The Great Brain Robbery, page 5
“Are you all right?” Wilmot asked as she put her hands on her knees and tried to regain her breath.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, feeling doubly glad that she hadn’t accepted his offer of Don’t Ask pies. “I just need a moment.”
“I’m afraid we don’t have a moment,” said Gertrude. “Quickly, please.”
Suzy couldn’t blame her for being anxious—if any part of the city was going to suffer the worst effects of the quake, it would be the Underside. It hung suspended beneath the huge arch of the bridge on which the city stood. Whole neighborhoods of houses, schools, and shops hung from their rooftops over the fathomless depths of the canyon. There were no streets as such, just a labyrinth of metal walkways that served as streets, and Suzy could look down through the lattice ironwork and see just how far they all had to fall if anything gave way. It did not make her feel very safe, and she was determined to keep her eyes on her friends as they set off again.
The damage to the Underside was bad. The hanging streetlamps flickered uncertainly, and most of the houses they passed sported broken windows and missing roof slates. A cleanup was already in full effect, though, and every front door stood open, the occupants turning out onto the walkways with brooms and dustpans. The trolls might have been caught by surprise, but they clearly weren’t about to sit idle. It lifted Suzy’s spirits a little to see it.
Night was falling by the time they finally reached the Valley View Rest Home. It was a large, elegant building, even though its curtains now flapped like ragged sails out the empty windows and a crack ran up the building’s facade from top to bottom.
Please don’t collapse, Suzy thought as they stepped inside.
On her last visit, the rest home had been an oasis of calm and ordered business. Now it was a frenzy of activity. The nurses hurried back and forth, carrying mops and brooms, hammers and saws. The wood paneling of the lobby was cracked, the portraits had fallen off the walls, and the black-and-white-tiled floor was littered with dust and grime.
Wilmot’s aunt Dorothy—Gertrude’s sister—appeared, pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken crockery. She dropped it when she saw the crew arrive, and hurried over. She was small and plump and dressed in her usual nurse’s uniform. Her skin, normally the same amber shade as Gertrude’s, was white with plaster dust. “Oh, thank heavens,” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around Gertrude. “I was worried something had happened to you all.”
“We’re in one piece, thank you,” said Gertrude. “But what about the rest of the Old Guard?”
“All fine, barring a few scrapes and bruises,” said Dorothy. “Though it gave us quite a fright, I can tell you.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her apron and mopped her brow with it, but as it was even dirtier than she was, all it did was leave a greasy stain on her skin. “I’ve got the Old Guard settled down in the lounge while the rest of us do emergency repairs.”
Gertrude looked around the lobby. “How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad,” said Dorothy. “The power keeps going out, half the plaster’s come off the ceilings, and we’ve got leaks all over the place.”
Fletch sniffed. “I can ’ave a look at the pipes, if you fancy.”
“Yes please,” said Gertrude. “And can someone help to keep an eye on the Old Guard? I don’t want them wandering.”
“Leave them to me,” said Mr. Trellis, starting toward the door marked RESIDENTS’ LOUNGE. “I’ll soon whip them into shape.”
“Thank you, Mr. Trellis.” As soon as he had gone, Gertrude turned to Stonker and Ursel. “Would you two mind supervising his supervision? It tends to get a little rowdy.”
“It would be our pleasure,” said Stonker with a knowing smile. Ursel grunted in confirmation, and they set off together.
“Right,” said Gertrude, rolling up her sleeves. “Let’s get to work. What needs doing?”
“We’re starting at the bottom and working our way up,” said Dorothy. “I got as far as the kitchen, but I’ve not even looked upstairs yet.”
“Oh no!” said Wilmot. “My room!” He bolted for the stairs.
“I’ll help,” said Suzy, chasing after him.
“And me!” said Frederick.
The three of them thundered upstairs to the landing, around a corner, and down a long carpeted hallway lined with doors. “These are the Old Guard’s rooms,” Wilmot explained as he dodged around several nurses who were repairing cracks in the wall with lengths of tape. At the far end of the hall was another, narrower flight of stairs, without a carpet, and the three friends clattered up them. They emerged into a short, plain passage with just two doors leading off it. The lightbulb overhead flickered. “This is where Mom and Aunty Dorothy live,” said Wilmot, panting.
“What about you?” said Frederick. “Don’t tell me you share with your mom!”
“Of course not,” said Wilmot. “I’m upstairs again.”
“What stairs?” said Suzy.
There was a click as Wilmot flicked a switch on the wall, and a square panel in the ceiling slid open. With a rattle and a clunk, a flight of steps unfolded from inside the opening, extending like a concertina until the bottom step came to rest on the floor.
“These stairs,” Wilmot replied. “Come on up!”
He raced up the stairs in a few seconds flat and disappeared through the opening. A little hesitantly, Suzy followed him.
She emerged through the opening, only to bump her head on what appeared to be the underside of a table. Annoyed, she crawled forward on all fours, trying to find a way out from underneath it. But there was none. There was just more table in every direction. She was lost in a small forest of table legs. “Wilmot?” she called.
“Over here,” came the reply. She looked, and saw Wilmot’s legs a short distance away. He must have been standing up, because she couldn’t see his top half. She scrambled over and found him standing in a square hole cut in the table. He shuffled to one side to give her space to join him. “Come up and look,” he said.
She stood, and looked down on a miniature landscape of rolling purple fields, stretching away toward a small village on top of a hill. Beyond that she saw a frozen landscape of icy mountains and volcanoes, and farther still a walled desert city surrounded by palm trees. It was a whole world in diorama, crisscrossed with dozens of railway lines. Because the table wasn’t a table at all—it was a model railway. Suzy had been crawling beneath it, and the “table legs” had been the wood beams supporting the entire structure. They were in the rest home’s attic, close underneath the sloping roof tiles, some of which were now missing.
“What do you think?” said Wilmot, giving her a hopeful smile.
Suzy said the first thing that came into her head. “It’s huge.” The diorama stretched from one end of the room to the other, weaving between the roof beams and the few items of furniture that had been squeezed into the last available spaces, including Wilmot’s bed.
“My dad started it years ago,” said Wilmot, righting a copse of trees that had fallen in the earthquake. “I’ve been working on it since he…” He paused, and dropped his eyes to the floor. “Well. Ever since. It’s taken me ages, but it’s nearly finished.” He pointed to the desert, which mostly consisted of layers of chicken wire and papier-mâché, half-painted.
Suzy looked at the diorama again with fresh understanding and placed a comforting hand on his. “I think it’s brilliant,” she said.
“Hey, nice place!” said Frederick, popping up from another hole in the middle of the arctic region. “Oh, wow! Is this bit based on the Trans-Petrekov line?”
“Yes,” said Wilmot with a sudden grin. “It’s even got working cryovolcanoes. They erupt ice. Watch!” He reached underneath the layout and flicked a switch. There was a spark of energy and a loud bang, and one of the model volcanoes rocketed straight up in the air and struck the ceiling, where it exploded in a shower of papier-mâché. They all ducked. “Perhaps it was damaged in the quake,” said Wilmot.
Suzy picked a fragment of papier-mâché out of her hair. “Is this really the first earthquake Trollville’s ever had?” she said.
“Yes,” said Wilmot. “And not just the first in Trollville. It’s the first in all of Troll Territory, ever!”
“But that can’t be right,” she replied. “Everywhere gets earthquakes sometimes, even if they’re only minor ones. I don’t know what it’s like here, but the surface of my world is made up of things called tectonic plates. They’re like huge, rocky platforms that are always moving, although very slowly. Sometimes they grind together and cause earthquakes. It’s natural.”
“Is your world one of those spherical ones?” said Wilmot. “Because I’ve heard they have a few design flaws like that. Troll Territory was engineered differently.”
She gave him a blank look in response. “Engineered?”
“Yes.” He shrugged. “According to the legends, eons ago, we trolls never used to have a homeland of our own, so our ancestors decided to make one. They gathered the raw materials from all across reality, taking spare parts that other Impossible Places didn’t want, and bolted them all together to form Troll Territory. It doesn’t have any moving parts. It’s completely stable.”
“Until today,” put in Frederick. Suzy scowled at him.
“How could they build a whole world, though?” she asked. The idea was so huge that her mind was struggling to keep hold of it. “The technology you’d need to do that would have to be absolutely incredible.”
“Oh, it was,” said Wilmot. “According to the stories, our ancestors built huge magical machines that walked like giants and burrowed like moles. They say they could pick up whole mountains, and dig beds for rivers and oceans. No one’s ever seen technology like it since.”
Suzy frowned. “So is any of it true?”
“Nobody knows,” said Wilmot. “You know what legends are like. But it’s exciting to think about, isn’t it?”
Frederick leaned his elbows on the painted surface of an ice floe. “If it is true, do you think it could have something to do with the earthquake?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Wilmot. “Ancient engineering isn’t really my strong point. I prefer to build my worlds on a smaller scale.” He picked up a model locomotive that had been lying on its side and set it back on the rails.
“Can we give it a test run?” asked Frederick.
Wilmot smiled. “I was hoping you’d ask.”
He was reaching for the controls when the whole building groaned around them. There was a juddering, banging sound from inside the walls, and Suzy gripped the desk as the floorboards trembled beneath her. “It’s another earthquake!” she said.
Then the dull whump! of an explosion sounded from somewhere deep inside the house, and the other noises stopped abruptly. In the ensuing silence, Suzy heard raised voices and running feet downstairs.
“That wasn’t an earthquake,” said Wilmot. “Something’s happened!” He vanished beneath the layout, like a gopher into its hole.
Suzy gave the model railway a last look, and then followed him.
5
SPARE PARTS
Suzy, Wilmot, and Frederick raced downstairs to the rest home’s lobby and straight into several inches of water. It sprayed from the cracks in the walls and fountained up from between the floor tiles.
“What happened?” asked Suzy. “We heard an explosion.”
“It’s the plumbing!” cried Dorothy, who was splashing around in circles, distributing umbrellas to the nurses. “Where’s Fletch? He was supposed to be fixing it!”
With a lot of sloshing and muttered curses, Fletch appeared from a side door. He was dripping wet from head to foot.
“It wasn’t me!” he said. “It’s the central heatin’ boiler down in the basement. The circulator pump’s blown. Everythin’s backin’ up.”
Gertrude emerged from the residents’ lounge, with Stonker, Ursel, and the Old Guard in tow. “Can’t you shut off the water supply at the mains?” she said.
“Tried that,” said Fletch, a steady trickle of water dripping from the tip of his nose. “It must have been damaged by the quake, because it ain’t workin’.”
“Then what are we going to do?” said Gertrude. “The water’s going to do more damage than the earthquake if we let it carry on like this.”
Fletch wiped his dripping nose on his sleeve. “You got a spare pump?”
“No,” said Gertrude.
Fletch considered this for a second, while the water lapped around his ankles. “I can probably lash one together, if I can find the parts.”
“Then please find them quickly,” said Gertrude, her patience clearly at its breaking point. “Dorothy? Help me move the Old Guard up to their rooms, please. We can’t have them standing around in cold water.”
Dorothy set about herding the Old Guard toward the stairs, with Stonker’s help. Fletch, meanwhile, gave a perfunctory salute and kicked his way through the flood toward the front door. “You comin’, Ursel?” he called. “You know your way around a pump.”
“Hrrrnk,” said Ursel, and lumbered after him.
“And what should we do?” asked Suzy, squeezing against the banister to give the Old Guard room to get past.
Fletch sucked his breath in through his teeth, then motioned for her to follow. “The more eyes we’ve got lookin’, the quicker we get the job done,” he said. Suzy exchanged a determined look with Wilmot and Frederick, and the three of them hurried after Fletch.
* * *
Suzy’s sneakers squelched uncomfortably as she and the others followed Fletch onto the suspended walkway outside the rest home. It was fully dark now, but the trolls’ cleanup efforts continued undaunted—where the hanging lamps had failed, they worked by flashlight.
“Where are we supposed to find parts for a pump?” Suzy asked. “It’s nighttime and there’s been an earthquake. I don’t think any of the shops are going to be open.”
“This is Trollville,” Fletch replied, setting off at a brisk trot. “There’s always parts goin’ beggin’ if you know where to look for ’em.”
Ursel made a gruff chuckling sound in her throat.
They hurried along like this for a few minutes, following the walkway up spiraling ramps, through junctions, and around blind corners. It quivered beneath their feet in places, the struts anchoring it to the bridge having come loose, but at last it brought them to a broad crossroads, where three other walkways joined it. On the corner opposite them hung what looked like an enormous lean-to shed. Suzy wasn’t sure if it had suffered in the quake, but the whole building seemed to be leaning in every direction at once. Its large rolling doors stood open, and light spilled out from inside. A sign above the doors read T. LANE—MACHINE PARTS EXCHANGED.
“Totters will sort us out,” said Fletch, joining the steady flow of trolls trooping into the building. Most of them were streaked with grime and dust from the repair work, and Suzy noticed that each of them was carrying some sort of appliance or bit of machinery. Some of these were as simple as light switches and toasters, while others she couldn’t even begin to identify.
As they filed in, each troll presented their contraption to a small female troll sitting on a stool just inside the doors. She was as purple and wrinkled as a prune, but her bottle-green eyes were sharp and lively. She peered over a clipboard at each component, scribbled down a quick note with a stub of pencil on a string, and nodded to a large metal bin beside her. As each new arrival tossed their offering in, she tore a raffle ticket from one of three rolls on a toilet-paper roll holder on the wall beside her, and handed it over.
“Blue items only,” she told the portly young troll in front of Suzy and the others, and handed him a blue ticket. The other ticket rolls were red and yellow, Suzy noticed. The young troll shuffled off, looking disappointed.
“All right there, Totters?” said Fletch, stepping forward.
She looked him over, no doubt weighing the decision of whether or not to comment on his soaking-wet suit. “Fletch,” she said at last. “Empty-handed again, I see.”
He gave her an easy smile. “I would have brought somethin’ but it’s been a busy evenin’.”
“You’re telling me,” said Totters. “Lots of people needing parts in a hurry. Speaking of which, what can I do you for?”
“I’m lookin’ for a class-two triple-valve heat pump. It’s pretty urgent, so I brought some helpers with me.” He nodded at Suzy and the others. “Everyone? This here is Totters, the owner. There’s not a spare part in all of Troll Territory she can’t lay hands on.”
Totters cast an uninterested eye over the group before consulting her clipboard. She pursed her lips. “I don’t reckon I’ve got a triple-valve in stock right now,” she said. “But you’re welcome to scavenge for parts and make your own.” She pulled a handful of tickets from the rolls beside her. “I can do you one red, two yellow, and two blue,” she said, passing them to Fletch. “That should be enough for whatever you need.”
“I dunno what this city would do without you, Tots,” said Fletch, palming his tickets. “Just put it on my tab.”
Totters made a noise halfway between a laugh and a cough. “It’s a good thing I like you,” she said. “But I’ve been looking for a Cosmo Venturan power adaptor, if you’re in that neck of the woods anytime soon.”
Fletch winked. “I’ll bring you half a dozen.”
“Get on with you.” Totters favored him with a smile and waved them all in through the door.
Suzy stepped inside and looked around. They were in an indoor scrapyard, piled high with old mechanical detritus. Much of it seemed to be railway related—signals stood like a copse of trees in one corner, while an assortment of wheels, sleepers, and rails were stacked against the walls. In among it all were rows of shelves and a series of large industrial bins, painted either red, yellow, or blue. All were loaded with scrap, and forty or so trolls were jostling for space as they hurriedly inspected their contents.
