‘What’s the matter?’ someone opposite asked.

‘East!’ Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights held. ‘Has this train changed direction?’

‘No, it’s eastbound,’ another of the passengers told him. ‘Are you on the wrong train?’

‘It should be heading west,’ Franz insisted. ‘It has been for the last ten days.’

‘Ten days!’ the man exclaimed. ‘Have you been on this sleeper for ten days?’

Franz went forward and found the car attendant. ‘Which way is this train going? West?’

The attendant shook his head. ‘East, sir. It’s always been going east.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Franz snapped. ‘I want to see the pilot’s log.’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible. May I see your ticket, sir?’

‘Listen,’ Franz said weakly, all the accumulated frustration of the last twenty years mounting inside him. ‘I’ve been on this..

He stopped and went back to his seat.

The five other passengers watched him carefully.

‘Ten days,’ one of them was still repeating in an awed voice.

Two minutes later someone came and asked Franz for his ticket.

‘And of course it was completely in order,’ the police surgeon commented. ‘Strangely enough there’s no regulation to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. I used to go for free rides myself when I was younger, though I never tried anything like your journey.’

He went back to the desk. ‘We’ll drop the charge,’ he said. ‘You’re not a vagrant in any indictable sense, and the transport authorities can do nothing against you. How this curvature was built into the system they can’t explain, it seems to be some inherent feature of the City itself. Now about yourself. Are you going to continue this search?’

‘I want to build a flying machine,’ M. said carefully. ‘There must be free space somewhere. I don’t know… perhaps on the lower levels.’

The surgeon stood up. ‘I’ll see the sergeant and get him to hand you over to one of our psychiatrists. He’ll be able to help you with your dreams!’

The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. ‘Look,’ he began to explain, ‘you can’t get out of time, can you? Subjectively it’s a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you’ll never be able to stop that clock’- he pointed to the one on the desk — ‘or make it run backwards. In exactly the same way you can’t get out of the City.’

‘The analogy doesn’t hold,’ M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the street outside. ‘All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?’

‘It’s always been here,’ the surgeon said. ‘Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it.’

‘The first bricks were laid by someone,’ M. insisted. ‘There was the Foundation.’

‘A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don’t try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can’t have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it and, even more difficult, where they came from?’

‘There must be free space somewhere,’ M. said doggedly. ‘The City must have bounds.’

‘Why?’ the surgeon asked. ‘It can’t be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you’re trying to believe?’

M. sank back limply. ‘No.’

The surgeon watched M. silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. ‘This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You’re caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven’t misinterpreted something you’ve heard about the Wall?’

M. looked up. ‘Which wall?’

The surgeon nodded to himself. ‘Some advanced opinion maintains that there’s a wall around the City, through which it’s impossible to penetrate. I don’t pretend to understand the theory myself. It’s far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they’ve confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.’

He went over to the door. ‘Wait here, and I’ll see about getting you a probationary release. Don’t worry, the psychiatrists will straighten everything out for you.’

When the surgeon had left M. stared at the floor, too exhausted to feel relieved. He stood up and stretched himself, walking unsteadily round the room.

Outside the last pilot lights were going out and the patrolman on the catwalk under the roof was using his torch. A police car roared down one of the avenues crossing the street, its rails screaming. Three lights snapped on along the street and then one by one went off again.

M. wondered why Gregson hadn’t come down to the station. Then the calendar on the desk riveted his attention. The date exposed on the fly leaf was 12 August. That was the day he had started off on his journey — exactly three weeks ago.

Today!

Take a westbound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and get a Red elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the station on Route 175, change to a 438 suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blue line to the Plaza, get off at 4th and 275th, turn left at the roundabout and You’re back where you first started from. $Hell x ion.

Venus Smiles

Low notes on a high afternoon.

As we drove away after the unveiling my secretary said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I suppose you realize what a fool you’ve made of yourself?’

‘Don’t sound so prim,’ I told her. ‘How was I to know Lorraine Drexel would produce something like that?’

‘Five thousand dollars,’ she said reflectively. ‘It’s nothing but a piece of old scrap iron. And the noise! Didn’t you look at her sketches? What’s the Fine Arts Committee for?’

My secretaries have always talked to me like this, and just then I could understand why. I stopped the car under the trees at the end of the square and looked back. The chairs had been cleared away and already a small crowd had gathered around the statue, staring up at it curiously. A couple of tourists were banging one of the struts, and the thin metal skeleton shuddered weakly. Despite this, a monotonous and high-pitched wailing sounded from the statue across the pleasant morning air, grating the teeth of passers-by.

‘Raymond Mayo is having it dismantled this afternoon,’ I said, ‘If it hasn’t already been done for us. I wonder where Miss Drexel is?’

‘Don’t worry, you won’t see her in Vermilion Sands again. I bet she’s halfway to Red Beach by now.’

I patted Carol on the shoulder. ‘Relax. You looked beautiful in your new skirt. The Medicis probably felt like this about Michelangelo. Who are we to judge?’

‘You are,’ she said. ‘You were on the committee, weren’t you?’

‘Darling,’ I explained patiently. ‘Sonic sculpture is the thing. You’re trying to fight a battle the public lost thirty years ago.’

We drove back to my office in a thin silence. Carol was annoyed because she had been forced to sit beside me on the platform when the audience began to heckle my speech at the unveiling, but even so the morning had been disastrous on every count. What might be perfectly acceptable at Expo 75 or the Venice Biennale was all too obviously pass at Vermilion Sands.

When we had decided to commission a sonic sculpture for the square in the centre of Vermilion Sands, Raymond Mayo and I had agreed that we should patronize a local artist. There were dozens of professional sculptors in Vermilion Sands, but only three had deigned to present themselves before the committee. The first two we saw were large, bearded men with enormous fists and impossible schemes — one for a hundred-foot-high vibrating aluminium pylon, and the other for a vast booming family group that involved over fifteen tons of basalt mounted on a megalithic step-pyramid. Each had taken an hour to be argued out of the committee room.