A Different Flesh (16 page)

When he said that out loud, Tilak chuckled, remarking, “The farm animals would agree with you, it seems.”

Prem Chand had been too busy studying the Iron Elephant to pay attention to them. A quick glance showed his fellow driver to be right. The livestock had reacted to their own train as they would have toward a couple of mules hauling a waggon past, which is to say they did not react at all.

The noisy, smoky, stinking steam engine was something else again. Animals' ears went up in surprise, then back in alarm. Terrified flocks pounded across the fields, farmers trying without much luck to halt them and now and then pausing to shake their fists at the Iron Elephant.

“I never thought of that,” Prem Chand exclaimed. “How can these machines ever accomplish anything, if sheep and cattle and horses will not go near them?”

“Trevithick has come this far,” Paul Tilak pointed out, which made Prem Chand give him a dirty look.

The sun climbed the sky. One by one, the townsfolk who had ridden out to watch the race began turning back for Springfield. It was not the sort of event to be easily watched. Neither contestant moved very fast, and they were drawing steadily farther apart. The only drama lay in who would finish first, but the answer to that was still more than a day away.

This time Tilak was the one who looked back. What he saw raised even his unsanguine spirits. “They have broken down!” he shouted.

Prem Chand slapped the spyglass to his eye. Sure enough, the Iron Elephant was barely limping along. Less smoke poured from the stack, and what there was had changed color.

The brakemen raised a cheer. “Come on, Caesar!” “Go, Hannibal, go!” “Run that hunk of tin back to the blacksmith's shop where it belongs!”

But Prem Chand kept watching. As he had been certain, Richard Trevithick was not a man to yield tamely to misfortune. The engine handler worked furiously on his machine. Once he leaped away; Prem Chand saw one of his henchmen rush up to help him bandage his hand. Together they plunged back to their repairs. After a while, the Iron Elephant picked up speed again.

All the same, Caesar and Hannibal gained on the steam engine with every step they took. They were pulling magnificently now, their heads down, their double-curved tusks—bigger by far than those of the Indian elephants Prem Chand's grandfather had fondly remembered—almost dragging the ground.

A small stream ran not far from the tracks. “They should water themselves,” Tilak said.

Prem Chand hated to stop for any reason, but knew his friend was right. He raised a signal flag to warn the brakemen to stop, called,
“Choro!”
to Caesar. Tilak echoed him. The brakes squealed as they halted. The two elephant drivers unharnessed their beasts and rode them over to the creek. “I'd like to see Trevithick do
this
when his boiler runs dry,” Prem Chand said. Tilak nodded.

Caesar and Hannibal lowered their trunks into the water. They squirted it down their throats, a good gallon and a half at a squirt. Tilak had been right—they were thirsty. They drank close to thirty gallons each before they slowed down.

Their exertion had also made them hot.
“Derr-tol!”
Prem Chand called: “Squirt water on your back.” Caesar did. Prem Chand scrambled forward onto the hairy elephant's head to keep from getting soaked.

As the elephant drivers led their charges back to the train, Caesar and Hannibal used their trunks to uproot a couple of bushes and stuff them into their mouths. They had eaten well before the race started and would be fed again come evening, but they were not the sort of animals to miss any chance for a snack.

“Mall-mall!”
Prem Chand shouted, and the train headed west once more.

Behind them, the smoke that marked the Iron Elephant sank lower and lower in the east. Finally Prem Chand had to use the spyglass to see it. It never quite disappeared, though, any more than an aching tooth that has stopped hurting for the moment ceases to give little reminders of its presence.

The farms that ran west along the railway from Springfield began to peter out. Not many ran east from Carthage; the tracks had reached it only a few years before. Between the two towns was a broad stretch where the four bands of iron ran through still-virgin prairie.

A herd of big-horned buffalo grazed north of the tracks. It was not one of the huge aggregations of spring or fall, when migrating throngs made the ground shake and could delay a train for hours or days as they crossed the rail line. Prem Chand knew some of his brakemen were swearing because the buffalo were out of rifle range. He did not care himself; he did not eat beef.

A pronghorn pranced daintily by, a good deal closer than the buffalo. A gun barked. Caesar jerked beneath Prem Chand; he heard Paul Tilak cursing and pounding Hannibal back under control.

When Prem Chand could spare a moment, he saw the pronghorn lying in the grass, kicking. He raised an eyebrow, impressed at the shooting. The little antelope was at least as far away as the sim a whole volley had missed on the way to Springfield.

Several men swung down from the waggons to pick up the pronghorn. All but one—presumably the fellow who had killed it—had rifles at the ready. The waist-high plains grass could hide almost anything: sims, wolves, a spear-fanged cat.

The brakemen had to run hard to catch up to the train with their booty. None of them called to Prem Chand to slow down. They knew what the odds were for that.

The elephant driver had his cap pulled low to shield his eyes from the westering sun when the train went by another creek. “What do you say we stop here?” Tilak called. “Hannibal is tired.”

Prem Chand did not want to stop for anything, but he could feel that Caesar was not pulling as powerfully as he had earlier in the day. The hairy elephants were so large and strong that it was hard to think they could wear out, but they did. Elephant drivers forgot it at their peril, and their beasts'.

“We will stop,” Prem Chand sighed.

They made a big fire to keep off purely animal predators, and set guards in case any sim hunting-band nearby was without flint and steel. Trappers and hunters who traded with the subhumans for pelts always got more for fire-making tools than anything else: before humans came to the New World, sims kept fires going if they found them but did not know how to kindle flames themselves. Now, most of them could.

It was not the sort of thing to take for granted, though.

Roasting pronghorn made Prem Chand's nostrils twitch and his belly rumble. Before he thought about food for himself, he saw to Caesar. The hairy elephant drank nearly as much as it had earlier in the day. Prem Chand lugged out bales of hay and set them in front of Caesar. As he watched, a couple of hundredweight vanished down the beast's throat. He gave Caesar a cabbage for a treat. A single crunch and it was gone.

Not far away, Paul Tilak was similarly tending Hannibal. He glanced over to Prem Chand. “We are lightening our train somewhat, also,” he said.

“Well, so we are,” Prem Chand admitted, “but not as much as Trevithick.” He wondered how far behind the Iron Elephant was; as the eastern sky darkened, the smoke plume became indistinguishable against it.

The pronghorn proved gamy and tough, but it was more appetizing than the salt pork Prem Chand had brought from Springfield. He washed it down with beer. The crew emptied more than one barrel. In that way too, Prem Chand thought wryly, the train was getting lighter.

He spread his bedroll under him. The night was too fine and fair to need more in the way of covers than a mosquito net. He fell asleep in seconds, as he usually did after a day aboard Caesar. The next thing he expected to see was dawn streaking the eastern sky with pink and gold.

When he woke and found darkness all around him, his first fuzzy thought was of marauding beasts or sims. His hand slid automatically toward the rifle beside him as he sat up.

He was not the only one awake; the whole camp was stirring. In the red light of the fire's embers men looked this way and that, wondering like Prem Chand where the trouble lay. The elephant driver scratched his head. He saw nothing amiss, heard no cries or gunshots to show someone beset.

All the same, his ears had wakened him. The chugging rumble from out of the east grew louder as he listened. It sounded different against night's stillness from the way it had in Springfield, but he did not take long to figure out what it was.

“That damned steam engine,” someone muttered, putting his thoughts into words.

Soon he could see it as well as hear it. The smoke shooting up from its stack was laced with glowing sparks. “By day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire,” a brakeman quoted.

Caesar and Hannibal trumpeted as the Iron Elephant drew level with them, but it made more noise than both of them together. Through the hiss and clatter, Prem Chand heard Trevithick call, “See you in Carthage, sleepyheads!” His crew whooped as they passed their competitors.

They got back curses aplenty. “We will see who sees whom!” Prem Chand shouted. By then the Iron Elephant had gone a good deal farther down the track; Prem Chand heard that Trevithick replied, but could not make out his words.

Paul Tilak asked the most important question in the world just then: “What time is it?”

Prem Chand squinted to read his watch by fading firelight. “Half past two.”

“Two and a half hours to sunrise,” Tilak mused. “They will have a lead of seven miles or so if we wait.”

Everyone looked at Prem Chand. He could see people making the same mental calculations he was. “We stay,” he said at last. “We can catch them before noon, a few miles outside Carthage. And if we race them now we risk running the elephants into the ground. They worked hard yesterday, and they need as much rest as they can get.”

The brakemen accepted his decision without argument, as he would have taken their word over anything concerning the waggons. Tilak, though, took him aside and said quietly, “I hope we
can
catch them. Hannibal was flagging badly there at the end yesterday.”

“Caesar too.” Prem Chand hated to make the admission, as if saying it out loud somehow made it more real. He was, however, far from giving up hope. “The steam engine has its problems too—I thought it would. If it were running as well as Trevithick claimed it could, it would have been here hours ago.”

“And if it had, we could have waved goodbye to the race.”

“That is true. But it passed us now, not then. We, at least, know how far we can hope to go on any given day. What will that smelly piece of ironwork do to schedules?”

“It has certainly played the very devil with mine.” Tilak yawned. “I am going back to bed.”

“There, for once, my friend, I cannot argue with you,” Prem Chand said. His only consolation was reflecting that Trevithick probably needed sleep even more than he did.

After eating enormously at sunrise, Caesar and Hannibal seemed eager to pull. The train rattled forward at a pace better than Prem Chand had expected. The Iron Elephant's plume of smoke, which had shrunk behind them the day before, now grew larger and blacker and stood taller in the sky as they gained. Only a couple of hours passed until the steam engine's train became visible, a long, black centipede stretched out along its track.

“Go ahead and run, Richard,” Prem Chand called, though Trevithick, of course, could not hear. “You cannot run fast enough.”

The engine handler must have seen his rival's train and disliked the rate at which it was gaining. He must have tied down a safety valve, for more smoke poured from the Iron Elephant's stack. All the same, the flesh-and-blood beasts continued to gain.

Closer and closer they came. Now they were only a mile behind, now half a mile. And there, heartbreakingly, they stuck. Caesar's and Hannibal's morning burst of energy faded. However much Prem Chand and Paul Tilak urged them on, they could come no closer. And as the elephant drivers watched and cursed, the Iron Elephant began to pull away once more.

Prem Chand felt like weeping from frustration. Through his spyglass, the men aboard the Iron Elephant seemed close enough to reach out and touch. Yet as he watched helplessly, they drew ever farther from him. He refused to lower the spyglass, cherishing the illusion it gave of a neck-and-neck race. And so he was watching still when the Iron Elephant slid into a pit.

Prem Chand stared, not believing what he saw. He knew how hastily this stretch of the railbed had been laid; it had only gravel underneath it, not a good solid foundation of stone and rammed earth. All the same, he had crossed the same stretch of track only a few days before, and there had been no storms since to undermine it.

But something had. Paul Tilak saw what it was. “Sims!” he shouted. Suddenly and most uncharacteristically, he burst out laughing. “Their trap caught a harder-skinned elephant than they bargained for!”

Once Prem Chand's attention was diverted from the train ahead, he too saw the subhumans rushing to the attack. Some carried wooden spears, their points fire-hardened. Others bore clubs, still others held stones chipped sharp that they could throw a long way. He spied the glint of a few axeheads and steel knives, perhaps stolen, perhaps gotten in trade.

Tilak was right: the sims would not gorge on hairy elephant, as they hoped. But they were not fussy about what they ate—brakeman would do well enough. And with everyone thrown in a heap by the Iron Elephant's sudden and unexpected stop, only a couple of men were able to shoot at the charging hunters. After that it was a melee, and the sims were stronger, fiercer, sometimes even better armed than their foes.

Prem Chand threw up the red flag to warn his crew, then yelled
“Choro!”
as loud as he could. The train stopped. “Get Hannibal out of his harness!” he told Paul Tilak. Prem Chand was already unbuckling the thick leather straps that linked Caesar to Hannibal. He stood up on his elephant's back, called to the train crew, “Grab your rifles and climb onto the two beasts. It is a rescue now!”