“The minute it’s dark enough,” said Frank, “just before all the lights come on, that’s when we move. Head north, get to that wide draw that’s up there.”
“Run away?” Jesse glared.
“Damn straight,” Frank said.
“Cowards run away.”
“Some do. Sometimes they’re just not brave enough to run. You been out there. How many cowards about to go runn’ into that?”
“You think—”
“I think we can make it to that arroyo. Then it’s just keepin ahead of Linderfelt.”
“You want to just check outside that flap for us?” said Stray.
The boy took a careful look outside. “Reckon two minutes before them lights’ll be on.”
“Now’d be a real good time,” Frank said. “Nothin much else to do here.”
“Dunn,” Jesse remembered.
“Where’d he get to?” Stray gathering up a pistol and some ammunition, looking around for her hat.
“Right here,” said Dunn, from behind the stove.
They all went out under the sides of the tent. A small band of horsemen was galloping past, a forward propulsion of muscle and hide, and hooves like massed weapons. The bunch might’ve been state militia, Baldwins, sheriff’s posse, Ku Klux Klan or any of the volunteer ranger groups. It was getting too dark out to tell. They were carrying torches. Rising with the flame was thick black smoke. As if the purpose was not to cast light but blackness.
The gunfire was unremitting now. Rifle smoke from the Guardsmen’s positions rose in the cold air. It didn’t help much to know where they were, because soon enough they would be here, in one of their pitiless charges, which came only in the dark, and when they were sure of their victims.
Jesse ran and was nearly to safety when a ragged shape rose up in his path and a hand gripped his arm and the cold metal snout of a service .45 was pressed to his head. “Where we going so fast, li’l dago?”
“Let go my arm,” Jesse said.
“You’re the tent kid used to come around the shop.” The gun muzzle stayed where it was. Jesse tried to think of ways he could come out of this with only pain, maybe something cut or broken that would only cost him some time for it to heal.
“You been shootin at us today, ain’t you son?”
“You been shootin at me,” said Jesse.
He got a long red-eyed look. The gun came away, and Jesse tensed up for what he was afraid was coming next. “I’m really fuckin tired. I’m hungry. Ain’t none of us been paid since we come down this miserable place.”
“Sure know how that feels.”
They stood as if listening to the shooting all around the junction.
“Get your anarchist ass out of here,” the trooper said at last, “and if you people pray, pray I don’t see it in the daylight.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jesse saw no harm in replying.
“Name’s Brice.” But by that time Jesse was running too fast to answer with his own.
THEY TOOK SHELTER with hundreds of others, at least for a few minutes, in the wide arroyo north of town, waiting for some letup in the shooting to get someplace safe. But the militia were trying to take the steel bridge over the arroyo, which would cut off any more escape to the westward. The searchlights swept in and out of the draw, throwing black shadows you could feel, like a breeze, as they went by. Now and then one of the kids went climbing up to see what was going on back at the tents, and had to be yelled at.
Frank felt a hand at his shoulder and thought at first it was Stray’s. But when he looked, he could only just make her out, through the blowing needles of spring snow, sheltering Jesse with her body. No one else was near him. Just as likely to’ve been the hand of some dead striker, reaching back through the mortal curtain to try and find something of Earth to touch, anything, and that happened to be Frank. Maybe even Webb’s own hand. Webb and all that he had tried to make of his life, and all that had been taken, and all the paths his children had gone off on. . . . Frank woke after a few seconds, found he’d been drooling down his shirt. This would not do.
Stray and the boy were both about the same height, Frank noticed for the first time. Jesse was asleep on his feet. Half a mile away, the tents were all being set on fire, one by one, by the heroes of Linderfelt’s Company B. An impure reddish light leapt and shifted in the sky and the troopers made sounds of animal triumph. Shots kept ripping across the perilous night. Sometimes they connected, and strikers, and children and their mothers, and even troopers and camp guards, took bullets or fought flames, and fell in battle. But it happened, each casualty, one by one, in light that history would be blind to. The only accounts would be the militia’s.
Stray opened her eyes and saw Frank looking at her. She looked back, and they were both too tired to pretend it wasn’t desire, even here in the middle of hell.
“When we get a minute,” she began, then seemed to lose the thought.
Frank sensed the bright awful chance they really might never even get to touch again. Last thing he needed to consider right now. “Just get you and him back to your sister’s place safe, O.K.?” he said finally. “It’s the one thing you got to worry about right now, all the rest can wait.”
“I’m goin with you, Frank,” Jesse’s voice slurred with exhaustion.
“You need to go with your Ma, make sure she gets out of here in one piece.”
“But the fightin ain’t over.”
“No, it ain’t. But you already put in a long day of good fightin, Jesse, and these ladies here, babies and so forth, they need a trusty rifle shot who’ll cover ’em till they can get over to that little ranch past the tracks. There’ll be plenty more fightin to do, everbody’ll get their share.”
He knew the pale smudge of the boy’s face was turned to him, and Frank was just as glad not to have to see the expression on it. “Now that I know how to get to your Uncle Holt and Aunt Willow’s place, ’cause you drew me that map and all, I’ll come down there quick as we can get this wrapped up.”
They both heard that “we,” not the one they’d hoped for but this other collective of shadows, dead on their feet, not half a dozen words of English among them, rifle butts dragging in the dirt, filing away east up the wagon road into the Black Hills now, trying to stay together.
“We’ll be up there,” moving his head toward the Hills, “supposed to be a mobilization camp someplace. Jesse you take care now—” and the boy ran to embrace him with such unexpected fierceness, as if he could hold everything, the night about to end, the shelter of the arroyo, hold it all still, unchanging, and Frank could feel him trying not to cry, and then making himself unclasp, step away, get on with this terrible onset of morning. Stray was there just behind him.
“O.K., Estrella.” Their embrace might not have been so close or desperate, but no kiss he could remember had ever been quite this honest, nor this weighted with sorrow.
“There’s trains heading south all the time,” she said, “we’ll be fine.”
“Soon as I can—”
“Never mind that, Frank. Jesse, you want to carry this here?” And they were gone, and he wasn’t even sure what it cost them not to look back.
That summer had been memorable for its high temperatures. All Europe sweltered. Wine grapes turned on the vine to raisins overnight. Piles of hay cut and gathered early as June burst spontaneously into flame. Wildfires traveled the Continent, crossing borders, leaping ridgelines and rivers with impunity. Naturist cults were overcome with a terrible fear that the luminary they worshipped had betrayed them and now consciously planned Earth’s destruction.
Reports had reached Inconvenience of an updraft over the deserts of Northern Africa unprecedented in size and intensity. To feed the great thermal ascent, air masses were being drawn down from the Alps and the Mountains of the Moon and the Balkan heights, and a sky-craft, even one the size of Inconvenience, had only to approach the flow and Saharan anti-gravity would take care of the rest. All that was really needed was to let
go.
There was discussion, of course, about the financing. These days the boys were pretty much on their own. The National Office had finally become so cheap with budget allocations that the crew of Inconvenience, after a meeting which lasted five minutes including the time it took to brew the coffee, had voted, finally, to disaffiliate. Nor were they alone in this decision. For some time, in fact, worldwide, the organization had been drifting into a loose collection of independent operators, with only the “Chums of Chance” name and insignia in common. There were no repercussions from above. It was as if the National had vacated its premises, wherever they’d been to begin with, and left no forwarding address. The boys were all free to define their own missions and negotiate their own fees, whose entire amount they would now get to keep, rather than tithing half and even more back to the National.
This greatly improved flow of revenue, along with recent advances in light-weight engines of higher horsepower, had allowed Inconvenience to expand to considerable size, with the mess hall alone occupying more space than the entire gondola of the previous version of the ship, and the kitchen grown nearly as enormous. Miles, as commissary, had installed patent refrigerators and hydrogen-burning stoves of the latest design, and hired a top-notch cooking staff, including a former sous-chef at the well-known Tour d’Argent in Paris.
Tonight’s meeting was about whether or not to take the Inconvenience into the great updraft over the Sahara without somebody paying for it in advance. Miles called the session to order by bashing upon a Chinese gong acquired years before from an assassination cult active in that country, during the boys’ unheralded but decisive activities in the Boxer Rebellion (see The Chums of Chance and the Wrath of the Yellow Fang), and wheeled around a refrigerated Champagne cart, refilling everyone’s glass from a Balthazar of ’03 Verzenay.
“Not ‘on spec,’ sky-brothers,” protested Darby, whose appreciation for the field of contract law had by now grown perhaps to the fringes of unhealthy obsessiveness. “We’re not in this racket for free. No client, no cruise.”
“Don’t you boys just have adventures anymore?” piped up Pugnax’s companion Ksenija, though she barked it in Macedonian. Not long before, Pugnax had met up with the fiercely beautiful šarplaninec sheep-dog, and convinced her to come aboard Inconvenience. Sometimes he thought he’d been waiting for her all his life, that she had always been down there, moving somewhere just visible, among the landscapes rolling beneath the ship, deep among the details of tiny fenced or hedged fields, thatched or red-tiled rooftops, smoke from hundreds of human fires, the steep shadowed mountains, pursuing by day the ancient minuet with the flocks. . . .
The vote was unanimous—they would venture into the updraft, and pick up the costs out of overhead. Darby had apparently voted against his own legal principles.
Because no one had yet measured the forces likely to be in play, ordinarily no skyfarer with his wits about him would have ventured within a hundred miles of the desert phenomenon, yet hardly had the boys secured the Special Sky Detail than they began to feel tremors in the hull, which presently became leaps of metal exhilaration, almost a breaking into some unimagined freedom, as the ship was seized and borne downslope off the Balkan Peninsula, faster and faster southwestward across the Mediterranean and the coast of Libya, directly toward the huge vertical departure somewhere ahead.
Those not actually on watch stood at the windows of the Grand Saloon and stared as the strangely red cylindrical cloud slowly rose, like a sinister luminary, up over the horizon—sands eternally ascending, bright and calamitous off their starboard bow and closing, empty and silent and forever rushing skyward, pure aerodynamic lift, anti-paradise. . . .
And as they entered and were taken, Chick Counterfly thought back to his first days aboard the Inconvenience, and Randolph’s dark admonition that going up would be like going north, and his own surmise that one could climb high enough to descend to the surface of another planet. Or, as the commander had put it then, “Another ‘surface,’ but an earthly one . . . all too earthly.”
The corollary, Chick had worked out long ago, being that each star and planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy.
Now, out in the suffocating heat of the sandstorm, Chick stood on the flying bridge, in protective desert gear, and took thermometer readings, measuring altitude meanwhile with an antique but reliable sympiezometer, salvaged from the wreck of the first Inconvenience after the little-known Battle of Desconocido, in California.
With the visibility only marginally improved, Chick was dismayed to note that the column of mercury in the instrument now stood higher, indicating an increase of atmospheric pressure and hence a lower altitude! Though the ship was still being carried by a rising air-current, as Chick reported with some urgency to Randolph, yet somehow it was also making its descent to a surface none could see. The skyship commander chewed and swallowed half a bottle of soda-mint tablets and paced the bridge. “Recommendations?”
“We still have our Hypops gear from the old Inner Asia assignment,” it occurred to Chick. “It might enable us at least to see through some of this.” He quickly rigged himself and the Commander into the strange futuristic arrangements of helmets, lenses, air-tanks and electrical power-supplies, allowing both aeronauts to ascertain that the ship was indeed about to crash into a range of mountains which appeared to be masses of black obsidian, glittering with red highlights, the razor-sharp crestlines stretching for miles before vanishing into a vaporous twilight. “Lighten ship!” cried Randolph, and Miles and Darby hurried to comply, the ominous red lights flaring after them, like molten lava at a time of geologic upheaval.
After the danger was averted with the usual “inches to spare,” Randolph and Lindsay repaired to the chartroom to see if they could find any maps to match the terrain, so far unfamiliar to any of them, above which the ship now cruised.
After a comprehensive review that extended through the night, the two-lad Navigational Committee determined that the ship had most likely come upon the Pythagorean or Counter-Earth once postulated by Philolaus of Tarentum in order to make the number of celestial bodies add up to ten, which was the perfect Pythagorean number. “Philolaus believed that only one side of our Earth was inhabited,” explained Chick, “and it happened to be the side turned away from the Other Earth he called Antichthon, which was why nobody ever saw it. We know now that the real reason was the planet’s orbit, the same as our own except one hundred eighty degrees out, so that the Sun is always between us.”
“We just flew through the Sun?” inquired Darby, in a tone his shipmates recognized as prelude to a quarter-hour of remarks about the Commander’s judgment, if not sanity.
“Maybe not,” Chick said. “Maybe more like seeing through the Sun with a telescope of very high resolution so clearly that we’re no longer aware of anything but the Æther between us.”
“Oh, like X-ray Spex,” sniggered Darby, “only different.”
“Antichthon,” announced Miles, like a streetcar conductor. “The other Earth. Watch your step, everyone.”
IT WAS LIKE their Harmonica Marching Band days all over again. They were on the Counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left.
As if all maps and charts had suddenly become unreadable, the little company came to understand that in some way not exhausted by the geographical, they were lost. Deposited by the great Saharan updraft on a planet from which they remained uncertain as to the chances of return, the boys could almost believe some days that they were safely back home on Earth—on others they found an American Republic whose welfare they believed they were sworn to advance pass
ed so irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic that it seemed they could not, after all, have escaped the gravity of the Counter-Earth. Sworn by their Foundational Memorandum never to interfere in the affairs of the “groundhogs,” they looked on in helplessness and a depression of spirit new to them.
Their contractual operations began to bring in less revenue than sources unrelated to the sky—rent on surface properties, interest from business loans, returns on investments of many years standing—and the boys had begun to wonder if their days of global adventure might not be behind them, when one night in the early autumn of 1914, they were visited by a shadowy Russian agent going by the name of Baklashchan (“An alias,” he assured them—“the more threatening ones were all spoken for”), who brought news of the mysterious disappearance of their old friendly nemesis Captain Igor Padzhitnoff.
“He’s been missing since the summer,” Baklashchan said, “and our own operatives have exhausted all clues. We wondered if someone in the same line of work might not have a better chance of finding him. Especially given the current world situation.”
“World situation?” frowned Randolph. The boys looked at one another puzzledly.
“You are . . . unaware . . .” Baklashchan began, then hesitated, as if remembering a clause in his instructions forbidding him to share certain information. He smiled in apology, and handed over a dossier containing the most recently observed movements of Padzhitnoff’s ship.
Despite the “Eleventh Commandment” prevailing among free-lance adventurers of the time, the boys agreed unhesitatingly to take the case. Initial payment was in gold, which Baklashchan had packed in on a Bactrian camel, which stood patiently beneath the shadow of the Inconvenience cast by a nearly full moon.
“And please do convey our regards to the Tsar and his family,” Randolph reminded the emissary. “We cherish our memories of their hospitality at the Winter Palace.”
“We should be seeing them quite soon,” said Baklashchan.
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