“You don’t hate the revolution,” I said. I waved a trail of smoke. “Civil war, terror, censorship, shortages, dictatorship—yeah, I’m sure you hate all that. But it’s still the beginning of socialism. It’s still the revolution, isn’t it?”

“Not my revolution!”

“You were never a wanker,” I said. “Don’t mistake me for one, either.”

He tossed his cigarette into the running gutter, and continued the arm movement in a wave.

“So why … all this?”

“We have perfected this machine,” I said.

He gave me a long look.

“Ah,” he said. “I see. Like that, is it?”

“Like that,” I said.

I held the door open for him as we went back in. The telly over the bar was showing yet another clip of the disastrous flight. Bob laughed as the door swung shut behind us.

“You didn’t perfect that machine!”

We picked our way through the patrons to the gang, who by now had shoved two tables together and were all in the same huddle of heads.

“Describe what happened,” I said, as we re-joined them. “At the Jardin.”

“Well,” Bob began, looking puzzled, “we all saw what was claimed to be an anti-gravity flying machine rise in the air and blow up. And some of us think—”

“No,” I said. I banged the table. “Listen up, all of you. Bob is going to tell us what he saw.”

“What do you want me to say?” Bob demanded. “I saw the same as the rest of you. I was just inside the park, I saw it on my phone and when the thing cleared the treetops I saw it with my own eyes. The machine, or what we’d been told was a machine, rose up—”

“Not that,” I said. “Start from when you got to the park.”

Bob frowned. “The Place was crowded. I couldn’t see what was happening around the crate. There were people in the way, trees …” He shrugged. “What’s to say?”

“Describe the trees. Think back to looking up at them.”

Bob sipped the dregs of the green drink in front of him, shaking his head.