Halloway began to reverse the truck down the street, but Olds held his arm warningly.

Follow him. Stillman needs to be given his own way.

As Halloway moved forward, following the tractor, Olds sat back. He had switched off the calculator, and seemed to have forgotten their exhilarating race through the flowers, his mind moving elsewhere, bored by the prospect of whatever was to come.

They emerged into ai open square, set in the heart of one of the oldest sections of the city, an area of theatres, bars and cheap hotels. Rising from the centre of the square was the largest of the eccentric memorials to TwentiethCentury technology that Halloway had seen so far. At first glance it resembled a gothic cathedral, built entirely from rusting iron, glass and chromium. As they crossed the square, following the tractor, Halloway realized that this structure was built entirely from the bodies of automobiles. Stacked one upon the other, they formed a palisade of towers that rose two hundred feet into the air.

A group of heavy cranes and a buttress of scaffolding marked out the working face, overlooked by an observation platform reached by a simple elevator. Standing at the rail, and waiting for the tractor to carry its latest contribution to the memorial, was a small, pugnacious man of advanced age. Although well into his eighties, he was dressed like a physical education instructor in immaculate white sweater and wellcreased trousers. Inspecting Halloway's glider with a critical eye, he picked up an electric megaphone and began to call out instructions in a high voice to the driver of the tractor.

Olds was gazing up at the monument of cars, shaking his head as if ruefully aware that he and this odd old man were in the same business. He switched on the calculator.

I'll wait for you here. You're about to meet Mr Buckmaster. Viceroy, czar, and warden of this island.

Halloway waited as the driver climbed down from his cab. Deliberately taking his time, he sauntered over to Halloway, pointing to his red, white and blue sneakers, yellow trousers and shirt covered with petals.

'The Rainbow Kid you come down from the sky and have yourself a time...'

Although twice Halloway's age, with slickedback hair and a pale skin that would always appear dirty, he had a lazy, youthful aura, as if a large section of his life had passed in his absence and he himself had never aged beyond his twenties. For all his sarcastic manner, he seemed watchful and ready to ingratiate himself at a moment's notice. With his selfdirected aggression and stylized swagger he was a type Halloway had never known at Garden City, but which all his reading confirmed was a classic specimen of metropolitan man.

'Take the elevator,' he told Halloway. 'Mr Buckmaster has been waiting to meet you. He'll want to induct you into his workforce.'

'This monument and the others? He built them all?'

'I built them. Buckmaster merely dreamed up the whole mad idea. Homage to the Chrysler Corporation, Datsun and General Motors. When we've finished, the spirit of Karl Benz will be laid to rest under a million driver's licences and parking tickets.'

He slammed the elevator grille in Halloway's face and punched the ascend button.

The old man in his whites was waiting for Halloway when he reached the observation platform. On a cardtable lay a set of blueprints, and Halloway could see that if ever completed the structure would rise some four hundred feet into the air.

The old man beckoned Halloway to the rail. Everything about him, his quick eyes and mouth, his restless hands, was in a hurry. He talked to Halloway as if he had known him for years and was resuming a conversation interrupted only a few seconds earlier.

'It looks a mess, eh? Just a pile of automobiles, a million junkyards are full of them. What do I think I'm doing? Wait and see.' He pointed to Halloway's glider on the back of the truck, where Olds was already tearing away the torn fabric. 'Is that a glider or a powerplane? During the war I built thirty thousand fighters for the government, we were turning them out so fast the Air Force kept the war going just to get rid of them. And that was on top of a hundred airships, cargosubmarines and enough spare parts to give every man on this planet his own robotassembly kit. Then I retooled and flooded the world with wristwatch TVs, compressed paper houses, a million gimmicks. Techniques of mass production raised to the nth power. Do you remember my protein synthesizer?' He glanced at Halloway, who nodded promptly. 'No, you're too young. No bigger than a suitcase, you put it under your bed at night and it ran off your sweat and body temperature. Somehow it didn't catch on, but I would have fed a starving world, lifted the population of this planet to fifty billion in comfort. I was ready to build them supercities, the first conurbation conglomerates, the megametropolis larger than any individual nationstate. I designed the first collapsible city, interchangeable parts moving around on gigantic rails. Makes sense if a theatre isn't being used by day, wheel it off and roll on an officeblock. Instead of which' here he raised his ancient hands eloquently to the empty streets 'they all just gave up and faded away. Goodbye, C20 Man, hello Arcadia, that timid world of waterwheels and solar batteries. Not that there's an unlimited future for tidal power. Every time one of those pontoons nods its head the planet slows down a little. The days are getting longer..

He turned away from the rail, and put a hard arm around Halloway's shoulder. 'Now, you've come to work for me? It's too late, I closed down my last design office ten years ago.' He steered Halloway to the elevator, nodding sagely to himself as they rode down together. 'A pity, you could have done great things with those hands. Anyway, you can work for Stillman, there's more than he can do.'

'Well...' Halloway glanced at the blackjacketed driver, standing beside the tractor with one hand on the automobile suspended in the air over his head. 'I was thinking of setting up on my own.'

'Good for you but it's all over. There's nothing to do now but close it down. Give it a humane burial, put up a monument here and there to TwentiethCentury technology, to all those things we took for granted tyres, engines, TVs, kitchen appliances, automobiles...'

His voice wavered for the first time and then stopped, as he gazed up wistfully at his cathedral of cars. Waiting for this strange old man to start again, Halloway remembered that he had seen his combative jaw and dreamer's eyes in the architecture textbooks in his grandfather's library. Buckmaster had been the last of the great entrepreneurindustrialists, part architect and engineer, part visionary, driven on by oldfashioned crankiness, ceaseless originality and a welldeveloped talent for seizing the headlines. Grandiose projects started all over the world and then abandoned to rivals and pupils, a succession of wives, the third of whom died in a mysterious scandal, lawsuits against any number of governments, plans for the first transAtlantic bridge these were elements in a stormy career spanning nearly seventy years. Although Buckmaster was clearly living a century too late there was something about his unflagging energy and resolve that fired a response in Halloway's mind. He couldn't help contrasting Buckmaster's limitless appetite for steel, power, concrete and raw materials with the selfdenying, defeatist lives of the engineers and architects at Garden City. There was even a fringe group of scientific fanatics the socalled 'heliophiles' whose ambition was to return energy to the sun by firing off all the old missiles with nuclear warheads, repaying the sun for its billionyear bounty.

He followed Buckmaster into the interior of the memorial, uneasily aware that this cathedral of rust might collapse at any time. At the far end of the nave the semicircle of internal walls had been transformed into a lavish botanical garden. Terrace upon terrace of climbing plants hung from the chassis of the cars, brilliant flowers bloomed in the windows and wheelwells. The golden bells of forsythia trailed from the windows of grand limousines a hundred feet in the air, the white mist of mileaminute vines hovered like steam above the radiator grilles and exhaust pipes.

Apparently unaware that this cascade of blossoms was already transforming his monument into a far more bizarre structure than he had visualized, Buckmaster began to point out various details of the construction. But Halloway was more interested in the hanging garden. A young woman was working at the flowers, taking nasturtium and petunia seedlings from a series of trays and planting them in the doors and windows. As she moved about, climbing up and down a high ladder, Halloway had difficulty in guessing her age. At Garden City the emancipated women wore simple homewoven smocks and jerkins indistinguishable from the men's. With undressed hair and devoid of makeup, their sexual roles were always explicit, desire worn casually on their sleeves.

By contrast, this young woman his daughter Miranda, Buckmaster informed him was dressed like the heroine of a lavishly costumed period musical. Everything about her, from her extravagant coppertinted hair in a PreRaphaelite cut to her long white neck and embroidered artnouveau gown, was calculated for concealment and effect, artifice and allure. Later, Halloway discovered that she changed her appearance every day, moving through the deserted boutiques and fashionhouses of the city, modelling herself on the vanished styles of the Twentieth Century. On one day she would appear in a cream cloche hat and Gatsby gown, on another in a lurex blouse, bobby sox and teenager's flared tartan skirt.

Buckmaster introduced Halloway to her. 'Miranda, a new recruit Mr Halloway, an aviator from Garden City. Any more like him and I may have to think again about opening my design office.'

As the old man wandered around, nodding at the profusion of flowers, Halloway searched for something to say. In his yellow trousers and multicoloured sneakers he was as much in costume as Buckmaster's daughter, but he felt gauche and clumsy beside her. Although she was his own age, there was something naive, and at the same time knowing and sophisticated, about Miranda. He guessed that he was the first young man of eighteen she had met, but that she had done a great deal of thinking about the subject and for all her shyness was well prepared to deal with him on her own terms.

'We watched you driving around,' she told him matteroffactly and without any rancour. 'Killing all those flowers in a way it must have been fun.'

'Well...' Lamely, Halloway tried to apologize. He helped her down the ladder, relieved when she was on his own level. There was something unsettling about the way she had looked down at him, surrounded by the vineinfested cars. 'I didn't realize that they were yours. I'll help you to plant them again they'll soon grow.'

'I know.' She strolled around him, picking the petals from his shirt, as if removing spots of blood. 'Sometimes I feel like the daughter of some great magician wherever I touch, a flower springs up.'

Halloway brushed away the last of the petals. His difficulty in talking to her stemmed partly from her ambiguity, the naively teasing sexual comeon, but more from his own inexperience. In Garden City the relations between young people were governed by the most enlightened rules, derived from the teachings of Malinowski, Margaret Mead and the anthropologists who had followed them. From the age of sixteen, in the approved Polynesian style, young people of both sexes lived together openly in the 'long house' dormitories set aside for them until they later chose their marriage partner. Halloway had opted out of this, for reasons he had never understood, so committing himself to the company of his grandparents on one side and the younger teenagers on the other. He had never regretted the decision there was something far too amiable, far too bovine and uncritical, about the handholding tenants of the long house.

Now, as he watched Miranda admiring his coloured sneakers, swirling her embroidered dress around him, he was certain that he was right. That ambiguity she showed, that moody combination of challenge and allure, was exactly what the city was about.

'I saw your glider yesterday,' Miranda told him. 'Crossing the Sound. It was like part of a dream, miles away across the water. Now suddenly you're here, in your miracle shoes.'

'I dream about powered flight,' Halloway told her with some pride. 'Olds and I are rebuilding the glider. When it's ready we'll put an engine on it.'

Miranda nodded, gazing up at her hanging garden, as if waiting patiently for the jungle to return. In some way she seemed almost at odds with her father, trying to undo his work and transform it for her own purposes.

'Halloway...' She touched his arm. 'My father's very old. I want him to finish this before it's too late. Stillman's losing interest. Will you work for us for a while?'

The next day Halloway joined Stillman's oneman construction gang. He had said goodbye to Olds, who returned with the sailplane to the airport, and spent the night in one of the small hotels around the square.

Riding on the cowling of the tractor's engine, Halloway squatted in front of the driving cab as Stillman roved the city, searching for the exact models of the cars that Buckmaster had ordered. Each one they carried back to the monument, and Halloway climbed the wall of vehicles and guided Stillman as he steered the largest of the cranes and inserted the car into its place. From the observation platform the old industrialist supervised the work from behind his blueprints. Meanwhile his daughter, dressed for the day in a 1940s business suit, with boxy shoulders and a skirt of brown pinstripe, her hair in a frizz, moved silently among the flowers in the centre of the memorial, tending the vines and blossoms in this dark, humid arbour.

His involvement with this strange trio surprised Halloway, but he soon realized that each of them played a role in certain unfolding obsessions of his own. Of the three, Stillman with his black jacket and hoodlum style most disturbed and most stimulated him, brooding over a dark dream of the city so like Halloway's own.

As they drove back through the streets on that first day Halloway had an unsettling glimpse of Stillman's unpredictable violence. The massive tractor was clanking down a wide avenue, a yellow taxicab held in its claw, when they passed a department store. Halloway was sitting in front of the cab, and was nearly flung to the road as Stillman slammed back the lefthand drive lever and turned the tractor towards the sidewalk. Cars were parked nose to tail along the kerb, but Stillman drove straight into them, knocking them out of his way with powerful left and right swings of the taxi. Gripped by the claw, the battered vehicle showered glass and rust on to the road. Working the levers and throttle with hard and almost spasmlike thrusts of his arms and shoulders, Stillman drove the tractor towards the store. His jaws champed rapidly on a piece of gum, but his face was deliberately expressionless, part of a continuous stylization of gesture and movement that Halloway had never seen before and that excited and disturbed him at the same time.

A group of mannequins sat in the store window around a table, part of a mock dinnerparty that had started twentyfive years earlier and never proceeded beyond the waxy hors d'oeuvres. The polite poses and prim overelegant manners clearly pulled a hairtrigger in Stiliman's mind. As the plate glass collapsed into the sidewalk he slung aside the taxi, sending it rolling across the street, and then began to sweep the mannequins out of the window, scattering them on to the sidewalk.

As he watched the destruction of these smartly attired female figures, Halloway was thinking of Miranda and her obsessive changes of costume. Was this her way of containing Stillman, or of provoking him? Stillman stared at her with a kind of humourless irony, as if forming in his mind a series of obscene jokes about her. Only his deference to the old industrialist seemed to prevent him from assaulting Miranda.

Seizing the yellow taxi again, Stillman set off down the street, the shattered mannequins lying in their tailored rags like the welltodo victims of a terrorist attack in a fashionable shopping centre. Halloway was shaking with excitement, barely able to keep his seat on the engine cowling. For all his fear of Stiliman, he knew that he was halfhoping that he would be violent again. He imagined the city filled with people, their lives invigorated by just this kind of callous and stylized aggression. When they passed another clothing store with a group of mannequins in the window he tapped the windshield and pointed them out to Stillman.

Later, when Buckmaster and his daughter retired to their thirdfloor suite in a hotel facing the monument of cars, Stillman and Halloway wandered through the dusk towards a nearby park. Stillman broke into a gunshop, and from the racks behind the counter took down a sporting rifle and shotgun. Pockets filled with cartridges, they strolled into the park, and in the evening light shot quail and a small deer. The roar of gunfire, the coarse smell of the cordite and the hard recoil against his arms and shoulders, the terrified movement of thousands of birds and animals as they fled through the forest, together filled Halloway's head with fantasies of violence.

Stillman occupied a penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor of a block facing the park.

'It's a long climb,' he warned Halloway. 'But I like to sit up there in the morning and watch dinner grazing down below.'

On the open terrace they lit a fire with pieces of furniture taken from the other apartments. Around them the walls of the city rose into the night. As he roasted the quail and turned the deer on its spit Halloway could see the flames reflected in thousands of darkened windows, as if the night were on fire. They sat together in armchairs by the embers flaring in the wind, and Stiliman talked about the city, of the period he could just remember when it had been filled with more than a million people, the streets packed with traffic and the skies with helicopters, a realm of ceaseless noise and activity, competition and crime. It was here, in fact, as a young student at the school of architecture, that Stillman had first met Buckmaster. Within six months he had killed the industrialist's third wife in a lovers' quarrel. The last murderer to be tried and convicted before the emigration from the cities began in earnest, he was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. Eighteen years later, rotting away in an empty penitentiary, the sole prisoner looked after by one aged warder, he had been freed by Buckmaster, who took him on his own parole in a strange gesture. Now he worked for the old man, operating the heavy lifting equipment and helping him to build his monuments to a vanished age of technology. All the while he could barely contain his anger at finding the city he had longed for through so many years an empty and abandoned shell.

Halloway listened to him without speaking. When Stillman finished and lay back in his armchair, staring at the embers of the fire and the bones scattered at his feet, Halloway walked to the balustrade and looked at the dark buildings around them.

'Stillman it isn't too late. It's all waiting for us here. We can start it up again. Olds can bring it back to life for us.'

During the next month, as he continued to work for the old industrialist on his memorials, Halloway began his selfappointed task of reanimating this huge metropolis. The cathedral of cars now reached to a height of three hundred feet, an eccentric but impressive structure of steel, glass and chrome. As it neared completion Buckmaster began to slow down, as if aware that this last monument would mark the end of his life and career.

Free during the afternoons, Halloway returned to Stillman's apartment house. Invariably he found the slim patient figure of Olds standing beside his breakdown truck. The mute's hopes of learning to fly, his dream of escape from the thousands of cars that surrounded him at the airport and the memories of his accident, had become the central obsession of his life. On the one afternoon when Halloway could spare the time to visit the airport he found his sailplane on the roof of the car park, tethered to the sloping concrete deck like a prisoner of the sky. Olds had rebuilt the wings and fuselage, and was already preparing a fifty horsepower engine and propeller to be mounted above the cockpit.

Nodding his approval, Halloway noticed that the museum of cars was already showing signs of neglect. Dust filmed the once immaculate coachwork, leaves and tags of paper lay against the unwiped windshields. As Olds gazed at the sailplane the calculator in his hand flickered continuously.

Halloway, we'll leave soon. When I've assembled the engine.

'Of course,' Halloway reassured him. 'We're going together, I know.'

Flying lessons?

There was panic in the quivering letters.

I can't fly yet!

'Olds, naturally. You won't find it difficult look at the way you handle machinery, you're a genius.'

But Olds was only interested in the aircraft. In the aviation section of one of the city's science museums he found a leather flying suit and helmet dating back to World War I. He took to wearing the costume, his slight figure and scarred head encased in this antique aviator's gear.

For the time being, Halloway decided to humour him. Olds was essential to his plan to restart the city, and without his electrical and mechanical skills the metropolis would remain as dead as a tomb. In return for the promise of flying lessons, Olds drove in from the airport each afternoon, equipped with his generators, cables and toolkit.

Sceptical of Halloway's ambitious scheme, Stillman wandered through the densely forested park with his rifle, killing the birds. Meanwhile Olds fitted the apartment house with its own electricity supply. A gasolenedriven generator in the entrance hail was soon pounding away, its power supply plugged into the mains. Even this small step immediately brought the building alive. Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels. Most of the equipment, barely used during the long period of power cuts twentyfive years earlier, was still in functioning order. Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remotecontrolled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away along the Sound.

However, in the taperecorders, stereosystems and telephone answering machines Halloway at last found the noise he needed to break the silence of the city. At first, playing through these tapes of conversations recorded by husbands and wives in the last years of the Twentieth Century, Halloway was disturbed by the anxious queries and despairing messages that described the slow collapse of an entire world. The sense of gloom and psychic entropy that came through these reminders to queue for gasolene and cooking oil were the absolute opposite of the vigour and dynamism he had expected.

But the music was different. Almost every apartment seemed to be a broadcasting station of its own. Bursting with crude confidence, the music transformed these ghostfilled rooms into a battery of nightclubs. He moved from floor to floor, blowing the dust from records and cassettes, switching on each of the apartments in turn. Rockandroll, big band, jazz and pop boomed through the open windows at the silent park. Even Stiliman was impressed, looking up in surprise from the waisthigh grass, shotgun raised hesitantly to the air as if thinking twice about trying to make an equal noise.

'Olds, it works!' Halloway found him resting by the generator in the lobby. 'If we can switch on this building we can switch on the whole city! Take off that flying cap and we'll start now.'

Reluctantly, Olds peeled off his helmet. He smiled ungrudgingly at Halloway, clearly admiring the energy and enthusiasm of this excited young man, but at the, same time he seemed to be estimating his degree of involvement with Halloway. Although surrounded by his tools and cables, ammeters and transformers, his mind was clearly miles away, in the cockpit of the glider on the roof of the car park. He looked bored by what he was doing, hardly the mechanic to the world whom Halloway needed.

Halloway noticed that Olds had found a second calculator. The two instruments lay side by side on the floor, the fragments of an extended private dialogue flicking to and fro under the Negro's fingers. For the first time Halloway felt impatient.

'Olds do you want flying lessons or not? If you can't help me I'll find someone else.' Enjoying his aggressive manner, he added, 'Old Buckmaster will know someone.'

I'll help you, Halloway.

For one flying lesson.

So Olds joined Halloway in his grand design. While Halloway drove over to the airport to collect the generators stored in the basement of the car park, Olds worked away at the apartment block, repairing the elevator and airconditioning units. With almost magical ease he moved around the building, opening fuseboxes, trailing cable from a second generator to the motors in the elevator head. When Halloway returned he found Olds serenely raising the elevator like a moody but elegant trapeze artist.

'Olds it's unbelievable...' Halloway congratulated him, careful to add, 'Wait until you repair the jet planes at the airport.'

Olds shook his head, watching Halloway reflectively, not taken in by him for a moment.

A little too much even for me.

'Nothing is now, we'll help Mr Buckmaster.'

Leaving a dozen stereograms to blare their music into the empty streets, Halloway and Olds set off for the mausoleum. Buckrnaster was resting in his bedroom. Flattered by Halloway's concern, he watched with approval from his balcony as Olds manhandled a generator into the lobby and ran the cables up to his suite.

From the breakdown truck Halloway unloaded a battery of six arclights he had removed from the faade of the airport terminal building.

'We'll set them up around the square, sir,' Halloway explained. 'At night you'll be able to see the whole monument floodlit.'

Buckmaster strolled across the square, his sharp eyes following Halloway with some curiosity as he darted enthusiastically around the cathedral of cars, setting the arclights in position. Deep in the nave of the monument Miranda was at work on the terraces of her hanging garden. Dressed today in blue jeans and a hippy jacket, a child's beads around her wrists, she was placing petunias and nasturtiums among the radiator grilles thirty feet above the ground. During the previous days Halloway had been too busy to make contact with her. Besides, her fey manner unsettled him. There seemed to be something decadent about this obsessive planting of vines and flowers, an unconscious but all the more sinister attempt to bring back a lurid and overbright nature red in tooth and claw. Halloway had begun to hate the carpets of blossoms, these creepers and climbing plants that threatened to strangle the city before he could release it. Already he was thinking of the defoliants he had noticed in a chemical supplies store.

'I'm grateful to you, Halloway,' Buckmaster told him as they walked back to the hotel. 'There's a sense of style about you that I like, all too rare these days, you belong to a vanished breed Brunel, Eiffel, Lloyd Wright, Kaiser, Buckmaster. For once, though, don't pitch your dreams too high. What happens when the gas runs out? You're going to have a second energy crisis all your own.'

Halloway shook his head confidently. 'Sir, there are millions of cars here. The tankers at the airport some of them are halffull of aviation fuel, enough to keep us going for a year. After that' Halloway gestured at the air 'we'll find something else.'

His hand on Halloway's shoulder, Buckmaster listened to the sound of the generator coming to life in the lobby. He watched the arclights pulse briefly and then blaze out, almost overheating the sunshine. For all the old industrialist's caution, Halloway could sense Buckmaster's excitement. Halloway was glad of this. For some reason he wanted to impress him. He was aware that the image of his father, which had propelled him towards the city, had recently begun to fade in his mind, confined to the sailplane tethered like an imprisoned bird on the roof of the car park.

Halloway pointed at the deserted streets around the square. 'There's so much that should have happened here that never did,' he explained to Buckmaster. 'I want to bring everything alive again, and give back to the city all that lost time.'

During the next weeks Halloway embarked on his grandiose scheme to reanimate the city. From the start he knew that the task of literally bringing back to life the whole of this huge metropolis was beyond the skills of even a hundred men like Olds. However, in a symbolic sense the task could be achieved on a more modest scale.

Adjoining the northern side of the square was a cluster of sidestreets that formed a selfsufficient neighbourhood cut off from the fiftystorey buildings surrounding it. By chance, this enclave, little more than a block in extent, contained the whole city in miniature. There were modest hotels and theatres, bars and restaurants, even a police station and one television studio. Wandering around these narrow streets in the afternoons, Halloway noticed that the stores and offices, banks and supermarkets had been built to a smaller scale than in the rest of the city, and at a time before the zoning ordinances which would have excluded the light factories erected in backyards, the autorepair shops in converted garages. On the first floors above the bars and shops were dozens of oneman businesses, minor printing works and travel agencies, tailors and TV repairers.

Sitting on a stool in an empty bar, Halloway calculated that the working population of this cityinminiature would have been little more than 2000 in its heyday. Even now, a hundred people like himself would be able to get most of its activities going again.

Through the weeks that followed, Halloway and Olds, with grudging help from Stillman, began the task of bringing this neighbourhood back to life. Olds drove in from the airport with a yellowhulled fuel tanker, filled with enough aviation spirit to power a hundred generators for a month. Tirelessly, he moved in and out of the inspection tunnels below the sidewalks, opening up the electricity substations and feeding down fresh cable. Meanwhile Halloway cut away the tangle of overhead wires that crossed the streets in steel webs, and then he and Olds began the laborious task of rewiring the roadways. First the street lights came on, filling these deserted thoroughfares with an eerie brilliance, then the traffic signals and pedestrian control signs. Stillman cleared away the hundreds of derelict cars that lined the streets, leaving some twenty vehicles that Olds decided he could renovate.

Supervising all this activity, Halloway drove around in a blackandwhite police car whose engine the young Negro had brought to life. Halloway had made the local police station his operational headquarters. The lavish wallmaps and communications equipment, the electric alarm signals that ran to so many of the stores and businesses, even the clandestine listening devices which the police had bugged in to many of the bars and iiotels, made the station a natural headquarters.

Often working a dozen hours a day, Halloway pressed on, too tired in the evenings to do more than fall asleep in his apartment two floors below Stillman's. Despite all their efforts, however, the chaos seemed to grow rather than diminish. Piles of garbage covered the sidewalks, dozens of generators and fuel drums blocked the doorways of the bars and supermarkets, everywhere there were sections of dismantled switchboards and circuitry.

But one afternoon, after returning from the airport with a small lathe for Olds, he knew that he had succeeded.

A hundred yards from the station he was approaching a minor street intersection when the traffic lights turned from green to red. Laughing aloud at himself for obeying this solitary signal in an empty city of ten thousand intersections, in which he was its only traffic policeman, Halloway nonetheless pulled to a halt and waited until the lights changed to green. An important principle was at stake. Later, as he sat in the cabin of Stillman's tractor, bulldozing the piles of garbage and collapsed electric signs out of the streets, Halloway reflected that he was not working for himself alone. In the three supermarkets within the reclamation zone he drained the freezer compartments, swept the aisles and restacked the pyramids of canned goods, like a dedicated resort hotelier preparing for an invasion army of tourists. Three taxicabs, each in running order, stood outside the neighbourhood's leading hotel. One by one the streets were cleared of debris and abandoned cars, the sidewalks were free from garbage, the plateglass shopfronts gleamed anew.

Amused but impressed by the transformation, Stillman at last decided to take part. At first, Halloway was reluctant to recruit this deviant figure. Every day Halloway heard him moving around the city, the violent explosions of breaking steel and glass as he dragged down another departmentstore portico and ran his tracks over the mannequins. In the evenings, as they sat together on the floodlit terrace of the penthouse, Stillman would gaze resentfully across the roasting deer, as if annoyed that the dark dream of the city which had sustained him for so long should be brought to life in so naive a fashion by this idealistic youth. Then, one evening when Halloway was rhapsodizing about the harshness and vitality of his neat and immaculate streets, Stillman brusquely shut him up and announced that he would join the reclamation project. Clearly he had decided to inject some real life into this toytown neighbourhood. He curtly turned down Halloway's suggestion that he take over the renovation of a store selling kitchen equipment.

'That's not my style, Halloway. I leave the domestic sciences to you. My expertise lies in other areas..

In no time Stillman had staked out two amusement arcades, several bars and a small nightclub in the basement of an office block. Once Olds had supplied electric current Stillman set to work with a will, moving at a far swifter pace than his usual surly languor had ever previously allowed. The amusement arcades were soon a blaze of garish lights. Pinball machines chattered and clanged, score numerals stuttered. In the communications room of the police station Halloway sat by the monitor screen of the trafficcontrol television system, watching the multicoloured lights ripple across the sidewalks.

Stiliman had stripped down the punctured neon signs above the bars and arcades. From a warehouse discovered somewhere he brought in a truckload of intact signs, massive pieces of electrographic architecture that dominated the whole of Halloway's neighbourhood. Giant letters dripped across the night sky, cascades of pink light fell mushily across the faade of his nightclub, the winged emblems of longvanished airlines pulsed through the overloaded air, the roofsills of bars and amusement arcades were trimmed with tubes of racing fluorescence.

Watching uneasily on his TV monitor, Halloway wondered how to put a stop to this lurid invasion. At dusk, as the surrounding city grew dark, he left the police station and cruised the streets in his squadcar, listening to the generators beating in the basements and alleyways, the tireless hearts pumping out this haemorrhage of light. He knew now why Stillman had been so dismissive of his laborious restocking of offices and supermarkets. It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive.

Halloway parked outside a bank he had begun to reclaim. Olds' toolbags and equipment trolleys were by the doorway. He had been working on the electrically operated vault doors before leaving for the airport, and the piles of old banknotes lay exposed in their metal trays. Halloway looked down at the bales of notes, worthless now but a fortune thirty years earlier. In Garden City money was never used, and had given way to a sophisticated system of barter and tithesgiving that eliminated the abuses of credit, instalmentbuying and taxation.

Touching the banknotes, with their subtle progression from one denomination to the next, a means of quantifying the value of everything, its promise and obligation, Halloway watched the garish lights of the neon signs in the street flicker across his hands. He was glad that Stillman had transformed this staid and wellswept thoroughfare. They needed workers for the stores and offices and production lines, and they needed visitors for the hotels and bars. They would need money, as well, to oil the engine of competition.

Halloway locked away the trays of banknotes and slipped the keys into his pocket. There were thousands of other banks in the city, but in the printing shop next to the police station Olds would overprint the notes with Halloway's frank. The thought pleased him to have reached the point of issuing his own currency meant that success was really at hand.

He ended his evening rounds at the square. Lit by the arclights, Buckmaster's memorial of cars rose over three hundred feet into the air, a cathedral of rust. The vines and flowers that climbed its sides looked dead in the fierce light. Halloway was glad to see that their once vivid colours were blanched out by the powerful glare. A dozen reflections in the dark buildings around the square transformed it into a mortuary plain of illuminated tombs.

Buckmaster stood on the steps of his hotel, looking with obvious pleasure at this huge spectacle. Miranda, however, watching from a window above, stared at Halloway with equally clear hostility. That afternoon Halloway had stripped the last of the poppies and forgetmenots from the avenues around the reclamation zone. As he crossed the square at the controls of the tractor, the bale of flowers in the metal scoop like a multicoloured haystack, Miranda followed him through the streets, catching in her white hands the loose petals that drifted in the air.

Now, on her balcony, she was dressed in a bizarre Barbarella costume of silver metal and glass, like a sciencefiction witch about to take her revenge on Halloway.