The Steam-Driven Boy (24 page)

The old man took a flask of rhubarb wine from one of his forty-seven pockets, tipped it and drank solemnly to the health of all his companions – not omitting a distant gopher on Runway Three. The girl wandered off to investigate this great open place, while the boy hunkered down in the sand to hear a story from his grandfather.

‘The old days were good days, boy. They were people days. No one had to be afraid of anyone, ever, and folks used to even leave their doors unlocked. There were good people everywhere, and they were all neighbours.

‘Oh, they didn’t all speak the same language, and they didn’t all sing to the same God on Sundays, but they were neighbours, just the same. Real neighbours.

‘Money was real, too. Real silver, not plastic. It rang true. And ice cream, cold as a puppy’s nose, cost just one thin silver dime of it.’ He paused, raising his sky-coloured eyes to look approval at his granddaughter. Barely seventeen summers old, she was out on the concrete runway gathering flame-bright autumn leaves.

The boy spoke. ‘Gosh, Grandpa, what was this “ice cream” like?’

‘Oh, delicious! It was as tasty as a seventeenth summer. As scrumptious as the smell of lavender rain. Yummier than freedom itself. In fact, the only taste I liked as well was the taste of stamps.’

The girl was nailing a festive swatch of leaves to the airport door, covering its
KEEP OUT
sign with autumn beauty.

‘Did you eat stamps, too?’ asked the boy.

The old man laughed, moving all the kind wrinkles that fanned across his cheeks like the veins in autumn leaves. ‘No,’ my boy, you
licked
a stamp and stuck it on a letter. Then the government carried the letter anywhere in the world you wanted, and the postman gave the letter to the neighbour you wanted to write to.’

‘Didn’t you have phones?’

His grandfather didn’t answer; he was calculating. It was more than
an hour since he and the young ‘uns had ripped off their mandatory personal phones. By now a telco computer was figuring probable places to look for them. Maybe twenty minutes remained, before the telco police would be here.

‘Yes, some of us had phones. But writing was more private. Nobody could listen in – and there are some things you can put in writing that just can’t be said any other way. You need time to get it just right
before
you say it. Thinking always takes time. That’s why we closed the post offices.’

The girl began decorating the rest of the airport building with autumn leaves. Now she called out from the tower, asking the old man if it were time, yet.

‘Not yet, my dear. Soon. We’ll be leaving soon. That’s what I mean,’ he added, winking at the boy. ‘Impatience. It built this airport – and it destroyed it again. This place is concrete now, hard as headstones, but I knew it when it was all soft, breathing grass, sweet as a bee’s keister. And then they came with their impatience, the fast-moving folks, the efficiency folks, and they built an airport so they could get from one pigsty city to another in less time.

‘Then they abandoned this airport to go off and build a bigger one somewheres else, so’s they could go even faster. They won’t be satisfied until they get to be everywhere at the same time, and maybe not even then. Because when you start a race with your own self, you know you have to lose.

‘Anyway, now they’ve left, and the sweetness is coming back. Dame Nature is gathering this place to her bosom again – repairing all their damage.’

He sipped silently for a moment more, then went on. ‘Impatience. When the telco – telephone company – took over the government, it was because the fast folks couldn’t take the time to write or read letters. So they stopped teaching writing in the schools, and they closed the post offices and they locked up all the libraries. Those who objected found out nobody could (or would) read their letters. Then they took away our art galleries and universities … and worse.’

The boy scratched a freckle. ‘You mean they took away your holograms?’

‘Worse still. I knew an old French woman once, name of Madame Faience, who had the sweetest postage stamp collection you could ever imagine: Birds, flowers, famous people – why, it was a little art gallery all by itself. My boy, they
burned
it.’

He looked up at the control tower, which the girl had now covered with an oriflamme of autumn leaves. Behind it stretched humpy white clouds, like a line of ivory elephants.

‘Yep,
burned
it. And though the whole fire wasn’t much bigger than an autumn leaf, Madame Faience managed to throw herself into it and burn up with her collection. Call it sentimental, maybe, but …’

‘The French
are
like that,’ the boy agreed. ‘Are any stamps left anywhere?’

‘A few.’ His grandfather reached into one of his many pockets and came up with a cracked leather case. ‘This is my own stamp collection, boy. It’s small, but it’s something to hold, something to have, something – real.’ He passed it over.

‘This is your collection? One stamp?’

‘That’s a picture of Abe Lincoln, my boy. He wrote a famous speech on the back of an old letter. One of our sweetest presidents.’

‘Did he write many letters, Grandpa?’

‘Everybody did. They wrote to the papers, so everybody could see what they thought. They sent greeting cards, valentines, gas bills, draft notices, telegrams … The first novel was written in the form of an exchange of letters. And part of the Bible – the most famous book ever written – part of it was .just letters from Paul to his neighbours.’

‘But why did they stop writing?’

‘Impatience again! Why spend time reading and writing, when you can watch ghosts.’

‘You mean holograms?’ asked the boy again. This time the old man nodded.

‘The ghastly, ghostly holograms! Why
read
Plato when you can conjure up an image of some actor impersonating him? Why study hard thinking when you can get it all boiled down into flattering conversation? Why learn, when the telco knows it all anyway?’

By now, the old man realized, the computers would have figured on this airport. Ten minutes to go, maybe.

‘That’s why you and your sister and me took off our phones and ran away,’ he explained. ‘And that’s why we’re going for that joy ride I promised you. Now a joy ride, remember, isn’t just a ride from A to B. It’s more, much more –‘

’Grandpa!’ the girl shouted from the tower. ‘They’re coming. I can see the dust, way off.’

‘We have time for one more question, my boy.’

The boy thought for a second. ‘What was it like, getting letters, Grandpa?’

As they walked over to the rusty hangar, the old man told him, in a voice fine and true. He told of waking one winter morning to the smell and delicious hiss of bacon frying; running outside to lie down in the snow and fan his arms, making an ‘angel’ imprint. Then meeting the postman with a big stack of Christmas cards from all your neighbours. ‘And there were angels on the Christmas cards, too, and on the stamps at Christmas,’ he added. ‘Like the first angelic postman who brought good news to a girl of Nazareth. Help me with this hangar door, will you? I’m … a little tired, today.’

The time of waiting was over.

The boy and the girl helped push open the creaking door of corrugated iron, rusted the colour of autumn leaves.

Inside was an airplane.

Scraps of fabric hung from two pairs of angelic dragonfly wings. Thick
dust and mildew spotted the fat body with Nature’s camouflage. And yet, peering through the cobwebs that had long since replaced wire struts, they could still make out the words painted on her side:
AIR MAIL SPECIAL
.

‘Come on, young ’uns. Get on board.’

‘How can it go?’ asked the boy, pointing to the broken, worm-pierced stubs of the propeller. ‘Where can we go in that heap?’

‘Just for a joy ride, boy. We won’t go far. In fact, we won’t go anywhere at all. Sometimes that’s the best ride of all. We …’

The old man coughed, seizing a wing brace to steady himself. It came away in his hand. ‘Well, hop in!’

The boy took the pilot’s seat, while the other two shared the observer’s place, behind.

‘Contact!’ yelled the old man. ‘Roger! Off we go!’

‘But nothing’s happening,’ the boy complained. ‘It’s just pretend!’

‘No it isn’t,’ shouted his sister, breathless. ‘I can feel it moving now. It’s lifting … it’s lifting …’

And then the boy heard the silent engine roar. The plane was taxiing, floating up, right through the roof of the rusty hangar, floating up and free.

Outside, the Telco police car stopped, and four doors were slammed. But here, inside, the three were aloft, riding the wind for joy. High above the ivory-elephant clouds, the boy clutched his stamp collection and looked down to see the world, small and lovely and perfect. And there, at the edge of the world …

‘Come out of there, you three! We’ll give you ten seconds to come out, before we laser the place!’ shouted the telecommunications police.

But the boy was too far away to hear. ‘I can see it. Grandpa!’ he yelled. ‘Just like you said: There’s a carnival and cotton candy and the Cub Scout weenie roast and a band concert in the park. It’s a fine day and the flag’s flying over the schoolhouse and kids are playing sandlot baseball and Mom’s making popcorn balls …’

‘Five seconds!’ brayed the rude cops.

Grandpa and the girl were both breathing hard back there. ‘Don’t turn around, boy. Keep looking ahead. What else do you see?’

‘I see … the angel postman! He’s got valentines and Christmas cards, birthday presents from Mom and Dad, something for everyone! The secret message ring I sent for, and comics. For you, Sis, a silver blackhead remover and some movie magazines. For Grandpa a
Reader’s Digest
and a mail order catalogue of a thousand pages! Oh Grandpa, now you can order that truss you wanted!’

‘T
IME’S UP
. A
RE YOU THREE COMING OUT OF THERE
?’

‘Gosh, Grandpa, and now the angel postman’s bringing a big package! Nothing can stay him from his extra special rounds now – here he comes – here he comes–‘

Grandpa and Sis were snorting like crazy back there, and bumping around in their compartment. The boy had to shout louder to make himself heard. ‘0 angel postman, I know you’re no ghost, you’re really,
really real! 0 golly, the package is for all of us. Grandpa and Sis! It’s a big box of –‘

The lasers worked their telecommunications magic, and the old hangar went up in one great flame.

‘Funny,’ said the cop. ‘Thought I heard that kid scream “Stamps on approval”.’

They climbed into their car and drove away fast, not looking back at the hangar, which was turning red and orange and yellow, all the colors of autumn.

B
Y
C
ARL
T
RUHACKER

Edward Kalendorf’s team had been investigating the Moon with telescopes. They’d discovered it to be spherical, about 2,159.9 miles in diameter, of some dense stony material. Orbiting the earth at an average speed of 2,287 mph, its apogee was 247,667 miles, its perigee 216,420 miles. There was some question as to how it had originated, or what, in fact, it was.

The team had come to the Deadly Desert to make some further observations. One evening in a local café, Prof. Kalendorf had the good fortune to meet Dr Porteus, the renowned physicist. Porteus had said, ‘Pass the sodium chloride,’ and one man of science had instantly recognized the other.

‘Sodium chloride reminds me of a funny story,’ said Kalendorf, and proceeded to spin a risque yarn about potassium chloride. The two fell to talking about the elements, the universe and the sense of awe inspired by a skyful of stars. Before long, Porteus was outlining his hypothesis in detail. He used the tablecloth for notations, to the chagrin of the waiter, no doubt!

‘Essentially, I mean to cut the universe down to size – to make it humanly manageable. For instance, we usually accept that the Moon is big and far away, when it could easily be small and close by.’

‘But triangulation –‘

’With all due respect to Euclid and the gang, my second equation shows that triangulation is impossible, because there can’t be any true angles.’

‘All well and good,’ said Kalendorf. ‘But one day men will conquer the Moon. They’ll build spaceships and land on it – in about A.D. 2120 or so – and then your second equation won’t matter a damn.’

Porteus laughed. ‘But don’t you see, man? All their spaceships and all their calculations will simply be distorted by the demands of space! They may appear to travel a quarter of a million miles – in reality they will go a few feet!’

‘An interesting theory, doctor. Let’s ask my assistant, Bowler, what he thinks of it. Bowler? That’s odd, he was here a minute ago.’

‘Maybe,’ suggested the physicist with a smile, ‘he simply walked off the edge of the universe and vanished.’

They strolled outside and gazed up at the full moon. Kalendorf lit his pipe. ‘Hmm. Distance not existing. A tempting theory, Porteus. But how would you go about proving it?’

‘Like this!’ The physicist reached up and plucked the full moon from the sky.