Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

great scar of the Kishorn Yard. There was a
trick of the eye in interpreting the sight -everything there, the
cranes and the platform and the ship, were much bigger than their
normal equivalents, like the Pleistocene relatives of familiar
mammals.
    The bus pulled up at the works gate. The stockade around the
yard had been constructed more to protect the careless or
reckless from wandering in thanto safeguard anything it enclosed.
I nudged Jondo awake and we alighted in a dangerous, fast-moving
convergence of buses and cars and bikes. We strolled through the
gate just as the seven-o’clock klaxon brayed. Hundreds,
then thousands, of workers streamed through the gate and swarmed
out across the yard. The place looked like a benign battlefield,
crater-pocked, vehicle-strewn, littered with the living. I
clamped the heavy helmet on my head, and with Jondo puffing along
behind me, plunged in; ducking and dodging along walkways, over
trenches, under cables; leaping perilous small-gauge railway
tracks and over waterlogged trenches and dried-up culverts
(drainage here had always been a bit hit-and-miss); past haulage
vehicles and earth-movers, air-compressors and power-plants,
portable cabins and toilets set down as if at random in the muck,
until at length we reached the immense dry-dock that was the
focus of the whole glorious affray.
    The dry-dock was a giant rounded gouge out of the side of a
hill where it sloped down to the sea -hundreds of metres across,
tens of metres deep. Its rocky cliffs were old and weathered; it
looked like some work of Nature, or of Providence – even of
Justice, the smiting of the Earth by a wrathful God; but in fact
it was the centuries-old work of Man. (It is their civil
engineering that most impresses, of the works of the ancients,
but this is perhaps because so much of it endures – greater
works than these have gone to the rust and the rot.) Iron
sluice-gates, on an appropriately Brobdingnagian scale, held back
the sea – though pumps laboured day and night to counter
the inevitable seepage and spill.
    Within it towered the platform, a – someday soon –
floating bastion of concrete and painted steel, and within that
towered the ship. The Sea Eagle (lolair -pronounced
something like fYillirrih’ – in the Gaelic) looked
like a rocket-propelled grenade buried nose-down in the platform.
Four fin-like flanges sloped from its central tower to intersect
the ovoid surface of its reactor-shell and reaction-mass tank,
which was forty metres across at its widest diameter. The part of
it concealed by the platform tapered from this equator to the
aerospike of the main jet, around which the flared nozzles of
attitude jets made a scalloped array.
    By now I was tramping along in the middle of my work-gang,
Jondo and I having been joined by Ma-chard, Druin, the Lewismen
– Murdo One and Murdo Too – Angelo and Trike. We
descended a zig-zag iron stairway, down and down again, and
walked across the floor of the dock, splashing through puddles of
rainwater and seawater (some of which were so long-established
that they had their own ecosystems) to the door at the base of
the platform’s southwest leg. It was like going into a
lighthouse: up and up, around and around the winding stair. The
air smelt of wet metal, hot oil, damp concrete. Every surface
dripped, every sound echoed.
    After two minutes’ climb we reached the level of the
internal scaffolding where we were working. I ducked through a
service door in the inner side of the leg and emerged on to a
walkway facing one of the platform’s turbines across a
twenty-metre gap. At our current worksite, a dozen metres along
the walkway, ladders, more scaffolding and planks disappeared
into – in fact appeared to merge with -the unfinished
structure of struts joining the support leg to the
platform’s engine mount.
    Our contract for the month was to finish that structure. There
was no flexibility in the contract: there was only a month to go
before the platformwas floated out. Angus Grizzlyback, the
foreman, was sitting at a wooden pallet mounted on crates to form
a table, on which were spread some disassembled welding-torches,
a small tin of kerosene and a few now very dirty seagull quills.
He stood and glowered at us, reflexively lowering his head so as
not to bash his pate on the next level up. You could see the
white hairs on his chest and forearms which had inspired his