The Far Side (80 page)

“That’s just it, Hank.  You have a question you can’t answer and you’ve stopped trying.  You have to get past that.  Your boy died because he traveled halfway around the world because President Bush ordered him to go, and there he tried to do whatever his officers told him to do.  A local killed him because he was an infidel American.”

“And like that explains it?”

“Hank, what other explanation is there?  Are you so egotistical that God has it in, personally, for you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then chill!  I have a news flash for you.”

“What?”

“The Arvalans can’t tell the difference between liberals and conservatives.  Most Americans wouldn’t understand the political differences here, either -- here they place a lot of emphasis on personal honor and oaths that we don’t.  In order to function in this environment, you have to use your best judgment from back home, apply a lot of Kentucky windage, and take everything you see here with a grain of salt.  If you do that, pretty soon you’ll start doing that to things at home and realize how bogus the issues are there, as well.”

“I’m not sure I translate that, Andie,” Dick told her.

She grinned.  “It’ll be dark shortly, even if it’s not even noon for us.  We’re going back inside where our people will spend time cleaning their weapons and checking their gear.  In an hour or so, we’ll have dinner and then try to get some sleep.

“If, by the time we are ready to leave tomorrow morning, local time, no one has seen you clean or check your weapons and gear, they’ll decide that you’re hopeless morons and treat you like you would treat a retarded child who you are fond of, but didn’t expect much from.”

Hank laughed.  “I’m surprised that no one ever smacked you upside the head, Andie.”

Dick laughed louder.  “She smacks back, dumb ass!”

They went back inside and ate a meal of MREs and drank cold beer.  The first thing the next morning, they were part of a convoy of a half dozen ATVs.  Each ATV had a driver and a sidecar for a passenger.  It took about an hour to travel more than a dozen miles north, where they stopped.  Hank looked around at the eight men with them, all of whom faced outwards and were scanning the sky.

“This seems -- excessive,” he told Andie.

“Two of our guards have been killed by dralka.  It colors their thinking.  Since the last fatal attack, there’s barely been a week without someone attacked.”

Dick waved at the view in front of them.  “This is awesome -- particularly for a railroader.  How far north do these benches go?”

“All the way, although there are a half dozen major river valleys between here and there, and a couple of dozen smaller ones.  I can’t stress too much that the geologists say that this planet is old, geologically.  One of the geologists was telling me that these are like ‘bathtub rings’ marking ancient shorelines.  It is remarkable that the highest ‘ring’ is about 2500 feet or so above the current sea level.  Of course, the tides here are something fierce; forty and fifty feet a day.  Still, either the peninsula is being pushed up or the ocean level has dropped quite a bit.

“I’ve asked the locals about earthquakes, and they’ve never heard of them and don’t know what they are.  They know about volcanoes, but they call them “fire lakes,” and none of them have erupted during their history.  We don’t know enough about the planet to know if there are icecaps at the poles, but the weather stays moderate at least to forty-five degrees north latitude.”

“By old, does that mean that the grades into the river valleys are low?”

“That it does.  A typical valley, at the altitude of this bench, drops a mile in five miles, and then climbs back.”

Dick was sarcastic.  “That’s a twenty percent slope, Andie.  You’d kill any train crew who tried it.”

“Sure, if you were counting like the locals, from the ridgelines.  But the benches cut into the ridges so it’s mostly a five hundred foot drop over five miles, and the last two hundred foot drop is at the river itself.  Most of those rivers would require two hundred foot or shorter trestles.  And that’s less than a three percent grade.”

“Put like that,” Dick told her, “you’re right, plus we contour down the slope -- we don’t go down a slope in a straight line.”  He shuddered theatrically.  “No, this is one percent, Andie.”

“Is it doable?” she inquired.

“It’s doable,” he confirmed.  He paused.  “Andie, you need a real railroad here, not something only a little more than one step up from a hobby line.”

“And I didn’t want to put you guys off.  It’s going to take the local people a year, maybe two, to start producing their own rails and their own ties.  There’s no way to get a serious engine through the door, so they’re going to have to make those here, as well.

“You have to understand that until now, they’ve used a couple of tons of steel a year.  All of a sudden they need thousands of tons.  Cannon, rifles, rails, engines, rolling stock, ship fittings -- it’s a tidy sum.”

“You say they have plenty of timber and coal?” Dick asked.

“You’ve seen one of the coal seams.  That one is five hundred feet thick, and so far as I know, it runs for nearly four hundred miles north.  I have no idea how deep it goes.  Right there -- assuming we just scoop the top hundred yards, that’s nearly 14 billion cubic yards -- nearly three cubic miles -- of coal.  There are at least four more strata like that along this finger, and half of those are thicker.  And, I might add, its anthracite.”

“Bituminous would be better,” Hank told her.

Andie raised her eyebrow.  “I thought the harder the coal, the more energy it released.”

“There are other considerations,” he told her.

Andie grinned.  “Well, the reason I didn’t tout the other layers of coal is that they’re soft.”

Hank grinned.  “One of these days, Andie, the bug will bite you.  You’re too close not to be bit.  When that happens, you come and see me.  I’ll bring you along.”

“Linda does that quite well,” Andie said with a laugh.

“No, not like that -- but I’ll tell you, after my wife died, putting my hand on throttle of Liberty 176 cured a lot of my ills.”

“But not all them.”

“No, not all of them.  By then I had come by my fair share of self-inflicted ills.  I don’t wish that on anyone, Andie.”

“Well, I don’t wish it on me, either.”  She waved ahead of them.

“We’re going back in a few minutes.  Tomorrow we’ll continue north, if you’re both willing to sign onto this project.  I’ll need estimates of what it’s going to cost, what’s going to take and how long it’s going to take.”

“Five hundred miles of fifteen inch track,” Dick told her.  “Call it a million dollars per hundred miles for the steel and ties.  I’ll have it installed on a graded bed in a year.  Labor... here, I’d just be guessing.  Call it two thousand men for a year.  Two years if you want to double track.  With less labor, it would take longer.  More would probably get in each other’s way.”

“We have all the money in the universe, at least for now,” she told him.  “The King estimates he has twelve tons of gold that he would dearly like to trade for twelve tons of copper.  Currently I’ve committed about five hundred pounds of that.  Right now your budget is essentially unlimited if you can do things quickly.”

Dick looked north.  “While these benches are great and wonderful, the fact remains that they still need to be surveyed.  There’s not much you can do to hurry a survey, when you don’t have either end of the line surveyed.”

“We don’t have either end surveyed,” Andie told him.

“Well we could go from both ends at once,” Dick told her, “but there is a non-trivial risk that the two ends wouldn’t meet.”

“Okay, so we use two survey crews anyway and tell them to be really careful.  They survey all but the last fifty miles between crews, and then we combine crews and work towards a target.  How long?”

“Yeah, it’s four hundred miles.  It’ll be at least five hundred before you’re done.  Ten miles a week from each crew once they get rolling.  And, if the security you’ve got for us is an indication, there will be a lot of guards.”

“Twenty-five weeks?”

“At least,” he told her, “plus the bridges will cost time... the survey is going to let us know how much that will cost.”

One of the guards lofted a radio in his hand.  “Andie?  Linda for you.  She says it’s urgent.”

The two men and Andie went over, and the guard handed her the radio.  “Linda?”

There was a brief pause.  “Is she all right?”

Another pause.  “What?  What did you say?”

Andie dropped the radio on the ground, looking dazed.  She looked around and walked over to a boulder that stuck a couple of feet from the ground.  Without warning her hand lashed out in a punch against the rock.

Hank went up to her.  “Andie?”

He saw she had tears in her eyes and was cradling her hand.  She’d hit the rock very, very hard.

“Medic!” he called, as he’d been told.  An earnest young man in combat fatigues trotted up.  Andie ignored him as he examined her hand.

Tears streaked down here cheeks, and up close he could hear her saying, “Fuck!  Fuck!  Fuck!”

“Is your friend all right?” he asked, assuming something that didn’t even come close to the worst possible event.

Andie looked at him and turned away, sobbing.  Hank had been there and done that.  He stooped down and pick up the radio.

“This is Hank, who’s this?”

“Linda Walsh.  Hank, what’s happening?”

“Andie’s lost it,” he said brutally, his eyes on the young girl.  “What did you just tell her?”

“They called Kris out on a rescue.  She, Ezra, Kurt and a dozen others went to Chicago to help get back five people pulled into a door.”  He heard what he was sure was Linda swallowing.

“Is Andie all right?” Linda asked.

“She punched a rock with her fist; the medic is looking after her hand.  I’m pretty sure she busted up her hand.  Is her friend okay?”

“Our people returned without injury.  The lost stayed lost.  Hank, the President nuked Chicago.”

Hank yelped.  “He did what?”

“They used two fuel air bombs, MOABs, Ezra said they are called.  Then a third weapon, which he is sure was nuke, but the government says it was just another bomb like the first two.  It wasn’t a very big nuke, an enhanced radiation weapon, from the descriptions.”

“My God, why would he have ordered something like that?”

“Because whoever was on the other side tried to gas the rescuers the first time they opened the door, and before Kris got the door closed, followed that up with a chemical and biological attack on this side.  The President scotched any contamination issues.”

“My God!” Hank said, repeating himself.

“Kris says that they’d evacuated everyone out to two miles, but there are always idiots, so a couple more people were killed and another handful injured.  Because of Kris, they had plenty of time to evacuate, and the loss of life was very low.  But she’s afraid the President will use this as an excuse to crack down even more on the doors.”

Hank’s mind raced.  “There’s no way the President could survive the accusation that he’d ordered a nuclear strike on the US.”  The cherries came up, three of them.  “What’s being reported?”

“They say that three conventional weapons were used to immolate the target -- there was no mention of nuclear weapons used.  Kurt and Ezra both say that the government covered it up with the larger fuel-air bombs.”

Hank looked at the medic who’d been wrapping Andie’s hand, and he told Linda that they were ready to come in.  “Let me talk to Andie for a second, please,” Linda told Hank.

“Linda, right now her hands are both busy.  Can I put this on the speaker?”

“Sure.”

Hank turned up the volume.

“I just got a call a second ago from Kris’ mother,” Linda told Andie.  You need to get in here right away; this is way, way beyond dynamite.  A metaphorical nuclear weapon this time.  Come as fast as you can.”

“The medic says I’m going to have to go back through to Earth, Linda.  I’ve really messed up my hand.  Remind me to hit a pillow the next time I lose my temper.”

“Sure, I’ll alert the other side.  But I’ve only heard a few minutes of this, and evidently I haven’t gotten to the good part yet.  The President has forbidden Kris from consulting on any further Far Side rescues, though.”

“What!  I’ll kill the fucker!”

Linda sighed.  “You can’t say that, sweetie, even as a joke.  From what Helen said, though, Kris really did something worse to him.  Something, she says, like your F-bomb, only worse.”

“We’re a dozen miles away; it’s going to take an hour, I’m afraid.”

“Come, but don’t take any chances.”

They headed back for the rookery, traveling maybe a mile an hour faster than they’d gone on the outbound trip.  Each bump caused Andie to wince, even after she’d taken to riding with her hand up in the air to cushion it better.

They walked into the cave system and right through to Earth.  “What happened?” Andie asked.

Linda smiled.  “You have to hear it yourself.  I never knew Kris had a temper, too.  The President really got her upset.”