Little more than half a mile away, in a plaza between two office buildings, Halloway found a second pyramid. From a distance it resembled a funeral pyre of metal scrap built from hundreds of typewriters, telex machines and duplicators taken from the offices around the plaza, a monument to the generations of clerks and typists who had worked there. A series of narrow terraces rose one above the other, the tiers of typewriters forming ingenious baroque columns. Brilliant climbing plants, lobster-clawed clematis and honeysuckle with pink and yellow flowers, entwined themselves around the metal colonnades, the vivid blooms illuminating this memorial of rust.
Halloway mounted a staircase of filing cabinets to the upper terrace of the pyramid. On all sides, in the nearby streets and on the raised pedestrian areas above the plaza, an extraordinary vegetation had taken root. Dahlias, marigolds and cosmos flourished among the cracked paving stones and in the ornamental urns outside the entrances to the office blocks. Along a three-hundred-yard section of the avenue all the cars had been cleared aside, and a field of poppies sprang from the broken asphalt. The bright, funeral flowers extended in a blood-red carpet down the line of hotels, as if waiting for a demonic visitor. Here and there an individual car had been picked out by this mysterious and profligate gardener, its windshield and windows knocked in and its cabin packed with blooms. As vivid as an explosion in a paint-shop, blue and carmine flowers and yellow-ribbed leaves crammed the open windows, mingled with tilting sunflowers and the vines that circled the roof and radiator grille.
From a side-street a quarter of a mile away came the sounds of collapsing masonry. Falling glass split the air. Halloway leapt down from the pyramid, holding to a column of typewriters as the road vibrated under his feet. The slow avalanche continued, the rumble of falling brickwork and the brittle ringing of breaking glass. Then Halloway heard the heavy beating of what he guessed was some kind of huge engine, throbbing with the same rhythm as the motor he had watched his father running in his workshop years before. It moved away, breaking through some glass and masonry obstruction in its path. Already the first dust was billowing from the end of the street, lit by thousands of coloured petals.
Halloway climbed into a nearby car, waiting as this machine moved away. In the deserted city the noise of the assault had carried with it an unmistakable violence, as if some huge and ugly creature was venting its anger at random on the buildings around it.
‘Halloway, time to go…’Already he had decided to leave the city and make his way home. Once he had crossed the river he would be safe.
When the streets were quiet again, and the cloud of petalled dust had drifted away down the avenue, Halloway set off, leaving the monument of typewriters and telex machines behind him. He ran silently through the field of poppies, as the last petals fell through the unsettled air around him.
When he reached the side-street he found the roadway littered with human figures. Masonry and broken glass, sections of store window as large as his sailplane’s wings, lay among the crushed flowers. Most of the clothing stores that lined both sides of this narrow street had been attacked, their glass fronts and window displays ripped out by some giant implement.
Everywhere the plastic mannequins lay in the sunlight, limbs crushed by the tracks of the machine, polite expressions looking up from the glass and masonry.
Frightened for the first time by the sight of violence, Halloway ran towards the river, and by luck found the open span of a large road-bridge that carried him away from the city. Without pausing to look back, ears listening for any sound of the machine, he sprinted along in his coloured sneakers. Halfway across the bridge he slowed down for the first time to catch his breath. The cloud of petals was still drifting eastwards between the office blocks. Halloway searched the northern suburbs for the mirror-sheathed building into which he had crashed, regretting that he would have to leave the sailplane among these anonymous streets patrolled by this violent machine.
Angry with himself, he pulled off his fleece-lined jacket and hurled it over the balustrade. It fell into the dead water like a sad, brilliant bird. Already he looked forward to his return to Garden City, with its civilized people and sane behaviour. Thinking back, his aggressiveness at the gliding championships embarrassed him.
‘…too eager for action at any cost,’ he reproved himself as he strode along. ‘In future check that, Halloway…’
