The Dome

I will fly a yellow paper sun in your sky,
When the wind is high,
When the wind is high.

Hal Hackaday & Lee Pockriss


This chapter is dedicated, in grateful memoriam, to Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913 - 1966)

'Come on,' said Alfie. 'Let's see what we can do for Mister Joyce.'

It was wonderful to hear a real voice in the all-enclosing darkness. 'All right.' I stood up. 'I love you, Alfie.'

'Of course you do, you silly girl.'

'Don't "silly girl" me, you rodent!'

'Don't be silly, then.'

'Grrrr...ouch!' I had walked into the stone steps and barked my shin. 'Oh, beggary!'

Alfie had been hurt too, so he said nothing.

- 0 -

I found Mister Joyce by walking around the steps and across to the other side of the underground chamber. I've said that it was utterly silent, but that wasn't really true. It was more that my ears had been so battered by the shelling we'd undergone that it took them a while to adjust to the relative quiet. But from time to time there was a distant thump from above, followed by the patter of dust falling from the roof. In the end I found Mister Joyce by smell. A powerful whiff of alcohol guided my nose to where he lay. I hadn't known he'd been keeping his own supply of brandy, or whiskey or whatever it was. He'd never offered to share it with me. Perhaps he'd thought I was too young to be drinking strong waters, even though he'd made no comment when he'd seen me buying brandy the night before. Oh, well. What strange creatures men were, especially this one.

I worked out by touch that he was lying on his left side. He was breathing steadily but his eyes were closed. I called his name a few times and shook his shoulder, but he made no response. Perhaps he needed a stimulant to wake him up. I couldn't find his bottle of brandy, so I took my own out of my pocket and put it to his lips.

I think it must have gone up his nose as well, for he spluttered and sat up suddenly. 'Jane? Jane?' he said. 'Lyra? Is it you? Am I dead again?' I didn't understand what he meant. He sounded confused.

'Mister Joyce?' I said. 'Are you all right? It's me, Driver Moon. Not Jane. Not Lyra.'

'Driver Moon?'

'Yes, me. Sonya Moon.'

'Oh, yes. Sam. The driver. Oh...' He cried out in pain and fell back. I put my arms under his shoulders and lifted him back up. His knapsack was by his side and I put it under his head as a makeshift pillow.

'Have some more brandy, Mister Joyce.' I held the bottle to his mouth, or where I judged his mouth to be.

'Not brandy... no good. Left coat pocket... bottle...' He was gasping in agony, taking fast, shallow breaths. I reached over him and put my hand in his coat pocket.

'Ow!' I pulled it out again in a hurry. There was a sharp object in the pocket and I had cut myself on it. Just to make it worse, there was something stinging in the cut.

'I'm sorry, Mister Joyce. The bottle's broken. It's cut my hand.'

'Oh... Oh...' There was a world of despair in Mister Joyce's voice. 'Has it leaked away?'

'Yes, I'm afraid so.'

'Then it's all gone. All of it. There's no hope... Oh, no, no, no.... Where are we? I can't see. Am I blind?'

I explained to Mister Joyce what had happened after he had been knocked out in the wood. 'We're trapped in a cellar underneath the hut in the trees. I don't know what to do. I'll try to dig us out in a minute but I don't think it'll do any good. There must be some filthy great big blocks of stone heaped up there.'

'Nobody knows we're here. Nobody'll try to get down to us from up there.'

'Not even Colonel Braeburn?'

'He can't help us. Give me some more of that brandy, would you?' I held the quarter-bottle up to him again. My cut hand had stopped hurting and for some reason I realised I no longer cared about the awful position we were in.

Mister Joyce took a serious swig. 'Ahhh!'

'Better?' I took the bottle back.

'Yes.'

'So what do we do now?'

'What I've been meaning for us to do all along. Miss Moon, would you get up and walk along the wall, keeping your left hand resting on it? I'm going to recite the alphabet while you do that. If you find you can't hear me, turn back.'

'Why? What am I looking for?'

'A passageway.'

I did as Mister Joyce had said and walked around the wall. First there was a right turn, and then a left. I hardly needed to hear the sound of Mister Joyce's a-b-c receding in the distance. The enclosed feeling had become more intense. I was walking down a passageway. 'All right,' I said, turning back. 'I've found it. Where does it go? Will it get us out of here?'

'Come and help me up. Then I'll tell you.'

- 0 -

It was a tunnel, Mister Joyce told me, and it went all the way to Geneva.

'It does? How far's that?'

'About four miles.'

Oh good grief. 'You mean we've got to walk four miles in the dark? What's it doing here? Why doesn't the our army know about it? Why aren't they using it themselves?'

'They do. Colonel Braeburn briefed me. You saw. I'll explain.'

We were lumbering, one step at a time, down the underground passageway, keeping as close to the left-hand wall as we could without bumping into it. Mister Joyce had given me his knapsack to carry. Every step was torture for him, I could tell, and my shoulders were staring to ache badly with the effort of holding him upright. I thought I'd better put off demanding explanations from Mister Joyce for now, even though I wasn't sure how much I believed in "Colonel Braeburn".

We took some more slow, one-at-a-time steps along the tunnel. I started to count them. After a while I had counted enough steps, and guessed enough passage of time, to estimate that we were going at a rate of about one step every other second and that each step took us about twelve inches forwards. Mental arithmetic wasn't my best subject, but I had to try to work out how long it would take us to cover the four miles to Geneva. Let's see. Suppose we could walk twelve hours a day, taking rest stops and sleep time into account. Thirty feet a minute, multiply by sixty; one thousand, eight hundred feet an hour. Multiply that by twelve. That made, er, twenty one thousand, six hundred feet a day. How many miles was that? How many feet in a mile? One thousand, seven hundred and sixty yards timesed by three made five thousand, two hundred and eighty feet.

So; about twenty thousand feet each day and about five thousand feet in a mile. That meant we could go twenty divided by five, which was four miles a day. Well, that was better!

'Mister Joyce,' I said. 'I've been doing some sums. It's only going to take us twelve hours of walking to get to Geneva. We can do that easily!

'Mister Joyce... Mister Joyce?' He didn't answer but slumped against me with a sigh. We stopped walking. So much for arithmetic.

- 0 -

We sat with our backs to the wall, recovering our strength.

'Miss Moon...'

'Yes? Are you ready to carry on?'

'In a minute. There's something I've got to tell you. Something I've got to own up to.'

'Go on.'

'It's that bottle - the one in my pocket. Did you think it was brandy? Were you annoyed that I'd had it all along and hadn't shared it with you?'

'No, I don't think so. It was only a bottle of brandy, wasn't it?'

'No, it wasn't. It was tincture of poppy. Opium. A drug. I've been taking it for years.'

'For the pain in your leg?'

'Yes.'

'Are you... are you dependent on it? An addict?' They had warned us about the dangers of drugs in the Brigade. I knew some of the nurses sneaked poppy tablets from the stores or inhaled chlorors from time to time or when things got too bad for them.

'Yes, I am. I'm not proud of it. I wanted you to know. It's going to make it hard for us to get down the tunnel.'

'Because of the pain?'

'Yes - and because... because I go.. funny when I need a dose. I shake badly. There are cravings... They're awful. I'm ashamed of myself. There. Now I've told you.'

'Oh...' A great wave of sympathy washed over me, mingled with heart-wrenching guilt. I'd been absolutely vile to this poor man, and all the time I'd not paid nearly as much attention as I should to his injuries - because he hid them away. They were just a nuisance as far as I was concerned. I hadn't thought about his pain and I'd never guessed how badly hurt he was inside. I paused to let this new knowledge soak into me.

'Peter... I can call you Peter, can't I?'

'I wish you would.'

'I've not been very nice to you. It wasn't fair. Oh - if only you'd told me earlier!'

'You wouldn't have minded?'

'Of course not. Oh, you daft beggar, why should I mind? I've been in hospitals, and I've driven an ambulance and worked up at the Front. Don't you think I've seen worse things than opium dependency?'

'You're not worried about my being a poppy-head?'

'No. I don't mind. In fact, I think I picked up a little bit of it myself when I cut my hand in your pocket, so that makes me a poppy-head too. And you're to call me Sunny. Good heavens! Here we are, stuck in a desperate dark hole under the earth and we're calling each other Mister Joyce and Miss Moon! It's bloody ridiculous!'

'So it is,' said Peter.

I'm proud of you, said Alfie.

- 0 -

We sat and talked. I wanted to know more about this secret way into the City. Peter said that it had been dug nearly forty years ago, as part of its defences. It was an escape route to be used by the senior clerics of the Magisterium as a last resort if they needed to get away in a hurry, for example if the City was invaded from the east. The tunnel was narrow so that it couldn't be used by an invading army. In addition, there ware iron bulkheads that could be lowered to prevent, for example, men with bombs from entering unseen and causing death and destruction in the City.

'Won't they be closed now?'

'No.'

'How do you know?'

That led on to a long discussion about the history of the City of Geneva. What it all boiled down to was that since the Blessed Pierre Leroque had become the head of the Society of the Holy Spirit there had been divisions within the Church - between those who supported his policy of spiritual liberalism combined with commercial expansion, and the Fundamentalists who regarded his doctrines as apostasy and yearned for the old days of the Consistory Court of Discipline.

'There used to be regular public floggings and burnings, you know.'

I knew - I'd studied history at Highdean. 'Yes, they were unjust. We know better now.'

'Do we? I wonder. What about the War? Do you think we're doing well?

'We're advancing all the time. The Enemy might have the City surrounded, but they haven't been able to get into it, have they? It's much too well defended for that. Meanwhile our forces are pushing the Pagans back all the time. We'll chase them all the way to Hindustan by winter. They won't dare to try start another War.'

'You're probably right, Sunny. But tell me - why do you think the War began?'

'It was the Pagan Horde. The Africs and the Tartars. They wanted to take the Holy City away from us.'

'Do you know why they wanted to do that?'

'Because they're unholy.'

'OK... Any other reason?'

'They want to steal the Holy Word from us.'

'That's right. The Society of the Holy Spirit guards the Holy Word, which is all the teaching of God as revealed and discovered by the clerkes and theologians of the world's centres of learning and research. It's a matter of great significance in the workings of the world's economy.'

'Yes, I know. God, through the Holy Spirit, shows the theologians the mysteries of His Creation. They note them down, and send their revelations to the Citadel of the Holy Spirit in Geneva for safe keeping.'

'Right. And then the Society, though its agencies, redistributes those mysteries for the glory of God and the well-being of Mankind.'

'Yes. Sorry, Peter, but I don't see what you're getting at.'

'It's this, Sunny. The Society does not distribute God's gifts freely; in both senses of the word. Firstly, it charges tithes - substantial tithes - for the Communion of the Word. Secondly, it only reveals its knowledge to its supporters. Not everyone who knocks on the doors of the Citadel is allowed inside, and of those who gain admittance not all are heard. Many leave empty-handed, either because they have been rejected or because the tithe for the knowledge they seek is set at such a high level that they cannot afford it.'

'Are you saying that the Africs and the Tartars are invading the Holy City because they weren't righteous enough to be granted God's Word?'

'Think of it like this, Sunny. Imagine a man - a man who has no money but who owns a field. The soil of the field is fertile and he has a store of grain set aside. If he could only sow that grain in his field, he would raise a fine crop of wheat. But in order to sow the grain he needs a plough. So he goes to a wealthy man and he says to him, "Please give me your spare plough or the money to buy a plough, so that I may grow wheat in my field and feed my wife and children."

'"The wealthy man replies, 'I did not become rich by giving my money and possessions away to all and sundry. Instead, I will lend it to you."

'"Thank you," says the first man.

'"But wait," says the wealthy man. "Money has a value of its own. If I lend you this money I shall require you to give it back to me with interest."

'"Gladly," says the first man. "Just as soon as I have brought in my harvest, I shall sell it in the market and return your money to you."

'"That is well," says the wealthy man, "Because I own the market and I set its prices. But listen to me. Your harvest may fail, and then where will my money have gone? I require more security than that. If you want me to lend you my money so that you may buy a plough, you must first grant me title to your field. Then you must agree to work for me to till that field, and you must hand over all the harvest to my granaries. In exchange, I will pay you a weekly wage and permit you to spend it in my market, where you may buy the necessities of life at the very reasonable prices I have set."

'"So, in order to feed my children I must give you my field?" said the man. "I cannot do that - it belonged to my father, and his father before him. I cannot pay that price."

'"Then you, your wife and your children can starve; and when you are all dead I will take your vacant field anyway, for there will be nobody to prevent me. Now get out of my sight, before I set my dogs on you!"

'And the man went home empty-handed to his wife. "Light of my eyes," he said. "The rich man will not give me a plough, nor will he lend me the money to buy a plough of our own unless I hand over our lives and my inheritance in return."

"Then," she replied, "He is an unjust man and our enemy, and it our duty to fight him. You and I will have to take the wealthy man's money from him by force. It is the only way to save the lives of our children." And the man had to agree with his wife.

'That' s the way it is between the Magisterium and the Pagan Nations, Sunny.'

I sat back, stunned. 'That's... that's blasphemy! I don't believe you! It's not like that at all!'

'Tell that to the hungry peoples of Africa. And ask yourself why the City of Geneva is covered by an armoured concrete dome.'

- 0 -

We lurched down the tunnel for another hour. At least, I think it was an hour. It was so hard to tell in the darkness. Then we sat down again on the cold floor for another rest. I'd been thinking.

'Peter?'

'Yes?'

'In the story you told me - are you saying that the man who owned the field went on to assault the wealthy man and try to steal his money?'

'That's what happened next, yes.'

'But that wasn't right. It was wrong of him to do that.'

'But his family was starving. What else could he do?'

I had an answer to that. 'Back at home, if there's an argument between two farmers - over a hedge or a field or a lane or something like that - then they go to see the justice. He listens to what they say and then he settles the disagreement. If the first man had gone to the magistrate instead of attacking the wealthy man he would have been treated fairly and a way would have been found to help him.'

Peter was quiet for a minute. 'Sunny, don't take this amiss, what I'm going to say. You told me before that your family had prospered by honest dealing, and I'm sure you're telling me the truth. You may be a pain in the neck-' Alfie sniggered, 'but you're an honourable pain. I can see that.'

'It's jolly decent of you to say so,' I said. Alfie jabbed me in the ribs. Sarcasm!

'But listen. The Moon family owns quite a lot of south Oxfordshire, doesn't it?'

'Yes, just about all of it.'

'And they're very influential in politics. Like your father is, for example.'

'Yes...'

'Suppose a neighbouring landowner had a quarrel with you and you couldn't sort it out between yourselves. He'd go to the justice, yes?'

'Yes.' I thought I could see what Peter was getting at.

'And who is the justice?'

Mister Joyce had caught me. I sighed. 'Daddy's cousin Bob. But look, it's not like you're trying to make out. He'd do his best to be impartial. He'd have to be or nobody'd trust him!'

'I'm sure he would. But your neighbour wouldn't see it that way. Even if the Church had perfectly credible reasons for denying the Afric Nations access to the Holy Word, they still wouldn't be believed. Against the rulings of the Magisterium there is no court of appeal. Their decisions are final.'

'Look... I can see what you're saying. But people are dying! I've seen more of the fighting than you have. I've been at the Front. I was there when the Zepps were bombing London. I saw women and children killed! I saw the injured men coming back home, every day. It was horrible. I know what it's like and you don't. And there's Gerry...'

'My son Danny is in the army. He's a second lieutenant.'

'Oh.' I shook my head. 'Oh heavens, I'm sorry. You must be worried about him, and I'm only making it worse by going on like this. And you're hurt too. But - fighting's wrong! Killing's wrong!'

'Yes, they are. That's why we're here. We've got to try to stop them.'

- 0 -

More dead steps in the darkness. We spoke little, except once when I had a sudden thought. 'Peter? We're in Enemy territory, aren't we? I mean, we must be underneath them by now.'

'Yes, I expect we are.'

'But sooner or later we'll pass underneath the walls of Geneva and then we'll be with friends again.' My voice echoed dully in the passage.

'Let's hope so.'

'What do you mean? They might not be our friends?'

'Let's just say we'll need to tread carefully and watch who we talk to and what we say to them.'

'Oh.'

- 0 -

I was dying for a ciggie, so I helped Peter to sit down by the side of the tunnel, searched through my pockets and found the Tinta Rosa packet and my half-empty box of Swan Vestas. I took out a cigarette and struck a match to light it. The passage was briefly illuminated by yellow light. Its walls were lined with bricks and the roof was slightly arched.

'Oh beggary!' I felt very, very stupid.

'I've been waiting for you to do that,' said Peter.

'You mean... you mean you knew I had matches all along and you didn't tell me? You've been letting us blunder around in the dark all this time and you knew? I don't believe it!' I slumped against the wall. It was, for the first time since we had started our trek, damp to the touch.

'I know where we're going. We haven't needed light. We might want the matches later. We should save them.'

'You idiot! You absolute idiot! Don't they sell matches in Geneva?'

'Yes, I suppose they do.'

'They we can buy some there. Oh bloody hell, Peter!'

After that, whenever either of us stumbled on an uneven part of the floor or bumped into a protruding piece of the wall we'd say 'Got a light, mate?' and fall about shrieking with laughter. It was like on the wireless when Joey Dunn says, 'Where's me old scrubber?' and everybody howls. It helped us keep going.

We needed that help. We were tired and hungry and thirsty and the dank atmosphere of the place was getting to me. I'm only talking about my feelings here, of course. Even now, I only have the haunting of an idea of how bad it was for Peter.

- 0 -

I suppose we must have spent about a day and a half underground. It was completely impossible to keep track of the passage of time mentally and there was no point in lighting a match and checking Peter's watch. It had gone the same way as the alethiometer, and had stopped for ever.

After an uncountable number of hours we stopped and tried to sleep. It was practically impossible. The air was neither warm nor cold, but as soon as you lay down on the ground or rested against the walls you felt the warmth being drawn out of you, as if you were lying in your grave. We lay together like spoons with Peter's jacket between us and the ground, and my tunic resting on top. I put my arms around him, crossed them over his chest and held him close to me.

At some point in that endless night I woke and knew that Peter was asleep and dreaming. He was making small spasmodic movements and muttering under his breath. Was it the poppy-need he'd told me about?

No. He's running. He's running freely along a country lane and up the sides of a grass-green valley. He's ten years old and he's chasing his brother Tom to the top of the hill. They're both trailing kites behind them. There's a fine breeze today - it's a great day for kite-flying. Viola is hawk-formed - her wings are broad and sharp-pinioned.

Oh, Alfie. Let it be a beautiful day for them - the very best day it could possibly be.

- 0 -

We passed through a zone where the air was moist and the walls ran with water. That was murder, because we couldn't stop and rest - there were puddles on the ground. I'm not ashamed to say that we cupped our hands and drank that foul, stinking water. It might make us ill, so it might; but the alternative was worse. It was then that my tired muscles screamed the loudest. It was then, too, that I most wanted Alfie to Change and help carry Peter the way he'd done when we had run for the shelter of the hut. But I refused to let him do that. What good would it do us if I came to rely too much on Alfie putting himself at risk unless the situation was one of life or death? I wasn't a little girl any more and I could no longer use Alfie's capabilities in a casual way. That word - incubus - and the remembrance of what we had suffered in the Chelsea Barracks prevented me; and he understood. Besides, what would Peter Joyce have thought?

- 0 -

From time to time the tunnel opened out into a wider space or cavern. We could feel it as a change in the texture of the air and a release of the pressure on our ears. Every time this happened I thought we were coming to the end of our underground ordeal, and every time I was disappointed. That is, until - and I refused to believe it at first, so used had I become to breathing the air of total darkness - a suspicion of light, a teasing of the eyes, began to grow in the distance ahead of us. At the same time, the floor tilted under our feet and sloped upwards. Step by painful step we advanced; and every step was all the harder now for being uphill.

We didn't stop. Not now our objective was in sight. We carried on; and every shallow breath I drew was red-hot and hissed out through clenched teeth. Every step was twelve inches of agony. Peter's head bumped hard against my shoulder each time his stump landed on the ground. I don't think he knew he was doing it, but he made a sound that was half a sigh and half a groan at every one of our joint footfalls.

Neither of us looked at each other. Nor did we look ahead of us. It would have been too bad; to have seen how far there was still to go, to have counted how many more footsteps we would have to make before we got there. So, when we did reach the end of the tunnel it was with a bang against a brick and a cry of desperation as we fell against the rungs of an iron ladder. I tried to hold onto it, but my hand was all pins and needles and I couldn't get a grip. Peter and I landed in a heap on the ground and, with a shock I had never experienced before his daemon Viola fell into my arms. Immediately, and despite my own feelings of overwhelming tiredness and hunger, I found myself transported. I left my own body and found myself - at least in part - occupying Peter's.

Suddenly I had no left arm and only half a leg. My breathing was tight and my head was wrapped in a throbbing iron band. My ribs were bruised and ached dully. But more; far more, far worse than those symptoms, bad though they were, was the pain in my mind. Poppy. I wanted it. I had to have it. There was nothing more important than finding a pharmacist's shop and asking for, and receiving, a bliss-giving, pain-banishing bottle of laudanum and drinking its contents. I could think of nothing else. The ghastliness of it - the horror of finding that my mind had been taken over by an artificial chemical desire - made me cry out and my hand jerked spastically. I couldn't stand it - I had to let go of Viola. I had to get away from that clawing, grabbing thing that was sucking up my spirit.

No, Sunny. Hold on! Alfie leapt from my side and landed on Peter's shoulder. He rested his cheek against Peter's own and licked at his face with his quick little tongue. We've got to help him. He's dying.

Alfie was right. Peter's face was grey and his eyelids flickered randomly. Worse than that, Viola seemed to be shifting in and out of reality as I held her. I lifted her up to my face and looked into her eyes. They were dull and smeared out of focus. On an impulse I kissed them; one, two, left, right. At the same time, Alfie's lips pressed against Peter's.

A diabolical little rhyme ran through my head, over and over again:

Think blue,
Count two.
Look for a red shoe.
Think blue,
Count two.
Look for a red shoe.

Round and round it went; maddening, insistent, meaning nothing. Peter's body shuddered in my arms. I had no idea whether I was doing any good; any good at all. Peter was dying, and I was on the floor of a cellar - or so I supposed it was - under the Holy City of Geneva, where the townspeople might be friendly and they might not and I would have to be careful what I said. I was shaking with Peter, and I wanted poppy more than I had ever wanted anything before. I wanted, wanted, wanted it.

Slowly, so slowly, the quivering in our bodies died down. The colour returned to Peter's face, revealing how dirty, unshaven and scratched it was. I supposed I looked the same. Finally, his eyes opened and he looked at me. Alfie returned to my side and I let go of Viola.

'So that's how it feels to be a girl...' His voice was a croaking whisper.

'I hope you enjoyed it!'

'More than you enjoyed being me, I suspect.' A fragile, ghostly smile chased across his mouth. I smiled in return. I didn't know what to say, either about the poppy-craving or about the experience of living in his body. Was that how it was when men and women made love? Was that how it would be for me some day? That was too much for me to think about, so instead I said the first thing that came into my head:

'Peter, what was all that funny stuff that about thinking blue? What did it mean?'

'Ah, you heard it too. The whole verse goes:

Lady, if a man,
Tries to bother you, you can
Think blue,
Count two,
And look for a red shoe.

'Think Blue, Count Two. It's a beautiful story about sin and redemption. I'll read it to you one day.'

- 0 -

The iron ladder led up fifteen feet to an empty room with a single wooden door, lit by high windows of frosted glass. It was the diffused light through those windows that had percolated down the passageway and shown us the way for those last terrible hundred steps. I stood at the bottom of the ladder and helped Peter climb, holding his stump while he gained purchase with his right leg. Once he was safely at the top I slung the knapsack over my shoulders and followed him. The ladder was much harder to climb than I had expected. I was - we both were - weak with hunger. Peter had to help me climb the last few rungs. At last I stood unsteadily at the top of the ladder and looked at Peter. He was filthy. I looked down at myself. So was I. We were covered in leaf-mould and our trousers and boots were soaked and caked with mud. Dirt from the tunnel walls was streaked down our jackets. 'Come here, mucky,' I said, and ran my hands down his clothes, trying to get rid of the worst of the mess as best I could. Then I brushed myself down.

'We look like a couple of tramps!' said Peter ruefully.

'Never mind. Come on, let's see where this door leads.' I held out my hand.

Peter shook his head. 'I'll have to try to walk by myself.'

'Can you?'

'Yes. Thanks to you and Alfie, I can.'

I led the way and opened the door. Not slowly - that would have been the same as admitting I was a trespasser. Instead, I flung it back and walked through it. I found myself in a deserted corridor with a white marble floor and wood-panelled walls. A few yards to the right was another door, of iron-studded oak. Peter followed me into the corridor. 'Come on,' I said. 'That way.' Again, I led the way. The door was heavy and creaked as I pulled it back. We passed through it and came out at the top of a short flight of steps leading down to a narrow street. 'Ready?

'Ready.'

I let Peter go first and he descended the flight with a rolling gait, rather like a sailor's. I went down with him. It would have been wonderful if I could have held his hand, but I still looked much more like a boy than a girl, and we'd very quickly got into trouble if we'd showed any such attachment in public. So we proceeded as best we could down the street which, after running fifty yards or so between high buildings of grey stone, led to a wide-open space; like a park except that instead of wide lawns of grass there was an expanse of paving slabs, on which were scattered trees and shrubs in wooden boxes with benches arranged in neat rows and squares between them.

'That's where the lake used to be before they drained it and filled it with earth,' said Peter.

'Let's go there and sit down for a while. Decide what to do next.'

We had to cross a wide roadway called the Quai des Bergues to reach the park. As we looked around us we caught our first sight of some of the inhabitants of Geneva. They were brightly dressed - putting our own drab clothes to shame - and walked briskly and purposefully up and down the broad pavements which bordered the road. I immediately noticed that there was something slightly odd about them - something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Open cars with (I supposed) anbarically powered motors whirred up and down in front of us. We waited for a gap in the traffic, crossed over to the other side of the road and found a bench to rest on.

I looked back the way we had come. The ground on which the city was built rose up past modern, official-looking concrete blocks of offices and apartments to the old town, which was constructed of darker, more weathered stone. The buildings there were, I could see, clustered closer together and the streets were crooked and irregular, in contrast with the sweeping boulevard we had just crossed. It was no surprise that our secret passage had emerged in the newer part of the town, nearer the old water-level of the lake. I turned to Peter.

'Did you see? There's something funny about the people here. Look!'

A woman passed by, pushing a perambulator and followed by a boy of about seven years old, holding his mouse-daemon in his right hand.

'See? They're looking down all the time. I know tall people look down as they walk along so they won't bump into the short people but those people aren't tall, are they? Why do you think that is?'

'Look up,' said Peter.

I tilted back my head. I had thought it was a cloudy day as the light from the sky was so grey and flat and the air so lifeless. But that was not so.

You can't tell if it's cloudy or not, said Alfie.

No, you couldn't. Arranged around the perimeter of the city centre were a number of powerful floodlights, spaced at regular intervals. They cast their light - a curious, blue-grey shadowy light against the overarching concrete dome that roofed the city from horizon to horizon. The sky seemed to be bearing down on us; perpetually falling, held up only by the xenon glow that illuminated it.

'Oh, good grief,' I said. 'That's absolutely ghastly. No wonder nobody looks at it.'

'No,' said Peter. 'Neither must we.'

'What shall we do? Apart from looking at the pavement all the time we're outside so nobody can tell we're from out of town?'

'Go there,' Peter replied, lifting his right arm and pointing north. 'Into the Old Town. We must find somewhere to stay and something to eat, and we must get new clothes as soon as we possibly can and try to blend in. We're standing out like a sore thumb at the moment.'

'Yes,' I said. And it seemed to me that, horrible as our journey in the tunnel had been, its clammy darkness was infinitely preferable to this terrible, ever-falling, soul-destroying mockery of a sky. I shivered, although there was no wind and the air was not cold. 'This is a ghastly place. I don't know how long I can stand it here.'

'Neither do I,' said Peter, 'Neither do I. But Sunny,' and he looked at me and smiled wearily, 'I don't think it will be for very long. Not very long at all.'