It was quite pleasant, sitting in the warm glow of the melted machinery.

From the wreckage on the floor, the ghosts of two pints of beer detached themselves and floated across to the table.

'Cheers!' said Mrs Tachyon.

The chairman of the Council looked over her glasses.

'Questions at the end, please.'

Johnny wavered. But if he sat down, the words would close over his head again.

'When is the end, please?' he said.

Johnny felt everyone looking at him.

The chairman glanced at the other speakers. She had a habit, Johnny noticed, of closing her eyes when she started a sentence and opening them suddenly at the end, so that they'd leap out and surprise you.

'When [close] we've fully. Discussed. The situa- tion. And then I will call for [open!] questions.'

Johnny decided to swim for the shore.

'But I'll have to leave before the end,' he said. 'I have to be in bed by ten.'

There was a general murmur of approval from the audience. It was clear that most of them ap- proved of the idea of anyone under thirty being in bed by ten. It was almost true, anyway. He was generally in his room around ten, although there was no telling when the lights actually went off.

'Let the lad ask his question,' said a voice from near the front.

' He's doing a project,' said another voice. Johnny recognized Mr

Atterbury, sitting bolt upright. 'Oh ... very well. What was it, young man?' 'Um.'Johnny felt them all looking at him. 'Well, the thing is ... the thing I want to know is ... is there anything that anyone can say here,

tonight, that's going to make any difference?'

'That [close] hardly seems an appropriate sort of [open!] question,' said the chairman severely.

'Seems damned good to me,' said Mr Atterbury. 'Why doesn't the man from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings answer the boy? Just a sim- ple answer would do.'

The United man gave Johnny a frank, open smile.

'We shall, of course, take all views very deeply into consideration,' he said. 'And—'

'But there's a sign up saying that you're going to build anyway,' said Johnny. 'Only I don't think many people want the old cemetery built on. So you'll take the sign down, will you?'

'We have in fact bought the—'

'You paid fivepence,' said Johnny. 'I'll give you a pound.'

People started to laugh.

'I've got a question too,' said Yo-less, standing up.

The chairman, who had her mouth open, hesi- tated. Yo-less was beaming at her, defying her to tell him to sit down.

'We'll take the question from the other young man, the one in the shirt no, not you, the—' she began.

'The black one,' said Yo-less, helpfully. 'Why did the Council sell the cemetery in the first place?'

The chairman brightened up at this one.

'I [close] think we have covered that very fully [open!],' she said. 'The cost of upkeep—'

Bigmac nudged Johnny, pointed at a sheet of figures everyone had been given, and whispered in his ear.

'But I don't see how there's much upkeep in a cemetery,' said Yo-less. 'Sending someone in once or twice a year to cut the brambles down doesn't sound like much of a cost to me.'

'We'd do it for nothing,' said Johnny.

'Would we?' whispered Wobbler, who liked fresh air to be something that happened to other people, preferably a long way off

People were turning round in their seats.

The chairman gave a loud sigh, to make it clear that Johnny was being just too stupid but that she was putting up with him nevertheless.

"The fact, young man, as I have explained time and again, is that it is simply too expensive to maintain a cemetery that is—'

As he listened, red with embarrassment, Johnny remembered about the chance to have another go. He could just put up with it and shut up, and for ever after he'd wonder what would have happened, and then when he died that angel although, as things were going at the moment, angels were in short supply even after you were dead — would say, hey, would you have liked to have found out what happened? And he'd say yes, really, and the angel would send him back and maybe this was— He pulled himself together. 'No,' he said, 'it isn't simply too expensive.' The woman stopped in mid-sentence. 'How dare you interrupt me!' she snapped.

Johnny ploughed on. 'It says in your papers here that the cemetery makes a loss. But a cemetery can't make a loss. It's not like a business or something. It just is. My friend Bigmac here says what you're calling a loss is just the value of the land for building offices. It's the rates and taxes you'd get from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. But the dead can't pay taxes so they're not worth anything.'

The man from United Amalagamated Consoli- dated Holdings opened his mouth

to say something, but the chairman stopped him.

'A democratically elected Council—' she began.

'I'd like to raise a few points concerning that,' said Mr Atterbury. 'There are certain things about this sale which I should like to see more clearly explained in a democratic way.'

'I've had a good look round the cemetery,' said Johnny, plunging on. 'I've been ... do- ing a project. I've walked round it a lot. It's full of stuff It doesn't matter that no-one in there is really famous. They were famous here. They lived and got on with things and died. They were people. It's wrong to think that the past is some- thing that's just gone. It's still there. It's just that you've gone past. If you drive through a town, it's still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn't roll up behind you. Things aren't over just because they're past. Do you see that?'

People told one another that it was getting chilly for the time of year. Little points of coldness drifted around the town.

Screen K at the Blackbury Odeon was showing a 24-hour, non-stop Halloween Special, but people kept coming out. It was too cold in there, they said. And it was creepy. Armpit, the manager, who was one of Wobbler's mortal enemies, and who looked like two men in one dinner jacket, said it was supposed to be creepy. They said not that creepy. There were voices that you didn't exactly hear, and they - well, you kept getting the impres- sion that people were sitting right beh— Well, let's go and get a burger. Somewhere brightly- lit.

Pretty soon there was hardly anyone in there at all except Mrs Tachyori, who'd bought a ticket because it was somewhere in the warm, and spent most of the time asleep.

'Elm Street? Elm Street? Wasn't there an Elm Street down by Beech Lane?'

'I don't think it was this one. I don't remember this sort of thing going on.'

She didn't mind the voices at all.

'Freddie. Now that's a NICE name.'

They were company, in a way.

'And that's a nice jumper.'

And a lot of people had left popcorn and things behind in their hurry to get out.

'But I don't think THAT'S very nice.'

The next film was Ghostbusters, followed by Wednesday of the Living Dead.

It seemed to Mrs Tachyon that the voices, whicl didn't exist anyway, had gone very quiet.

Everyone was staring at Johnny now.

'And ... and,' said Johnny, ' ... if we forget; about them, we're just a lot of people living in ... in buildings. We need them to tell us who we are. They built this city. They did all the daft human things that turn a lot of buildings into a place for people. It's wrong to throw all that away.'

The chairman shuffled the papers in front of her.

'Nevertheless [closeJ, we have to deal with the [open!] present day,' she said brusquely. 'The dead are no longer here and I am afraid they do not vote.'

'You're wrong. They are here and they have got a vote,' said Johnny. 'I've been working it out. In my head. It's called tradition. And they outvote us twenty to one.'