more personal thought waiting there to catch her. Newt was okay, really. And the thing about spending the rest of your life with him was, he wouldn’t be around long enough to get on your nerves.
The radio was talking about South American rainforests.
New ones.
It began to hail.
BULLETS OF ICE shredded the leaves around the Them as Adam led them down into the quarry.
Dog slunk along with his tail between his legs, whining.
This wasn’t right, he was thinking. Just when I was getting the hang of rats. Just when I’d nearly sorted out that bloody German Shepherd across the road. Now He’s going to end it all and I’ll be back with the ole glowin’ eyes and chasin’ lost souls. What’s the sense in that? They don’t fight back, and there’s no taste to ’em …
Wensleydale, Brian, and Pepper were not thinking quite so coherently. All that they were aware of was that they could no more not follow Adam than fly; to try to resist the force marching them forward would simply result in multiply broken legs, and they’d still have to march.
Adam wasn’t thinking at all. Something had opened in his mind and was aflame.
He sat them down on the crate.
“We’ll all be all right down here,” he said.
“Er,” said Wensleydale, “don’t you think our mothers and fathers—”
“Don’t you worry about them,” said Adam loftily. “I can make some new ones. There won’t be any of this being in bed by half past nine, either. You don’t ever have to go to bed ever, if you don’t want to. Or tidy your room or anything. You just leave it all to me and it will be great.” He gave them a manic smile. “I’ve got some new friends comin’,” he confided. “You’ll like ’em.”
“But—” Wensleydale began.
“You jus’ think of all the amazin’ stuff afterwards,” said Adam enthusiastically. “You can fill up America with all new cowboys an’ Indians an’ policemen an’ gangsters an’ cartoons an’ spacemen and stuff. Won’t that be fantastic?”
Wensleydale looked miserably at the other two. They were sharing a thought that none of them would be able to articulate very satisfactorily even in normal times. Broadly, it was that there had once been real cowboys and gangsters, and that was great. And there would always be pretend cowboys and gangsters, and that was also great. But real pretend cowboys and gangsters, that were alive and not alive and could be put back in their box when you were tired of them—this did not seem great at all. The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.
“But before all that,” said Adam darkly, “we’re really goin’ to show ’em … ”
THERE WAS A TREE in the plaza. It wasn’t very big and the leaves were yellow and the light it got through the excitingly dramatic smoked glass was the wrong sort of light. And it was on more drugs than an Olympic athlete, and loudspeakers nested in the branches. But it was a tree, and if you half-closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears.
Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn’t want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn’t a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn’t dreamed of. His grandfather hadn’t dreamed of any money at all. He hadn’t even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.
But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that’s how it went.
He hid his trolley behind the newspaper stand, sat down furtively, and opened his lunchbox.
It was then that he became aware of the rustling, and a movement of shadows across the floor. He looked around.
The tree was moving. He watched it with interest. Jaime had