‘Wobbler?’ said Johnny, without looking around.

‘Yeah?’

‘You there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thanks.’

He could feel something lifting off him, like a heavy blanket. He was amazed his feet still touched the ground.

He ran along North Drive, to the little area where all the dead roads met.

There was someone already there.

She spun around with her arms out and her eyes blissfully shut, the gravel crunching under her feet, the moonlight glinting off her ancient hat. All alone, twirling and twirling, Mrs Tachyon danced in the night.

Not all alone . . .

The air sparkled. Glowing lines, blue as electricity, thin as smoke, poured out of the clear sky. Where they touched the fingers of the dancing woman they stretched out and broke, then reformed.

They crawled over the grass. They whirred through the air. The whole cemetery was alive with pale blue comets.

Alive . . .

Mrs Tachyon’s feet were off the ground.

Johnny looked at his own fingers. There was a blue glow crackling over his right hand, like St Elmo’s Fire. It sparkled as he waved it towards the stars and felt his feet leave the gravel path.

‘Ooowwwwwah!’

The lights spun him around and let him drift gently back down.

‘Who are you?’

A line of fire screamed across the night and then exploded. Sparks flew out and traced lines in the air; which took on, as though it was outlined in neon, a familiar shape.

‘Well, until tonight,’ it said, blue fire sizzling in his beard, ‘I thought I was William Stickers. Watch this!’

Blue glows arched over the gravestones again and clustered around the dark bulk of the bulldozer, flowing across it so that it glowed.

The engine started.

There was a clash of gears.

It moved forward. The railings clanged and cart-wheeled away. The brick wall crumbled.

Lights orbited around the bulldozer as it ploughed onward.

‘Hey! Stop!’

Metal groaned. The engine note dropped to a dull, insistent throbbing.

The lights turned to look at Johnny. He could feel their attention.

‘What are you doing?’

A light burst into a glittering diagram of the Alderman.

‘Isn’t this what people wanted?’ he said. ‘We don’t need it any more. So if anyone’s going to do it, it should be us. That’s only right.’

‘But you said this was your place!’ said Johnny.

Mrs Sylvia Liberty outlined herself in the air.

‘We have left Nothing there,’ she said, ‘of any Importance.’

‘Force of habit,’ said William Stickers, ‘is what has subjugated the working man for too long. I was right about that, anyway.’

‘The disgusting bolshevik, although he needs a shave, is Quite correct,’ said Mrs Liberty. And then she laughed. ‘It seems to me we’ve spent Far too long moping around because of what we’re not, without any Consideration of what we might be.’

‘Chronologically gifted,’ said Mr Einstein, crackling into existence.

‘Dimensionally advantaged,’ said Mr Fletcher, sparkling like a flashbulb.

‘Bodily unencumbered,’ said the Alderman.

‘Into Extra Time,’ said Stanley Roundway.