Faust Among Equals (28 page)

For crying out loud
, it broadcast to the barren cosmos,
there's some of us trying to sleep
.

Links consulted his watch. It was a pity that his Spyderco Combat Chronometer had chosen this day of all days to fall into the bath and get all clogged up with suds, because this was just the sort of special mission he'd bought it for ($14.95 plus postage). As it was, he'd had to rummage around in his dad's bedside drawer for his spare, the one he got free with five litres of oil at the gas station. It worked fine, sure, so far as telling the time was concerned, and all that stuff; but it wasn't black parkerised steel and it didn't have a camouflage strap with a built-in compass. Sometimes, Links reflected bitterly, Life can be so
unfair
.

‘Hello, Mr Lundqvist, are you receiving me? This is Links here, Mr Lundqvist. Ready when you are, Mr Lundqvist. Mr Lundqvist?'

He was just about to try again, only louder, when the reply came in through the headphones. It took the form of an urgent request for radio silence until further notice, combined with a warning as to the anatomically complex consequences of non-compliance.

‘Sorry, Mr Lundqvist,' Links replied, ‘I didn't mean to speak so loud. Is that any better? Gee, I hope I haven't spoiled things, I'd feel really bad if—'

‘Links.'

‘Yes, Mr Lundqvist, I'm here.'

‘Shut up. '

‘Yes, Mr Lundqvist. Am receiving you, over and out.'

Nothing to do, apparently, except wait.

Links gazed round the operations room, his eye passing over the banks of computer consoles and the white-coated boffins behind them. So far, he hadn't got to the part in the course that dealt with stealthy waiting, but he felt confident that, with his newly acquired skills, he'd be able to work it out for himself from first principles.

Waiting. Well, for a start, you obviously didn't just sit there like a sack of potatoes. Any dumb civilian could do that. Presumably you had to wait like a coiled spring, concentrating the mind's potential energy and regulating the adrenaline flow. Probably there was one of those mystic Eastern things you could do, but that was most likely somewhere around Lesson Thirty-Six. Links focused his mind and tried to imagine the sound of two hands clapping. It had said one hand in the book, but that was obviously a misprint.

Just as he was getting the hang of it (Clap. Clap. Clap.) a light flashed on the console. Incoming message from Operative One.

‘Operative One, this is Guadalahara Central,' he said brightly. ‘Guadalahara Central receiving you, come in, Operative One, over.'

‘Yeah,' said the voice. ‘This is Morrie Goldman here, can I talk to Mr Lundqvist, please?'

Links frowned. ‘Negative, Operative One.' He paused, trying to translate what he wanted to say into commandspeak. He gave up; too difficult. ‘Mr Lundqvist isn't here right now, can I take a message?'

‘What? Oh, sure. Look, this is Goldman. I'm just about to go in and serve the possession notice right now. Have your guys standing by, because I have this feeling the tenants aren't going to be too happy.'

‘Receiving you, Operative One. Confirm all systems are operational, awaiting clearance to proceed, over.'

‘Yeah, well.' The voice hesitated. ‘Just tell him I called, okay?'

‘Positive. Message received and logged. Over and out.'

 

Morrie Goldman hung up and looked around him.

This, he felt, was as good a place as any. He walked up to the counter.

After all, he reassured himself, the man had told him to serve the papers in Washington DC. And here he was in Washington. And besides, the whole goddamn country was going to be blown to antshit a few seconds after he'd effected service, so nobody was ever likely to know even if he did goof it up.

‘Hi, my name is Cindi, can I take your order, please?'

Goldman froze. The papers were already in his hand. All he had to do was hand them to somebody, say what they were and timejump out of here; simple as that. He looked at the waitress and flexed his larynx.

‘Hi,' he said, ‘I'll have the double cheeseburger, the vanilla shake, regular, and, um, large fries.'

‘Coming right up.'

He opened his mouth to say the next bit . . .

(
This is a sealed copy of a possession order issued out of the Sublime Court, requiring you to surrender possession of the premises known as North America. If you are in any doubt as to the effect of this order or the likely consequences of failure to comply with the terms hereof, you should immediately seek the advice of your own legal adviser
.)

. . . but the waitress had gone. She now had her back to him, and was yelling the order through to the kitchen. There was obviously more to process-serving than he'd originally anticipated.

‘Hi, I'm Ayesha, are you being served?'

Goldman stared into the friendly brown eyes in front of him, closed his own, thrust the papers over the counter and said the magic words. They came out in a sort of congealed lump, like melted popcorn.

‘Excuse me?' said the waitress.

The sensible thing to have done would have been to turn away quickly and run for it. Instead, Goldman made a fatal mistake. He tried to explain.

‘Look,' he said, ‘I'm a process-server, and . . .'

The brown eyes clouded over. ‘Get outa here,' they said. ‘I'm telling you, I never owned the goddamn car. I never signed
nothing
. What you come in here hassling me for?'

‘No, it's not about a car,' Goldman said. ‘In fact, it's not you personally, it's . . .'

‘You wait there,' said the brown eyes. ‘I'm gonna get the manageress.'

Goldman winced. ‘No, there's no need for that,' he said. ‘Look, it's perfectly in order for you to accept service, in fact service has now been effectually, um, effected, so . . .'

‘Don't you give me none of that bullshit, man. I ain't signing nothing. You think I'm crazy or something?'

Meanwhile a large man in a cook's hat had materialised from somewhere out back. Was there, he enquired, some sort of a problem going on here?

‘You bet there's a problem,' said the brown eyes emphatically.

‘This guy here says he's a process-server, I told him, I ain't accepting no service, I ain't signing
nothing
, and he says—'

‘That's all right,' said the large man. ‘You just get Carla and everything's gonna be fine.'

A statement which turned out to be more accurate than he could possibly have imagined.

The building began to move . . .

 

It happened like this.

The water from the Marianas Trench hits the boiler over Number Six furnace, turns to steam . . .

Which passes through a series of ports into an expansion chamber in the centre of the planet, fills the chamber and starts to move upwards . . .

Bearing against the piston, which is driven with staggering force up towards the surface of the Earth, until . . .

It connects with and locates into a receiving slot on the underside of a thirteen-thousand-ton slab of kevlar-reinforced concrete directly under the biggest skyscraper in Kansas City (which is, of course, as near as makes no odds the geographical centre of the United States), whereupon . . .

The skyscraper is pushed up clear of its foundations into the air; but of course . . .

Thanks to the Da Vinci Project, it's linked with steel girders to all the neighbouring buildings, which in turn are linked to all the buildings across the entire nation, with the result that . . .

(The force being exerted on the piston is, remember, absolutely phenomenal; almost a quarter of the Pacific Ocean's been turned to steam by now and the water's still coming; and when steam expands, it's got to go somewhere; and those steel girders they've got linking up all the houses aren't rubbish, they make the Golden Gate bridge look like a cheap Taiwanese paper-clip, so . . .)

America rises.

Or at least, the buildings do. The ground stays put. The ground, after all, now indefeasibly belongs to the Lundqvist Trust (Holdings) Corporation, and has to be surrendered in accordance with the notice to quit. On the other hand, the buildings are tenants' improvements, and may be removed at any time prior to the surrender of the premises. Ask any lawyer.

A split second after the moment of lifting, of course, the steam pressure in the cylinder blows out the gaskets; the piston goes crashing back down to the centre of the Earth in a cloud of burning steam; the network of girders crumples under the strain like gossamer and falls away . . .

But not so the buildings, because for the last thirty-six hours, all the birds in North America, under the direction of two extremely persuasive seagulls, have been feverishly occupied knotting helium-filled balloons to all the cup-hooks screwed into all the roofs of all the buildings in every state in the Union; and a micron of a second before the whole thing is due to succumb to gravity and hit the deck, the balloons take the strain, and . . .

America floats . . .

Some twenty feet or so above ground level. Fortuitously it's a pretty windless day, and the birds have also tethered the buildings together to stop them drifting too far apart. They're now zooming from building to building (a pigeon's work is never done) with rope-and-plank bridges, to take the place of the sidewalks.

It goes without saying, incidentally, that the balloons are coloured red, white and blue and have been neatly arranged to form an appropriate pattern when viewed from above. Lucky George got them cheap, as a job lot, surplus, after the recent round of party conventions.

And, as a final touch, from the roof of the United Nations building in New York, twenty thousand specially trained white doves take off and glide in perfect formation across the city and out over Long Island. As they fly, they spell out:

until, as they pass over Port Jefferson and turn north towards New Haven, they change formation and instead read:

Somewhere in the City of London a young stockbroker dashed into the firm's main office, tore off his coat and tucked his long knees under his computer terminal. Preoccupied with his own concerns, he failed to notice the deathly hush.

‘Sorry I'm late, everyone,' he said generally. ‘Update me, someone. Wall Street gone any higher since we opened?'

One of his colleagues turned his head and gave him a long, strange look.

‘In a manner of speaking, yes,' he said.

 

Impossible.

On the following grounds:

Correct. Impossible.

 

America swayed in the slight breeze.

Gradually, her population began to come to terms with it. True, they were hanging out of the sky from balloons; but once the rope and plank bridges were in place, they tentatively began to venture out, not looking down, trying very hard indeed not to think about it all. Within two hours, the first rope-and-plank-bridge-theatre performers were miming the man-inside-a-box routine twenty feet above Central Park.

True, there were no fields to plough, no lumber to jack; worst of all, no roads to drive on. Take away America's cars and you take away her soul. But within an hour and a half, the first Mack airship was bobbing drunkenly across Arizona airs pace, country music blaring from the cock pit, the propulsive force being provided by a propeller and five thousand rubber bands.

True, with no mean streets, there was nowhere for a man to walk down; and for the first forty minutes all the cops in all the precincts in all the states of the Union suddenly found themselves with no excuse whatsoever for not catching up with the paperwork. But there are too many rooftop chase sequences in cinematographic history for the lack of streets to be a problem for terribly long.

True, nobody had the faintest idea what was going on, or what was all behind it, or whose fault it was or how long it was going to last. In other words, normality. The status quo.