The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (58 page)

“Ahah! You’re an electropacker,” he said.

“I’m going to be,” said Brian. “And you are?”

The man came forward into the room, uninvited. He held out his hand; Brian shook it.

“Arthur Salford,” said the intruder. He had a firm grip, one that suggested not so much a handshake as a challenge. “I work in blasting.” he said, releasing Brian’s hand and pulling a little red pad of paper from his pocket. He tore off a square. “I’m interested in electropacking, though. Just got in from Bombay yesterday. I’ll stay here for the two-week window before moving on to Ceylon. How about you?”

Brian pulled a yellow square of paper from his pad.

“This will be my first job. I’m hoping to get a call to go on to the next sites.”

Arthur nodded. Brian noted the creases he was making in the little square of paper: he guessed Arthur was folding it into the shape of a crane.

“That’s an interesting accent,” said Arthur, busily folding. “What are you, Canadian?”

“No, I’m actually from Manchester, originally. Denton. I’ve been working in America for the past fifteen years, helping set up the power grid in the Mid West.” Brian began to fold his paper into shape. “That’s where I first learned to handle electrocotton.”

Arthur had completed his crane. He placed the little red paper bird on the tiny brown table by the bed, then cocked his head and gave Brian an appraising look.

“Denton, eh? I know a few lads from Denton. Which school did you go to?”

“Audenshaw Boys.” Brian quickly finished folding his piece of paper. He placed a little yellow cat by the bird. The two men exchanged looks.

“Grammar school lad, eh?” said Arthur. “No wonder you’re working electrocotton.” He tore off another piece of paper and began folding. “I was in Persia when someone got the order of packing wrong and the stuff just spewed out over the field. We were all sent out to help sort out the mess. They had a little shanty town built just about half a mile from the edge of the bore hole. Wooden shacks, bars, dance halls. You know the sort of thing. All covered in cotton, still holding a charge. We had people like you working out the paths through the tangle, trying to get into the survivors.” He stared into the distance. “They kept making mistakes. I stepped into a loop, it discharged right down my right side . . .”

Arthur placed a red paper lion next to Brian’s cat.

“I still wonder about the training they give to you packers. It’s supposed to be a meritocracy now, this country, but you still see a lot of people who went to the right school getting the best jobs.”

“Oh,” said Brian. He began to fold another piece of paper.

“I had my application for electrocotton training turned down,” said Arthur. “Still, I never made it to grammar school. I was always better with my hands. But isn’t that what electropacking is all about?”

He looked keenly at Brian, who stopped folding his square of paper, crumpled it in a ball and dropped it on the bed. Something about Arthur didn’t quite seem right. Brian had been warned about spies . . . Could Arthur be one? Play it safe, he thought.

“You’re probably right, Arthur,” he said. He gave a loud yawn. “Anyway. I’m off to bed,” he said. “Early night. I had a long journey up here.”

Arthur looked at his watch.

“I’d give it half an hour. Wait until the next launch is over.”

Brian Chadwick was up early next morning. He ate breakfast in silence at a tiny table with three other men. Watery scrambled eggs and tinned tomatoes. Heavy rain pounded at the grey windows. Torrential rain. The landlady permitted herself one of her rare smiles as he saw him looking out into the drenched day.

“Cheer up, chuck. Give it a year and we’ll be eating our breakfast outside under a parasol.”

Brian didn’t have a raincoat with him. Lord Durham hadn’t thought of that either when packing the green carpetbag.

“There’s an ARTEMIS store on the square next to the tram stops,” said Arthur, noting Brian standing hesitantly at the front door, turning up the collar of his jacket as he looked out into the pouring rain. Arthur had fixed Brian with another of his keen stares. “Eh, fancy forgetting to pack your mac. You’ve been in America too long, lad.”

“I probably have,” said Brian, smiling sheepishly. He pushed his documentation into his pocket and then ran from the house, pell mell through the sheets of rain that bounced from the road, gurgling up around the spaces in the cobbles. Rain plastered his hair to his head, ran down the back of his neck, soaked his trousers so that they clung to his legs. Eventually he reached the square, busy with the blue sparking hum of trams. He saw the store and ran for it, the familiar red and gold sign arched over the plate glass door, the red and gold liveried doorman holding it open for him as he ran squelching in.

“Gentlemen’s raincoats and umbrellas, second floor,” said the doorman, without needing to be asked.

“Thank you,” said Brian.

Napoleon had said that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers. Nothing much had changed, in Brian’s opinion, except now their shop was the whole world. Every town in Britain had its ARTEMIS store, and there, in its galleries, was laid out the produce of the world. Even in this rain soaked northern town there could be seen displays of ivory, a pet shop selling apes and peacocks, racks of sandalwood and cedarwood and sweet white wine. The ground floor had its jewellers selling diamonds, emeralds, amethysts and topazes. All taken from the shores of the world. And now that those shores were being swallowed by the changing tides, the signs that Brian passed on the escalator invited customers to visit the estate agents tucked away on the top floor and to speculate on those lands that would benefit from the improved climate.

Brian found a smartly dressed gentleman on the second floor who quickly selected a suitable raincoat for him.

“And an umbrella sir? We have a range made from discharged electrocotton. They actually repel the rain.”

Brian chose an umbrella, paid, and then made to leave. Descending the escalator, he was delighted to hear Miss Scrobot’s voice.

“Hello there sir. And what do you do? Would you be interested in a Calculating Device?”

It wasn’t Miss Scrobot, but it looked like her. Brian felt more disappointed than he would have expected on discovering this. The machine had the same gunmetal hair, the same smooth face. She was dressed, however, in smart grey and lavender tartan. The mechanical woman rolled towards him.

“Would you be interested in purchasing a device to keep your home, sir? I notice from your left hand you are not yet married.”

“Ah, but I am betrothed,” lied Brian.

“I am not surprised to hear that, from so handsome a gentleman. And have you named the day?”

Brian wiped his forehead of the rain that was dripping from his hair. The sight of the mechanical woman made him feel very lonely and far from home.

“Maybe when the weather improves,” he said, sadly.

The tram glided down the hill on which the town was built through wet, cobbled streets. The wide, handsomely proportioned buildings that clustered around the parks at the centre of Oldham gradually gave way to a long, long road lined by red terraced houses that seemed to lead up into the moors. Gradually the houses petered out and Brian found himself travelling over bleak moorland. The tram increased speed, the tracks over which it ran seemed newly laid, no doubt to service the launching area.

Brian looked out of the window at the view, such as it was. There was nothing of interest out there so far as he could see: just endless grey green moor under the drizzling grey sky. They rolled smoothly on for some time across the unchanging landscape, and then, in the distance, he caught a glimpse of movement. He stared hard and realized he was looking at another tram. Then another appeared, and then another. Lots of trams, just like his, all converging on a point. He watched as the closest drew nearer, he could see passengers sitting warm inside the rain slicked varnished yellow wood. Brian noted how the roof pickup had been lowered. Judging by the sparking, the tram now drew its current from the rails.

And now his tram was slowing as they approached the launching site. Looking forward, Brian realized the site was hidden in a valley tucked away in the endless scrubby grass of the moor. They shuddered to a halt by a wooden platform. Other workers were disembarking, pulling out their work dockets. Brian did the same.

He walked down —the slippery wooden surface of the platform, one of a mass of people, dispensed by the yellow wooden trams that rolled in over the horizon from all directions. A man stood by a turnstile at the end of the platform checking dockets.

“Electrocotton,” he said with grudging respect. “First time here, eh? Okay, Staircase 11. Hangar 3.” He stamped the docket and Brian found himself on a gravel road that ran along the line of the top of the valley. He walked along until he came to a sign bearing the number eleven and joined the queue that took him on to an enormous moving staircase that ran down the side of the hill to the valley below.

If ever he had doubted the vision and the commitment of the English, he did so no longer. Now he could see down into the wide floor of the valley, and he gasped at the sight of a cleared area through which strode mechanical men the size of the Eiffel-Citroën tower. Huge mechanisms, carrying great wooden crates from the hangars to the launch bore that lay near the centre of the area: a circular hole plunging deep underground. Yellow tractors and land trains ran across the churned earth, corrugated metal buildings rose from the sea of mud. Workmen moved busily back and forth beneath the face of a great white clock erected near the centre of the site on a metal tower. The hands ticked backwards, counting down to the next launching. One hour and twenty minutes.

One hour and twenty minutes to save the Earth.

Brian Chadwick had practised on what electrocotton the American government could afford to buy, but it hadn’t been enough. It was inferior stuff, pale yellow, not like this dark green cloth that unspooled from the great reels that hung in the roof space of Hangar 3. This cotton smelled different: richer, heavier. It was a little greasy and wider. There also seemed to be a lot more of it than Brian had been expecting. The reels were almost twice as thick as he had been led to believe they would be. Durham’s intelligence was not what it should have been.

At least the packing case was just as he expected: a yellow wooden cuboid the size of a large house. The electropacker just finishing his shift climbed up a wooden ladder from inside the case and shook Brian’s hand. His eyes glowed oddly behind the blue lenses of his electrogoggles.

“Hey pal. It’s all yours. I’ve been following an alternate diagonal pattern and I’m having trouble figuring out how to make the eighth perpendicular.” He pushed a clipboard into Brian’s other hand. “I’ve marked off where we’re up to on the chart there, sign here to show you accept the changeover.” A pencil was shoved at him and a lanolin covered finger pointed to a place on the chart “. . . and here,” continued the man as Brian signed, “. . . and here. Okay, it’s all yours. Good luck!”

With that the electropacker wiped his hands on a yellow duster, pulled off the big white woollen socks that covered his shoes, pulled on his raincoat and marched across the floor of the hangar beneath the great wooden reels of electrocotton brooding above.

Brian took a deep breath and dipped his hands into the nearby tub of lanolin. He rubbed them slowly, taking care to cover the skin. He took a deep breath, and felt the prickly silence of the hangar fall around him and then he descended the wooden steps of the ladder, slippery with more lanolin, and walked out on to the green expanse that filled the bottom quarter of the box. The dark green electrocotton hung down from the wooden reel above, and with a deep breath he took hold of it. He felt a tingling deep within his hands as he walked backwards up the left hand side of the case, laying the electrocotton in a neat stripe as he did so. It was important to be careful because although it did not feel it, such was the force of repulsion from material, the cotton was only one molecule thick. If handled incorrectly, it could slice into flesh without you noticing it. At the end of the case, he turned the cloth through ninety degrees, making a dog-ear shape in the corner of the box and continued along the top. At the next corner he tried the same, but he felt the pressure of the charge in the cotton already laid down beneath his feet fighting his move and so he reversed, going back the way he had come. A yellow length marker came by signalling he had only thirty feet until he reached the perpendicular, where he would have to fold the cloth through a series of shapes so that it unwound correctly when released into space.

Thirty feet. That would be the hard part. He was already sweating as he ran the cotton diagonally from one corner to another and . . . trouble! He gasped as the potential lurking there threw his hands back with a force that wrenched his shoulders. Sweating, he regained his composure. He had been lucky. If the potential there had been negative, it could have pulled the cotton in his hands down causing a flash back.

“You okay there?” asked a passing supervisor looking down from the top of the case “Fine,” said Brian. “Fine.”

He took a deep breath and continued packing. The twenty foot marker passed, then the ten foot marker. And then it was time for the knot. This was the tricky part. Brian began the complicated pattern. Gradually he relaxed. It was easier than it seemed. Folding the cotton over itself repeatedly, he formed the pattern that would cause the cloth to unravel at the perpendicular.

Brian continued to fold. Eventually, the knot was finished. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then looked up to see if he was being watched. No one. There were a lot of packing cases in the enormous hangar. Now he did the job that he was here for. Sabotage!

He did the knot again.

No one noticed. He went on packing until the sirens sounded for the launch.

The workers made their way along the paths to the shelters and blast walls that ringed the launch site. There was a crackle of a tannoy.

“Launch in three minutes.”