Limpkin took with him a folder from Trebbly: recommendations, requisitions, plans, blueprints, and duplicates of plans being sent for deciphering.
When he arrived home, three weeks later, Limpkin found that the Office of Reconstruction had been renamed the Admiralty; George XXVIII thought it had a rather appropriate air, but Limpkin suspected that the slow-witted monarch had just not grasped the idea that the ship was to fly instead of float. He saw that Moresly was moving along nicely at the Armories and was already beginning to turn out plans for dummy transformers and real power lines that could be set up at the rate of a mile a night.
The first large convoy of common people was preparing to shove off within the month; a contingent of engineers and scientists had already left with enough personnel to more than double Trebbly's force.
Within six months of Limpkin's return, two remarkable events took place. A small dam, not more than fifty feet across, was actually completed; equally amazing, its miniature hydroelectric plant worked. Then, with some secret help from Moresly's rapidly expanding force, a telegraph line was strung from the capital to Kelph on the Tyne, the main jumping-off spot for the Yards.
The day after the line was finished, a ball was held on the grass at Palace Park—the weather being exceedingly mild for that time of year—the first one so staged in over a century. Limpkin with his inherited collection of psychological studies made the most of the affair: speeches by all the great men involved in the project, fireworks, dancing. At midnight George, with his Council in attendance, mounted a pavilion and slowly tapped out the word "begin" over and over on an ancient telegraph key. A crude electric light displayed the dots and dashes to the watching crowd until it burned out halfway through the sixth "begin." Miles away, at a dock at Kelph, a fast galley saw another light blink out the word; it shoved off for the Yards, its captain carrying the order to Trebbly.
Almost exactly a week later the order reached the Yards and the first section of the Victory's keel was lifted into place. Four years after that, the entire keel was finished.
A grand ceremony was held in the Yards and in the Caroline Empire (for so it was now named) to celebrate the completion of the keel. But the whole thing was turned into a rather dismal affair when George XXVIII, who had been lapsing in and out of insanity for the past couple of years, died. And to compound the genuine sorrow that the nation felt for the kindly half-wit, Sir Henry Limpkin, O.O.C., D.S.C., K.O.S., followed the monarch soon afterward. The Council assumed rule of the Empire until George's son Clement came of age and as its first official act made Limpkin the Viscount of Westwatch; his widow said that she was overcome with the sympathy that the nation and the Government had displayed, and promptly ran off to New Svald with a cavalry officer twenty years her junior.
According to Limpkin's will, he desired that a young man named Trensing should become head of the Admiralty. This nettled Moresly quite a bit, for he had expected Limpkin to follow the General's instructions and leave the appointment of Office of Reconstruction heads to the Office of Procurement. But considering the essentially covert nature of his Office and the then-rampant sympathy for Limpkin, his vehement objections were not heard outside of the higher government circles.
Although Trensing's lens-like spectacles and artificial arm (the real one had been lost, along with his family, in the Fairmont Massacre twelve years before) repelled most people, no one could deny his administrative competence. Trensing won even Moresly's grudging admiration when he took over the funeral duties and combined them with those of George; he ended up managing the resulting carnival and drained every last ounce of emotional value from it.
Trensing fully approved of the symbolic way station of Bloody Ford, but it seemed to him that a terminus was needed at the Yards themselves. The ship was still too alien to most people and battles were out of the question in that deserted land. In lieu of the triumphant sorrow with which victors always regard the scenes of their victories, he placed sorrow alone.
So, on a bright day in the middle of spring, when the trees and flowers were beginning their annual struggle against the poisons of the World's air and soil, George XXVIII, Sovereign of the Caroline, Commander of the Armies, Patron of the Arts and Sciences, and Rebuilder of the World, was carried to Kelph upon a huge flatbed trailer. Behind him, on a bier about three feet lower, rode the coffin of the Viscount Limpkin of Westwatch. The trailer was pulled by the ancient truck that Limpkin had sent running about the countryside before the Myth of the Ship was generally known.
At Kelph the coffins were unloaded and placed on board one of the five galleys that had made it back from Bloody Ford. A thirty gun salute was fired from a battery of nine newly cast, rifled cannon; the assembled masses were heartened when only one of the guns blew up during the ceremony. A mausoleum had been built for George just within the northern edge of the Yards. It was made from the steel that had lain beneath the Yards for thousands of years; engraved upon its three foot thick outer door were George's accomplishments, or rather most of the noteworthy things that happened during his pleasantly muddled rule and that sympathy demanded be attributed to George. A little to the east a smaller tomb was built, this of stone from the Yards themselves, and here Limpkin was laid to rest, at the right hand of his king. It was all most effective for the mob of People who had even then come to live by the Yards. A city was growing for the People—as they were now called by the Technos—a thousand little prefabricated houses, each with its own neat, sterile plot. Over to the north and east, among the foothills of the mountains that ringed the Yards and separated them from the Barrens, the houses of the Technos—as the technical elite were now called by the People—were being built, looking down from their rugged heights upon the vast ship that was taking shape under their direction. All classes came to weep, some more for show than others, and bid farewell to the Great Men. Trebbly, observing the rites from his home on Mount Dethmet, smiled approvingly; now he could tell the People to work for the ship and for the memory of George and for the memory of the Viscount Limpkin. But, as he peered through a telescope, he could not help but feel a perplexing kind of fear, for the People thronged the larger of the two death buildings almost without exception, while his Technos had congregated in a solemn mass of black around Limpkin's grave, their silver insignia flashing in the dark universe of their uniforms. Of course, the explanation was that not many of the People knew anything about the role of Limpkin in the building of the ship. Trebbly turned from the window, for his maid had just finished preparing lunch; he wondered who had mourned over poor Toriman's resting place.