Adam Thirlwell - The Complete Short Stories - Volume 1

‘I was suspended in the air above a flat stretch of open ground, something like the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down, floating –’

‘Hold on,’ the surgeon interrupted. ‘Are you sure you weren’t swimming?’

‘No,’ M. said. ‘I’m certain I wasn’t. All around me there was free space. That was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness. That’s all I remember.’

The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my friends helped me construct it.’

The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet and crushed it with a single motion of his hand.

‘Don’t be absurd, Franz!’ Gregson remonstrated. They took their places in the chemistry cafeteria queue. ‘It’s against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your buoyancy?’

‘Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane,’ Franz explained as they shuffled past the hatchways. ‘Say ten feet across, like one of those composition wall sections, with hand grips on the ventral surface. And then you jumped down from the gallery at the Coliseum Stadium. What would happen?’

‘You’d make a hole in the floor. Why?’

‘No, seriously.’

‘If it was large enough and held together you’d swoop down like a paper dart.’

‘Glide,’ Franz said. ‘Right.’ Thirty levels above them one of the intercity expresses roared over, rattling the tables and cutlery in the cafeteria. Franz waited until they reached a table and sat forward, his food forgotten.

‘And say you attached a propulsive unit, such as a battery-driven ventilator fan, or one of those rockets they use on the Sleepers. With enough thrust to overcome your weight. What then?’

Gregson shrugged. ‘If you could control the thing, you’d, you’d …’ He frowned at Franz. ‘What’s the word? You’re always using it.’

‘Fly.’

‘Basically, Matheson, the machine is simple,’ Sanger, the physics lector, commented as they entered the science library. ‘An elementary application of the Venturi Principle. But what’s the point of it? A trapeze would serve its purpose equally well, and be far less dangerous. In the first place consider the enormous clearances it would require. I hardly think the traffic authorities will look upon it with any favour.’

‘I know it wouldn’t be practical here,’ Franz admitted. ‘But in a large open area it should be.’

‘Allowed. I suggest you immediately negotiate with the Arena Garden on Level 347–25,’ the lector said whimsically. ‘I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear about your scheme.’

Franz smiled politely. ‘That wouldn’t be large enough. I was really thinking of an area of totally free space. In three dimensions, as it were.’

Sanger looked at Franz curiously. ‘Free space? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Space is a dollar a cubic foot.’ He scratched his nose. ‘Have you begun to construct this machine yet?’

‘No,’ Franz said.

‘In that event I should try to forget all about it. Remember, Matheson, the task of science is to consolidate existing knowledge, to systematize and reinterpret the discoveries of the past, not to chase wild dreams into the future.’

He nodded and disappeared among the dusty shelves.

Gregson was waiting on the steps.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Let’s try it out this afternoon,’ Franz said. ‘We’ll cut Text 5 Pharmacology. I know those Fleming readings backwards. I’ll ask Dr McGhee for a couple of passes.’

They left the library and walked down the narrow, dimly-lit alley which ran behind the huge new civil engineering laboratories. Over seventy-five per cent of the student enrolment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meagre two per cent in pure sciences. Consequently the physics and chemistry libraries were housed in the oldest quarter of the university, in two virtually condemned galvanized hutments which once contained the now closed philosophy school.

At the end of the alley they entered the university plaza and started to climb the iron stairway leading to the next level a hundred feet above. Halfway up a white-helmeted F.P. checked them cursorily with his detector and waved them past.

‘What did Sanger think?’ Gregson asked as they stepped up into 637th Street and walked across to the suburban elevator station.

‘He’s no use at all,’ Franz said. ‘He didn’t even begin to understand what I was talking about.’

Gregson laughed ruefully. ‘I don’t know whether I do.’

Franz took a ticket from the automat and mounted the down platform. An elevator dropped slowly towards him, its bell jangling.

‘Wait until this afternoon,’ he called back. ‘You’re really going to see something.’

The floor manager at the Coliseum initialled the two passes.

‘Students, eh? All right.’ He jerked a thumb at the long package Franz and Gregson were carrying. ‘What have you got there?’

‘It’s a device for measuring air velocities,’ Franz told him.

The manager grunted and released the stile.

Out in the centre of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fan-like wing of wire and paper, a narrow strutted fuselage and a high curving tail.

Franz picked it up and launched it into the air. The model glided for twenty feet and then slithered to a stop across the sawdust.

‘Seems to be stable,’ Franz said. ‘We’ll tow it first.’

He pulled a reel of twine from his pocket and tied one end to the nose. As they ran forward the model lifted gracefully into the air and followed them around the stadium, ten feet off the floor.

‘Let’s try the rockets now,’ Franz said. He adjusted the wing and tail settings and fitted three firework display rockets into a wire bracket mounted above the wing.

The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred and fifty feet high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.

There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of coloured smoke spitting out behind it. Its wings rocked gently from side to side. Suddenly the tail burst into flames. The model lifted steeply and looped up towards the roof, stalled just before it hit one of the pilot lights and dived down into the sawdust.

They ran across to it and stamped out the glowing cinders. ‘Franz!’ Gregson shouted. ‘It’s incredible! It actually works.’

Franz kicked the shattered fuselage. ‘Of course it works,’ he said impatiently. ‘But as Sanger said, what’s the point of it?’

‘The point? It flies! Isn’t that enough?’

‘No. I want one big enough to hold me.’

‘Franz, slow down. Be reasonable. Where could you fly it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Franz said fiercely. ‘But there must be somewhere!’

The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the stadium to them.

‘Did you hide the matches?’ Franz asked quickly. ‘They’ll lynch us if they think we’re Pyros.’

Three afternoons later Franz took the elevator up 150 levels to 677–98, where the Precinct Estate Office had its bureau.

‘There’s a big development between 493 and 554 in the next sector,’ one of the clerks told him. ‘I don’t know whether that’s any good to you. Sixty blocks by twenty by fifteen levels.’

‘Nothing bigger?’ Franz queried.

The clerk looked up. ‘Bigger? No. What are you looking for – a slight case of agoraphobia?’

Franz straightened the maps spread across the counter. ‘I wanted to find an area of more or less continuous development. Two or three hundred blocks long.’