TINKER BLOMP sighed long and softly.

It felt like a hard day's work had been completed and now was the time to sit back in the comfy chair and relax.

Yet he knew matters were not quite all resolved in this part of the world. There was that thing at the old abandoned fireworks factory which was worth a cursory look. Spreading good news could have its drawbacks when the recipients of such were not yet ready to receive certain messages in the way they were intended.

Thus the Tinker who loved a bit of juggling decided a more officious role was in order. He thumped the ground with his staff and shook himself all over.

There. All done.

His appearance had not changed at all. Still he looked a rather plump shambling figure in a dark shapeless robe with deep and curiously filled pockets. Upon his head was a pointed hat with a slight dent in it, caused many, many years ago by a cucumber. Every effort to get rid of that dent failed and he realised there was a significance there. Thus to offset the shabby he added some chic with a little bit of gilding on the rim of his hat.

None of this mattered to the people bustling around him as he sauntered up the shallow steps to a less populated area of Cherryball Flats known affectionately as the Death Zone.

It was here could be found some of the more hazardous industries that greased the wheels of Frangean industry. Toxic waste management was an expanding business here, a spreading concern to some and an oozing worry to everyone else.

Here too Shimmer Blane plied his trade in sudden expansions of his own making by means of explosive mixtures that were meant to bring fun with colour and glitter and sparkly displays. Sadly fireworks had the habit of falling into wrong hands and evolved into weapons of urban warfare. Still, it made a useful contribution to population control and slum clearance. If only it wasn't so noisy.

A sharp rap on a reinforced partition might thus go unregarded, unless it was a Tinker who had come to call.

"Who is it?" and the door opened in a shack surrounded by a concrete wall. It had the air of a bunker about it. The man who stood there blinked at the curious-looking visitor a moment and thought he looked a bit officious so he straightened his back. "Can I help you madam?" he offered.

Tinker Blomp cleared his throat and deepened his voice a few tones while stroking his beard meaningfully.

"Shimmer Blane?"

"Yes, uh sir?"

"I understand your licence to create massive unexpected and uncontrolled explosions had been revoked some years ago."

"Sorry?"

"Been reports of blasts coming from your old fireworks testing ground."

"That was ages ago, uh sir," the man said. He scratched at his straggly hair. Parts of his scalp were scarred and no hair grew there so any attempts at combing it into neatness would be hit and miss, so he had relinquished that particular activity a while back.

"Last spring, if the reports, and they were quite loud reports, are correct." Blomp ramped up the sense of officiousness to a higher level. It was great fun juggling with people this way as many were quite willing to confess to all sorts of things when in the presence of what appeared to be duly delegated authority.

"Oh, you mean them lads setting off rockets for fun like. I just rented them the place for a bit. Didn't see no money though, just ower notes."

"Ah, may I see them." Then Blomp coughed. "I think I should see them," for Shimmer Blane looked as if he wanted to demur on a request. A command however did the trick and in moments Tinker Blomp was in possession of names written with a curious flourish.

"Thank you for your time. We may be in touch in due course," he said by way of farewell.

"Who did you say you represented?" Shimmer felt obliged to ask.

"The future," Blomp said casually and waddled off in high delight at his discoveries.

***

OF COURSE WITH an extravagant signature like that, Teasel Marchmont had to be an entrepreneur. Only it appeared such glories were very much over as he washed dishes in a down-market eatery at the back of Savoury Drive. He seemed a forlorn figure. Blomp watched him discreetly while he officiously inspected the kitchen of the Stuffit Inn. The manager was most helpful on the qualifications of his employees.

"Good lads, most of 'em," he said. "Nice and clean. Take that Teasel there," and the man flinched on being noticed, especially where any sentence spoken in his hearing implied being taken somewhere. "Quiet worker, well organised. Likes the late hours he does. Got a future in scrubbing things clean, a vocation, a lifetime of it perhaps."

"Seems fitting," Blomp said inscrutably and then changed the subject to floor scrapings before pretending to sign off on a certificate which would be delivered to the establishment in due course.

"What organisation did you say you worked for again?" the manager said as he mopped his brow with relief and showed the bulky figure the back door, lest customers spotted him.

"Fit To Eat," Blomp said casually. "Check our on-grid presence. You might find you've been awarded a Spit Mark."

"Excellent, good day."

"Indeed," and the Tinker quickly sauntered along Savoury Drive in search of a connecting route to the Wisdom District, which quite wisely kept well clear of certain areas of Cherryball Flats.

It was his favourite district for here would be found attempts by mortal beings to fathom the eternal by the instrumentality of induction. Unravelling the mechanism of the universe was great fun in its way but could be overwhelming to some, especially those on the cusp of intellectual revelation, those troubled individuals known affectionately as students.

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A little knowledge goes a long way, dangerously at times and in the corridors of Academia that knowledge could trip up the most conscientous investigator.

It took a while for Tinker Blomp to find him, and when he did so he realised he had been just in time to save a talented mind from an irretrievable meltdown.

There he sat in a garden shed away from distractions known to some as parents. He was surrounded by printouts and flickering tablet screens that showed graphs and figures and three dimensional gridography that impressed the Tinker not a little.

Stane Mallix had the seed of genius in him. Shame really.

"Relax, boy," Blomp said softly as he saw the fretting figure scan documents with desperate gestures. A hand gently resting on the squat figure's shoulder seemed to relax him a little. "It has been taken care of."

"Really, uh professor?" a croaking voice said. Curious how Blomp's officious persona was perceived as a professorship to this lad, the Tinker observed to himself quietly. Curious indeed.

"Yes. You were right in everything you did, except for that decision to take on the assignment in the first place. That was a bit of poor judgement. Singing rockets, hmn?"

"It did seem silly in retrospect," Stane replied, relaxing enough to let some of the papers fall to the ground in front of him. Blomp took one up.

"See, this is quite right, in line with Mole's gravimetric algorithm."

"You know about it then? This distortion of the fundamentals, professor?"

"Ah yes. A bit of a quantum anomaly got entangled in the machinery I'm afraid. Got called in to fix it. Check your figures again with the source data."

The engineering student did so, having refused for so long to look at what seemed to him an inexplicable impossibility of universe-distorting proportions. Such a supposition had made him physically sick and he dared not glance over such an abomination again. Yet there was no hesitation this time and he plunged right in.

The expression on his face changed. His eyes brightened at what he was seeing. The error was not his, the error was not a world out of sync with reality. The error was a typo caused by a quantum array insertion amid crucial energy level vectors. Obviously.

"So my rockets would have done as they were supposed to," he cried happily, looking around. "Professor?"

He found himself alone, except for what looked like an ower note on the floor just by a slowly closing door. Stane Mallix went over to it, stretching stiff limbs for he had been squat down for some hours in turmoil, and gazed at the slightly grubby rectangle of this paper. He recognised his signature and an unreadable scribble that must belong to the advertising guy. Briefly he wondered what happened to him and whether it might be possible to get in contact with him again. Then he flipped the paper over, noting something was written there in strange emerald ink with a metallic sheen.

"Don't even think about it," was all it said.

***

MANSIONS OF the dead.

A grandiose name for repositories of the departed, but many there were who liked the idea their loved ones were comfortably settled.

It never ceased to attract Tinkers with a lot on their mind, these gatherings of remembrance that spanned generations, grouped families and created a city of departed souls that were so different from living cities. It was the silence of course. The sense also of being frozen in time as if everyone simply stopped what they were doing and laid down to rest all together on this one spot.

Tinker Blomp knew this was not true of course. Cemeteries grew like living things strangely enough. Every time he visited one to remind himself what he was Tinkering for, a future for those still living, accepting he could not save everyone, he felt a need to unburden himself with silent words of apology and forgiveness. And every time he would find another poor soul added to the roster among the mansions of the dead.

As with all new tenants, visitors would be frequent for a while before tailing off until one day no one ever came again. Here then, as Tinker Blomp toiled his way up the side of the sloping hill where this particular cemetery lay he saw a darkly dressed figure paying respects to a marble block jutting out of a grassy slope dotted with newly planted flowers. In the lush climate of Frangea the flowers were already threatening to riot all over the grave.

"Sallmer Weet," Tinker Blomp said, reading the name. "Forgive me," he added on seeing the other man turn, "I've disturbed your prayers."

"Not prayers," the other replied with a slight frown. "I am a man of science, though troubled by superstitious awe." Then he smiled, touching hands with the somewhat shambling figure who seemed somewhat of an officious nature. "Indeed," he continued, "I must ask your forgiveness. He was not a relative. A patient of mine I could not save. Doctor Falt, Mobius Falt." He stared again at the grave.

Tinker Blomp was struck by a thought.

"We cannot always save lives in spite of our best endeavours," he said.

"Would you think ill of me if I said I was to blame for this man's death?"

"That depends."

"I am, as I said, a man of science. This gentleman defied all attempts to cure him of the pain that blighted his life. Every time he came to me there was a pleading in his eyes, a begging to end the pain. I could do nothing for him and wished silently his suffering might end."

"You broke your oath?" Blomp said with a gasp.

"I did, and I did not," the doctor quickly replied. Again he stared at the carved name upon the marble tablet, sponsored as he read by a loving daughter. "I wished him well, I wished him at peace, and I told him I would try something new. That was the last I saw of him. I am a man of science, yet somehow feel responsible for his death. My sympathetic wishes brought his death upon him. A terrible accident befell him the moment after he left my office. He lingered a little and then passed on."

"You willed his death?"

"It seems so."

"Now he's at peace."

Doctor Falt looked away out over the valley.

"She chose a nice view for him, didn't she, the surviving daughter? He left a wife and son too, but only the daughter comes here. She sits by the tablet and gazes out over the view as if she were watching it with him. A comforting thought."

Tinker Blomp was unsure how to respond to this. The man seemed determined to take the blame for a coincidence. A guilty conscience was a strange creature, seeking to take up residence in the most innocent of souls.

He remembered the tragedy of the Mandrake family, crushed by a falling building. A cluster of graves appeared on the hillside one day and Blomp felt honour bound to pay his respects to young lives lost too soon. Yet there had been a survivor. A boy who went out to the shops and returned to find his loved ones gone forever.

Broken.

That was the word he kept using over and over. He felt appalling guilt at not being there with them amid the rubble, just as broken as they. The only thing he could think of from that moment onwards was to try to fix things, as if in doing so he was serving a penance for not being able to fix the broken bodies of his lost family.

Guilt and blame were two different things.

"You are a good man, Mobius," Tinker Blomp said. "Your desire to relieve the pain of those who suffer is as much of merit as finding an actual cure for what ails them. It is a desire to do good, an unchanging, unflinching determination to make difficult lives more endurable. Nothing in this world will stop cemeteries like this from growing, not until we all finally meet our end and the last survivor lays down to rest in eternal peace, unburied and unknown."

"There's a bleak prospect."

"Yes it is, and it is much my duty as it is yours to never let that happen."

The doctor looked at the other a moment, half registering his appearance in the fading light of evening.

"I did not catch your name?" he said.

"Oh, I'm nobody really. Just a busybody with too much time on my hands. Centuries of it in fact. Good evening," and he tipped the gilded brim of his hat before bustling down the winding path of the hill and out of the lives of the people of Frangea, for a little while longer at least.

The doctor watched him depart and then sat on the spot where he had seen the man's daughter sit. He too gazed out at the grassy slopes rising up to a line of forest trees. Then he glanced at the white marble briefly.

"I really hope you can see this view," he said companionably after a moment.