*
An official in the Department of Public Works by the name of Toyk studied the same photograph with a dry eye and drew his own conclusions. What held his attention was not the dead boy, but the wall against which he had dashed out his brains; more specifically, the point where that fatal wall, which was made of a distinctive yellow stone, joined up with another more ordinary panel of red brick. As the official responsible for granting licences and approving plans, Toyk took a particular interest in the city wall, and especially in the preservation of those sections of it that had survived from antiquity. There was a building regulation expressly prohibiting the erection of any structure so that it abutted upon the wall. It was clear from the photograph that the law had been broken.
The following day found Toyk in the alley behind the football factory. He expected to do no more than serve notice upon some refractory citizen to demolish his illegal hen-house, or have the Department do it for him. But what he saw instead struck him dumb.
Toyk was a land surveyor by training. He went home at once and unpacked his instruments, scarcely touched since his graduation to matters of regulation. He bore theodolite and spirit level to the industrial zone, where it did not take him long to verify what McCaffery had already proved by example and he himself had inferred from observation: the football factory was on the move. It had drifted off its foundations and floated away to the south, coming to rest against the city wall and sealing off the alley behind. The distance was not great, but the effect was dramatic. Who could tell where the building would have ended up had there been nothing to block its course? Perhaps it would have fallen into the sea?
Quietly, to avoid causing panic among the people of Alibia, who valued stability above all things, Toyk made a cursory examination of the surrounding blocks. He discovered that several other buildings had wandered away from their official locations. First thing Monday, he decided, he would make a report to his superiors and seek permission to broaden his investigations.
*
The Members of the Society soldiered on, with the silence of the City Fathers ringing in their ears. They were all past exhaustion. But whereas some were ready to submit, others were determined to go on to the end, no matter the sacrifice. Factions arose. The meetings at the Café Europa, which had been called to discuss strategy, but which always ended in stalemate, grew more and more fractious.Voices were raised and threats levelled. Then one evening, pencils were pointed in anger for the first time in the Society’s history, and the meeting broke up in disorder.
In the small hours of that bitter morning, Fluxman stood sleepless at the window of his penthouse, looking down on Alibia. Tutivillus Heights was the city’s only skyscraper — in Alibia, the top of a six-storey block will brush the brow of heaven — and it made him feel immensely alert and far-seeing, and utterly detached from the earth. His eyes wandered from rooftop to rooftop, from street to street. He felt it. The building was swaying, a motion so gentle it would have escaped the notice of all but the most perceptive observer. It was not soothing at all; it filled him with foreboding. Then he recalled who he was and what he stood for. He erased his frowning misgivings from the glass before him with an eraser shaped like an egg, but they came back again and again.
*
Toyk’s report was an eye-opener. There was movement everywhere, not just in the outlying industrial zones, but in the heart of Alibia. The signs pointed to massive geological instability. Nothing would stay put. Structures were shifting closer together or further apart, skylines were rising and falling, streets were narrowing, views were opening up, cracks were appearing.
Most puzzling, he reported, was the fact that some of these changes would later reverse themselves, just as mysteriously, as if a countervailing force were at work. One of his own juniors, a certain Bron, was on hand when two houses in Capitol Hill, the most sought-after of the hillside suburbs, having moved slowly but surely closer together for several weeks, suddenly sprang back to their original positions. The deviation, a matter of inches, had been perceptible only with measuring instruments, but the correction was so abrupt, it was visible even to an untrained eye.
A stitch in time saves nine. But it is the lot of ordinary people that they are seldom aware of the loose threads in the seams of their own lives. And a missing button, as they say in Alibia, leads to a lost coat. Months went by, and the citizens remained blind to the changes taking place around them. Then, at last, the observant ones began to notice the more violent reversals. Some of them, like the occupants of the houses in Capitol Hill, whose crockery had been rattled until it broke, put it down to earth tremors; others were inclined to speculate. Before Toyk had time to complete his investigation, there were letters to the Star suggesting that such upsets were symptomatic of chronic instability in the body politic, claims the City Fathers always denied.
Behind the scenes, Toyk’s report caused a furore. Even as they were pronouncing the whole region as safe as houses, the Fathers were issuing urgent instructions to Public Works to begin with repairs immediately. Soon the streets were filled with teams of men in orange overalls performing highly visible and ineffectual shoring-up operations — securing cables to walls, hammering posts into pavements, building retaining walls and dykes, digging trenches, sinking boreholes, grounding flying buttresses, pouring road metal into fissures.
These busy efforts had no effect. On any day of the week, in any close or wynd, one might see someone trip over a step where no step had been before, or pause to gaze anxiously into the black space that had opened up between a newly built wall and a newly grouted pavement. All it took was for the street signs to make one quarter of a turn, anticlockwise, and the city would be clogged with people who had lost their way.
*
Night after night, a shudder of restless fidgeting passed through the city. Everything that opened and shut was doing so, secretively and obsessively. Windows and doors, posts and rails, tongues and grooves, stocks and mitres were testing the bounds of their unions, engaging and disengaging, clasping and releasing, over and over, as if they meant to part company soon. Those who were awake to this experimental dissent shivered, and imagined that someone had walked over their graves.
*
The Proofreaders, persevering in wounded silence, were not spared the trials that befell ordinary Alibians. Figg was inserting some new arrivals into the Register of Births and Deaths one morning — it was supposed to be his day off, but he was slaving away as usual — when the threads that secured the bone-yellow buttons of his cuffs unravelled with a fizz, as if he had held a flame to them, and fell away. He gazed in consternation at the squiggles of black thread on his sleeves and the flakes of ash on the backs of his hands.
He turned his eye again to the page before him. ‘Knowing you enriched our lives’ Good Lord! There was something wrong with the paper. It seemed strangely pale, it was floating, curling up at the edges and drifting free of the desk. ‘Safe in God’s care’ And then he saw what the problem was: there was not a single full stop left anywhere. He paged backwards and forwards. Nothing. The leaves levitated, the edges feathered into deckle. The whole stack fluttered and began to reshuffle itself, as Figg hastily rolled up his sleeves. Then he pinned the concertinaed sheaf to the desk with one hand and took up his blue pencil with the other. He worked with feverish concentration until night fell, buttoning down line after line … caret, caret, caret … until he could hardly see straight.