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returned to the dark area beneath the bulk of the city, and walked out between the tracks to the sunlight.
    Malchuskin was exhorting his unwilling labourers to unload the bogie of its rails and sleepers, and he hardly noticed that I had returned.

 
     
5

    The days passed slowly, and I made no more return visits to the city.
    I had learned the error of my ways by throwing myself too enthusiastically into the physical side of the track-work. I decided to follow Malchuskin’s lead, and confined myself in the main to supervising the hired labourers. Only occasionally would he and I pitch in and help. Even so, the work was arduous and long, and I felt my body responding to the new labours. I soon felt fitter than I had ever done in my life before, my skin was reddening under the rays of the sun, and soon the physical work became less of a strain.
    My only real complaint was with the unvarying diet of synthesized food and Malchuskin’s inability to talk interestingly about the contribution we were making to the city’s security. We would work late into the evenings, and after a rough meal we would sleep.
    Our work on the tracks to the south of the city was nearly complete. Our task was to remove all the track and erect four buffers at a uniform distance from the city. The track we removed was carried round to the north of the city where it was being re-laid.
    One evening, Malchuskin said to me: “How long have you been out here?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “In days.”
    “Oh … seven.”
    I had been trying to estimate it in terms of miles.
    “In three days’ time you get some leave. You have two days inside the city, then you come back here for another mile.”
    I asked him how he reckoned the passage of time in terms of both days and distance.
    “It takes the city about ten days to cover a mile,” he said. “And in a year it will cover about thirty-six and a half.”
    “But the city isn’t moving.”
    “Not at the moment. It will be soon. Anyway, we don’t take account of how much the city has actually moved, so much as how much it should  have moved. It’s based on the position of the optimum.”
    I shook my head. “What does that mean?”
    “The optimum is the ideal position for the city to be. To maintain that it would have to move approximately a tenth of a mile every day. That’s obviously out of the question, so we move the city towards optimum whenever we can.”
    “Has the city ever reached optimum?”
    “Not as long as I can remember.”
    “Where’s the optimum now?”
    “About three miles ahead of us. That’s about average. My father was out here on the tracks before me, and he told me once that they were then about ten miles from optimum. That’s the most I’ve ever heard.”
    “But what would happen if we ever reached optimum?”
    Malchuskin grinned. “We’d go on digging up old tracks.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the optimum’s always moving. But we’re not likely to reach optimum, and it doesn’t matter that much. Anywhere within a few miles of it is O.K. Put it this way… if we could get ahead of optimum for a bit, we could all have a good long rest.”
    “Is that possible?”
    “I guess so. Look at it this way. Where we are at the moment the ground is fairly high. To get up here we had to go through a long stretch of rising country. That was when my father was out here. It’s harder work to climb, so it took longer, and we got behind optimum. If we ever come to some lower country, then we can coast down the slope.”
    “What are the prospects of that?”
    “You’d better ask your guild that. Not my concern.”
    “But what’s the countryside like here?”
    “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
    Though I hadn’t followed much of what Malchuskin said, at least one thing had become clear, and that was how time was measured. I was six hundred and fifty miles old; that did not mean that the city had moved that distance during my lifetime, but that the optimum had.
    Whatever the