When he woke the next morning, Halloway went out on to his balcony, uncertain whether the dense vegetation rooted securely to the ground was an illusion of his mind. Later, when he paused briefly at the police station, the vision of these flying oaks and marigolds, elms and daisies still hung in the air, brighter than the neon faades of the bars and amusement arcades.

Instead of switching off the lights and going to work, people were hanging around the doorways of the bars, watching Halloway across the pintables in the arcades. None of the police force had turned up for duty, and for a moment Halloway felt that the day itself had failed to appear.

Determined now on a confrontation with Stillman, he went back to his car. He was convinced that the former convict was responsible for the collapse of everything he had worked for. Stillman had been drawn here by the limitless opportunities he had seen for cruelty and disruption. He needed a dying city, not a living one, a warm cadaver that he could infest like a maggot.

After locking the police station, Halloway drove along the park to Stillman’s headquarters, a cylindrical art museum with a single spiral ramp that circled upwards to Stillman’s audience chamber. Armed guards lounged in their black uniforms around the line of armoured limousines parked outside. They signalled Halloway forward, clearly expecting him. As Halloway walked towards the elevator Stillman was standing in a theatrical pose on the topmost stage.

Their meeting never took place. Halfway up, the elevator stopped with an abrupt shudder, its lights failing. Everywhere voices began to shout, a shot was fired, feet raced past down the ramp. By the time Halloway broke free from the elevator he was the last to leave the darkened building. Stillman and his gang had set off, taking Halloway’s car with them.

When he reached the police-station half an hour later an electrical storm was sweeping the streets of the reclamation zone. Cars were stalled bumper to bumper at the intersections. The drivers stood by their vehicles, flinching from the neon signs that were exploding in cascades of molten glass above the bars and restaurants. Everywhere the overloaded circuitry was burning out. Coloured light-bulbs burst and ripped across the ceilings of the amusement arcades. Pintables exploded in a chatter of free games, in the supermarkets the first fires were lifting from the freezer cabinets, flames roasting the carcasses of the deer and wild-fowl. The noise of a hundred generators filled the air, turned up by someone to their greatest output.

It took Halloway several hours to restore order. Long before he had turned down the last of the overheated generators, replaced the fuses and put out the most serious of the fires, Halloway knew who had been responsible. Dozens of the pocket calculators lay around the generators in the alleyways and basements, display panels glowing dimly. Olds must have ransacked the business-machine stores, gathering together as many calculators as he could find to cope with his mental crisis. They were scattered in his trail, spinning off from his hyper-active mind.

Wings?

Mixture rich, carburettor heat cold.

Sparrow, wren, robin, hummingbird…

Halloway stared down angrily at these fragmentary messages, bulletins to himself that expressed Olds’ doubts and anxieties. When Halloway found him he would scream him into submission with one potent word, throw him into a final fit from which he would never recover.

Kiwi, penguin?

Pitch full fine, fuel cocks open.

Starling, swallow, swift…

Halloway stamped on the calculators, pulverizing this ascending order of birds. Exhausted by the effort of shutting down the generators, he sat on the floor in the supermarket basement, surrounded by soup cans and the glowing dials.

Climbing.

Flaps down, throttle slightly cracked.

Elizabeth, dead child. No pain.

Blue eyes. Insane.

Partridge, quail, geese, oriole… eagle, osprey, falcon.

Guessing that he might find the mute in his automobile plant, Halloway ran down the ramp into the basement. But Olds had gone. In a last galvanic spasm, the thirty cars on the production line had been hurled against the concrete wall, and lay heaped across each other in a tangle of chrome and broken glass. On the desk in his office the calculators were laid out neatly to form a last message.

01 Old Olds Oldsm Oldsmo Oldsmob Oldsmobi Oldsmobil OLDSMOBILE!!!

And then, in the drawer where he had kept his antique flying-helmet: I can—!

Fulmar, albatross, flamingo, frigate-bird, condor…

IGNITION!

Abandoning his car, Halloway walked through the empty streets, littered with smouldering neon tubes as if a burntout rainbow had collapsed across the sidewalks. Already he could see that everyone had gathered in the square, their backs turned to Buckmaster’s memorial. They were looking up at the display sign on the newspaper building, the brief message which Olds had left for them repeating itself in a cry of fear, pride and determination.

By the time Halloway reached the airport the siege was well under way. Stiliman and his men surrounded the car park, crouching behind their limousines and firing at random at the upper floors. There were no signs of Olds, but from the apex of the pyramid of radiator grilles Halloway could see that the powered glider on the roof had been readied for flight. Olds had fitted an undercarriage and tail-wheel to the craft. No longer tethered, it had been moved to the upper end of the canted roof, the two hundred yards of concrete sloping away below the polished propeller.

Under cover of a fusillade of shots, Stillman and three of his men rushed the building and entered the ground floor of the car park. Ten storeys above them, Olds appeared on the roof, dressed in his antique flying-suit, leather jacket and gaiters. He moved around the aircraft, making some last adjustments to the engine, oblivious of the shooting below.

Twenty minutes later, smoke began to rise from the eighth floor of the car park, dark billows that lifted towards the roof. Seeing the smoke, Olds stopped and watched it swirl around him. Then, above the sound of gunshots and exploding fuel tanks, Halloway heard the clatter of the aero-engine. The propeller span briskly, pumping the heavy smoke out of its way.

Knowing that Olds would be killed if he tried to take off, Halloway ran towards the car park. Shouting at Stillman’s men, he pushed past them to the emergency stairs.

When he reached the eighth floor one of the young guards held him back. At the far end of the sloping concrete floor Olds had built a solid barricade with his four land-cruisers. Unable to climb past it, and with the remainder of the stairway blocked by a pile of generators and electrical equipment, Stiliman and his men were setting fire to the cars, shooting into the engine compartments and fuel tanks of these once-cherished sedans and limousines.

‘Stillman!’ Halloway shouted. ‘Let him go! If he tries to fly he’ll kill himself!’

But Stiliman waved him away. Two of the cars were burning briskly, and he and his men pushed the flaming vehicles up the slope and rammed them into the land-cruisers. Within moments the metal cabins were splitting in the fierce heat. Watching this conflagration begin, Stillman beckoned his men down the slope.

Then, moving down the gutter below the internal balustrade, came a thin stream of fluid, working its way around the old tyres and the piles of leaves and birds’ nests. Thinking that this was Olds’ pathetic attempt to douse the fire Stiliman had started, Halloway grappled with the guard, trying to wrest the shotgun from him. As they struggled together by the staircase he saw that the stream had expanded into a broad sheet, as wide as the sloping floor, moving swiftly like a tidal race. It swilled below the land-cruisers and around the wheels of the burning cars, touched here and there by the nimbus of a flame. The fluid overran Stillman’s feet as he and his men turned and ran for their lives, splashing through the fast-moving sluice. In the last seconds, as the whole floor lit up in a sudden bloom of flame, illuminating the running figures trapped in the centre of this sloping furnace, Halloway hurled himself down the staircase. The sounds of explosions followed him to the ground floor.