Gull by Glenn Patterson Page B

hold you to them. Until this point the clock has been ticking down. From here on it is ticking away. You know the principle of the away rule, don’t you? Everything against you counts double.’
    Randall had not the first idea about the away rule, but he understood the import of the metaphor.
    To replace it with one of his own: the longer the delay the deeper the shit they were likely to find themselves in.
    The only thing he could do was to help keep the preparations here on track, be ready.
    *
    The way it was explained to Liz and her co-workers, they had to be familiar with every stage of the assembly process so that in the event of an emergency – ‘Armageddon’ was the word Mr Bennington had used, and coming from him you could well imagine it – any one of them could stand in for any other, all the others, and finish the cars single-handed. (‘Because make no mistake,’ Bennington said, ‘if anything can emerge from Armageddon other than the cockroaches it’ll be our cars.’) Hence the months, and months, of training.
    To begin with they were in the old carpet factory, watching videotapes and live demonstrations, being introduced to the DMC-12 part by part and to the tools they would be using to put those parts together, tools , as Liz soon learned, being a term that covered everything from a wire brush to the enormous dies – the size and shape almost of landing craft – in which the fibreglass bodies were to be moulded. A handful of completed bodies were already in circulation for them to practise on. ‘Mules’ they referred to them as and approached them to begin with as though they might actually get a bite off them or an almighty and unexpected kick.
    As the new buildings took shape and more and more of the equipment was installed the workers were walked through them, group tours, two, three times a week: here – the body-press shop – is where those dies would operate in the fullness of time; there – the chamber with concrete piers and desolate air of a concentration camp that never failed to give her the creeps – would be the ovens for curing the bodies for fettling (a good old-fashioned scrub, the task of the wire brushes) and transport by cranes – for the moment hypothetical – to the assembly shop, which was, or would be, a whole other world again.
    They had been shown photographs of the Tellus carriers, which were somewhere between a low platform and a species of lunar vehicle, in length and breadth a foot or two bigger than the car bodies they would move around the assembly shop under instruction from a computer. The track that they would run on (Liz remembered the boys’ Scalextric, its cars more often off than on) had already been laid down one side of the shop starting at the point where what they called the trim line – all the internal wiring – and the chassis line were to meet and the body and chassis ‘mated’, a word that, when it came up in the tours, never failed to raise a laugh and a few choice comments: how many screws does it take...?
    At intervals along the carriers’ route other lines would come in at right angles, bringing the engines, the stainless steel panels, those outrageous doors, and finally the seats and the wheels, at which point the car would be transferred on to another contraption – a rolling road (it went nowhere but round on itself) – to test its brakes before the big roller door in the bottom left corner of the shop was raised and out into the world it would go.
    Eight minutes’ worth of fuel was all that it was to have in its tank, that being to the precise second what was required to take it through the Emissions and Vehicle Preparation shed, whatever that was, once round the test track and up the ramp of the transporter that would carry it to the docks.
    Liz learned it like a catechism, recited every night with the prayer that Robert was wrong, that tomorrow or the next day or the next week at the latest they would start and build a bloody