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then, under the ground?”
    Lucas Mucus shook his cropped head. “On the contrary, very much over the ground, as it happens.”
    “Oh, yes!” crowed Ffog. “And where do you propose to put it?”
    Mucus took up a pointer. “Here, here, here, here and here,” he dipped variously about the borough.
    Clyde Ffog looked baffled. Ms Naylor said, “I think you’d better demonstrate, Lucas.”
    “Certainly, madam. If you would be so kind, Julian.”
    Julian smiled, nodded and, stooping, withdrew from a compartment in the trolley a glittering object approximately a third of the size of the model village. It had much the look of a flat star which contained at its centre a dancehall mirror-globe. Julian held it out proudly before the assembly. “The Star Stadium,” he said. If he had been hoping for a round of applause then he was to be sorely disappointed.
    “And where would you like to stick that?” asked Ffog pointedly.
    “Lucas, if you would be so kind.”
    Lucas nodded with politeness and pressed a small button at the side of the model. There was a hiss of hydraulics, and from each of the five locations previously appointed arose a telescopic column. When these had risen to their full extent, Julian stepped forward and placed the “star” gently upon them, tip upon tip. “Wallah,” he said.
    Lucas made free with his pointer. “The columns will be five hundred feet high,” he said proudly. “Traffic will flow into the North and East legs directly from the Great West Road, to rise upon a continuous belt lift to parking bays beneath the stadium. Each area between star tip and sphere houses an Olympic village, the central sphere a stadium seating five hundred thousand, swimming pools, full games complexes, etc., etc., etc.”
    “Hold on, hold on,” blustered Clyde Ffog. “You are seriously proposing to hang this thing above Brentford? Apart from the obvious dangers, it will plunge half the town into permanent darkness.”
    “Do you think so?” Julian asked. “Look closely at the model.”
    Clyde Ffog gave the thing a good squinting. To his amazement he realized that the stadium cast no shadow. “There is no shadow!” he exclaimed.
    “That heap big medicine by any reckoning,” declared Barry.
    “A scientific breakthrough,” said Lucas. “The top of the stadium is covered in solar cells, these absorb light and project it through similar cells on the underside. In fact, when the real stadium is completed it will appear literally invisible from below, there will simply be the appearance of a clear sky.”
    “If not talking out back of loincloth then that technological miracle of first magnitude,” Barry said, nodding respectfully. “Nobel prize in that for inventor.”
    “That is only one small miracle,” said Lucas. “You mentioned obvious danger did you not?”
    Clyde nodded fiercely, “What if the whole shebang falls down on Brentford? Don’t tell me you can put up a thing like that without something getting dropped, or falling off!”
    “Julian,” said Lucas. Julian reached into his trouser pocket and withdrew a flat black disc about the size of an old penny. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘Gravitite’. A self-buoyant polysilicate which has rather special qualities.” He held the disc between thumb and forefinger and then released it. To general amazement and gasps of disbelief it did not fall to the floor, as one might reasonably expect. Instead it remained where it was, suspended in the air in defiance of all the laws of nature, or some of them at least.
    “That not heap big medicine,” said Barry Geronimo. “That fucking impossible!”
    “Not really,” said Julian Membrane. “You see, it is not actually defying gravity. The disc is falling, but it is falling so slowly that its movement is scarcely perceptible. So you see the stadium is really only moored to the five columns. During the two months or so it is in use it will fall possibly two inches or so.”
    Even though he felt