‘Sh, don’t bother now. Just relax.’
I put my head on Helen’s shoulder and looked up at the ceiling, listening to the sound coming from the variety show. I thought back through each turn of the round-about, wondering whether I could have dreamt it all.
Ten minutes later Helen said, ‘Well, I didn’t think much of that. And they’re doing an encore. Good heavens.’
‘Who are?’ I asked. I watched the light from the screen flicker across her face.
‘That team of acrobats. The something Brothers. One of them even slipped. How do you feel?’
‘Fine.’ I turned my head round and looked at the screen.
Three or four acrobats with huge v-torsos and skin briefs were doing simple handstands on to each other’s arms. They finished the act and went into a more involved routine, throwing around a girl in leopard skin panties. The applause was deafening. I thought they were moderately good.
Two of them began to give what seemed to be a demonstration of dynamic tension, straining against each other like a pair of catatonic bulls, their necks and legs locked, until one of them was levered slowly off the ground.
‘Why do they keep on doing that?’ Helen said. ‘They’ve done it twice already.’
‘I don’t think they have,’ I said. ‘This is a slightly different act.’
The pivot man tremored, one of his huge banks of muscles collapsed, and the whole act toppled and then sprung apart.
‘They slipped there the last time,’ Helen said.
‘No, no,’ I pointed out quickly. ‘That one was a headstand. Here they were stretched out horizontally.’
‘You weren’t watching,’ Helen told me. She leant forward. ‘Well, what are they playing at? They’re repeating the whole thing for the third time.’
It was an entirely new act to me, but I didn’t try to argue.
I sat up and looked at the clock.
10.05.
‘Darling,’ I said, putting my arm round her. ‘Hold tight.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This is the merry-go-round. And you’re driving.’
The Concentration City
Noon talk on Millionth Street: ‘Sorry, these are the West Millions. You want 9775335th East.’
‘Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!’
‘Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you’ll find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.’
‘There’s a cave-in down at KEN County! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels.’
‘Listen to this — “PYROMANIACS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!”
‘It’s a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 per cent monoxide. Cost me three hundred dollars.’
‘Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? They take only ten minutes to go up 3,000 levels!’
‘Ninety cents a foot? Buy!’
‘You say the idea came to you in a dream?’ the voice snapped. ‘You’re sure no one else gave it to you.’
‘No,’ M. said. A couple of feet away from him a spot-lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge and swung round on him again.
‘You talked it over with your friends?’
‘Only the first theory,’ M. explained. ‘About the possibility of flight.’
‘But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it from them?’
M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. ‘I was afraid they wouldn’t understand what I meant.’
The sergeant laughed. ‘Do you mean they would have thought you really were insane?’
M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of cross-questioning logic had faded. ‘The concept was a little abstract. There weren’t any words for it.’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘I’m glad to hear you say it.’ He sat down on the desk, watched M. for a moment and then went over to him.
‘Now look,’ he said confidentially. ‘It’s getting late. Do you still think both theories are reasonable?’
M. looked up. ‘Aren’t they?’
The sergeant turned to the man watching in the shadows by the window. ‘We’re wasting our time,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll hand him over to Psycho. You’ve seen enough, haven’t you, Doctor?’
The surgeon stared at his hands. He had taken no part in the interrogation, as if bored by the sergeant’s method of approach.
‘There’s something I want to find out,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone with him for half an hour.’
When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the ventilator shaft which rose out of the street below the station. A few roof lights were still burning and two hundred yards away a single policeman patrolled the iron catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness.
M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back into his legs.
Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet.
Name Franz M.
Age 20.
Occupation Student.
Address 3599719 West 783rd St. Level 549-7705-45KN1 (Local).
Charge Vagrancy.
‘Tell me about this dream,’ he said, idly flexing a steel rule between his hands as he looked across at M.
‘I think you’ve heard everything, sir,’ M. said.
‘In detail.’
M. shifted uneasily. ‘There wasn’t much to it, and what I do remember isn’t too clear now.’
The surgeon yawned. M. waited and then started to recite what he had already repeated twenty times.
‘I was suspended in the air above a flat stretch of open ground, something like the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down, floating—’ ‘Hold on,’ the surgeon interrupted. ‘Are you sure you weren’t swimming?’
‘No,’ M. said. ‘I’m certain I wasn’t. All around me there was free space. That was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness. That’s all I remember.’
The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my friends helped me construct it.’
The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet and crushed it with a single motion of his hand.
‘Don’t be absurd, Franz!’ Gregson remonstrated. They took their places in the chemistry cafeteria queue. ‘It’s against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your buoyancy?’
‘Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane,’ Franz explained as they shuffled past the hatchways. ‘Say ten feet
