Unaware of his daughter's anger, Buckmaster took Halloway's arm and pointed to a building across the square, the offices of a former newspaper. A frieze of electric letters that had once carried a continuous news strip had been repaired by Olds, a citysized replica of the display panels of his pocket calculators. Letters began to race from right to left.

'Halloway, they ought to hand you the mayoral chain, my boy, and put your name up there, high, wide and handsome!'

But already the first message was flashing past.

OLDS! OLDS! OLDS! OLDS! OLDS!.

Delighted by this, Halloway joined Buckmaster and rode the elevator with the old industrialist to the observation platform beside his cathedral. As they stepped out, however, a new message was racing across the display sign.

DANGER! FIVE MILES NORTHEAST. INVASION PARTY COMING.

Two days later, when the rescue expedition arrived, Halloway was ready to deal with them in his own way. During that first night after Olds had given the alarm he spent the long hours until dawn in the topfloor offices of the newspaper building. Soon after sunrise he watched the landing party disembark from their sailing vessel, a threemaster whose white aluminium sails and white steel hull stood out against the dark water like chiselled bone. Using binoculars, Halloway immediately identified the ship, a barquentine built by the Garden City administrative council.

Halloway had taken for granted that a rescue party would one day come to search for him. Presumably they had been scouring the shore along the northern coast of the Sound, and had now decided to explore the city itself, no doubt guided there by the sudden efflorescence of light each evening, this neon pleasuredrome that had come to life among the silent towerblocks.

An hour after dawn Halloway drove north through the city in his squadcar. He left the vehicle half a mile from the landing point and walked ahead through the deserted streets. The white masts and square metal foresail of the barquentine rose above the buildings near the quay where she had docked. There was no riggingremotecontrolled by an inboard computer that assessed tides, course and windvelocity, the ship was the ultimate in the technology of sail.

Halloway climbed on to the roof of an appliance store and watched the expedition party come ashore. There were ten people in the group, all members of the Garden City gliding club Halloway recognized the architect and his twelveyearold son, and the elderly hydrographer with the red beard. As they unloaded their bicycles and wicker hampers they reminded Halloway of a Victorian picnic party exploring a nature reserve. Had he really spent his life with these quiet, civilized and anaemic people? Amused by them, but already bored by the whole absurd business, he watched them adjust their bicycle clips and tyre pressures. Their polite and gentle manners, the timid way in which they gazed down the empty streets, had given him all the ideas he needed on how to deal with them.

As Halloway had guessed, it took the rescue party a full two days to reach the centre of the city. During the mornings they pedalled forward at a sedate pace, cautiously making their way through the abandoned cars and festoons of rusting telephone wire. There were endless pauses to consult their maps and take refreshment. They had even brought a portable recycling unit with them, and carefully reprocessed their kitchen and other wastes. By early afternoon they were already pitching their elaborate tents and laying out their complex camping equipment.

Luckily, it was almost dusk when they finally reached the central square. On the television monitor in the police station Halloway watched them dismount from their bicycles and stare with amazement at Buckmaster's towering monument. Lit by a single floodlight inside the nave the memorial rose above the darkened square, the hundreds of windows and radiator grilles shining like the facets of an immense glowing jewel.

The party edged forward tentatively, gripping their bicycle handlebars for moral support. All around them the streets were dark and silent. Then, as they all bent down to take off their trouser clips, Halloway leaned across his control console and began to throw the switches.

Later, when he looked back on this episode, Halloway relished his routing of the rescue party and only wished that he had recorded it on the traffic control videotape system. For thirty minutes total pandemonium had broken loose in the square and nearby streets. As a hundred generators roared into life, pouring electric current into the grid, arclights blazed around the square, freezing his wouldbe rescuers in their tracks. The faades of the buildings around the square erupted into a cataract of neon. Traffic lights beckoned and signalled. From the loudspeakers which Olds had strung across the streets came a babel of sound police sirens howling, jet aircraft taking off, trains slamming through junctions, car horns blaring, all the noises of the city in its heyday which Halloway had found in a speciality record shop.

As this visual and acoustic nightmare broke loose around the members of the rescue party, Halloway left the communications room and ran down to the street. As he climbed into his police car Stillman swerved past in his white gangster's limousine. Racing after him, Halloway switched on his siren. He reached the square and hurtled around it, cornering on two wheels in the way approved by the stuntdrivers in the fiftyyearold crime films which Stiliman had screened for him in his nightclub that afternoon.

For the next fifteen minutes, as the noise of police sirens and aircraft, machinegun fire and express trains sounded through the streets, Halloway and Stillman put on their mock car chase, pursuing each other around the square, plunging out of narrow alleys and swerving across the sidewalks, driving the terrified members of the rescue party in front of them. Stillman, inevitably, soon went too far, knocking the bicycles out of their hands and crushing two of the complex machines against a fire hydrant. In fact, Halloway was certain that if they had not turned tail and run at least one member of the party would have been killed.

Abandoning their equipment and sharing the remaining bicycles, it took them less than six hours to reach the ship and set sail. Long after they had gone, when Halloway had switched off the recorded sounds and dimmed the neon lights, Stillman continued to drive around the square in his white limousine, jumping the lights at the traffic intersections, tirelessly wheeling the big car in and out of the alleys and sidestreets, as if deranged by this dreamcometrue of the violent city.

From the communications room at the police station Halloway watched Stillman's car swerving around the square. Somehow he would have to find a means of containing Stillman before he destroyed everything they had done. Tired out by all the noise and action, Halloway reached forward to switch off the monitor, when he realized that he was no longer the only spectator of Stillman's disturbed driving.

Standing in the portico of a deserted bank, their slim figures almost hidden by the high columns, were two boys in their late teens. Despite the shiny plastic suitcases and their flamboyant shoes and jackets presumably taken from the stores on the outskirts of the city Halloway was certain that they had come from one of the pastoral settlements. On their Garden City faces was a childlike expectation, an innocent but clear determination to seize the life of the metropolis.

Switching on the loudspeaker system so that he could talk to them, Halloway picked up the microphone. The first of his people had arrived to take their places in his city.

It had been another successful day. On the television monitor in the police commissioner's office Halloway watched the activity in the avenue below. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and the rushhour traffic was beginning to build up. The sidewalks were thronged by more than a dozen pedestrians, leaving their offices and workshops on their way to the neighbourhood bars and supermarkets. A hundred yards from the station, six cars were blocking an intersection where the lights had failed. Their horns sounded impatiently above the street noise.

Halloway spoke to the desk sergeant in the orderly room. 'Get a man over to the Seventh Avenue intersection. There's a faulty green light holding up the traffic.'

'He's already left, Mr Halloway.'

'Good if we don't watch it now there'll be chaos in an hour or two.'

These minor breakdowns were a pleasant challenge to Halloway. Even now, as one of Stillman's young men ignored the stuttering red light and the outstretched arm of the police constable, Halloway was in no way annoyed. In a sense, these displays of aggression pleased him, confirming everything he had hoped about the reclamation scheme. The pedestrians in the street below strode along purposefully, pushing past each other with scant courtesy. There was no trace here of good humour and pastoral docility.

In an alleyway facing the station a diesel generator was pumping out dense clouds of sooty smoke. A threeman repair gang recently trained by Olds had emptied the sump oil across the sidewalk, in clear contravention of the local ordinances. But, again, Halloway made no attempt to reprimand them. If anything, he had done what he could to frustrate any efforts to bring in stricter clearair regulations. Pollution was part of the city, a measure of its health. All the socalled ills that had beset this huge metropolis in its prime had visited themselves with flattering haste on Halloway's small enclave. Pollution, traffic congestion, inadequate municipal services, inflation and deficit public financing had all promptly reappeared.

Halloway had even been pleased when the first crime was committed. During the previous night several clothing stores had been broken into, and pilfering from the supermarkets went on continuously. Halloway had spoken to Stillman about the lightfingered behaviour of his entourage. Lounging back with his young cronies in his 1920s gangster limousine, Stillman had merely flicked the sharp lapels of his dovegrey suit and pointed out that petty crime helped to keep the economy running.

'Relax, Halloway, it's all part of the problem of urban renewal. Do I complain that some of your boys are on the take? You've got to increase turnover. You're working these poor devils so hard they haven't time to spend their pay. If they've got anything left by the end of the week, that is. This is a real highrent area you've set up for them. Any time now you'll have a housing crisis on your hands, social problems, urban unrest. Remember, Halloway, you don't want to start a flight from the cities.'

Halloway had taken this friendly ribbing in his stride, though the rapid increase in the size of Stillman's gang had begun to make him uneasy. Clearly Stiliman relished lording it over this entourage of wideeyed teenagers and farmbred youths, fitting them up with their gangster suits and weapons like a corrupt stagedirector playing ironic games with a chorus of young actors. At times Halloway felt that he too was part of this sardonic man's devious entertainment.

However, apart from the stealing, Stillman's continued ravaging of department store windows in the surrounding districts of the city had turned Halloway's neighbourhood into an island of light and activity in an everlarger sea of devastation. Halloway's plans for expansion had been effectively shelved by this deliberate vandalism, the wholesale destruction of complete city blocks.

In addition, Stillman's entourage had come into collision with Olds, and Halloway now depended more than ever on the mute. Two of Stiliman's men had tried to break into Olds' automobile plant, complaining that the models they had ordered from him had not been delivered. For several days Olds had retreated to his rooftop eyrie above the garage at the airport. Without him everything soon began to run down. Halloway drove out to pacify him, and found Olds sitting below the wing of the glider tethered to the roof, calculators flicking in his hands as he brooded to himself. His eyes were gazing at the flights of birds taking off from the reservoirs around the airport, thousands of wild geese moving westwards across the city. Uneasily, Halloway noticed that the cars in his museum were still dusty and untended. One of them, the black Duesenberg, had been savagely attacked, its windows knocked in and upholstery slashed, controls pounded out of recognition by a heavy mallet.

But for a brilliant stroke of Halloway's, Olds would long since have left. Two months beforehand, he had shown his first irritation with the throngs of youths and teenage girls who were entering the reclamation area. Many of them were idealists like Halloway, repressed by the passivity of the garden communities and eager to help restart the city. However, an equal number were drifters and misfits, who resented taking orders from Olds and began to mimic him, flashing obscenities on the readout panels of the pocket calculators they had taken from a businessmachines store.

Searching for some way of retaining his hold over Olds, Halloway came up with the suggestion that the mute could own and manage his own automobile plant. The idea had immediately appealed to Olds. In an underground garage near the policestation he and his workforce soon constructed a crude but functioning production line, on which the dozens of cars being reequipped and reengined moved along a section of railway line. They entered as little more than wrecks picked up off the street by their prospective owners, and emerged at the far end of the line as fully functioning vehicles. Delighted by this, Olds had agreed to stay on in the city.

In fact, Halloway's idea worked better than he hoped. The motorcar was the chief commodity of the city, and demand for it was insatiable. Almost every one of the new inhabitants now owned three or four cars, and their chief recreation was driving around the streets of the reclamation area dressed in the latest finery. Parking problems had become acute, and a special task force under Olds was renovating the kerbside meters, an unpopular measure grudgingly accepted only because of the special status of the automobile and the important position it occupied, economically and otherwise, in people's lives.

Despite these problems, Halloway was satisfied with his achievement. In the four months since the first of the new arrivals had turned up, a genuine microcosm of the former metropolis had come into existence. The population of the city was now two hundred, girls and youths in their late teens and early twenties, emigrants from Garden City and Parkville, Laurel Heights and Heliopolis, drawn from these dozy pastoral settlements to the harsh neon glare that each evening lit up the night sky like a beacon.

By now any new immigrants some of them, worryingly, little more than children were rapidly inducted into urban life. On arrival they were interviewed by Halloway, issued with a list of possible jobs, either on Olds' production line, in the clothing stores and supermarkets, or in any one of a dozen reclamation gangs. The last group, who foraged through the city at large for cars, fuel, food supplies, tools and electrical equipment, in effect represented the productive capacity of the new settlement, but in time Halloway hoped that they would embark on the original manufacture of an everwider range of consumer goods. Cash credits (banknote6 franked with Halloway's name) were advanced to the new recruits against their first week's pay, with which they could buy the garish clothing, records and cigarettes they seemed to need above all else. Most of the two hundred inhabitants were now heavily in debt, but rather than evict them from their apartments and close the discotheques, bars and amusement arcades where they spent their evenings, Halloway had astutely lengthened the working day from eight to ten hours, enticing them with generous though uneconomic overtime payments. Already, he happily realized, he was literally printing money. Within only a few months inflation would be rampant, but like the crime and pollution this was a real sign of his success, a confirmation of all he had dreamed about.

There was a flicker of interference on the monitor screen, indicating a fault in the camera mounted outside the station. Muttering with mockannoyance, 'Nothing works any more,' Halloway switched to the camera in the square. The open plaza with its memorial of cars was deserted at this hour. The monument had never been completed. Stiliman had long since lost interest in the hard work of construction, and no one else had volunteered, particularly as no payment was involved. Besides, these memorials of cars and radiator grilles, tyres and kitchen appliances created an atmosphere of defeat and fatality, presiding like funeral pyres over the outskirts of the city as the new arrivals pressed on to their promised land.

A few attempts had been made to dismantle the pyramids, but each time Buckmaster and his daughter had managed to make good the damage. Dressed in her everchanging costumes, in this cavalcade of TwentiethCentury fashion, Miranda moved tirelessly through the city, seeding the glassfilled streets with poppies and daisies, trailing vines over the fallen telephone wires. Halloway had given two assistants the task of following her around the city and destroying whatever new plants they could find. Too many of the flowers she was now setting out in window boxes and ornamental urns had a distinctly sinister aspect. Halloway had caught her the previous week, eerily at work in the reclamation area itself, bedding out bizarre lilies with nacreous petals and mantislike flowers in the entrance to the policestation, glamorous but vicious plants that looked as if they might lunge at the throats of anyone passing by. Halloway had pushed past her, overturned her flower trolley and torn out the lilies with his bare hands. Then, with unexpected forbearance, he had ordered his sergeant to drive her back to her hotel. His feelings for Miranda remained as confused as they had been at their first meeting. On the one hand he wanted to impress her, to make her recognize the importance of everything he had done, on the other he was vaguely afraid of this young and naive Diana of the botanical gardens, about to embark on some macabre hunt through the intense, overheated foliage.

The day after this incident Buckmaster paid Halloway a visit, the first he had made to the reclamation zone. Still keen to earn the old industrialist's approval, Halloway took him on a tour of the neighbourhood, proudly pointing out the mechanics working on the motorcars on Olds' production line, the gleaming vehicles being collected by their new owners, the system of credit and finance which he had evolved, the busy bars and supermarkets, the new arrivals moving into their refurbished apartments, and even the first twohouraday transmissions from the local television station the programmes, with complete historical accuracy, consisted entirely of old movies and commercials. The latter, despite a hiatus of thirty years, were still uptodate advertisements of the products they bought and sold in the stores and supermarkets.

'Everything is here that you can think of, sir,' Halloway told the old man. 'And it's a living urban structure, not a film set. We've got traffic problems, inflation, even the beginnings of serious crime and pollution...'

The industrialist smiled at Halloway in a not unkindly way. 'That's a proud boast, Halloway. I'd begun to notice those last two myself. Now, you've taken me on your tour let me take you on one of mine.'

Reluctant to leave his command post in the commissioner's office, Halloway nonetheless decided to humour Buckmaster. Besides, he knew that in many ways Buckmaster had taken over the role of his own father. Often, as he relaxed in the evenings at his apartment overlooking the park, Halloway seriously wondered if his father would have understood all that he had achieved, so far beyond the antique engine parts and aircraft designs. Unhappily, Buckmaster who certainly did understand remained ambiguous in his response.

Together they set off in Halloway's car, driving for over an hour towards the industrial areas to the northwest of the city. Here, among the power stations and railyards, foundries and coal depots, Buckmaster tried to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its selfmade death. They stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery.

But as he listened to the old man warning him that sooner or later he would add to these terminal moraines, Halloway had been exhilarated by the scenes around him. Far from disfiguring the landscape, these discarded products of TwentiethCentury industry had a fierce and wayward beauty. Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metalscummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink. He was fascinated by the cobalt clouds that drifted below the surface of the water, free at last of all plants and fish, the soft chemical billows interacting as they seeped from the sodden soil. He explored the whorls of steel shavings, foliage culled from a metallic christmas tree, the bales of rusting wire whose dense copper hues formed a burnished forest in the sunlight. He gazed raptly at the chalky whiteness of old chinaclay tips, vivid as powdered ice, abandoned railyards with their mosscovered locomotives, the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature's, more splendid than any Arcadian meadow. Unlike nature, here there was no death.

Lulled by this vision of technology's Elysian Fields, Halloway sat halfasleep behind the commissioner's desk, dwarfed by the leatherbacked chair. When he woke he found that the TV monitor was again showing a jumble of interference patterns. Part of the excitement of city life was the constant breakdown of these poorly designed appliances, and the difficulty of getting hold of a repairman. In Garden City, every piece of equipment, every washing machine and solarpowered kitchen stove, functioned for ever with dismaying perfection. In the rare event of even the smallest malfunction the designer would appear on one's doorstep as fast as his bicycle could carry him. By contrast, the metropolis operated an exciting knifeedge away from total collapse.

Leaving the station, Halloway saluted the two eighteenyearold policemen sitting in their patrol car. There were ten officers under his command, an overlarge proportion of the total number of inhabitants, but all Halloway's scrutiny of the commissioner's records confirmed that a large police force, like pollution and a high crimerate, was an essential feature of city life.

Besides, they might well be useful sooner than he expected. As he stepped into his car to drive the fifty yards to Olds' garage Halloway never walked, however short the distance, and often Uturned his car to get from one side of the road to the other a gang of teenage boys tumbled with a chorus of obscenities from a nearby amusement arcade. They clustered around a large motorcycle with extended forks and a lavishly chromed engine. All wore black leather jackets strung with sinister ornaments iron crosses, ceremonial daggers and death's heads. The driver kickstarted the machine with a violent roar, then lurched in a circle across the sidewalk, knocking down part of a tobacco kiosk before veering into Halloway's path. Without apology, he drummed his fist on the roof above Halloway's head and roared off down the street, weaving in and out of the shouting pedestrians.

As Halloway expected, most of the workers on Olds' production line had packed up early. The thirty vehicles mounted on their movable trolleys had come to a halt, and the few mechanics left were plugging the batteries into the overnight chargers.

Olds was seated in his glasswalled office, moodily playing with his collection of pocket calculators, slim fingers flicking out fragments of some strange dialogue. As life for him had become increasingly complex, with all the problems of running this automobile plant, he had added more and more calculators. He placed the instruments in a series of lines across his desk, and seemed to be working towards a decision about everything, laying out the elements of this reductive conversation like cards in a game of solitaire.

He gazed up at Halloway, as if recognizing him with difficulty. He looked tired and listless, numbed by his work on all the projects which Halloway pushed forward ruthlessly.

'Olds, it's only six. Why are we scrapping the evening shift?'

There are not enough men for the line.

'They should all be here.' When Olds sat back, shuffling the calculators with one hand, Halloway snapped, 'Olds they need the work! They've got to pay back their wage credits!'

The mute shrugged, watching Halloway with his passive but intelligent eyes. From a drawer he pulled out his old flyinghelmet. He seemed about to question Halloway about something, but changed his mind.

Halloway, they lack your appreciation of the value of hard work.

'Olds, can't you understand?' With an effort, Halloway controlled his exasperation. He paced around the office, deciding on a new tack. 'Listen, Olds, there's something I wanted to bring up with you. As you know, you don't actually pay any rent for this garage in fact, this whole operation makes no direct contribution at all to the municipal budget. Originally I exempted you because of the help you've given in starting everything up, but I think now we'll have to look into the question of some kind of reasonable rent and of taxation, too, for that matter.' As Olds' fingers began to race irritatingly across the calculators, flicking out a series of messages he was unable to read, Halloway pressed on.

'There's another thing. So much of life here depends on time hours of work, rates of pay and so on, they're all hitched to the clock. It occurred to me that if we lengthened the hour, without anyone knowing, of course, we would get more work out of people for the same rates of pay. Suppose I ordered in all the clocks and wristwatches, for a free checkup, say, could you readjust them so that they ran a little slower?' Halloway paused, waiting to see if Olds fully appreciated the simplicity of this ingenious scheme. He added, 'Naturally, it would be to everyone's benefit. In fact, by varying the length of the hour, by slowing or speeding up all the clocks, we would have a powerful economic regulator, we'd be able to cut back or encourage inflation, vary payrates and productivity. I'm looking ahead, I know, but I already visualize a central radio transmitter beaming out a variable time signal to everyone's clock and wristwatch, so that no one need bother about making the adjustments himself...'

Halloway waited for a reply, but the calculators were silent for once, their display panels unlit. Olds was looking up at him with an expression Halloway had never seen before. All the mute's intelligence and judgment were in his eyes, staring at this blondhaired young man as if seeing him clearly for the first time.

Annoyed by his almost disdainful attitude, Halloway was tempted to strike the mute. But at that moment, carried clearly above the drumming of the generators, they heard the squeal of tyres in the road above, and the sounds of breaking glass and a child's scream.

When they reached the street a crowd had already gathered, standing around a white limousine that had swerved across the sidewalk and plunged through the windows of a supermarket. Cans and detergent packs, which Halloway had helped to stack into their display pyramids, were scattered among the broken glass. Stillman's chauffeur, a blackjacketed youth of sixteen, stepped from the car, spitting away his gum in a nervous gesture. Everyone was looking down at two elevenyearold boys, barely conscious, stretched out in the roadway, and at the dead body of a young girl lying under the limousine between its rear wheels.

As the siren of a police car wailed towards them Olds pushed through the crowd. He knelt down and held the girl's bloodied wrist. When he carried her away in his arms, pushing brusquely past Halloway, he held the calculator in one hand. Halloway caught a glimpse of its display panel, screaming out a single silent obscenity.

The next week marked an uneasy interregnum. On the pretext of keeping an eye on everything, Halloway retreated to the commissioner's office, watching the streets for hours on the TV monitor. The death of the girl, the first traffic fatality of the new city, was an event even Halloway was unable to rationalize. He stayed away from the funeral, which was attended by everyone except himself. Olds drove the huge hearse, which he found in a breaker's yard and spent all night refurbishing. Surrounded by an arbour of flowers, the dead child in her lavish handcarved casket moved away at the head of the procession, followed through the empty streets by all the people of the neighbourhood, everyone at the wheel of his car. Stiliman and his entourage wore their darkest gangster suits. Miranda and old Buckmaster, both in black capes, appeared in an ancient open tourer filled with strange wreaths she had prepared from the flowers that Halloway's men had destroyed.

However, much to Halloway's relief everything soon returned to normal, though by some unhappy paradox this first death set off an even greater latent violence. During the following days more and more workers defected from their jobs to join Stillman's entourage, which by now had swollen to a substantial private army. Many of them wore black paramilitary uniforms. All day the sound of gunfire echoed through the streets as they destroyed hundreds of the deer in the park, driving away the pheasants, quail and wild duck on which Halloway depended to stock the fresh meat counters of the supermarkets. Armed with rifles, they marched up and down the square in parade order, presenting arms beside the files of slaughtered deer. Stillman, now affecting a military tunic and peaked cap, had swapped his limousine for an opentopped halftrack, in which he stood to attention, taking the salute.

Halloway tried to laugh off these absurd games as another mental aberration of this convicted murderer, but Stiliman's men had begun to disrupt the life of the zone. They strolled in gangs around the supermarkets, helping themselves to whatever they wanted and brushing aside any requests for payment. Taking their cue from this, many of the apartmenthouse tenants defaulted on their rents. Instead of shopping at the supermarkets, and helping to bolster the faltering economy of the zone, they were breaking into the stores outside the area. Each day there was a further slide towards anarchy, the failure of another generator, an increase in traffic delays and parking offences, and above all a growing conviction that the city was unmanageable.

Faced with this collapse of his dream, worked for with such effort, Halloway decided to reassert his authority. He needed some means of inspiring these new urban dwellers. Bored by their long hours of repetitive work, most of them did no more in their leisure time than hang around the bars and amusement arcades, driving aimlessly around the streets in their various cars. The influx of new arrivals had begun to fall off, and already the first of the original settlers were packing their bags and drifting off to the suburbs.

After a night of continuous uproar, filled with the sound of sirens and gunfire, Halloway decided to enlist Buckmaster's help. The old industrialist was the only person he could fall back on. Olds no longer spoke to him the whole makebelieve of teaching the mute to fly had long since lost its credibility. But Buckmaster had been one of the pioneers who created the Twentieth Century, and might well be able to charge everyone with enthusiasm again.

Outside Buckmaster's hotel Halloway hesitated before stepping from his car. His ruthless use of defoliants on Miranda's plant kingdom made him uneasy about seeing her, but he would have to brush this aside.

As he climbed the steps to the hotel entrance he noticed that the revolving door had been converted into a miniature greenhouse. Each of the segments was filled with an unfamiliar plant, with purple flowers and purpleblack berries. With a reflex of irritation, Halloway was about to rip them out with his hands, but a brief movement on a balcony above him caught his eye.

Three floors above, Miranda was standing on her balcony and looking down at Halloway, a posy of mantis lilies in her hand. She was wearing a long white dress and white lace veil that Halloway had never seen before, but which he recognized immediately. Gazing up at her, and knowing that she had never been more beautiful, Halloway was suddenly convinced that she was wearing the wedding gown for him. She was waiting for Halloway to come and collect her from the hotel, and then they would cross the square to the cathedral of cars where her father would marry them.

As if to confirm this, Miranda leaned slightly over her balcony, smiling at Halloway and beckoning to him with a whitegloved hand.

When he reached the revolving door the purple flowers and dark berries clustered thickly around him. He was about to push past them when he remembered the posy, of lilies in her hand, and the tooeager way in which she had watched him arrive. Then he realized that the plants he was about to brush out of his way, festering here in this glass execution chamber between himself and his bride, were deadly nightshade.

In the early afternoon Miranda and her father left the city for good.

That night, as he lay asleep in his apartment, Halloway dreamed that he was standing at an open window overlooking the park. Below him the waisthigh grass shivered and seethed. Some deep motion had unsettled the ground, a profound shudder that crossed the entire park. The bushes and brambles, the trees and shrubs, even the lowliest weeds and wild flowers, were beginning to rustle and quiver, straining from the ground. Everywhere branches were waving in an invisible wind, leaves beating at the passing air. Then, by the lake at the centre of the park, a miniature oak broke free, boughs moving like the wings of an ungainly bird. Shaking the earth from its roots, it soared towards Halloway, a hundred feet from the ground. Other trees were following, branches grasping at the air, a million leaves whirling together. As Halloway watched, gripping the windowsill to stop himself from joining them, the whole park suddenly rose upwards, every tree and flower, every blade of grass joining to form an immense sunlit armada that circled above Halloway's head and soared along the rays of the sun. As they moved away across the sky Halloway could see that all over the city the flowers and vines which Miranda had planted were also leaving. A flight of poppies soared past, a crimson carpet followed by an aerial causeway of daisies, petals beating as if they were the cilia of some huge lacelike creature. Halloway looked up from the city, with its now barren stone and dying air. The sky was filled with a legion of flying creatures, a green haze of petals and blossoms free at last to make their way to the welcoming sun.

When he woke the next morning, Halloway went out on to his balcony, uncertain whether the dense vegetation rooted securely to the ground was an illusion of his mind. Later, when he paused briefly at the police station, the vision of these flying oaks and marigolds, elms and daisies still hung in the air, brighter than the neon faades of the bars and amusement arcades.

Instead of switching off the lights and going to work, people were hanging around the doorways of the bars, watching Halloway across the pintables in the arcades. None of the police force had turned up for duty, and for a moment Halloway felt that the day itself had failed to appear.

Determined now on a confrontation with Stillman, he went back to his car. He was convinced that the former convict was responsible for the collapse of everything he had worked for. Stillman had been drawn here by the limitless opportunities he had seen for cruelty and disruption. He needed a dying city, not a living one, a warm cadaver that he could infest like a maggot.

After locking the police station, Halloway drove along the park to Stillman's headquarters, a cylindrical art museum with a single spiral ramp that circled upwards to Stillman's audience chamber. Armed guards lounged in their black uniforms around the line of armoured limousines parked outside. They signalled Halloway forward, clearly expecting him. As Halloway walked towards the elevator Stillman was standing in a theatrical pose on the topmost stage.

Their meeting never took place. Halfway up, the elevator stopped with an abrupt shudder, its lights failing. Everywhere voices began to shout, a shot was fired, feet raced past down the ramp. By the time Halloway broke free from the elevator he was the last to leave the darkened building. Stillman and his gang had set off, taking Halloway's car with them.

When he reached the policestation half an hour later an electrical storm was sweeping the streets of the reclamation zone. Cars were stalled bumper to bumper at the intersections. The drivers stood by their vehicles, flinching from the neon signs that were exploding in cascades of molten glass above the bars and restaurants. Everywhere the overloaded circuitry was burning out. Coloured lightbulbs burst and ripped across the ceilings of the amusement arcades. Pintables exploded in a chatter of free games, in the supermarkets the first fires were lifting from the freezer cabinets, flames roasting the carcasses of the deer and wildfowl. The noise of a hundred generators filled the air, turned up by someone to their greatest output.

It took Halloway several hours to restore order. Long before he had turned down the last of the overheated generators, replaced the fuses and put out the most serious of the fires, Halloway knew who had been responsible. Dozens of the pocket calculators lay around the generators in the alleyways and basements, display panels glowing dimly. Olds must have ransacked the businessmachine stores, gathering together as many calculators as he could find to cope with his mental crisis. They were scattered in his trail, spinning off from his hyperactive mind.

Wings?

Mixture rich, carburettor heat cold.

Sparrow, wren, robin, hummingbird...

Halloway stared down angrily at these fragmentary messages, bulletins to himself that expressed Olds' doubts and anxieties. When Halloway found him he would scream him into submission with one potent word, throw him into a final fit from which he would never recover.

Kiwi, penguin?

Pitch full fine, fuel cocks open.

Starling, swallow, swift...

Halloway stamped on the calculators, pulverizing this ascending order of birds. Exhausted by the effort of shutting down the generators, he sat on the floor in the supermarket basement, surrounded by soup cans and the glowing dials.

Climbing.

Flaps down, throttle slightly cracked.

Elizabeth, dead child. No pain.

Blue eyes. Insane.

Partridge, quail, geese, oriole... eagle, osprey, falcon.

Guessing that he might find the mute in his automobile plant, Halloway ran down the ramp into the basement. But Olds had gone. In a last galvanic spasm, the thirty cars on the production line had been hurled against the concrete wall, and lay heaped across each other in a tangle of chrome and broken glass. On the desk in his office the calculators were laid out neatly to form a last message.

01 Old Olds Oldsm Oldsmo Oldsmob Oldsmobi Oldsmobil OLDSMOBILE!!!

And then, in the drawer where he had kept his antique flyinghelmet: I can !

Fulmar, albatross, flamingo, frigatebird, condor...

IGNITION!.

Abandoning his car, Halloway walked through the empty streets, littered with smouldering neon tubes as if a burntout rainbow had collapsed across the sidewalks. Already he could see that everyone had gathered in the square, their backs turned to Buckmaster's memorial. They were looking up at the display sign on the newspaper building, the brief message which Olds had left for them repeating itself in a cry of fear, pride and determination.