'That must remain a confidential matter between me and the Governor. The Governor requested that our discussion of Dr Wieland's merits, or otherwise, be conducted under such conditions. I regret -'

This was too much for Wieland, clearly. He stepped towards him. 'Listen to me, you nigger bastard -'

'What did you call me? I warn you, I -'

Carriscant's swinging fist caught Wieland too high, on the left ear, and it caused his knuckles to ring with pain, but the force was sufficient to send Wieland down and a moment later Carriscant was astride him, fingers round the plump and pleated throat, his thumbs searching for his windpipe. Cruz threw himself bodily at him, charging him with his shoulder like a man trying to break down a door, and sent him flying into his desk, his head connecting with one of the mighty turned legs. For a second or two all three men were sprawling on the floor, Manila 's medical elite in professional dispute. Wieland was the first to his feet, coughing, massaging his throat, and helped Cruz up, shakily. Carriscant, somewhat dazed, rubbed his face with his hands, both excited and shocked at the violence which had risen in him. He rose to his feet slowly, his head was aching and his body was trembling.

'I'll get you, Carriscant!' Wieland shouted at him, hoarsely. He spat on Cruz's polished floor. Twice. Two silver dollars.

Cruz seemed not to notice, or care. 'I'm reporting you to the board,' he bellowed also. 'You'll be dismissed!' His chest was heaving, his grey hair spikily awry.

Carriscant said nothing. With one hand held out, fingertips brushing the wall, he walked round the room to the door. There, he paused and turned to face them.

'If you ever insult me again, Wieland,' he said in a low, quavering voice, 'I'll kill you.'

'I heard that,' Cruz yelled. 'I am a witness to that threat!'

He turned to Cruz. 'And as for you, I'm going to ask the board for your removal as medical director. You are a disgrace to the profession.'

He left the room, heedless of their furious shouts.

'My God,' Pantaleon said, with an enthusiastic smile. 'It's war.'

'It had to happen sooner or later,' Carriscant said. They were walking from Pantaleon's apartments towards the nipa barn. 'But I have a feeling everything will go quiet.' He smiled with some bitterness. 'Cruz knows full well that you and I are the source of the hospital's real prosperity. And I have Bobby – even Taft – on my side. Cruz is washed up. Wieland's a fraud and a hopeless drunk. You and I could move to San Lazaro tomorrow – they'd take us with open arms.' They pushed through the gap in the plumbago hedge. 'No, I'm expecting something more underhand, something more insidiously worthy of the two of them.'

He saw that the barn doors were open wide and that the sounds of delicate hammering came from within, small hammers on fine tacks.

'By the way,' Carriscant went on, 'you know that storeroom, just off the corridor to the theatre? I've had it cleaned out.'

'Really? Why?'

'It's our new morgue. I'm having some of Cruz's freezing boxes put in there. Big locks on the door, make sure Braun stays safe. I'll see if I can get Ward back from the other place.' He shrugged. 'It should make a difference. Keep Cruz and Wieland out of our hair.' He turned towards the barn. 'What're you up to now?'

'Wait here,' Pantaleon said. 'I'll show you.'

Carriscant waited while Pantaleon entered the barn and the sound of hammering ceased. He exhaled and closed his eyes, feeling his aches, feeling the tension in his limbs groan and tighten. His life was complicated enough, confused and disturbed enough, at the moment, he knew, without violent animosity breaking out between him and Cruz, but the uneasy neutrality that had existed since the war had ended in July was bound to founder eventually. Perhaps it was better this way, he tried to tell himself, it would at least take his mind off this impossible, obsessive infatuation he had developed… Put Cruz out to pasture with his dogs and monkeys, run the hospital in his way, according to his principles and advanced scientific method, sweep out the dead wood – 'Salvador, look.'

He opened his eyes. Pantaleon's flying machine was being wheeled out of the shed by a quartet of local carpenters. The thin tapered body rested on a carriage of four bicycle wheels, with a fifth, a smaller one, further back to provide stability. The Aero-mobile, as he remembered it was called, had two wings, one above the other, a dense network of slim bamboo struts and tensed wires between the two. Thrusting up from the rounded nose was a third shorter wing held out and aloft by cradling wooden arms. At the rear was the horizontal semicircular tail, and he noticed that both this and the small panel wing at the front were attached to wire pulley devices that led back to simple wooden levers mounted above the four-wheel carriage. Most of the body and wings were covered with near-transparent panels of silk. He reached out and touched the end of a wing: the material was hard and varnished, it reverberated beneath the tap of his fingernail like a drum.

'Extraordinary,' he said, genuinely amazed. 'And you're sure this thing will fly?'

'In theory. Far enough to win the prize, certainly.'

It looked, to his eyes, very frail and very ugly. Like a giant botched model of a dragonfly, crudely conceived, as if by someone who has only had a dragonfly described to him, rather than seen it with his own eyes, and been told to construct a simulacrum from basket weave, matchwood and paper. It looked front-heavy and impractical… And yet there was something touching and ethereal about its cackhandedness, its very inelegance. Like certain insects, certain ephemera, which look as if they were never designed by God to fly and yet somehow take to the wing to everyone's surprise. Perhaps Pantaleon's machine would be the same.

'What's missing are the propellers, two of them,' Pantaleon said, indicating a wooden mounting on the lower, leading wing. 'Screw propellers, based on the marine model but larger. The engine will be here in the nose, and we'll run chains out here to drive the propellers.'

Carriscant wandered around to the rear of the machine. He really had to congratulate Pantaleon: this idealistic dedication, this single-minded pursuit of a dream was rare in anyone, and now it produced a Pantaleon he hardly recognised. He felt sudden tears of emotion in his eyes and his gaze blurred with salty water. Tears of pride and admiration, tears of love for this lanky young friend of his.

Pantaleon was wiggling the large semicircular tail. It was mounted on a block that could turn, allowing the tail to rotate partially on its axis: one tip dropping two feet while the other rose, and vice versa.

'This is the crucial control,' Pantaleon was saying. 'It took me a year to develop, and long observation of gliding birds – hawks, buzzards. It's this ability to twist their tails-' he demonstrated with his spread fingers, waggling left and right, ' – that controls rolling in flight.' He smiled at Carriscant. 'Pitch, yaw and roll,' he said, 'that is what the aero-mobilist really has to conquer. Once we control these three devils then the air will become our new domain…' He walked over to Carriscant and put his arm round his shoulders. 'Please, Salvador, don't cry, there's no need.' Carriscant, wordless, moved, turned away and blew his nose into his handkerchief.

'I'm overwhelmed, Panta, overwhelmed.' He embraced him. 'After a day such as I've had you don't know what a tonic you are, my friend, what an inspiration.'

Carriscant supervised the installation of the ice chests in the new morgue himself. They were in fact used for the refrigerated transportation of perishable food at sea, first developed in Australia, Udo Leys had told him, when Carriscant had first described Cruz's arrangement. And it was Udo who had managed to procure these three second-hand examples for him, not quite as large as Cruz's, but capacious enough to hold two bodies very comfortably. He had had the interior lining cavity restuffed with new straw and had had the stencilled sign on the side, 'Oh Chung Lu, Meat amp; Fish Importers', painted over. Filled with ice, the chests (one containing Ward, whom he had rescued from the old morgue, one containing Braun) were pushed against three walls of the new morgue while in the middle of the room was an enamel-topped examination table with three tin basins beneath. There was already a sink against the fourth wall and the wooden floorboards had been covered with a waterproof cork carpet on his instructions. The morgue would function perfectly until he could secure Cruz's dismissal. It also provided him, he realised, with an ideal place for his own dissections and investigations, should he require it. There was no longer any need to visit the anatomy laboratory at San Lazaro hospital: everything necessary was now under his own roof.