The lights go up on the Marquee
There is a silver airship that drifts a slow hexagon around the Sky Ring selling you chowder, war bonds, and an all-night cafe. It has never once fired a shot. As of today it is also the brightest thing in the sky.
A sign worth the name
The Marquee has been flying under a slight fib. Its copy was painted straight onto the gasbag — fine at noon over an empty lagoon, invisible the moment the light went long, and hardly the treatment a paying sponsor deserves from a craft that is named after a marquee.
So it got one. Off each flank now hangs a proper board: dark timber, a gold beaded rim, the poster in the middle, and forty-six fat filament bulbs ringing the whole frame. Every third bulb burns at any moment and the lit ones walk steadily round the loop, top rail to the right post to the bottom rail and up the left again, the way they do over a picture house on opening night. It is mounted, not painted — sunk into the envelope at the middle, standing proud at the corners, exactly the way a real one would be strapped on.
It reads at midnight now
The bulbs aren't decoration. They wash the poster, so the slogan stays legible when the sun has gone and the sea below has turned to ink. Come off a night scrap over the ring, roll level, and there it is out on the flank of the horizon: a small gold rectangle with something moving around its edge, close enough to read before you've decided whether to go and shoot it.
Which, as ever, you may. The circus flies for no flag, nothing on either side aims at it, and popping one is still worth a token handful of points to your team. The sponsors always send another — same copy, same tour, same lights.
The bulb nobody fixes
One bulb on every board stutters. It isn't the same one from craft to craft, it never quite goes out, and it has been that way since the day the sign was bolted on.
Nobody is going to fix it. A marquee with all its bulbs working isn't a marquee — it's a billboard. Go and read one.