Superior Saturday(44)

‘For what?’ asked Arthur.

‘The others will throw things as soon as they know it’s a promotion. Wait for Whrod now.’

Arthur nodded and stopped where he was. Whrod was close behind, and the other grease monkeys were approaching in an extended line across a dozen offices.

‘Go!’ shouted Alyse. She ran ahead to the chosen office, jumped on the desk, and then from there to a corner of the cube. Holding on to the frame with one hand, she started working on something with a wrench.

The Denizen stood up and folded her yellow umbrella. It turned black as it closed. Then, as she reopened it, a rich purple colour spread in swirls across the fabric like oil in water. She propped the umbrella up, then quickly climbed under the desk, calling out as she did so.

‘Goodbye, idiots! Long may you labour in vain!’

As the other grease monkeys swarmed over to the office, Arthur ran with Whrod to the lower-left corner. Whrod had his wrench out and started working on a large bolt that fastened the office cube to the framework. Arthur didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He drew his wrench but only stood there until Whrod looked up at him angrily.

‘Come on! Get the other side!’

The restraining bolt went through the frame and was fastened on the other side with a large hexagonal bronze nut. Arthur got his wrench onto it as Whrod turned the bolt and drew it free.

Arthur caught the nut as it fell, just before it disappeared through the latticed floor.

‘Next one up!’ Whrod called out, immediately going to another bolt a foot up from the first. Three other teams of grease monkeys were undoing the bolts in the other corners, and more were working above and around the office, some of them standing on each other’s shoulders and some even hanging by their fingers from the latticed floor above, like real monkeys.

‘Booklicker!’ shouted a nearby Denizen.

‘Toady!’

‘Slithering sycophant!’

‘You stole my promotion!’

All the Denizens in the nearer offices were shouting, waving their umbrellas, and becoming very obstreperous.

‘Hurry!’ snapped Whrod. ‘They’ll start throwing things in a second.’

As Arthur crouched to get his wrench positioned, something hit him hard in the back and fell at his feet. He looked down and saw it was a broken teacup. Then a saucer smashed into pieces in front of his face, the debris falling on Whrod’s back.

‘Lower East bolts clear!’ shouted a grease monkey.

‘Lower West bolts clear!’

‘Lower North bolts clear!’

‘Darn it,’ spat Whrod. ‘Last. Got the nut? Lower South bolts clear!’

His declaration was echoed by the teams working on the ceiling and by shouts that came from higher up. Arthur looked and saw that there were other gangs on the higher floors, and, amid them, several dull bronze automatons that looked like ambulatory jellyfish, round three-foot-diameter globes that stood five feet tall and walked on four or five semirigid tentacles while they wielded tools in their other numerous appendages.

‘Check chain!’ shouted Alyse.

Whrod used the edge of his wrench to peel back what Arthur had thought was a solid part of the vertical frame, but was in fact a red-painted cover or lid that fitted snugly on the beam. Under it, there was a smaller version of the Big Chain, big fat links four or five times the size of a bicycle chain. The chain ran on the inside of the U-shaped vertical beam, though it was not moving now.

‘Chain present – looks all right!’

Diagonally opposite, another grease monkey confirmed that the chain was present there.

Alyse looked up, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted, ‘Ready to rise! Shift them aside!’

Arthur looked up too, completely in the moment, all his troubles and responsibilities forgotten, replaced by curiosity as he wondered what exactly was going to shift aside.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN





THE OFFICES ABOVE Arthur creaked and rattled, then a whole line of them started to move slowly to the right, like carriages on a train being shunted off from a station. The next level up again, other offices were moving away in a different direction, and on the next level above that, and above that, presumably all the way up to level 61012, seventeen floors above.

As the vertical gap appeared that would allow the promoted Denizen’s office to ascend, the barrage of cups, saucers and inkwells slowed and then stopped, as did the stream of abuse. But a lot more water started coming down, more than could be explained by the constant rain, and Arthur saw brief, hallucinatory images of giant buckets woven out of purple light that were up-ending themselves into the new, temporary shaft.

‘Stand clear!’ ordered Alyse. ‘Not you, Ray. You stay with me. The rest of you, take the Big Chain to 61012.’