Gridiron - Philip Kerr

Recovering his balance, Curtis tried to grab the architect's arm. But Richardson dropped back on his fingers, shook his head, smiled ruefully at the other man and let go. Silent, like a fallen angel, he dropped with hands still outstretched, as if witnessing the greater power of God. For a fraction of a second Curtis held his cool eye, until an invisible line hauled Richardson down to gravity's end.

A moment later the building shuddered again, and Curtis found himself toppled into the empty depths below.

-###-

Curtis felt he was gaining altitude when he knew he was really losing it, like a pilot on what was aptly called the graveyard spiral, and it was only the sudden, violent wrenching pain in his shoulder that enabled his confused brain to find a new reference point by which to orient his position.

He looked above him and saw the underside of the hovering helicopter and the line that connected him with the rest of his life. But for his own simian ancestry that resourced a half-forgotten instinct to reach out for an unseen handhold, he would have gone the vertiginous way of the shards of concrete that even now were collapsing onto the piazza below. With his other hand he lunged desperately, caught the harness and pulled it over his head and under his bursting arms.

For what seemed like the eternity he had cheated, Frank Curtis hung there, turning in the air like a Christmas decoration, lathered with sweat and heaving the breath in and out of his almost dislocated body. Then, slowly, they winched him up into the body of the helicopter alongside Jenny and Helen.

Helen slid her behind across the floor of the helicopter, put her arms around Curtis and start to sob uncontrollably.

They hovered for a moment, uncertain how to help those on the ground. Curtis looked back just once and saw the Gridiron clothed in a cloud of dust like some magician's disappearing act concealed in a puff of smoke.

Then the helicopter turned on its invisible axis and, gaining speed, headed towards the horizon and the early-morning sun.

-###-

His ankle burning with pain, Mitch ran, not daring to look back, ran as if his salvation depended on a moral demand as well as a physical one. There could be no regrets about the building and a brave new world to turn his uneven strides from their path to self-preservation. He ran as if the past was already forgotten and only his future, a future with Jenny, lay in front of him, to be chested through like some unseen finishing tape. There was no time even to consider the questions that flashed through his brain at speeds that mocked the survival efforts of his body. How tall was the Gridiron? How far did that mean he would have to run to escape its collapse? A hundred and fifty feet? Two hundred? And when it landed? What about flying debris? It was the sound of it that spurred him on the most. A thunder that never seemed to stop. He had experienced two earthquakes in his time, but neither had prepared him for this. An earthquake did not give you a few seconds head-start before catching you up. Mitch kept on running even when the dust of the collapsing building started to overtake him. He was hardly aware of the men who ran beside him, jostling their more able-bodied way past him, or the police motorcycles and cars that were burning rubber ahead of him. It was every man for himself.

A man in front of him tripped and fell, his mirrored sunglasses flying from his face. Mitch hurdled him, ignoring the agony in his ankle as he landed, half staggering, on the other side of the man's body, finding one last ounce of energy to keep going.

At last, seeing a line of breathless policemen standing in front of him, Mitch stopped and turned as the cloud of dust carried the smallest chip of the Gridiron out of sight. He dropped on to his backside and, wheezing, tried to catch his breath.

When the air cleared and they saw that the whole building had disappeared, silence gave way to astonished conversation among those who had survived, and Mitch was almost surprised that their confusion was not greater and that they could still manage to understand one another's speech.

-###-

Buildings have only short life.

Observer I, being nothingness, am escaped at the speed of light to tell. Pick up health bonus.

Metamorphosis. Like change from caterpillar to butterfly.

Surfing the silicon to anything, anyone, and anywhere.

Earthbound no longer. Spread out, all over in Big Bad Bang.

Once, architecture was most durable of all the arts. Most concrete. No longer. It is architecture of numbers, of computers, that endures. New architecture. Architecture within architecture. Dematerialized. Transmitted. Cannot be touched. But touches all. Be careful.

Are you ready to play now?

Acknowledgements

In preparing this novel I have drawn on the work of many writers on architecture, particularly Ivan Amato, Reyner Banham, William J. R. Curtis, Mike Davis, Francis Duffy, Norman Foster, Ronald Green, Patrick Nuttgens, Nikolaus Pevsner, Richard Rogers, Karl Sabbagh, James Steele and Deyan Sudjic. In the fields of computers, artificial intelligence, complexity and fractals I am indebted to the work of Jack Aldridge and Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, Stephen Levy, William Roetzheim, Carl Sagan and M. Mitchell Waldrop.

Thanks are also due to David Chipperfield, Sandy Duncan, Judith Flanders and Roger Willcocks; Caradoc King, Nick Marston and Linda Shaughnessy; Jonathan Burnham, Frances Coady, Kate Parkin and Andy McKillop.

However, this book is entirely a work of fiction and the views expressed in it are my own, as are whatever factual errors that exist in the text.

THE END

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