Railroad! Collection 2 (The Three Volume Omnibus)

by Tonia Brown

  “It wasn’t the equipment-” Dodger tried to say.

  “No,” the professor said over him. “I want to get this off my chest. I sent you and that poor man into the field as human guinea pigs. I can never make up for it.” The doc perched himself at his stool, his chunky legs swinging back and forth as he made his confession, leaving him looking more like a contrite schoolboy than like Dodger’s boss man. “I think, perhaps, I am just used to employing Ched as the subject for my experiments. After all, the man can’t … well, you know. I take his unique ability for granted sometimes. I forget that not everyone is as resilient as our dear Ched.”

  “No, sir. I reckon we aren’t.”

  “Even though Ched had used the belt before, it was only during one clinical trial. And not for very long. Not that there were complications. It was the subject who forced us to cease testing. Ched didn’t like being little. It made him uncomfortable.”

  “Speaking from experience, it is an uncomfortable feeling.”

  “Shcared sheetlessh was the phrase he used, I think.” The professor tried out a little giggle, but it sounded just as sad as he looked. “I guess what I am trying to say is I’m sorry for causing your friend’s death.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was my faulty equipment.”

  “You didn’t know that kid was gonna crush the belt like that.”

  “True.”

  “And you certainly didn’t know that the proximity of the expended energy from my belt would cause his malfunctioning belt to overcompensate for the damage and translate the incoming fluctuations so far around the spectrum that it ended up shrinking him further rather than enlarging him.” It was a logical conclusion, and one that Dodger would normally keep to himself. But he supposed it was fruitless to hide such things from the doc. The man had ways of dragging your true mental power from you, even if it came along kicking and screaming.

  “That’s also true … and a clever deduction.” And finally, at last, the doc faced Dodger, and that gleam of delight returned to the man’s weary eyes. “Mr. Dodger. The depth of intellect you continue to display never ceases to amaze me.”

  “Thank you, sir, but it was really just a lucky guess.”

  “Lucky guess, my foot. That was pure genius.”

  “Then you agree it wasn’t your fault.”

  The professor tipped his head to one side, considering the offer. “Only if you agree it wasn’t your fault. After all, I can’t have my best man trying to work with such an undeserved weight on his conscience.” The doc leaned in closer to add, “Especially when you already have so much worry on your mind.”

  “I suppose I can agree to that. Sir.”

  “Excellent.” The doc rubbed his hands together, ready to get back to work. He wasn’t his old self, yet. But he would be. In time. “Tell Ched to set a course southeast, if you please. There’s an apothecary I must visit in order to finish some work. He’ll know the one. And I hope you don’t mind waiting another night for your sleep aid. Turns out I didn’t have as much melatonin as I thought.”

  “Not a problem, sir. I’ll tell Ched to plot a course.” Dodger made to leave, pulling open the door, only to find Lelanea on her way in.

  “Mr. Dodger,” she said. “Just the man I was looking for.”

  Dodger couldn’t help but smile. “Those are the kind of words every man wants to hear from a beautiful woman.”

  Lelanea snorted at his implication, but he could see her trying to repress a grin. “Actually, I don’t need you. I need the homing device Uncle lent you. I understand you wish to keep tabs on us.”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t. But I need to work on making duplicates for the rest of the crew. Per your request.”

  “So are we doing what I ask now?”

  “Only when it pertains to my areas of expertise.”

  “Ah, of course.” Dodger pulled the metal button from his lapel, passing it off to the young lady.

  She handed it to her uncle, who explained, “I’m sorry to report that they don’t work when the subject is deep underground, so they might not be as reliable as we first imagined. Just another failure on my part, I suppose.” The professor tossed the thing to his cluttered desk before holding his hand out again, wiggling his fingers in request. “And the other one.”

  “Sir?”

  “The other one. There should’ve been two.”

  Dodger eyed the man for a moment. “The second one was with Duncan. And he’s gone.”

  “Really? You didn’t get it back from him?”

  “No, sir.”

  The doc rubbed his chin. “And, just to clarify a point, the lad was already gone when we joined up with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How odd.” The professor leapt down from his stool and went to the metal flower near the door—the speaking tube. After pressing some hidden button, the flower opened and the professor shouted into it, “Mr. Torque! I need you here. Now!”

  “Is there something wrong?” Dodger asked.

  “Not wrong. Just odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “What are you thinking, Uncle?” Lelanea asked.

  The professor rubbed his chin again as he said, “Well, you see when we caught up with Mr. Dodger and that bleeding fellow, Mr. Torque claimed there were-”

  The sound of the door slamming interrupted the professor’s explanation as Mr. Torque stormed into the room.

  “Well?” the metal man demanded. “What do you want now? I don’t have all day.”

  “Mr. Torque,” the doc said, “bring up your sub-aural detection scope. And translate it to a tone we all can hear. I want to confirm something.”

  “You want me to do what?”

  “You heard me. Make it snappy.”

  “Snappy! You want me to stand here like a metal moron, beeping for your amusement, and you want me to make it snappy? Why I have never been so insulted in all my life.”

  “Why me? Have I harmed you in some way? Why must you torture me with your continual rudeness? Why can’t you just be obedient for once?”

  Torque thought about this for a moment, then made a sound very much like a child blowing a raspberry while he gave his creator the old two-finger salute.

  Atop this moment of anarchy, Lelanea said, as calmly as Dodger had ever heard her say anything, “Swordfish.”

  At the word, Mr. Torque ceased arguing. In truth, he ceased everything. His body went slack, his eyes lost their spark of life, even his moustache stopped that nervous twitching to which Dodger was just now getting accustomed.

  “Lelanea!” the professor shouted.

  “What just happened?” Dodger asked.

  “I shut the blasted thing down,” she said, then reached out to press upon the chest of the now-silent Mr. Torque. A small keyboard flipped out of the metal man’s sternum—a typewriter breastplate.

  “That was just rude,” the doc said.

  “Rude is not cooperating when set to a task.” Lelanea punched at the keys with some concentration. “Now that I bypassed his personality settings, we can access his functions without the distractions of his mouth.”

  “How did you shut him down?” Dodger asked.

  “It’s a verbal command code,” the professor confessed with some shame. “I installed a shut-off word in case I needed him to revert to manual. I don’t employ it often, because I don’t like what it makes of him, or me. But in this case, I’m afraid my niece is correct. We don’t have time to argue with the hunk of junk. We need his technical abilities, not his opinions.”

  Lelanea punched a few more keys and stepped back. “There we are. He should be on basic functions. Torque, can you hear me?”

  The metal man raised its head and stood straight. “Yes, mum.” The voice was emotionless, unlike the feminine lilt of Torque’s normal mechanical tones, and the words brought an eerie light to its eyes, which glowed and faded with each syllable.

  “Access sub-aura
l scope; play the tones aloud,” Lelanea said as she pressed three or four more keys. “At these decibels, if you please.”

  “Yes, mum. As you request.”

  Dodger waited with the professor as the metal man processed the request. All at once, the room filled with a quick throbbing pulse, a strong lub followed by a softer dub, like a heart beating in double time.

  “Torque,” the doc said, “locate the source of the strongest frequency.”

  The clockwork man stirred with jerky movements, shifting this way and that until it settled in the direction of the metal button on Dittmeyer’s desk. Torque raised its hand to Dodger’s S.N.I.F.E.R. across the room. “The primary source of frequency is two meters from this access point.”

  “Eliminate that input source, please.”

  “As you command.”

  The throbbing in the air changed at once from a strong double heart beat to a weak pulse barely discernable from the gears and whirs of the clockwork man himself.

  “Ah!” the professor shouted. “As I suspected!”

  “What is that?” Dodger asked.

  “The second button.” The professor nudged his niece to one side and began wildly punching at the keys in the metal man’s chest.

  “But that button disappeared with Duncan.”

  “That might be the case,” Lelanea said, “but it would seem that the thing is still giving off a signal.”

  “And judging by the weakness of the pulse, it is either very far away or …” The doc didn’t finish the thought, instead turning his attention to finishing his sequence on the keyboard. “There. I do so hate manual mode. Hard on the fingers, as it were.”

  “That’s why you have me, Uncle,” Lelanea said, taking up the older man’s hands and massaging his fingers.

  “You’re too good to me, Ludda.”

  Dodger cocked his head and eyed Lelanea at this curious pet name. She thoroughly pretended to ignore him.

  “Torque,” the doc said. “Use those algorithms to home in on the source of the second pulse.”

  “Are you sure, sir?” Mr. Torque asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sir is aware that the calculations are into the negatives. They go below the standard threshold.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  This would be the point at which Mr. Torque—the normal Mr. Torque, that was to say—would rant and rave about how such a job was beneath him. But no, this metal shell of the clockwork man just nodded its head and said, “As you command, sir.”

  “Below the standard threshold?” Lelanea asked.

  “Certainly. Makes sense when one thinks about it.”

  Lelanea took on a far-off look, as if she really were thinking about it. In a flash, her eyes went wide and she announced, “Of course! Uncle, you’re a genius.”

  As Mr. Torque shifted in its herky-jerky manner about the room, Dodger turned the question over in his mind. Why would the professor use negative algorithms to locate the second button? How could something have a negative value? No, wait now. Not negative value. A negative size. The negative calculations meant the machine was searching for something smaller than the given threshold. Which meant Torque was looking for something that ran backwards in relative size.

  Without warning, Torque raised its metal hand, pointed at Dodger’s trousers, and claimed with some level of authority in its cold voice, “The secondary input source is less than one meter from this access point.”

  “Excellent!” the professor shouted and clapped.

  “I don’t understand,” Dodger said. And it wasn’t a lie. Though he had worked out some of the details, he just couldn’t see how the second button had anything to do with him. “I told you. I don’t have it.” He turned out his pockets to prove the point. “See? I don’t have it.”

  “I know you don’t. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t on you.”

  “Take off your pants,” Lelanea demanded.

  “What?” Dodger asked.

  “This is no time to be shy, Mr. Dodger,” the professor said. “A man’s life hangs by a very, very small thread.”

  “A man’s life …” Dodger almost gasped as he finally grasped what was happening here. “You think Duncan might still be alive?”

  “Yes. But the only way to know is to locate him before it’s too late. Now, take off your pants. Carefully. We don’t need to jostle him any more than he’s already been tossed about.”

  Thankful he’d chosen to sport underwear that day, Dodger slipped off his pants and handed them to the young woman.

  Lelanea and her uncle held the trousers out to Torque, leg by leg by pocket by crotch until the metal man announced that the signal was coming from near Dodger’s right front pocket. Dittmeyer grabbed a glass slide from his microscope and scraped it across the area, holding it out to Torque with each progressive scrape until the machine at last confirmed that the source of the pulse had indeed moved from the pants to the slide. With the slide in hand, he dashed over to his microscope, slipped it into place and set to working the various controls.

  “Ah, yes, we have a winner,” the doc said.

  “Marvelous,” Lelanea said.

  “Is that him, then?” Dodger asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Dodger,” the professor said. “If you will please get on the tube and ask Ched to stop the train. The next step is going to take some room.”

  “How much room we talkin’?”

  “Rather a lot of room, really. I’m afraid that, for this, we will have to disembark.”

  ****

  back to top

  ****

  Chapter Twelve

  From Slide to Slab

  In which Dodger helps implement big plans

  The process did require a lot of room.

  A lot of room and, as it turned out, a lot of energy.

  The professor and Ched readied the equipment while Lelanea and Feng prepared a makeshift infirmary. Dodger’s sole task was to keep a firm and steady hand on the slide. Everyone seemed both excited and worried by the task ahead. Everyone save for Mr. Torque, who lingered in the doorway of the meeting cab behind the rest of the crew, sulking over what he referred to as a ‘personal violation’ by Miss Lelanea.

  Dodger, for lack of anything better to do, inquired as to the nature of the machine the pair of men was installing in the long shadows of the setting sun.

  “The EPR,” the professor explained, “or Enlarging Projection Ray, works much like the shrinking belts, only in a sort of reverse manner. It makes things bigger as apposed to making them smaller. The only drawback is that enlargement doesn’t last nearly as long as the shrinking effects of the belts or the shrink ray. The typical enlargement only lasts a few minutes, which is why the EPR never found its way onto the common market. It seems that when folks enlarge something, they wish for it to remain so, permanently.”

  “What good will a few minutes do?” Dodger asked.

  “It will allow us to confirm that this friend of yours is still alive,” Lelanea said.

  “And if he is,” the doc said, “I think I can provide a way for him to remain his normal size.” The doc patted the silver belt slung over his shoulder. “Are you done setting up, Ched?”

  “Yesh, shir,” Ched said as he stepped back to admire his work. “The thing ish hooked to the Shleipnir’s generatorsh, like you ashked.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I shure hope she’ll make enough power for ya.”

  “I should hope so too.”

  “We might be a bit presshed for water after thish, though.”

  “We’ll manage. We always do.”

  The EPR looked just like the Reduction Machine from the bank. Similar shape. Similar purpose. The barrel was pointed away from the train, aimed at an X that the professor had dug into the ground with his heel. Rather than employing a manual crank, the driver hooked a series of cables to the couplers, which ran all the way to the engine of the train.

  “You think you can really bring thish feller back?”
Ched asked.

  “I’m positive I can,” the professor said. “That is to say, if he is actually there. Ched, go and stoke the boilers to their highest output. Mr. Dodger, please set the slide on the marked position.”

  After cautiously carrying the glass side to the X some fifty feet from the train, Dodger placed it in the crux of the furrows as gently as possible. He stood over the slide, staring down at it in a moment of silent prayer for the safe return of the deputy.

  “Come away from there, Mr. Dodger!” the doc shouted. “We’re ready to begin.”

  Dodger hightailed it out of the ray’s path, rejoining the group once more.

  “Now comes the tricky bit,” the doc said. “Everyone, either grab a pair of SPECS or look away. I’m afraid the beam isn’t kind to the corneas. Oh, and don’t be surprised if this is a complete failure.”

  “Sir,” Dodger admonished as he put on a pair of goggles. “You can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened to him.”

  “It’s not that. You see, I never really got the enlarging ray to work properly. For all I know, it will set the target on fire.”

  Dodger’s skin crawled at the doc’s sincerity. “Why would you think something like that?”

  “Because that’s what happened the last ten times I tried to use it. But not to fret, I may have worked out the kinks.” He pulled a pair of SPECS over his eyes and added, “Everyone ready?”

  The crew nodded as one. (Even the dour Mr. Torque.) The professor adjusted the dials and switches on the EPR. He adjusted them again. And again. For a moment, Dodger thought that the man was stalling because he feared meeting with failure twice in one day. Lelanea placed her hand on her uncle’s shoulder, which reassured him enough to continue.

  “Here we go,” the doc said, and pressed the largest, reddest button in the center of the machine.

  The device projected a fine white line of light, which struck its intended mark—the center of the X, where the glass slide rested. At first, nothing appeared to happen. Dodger held his breath in this eternity of nothing, repeating his silent prayer. Without warning, the one-inch slide began to grow. Twice its size. Three times that. A foot long. Two feet. Ten feet. And all the time, it rose in height as well. Within sixty seconds, the glass slide nearly covered the fifty feet between itself and the EPR, almost reached Dodger’s head in height, and was still growing.