Bernice felt rather strange as they entered the office. It was as if she were day-dreaming, as if none of this were really happening. Perhaps it was just a defence mechanism of her mind, unable to accept directly the horrible reality of what lay before them.
At least with the difficult launch schedule she had been able to compare it with her past experiences. What they had to do now was completely outside her previous knowledge. She could see how most of the copy could be regenerated, but how on earth would they lay out and pass 120 or so pages in the next few days? A lot depended on Wobs: she realised that she still had no idea of just how good he was. His designs had been good, and he had worked well on the dummy and first issue, but only now was he really being pushed. She wished you could tell whether today's T-shirt - the word 'Undergrateful' printed in large orange letters - was some kind of subtle message to her.
Despite the challenges facing them, she had decided not to call Pete. He had enough on his plate without her problems. Besides, she was confident that Yasmeen would be able to replace Pete's work relatively easily. It was strange how at ease she felt with Yasmeen, how certain she was of this serious young woman's abilities. Perhaps she recognised something of herself in her quiet determination and unwavering professionalism.
As for the others, she felt that it was going to be interesting to see them under these extreme circumstances. Although they had been working together for over a month now, she felt that they were still strangers in many ways. The coming 72 hours could well make or break her team. Certainly it could break Kate if they did not succeed. Though obviously the fire itself had been just extremely bad luck, Kate felt responsible for her own failure to keep the backups separate. In truth her standards were simply too high, and Bernice was glad that Terence seemed such a dependable type: perhaps he would help Kate keep things in perspective.
Like Bernice, Martin was going through in his mind what needed to be done. It was an ironic twist of fate that the sheer lateness of the advertisements had meant that they had not been lost with the editorial copy as would have happened had everything been sent down on time. Finding duplicates of ad pages would have been a nightmare too horrible to contemplate given the difficulty most advertising agencies had in supplying the first set anywhere near deadline. In some terrible sense Martin was grateful that of the two components eds and ads it had 'only' been the editorial that had been lost. This was not laziness or selfishness on his part, simply a reflection of the fact that he knew if anyone could pull them through, Bernice could.
Liaising with Sue he had quickly found a typesetter that would be able to take the work immediately; the prices were unfortunately higher than Zippy's on a per-page basis, but he was hardly in a strong bargaining position. He had arranged for the courier service to pick up copy from the office and bring back pages from the typesetters as often as Bernice wanted. He had also managed to squeeze a couple of extra days out of the printers - though again for a higher price. He had the horrible suspicion that he would soon start to smell his bottom line again. As he thought, keeping the office open was not an insuperable problem, and simply required some paperwork - largely to do with insurance matters - to be signed by Charles.
The latter was very supportive, betraying no sign of any lack of confidence in Martin and his team. Sometimes the disloyal thought crept into Martin's mind that this was because Charles had become so distant from the day-to-day running of magazines that he assumed that they came out almost by themselves and required little human intervention, and that employees were kept on simply as kinds of feudal retainers, supported more out of benevolence than necessity. But this was being unfair. In fact Charles knew well the traumas of launching a magazine, but also knew that as in other extreme circumstances human beings are capable of extraordinary efforts to achieve what might to the dispassionate outside observer seem plainly impossible. Indeed, he secretly rather envied them the sheer intensity of the experience that lay before them. His own corporate existence, though filled with its own tensions and excitements, had none of that raw immediacy he knew journalists enjoyed as a matter of course.
Back in the office Bernice was drawing up a detailed list of what copy they had, and what remained to be done. It turned out that Dave's notes were fairly fragmentary. Perfectionist that he was, he tended symbolically to consign the previous version of his work to what he called his Ultimate Filing Cabinet - the rubbish bin - as soon as he had produced something better. Chris had no backups partly because he tended to put all of his efforts into a do or die single draft. It turned out that there were a few more backups than Bernice had initially thought because Janice had kept copies of her diary pages, but had felt too modest to range herself alongside the 'real' journalists when Bernice asked. As far as production went, she had decided to ask Kate and Terence to take on some of the page make-up, particularly of the simpler pages such as news and the columns. This would cut down the work Wobs would have to do.
She wondered what exactly Wobs would have been up to that weekend that now he would have to forgo. He was such an enigma: with his small form - Bernice towered over him - he was easy to patronise. But she recognised increasingly that his many strange habits - the weird and seemingly endless collection of T-shirts he wore, his Lucozade binges, this inability to work without his Walkman headphones clamped around his head - were all simply expressions of his lively personality. Since her own copy situation was well under control - she had dug out her backups, made further photocopies, and then given them to Kate to start working on: "Not again," had groaned Kate in mock horror, an encouraging sign that she was coming out of her depression - she couldn't resist going over to Wobs to dig a little about his weekend activities.
"I'm sorry about this, Wobs, I hope it doesn't spoil what you had planned for the weekend too much," she said.
"No, I've called someone to take over from me," he answered.
"Take over?" she asked.
"Yes, at the club - I do the heavy session round 2 am of a Saturday."
"Sorry, I don't quite -"
"Deejaying" he said as if that explained it all.
So that was it, thought Bernice. And what about the rest of them? What were they going to miss? Or were they like her, so caught up in work that their social lives had withered away, something that could be postponed in a way that the driving imperatives of deadlines could not? Back in the days when she worked on Employment Monthly - God, they seemed so far away now, halcyon days of relatively easy, peaceful journalism as she recognised now, even if they had seem hard enough at the time - she had often gone straight from work to the theatre with friends, with lovers even. She adored the density and clarity of life up there on the stage, with the wellsprings of human nature laid bare like a well-written feature. She'd not been for two months now, and there was little prospect of that changing for the near future.
"What about you, Dave?" she said, turning to Mowley as he pored over his copious notes, trying to reconstruct the polished phrases he had spent weeks creating.
"What about me what?" he said, not best pleased at having his train of thought disturbed.
"What am I depriving you of this weekend?" she asked quite shamelessly.
"Oh the usual, reading a few books, catching up on magazines," he answered.
"But you are always reading," said Chris, "I mean you even go to the library to read at lunchtimes."
"I think you'll find that that's what libraries are there for," said Dave.
"Yes, I know, but nobody uses them these days, do they?" Chris had this image of libraries at university, something you used when necessary and avoided when possible. The idea of going to a library for pleasure never really crossed his mind. "What do you read?"
"Encyclopaedia Britannica," said Mowley.
"No, but seriously," said Chris.
But Dave was serious: whenever he felt he could sneak off he went to the Southdon public library - one of the best outside central London - and continued working his way through the volumes. He also read the Britannica Book of Year, summaries of the year in question, but working backwards in time.
"Why?" asked Yasmeen, genuinely interested.
"Because you never know what you'll come across. The connections between things, the explanations, the revelations - they're like novels, really," he answered truthfully.
"I remember a travelling salesman tried to sell me some encyclopaedias once," began George, "that was in the days before pyramid selling of course."
"Do they sell many pyramids door-to-door these days?" asked Chris. George was not amused.
"I must confess I'd never really thought of reading encyclopaedias like novels," said Yasmeen, intrigued by the idea. "But then I don't really read novels, either."
"Why not?" asked Chris, who had read a few a university, but had stopped since leaving, and so was interested to find someone who had missed out the first phase and gone straight on to the second.
"Oh, I don't know," said Yasmeen, slightly embarrassed at having to explain something so subjective. "When I've dipped into them I've found them so unrealistic. I mean, complete sentences everywhere, with verbs. Or with semi-colons and colons: who ever uses them when they're talking?"
"But it's all formalised," explained Mowley, "it's all about working within constraints and conventions. Just like journalism - or encyclopaedias."
"Or epics," said Chris, vaguely remembering something on the subject in one of the early lectures he attended, and wanting to show that he could match Mowley for heavy analysis. Which of course he couldn't.
"That's right," said Mowley, quite oblivious of this attempt by Chris to jockey with him intellectually. "I mean it's been the same throughout history - look at Homer, or Beowulf or Racine: they're all using highly formalised languages to convey the same basic kinds of story."
"Like?" asked Yasmeen, always keen to profit from these kind of conversations. Bernice looked on, beaming maternally as her boys and girls relaxed before plunging once more into the fray.
"Well, basically love versus glory, desire versus ambition. It's the same today with TV soap operas."
"I thought you said the other day that you didn't have a TV?" said Janice, keen to join in.
"I don't," replied Dave, "but I've read a few books about it."
"Hardly the same, is it?" asked Chris, who spent most of his evenings watching TV these days, too exhausted to do anything else.
"No, it's not the same, but it does mean that I can still understand the concepts."
"So what were you saying about soap operas?" asked Bernice, quite happy to keep the conversation boiling at little longer while everybody got over the shock of the news about the fire before settling down to some serious work.
"Just that if you analyse them in terms of the techniques they use - the televisual rhetoric you could call it if you wanted to be pretentious - you find that they work in a way that is almost identical to the epics of three thousand years ago."
"That is?" asked Yasmeen.
"That is, characters have certain recognisable markers - clothes, appearance, set-phrases and so on - you also find it in Dickens, where his characters are often little more than assemblages of personal ticks or clichés. But far from making his novels trivial they allow him to work on a huge canvas - 30 or 40 characters - which the reader can hold in their head without getting completely lost. Which takes us back to Homer, whose works were originally recited, and hence had to make their characters instantly recognisable each time they appeared."
"Fascinating stuff," said Bernice, genuinely impressed with Mowley's apparently effortless insights, "but not, alas, directly relevant to getting this bloody issue out" - one of the ways teams signal their increasing ease with each other is the gradual degradation of language to include more and more swear-words, often used simply as signals of this social comfort.
"Well, actually, there are other interesting structural parallels between journalism and novels, in fact -" Mowley began, the article that he was re-writing forgotten for the moment as his analytical abilities began to engage with an idea.
" - Which we will explore later on, OK?" said Bernice who wanted to redirect people's energies now.
Kate and Terence had not really joined in this spot of relaxation, partly because they still felt a little guilty about the events of the last few hours, and partly because they had copy to sub and get away to the typesetters. Kate asked Janice to arrange the first of the bikes to the typesetters - also in EC1, but not located in a fire hazard, Martin assured them.
Yasmeen was soon hard at work, sketching out the replacement for Pete's article on flexible working hours. Bernice had given her a few suggestions for reading amongst recent magazines and papers, as well as a few ideas of her own. But basically it would be top of the head stuff. Chris, on the other hand, found it rather harder to settle down to re-write his piece on office romances. In part this was because he felt that its subject matter might become rather too relevant for him. He was increasingly aware of both Bernice and Yasmeen in the office, and was distracted by the different presences. He found Yasmeen's calm beauty hypnotic, but was equally fascinated by the tremendously energetic and self-confident way Bernice was taking charge of what seemed to him to be a hopeless situation. He would have called it masterful, but was conscious that the word was inappropriate for someone who managed to be so feminine at the same time as being strong. Mistressful? he wondered to himself idly.
It was now tea-time, and with the office humming nicely - phones ringing, typewriters being pounded, and copy being struck out - Bernice slipped out for a few moments. Nearby to Wright's there was a baker's that sold simply obscene cream cakes. She bought a couple of dozen of these and went back to the office to be greeted with cheers from the team who immediately put on some coffee. One of Terence's innovations when he arrived was the installation of a very serious coffee percolator, so they were now drinking the real thing instead of the artificial industrial variety the company machines tended to produce. When they were working these vending machines had the habit of leaving residues from other drinks in the works; as a result, you tended to get a taste that was 90% what you expected with a 10% tang of something extraneous like vegetable soup.
In fact Bernice's little outside trips became one of the main milestones during the hours and days that followed. In part this was because she was unwilling to use Janice like a flunkey; in part it was also down to the fact that paradoxically she had less to do than anyone else. All of her copy had been replicated and was now being laid out by Wobs. She felt that it was important for her to trust to the others to produce words rather than stepping in and doing it for them - something she could have done quite easily.
It was now late on Friday afternoon. It was just a question of continuing as they had started. Just.... Bernice wanted to speak to Martin, and looked in at the ads office. She was surprised to find nobody there, just the discarded paper cups and champagne bottles that suggested Martin had been at work in more ways than one. A glance at the board confirmed what she had hoped: they had closed the issue, somehow finding the requisite number of advertisements to fill the gaps between the editorial. She looked at the names listed there against the number of pages taken, and wondered what their ads would look like.
She therefore went along to Martin's office, where she found him staring at his micro. He looked totally exhausted, but managed to smile weakly when she came in. Her presence made things better.
"How's it going?" he asked.
"It's going," she said, not wanting to get into a detailed discussion of where they were. "But we're going to need various things this weekend, so I just wanted to check that I had your authorisation to get them."
"Sure. What sort of things?" he asked.
"Well, food and drink obviously: if we going to be here all this weekend we are going to have to eat."
"Fine," he said.
"Then there are few odds and ends. Like toothbrushes," he nodded, "soap, towels" - towels? he queried - "people need to wash, and I know that there are some showers on the sixth floor on our building, and then I'd like to give people permission to buy...underwear."
"This is all highly irregular, you realise?" he said, not used to having chats about such things in a business context. Underwear? How was he going to get that past accounts? But he could see her point. Besides which, had not the sacred oracle of the Wright's Manager's Diary itself said that very day: "It is easier to apologise afterwards than to ask permission before"? Dammit, she would have her underwear, and to hell with the consequences.
"But OK, OK," he said luxuriating in the power of this decision, "go for it. I do recognise that what you and your team are doing is pretty extraordinary, so perhaps it's no wonder your needs are too. Oh yes, by the way, I hope to come in over the weekend myself, just to see if there's anything I can do," he said as if this would be a great consolation to her.
"Oh, please don't bother - I mean don't trouble yourself" - the last thing she needed was a publisher in her hair.
"Oh, it's no trouble," he assured her, "it'll be a pleasure in fact." And he meant it.
After Bernice had sent out for some pizzas which were delivered to a shocked security man down on the reception desk, the long hours ahead of them began to open up as dusk gave way to night. The lights in the tower-blocks opposite them on the other side of the dual-carriageway underpass went off one by one as everybody else shut up shop except them. They felt abandoned. But the copy was starting to come through. Yasmeen had finished her piece on working hours, and was now beginning to tackle the news, most of which had been written by Chris before, but who was still struggling with his article. Bernice had sent George home, asking him to return tomorrow morning when there would be more for him to do. He insisted he stay with the troops but was not too sad to be ordered to go home. His elderly father lived with him and his wife, and he was worried about leaving him too long.
Wobs had not been idle while waiting for the galleys to come back from the typesetters. It turned out that he had a near-photographic memory, and he was sketching out some of the more complicated layouts to help him reconstruct them later on. One of the problems was pictures. Fortunately these were not in the typesetters at the time of the fire: they had been sent down the road to one of Zippy's many sister companies - everyone in the typesetting industry seemed to own part of everyone else - to be scanned and resized. They were all safe, but because of the fire Zippy's sister had closed for the weekend in sympathy, and nobody had thought to retrieve the pictures first. Wobs was trying to work out the sizes he had used and for which pictures so that he could simply leave spaces in the layouts where they were to go. For some of the simpler news stories he was able to use other pictures, but for the main features these would have to be dropped in on Monday when they had the other pictures and artwork again.
Towards the middle of that first night Bernice produced some fine malt whisky. She had no intention of rendering her workforce legless - clear heads were the order of the day not to mention night - but a dram or two together with several mugs of Terence's high octane coffee would do no harm. She used the occasion to instigate another break.
"So, Dave," she said, shamelessly starting the ball rolling, "what was it you were saying about journalism and novels?"
"Uh?" Dave muttered, his mind still immersed in global stock markets and the search for the mot juste. He soon regained his focus. "Oh, yeah, well that both are about plots and characters. After all, what is the journalist's perennial cry but 'where's the story?' - and weren't you encouraging us to look for the human angle. And these office case studies, aren't they just mini-novels, just like all the Mills and Boon romances?"
"Hang on a minute," said Bernice, none too pleased to have her innovative case studies compared to twopenny romances. "Surely the interesting point is that on the contrary the case studies are quite unlike novels in the sense that there are practically no novels about business. OK, sure, one or two have scenes that take place in offices, but very, very few are about the actual business of business."
"That's doubtless because very few writers have ever had a real job," said Terence, as Kate showed signs of allowing herself and Tel a few minutes' break. For someone who loved words he had a very ambivalent attitude to the people that produced them - no bad thing in a sub, thought Bernice.
"What about Pete?" asked Janice.
"What about him?" asked Chris, who had more or less forgotten about him. "Do you want to invite him to join us, or something?"
"No, I mean what about his novel?" Janice went on.
"What novel?" asked Bernice. "Has he written a novel?" she asked, ready to revise her opinion of him somewhat.
"Well, I don't know if he's finished it, but he's certainly been writing it for a long time. He told me he began writing it at university, but that it changed when he started working, and he wanted to write a novel about business because - just like you said, Bernice - there are really no novels about businesses that give a true impression of what it's like to work in them. Well, that's what he said, anyway."
"Oh, really," said Bernice, surprised by these hidden depths in Pete.
"Well, I'll believe it when I see it," said Dave.
"Look who's talking," said Chris rather cattily, still envious of Dave's fluency with ideas. Dave muttered some oath to himself and then sulked.
"OK, OK, cool it, we've got a long way to go yet, so if you could restrain the clever remarks Chris, please - and perhaps hand in some copy yourself?"
Ouch, Chris did not like being told off like a naughty schoolboy. He was only kidding, so there was no need for Bernice to start pulling rank on him. Turning back to his work he glanced at Yasmeen and raised his eyes to heaven in mock martyrdom. She just got on with her work, so he did too.
They were now deep into the night, and the couriers were bringing more galleys - the copy run out as long columns, ready to be stuck down - and taking back the made-up pages. These were starting to appear from Wobs with a startling speed: one every few minutes it seemed, as the air soon became heady with the intoxicating smell of solvent from the thick, clear gum used in the production process. How Bernice loved watching the galleys as they were stuck down on the make-up boards and then slid around as if by magic into their exact positions. The gum had the miraculous property that it held the paper firmly and yet allowed it to be peeled off, cleaned of the old glue, and re-gummed if necessary. The day such ancient skills were lost would be a sad one, she reflected.
Despite this blur of activity, Bernice could detect few signs of haste in the boards. True, Wobs had made up the same pages only recently, but the copy was slightly different now, reworked as it was under different circumstances. And yet everything was being made to fit without undue violence. She was very impressed by this young man. If he was young: he might have been a hundred-year-old hobgoblin for all the clues that his physical appearance gave. But frankly Bernice couldn't have cared less. Her eye caught his: spontaneously she gave him a kind of interrogative thumbs up, raising her eyebrows at the same time. In answer he broke into what looked like a high speed jig, responding on the spot like a worker bee to his Queen(ie) with a dance that was louder than words.
Outside it was almost completely still, with few cars passing. It was four o'clock in the morning. Bernice sat back in her chair and watched her team: there were a team now, working away quietly and professionally, fighting back the yawns, throwing around the odd comment, raising the odd laugh, but then returning to the task in hand. By now nearly all the copy had been re-written. Yasmeen in particular had got through enormous quantities in that time. Chris and Dave were just finishing their re-writes. For the next forty-eight hours the focus would now shift to the production side.
Although Wobs was making up pages at a tremendous rate, there still remained much to be done on them. When they came back from the typesetters - where it took two and sometimes three make-up artists to keep pace with the workflow Wobs was generating - there were the usual sort of mistakes that had to be found and then corrected, and then re-corrected and then re-re-corrected. The only way to do this was to read the pages and compare them with the subbed copy or the corrected galleys. This was a slow and laborious process where there was no substitute for painstaking work. Now that the writers had finished producing the words they too could help out.
She began by teaching Chris the standard mark-up signs. These were the ways to indicate any changes - additions, deletions, re-arrangements - that needed to be made to the proofs now being biked over almost hourly. Chris soon learnt these; what he found harder to do was to read the pages.
Like most people, he read what he thought he saw rather than what was actually there. As a result the tiny typographic errors - letters or even words missed out, words repeated across lines - slipped by him as they do most readers of magazines and newspapers. The proofreader's job is therefore something out of the ordinary: he or she must read with an intensity that is rarely required outside the job.
As Bernice expected, Yasmeen, with her professionalism and conscientiousness, proved highly adept at this. Equally expected was Dave's very slow rate of reading. He was thorough enough, but he seemed to be pondering long and hard the underlying ideas of an article, as if he were checking them against some internal copy, as well as the form of the words used to express those thoughts.
After a few hours of this Bernice decided that they needed a serious break. It was now quite light so far as they could tell through the office's tinted windows. A few cars could be seen on the roads, and the street lamps had gone out.
"OK, everybody, before serious word blindness sets in, I suggest we have some breakfast. After that, I think we need to have a wash - nothing personal, you understand. So for those of you living nearby, I suggest that you go home, either before or after breakfast; for the rest of us, we will go on a shopping expedition to buy us some bits and bobs."
When they came back from breakfast and the shopping expeditions, they found George already in the office.
"Hello, Gorgeous," said Bernice, light-headed through lack of sleep. "Did you sleep well? Can you remind us what sleep is like?" It was slightly disturbing having someone not suffering from exhaustion in the office: they were too normal, too sane, although paradoxically it was George who felt abnormal amongst all these sleep-deprived people, as if sleeping had suddenly gone out of fashion. Interestingly enough, Wobs seemed quite unaffected by the lack of sleep, as if he did this sort of thing all the time, which in fact he did. Luckily, though, his behaviour was sufficiently abnormal even when it was normal that everyone felt at their ease with him.
The showers on the sixth floor proved to be a godsend: everyone returned invigorated, and settled down to a solid session of proofreading, including George, who was quite good at it. He seemed to enjoy the self-discipline it required, and the clearly-defined boundary between success and failure it offered.
Just before Bernice was about to go out for some lunch, Martin turned up. His arrival, however, was all the more welcome for the fact that in addition to bringing the inevitable champagne, he also brought with him freshly-prepared smoked salmon sandwiches, a range of salads and strawberries and fresh cream. They broke off work for a while and declared the next hour or so an official picnic.
As they sat around, dark rings under their eyes, the heads lolling occasionally, Martin felt a pang of envy. He could detect plainly the camaraderie the situation was engendering, the sense of shared achievement. He felt none of that with his fellow publishers. They rarely met as a group, and when they did there was always an undertow of suspicion. At their level competition for the next move was high; as a result all other publishers had to be regarded as potential enemies, and fraternisation kept to a bare, superficial minimum.
Here, though, he saw how the extreme conditions of work were gradually loosening the inhibitions of the editorial team. When you have been working for over 24 hours without sleep, you become focussed on the task; those that are working with you become the key personalities in your world, excluding all others. Martin understood that at this moment Bernice was closer to everyone else in the room than she had ever been with him, and he wondered what, if anything, he could do to break down those barriers, short of becoming a junior reporter again - hardly an option.
After he left with their thanks and cheerios ringing in his ears, and an emptiness in the pit of his stomach, Bernice and her staff got back to work. This was the difficult period: after eating and nearly 36 hours without sleep, there is a low-point where the body strives mightily to tip the mind into blissful oblivion. Bernice knew what everyone - except George, of course - was going through, because she herself was fighting the same demon. Unless she concentrated extremely hard on the words in front of her the page began to swim disconcertingly, and her head to loll forward lead-like to meet the desk. She forced herself to sit upright and look at the others: Chris had already nodded off, and Kate was flagging somewhat.
"Kiss!" she shrieked rather louder than she had intended.
Chris sat bolt upright.
"Sir!" he said as if emerging from a dream that required such formalities. "Sorry about that," he went on, once he had regained his bearings, "it won't happen again, cap'n" - the latter in his best Long John Silver pirate voice.
This episode, tiny in itself, somehow got everyone through the trough of that day. Thereafter they were able to work rather more successfully, at least until that evening. By now over three-quarters of the magazine had been made up by Wobs, and half of those pages read and finally cleared. This time copies were carefully made of everything, given that these new pages would have to sit at the typesetters until Monday when the pictures would be sent round and added.
Dinner that night was Chinese takeaway - appropriately enough, as Chris remarked, since everything looked Chinese to him at the moment.
"Talking of China," said Bernice with slightly forced logic, "what do we think's going into happen there?"
"Why should anything happen there?" asked Chris, glad of the break and of the opportunity to keep himself awake by talking.
"Well, I mean that things have started moving in Russia recently - pulling out of Afghanistan, the recent marches in the Baltic states - so is the same going to happen in China?" She looked around, hoping that someone might pick up on this. She was certainly a keen follower of world events - something that at least she could keep abreast of by reading the newspapers they received in the office - and she could not imagine that the others were not similarly fascinated by what happened beyond the four walls of their office.
But to her disappointment neither Chris nor Yasmeen had anything to contribute. George had gone home, and Wobs was too busy working. Inevitably, then, it was Dave who finally replied.
"Different situation there. The Soviet Union - not to be confused with Russia - is not a country but an empire, put together by Peter the Great and to a lesser extent Stalin. Like all empires, it is bound to fall to pieces sooner or later. For my money, the main driving force is going to be Islam. China's quite different. Sure, it invaded Tibet, and there are some dodgy areas up in the Xinjiang province, and local rivalries can run high, but generally it is much more unified as a country than the USSR. What I think you'll see are a good few more years of repression before any interesting happens. In fact if anything causes change China it's more likely to be a variant of capitalism, either brought in via Hong Kong, or else home-grown."
Interesting as this was, it had not generated the kind of lively debate Bernice had been counting on to keep people awake, so she let it drop. They got back to reading the blasted pages as they now began to think of them. They were all surprised how much they hated their new magazine by now, and were almost indifferent as to whether it came out or not. It was only pride - not wanting to admit defeat or to show weakness in front of their peers - that kept them going.
And going they did indeed keep. Deep into the night until time ceased to have any meaning. It was as if they had always been reading pages, as if they always would. Perhaps this was hell, and the others were simple fellow sinners condemned to suffer the same punishment. Their minds by now were starting to play odd tricks on them as sleep deprivation started to take its toll. And then suddenly, as the involuntary groans in the office started to accelerate and crescendo, Dave said à propos of nothing:
"But don't you see," as if addressing a previous speaker, or talking to assembled multitudes, "these are the most bloody intense moments of your life...you'll never experience anything like this again." And Dave sounded almost sad, as if already he had lost the intensity that he was talking about.
"Bloody well hope not," said Terence, standing for none of this airy-fairy nonsense.
"No, he's right," said Chris, his eyes burning as if in fever. "What we are doing is amazing - no, really. One day, one day - " he groped for the image, for the words " - one day they'll make a film about this - Doing the Wright Thing," he suggested, and burst into slightly hysterical laughter.
"Out to Launch more like," said Tel, breaking into a broad smile despite himself.
And as Bernice sat there, almost out of her head through lack of sleep and excess of copy, she wanted to weep with happiness, suddenly understanding what Dave meant, and knowing that he was right. Or Wright.
But she pulled herself together, and urged her flagging team to one final effort.
"Come on then, boys and girls" - seriously out of control now - " we're nearly there. John - " she said to an unhearing Wobs who was boogieing around furiously to the music in his earphones, music which emerged into the outside world as faint, fly-like buzzing - "wake that man up," she said to Kate, who sat in front of him - "John, how we doin'?"
"We doin' OK. Last spread coming right up," he said as if he were serving in a late night hamburger joint. And amazingly it was. In the last 36 hours he had laid out most of the 120 pages again, an average of three an hour. And the reading of the pages was coming on too: they had now passed around 100 pages, with the next 10 or so well on the way.
Suddenly Wobs tore off his headphones, stuffed them in his bag, and then looked at his watch.
"Right, then," he said, "if you've no objections, I'll be a-going then."
"Of course not, Wobs, you've done a fantastic job. Go on, go home, get some sleep."
"Sleep?" asked Wobs incredulously, "no, I'm out of here down the club. I should just make it in time for my slot."
"But I thought you said you'd arranged for someone else to take it?" said Bernice, not quite sure what he had said some two or three centuries ago.
"Did I? Must be have been the Lucozade talking. I'm history," he said, moving towards the door. "Are you sure you don't want me to come back later - say eightish - no problem if you do?"
Was this person human? wondered Yasmeen who was barely able to sit up, and was seriously impressed by this stamina. Focussing her eyes on Wobs with some difficulty, she seemed to see him properly for the first time.
"No, but thanks Wobs," said Bernice, just about capable of realising that Wobs had planned to do his DJ slot all along, and had been working to his own schedule - even more unreasonable than hers.
And so her left them with a terrible spring in his step, or jiggle at least.
They were not jiggling and they became even more jiggleless in the next four hours as the final pages laid out by Wobs came back from typesetters, mercifully reasonably clean. It took only a few corrections to get them right.
And then, around five o'clock on Sunday morning, as Kate sent off the last corrections, and after nearly 45 hours' work, Bernice let out a totally uncharacteristic banshee cry.
"Yee-haa!" she screamed. "We've done it, we've finally finished."
"Again," said Terence pointedly. As Bernice jumped up and ran round the room kissing and hugging everyone.
"I think you need some sleep, Bernice," said Yasmeen, slightly shocked by this un-Editor-like comportment. She certainly did. They all did. So in a final act of sanity and leadership Bernice ordered taxis which arrived shortly afterwards, five of them all together. As the semi-conscious editorial team of The Business stumbled past the slumbering security guard out of the great glass pyramid towards waiting vehicles, they might have seen the first hint of light beginning to break in front of them had they not been concentrating so single-mindedly on staying upright. And certainly by the time the second dawn of the weekend finally came, they were all in bed sleeping far too soundly to notice.
