girl stood up quite straight – then she confidently stepped onto the metal beam that had once supported the fire escape floor, her fingers almost within touching distance of the balloon now, but not quite. For one whole minute the child stood completely still and then, very slowly, she took her hands from the safety rail, spread her arms wide like a tightrope walker might, and continued to pursue the balloon by stepping one foot exactly in front of the other along the narrow iron strut that jutted from the building.
The woman on the sidewalk gasped, unsure if she should call out, or if her cry might cause the girl to lose her balance and fall. She could neither run for help nor warn the child – so she just stood there rooted to the ground, waiting for tragedy to play out.
The girl, unaware of the woman’s dilemma, was interested only in the label tied to the balloon’s string. What did it say?
She grabbed for it but as she did so her foot slipped, she toppled forward and, with yellow balloon in hand, fell towards earth.
The woman on the sidewalk covered her eyes and screamed and a man walking his dog froze.
As the child fell she thought about Agent Deliberately Dangerous and his amazing floating cloak – a gravity-defying garment that always brought him safely back down to earth. She thought about what she had eaten for breakfast: a bowl of Puffed Pops and two whole glasses of banana milk. Was this enough to make the difference between floating like a leaf and plummeting like a stone? She thought about what noise she would make when she hit the sidewalk. Would it make a boing sound like that Looney Toons dog, or would she land, cat-like, on her feet?
And just as it seemed she was going to smack down hard on the tarmac, something amazing happened. A truck drew up – it belonged to the Twinford featherbed company – and the little girl landed with a puff, plumb-square in the middle of it. Of course all of this happened in the space of 3.2 seconds but it played out in cartoon time.
A couple of blocks away, when the truck stopped at a red light, the child climbed out unnoticed and walked back to the party, balloon in hand.
When she got to the street corner she paused to examine the tag. Disappointingly, there was no message; it was entirely blank, save for an image of two eyes tightly shut. Still, she untied it from the balloon’s string and tucked it in her pocket. She had gone to a lot of trouble to get it and in any case who knew when a brown label might come in handy?
She let go of the smiling balloon and it climbed back into the sky until it was so high it was no longer visible.
The woman from the sidewalk searched and searched but there was no sign, no visible trace of the girl who had fallen from the sky.
WHEN RUBY REDFORT WAS EIGHT SHE TOOK PART IN AN EXPERIMENT. She and thirty-three other participants were asked to watch a piece of film which showed six people – three in white T-shirts and three in black T-shirts – throwing basketballs to each other. The task was to count the number of times the players in white passed the ball.
Ruby counted sixteen passes.
This was the correct answer.
She also noticed the gorilla.
Or more accurately, the man in the gorilla suit who walked across the basketball court, stopped, beat his chest and strolled out of shot.
Fifteen of her co-watchers noticed this too.
Ruby also noticed that one of the three players dressed in black departed the game when the gorilla appeared.
Five of her co-watchers noticed this too.
Ruby noticed the curtain in the background change colour, from red to orange.
Zero of her co-watchers noticed this.
The psychologists conducting the experiment declared that Ruby was a remarkably focused individual, but also had an extraordinary ability to see everything all at once.
Aside from the things Ruby had spotted in the content of the film, she had also noticed one of her co-watchers (the one with the mole on her left cheek) sticking a piece of chewing gum (the brand was Fruity Chews) under the adjacent seat, another (the guy with the hayfever) knocking over his glass of water, and a third (a woman with a Band-Aid on her fourth finger) anxiously twisting her earring (she was wearing mismatched socks, very slightly different shades of green).
Not that any of these three observations had anything to do with the experiment Ruby was taking part in.
Some several years later. . .
RUBY REDFORT LOOKED DOWN.
She could see the traffic moving like little inching bugs, far, far beneath her feet. She could feel a hot breeze on her face and hear the muffled sounds of car horns and sirens. It was a day like most of the days had been that summer – too hot to be comfortable; the sort of heat that brought irritability and rage and left a sense of general malaise.
Ruby surveyed the whole beautiful picture that was Twinford City – all detail gone from this height, just the matrix of streets and building blocks; huge skyscrapers punctuating the grid. Outside the city, the big beyond: desert to the east, ocean to the west and mountains marching north. From up here on her ledge she could see the giant blinking eye that was the logo of the city eye hospital, with its slogan beneath it: “the window to your soul”.
The eye-hospital sign had been there since 1937 and was something of a landmark. People actually travelled downtown to have their picture taken with the neon eye winking above them.
As Ruby sat there on the ledge of the Sandwich, she was contemplating recent events, and the various ways she had almost met her death – the past couple of months had offered a range of possibilities. Death by wolf, death by gunshot, death by exposure, death by cliff fall, death by fire. In one way it didn’t make for happy reminiscing, but in another it sort of did. She was alive after all, because somehow she had dodged bullets – metaphorical and literal – and was now sitting calmly watching the world go by. It was unlike Ruby to dwell on things, but Mr Death had come so close to knocking at her door that she found herself fascinated by the very thought of it.
Now here she was sitting on the window ledge of a skyscraper, with news of an approaching storm on its way. Some would regard this as a risky activity. Ruby did not. Disappointingly, as far as she was concerned, at this exact moment there were no gusting winds, no adverse weather conditions, not even a stray pigeon looking to take a peck out of her. She judged her spot on Mr Barnaby H. Cleethorp’s windowsill to be no more dangerous than sitting on a park bench in Twinford Square. Well, that wasn’t quite true; there was the danger that Mr Cleethorps would finish his meeting with her father early and they would both give her grief for parking her behind on the ledge of his seventy-second-floor window and playing fast and loose with gravity. But it was hardly the high-octane excitement Ruby had become used to during the past five months as a Spectrum Agent.
Ruby
