7

Victoria and I agreed that we should marry as soon as possible. She told me that during the next mile she would find out what formalities we had to undergo, and that if it were possible we would marry during my next period of leave, or during the one after. In the meantime, I had to return to my duties outside.

As soon as I came out from underneath the city it was obvious that much progress had been made. The immediate environment of the city had been cleared of most of the impedimenta of the work. There was none of the temporary buildings in sight, and no battery-operated vehicles stood against the recharging points, all, presumably, in use beyond the ridge. A more fundamental difference was that leading out from the northern edge of the city were five cables, which lay on the ground beside the tracks and disappeared from view over the hump of the ridge. On guard beside the track, pacing up and down, were several militiamen.

Suspecting that Malchuskin would be busy I walked quickly towards the ridge. When I reached the summit my suspicions were confirmed, for in the distance, where the tracks ended, there was a flurry of activity concentrated around the right inner track. Beyond this, more crews were working on some metal structures, but from this distance it was impossible to determine their function. I hurried on down.

The walk took me longer than I had anticipated as the longest section of track was now more than a mile and a half in length. Already the sun was high, and by the time I found Malchuskin and his crew I was hot from the walk.

Malchuskin barely acknowledged me, and I took off the jacket of my uniform and joined in with the work.

The crews were labouring to get this section of track extended to a length equal to the others, but the complication was that a patch of ground with a rock-hard subsoil had been encountered. Although this meant that the concrete foundations were not necessary, the pits for the sleepers could only be dug with the greatest difficulty.

I found a pickaxe on a near-by truck, and started work. Soon, the more sophisticated problems I had encountered inside the city seemed very remote indeed.

In the periods of rest I gathered from Malchuskin that apart from this section of track all was nearly ready for the winching operation. The cables had been extended, and the stays were dug. He took me out to the stay-emplacements and showed me how the steel girders were buried deep into the ground to provide a sufficiently strong anchor for the cables. Three of the stays were completed and the cables were connected. One more stay was in the process of completion, and the fifth was being erected now.

There was a general air of anxiety amongst the guildsmen working on the site, and I asked Malchuskin the cause of this.

“It’s time,” he said. “It’s taken us twenty-three days since the last winching to lay the tracks this far. On present estimates we’ll be able to winch the city tomorrow if nothing else goes wrong. That’s twenty-four days. Right? The most we can winch the city this time is just under two miles… but in the time we’ve taken to do that the optimum has moved forward two and a half miles. So even when we’ve done this we’ll still be half a mile further behind optimum than we were at the last winching.

“Can we make that up?”

“On the next winching, perhaps. I was talking to some of the Traction men last night… they reckon we can do a short winch next time, and then two long ones. They’re worried about those hills.” He waved vaguely in a northern direction.

“Can’t we go round them?” I said, seeing that a long way to the north-east the hills appeared to be slightly lower.

“We could… but the shortest route towards optimum is due north. Any angular deflection away from that just adds a greater distance to be covered.”

I didn’t fully understand everything he told me, but the sense of urgency came across clearly.

“There’s one good thing,” Malchuskin went on. “We’re dropping this crowd of tooks after this. The Future guild has found a bigger settlement somewhere up north, and they’re desperate for work. That’s how I like them. The hungrier they are, the harder they’ll work… for a time, at least.”

The work continued. That evening we didn’t finish until after sunset, Malchuskin and the other Track guildsmen driving on the labourers with bigger and better curses. I had no time to react one way or another, for the guildsmen themselves, and I, worked no less hard. By the time we returned to the hut for the night I was exhausted.

In the morning, Malchuskin left the hut early, instructing me to bring Rafael and the labourers across to the site as soon as possible. When I arrived he and three other Track guildsmen were in argument with the guildsmen preparing the cables. I set Rafael and the men to work on the track, but I was curious about the dispute. When Malchuskin eventually came over to us he said nothing about it but threw himself into the work, shouting angrily at Rafael.

Some time later, when we took a short break, I asked him about the argument.

“It’s the Traction men,” he said. “They want to start winching now, before the track’s finished.”

“Can they do that?”

“Yes… they say that it’ll take some time to get the city up to the ridge, and we could finish off here while that’s going on. We won’t allow it.”

“Why not? It sounds reasonable.”

“Because it’d mean working under the cables. There’s a lot of strain on the cables, particularly when the city’s being winched up a slope, like the one before the ridge. You’ve never seen a cable break, have you?” It was a rhetorical question; I didn’t know before this that cables were even used. “You’d be cut in half before you heard the bang,” Malchuskin finished sourly.

“So what was agreed?”

“We’ve got an hour to finish, then they start winching anyway.”

There were still three sections of rail to lay. We gave the men a few more minutes’ rest and then the work started again. As there were now four guildsmen and their teams concentrated in one area, we moved quickly, but even so it took most of the hour to complete the track.

With some satisfaction, Malchuskin signalled to the Traction men that we were ready. We collected our tools, and carried them to one side.

“What now?” I said to Malchuskin.

“We wait. I’m going back to the city for a rest. Tomorrow we start again.”

“What shall I do?”

“I’d watch if I were you. You’ll find it interesting. Anyway, we ought to pay off these men. I’ll send a Barter guildsman out to you later today. Keep them here until he arrives. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Not really. While the winching is taking place the Traction men are in charge out here, so if they tell you to jump, jump. They might need something done to the tracks, so you’d better be alert. But I think the tracks are O.K. They’ve been checked already.”

He walked away from me towards his hut. He looked very tired. The hired men went back to their own huts, and soon I was left to my own devices. Malchuskin’s remark about the danger of a breaking cable had alarmed me, so I sat down on the ground at what I considered was a safe distance from the site.

There was not much activity in the region of the stayemplacements. All five of the cables had been connected up, and now ran slackly from the stays across the ground parallel to the tracks. Two Traction guildsmen were by the emplacements, carrying out what I presumed was a final check on the connections.

From the region of the ridge a group of men appeared, and walked in two orderly files towards us. From this distance it was not possible to see who they were, but I noticed that one of their number left the file at approximately one hundred yard intervals, and took up a position at the side of the track. As the men approached I saw that they were militiamen, each equipped with a crossbow. By the time the group reached the stayemplacements only eight of them were left, and these took up a defensive formation around them. After a few minutes one of the militiamen walked over to me.