The Rise of Ransom City (55 page)

The arm I’d been shot in was no use and so I could neither pull myself up nor climb down. Instead I just dangled there over the hard & distant floor of the Concourse and watched the Engine slowly move.

I believe it was retreating. Retreat does not come naturally to its kind and you could tell that just by looking at it. Connecting and coupling rods like the arms of giants bent backwards and strained to move wheels bigger than my father’s house. It would have been faster maybe but for the fact that it was still loading and unloading all along its huge body and as it lurched back Linesmen fell from broken planks and rolled beneath its wheels— trolleys spilled cargo, and a lot of it was concrete or canned food or rifles but some of it was rockets, and some of those went off, at 60 yards down the length of the Engine, 160 yards, 300, one by one lighting up the shadows of the Concourse.

I swung my legs until I was able to catch my foot in a cleft between two struts, and then I tried to kick myself up onto the platform again. When I got my head up I saw that a man had broken from the crowd and was running up the steps of the scaffold— well he was not so much running as he was climbing and jumping. He wore a flat cap and a scruffy beard and a brown jacket and he carried a big red rock in his hand. As he passed me he kicked my arm, not quite hard enough to dislodge me— but then I guess he had bigger game in mind.

With a cry of, “The Red Valley Republic lives again!” he stood before the Kingstown Engine and he lifted the red rock over his head in both hands.

Nothing immediately occurred. In fact he had time to continue his speech, saying something about the rights of man and the future and freedom and peace and the little fellow.

Believe it or not I think I knew him— before the Battle of Jasper City he’d been employed by the
Jasper City Evening Post
as an editor of some kind, and I had met him in the company of Mr. Carson. But that’s by the by.

Nothing continued to occur. He lowered the rock and held it in his hands and looked at it like it was very puzzling to him. Then he looked up and into the Engine’s black mask, bigger than a barn, as big and round and blank as the face of the clock on the famous Territorial Tower that used to stand in Juniper City.

I guess I was born without much of a sense of danger but it is a muscle like any other and I had given it years of exercise. I did not know what was going to happen but it seemed to me better to take my chances with the drop than stay where I was.

I let go. As I fell backwards through the air the Engine screamed and a big cloud of gray-white steam emerged from its vents and swallowed up the whole scaffold, stripping paint and warping wood and boiling that poor fellow right where he stood, rock in his hand.

I had the good fortune to land on an Officer of the Line. I broke my hip-bone but I was otherwise unharmed.

The Kingstown Engine withdrew from the Station, gaining speed as it went. In another few minutes it was gone entirely, leaving only smoke and heat behind. The fighting continued on the Concourse for a while but I was picked up by two Officers of the Line and taken to what they called safety, and I called captivity. With my hip-bone and shoulder broken there was little I could do except hang there with my arms around their shoulders and go where they steered me.

I said, “Who are they? Who are these people— what’s going on— wait, hold on—”

I still do not know who they were. There were at least one hundred of them and my best guess is that most of them were working men from the factories and Yards of Jasper City, and that what ever connection they had to the Republic was only in their heads. That’s all I can say.

Anyhow after that incident the authorities of the Line decided that Jasper City was too dangerous, and so they relocated me to Gibson City, and then six weeks later to Harrow Cross, along with Old Man Baxter’s triplicate typewriter and my adjutants and all the engineers and the prototypes and in fact the entire Ransom Project, by which I mean the Bomb.

Too much has already been written about the sounds and the smells and the sights of Harrow Cross, oldest and biggest and foremost of the Stations of the Line— you could make a heap of words as tall as its tallest spike— I do not have the time or the inclination to add to that heap. The
Official Statistical Digest of the Surveyors of the Line
boasts of the Station’s size and power— Harrow Cross is to Jasper City as Jasper City is to East Conlan. There is nothing bigger than it. It is as far as you can go in that particular direction. The mad poetess Miss Hermosa Goucher of Keaton City wrote a poem about the place called “The Scream” and though she never visited it but only saw it in a dream, I hear her poem is well-regarded, if you like that kind of thing— I must warn you though that it does not rhyme. Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson stayed for three months in 1874 in a hotel on one of the sky-scraping upper levels above the smog, and later he wrote a book about it called
On the Men Who Toil in Darkness,
that was banned in Line territories but I hear it sold pretty well elsewhere. I don’t reckon much changed in Harrow Cross between 1874 and when I was there except that the smog level rose to engulf Mr. Carson’s hotel and the thing was converted into tenements. I recommend it to you, the same way I recommend all the works of my friend Mr. Carson to you. May he write kindly of me when I am gone!

The Agent Jim Dark wrote an account of how one time he stole into the Station and fought through its labyrinth of lightless tunnels and wrestled with gas-powered pistons with his bare hands and outwitted an Engine in its lair and escaped in a stolen aircraft. It is called
How I Fought in the Great War,
and officially it is banned in the remaining territories of the Line, but in reality it is freely available as an example of how everything the Line’s enemies say is lies and bullshit and self-flattery.

Old Man Baxter himself or whoever wrote his
Autobiography
sang for many pages the praises of Harrow Cross’s pistons and steam and smoke and industry and how every man there was sorted into his proper place, some at the top and some at the bottom, according to their nature. I am ashamed to say that when I read those pages as a boy I thought only about what it was like at the top.

This morning we saw the trail of Heavier-Than Air Vessels overhead, criss-crossing, hunting. Miss Fleming was the first to notice the trails but I saw them clearly enough. They are fading now, which I guess means that the Vessels have moved on, or returned to their base to report. Back in Harrow Cross the sky was always dark with smoke but out here it is a very strange sight.

They moved me from Jasper City to Harrow Cross by motor-car, under light guard, for reasons of secrecy. Ordinarily dignitaries such as myself would have been moved by Engine, but from the gossip of the officers who drove me and guarded me I learned that the Engines were no longer considered safe. The Engines themselves were targets now. This fact frightened the officers so much they could not stop themselves from talking about it, as if by repeating the absurdity of it they could prove to themselves that it was not true.

I did not want to go to Harrow Cross. I wanted to be free again. But though things were changing and the discipline of the Line was not what it once was, its officers could not be bribed to let me go. They just ignored all my offers.

They helped me out of the back of the motor-car and as they helped me to stand I opened my mouth to make one last attempt to bribe or cozen them but the noise and stench and hugeness of the Station took my words from me. They said, “This way sir,” and they moved me from the motor-car bays of the Station’s Arch Six up through a maze of corridors and elevators to a tower-top apartment, taller by far than Mr. Baxter’s pent house, from which I could look down from high windows into many-layered canyons of black metal, all the way down to the depths where I cannot think any daylight ever reached— the darkness crawled with what I think were men and women and machines.

Officially the story was that I remained the head of the Baxter-Ransom Trust, and that I had been removed from Jasper City to Harrow Cross only so that I could be given the finest medical treatments available, after the injuries I sustained in the cowardly and underhanded and unsuccessful &c attack, in which I had bravely though unnecessarily stood between the assassin’s bullet and the Kingstown Engine.

It was true that I had been injured. It was weeks before I regained the use of my right arm, and months before it was strong again, and I still have some pain in it. I had to learn to write my correspondence with my left hand.

My leg was not quick to heal either— I blame it on the bad air of Harrow Cross, and my conditions of confinement. For months I was stuck in a Wheelchair. This was a heavy contraption of metal and hard black rubber, a noisy rattling menace. It was never under any circumstances comfortable, like a device constructed for the self-mortification of an old-country Saint. Its wheels constantly threatened to sever wayward fingers, and once it started rolling sometimes the brakes could barely stop it and I was a danger to myself and anyone in my path. An adjutant was assigned to push me. This one was a woman, and she must have been stronger than she looked. I did not ask her name and she did not tell me. She addressed me as Sir, with contempt. Every day like clockwork she pushed me up and down the long electric-lit corridors and elevators and across the expanse of concrete rooftop between my quarters and the laboratories where they were building the Bomb.

In Jasper City I had been a prisoner, but also a dignitary. I’d been the heir to the Baxter Trust, the man in the pent house, a man of many philanthropic enterprises, the wealthiest and most successful fellow for miles around. It was all an illusion, but a powerful one, and often even I thought that it was real. In Harrow Cross they did not play the same game. I was not admired or adored or respected. I was not called on to give speeches to the masses. I was not quoted in the newspapers— there were no newspapers. In Harrow Cross there were no Great Men. They were beyond such notions. My job was to advise on the construction of the Bomb. That was all.

Truth is I had little to do with it. I had delayed and prevaricated and fed my captors false information for as long as I could, but bit by bit I had let slip too much of the truth, and now the engineers of the Line hardly needed me at all. The project was gathering its own momentum. Tests took place and the results were reported to me in the form of a rapidly upward-rising line on a chart pinned to the wall of the laboratory. The engineers were eager but silent young men who never questioned what they were doing. They talked over my head. They looked forward with quiet pride to the moment when they would win the approval of the Engines, when the Bomb was ready to be used against their enemies.

When the phantoms started appearing again I was pleased to have somebody to talk to, even if they never talked back, just stood there looking stiff and wide-eyed and open-mouthed with alarm.