The locals were moderately excited by this development, and a great milling throng of perhaps eight people gathered at a respectful distance from the train and the row of gaudy entomopters that stood before it along the access road, gleaming and so out of place in the determinedly bucolic setting that they may as well have just set down after a long migration from Mars. Miss Virginia herself approached the worthies and spoke to them of aerial thrills, adventures, excitement, and very good crop-dusting rates. This last raised most interest and, along with a few courier requests to carry reasonable loads for reasonable distances, represented the first part of the Circus’s trade for the day. The afternoon would feature a display, providing the media blitz represented by a foolscap-sized poster placed within the covered town notice board a fortnight before proved sufficient to provide a viable audience. The town, for all its profound failure to whelm, was still the centre of a substantial farming area and should, according to Miss Virginia’s calculations, provide enough financial reasons to linger for three days.
