So Olds had opened the stopcocks on the fuel tanks of the cars on the ninth and tenth floors. When Halloway reached the road the upper three storeys of the garage were aflame. Powerful explosions were ripping apart the limousines, sports-cars and open tourers that Olds had collected so carefully. Window glass and pieces of sharp chrome flicked through the air, landing on the sidewalk around him as he crouched behind an airline van. Fifty feet high, the flames of the burning gasolene rose into a sluggish tower of smoke two hundred yards in diameter.
Most of Stillman’s men had driven off, these youths in their black uniforms and large cars frightened by the violence of the explosions. Three others had remained behind, waiting with their rifles raised, but Halloway was certain that both Olds and Stillman had already died.
High above him, a propeller whirled through the smoke. The sailplane moved across the roof, lining itself up for take-off. Olds’ slim figure was crouched in the cockpit, face hidden by the antique helmet. The engine deepened its roar, and the aircraft with its long drooping wings sped forward down the sloping roof. As it left the building and sailed into the open air it seemed to fall towards the ground, but its wings suddenly climbed on to the light wind crossing the airport. It soared along, engine blaring, a few feet above the cars parked nose-to-tail down the runway, and shook off the oily smoke that still wreathed its wings and fuselage. It flew on steadily, gaining altitude as it cleared the perimeter fence. Moving northwards towards the Sound, it made a careful left-hand turn, three hundred feet above the ground. It set off across the river, wings rocking as Olds tested the controls. Halfway across the river it picked up a flight of wild duck which were circling the city, and then joined a stream of petals half a mile long that was being carried away by the wind. Together, the three flights — the wild duck and the stream of petals, and Olds in his sailplane — flew on to the north-west, parting company when they crossed the ruined suspension bridge. Halloway waited as the sailplane, little more than a point of light reflected from its propeller, climbed higher into the secure sky, and finally vanished on its way westwards across the continent.
When he had driven back to the city Halloway left his car in the square. Standing beside Buckmaster’s memorial, he watched the supermarkets and stores, the bars and amusement arcades close themselves down. Almost everyone had left now, as the young people made their way back to their garden settlements.
Halloway waited until they had all gone. The last of the generators had run out of fuel, dimming the lights in the police-station. He walked through the streets, picking his way over the broken glass and burnt-out cables, past dozens of abandoned cars. Discarded banknotes, printed with his own name, drifted along the roadway.
In the space of only a few months he had managed to achieve what had taken this metropolis as a whole more than a hundred and fifty years to do. However, it had all been worthwhile. He knew now that he would never return to Garden City, with its pastoral calm. In the morning, after he had rested, he would set off on foot, searching for Olds and the sailplane, following the memorials westwards across the continent, until he found the old man again and could help him raise his pyramids of washing machines, radiator-grilles and typewriters. Somehow he would come to terms with Miranda, and help her to re-forest the cities. Maybe, then, she would wear her wedding dress again for him.
Confident of all this, Halloway set off across the square. Already he was planning the first of a series of huge metal pyramids in his mind, as high perhaps as these skyscrapers, built of airliners, freight trains, walking draglines and missile launchers, larger than anything of which Buckmaster and the Twentieth Century had ever dreamed. And perhaps, too, Olds would teach him how to fly.
The Dead Time
Without warning, as if trying to confuse us, the Japanese guarding our camp had vanished. I stood by the open gates of the camp with a group of fellow-internees, staring in an almost mesmerized way at the deserted road and at the untended canals and paddy-fields that stretched on all sides to the horizon. The guard-house had been abandoned. The two Japanese sentries who usually waved me away whenever I tried to sell them cigarettes had given up their posts and fled with the remainder of the military police to their barracks in Shanghai. The tyre-prints of their vehicles were still clearly visible in the dust between the gate-posts.
Perhaps even this hint at the presence of Japanese who had imprisoned us for three years was enough to deter us from crossing the line into the silent world outside the camp. We stood together in the gateway, trying to straighten our shabby clothing and listening to the children playing in the compound. Behind the nearest of the dormitory blocks several women were hanging out their morning’s washing, as if fully content to begin another day’s life in the camp. Yet everything was over!
Although the youngest of the group — I was then only twenty — on an impulse I casually stepped forward and walked into the centre of the road. The others watched me as I turned to face the camp. Clearly they half-expected a shot to ring out from somewhere. One of them, a consultant engineer who had known my parents before the war separated us, raised his hand as if to beckon me to safety.
The faint drone of an American aircraft crossed the empty bank of the river half a mile away. It flew steadily towards us, no more than a hundred feet above the paddy-fields, the young pilot sitting forward over his controls as he peered down at us. Then he rolled his wings in a gesture of greeting and altered course for Shanghai.
Their confidence restored, the others were suddenly around me, laughing and shouting as they set off down the road. Six hundred yards away was a Chinese village, partly hidden by the eroded humps of the burial mounds built on the earth causeways that separated the paddies. Already substantial supplies of rice beer had been brought back to the camp. For all our caution, we were not the first of the internees to leave the camp. A week earlier, immediately after the news of the Japanese capitulation, a party of merchant seamen had climbed through the fence behind their block and walked the eight miles to Shanghai. There they had been picked up by the Japanese gendarmerie, held for two days and returned to the camp in a badly beaten state. So far all the others who had reached Shanghai — whether, like myself, searching for relations, or trying to check up on their businesses — had met with the same fate.
As we strode towards the village, now and then looking back at the curious perspectives of the camp receding behind us, I watched the paddies and canals on either side of the road. In spite of everything I had heard on the radio broadcasts, I was still not certain that the war was over. During the past year we had listened more or less openly to the various radios smuggled into the camp, and had followed the progress of the American forces across the Pacific. We had heard detailed accounts of the atom-bomb attacks — Nagasaki was little more than 500 miles from us — and of the Emperor’s call for capitulation immediately after. But at our camp, eight miles to the east of Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtse, little had changed. Large numbers of American aircraft crossed the sky unopposed, no longer taking part in any offensive action, but we soon noticed that none had landed at the military airfield adjacent to our camp. Dwindling but still substantial numbers of Japanese troops held the landscape, patrolling the airfield perimeter, the railway lines and roads to Shanghai. Military police continued to guard the camp, as if guaranteeing our imprisonment through whatever peace might follow, and kept little more than their usual distance from the two thousand internees. Paradoxically, the one positive sign was that since the Emperor’s broadcast no food had arrived for us.