‘Haunts?’ said William Stickers.

‘Check out?’ said Mrs Liberty.

‘That’s modern talk for—’ William Stickers began.

‘I’m sure I don’t want to know!’ Mrs Liberty stood up. ‘The very idea!’

‘There’s a world out there, and we helped to make it, and now I want to find out what it’s like,’ said the Alderman sulkily.

‘Besides,’ said Mr Vicenti, ‘if we stick together no one will forget who they are, and we’ll all go further.’

Mrs Liberty shook her head.

‘Well, if you insist on going, then I suppose someone with some Sense should accompany you,’ she said.

The dead marched off in, as it were, a body, down the canal path and towards the town centre. That left only Mr Einstein and Mr Fletcher, still sitting happily beside their television.

‘What’s got into them?’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘They’re acting almost alive.’

‘It is disgusting,’ said Mr Grimm, but somehow in a triumphant tone of voice, as if seeing people acting badly was very satisfying.

‘Solomon here says that space is a delusion,’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘Therefore, it is impossible to go anywhere. Or to be anywhere, either.’

Einstein spat on his hands and tried to smooth down his hair.

‘On ze other hand—’ he said, ‘there was a nice little pub in Cable Street.’

‘You wouldn’t get a drink, Solly,’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘They don’t serve spirits.’

‘I used to like it in there,’ said Einstein, wistfully. ‘After a hard day stuffing foxes, it wass nice to relax of an evenink.’

‘You did say space was a delusion,’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘Anyway, I thought we were going to do some more work on the television. You said there was no theoretical reason why we shouldn’t be able to make—’

‘I zink,’ said Mr Einstein carefully, ‘I would like to fool myself a little.’

And then there was only Mr Grimm.

He turned back, still smiling in a glassy kind of way, and settled down and waited for them to return.

Chapter 7

The Frank W. Arnold Civic Centre meeting room was about half full.

It smelled of chlorine from the swimming baths, and of dust, and floor polish, and wooden chairs. Occasionally people would wander in thinking the meeting was the AGM of the bowls club, and then try to wander out again, pushing on the bar on the door marked ‘Pull’ and then glaring at it as if only an idiot would put ‘Pull’ on a door you pulled. The speakers spent a lot of the time asking people at the back if they could hear, and then holding the microphone too close to the loudspeakers, and then someone tried to make the PA system work properly, and blew a fuse, and went to find the caretaker, pushing on the door for a while like a hamster trying to find the way out of its treadmill.

In fact, it was like every other public meeting Johnny had ever attended. Probably on Jupiter seven-legged aliens had meetings in icy halls smelling of chlorine, he thought, with the microphones howling, and creatures frantically aing at doors clearly marked ‘’.