Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

smelled like it had
been used to beat down fires, which it had.
    He was the best historical scholar in the University, and
quite possibly in the whole British Isles; and the kindest and
most modest man I’d ever met.
    ‘Ah, hello, Clovis,’ he boomed. ‘How good to
see you!’ He strode up and shook hands. ‘And
who’s your friend?’
    ‘Menial – Dr. Anders Gantry,’ I said.
    He held her hand and inclined his head over her knuckles.
‘Charmed.’ He looked at her in a vaguely puzzled way
for a moment, then turned to me. ‘Now, colha Gree, what can
I do for you?’
    Gantry had agreed to supervise my project; it was a persistent
irritant to my conscience that I hadn’t seen or written to
him all summer.
    ‘Oh, nothing at the moment, Dr. Gantry. I’ve been
doing a fair bit of preliminary research up North, and I’ve
about finished the standard references.’ I rubbed my ear,
uneasily remembering the dust on the books. ‘And I thought
I’d take the opportunity of a wee visit to Glasgow to drop
by the library.’
    ‘That’s very commendable,’ he said. I was
unsure of the exact level of irony in his voice, but it was
there. ‘We’ve rather missed you around
here.’
    ‘He works very hard,’ Menial put in. ‘The
space-launch platform project is on a tight schedule.’
    ‘Oh, so that’s where you are. Kishorn. Hmm. Good
money to be made up there, I hear. And you, miss?’
    ‘I have an office job there,’ Menial said blandly.
She shot me a smile. ‘That’s how I know he works
hard. He’s saving up money to live on next year.’
    ‘Well, I suppose there are ways and ways of preparing
for a project,’ said Gantry, in a more indulgent tone.
‘No luck with patronage yet, I take it?’
    ‘None so far, no.’
    He clapped me around the shoulders. ‘Perhaps you should
try to extract some research money from the space
scientists,’ he said. ‘Our great Deliverer had much
to do with spaceflight herself. There might still be lessons in
her life story, eh?’
    Menial’s face froze and I felt my knees turning to
rubber.
    ‘Now that’s a thought,’ I said, as calmly as
possible.
    Gantry guffawed. ‘Aye, you might even fool them into
thinking that!’ he said. ‘Good luck if you do. Now
that you’re getting stuck in, Clovis, I have something to
show you.’ He grinned, revealing his teeth, yellow as a
dog’s. ‘It’s in the library.’
    With that he turned away and bounded up the stairs. I
followed, mouthing and gesturing helplessness to Menial. To my
relief, she seemed more amused than alarmed.
    By the time we arrived at the open door of the library
he’d vanished into the shadows.
    ‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered to
Menial.
    ‘If he stays around, you keep him busy,’ she said.
‘I’ll get the goods.’
    I was about to tell her how unlikely she was to get away with
that when Gantry came puffing up, carrying a load of cardboard
folders that reached from his clasped hands at his belt to his
uppermost chin.
    ‘Here we are,’ he said, lowering the tottering
stack on to a table. He sneezed. ‘Filthy with dust,
I’m afraid.’ He wiped his nose and hands on an even
dirtier handkerchief. ‘But it’s time you had a look
at it: Myra Godwin’s personal archive.’
    ‘That really is amazing,’ I said. My voice
soundedlike a twelve-year-old boy seeing a girl naked for the
first time. I picked them up and put them down, one by one. Eight
altogether: bulging cardboard wallets ordered by decade, from the
1970s to the 2050s.
    I hardly dared to breathe on them as I opened the first one
and looked at the document on the top of the pile, a shoddily
cyclostyled, rusty-stapled bundle of pages with the odd title Building a revolutionary party in capitalist America.
Published as a fraternal courtesy to the cosmic current.
    ‘Why haven’t I seen these before?’ I
asked.
    Gantry shuffled uncomfortably. He glanced at Menial, rubbed
his chin and said, ‘Am I right in thinking you’re a
tinker?’
    ‘You’re right, I am that,’ Merrial said,
without hesitation.
    Gantry smiled, looking relieved. ‘Urn, well. Between
ourselves and all that. Scholars and tinkers both know, I’m
sure, that we have to be… discreet, about the
Deliverer’s… more discreditable deeds and, ah,
youthful follies. So, although previous biographers have seen
these documents, we don’t tend to show them to
undergraduates. What I hope, Clovis, is