Now someone was crouching beside his bed, shaking him. He remembered that it could not be Hester and sat up. A lantern dazzled him. He turned his head away and saw a couple of Garamond’s boys in the doorway. The person who had woken him was Clytie Potts.
“There’s a problem, Tom. It’s Kobold and your daughter. Oh, they’re quite all right, but—I think you’d better come.”
Out across the ruins. Moonlight and scrap metal. Clytie walked with Tom, the two of them surrounded by silent Londoners, some carrying guns.
“What has Wren been doing?” he asked as they hurried him along.
“Spying,” said Clytie. “She and Kobold were found … where they should not be.”
“Wren’s just a girl!” Tom protested. “She may be inquisitive and foolish, but she’s not a spy! What was she spying
“Easier to show you than explain,” said Clytie.
Tom pulled his coat more tightly around him. It wasn’t just the cold that made him shiver. He had a feeling that he was close to learning the secret of his city. Had Wren discovered it already for herself? Was that was this was all about? He felt proud of her bravery, but worried too, in case she was in danger.
In an open doorway at the foot of a wall of wreckage Dr. Childermass and five of her fellow Engineers stood waiting; six bald heads like a clutch of eggs. “Mr. Natsworthy,” said the Engineer with a faint, weary smile, “you may as well see the project. No doubt your daughter and her friend will tell you about it anyway. As long as we can dissuade our more excitable colleagues from shooting them, that is.”
Up a stairway, through a plastic curtain, and out onto a narrow metal viewing platform where Garamond and a gaggle of his people stood around Wren and Wolf Kobold. They had both been made to kneel, and their hands were tied. Dr. Childermass said, “Oh, don’t be such a twerp, Mr. Garamond!”
“They were in a restricted area! Spying!” Garamond complained.
“Only because you let them come here,” retorted the Engineer. “Really, Garamond, your people are appallingly slack. Now let them go.”
Garamond and his young followers reluctantly freed their prisoners and let them stand. Tom ran to hug Wren, intending to tell her how foolish she’d been, but just as he reached her, he noticed what lay below, filling the hangar, and surprise drove all the words out of his head.
It was a town. Not a large town, nor a very elegant one (most of the buildings on its upper deck were missing, and there were no wheels or tracks) but a town nonetheless. It had no jaws, but in most other ways it seemed to Tom to match the basic blueprint of a London suburb: those small places like Tunbridge Wheels and Crawley that London had built to carry her excess population during the golden age of Municipal Darwinism.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” asked Clytie, gazing down with a look of awe and affection at the unfinished town.
Dr. Childermass said, “The fruit of many, many years of hard work, now nearing completion.”
A big saw was at work somewhere beneath the town, which was resting on a cradle of rusty stanchions. A spray of sparks scattered across the hangar floor like boisterous glowworms.
“You
“Not quite,” said the Engineer. “The chassis and most of the upperworks were here already. My division began working on this project long before MEDUSA. Luckily this experimental hangar was deep enough in the Gut to survive without too much damage.”
“But why didn’t I know about it?” Tom wondered. “I mean, if London was building a whole new suburb, surely it would have been news?”
Dr. Childermass shrugged. “It was a secret. My Guild was very keen on secrecy. Anyway, this little place was only intended as a prototype. Experimental Suburb M/Ll is its official designation. We designed it as an answer to London’s problems, but Magnus Crome was never keen on it. He thought that MEDUSA was a better solution, and gradually he withdrew more and more funding from my Mag-Lev Research Division and diverted it to MEDUSA. Now those of us who survived MEDUSA’s failure have been able to pick up the work. It is not just the Engineers’ project anymore, Tom. Everyone in London has worked together on it.”
“And please don’t think of it as a suburb,” said Clytie. “It may be small, but to everyone in London it is a city; our new city. Soon we shall climb aboard it and leave these debris fields behind forever.”
Tom gazed down at the tiny forms of Londoners clambering over the new city, laying cables, welding girders, marking out the shapes of streets and buildings on the bare deck plates.
“But it’s got no wheels,” Wren pointed out.
“I can see you don’t know what Mag-Lev stands for, my dear,” said Dr. Childermass.
“It’s a code name, isn’t it?” asked Tom, who didn’t know either.
“Oh no,” Dr. Childermass said. “Mag-Lev is just a shorter way of saying Magnetic Levitation.”
“It floats!” said Wolf, gazing down at the new city entranced. “Like a gigantic hovercraft…”
Dr. Childermass gave him a graceful nod, pleased that at least one of her listeners was keeping up. “Rather quieter than a hovercraft, Herr Kobold, and not nearly so hungry for fuel. More like a very large, low-flying airship. You see those silvery disks along the flanks and underbelly?”
Tom, Wren, and Wolf nodded in unison. There was no missing the disks, dirty metal mirrors fifty feet across, swivel-mounted like an airship’s engine pods.
“Those are what I call Magnetic Repellers. Once they are powered, the whole city will be able to swim in the currents of the earth’s magnetic field. It will hang a few feet above the ground—or above the water; indeed, it makes no difference. The small prototypes we made worked splendidly. All we need do now is to complete the electromagnetic engine that powers the repellers—”
“The Kliest Coils!” cried Wren, like a plucky schoolgirl detective making a brilliant deduction.
“Yes,” admitted Dr. Childermass. “We were having trouble generating enough power until Mr. Pomeroy told me about Dr. Kliest’s work on the Electric Empire machines. I guessed at once that something like that was what we needed. Clytie has managed to acquire several dozen, along with the materials we need to fabricate new ones.”
Wren glanced at Wolf and saw him gripping the handrail and staring at the little city with the wide, shining eyes of someone who has been granted a vision of the future.
“So you see why we’re nervous about spies,” said Clytie Potts. “It’s taken us nearly twenty years to put New London together. We’d hate a scavenger to get wind of it now that we’re so nearly finished.”
“New London!” said Tom softly. “Of course…” You could not go on calling a place “Experimental Suburb M/L1” forever, not if you meant to live aboard it, and carry the culture and memories of your city away on it to new lands.
“I’ll help!” he said. “I mean, if you can use me. I can’t stay here, eating your food, getting in your way, doing nothing, while you all do so much. I’m a Londoner. I want to see London move again as much as any of you. I’m no Engineer, but I kept the
“Of course I don’t,” said Wren, and Tom could see that she was just as impressed as him by New London. “And I expect Mr. Kobold will want to help too,” she said, turning to draw their companion into the conversation.
But Wolf Kobold was gone. While everyone had been listening and looking down at New London, he had slipped silently away.
Garamond turned white and started shouting things about securing the perimeter and organizing searches. Dr. Childermass stared hard at him. “See?” she said. “Slack.”
News of Wolf’s escape went ahead of Tom and Wren. By the time they reached Crouch End, they found search parties being organized, armed with crowbars, crossbows, and even lightning guns. “We’ll catch ’im!” Angie Peabody vowed, buckling on a quiverful of crossbow bolts. “He ain’t going to sell New London out to no dirty pirate suburb.”
“Oh, be careful,” Wren warned. “He’s dangerous!”
“There are dozens of us and only one of your friend, Miss Natsworthy,” snapped Mr. Garamond. “And we know these debris fields a lot better than him. It’s Kobold who’s in danger, not us. Come along, everyone! Move out!”
“We’ll come with you,” said Tom.
