The snap! that locked the flange at the airship’s nose to the collar atop the mooring mast made the immense craft vibrate for a moment. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached the ground at New Liverpool at three fifty-eight local time. The weather is sunny, as you’ll have seen; local temperature is seventy-seven degrees. On behalf of the entire crew, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure serving you aboard the Upper California Limited these past two days. We hope you’ll fly with us again soon.”
Along with the rest of the passengers, Bushell filed toward the exit at the rear of the gondola. As always at the end of an airship flight, the sound of running, splashing water filled his ears as the ground crew pumped the ballast tanks to the very top to make the Upper California Limited less a plaything for the fickle wind.
A man shifted from foot to foot. After glancing around to make sure no women were in earshot, he said, “That noise always reminds me I should have gone to the jakes.” Bushell smiled, but thinly; the joke had to be as old as airships.
While the passengers descended the wheeled stairway the ground crew had attached to the exit door, their luggage slid down a metal ramp alongside. As soon as he started down the stairs, Bushell donned the snap-brim fedora he’d carried in his left hand. Once on the ground, he queued up to reclaim his bags. That took a while; the Negro clerk who gave them out lived up to his race’s reputation for fussy precision, meticulously comparing every claim check to the corresponding label on suitcase or trunk.
“Those two there,” Bushell said, pointing to his pigskin bags.
“Yes, sir,” the clerk replied, though his eyes said he looked at Bushell, as at everyone else, as a likely thief. “Give me your stubs, sir, and I’ll just go and see if they’re the proper ones.” He took the stubs, compared the numbers, and let out a loud “Huh!” when they matched. Bushell took the bags, tipped him a sixpence, and carried them off toward the parking garage a couple of hundred yards away. By the time he got to his steamer, his arms felt several inches longer. He opened the boot and tossed in the suitcases, then got behind the wheel and put his carpetbag on the seat beside him. The car had sat idle here for several days while he was in Victoria, so he’d shut off the burner under the boiler. That meant he’d have to get up steam before he could go.
He turned the key. A battery-powered sparker lit the burner. A twist of a dashboard knob brought the flame up to high. Then he had nothing to do but wait and watch the pressure gauge. He glanced at his pocket watch, wondering if he had time to go back to his flat before he reported to the Royal American Mounted Police office. He shook his head. No.
After eight or ten minutes, the pressure gauge eased off the zero peg. He reduced flame; maintaining pressure took a lot less kerosene than starting up. He released the brake, put the steamer in gear, and drove away. The garage attendant glanced at the date stamped on the ticket he presented, said, “That’ll be two pounds even, sir,” and accepted the blue banknote he proffered with a word of thanks and the brush of a forefinger against the brim of his flat cloth cap.
Traffic, light near the airship port, picked up as Bushell made his way toward the heart of New Liverpool. Not for the first time, he marveled at how the sleepy Franco-Spanish village of Los Angeles had, in the century and a third since its incorporation into the North American Union, grown into a great and thoroughly Brittanic city.
Oh, a fair number of the people in cars, on bicycles, and walking on the sidewalks showed Nuevespañolan blood. In manner and dress, though, most of them were not easily distinguishable from their Anglo-Saxon and Celtic counterparts of similar class.
Clothes didn’t make the man, but they gave an experienced observer like Bushell a good idea of how he earned his bread: laborers in overalls and cloth caps; jacketless clerks, some also wearing caps, others in straw boaters; junior businessmen in wide-legged trousers and striped jackets with high, pointed lapels, generally in fedoras with snap or round brims but sometimes choosing straws; more senior businessmen in tighter-fitting pants and longer jackets of somber black or brown or blue, many with cravats in public-school patterns, almost all wearing waistcoats and homburgs or narrow-brimmed derbies. A few men showed they were on holiday with their tennis whites or cricketers’ caps. By their clothing, the Negro men Bushell saw might all have been captains of industry. Most of them, though, were undoubtedly civil servants, even if they did affect the quiet elegance of the moneyed classes. But for those who wore the black dress and white apron that marked servants, women enjoyed more latitude in their dress than men. Age and fashion spoke louder than class. Older women’s dresses still brushed the sidewalk, as they had in Victoria’s day. Their daughters and granddaughters, though, displayed not only ankles but several inches of shapely calf in pleated linen skirts of bright, flowery hues.
“Irene,” Bushell muttered, and gripped the steering wheel with unnecessary force. She’d been older than most women who’d adopted the daring new style a few years before, but no one who saw her in one of those short skirts would have denied she had the legs to wear them. No one at all ... He pulled into the carpark next to the Royal American Mounties’ headquarters just as the bells of the Anglican cathedral across the street rang five. When he parked, he put the steamer in neutral, set the hand brake, and turned the burner flame down to its lowest setting, just enough to keep the steam live in the boiler and let him drive off without having to wait and get it up again. RAMs greeted him as he got out of the car and headed for the office, carpetbag in hand: “Welcome back, Colonel!” “Hope you gave the red-tape artists in Victoria the what-for.” A couple of men asked anxiously, “How does the appropriation look for next year?” New Liverpool was a long way from the capital of the NAU; everyone worried about being forgotten when budget time rolled around.
“General Bragg says we have nothing to worry about,” Bushell answered, to the visible relief of his questioners. They knew he and Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg had been friends since their days as subalterns in the army; if the RAMs’ commandant told Bushell the appropriation would be all right, you could rely on it.
Bushell went up the marble steps and into the office building. He exchanged more greetings with the men he met there, but didn’t pause to chat. As he headed for the stairway, someone behind him said, “He’s got his business face on already.”
“No - still,” someone else answered, just loud enough for him to catch. He took the stairs quickly, and was breathing a little hard by the time he reached the third floor. That annoyed him, and made him think less kindly of the large and excellent luncheon he’d eaten aboard the airship. As if to exorcise the ghost of that luncheon, he half trotted down the hall to his office. Gilt letters on the door stared at him as he fumbled for his keys:
COLONEL THOMAS BUSHELL, CHIEF
UPPER CALIFORNIA SECTION
ROYAL AMERICAN MOUNTED POLICE
One of these days, they’d scrape off his name and rank and replace them with someone else’s. The rest of the legend could stay the same. That would save the ratepayers money. He turned the key in the lock, opened the door, closed and locked it after him. The office was twilight gloomy, the Venetian blinds closed so the late-afternoon sun only painted two rows of little glowing dots across the near wall. Instead of opening the blinds, Bushell flicked the switch by the door. A bare bulb mounted in a ceiling fixture filled the office with harsh, yellow light. The wooden swivel chair behind the heavy oak desk squeaked as Bushell lowered his weight into it. It squeaked again when he leaned back and stared at the opposite wall. Between a tall, oak file cabinet that matched the desk and a bookcase crowded with statute books, legal tomes, and criminological texts hung a framed color print of The Two Georges. Just below it was a rectangular patch where the wallpaper was of a slightly darker blue than anywhere else in the office, as if another picture had hung there until recently.