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various travel arrangements required, beginning with the good old GWR to trundle me from the gleaming lofty brow of the metrop to the hearty working-man’s backbone that was Bristol.
     
    It is, they say, where those genius engineering chappies Brunel and Jessop had gotten much of their start. Locks, docks, and floating harbours … railways, steamships, airships … more factories and manufacturies than you could shake a fish at. Or is it shake a fist at? Either way.
     
    But, for each genius engineering chap like Jessop or Brunel, and each genius business-and-commerce chap like George Plimsby, there must be thousands of the non-genius everyday laborer chappies. Which meant that, overall, it wasn’t the prettiest of places, to be sure. Rough-handed, bustling, and sweaty. Still and all, it’s what makes civilized life possible for the rest of us, hey what?
     
    After the train, it was a chug-a-tug down the river and into the aforementioned floating harbour, which did not float
per se
but had something to do with locks and ships and whatnot. There’s an immense concrete and steel spire out there, sunk through into the bedrock, or some such, with an inner revolving axle. Tethered to that by the thickest cable I’ve ever clapped the oculars to was George Plimsby’s vast hovering monstrosity.
     
    Don’t get me wrong; I’ve nothing against flying. I’ve taken the odd whirl in a whirligig and done the trans-oceanic via airship before. Very different, the dirigibles, the soundproof cabins, the take-off from a sky-tower mooring station and all. You’re up in the clouds before you know what’s what. Quiet, and smooth. Like a balloon, up up and away, a drink in your hand and not a care in the world.
     
    Plimsby’s factory is another kettle of gears. The size of a town in its own right, it’s kept perpetually aloft by grinding airscrews and roaring propellers that would give tornadoes a run for their money. A liftavator ascends the spire to a rather gantry-like topmost platform. Then, a fellow finds himself climbing into a suspended gondola that carries him up along the angled cable on motorized pulleys.
     
    We Wilmotts aren’t usually bothered by heights, as a rule, but every rule does have its exceptions.
     
    I do admit, the ride
was
spectac in the scenery department, if quite the white-knuckler. Scarier, somehow, than any of the airship trips I’d been on. More … real, in a way. The wind, for instance. Could have done with some enclosed windows on that gondola, rather than open-sided waist-high rails.
     
    I could see everything, and in greater detail than was strictly soothing to the nerves. Smokestacks, chimneys, slanted rooftops, crowded streets, colleges and hospitals and churches packed in among manufacturies, the occasional spot of green for a park or winding ribbon of a waterway … that famed suspension bridge across the Avon, that marvel of modern design, looking like something someone’s kid brother might have knocked together with a builder’s set for his toy automotives…
     
    All in all, stunning view, squirrelly on the nerves. Not so distant and indistinct as to be meaningless, but vivid enough that a person could readily imagine — whether he wanted to or not — the fall if that cable let go. By the time the gondola reached the factory, my knees were shakier than Moggy’s plan. I’d had ample occasion for first, second and third thoughts by then, not that any of them were sparking the bulbs.
     
    Honestly, it
had
made some sort of sense when he laid it all out for me. I’d agreed, after all. I might have come up with something similar myself.
     
    Plimsby had, you see, entrusted Moggy with securing new accounts. Moggy reasoned that he’d make a better impression on the old man if he could land some juicy prospects snap out of the gate.
     
    Hence, this viscount fellow, who was quite interested in placing an advance order for the upcoming line of the latest model of the whatever-it-was. He,