to be convinced.

'I could be a child model, you know,' Cadel announced, deciding to unveil his secret weapon. When he saw his father frown, he knew that his aim had been true. 'I was at the shops on Sat.u.r.day and a man came up,' he said. 'A photographer. He said he could get me work. He gave his card to Filomena.' Filomena was Cadel's latest nanny. Cadel didn't add that the photographer had been surprised to learn Cadel's true age. ('I thought you must be eight or nine,' he had said.) That part of the conversation had been a bit humiliating. In fact the whole conversation had been a bit humiliating because Cadel didn't much like his own looks. Given the choice, he would have preferred a few more muscles and a square jaw. There could be no doubt, however, that the meeting in the mall had provided him with some great ammunition. 'Lanna likes the idea, but Stuart doesn't. They've been arguing about it.' Out of the corner of his eye, Cadel saw Dr Roth's smile widen. 'I could make lots of money,' Cadel finished. 'Lots and lots. Enough to buy my own computer.'

'Which the Piggotts would confiscate,' Dr Darkkon snapped.

'Not if I paid Filomena to say that it was her computer. I'd have enough money for that, too.'

'Cadel, you're not going to be a child model,' Dr Darkkon declared. 'You know what I've said about keeping a low profile. How can you keep a low profile if your face is plastered all over television ads for fruit chews?'

'But a '

'I'll make you a computer phone,' Dr Darkkon said abruptly. 'I'll do it if you tell me how.'

Cadel's bubbling excitement suddenly went off the boil.

'Pardon?' he bleated.

'Tell me how, and I'll do it.' Dr Darkkon squinted into the transmitter. 'You're the one who made the suggestion. You'll have a screen the size of a postage stamp, and precious few keys a it'll be a third generation, I suppose?'

'Probably.'

'Even so, there'll be a b.l.o.o.d.y great DSP cluttering up its innards, DNA wiring or no DNA wiring. You'll have your work cut out. We all will. Not that it can't be done. We're heading that way as it is, what with texting and calendar functions and multi-player gaming and video-conferencing a in fact I seem to recall reading somewhere a '

'I know,' Cadel interrupted. He was feeling very low, because he had just realised how long it would take him to design such a piece of technology a if he could do it at all. 'Will you . . . will you help me?' he stammered. 'If I need to ask questions?'

Dr Darkkon smiled. (It wasn't a pretty sight.) 'Of course I will,' he said. 'You can have all the help you need.'

'Thanks.'

'And when we put this thing together, you can have the patent on anything new you come up with. That means you'll get most of the money when we launch it onto the market a though we won't attach your name to your Swiss bank account, of course.'

'Oh, but a '

'Relax, son. We won't go public unless someone else is catching up fast.' Another ferocious grin. 'It'll be like this transmitter, won't it? Our little secret. For the time being.'

'Okay.'

'Now it's down to you,' Dr Darkkon finished, settling back, so that his image careered wildly around the screen. 'We'll have to see how long it takes you to come up with something workable.'

In the end, it took just over eight months. By then, Cadel had been promoted to year nine, and had begun to worry a few of the more intelligent teachers on the staff of Crampton College. The trouble was, they couldn't quite work out exactly why he worried them. Perhaps it was his obvious isolation. Perhaps it was his placid blue gaze. Or perhaps it was his tendency to be hanging around on the sidelines during those peculiar events that seemed to overtake the school more and more often, as Cadel moved quickly up the educational ladder.

First there was the brawl that occurred among a softball team waiting to bat. (Cadel was on that team, hovering at the edge of the fight.) Then there was the teacher who slapped another teacher in full view of several students a including Cadel. Then there was the sprinkler system in one of the science labs that suddenly turned itself on and doused the whole lab with a strange, red, strong-smelling, jam-like substance. (Cadel wasn't anywhere in the vicinity, but he had used the cla.s.sroom.) There was the teacher who was found pa.s.sed out in the school vegetable garden, drunk, wearing only his jockey shorts. (He couldn't remember what had happened.) There was the case of the disappearing gym mats, the mysterious sighting of a 'green pig' in the canteen, and stories of a haunted art cupboard. Finally, there was the incident of the teacherless morning.

This occurred after Cadel had been promoted to year ten. One Monday morning, the students of Crampton turned up at school to discover that none of their teachers was present. So the kids milled around for a while; some went home, some stayed. At last the vice-princ.i.p.al appeared, at about half past ten, and from then on the staff trickled in until three-quarters of them were at their posts. The rest telephoned with various excuses, mostly to do with being ill, though one had to wait for a plumber to mend a burst pipe and one didn't telephone at all until the next day: he had been lost on a weekend bushwalk.

The teachers who did make it had all been held up by a peculiar combination of traffic problems, rail delays, stopped watches and the wide-ranging failure of telephone company wake-up calls. They were completely flummoxed.

There was one teacher, though a a maths teacher named Mrs Brezeck a who felt that Cadel might have done something to her fancy new digital watch. The watch possessed certain functions that she never used, and Cadel had been advising her on their finer points the Friday before Monday's fiasco. She had spent half an hour on Sunday reprogramming international times and dates, according to Cadel's specific instructions.

Could she have accidentally programmed the watch to 're-boot' during the night, and lose a few hours?

The answer, of course, was that she had a and that there had been nothing accidental about it. But Cadel wouldn't confirm her suspicions. He simply gazed at her, looking puzzled. He could do that very well. And she went away unsatisfied, with a niggling sense of unease.

From that day on, she watched Cadel more closely. There was something about him that she didn't quite trust.

As for Cadel, these amusing little experiments boosted his self-confidence whenever his mobile-phone research hit a snag. He had a lot of electronic theory to master before he could present his father with a blueprint for his computer-phone. He had to plunge into the murky world of DRAM, SRAM, ROM and EPROM, of bootstrap loaders and chipsets, of transistors and capacitors. He also had to read up on nan.o.biometrics, using information fed to him by Dr Darkkon. He loved nan.o.biometrics. He loved learning about alkanethiols, ATPase nanoturbines, and ion channel switch biosensors. It was a fascinating new world. But welding the two specialties together wasn't easy.

He was forced to appeal to his father for help, not once, but many times. Though he hated to do it, he didn't have a choice. Not if he was going to have a computer phone by the time his twelfth birthday rolled around.

His circuitry plans, when he finished them, had to be transmitted to Dr Darkkon with Thaddeus's help. There followed four months of waiting, which Cadel found very hard to deal with. He spent a lot of it studying the plans for a new sports hall at Crampton. It occurred to him that, if he did a bit of research on wind-loading, structural pressure points and other aspects of architectural theory, he might be able to sabotage the new building a which was, after all, just a little system unto itself.

Finally, a week before his twelfth birthday, he arrived at Thaddeus's office to find a brightly wrapped package waiting for him.

He stared at it, then at Thaddeus.

'Is it...?' he queried, breathlessly.

'Have a look,' Thaddeus responded.

'Did he wrap it? Himself?'

'I wrapped it.' Thaddeus's tone was dry. 'You don't realise what it involved, getting this thing into the country, Cadel. It wasn't easy. It had to be smuggled.'

'Does it work?'

'Of course it works,' said Thaddeus. 'Didn't you hear what I said? He wouldn't have gone to so much trouble if it didn't work.'

Cadel picked up the little package, and slowly pulled off its silver ribbon. He was holding his breath. When the machine inside the parcel was finally exposed, he saw that it looked just like his own mobile. Right down to the scratch on the liquid crystal display.

'Wow,' said Cadel, reverently.

'Dr Darkkon didn't send an instruction book,' Thaddeus drawled. 'I just hope you can remember what you told him.'

Cadel looked up. There were tears in his eyes. As he blinked them away, he felt a light touch on his cheek.

'Happy birthday, Cadel,' Thaddeus murmured. 'Many happy returns.'

It was thanks to Dr Darkkon, and the marvellous computer phone, that Cadel finally met Kay-Lee McDougall.

SEVEN.

Before Cadel turned thirteen, several important things happened.

Firstly, he began to grow. His voice broke, and a few soft, dark hairs appeared above his mouth. Noticing this, Mrs Piggott suddenly decided to redecorate his room. The sailing boats and nursery-school colours disappeared, to be replaced by muted shades of cream and gold and chocolate. A state-of-the-art desk was installed to match the new built-in bookshelves, concealed lighting, silk scatter cushions and framed posters. Lanna had selected a poster of James Dean, another of Jimi Hendrix, and a third of a contemporary pop star whose name always escaped Cadel, but whose brooding intensity must have appealed to Mrs Piggott. While Cadel didn't like the subjects of these posters any more than he had liked the sailing boats, he much preferred the new room to the old. It felt like a hotel room, but he didn't mind that, because it also had a serious look. And Cadel was a serious sort of person.

The second thing that happened was his promotion to year eleven, despite the misgivings of every teacher at the school. Though bigger than he had been, he wasn't that big. Beside his cla.s.smates he looked like a baby; the girls actually called him 'baby', when they addressed him at all. For a while they treated him like a doll, or a mascot, and would ruffle his hair and coo over the size of his feet. But they quickly began to resent the way he topped every cla.s.s.

Soon he was being ignored, much to the concern of his teachers. Despite their attempts to 'integrate' him, with buddy schemes and age-specific sports programs and quiet talks with the library monitors, Cadel usually spent his lunchtimes reading.

'Though he's really no worse off than he was in year seven or year eight,' his English teacher fretted. 'I mean, he was a loner then. Things are no different now, I suppose.'

'He'll be a loner all his life,' another teacher pointed out. 'It's just the way he is. You know his IQ's off the chart, don't you? I mean, really off the chart.'

'He's certainly left me behind,' Cadel's maths teacher remarked. 'I just let him do what he wants. He's been looking into quantum computers a I've been sending his work off to my old maths professor, at uni. Personally, I can't make head nor tail of it. Can you, Anna?'

Mrs Brezeck shrugged. She never commented on Cadel. She just watched him, and kept her thoughts to herself. When he was moved up to year twelve, a couple of weeks before his thirteenth birthday, she welcomed him into her four-unit maths group without enthusiasm. Already, she had begun to entertain suspicions about his role in the collapse of the new sports hall.

That was another important event which occurred during Cadel's stint in year eleven. After nearly a year of construction, the dazzling new complex had been almost ready for its grand opening. It had contained two basketball courts, a small swimming pool, two change rooms, a scattering of toilets and a gym, as well as various cupboards, lockers and electronic switchboards. Money had been poured into its rows of louvred windows, its dramatic roofline, its polished wooden fittings, its lavish trophy display cabinet. Some of the staff had complained that the school princ.i.p.al, a former health and fitness teacher, was pursuing his dream at the expense of Crampton's library and computer science department. The librarian in particular was very bitter about what she called the 'Taj Mahal'. (Her library was squeezed into a double cla.s.sroom near the boys toilets.) But work had proceeded, and three days before the grand opening ceremony, Crampton's princ.i.p.al had invited a group of munic.i.p.al councillors to inspect the brand-new complex.

Together they had approached the building from the east, admiring the front door and the red-brick path sweeping up to it. From a second-storey window in the science block, Cadel had watched his headmaster gesturing towards the sports hall's gleaming colourbond roof. One of the councillors had admired the choice of native shrubs planted on either side of the path. Then the princ.i.p.al had stepped up to the bank of gla.s.s doors at the front of the building, opened the middle one with a flourish and...

Whoosh!

With a gigantic roar, the building's eastern end had collapsed. The princ.i.p.al and his guests had run for their lives as a huge cloud of dust enveloped half the school.

Everyone had rushed outside to have a look. The fire brigade had been called. It had all been very exciting.

Cadel, however, wasn't entirely pleased with the end result of his sabotage. Though he had planned it with immense care (not actually wanting to kill anyone), the collapse had been incomplete. The rear part of the sports hall had remained standing, though of course it was eventually demolished. Cadel would have preferred the full, comic effect of the entire structure tumbling down. It would have been funnier, and more creatively satisfying.

Still, it wasn't a bad trick. Thaddeus certainly appreciated it. And because Cadel didn't much like sport, he neither felt nor displayed any remorse at the destruction of the new complex. Mrs Brezeck noticed this. She also noticed in his workbooks a number of diagrams and calculations that seemed to have some bearing on things like steel girder construction, foundation-laying, and load-bearing ratios.

She didn't really believe that Cadel could have sabotaged the building. This seemed impossible, however smart he might be. But she couldn't help thinking that it was a slightly sinister coincidence, and it worried her. She couldn't get it out of her mind.

Especially since he seemed to be strutting around with a more self-satisfied air than usual.

The last important event that occurred during Cadel's brief spell in year eleven was his creation of an online dating service called Partner Post. After spending two years observing the kids at school, reading the personal ads in newspapers, and studying soap operas, romance novels and sociology textbooks, Cadel felt ready to try out his new idea. He had decided to start a service that claimed to link paying clients with other paying clients. The secret to success, he told Thaddeus, would be to make sure that every client found his or her perfect match.

'They'll have to fill in a really good a.s.sessment form,' Cadel explained. 'If it's good enough, it can tell me all I need to know. And I was thinking, maybe you could help me with the wording? If I paid you? I could pay you out of the profits.'

Thaddeus smiled. In the six years that Cadel had known him, his hair had become much greyer, and his face more lined. But his eyes were still as sharp as arrowheads as he blinked lazily up at Cadel from his crimson couch, which had grown rather shabby.

'So you've decided to make money from your study of human behaviour, at long last,' he murmured. 'Very wise.'

'Yes, that's just it,' Cadel replied eagerly, his voice cracking on a high note. 'I think this would be profitable, as well as educational.' Thaddeus's sudden laugh made Cadel frown. 'What?' he demanded. 'What's so funny?'

'Nothing.' The psychologist waved his hand. 'Most of the time, Cadel, it's hard to remember that you're still a child. And then occasionally your language reminds me. Yes, of course I'll help. If you think it's worthwhile. But the hard part, surely, will be kicking off? What happens if you start with five clients, and none of them suit each other? Won't that be a problem?'

'Oh no,' said Cadel dismissively. 'That's my point. Because it's online, I can make up the partners. I can put them in Bulgaria or something.'

Thaddeus's eyes narrowed. 'I see,' he said.

'I bet you half these people will be using an online service because they're ugly or old,' Cadel continued. 'Because they don't even want to meet people face to face. It'll be easy. I'll just have to make up characters. Characters who sound lovable and interesting a you know.'

Thaddeus nodded. It suddenly occurred to Cadel that he knew almost nothing about Thaddeus. The psychologist had never mentioned a wife or children.

When Cadel tried to picture Thaddeus carrying a grandchild, he couldn't. He couldn't even imagine Thaddeus's house. Was it an old house? A modern one? Did it have a big garden around it, and a grey-haired wife inside it? Why hadn't Cadel ever considered these questions before? Why had they never even crossed his mind?

Was it because he had simply taken Thaddeus for granted?

'Well, good luck,' Thaddeus said. 'It sounds interesting. But don't be disappointed if you fail to pull this off the first time round.' Leaning forward, he fixed Cadel with a searching look. 'People aren't motherboards,' he said quietly. 'They're not like chemicals a they don't always respond the same way when you mix them, no matter how precisely you might have measured and calculated. I can teach you about the Myers-Brigg Personality Test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Global a.s.sessment Function, but in the end, Cadel, there really isn't a formula for predicting people's behaviour.'

'Don't worry,' Cadel replied, with a confidence that he could only afford to air in the privacy of Dr Roth's consulting room. 'If there isn't a formula now, there soon will be. I'm working on it. And this dating service will help me.'

EIGHT.

It was Dr Darkkon's computer phone that allowed Cadel to develop Partner Post. Without the converted mobile, Cadel never could have carried out his plans; he wouldn't have had enough time online. From the very start, he had to spend hours working on email messages, organising client information and developing character charts. (Keeping records of the various people he created was especially important, because he had to be consistent. He couldn't afford to forget what colour someone's eyes were supposed to be, or how many children they were supposed to have.) Thanks to the computer phone, the Piggotts didn't get suspicious. Whenever they began to wonder what Cadel was doing, and poked their heads into his room, they would find him lying on his bed, fiddling with his mobile. That didn't seem to worry them. Apparently, they were delighted that Cadel even had any friends a especially friends who wanted to speak to him for hours at a time. As far as they were concerned, endless phone calls were a normal part of growing up. They congratulated each other, loudly and proudly, over the dinner table every night. Cadel, it seemed, was shedding his antisocial behaviour. At last he was starting to blossom.

Maybe, said Lanna, he would actually bring some girls home soon. Like a normal teenager.

In fact, Cadel's off-line social life was almost nonexistent. Even online, he had separated himself from the society of his fellow hackers. There was a huge population of bright sparks out in cybers.p.a.ce, and for a while Cadel had become involved in Internet a.s.sociations like the Masters of Deception. He enjoyed the company of others who spent their spare time burrowing into heavily protected networks. He liked sharing thoughts on code-breaking modules, encryption programs, dynamic pa.s.swords and electronic remailers. The trouble was that to some of these cyberspies, nothing was sacred. Because Cadel himself had whipped up some very challenging little firewalls featuring 'asymmetrical ciphering' (to protect sensitive material like his Partner Post database) he became a target for some fellow hackers. They sent in sniffing programs to intercept his access code. They bombarded him with the contents of pa.s.sword dictionaries. They pestered him like mosquitoes, until he became enraged.

From then on, his user name disappeared from newsgroups and bulletin boards frequented by the world's hackers. He simply didn't trust them enough to make friends, though he did keep an eye on the latest breakthroughs.

As for his face-to-face contacts, they were just as unsuccessful. He was only thirteen when he entered year twelve, around the beginning of second term. All the other kids in his year were four or five years older than he was, and they thought him a joke. A freak. Their interests revolved around cars, clothes, s.e.x and (sometimes) exams, so Cadel didn't fit in at all. He wasn't old enough to drive. He was too small to wear most of the trendy clothes. And he'd never had s.e.x, of course, though he was starting to think about it a good deal, simply because of Partner Post. There was a lot of s.e.x talk on his secure sites a more than he'd ever antic.i.p.ated a and he was reluctant to ask Thaddeus for help on this subject. Fortunately, the Piggotts kept a large stock of dirty magazines in their dressing room. And a few of the year-twelve boys talked about s.e.x endlessly, obsessively. So Cadel was able to piece together some convincing replies to his clients, many of whom, he thought indignantly, were quite disgusting.

They didn't deserve to have real partners, in his opinion. They didn't deserve to have partners at all.