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 horse-power 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 tool-kit.
