Part 10 (1/2)
”It will take at least an hour to fill Dr. Collihole's balloon,” Fever reasoned. ”I would rather spend that time in the search for knowledge than sit listening to them .”
The sound of the crowd outside rose to a bullish roar as she spoke. Then it died away. A single voice bellowed angry words that Fever could not make out. Some tub-thumper, she guessed, rousing them for another onslaught on the fence.
”Please, Dr. Crumb!” she begged. ”I remember such strange things. I thought I was going mad, but now I think...Now I don't know what to think.”
”As long as you are thinking, Fever,” said Dr. Crumb warningly. ”As long as you are not giving in to emotion.” But she could tell he was wavering. ”I am sure Dr. Isbister will not approve of us rummaging through his collection,” he said.
”Oh, n.o.body takes any notice of Dr. Isbister, it seems,” said the librarian peevishly, and waved them toward the library's tall doors.
Chapter 24 The Library.
Through the crowds outside, an old-fas.h.i.+oned sedan chair came creeping. It was heavy and richly ornamented, and needed four bearers to carry it along. Ted Swiney, who was standing up on the roof of another chair with Charley at his side, shouted, ”Let them through! Make way there! Let him through!”
The crowd eddied, jostling Swiney's chair and making Charley fearful that he'd fall from it and end up trampled. But the mob were just obeying Ted's orders, pus.h.i.+ng aside to let the big chair through. Its bearers set it down, and Thaniel Wormtimber stepped out of it, blinking in the glare of the torches which men held up all round him.
”Is all this trouble your doing, Master Swiney?” the Master of London's Devices grumbled, squinting upward through the rain.
”I didn't rouse this lot up,” said Ted. ”But now they're roused, I mean to make sure they keep on seeing me as their mate, and you'll do the same, if you're wise.” He shouted to the crowd, ”Here we go, mates! This here is Master Wormtimber, our Master of Devices. One of the few men on the New Council who still cares how us commoners feel. That's why I sent for him. He's brought us what we need to winkle the Patchskin maid and her cronies out of that Head!”
Wormtimber slipped a satchel from his shoulder and pa.s.sed it up to Ted, who held it high.
”This is old-tech!” bellowed Ted. ”With what's in 'ere, our new Skinner can finish his work.” He pushed the satchel at Charley. His face, with its eyebrows scorched off, looked more furious than ever.
”Go on then! Take it!”
Charley took the satchel from him and peeked inside. Folded paper, thick and white. The bag was stuffed with paper boys.
”What do you want me to do, Ted?” asked Charley, feeling scared of Ted, of the crowd, of the magic fence that ringed the Head, scared of everything.
”Use it!” said Ted, sounding fierce, but smiling as he spoke, because he wouldn't want to let the crowd see him treating Bagman Creech's heir as if he were a common pot boy. He looped the satchel's strap over Charley's head and seized him under both arms, swinging him down off the chair roof. Charley never quite reached the ground. Other hands took hold of him, lifting him high. He was pa.s.sed from man to man across the crowd's heads until he reached its edge, where they set him down, cheering him, thumping him between the shoulder blades.
Ahead, a few score yards of sodden mud and rubble lay between him and the Engineers' fence. The weeds that had grown there had been tramped flat by the crowd earlier, and the air was filled with the salad-y scent of their crushed stalks.
”Three cheers for the Skinner!” shouted a voice behind him -- Ted's -- and three great waves of sound rolled and broke against the giant metal face that towered above him. Charley looked up at it. He thought of the girl with odd eyes, and imagined her crouching inside, terrified and doomed. Well , serve her right, he told himself. Best get it over with. He undid the fastenings of the satchel. Then he ran at the fence and, just before he reached it, flung the satchel as hard and as high as he could. He almost overbalanced as he let it go, almost reached out and grabbed those deadly wires, but he saved himself just in time. The bag landed with a dull flump among the weeds and rubbish between the timber props which supported G.o.dshawk's ma.s.sive chin.
A half-dozen white shapes spilled out, like dropped sandwiches. They lay there for a moment. Then, with furtive, papery motions, they started to unfold.
The Engineers had dragged Dr. Collihole's great paper balloon up out of his attic works.p.a.ce and spread it on the Head's tar-paper roof. It looked like a giant's eiderdown, and it was growing plumper and cozier-looking by the minute as hot air, pumped through special tubes from modified braziers, started to fill the envelope.
”Careful!” shouted Dr. Collihole, bustling about like a rheumatic hen. For years he had been studying the possibility of flight, inspired by the discovery of the great complex at Eefrow, to the west of London, from whose broad runways he believed Ancient machines had once sped into the air. His own sc.r.a.p-paper invention looked hopelessly small and childish now, compared to the great rusted bird-shapes that archaeologists had uncovered there. He had only ever meant it to be a beginning; a first, tentative step on the ladder that would carry men back into the sky. Now everything was suddenly rush and hurry, and Fever's life depended on him. He wished that he had time to go below and check his calculations one last time. ”Don't let the braziers burn too hot!” he insisted. ”We must not let the whole thing catch ablaze!”
G.o.dshawk's surviving notebooks were kept in a locked case deep in the stacks, as if even the Order of Engineers considered them dangerous. Dr. Isbister brought the key and kept watch over Fever and Dr. Crumb as Fever pulled out the notebooks one by one. The books were circular, like the one she had seen at Kit Solent's house, and with typical Scriven perversity their t.i.tles were written only on their front covers, not their spines. At last she found one that looked promising. On Stalkers, G.o.dshawk had scrawled across its binding. Isbister had labelled it neatly vol 86.
She pulled it down from the shelf and sat on the floor and opened the book on her lap, while Dr. Isbister fussily rearranged the other volumes she had upset in her search and Dr. Crumb stood over her holding a 'lectric torch. Its light fell upon page after page of intricate diagrams and G.o.dshawk's tiny, crabbed handwriting.
”He knew so much,” whispered Fever, turning and turning the pages. Careful drawings traced what happened when a Stalker brain was inserted in a corpse's skull; weird wiry tendrils unfurling to colonize the dead man's nervous system, wrapping like bindweed round the spinal cord.... ”No wonder G.o.dshawk wanted immortality. He could not just let all this knowledge vanish. He had to do something....”
She lost patience and began flicking through the packed pages, past images that jogged a cascade of memories, until she reached blank, empty leaves at the end. She flicked back and found the last picture in the book. A tiny object, drawn life-size in a corner and again, much larger, in the middle of the page. The shape of a walnut. The size of an almond.
”That is the thing he showed me in the garden!” said Dr. Crumb.
Fever flicked back through the final pages, but they were as blank as before. ”He lost interest in Stalkers after he found that. It set him off on a new course, in a new notebook....”
Dr. Crumb went back to the shelf, almost shoving Dr. Isbister aside in his eagerness to grab the next volume. He came back empty handed. ”It's not there. Lost in the riots, I expect.”
”Shhhhh!” said Isbister abruptly.
They fell silent, listening.
From somewhere nearby came odd sounds. Crinklings. Scratchings. Tiny, papery creaks. Mouse noises, not out of place among so many books and papers, but too deliberate, somehow. The sound of someone or something keeping much too quiet.
”Have the rioters broken in?” asked Fever, and the puzzle that had been coming together in her mind fell apart again. How could she think about her past when her future looked set to be so brief and violent?
”Who's there?” called Dr. Crumb.
”Keep your voice down, Crumb, you're in a library!” hissed Dr. Isbister.
In the sudden silence, the sound of dust settling. ”We should leave,” said Dr. Crumb.
”After first replacing the books,” Isbister reminded him in a whisper.
Behind the librarian a white figure stepped out of an impossibly narrow gap between two bookcases. It was exactly the same size and shape as Fever.
”Dr. Isbister!” she shouted.
”Shhh!” said the librarian, pointing upward at the silence sign that hung above them. The paper boy lunged forward and drew a needle claw across his neck. ”Ow!” he shouted. ”I mean, ow!” he whispered. He turned, but the paper boy's venom was already taking effect; stumbling drunkenly, he crashed sideways into the shelves which held G.o.dshawk's books. Gla.s.s starred and shattered, dropping with him in long blades as he slid to the floor, shuddering, choking, dead.
The paper boy, with a tiny ripping sound, stuck out a second claw. Fever stared at it. She was remembering how it had felt to glue its two halves together and carry it out onto the roof to dry. She remembered how it had felt to lie on that paper while Dr. Crumb drew her outline around her. It was like being menaced by her own shadow. Dr. Crumb, more practiced than her in the art of keeping calm, just s.n.a.t.c.hed a heavy book and threw it. The near-weightless paper boy was carried backward and trapped beneath the book as it thudded to the floor. Its arms and legs flapped helplessly. It rattled like a paper bag caught on a branch in a gale.
”Come on, Fever!”
”But Dr. Isbister ...
”He's dead. And if the rioters have access to the New Council's store of paper boys there may be many more of them in here with us....”
Fever started to follow him between the stacks, and as she went she heard the awful sound of paper footsteps keeping pace with hers along a neighboring aisle.