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A vast city, glistening in the early morning sunshine, lay spread out three thousand feet below them. At that height, the cars were like little beetles crawling along the streets, and people walking on the pavements looked no larger than tiny grains of soot.
'But what tremendous tall buildings!' exclaimed the Ladybird. 'I've never seen anything like them before in England. Which town do you think it is?'
'This couldn't possibly be England,' said the Old-Green-Grasshopper.
'Then where is it?' asked Miss Spider.
'You know what those buildings are?' shouted James, jumping up and down with excitement. 'Those are skyscrapers! So this must be America! And that, my friends, means that we have crossed the Atlantic Ocean overnight!'
'You don't mean it!' they cried.
'It's not possible!'
'It's incredible! It's unbelievable!'
'Oh, I've always dreamed of going to America!' cried the Centipede. 'I had a friend once who - '
'Be quiet!' said the Earthworm. 'Who cares about your friend? The thing we've got to think about now is how on earth are we going to get down to earth?'
'Ask James,' said the Ladybird.
'I don't think that should be so very difficult,' James told them. 'All we'll have to do is to cut loose a few seagulls. Not too many, mind you, but just enough so that the others can't quite keep us up in the air. Then down we shall go, slowly and gently, until we reach the ground. Centipede will bite through the strings for us one at a time.'
Thirty-three
Far below them, in the City of New York, something like pandemonium was breaking out. A great round ball as big as a house had been sighted hovering high up in the sky over the very centre of Manhattan, and the cry had gone up that it was an enormous bomb sent over by another country to blow the whole city to smithereens. Air-raid sirens began wailing in every section. All radio and television programmes were interrupted with announcements that the population must go down into their cellars immediately. One million people walking in the streets on their way to work looked up into the sky and saw the monster hovering above them, and started running for the nearest subway entrance to take cover. Generals grabbed hold of telephones and shouted orders to everyone they could think of. The Mayor of New York called up the President of the United States down in Washington, D.C., to ask him for help, and the President, who at that moment was having breakfast in his pyjamas, quickly pushed away his half-finished plate of Sugar Crisps and started pressing buttons right and left to summon his Admirals and his Generals. And all the way across the vast stretch of America, in all the fifty States from Alaska to Florida, from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, the alarm was sounded and the word went out that the biggest bomb in the history of the world was hovering over New York City, and that at any moment it might go off.
Thirty-four
'Come on, Centipede, bite through the first string,' James ordered.
The Centipede took one of the silk strings between his teeth and bit through it. And once again (but not with an angry Cloud-Man dangling from the end of the string this time) a single seagull came away from the rest of the flock and went flying off on its own.
'Bite another,' James ordered.
The Centipede bit through another string.
'Why aren't we sinking?'
'We are sinking!'
'No, we're not!'
'Don't forget the peach is a lot lighter now than when we started out,' James told them. 'It lost an awful lot of juice when all those hailstones hit it in the night. Cut away two more seagulls, Centipede!'
'Ah, that's better!'
'Here we go!'
'Now we really are sinking!'
'Yes, this is perfect! Don't bite any more, Centipede, or we'll sink too fast! Gently does it!'
Slowly the great peach began losing height, and the buildings and streets down below began coming closer and closer.
'Do you think we'll all get our pictures in the papers when we get down?' the Ladybird asked.
'My goodness, I've forgotten to polish my boots!' the Centipede said. 'Everyone must help me to polish my boots before we arrive.'
