The other boys ran after him. Howard was a fast runner, but he was slowed down by the violin in its heavy black case. The boys were not carrying anything, and they kept catching up. To Howard’s annoyance, they chased him all the way to school. He was forced to stop and use the violin as a weapon again at the corner of Union Street and again just outside school. Here someone had been busy with red spray paint and written “ARCHER” in huge letters outside the school gate. The third lot of fighting took place on top of it. By this time Howard was not feeling noble, and his temper seemed to have worked on rather than off. When he finally limped into school, hot and sticky and prickly with running in the rain, his nose was bleeding and he hated the name of Archer.
Howard’s nose trickled blood most of the morning. He felt steadily more angry. His whole family was being got at by Archer, and he wanted to do something about it. That morning he had not even the patience to design a spaceship. He simply waited for the bell to go so that he could get away and see Archer. When it did, he leaped up and ran.
The boys were waiting across the street in spite of the rain. There seemed to be nearly twenty of them now. A lot of people who arrived at the gate at the same time as Howard were turning back inside the school. “It’s Hind’s gang,” Howard heard someone say. “I’m going out the back way.” Howard was tempted to do the same, but when he looked at his watch, he saw he had not time to go all that way around and still be sure of meeting the Goon. He set off through the gates at a run.
Hind’s gang ran slantways across the street to catch him. There was a lot of hooting and angry shouting, and most of them were held up in the traffic; but five arrived on the school side in front of Howard. Howard folded his arms across the top of his head and used himself as a battering ram. He was determined not to let Archer or anyone else stop him. He was held, and tore free, and was held again. The boy doing most of the holding was a ginger-haired lad Howard remembered from that morning. Howard hit at him and missed and got hit by someone else. When he finally dragged loose, they had added a bleeding lip to his bleeding nose. Howard mopped it angrily as he ran. They ran after him, but he had no violin to slow him down this time, and he got away quite easily. He arrived at the bank only a minute late, trotting, mopping, and very much out of breath.
The Goon was standing in the bank doorway with Quentin, sheltering from the rain. He gave Howard a look of professional interest. “Fight?” But before Howard could answer, Fifi and Awful trotted up, both of them looking rather the way Howard felt.
“A lot of big boys just set on her!” Fifi said. “It’s too bad!”
“Fifi knocked their heads together,” said Awful. “I kicked.”
The Goon and Howard stared at Fifi. It was hard to imagine her that warlike. Quentin humped his shoulders under his red and black checked overcoat. “The bank will take one look at us and decide this is a holdup,” he said.
The Goon grinned and barged his way through the door into the bank. It was a very stately bank inside, hushed and respectable, with orderly lines of quiet people waiting in front of each cashier. The Goon, in his usual way, strode to the front of the nearest line and shouldered the person there out of the way. Everyone in the line looked at him indignantly, but he took no notice and stooped his small head down to speak to the cashier. It was like the Town Hall all over again, Howard thought, and braced himself to be thrown straight out. But the cashier answered the Goon politely and pointed to the other end of the counter. The Goon strode up there and beckoned. Almost at once a respectably dressed young lady in a neat pleated skirt like Miss Potter’s came out of a side door and waited for them.
“What did he say?” Fifi wondered as they went over there.
“‘This is a stick up,’ of course,” Quentin said. “It’s the only language he knows.”
But nothing could have seemed less like a stickup. They followed the young lady through the door and among other young ladies all busy at things like oversized typewriters and then into an inner part where everyone was looking urgently at displays on screens. It was all wonderfully quiet. Nobody seemed surprised to see them being led past. Howard found his anger was drizzling slowly away. Feelings like anger just did not seem to fit here. The thing that worried him most was the fact that none of them looked respectable. His lip was swollen, Fifi and Awful were disheveled, and Quentin’s coat was a perfect eyesore. Quentin loved that coat. He had worn it from ever since Howard could first remember. Everyone else in the family hated it. Catriona called it the Tramp’s Coat.
Finally, they arrived at a door which said, in gold letters, “J. C. Whyte, Manager.” The young lady tapped discreetly on this door, and someone inside said, “Come!” The young lady opened the door and motioned them through.
They went into a nice modern office room with a warm orange-red carpet. J.C. Whyte—if that was his name—had iron gray hair and a quiet, impressive manner, wrapped in a quiet, impressive striped suit. He was talking to a customer when they came in, a big young man in overalls, who looked even more out of place in the office than they did. J.C. Whyte was obviously trying to get rid of the young man because he said, in a final sort of way, “Well, that’s the best we can do, considering the recession,” and handed the young man a bundle of papers on his way to shake hands with Quentin. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Sykes,” he said, as if Quentin were the most important person in the bank.
As Quentin shook hands, the young man in overalls slung the bundle of papers carelessly back onto J.C. Whyte’s desk and said, “I’d better take them all out of your way, J.C. He seems to have brought the whole family.”
Quentin stared a little. Mr. Whyte said very politely, “If you’d be good enough to go with Mr. Archer, Mr. Sykes.”
“Oh,” said Quentin. “Yes, of course.”
The young man in overalls gave them all an amused look over his shoulder as he led the way to a door at the back of the office. It swung heavily, and when it was open, they could see it was more than a foot thick. Howard could have sworn it was the door to a safe. Inside, he knew it was a safe. Its walls were lined with pigeonholes, so that there was only a narrow passage down the middle. He looked into some as the young man led them through. He saw black cashboxes, brown leather jewel cases, and bundles and bundles of important-looking envelopes. Some of the lower pigeonholes had doors across, perhaps to hide money. But there was not much chance to look because Archer led them straight through to another, much smaller door at the back. This door was just as thick, and they all had to bend to go through it except Awful. Beyond that they came out into a huge place. It was as big as an airplane hangar, brightly lit by dangling electric bulbs.
They all stopped, in a huddle, and stared around. There were installations, machines, cabinets, readouts, winking lights, screens, dials, illuminated plans, displays flashing in all directions, almost as far as they could see. There were machines in the distance quietly at work running on rails, pushing more displays into place. Other machines were humming along the iron girders overhead. Howard’s anger vanished completely. He forgot his fat lip. He did not even mind about Dad’s coat—it did not look out of place here anyway. All he could feel was amazement and a good deal of rather strong envy.
One of the machines ran along the girders overhead until it stopped just above them. With a gentle humming it lowered what seemed to be a huge scoop. Quentin and Fifi backed nervously away from its shiny red underside. But when it came to floor level and stopped, they saw it was upholstered inside in cream-colored leather, like a huge armchair or the inside of an expensive car. Archer swung himself briskly into it and settled in a cream swivel seat at one end, where there was a display screen and a control panel with banks of colored buttons.
“Come on,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.”
They climbed in and sat in the leather seats around the inside. Archer touched a button. The machine hummed, and they found the scoop rising up into the middle of the vast workshop. It was a strange feeling, half-cozy, half-exposed,
and very like being on the big dipper in a fairground. Fifi looked more nervous than ever. Awful gazed over the edge, delighted. Quentin folded his arms and pretended he was quite used to this sort of thing. Howard, staring about even more eagerly than Awful, realized at last that the Goon had not come with them. In fact, now that he thought, he could not remember the Goon’s coming any farther than the main part of the bank. Archer, of course, was boss here.
Archer swung his seat around to face them. He was not very like Dillian since his hair was dark and his eyes were far bluer than hers. In fact, they were the bluest eyes Howard had ever seen, luminous cornflower blue, with a keenness to them that caused Howard another large jab of envy. For Archer’s eyes clearly were eyes that spent their time scanning banks of instruments, just as Howard had always longed to do.
“Why did you want to see me?” Archer asked Quentin. He had a very crisp way of speaking, which Howard found he rather admired.
“I want to know,” Quentin said, “why you’ve made me write you two thousand words every quarter for the past thirteen years.”
“I don’t know,” said Archer. “Because I haven’t.”
Quentin’s mouth opened, then shut again. He rubbed his hair to give himself time to absorb this. “But I understand you control power supplies,” he said. “So it must have been you who cut off all my services eight years ago, when I failed to deliver the words.”
Archer said, “I do farm power. I knew you were cut off then. But it wasn’t me who did it.”
“But,” said Quentin, “you don’t deny sending the Goon around to me when this last lot of words went missing?”
Archer smiled. He had a nice, wry sort of smile. “I admit he came from me. Yes. But the idea was just to intercept one lot of words to find out what was being done with them. I didn’t want Dillian getting too far ahead of me. But the words you sent then were the only lot I’ve ever seen. And they were quite worthless. You know that, don’t you?”
They stared at him suspiciously. Archer looked back, straight and calm and blue-eyed. He seemed honest as the day. There seemed so little harm in him that Awful said boldly, “Then why do you keep interrupting our telly with ‘ARCHER IS WATCHING’?”
“And why did you set that gang on us and chalk ‘ARCHER’ in the street?” Howard said.
A slot in the instrument panel by Archer’s seat began to reel out a long paper tape with numbers on it. Archer ran it through his fingers and read it as he answered. “I don’t own any gangs. I never chalk on streets. People always try to put the blame on me. Excuse me a moment.” He bent forward to speak into a grille. “Those Mompas futures—buy them in, as many as you can get. And you can begin selling Steeples now.”
“Where do you come in the family?” Awful asked, watching with interest.
“I’m the eldest,” said Archer. He tore the tape off, crumpled it, and threw it into another slot, which swallowed it with a whoof. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Now—”
“I thought you must be the eldest,” Awful said.
Archer was surprised. “Why?”
“Because Howard always gets blamed for the things I do,” said Awful.
Archer looked at Howard and smiled, with his mouth tipped down sympathetically. Howard licked the swelling on his lip and remembered that Archer had had nothing to do with that. Archer had sent the Goon, of course, but even so it was quite hard not to like him. If it were not for the way Quentin was rubbing his hair and watching Archer dubiously, Howard would have decided Archer was one of the nicest people he had met. But Dad did know about people.
“You don’t look any older than Dillian,” Fifi said to Archer in a hoarse, shy whisper.
“My family doesn’t age at the rate you people do,” Archer said.
“Where are you from then?” Fifi whispered.
Archer was not saying. He gave a private, wry grin. “Elsewhere,” he said, and the grin faded off his face as he turned to Quentin. Howard was surprised to see how much less pleasant that left his face. “And here we stick,” he said, “because one of us seems to be using your words to pin us to the spot. Whom were you sending your writing to?”
“I don’t know,” said Quentin. “I only dealt with Mountjoy.”
“Then have you any idea what you did to make your words so powerful?” Archer said. “Describe what you were told to do and how you carried out your orders.”
“I flatter myself that my words are always powerful,” Quentin said. “Yes. I’ll describe what I did. But only on condition that you answer a few more of my questions first.” Archer seemed astonished at this. He stared at Quentin. Quentin stared back.
“I don’t see why I should tell you anything,” Archer said at length in a mutinous sort of mutter. His face turned rather red, and it was clear he had his teeth clenched. He swung his chair around suddenly so that he could see over the side of the scoop and began to work buttons and levers in his control panel. There were hollow echoes down below. One of the machines ran on its rails to a row of slim steel installations and began moving them slowly to a new position. Everyone else sat tensely. It gave you a very helpless feeling, aloft in the scoop, with all the controls in Archer’s hands. “I love technology,” Archer remarked, carefully maneuvering the machine to a new line of rails. “I have machines here that can do anything I want them to. I can tamper with anything in town. I always think it’s lucky for the citizens here that I’m not particularly cruel.”
Quentin said very carefully and calmly, “In that case, I’d better point out that I’m due at the Polytechnic in half an hour, and my children are supposed to be back in school.”
“I know,” Archer said, still leaning out and guiding the machine. “But no one could do anything if I kept you here—unless Dillian felt like swapping the words she stole for you, of course.”
There was a short silence, which felt rather long. Then Fifi said timidly, “But you won’t hurt any of us. I can see you won’t, Mr. Archer.”
The steel instruments now seemed to be where Archer wanted them. He stopped the machine and swung his chair around again where he sat thoughtfully tinkering with other knobs and controls. Below, in the vast shed, displays lit and colored lights flashed as he turned them on and off. Then he said, “Does anyone besides me want a hamburger?”
“Me, please,” Howard and Awful said together.
Archer turned around and laughed. He seemed to be in a thoroughly good mood again. “Eight hamburgers then,” he said. “I expect you both can eat two.” He pressed some more knobs. After a moment a tray slid out from under his control panel, bringing with it a most appetizing smell. Eight brown buns were on it with a steaming hamburger peeping out from each. “I’m not unreasonable,” Archer said as he passed them around. “Ask me your questions. And perhaps you’ll see then how important it is for me to have a new piece of writing from you.”
Everyone bit and chewed enjoyably. Quentin swallowed a huge bite and said, “So we take it that my words somehow have power to impose restrictions on you. What are these restrictions precisely?”
“I can’t move from this town,” Archer said. “None of us can. Erskine can go out as far as the sewage plant, but the rest of us are stuck inside the city boundaries.”
“I can see that must be a great nuisance,” Quentin said, chewing thoughtfully. “How did you discover my words were doing it?”
“By looking until I found the unusual thing,” Archer said. “We probably all found out that way. I found out eight years ago, when whoever it was cut off your supplies of power. I’ve kept careful watch ever since, but I still can’t find out who’s doing it or how.”
“How do you keep watch?” Howard asked, picking up his second hamburger.
Archer laid down his second hamburger and swung his chair to press some more knobs. The screen at the end of the scoop lit up like a television. It showed a view of the front room at home. Just the low down view from one corner, Howard thought, that you would get if you looked out of the te
levision. Archer pressed another knob. The picture changed to a view of the kitchen, looking down from the ceiling. The light bulb, Howard thought. It changed again to the same sort of overhead view of Quentin’s study. “I wish you used a word processor,” Archer said to Quentin, “or even an electric typewriter. I’d know at once how it was being done if you did.”
“I detest the things,” Quentin said. He sounded quite quiet, but Howard could tell he was getting angry.
“That’s how you put the words on our telly,” Awful said, wiping her fingers on her coat. “I know you did because you didn’t say you didn’t. I need some chips now to wash down my hamburger.”
Archer smiled agreeably. He pushed the tray back under his control panel and pressed knobs again. “And I’ll tell you a very odd thing,” he said to Quentin, “which you wouldn’t know to ask. We’ve been stuck in this town for twenty-six years really. I’ve no idea how it was done for the first thirteen years, but when I came to check, all my instruments agreed that it had been going on for twice as long as I thought.” The tray slid out again with two newspaper bundles on it. Archer handed one to Awful and one to Howard, although he had not asked. The chips inside were nicely salted and soaked in vinegar. “I thought I was the only one who knew,” Archer continued. “But Erskine knew. He told me when he came to see me last week. He said he thought whoever it is was going to try to get rid of us all soon.” Archer’s face went very unpleasant as he said this. “That’s why I needed some words from you,” he said.