“Fred Harvey is a man of whom the Empire may be proud,” Bushell answered, “and his sons and grandsons have maintained his tradition.” He waved out the window to the grand aerial vista spread out before them.
A waiter handed out menus, then retired to give the diners time to make their choices. Bushell was torn between the salmon poached in white wine and the larded tenderloin of beef in Madeira sauce. At last he chose the latter because it would go well with a Bordeaux whose acquaintance he’d been lucky enough to make the night before.
“A very sound selection,” his corpulent table companion said when he gave his choice to the waiter. “A splendid year, 1981, and just now coming into full maturity.” He picked the salmon himself, and a pinot blanc of formidable heritage.
Far below, dust devils swirled over the red-brown desert ground. The wind that kicked them up also beat against the airship. The passenger gondola rocked slightly, as if it were a boat on a rippling pond. The sommelier arrived just then with the wine. After the ritual of the cork, he poured. The headwind made the wine stir in its goblet, but it did not come close to spilling.
“Better than traveling by sea,” the fat man said as the wine steward poured his fancy white. “There they put the tables on gimbals, to keep the food from winding up in the passenger’s laps. And it would be a pity to waste this lovely wine on my trousers. They haven’t the palate to appreciate it.” He chuckled wheezily.
Bushell raised his goblet in salute. “His Majesty, the King-Emperor!” he said. He and his companion both sipped their wine to the traditional toast heard round the world in the British Empire.
“I drink to headwinds,” the fat man said, lifting his glass in turn. “If they make us late getting into New Liverpool, we shall be able to enjoy another supper in this splendid establishment.”
“I shouldn’t drink to that one,” Bushell said. “I have enough work ahead of me to want to get to it as soon as I can. However - ” He paused, remembering supper the night before, then brought the goblet to his lips. The fat man laughed again.
The waiters began serving. Conversation in the dining room ebbed, supplanted by the gentle music of silver on silver. Meals aboard the Upper California Limited deserved, and got, serious attention. Bushell’s tenderloin was fork-tender and meltingly rich, the dry wine in the Madeira sauce bringing out the full flavor of the beef. The tenderloin was a generous cut, but when it was gone he found himself wishing it had been larger.
Across the table from him, the fat man methodically demolished his salmon. Bushell had chosen a plate of cheese and apple slices for dessert, but the fat man devoured something Teutonically full of chocolate and cream and pureed raspberries. When he leaned back in his chair, replete at last, he was even more florid than he had been before the meal.
He drew a silver case from the inner pocket of his jacket. “D’you mind, sir?”
“By no means.” Bushell took out his own case, chose a cigar from it, and struck a lucifer. He savored the mild smoke. The aroma of the fat man’s panatela said he was as much a connoisseur of tobacco as he was of fine wine.
Bushell savored his feeling of contentment with the world; he knew it too seldom. He leaned back in his chair, peered out the window once more. Suddenly he pointed. “Look! There’s an aeroplane!”
“Where?” The fat man stared. “Ah, I see it. Not a sight one comes across every day.”
“Not in peacetime, certainly,” Bushell said. The aeroplane flashed by at breathtaking speed, twin wings above and below its lean, sharklike fuselage providing lift. It was gone before Bushell got more than a glimpse of the blue, white, and red roundel on its flank that announced it belonged to the Royal North American Flying Corps.
The fat man puffed moodily on his cigar. “So much speed is vulgar, don’t you think?”
“Useful for the military,” Bushell answered. “In civilian life, though, there’s not usually much point to dashing across the continent in ten or twelve hours. You hardly have the time to accomplish anything while you’re traveling.”
“Quite, quite.” The fat man’s jowls wobbled when he nodded. “If you need to get anyplace in such a tearing hurry, chances are you’ve either started too late or, more likely, put less thought into your journey than you should have.”
“Just so.” Bushell finished his cigar and then, with a nod to his table companion, excused himself and went back to his stateroom. He knew how much he still had to accomplish before the Upper California Limited docked itself to the mooring mast in New Liverpool.
When he got back to his desk, he lit another cigar and plunged once more into paperwork. As much as anything could, the smoke relaxed him. In the early days of dirigibles, when inflammable hydrogen filled their gasbags, such a simple pleasure would have been forbidden as deadly dangerous. But coronium, though its lifting power was slightly less, had the great advantage of being immune to the risk of fire. Tapping his ash into a cut-glass tray, Bushell gave silent thanks to technical progress. He had so immersed himself in his reports that he started when the captain came on the ceiling speaker and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we shall be mooring in New Liverpool about an hour from now, just before four in the afternoon, very close to our scheduled arrival time. I hope you have enjoyed your flight aboard the Upper California Limited, and that - ”
Bushell stopped listening and went back to work. About forty minutes later, he found himself rubbing his eyes. At first, he thought they were just tired. Then he laughed. “I’m nearly home: I can feel it in the air,” he murmured. Although New Liverpool drew most of its power from electric plants far away, the valleys in which the city nestled had a way of trapping the fumes of burnt kerosene from steam cars, along with factory smoke and locomotive exhaust, until they sometimes made the air almost as bad as it got in London.
The policeman got up, stretched, and packed the reports on which he’d labored so mightily into his carpetbag. After checking to make sure he was leaving nothing behind in the stateroom, he went to the lounge to watch the dirigible land. The lounge was packed; a good many others had the same idea. The Upper California Limited glided over the streets and suburbs of New Liverpool toward the airship port, a great flat expanse of macadam hard by the Pacific, south and west of the central core of the city. But New Liverpool sprawled in a way different from cities in the eastern provinces of the NAU. Because earthquakes visited the Californias so often, buildings above a dozen stories were forbidden here. New Liverpool had grown out, not up.
“Look!” someone said. “You can read the traffic commandments painted on the highways down there.”
“And look at the steamers and the electric coaches,” someone else chimed in. “They’re tiny as toys.”
Off to the north, a train, also seemingly toy-sized, rolled toward the station. Private cars were wonderful for getting about inside a town, but trains and airships traversed the vast reaches of the North American Union far more efficiently.
Down on the sidewalks, antlike people pointed and waved up to the Upper California Limited. They and their conveyances swelled as the dirigible continued its descent toward the airship port. Bushell spied the great silver shapes of two other airships already berthed at their masts. The muted roar of the Upper California Limited’ s motors lessened as it neared its own mooring mast. The airship slowed until it was all but hovering, like an enormous, elongated soap bubble. The captain let down the landing lines. A swarm of overall-clad groundcrew men - about half and half, pale Irish and brown Nuevespañolans - seized the lines and began the job of tethering the airship to the ground once more.