Chapter 9
Built on a low bluff, near the place where a smaller stream joined a river, the Duke’s base presented a number of problems to an attacker. Its location made approach tricky from any direction but one, while an impressive tangle of barbed wire blocked the way in that direction. A tall watchtower looked far out over the countryside, making surprise more difficult. The buildings in the camp were completely surrounded by an earth wall and an outer ditch. Like all of the Duke’s arrangements that Brian had seen so far, the base had a solid look, as if it were very unlikely to fold up at the first blow.
Brian and his companions had been unable even to catch sight of Anne. They had hoped for better luck at the base, but what they’d seen so far looked unpromising.
Inside, Brian, Carl and Smitty were given quarters in a one-story building about forty feet long. At one end was a small room containing two double bunks. Across the short hall was a lavatory. The rest of the building was empty. Shortly after they’d gotten there, several of the Duke’s men carried in a box containing an assortment of books, most of them high school texts in chemistry, physics and biology, and a plain wooden table.
Smitty said dryly, “Now we’re all set.”
Brian said, “Well, the main thing is to find Anne, then get in touch with Cardan.”
“We’ll have a swell time doing it. Did you notice the layout on the way in?”
Brian nodded. There had been half a dozen worn, two-story wooden structures side by side in a straight line, with another two-story building placed well back of one end of the line, and the low one-story building they were in now, set well back of the other end. These buildings were rectangular, and had apparently all been there long before the Duke. In addition, there was a newer-looking, large, square central mess hall, with another square building and the watchtower in a line back of it. The original rectangular buildings and the mess hall, seen from the air, would form sort of jack-o’-lantern’s face, the straight line of six buildings, side by side, forming the mouth, the square mess-hall the nose, and the two separated buildings further back, the eyes. The other square building was at a point midway between and slightly above the eyes, with the watchtower in line further above it. In addition, a number of smaller buildings were scattered around without visible pattern. But what Brian and Smitty were thinking about was the particular way these buildings were split up.
When they’d marched in with the others through the gate, they’d found themselves between two lines of strong fence topped with barbed wire. This led directly through a second gate into a large circular yard with the mess hall in the center, and five additional gates leading to the five separated sections of the base. The row of six side-by-side buildings was split in half by the two lines of fence leading in from the outside. The two other widely separated buildings that sat back from the ends of this line were cut off from it by two more fences. The watchtower and the square building back of the mess hall were separated from the other buildings by double lines of fence topped with barbed wire. Each of these separated sections was connected to the others only by a gate to the yard around the mess hall. When they marched in, half the troops promptly turned right through one gate, while the other half went left through another gate. The line of six two-story buildings were evidently barracks. The Duke and certain of his officers and men went to the square building back of the mess hall. That must be the headquarters building.
Brian, Carl and Smitty had been shown into the small building they were now in. There remained only one place on the Duke’s base that might house Cardan and his men. That was four fences away, on the opposite side of the Duke’s headquarters and watchtower. Anne, if she was actually on the base, was apparently inside the heavily fenced headquarters building.
As Brian was contemplating these obstacles, there was a knock on the door at the end of the large room. A man came in carrying a covered tray and a wicker basket.
“Eats,” he said cheerfully. He set the tray and basket on the table. “Duke says to start studying up on steam engines. You want to earn your pay and water, you’re going to have to repair one we’re bringing in.”
Smitty said promptly, “For that, we’ll need tools.”
“Sure. You’ll get tools.” He grinned broadly and went out.
Carl said, “What was that about earning our pay and water?”
Brain scowled and raised the lid of the tray. The odor of roast beef, boiled onions and baked potatoes drifted out into the room. In the basket were three fresh rolls, split open, butter melting on them.
“There’s plenty of food here,” he said, “but no water.”
Smitty came back into the room from the direction of the washroom. “There are four sinks, a shower, and a variety of other fittings in there. The only thing in the pipes is air.”
They looked at the food a moment, then glanced at each other. Smitty said, “Well, we may die of thirst, but I don’t plan to die of starvation.” He pulled out a roll.
They were finishing a highly satisfying meal when there was a rumble and a clank outside. Brian opened the door and saw a collection of rusty scrap metal being unloaded from a wagon.
Carl came over. “What’s that?”
Brian swallowed the last of his roll with a dry mouth.
The men on the wagon dropped off a couple of rods with large fittings at one end, swung the wagon around and went out. The gate clanged shut behind them.
Carl turned around and leaned back into the building. “Hey, Smitty!”
Smitty mopped his plate with his roll. “I’ll be out in a minute. Look things over and see what you think.”
Brian and Carl walked around the pile of parts, but were no wiser at the end than at the beginning. There were, among other things, a large, heavy cast-iron base, a heavy spoked wheel, rods of different shapes and sizes, a cylindrical piece of metal, a good-sized piston, a little tank, odd lengths of pipe, and assorted loose bolts and cap screws. To one side lay a greasy cloth with a hammer and a variety of wrenches and other tools wrapped up in it.
Smitty came out the door of the building wearing a look of contentment, and walked around the pile. He bent over, pulled out one of the rods and examined the large end carefully, got up, and leaned over to pull out another part.
On the far side of the fence, a good dozen of the Duke’s men lounged around, grinning and watching the obvious discomfiture of Brian and Carl.
Smitty straightened up. “It’s all here. In fact, some joker has thrown in some extra pieces to foul us up.”
“Great,” said Carl. “What is it?”
Smitty looked surprised. “It’s a low horsepower, side-crank, slide-valve steam engine. See, here’s the crosshead, this is the connecting rod, and there’s the crankshaft. The whole thing has already been put together and then disassembled. You see the grease here, and the way this rust has been scraped away so the metal is shiny where the parts have been fitted together?”
Carl shook his head. “I’m just manual labor on this job.”
Brian was struggling to remember what little he’d ever learned about steam engines.
Smitty said, “Do just as I say. First, bring that table out so we can get some of these parts up out of the dirt. Then we’d better start putting it together. I’m thirsty already.”
Under Smitty’s directions, they began assembling the engine. At dusk, one of the Duke’s men carried out a gasoline lantern which cast its white glare and hard shadows on the scene. Around midnight, the three men, covered with perspiration and dizzy with thirst, stood back from the finished job. They were through.
The piston was connected to the piston rod, the piston rod to the crosshead, the crosshead to the connecting rod, the connecting rod to the crankshaft. The valve gear was all connected up. If they had a source of steam, the thing should work.
There was a clang as the gate opened and three men came in carrying buckets of water, while a fourth man looked over the engine, grinned, and said, “Okay, you’ll do. The Duke’ll see you tomorrow morning at eight.” He nodded to the others, who set down the water.
Brian, Carl and Smitty drank the cool water cautiously, like men who have crossed the desert and are afraid to take too much at once. They fell into their bunks, exhausted—only to be blasted out of bed by a bugle thrust in the nearest doorway. They were sure they’d slept about an hour; it turned out to be six a.m. The roar of a megaphone invited them out for half an hour of violent calisthenics. A tray containing three steaming bowls of corn-meal mush was delivered to them at seven ten, followed by another six buckets of water. A small wood stove was lugged into the room, and several men were connecting it up as Brian, Carl and Smitty trudged sleepily out to the gate and said, “We’re supposed to see the Duke at eight. Where do we find him?”
“At the palace. Through that gate to the left.”
The “palace” turned out to be the large square headquarters building near the watchtower. This had a porch completely around the base and the second floor, with several business places, namely the Palace Barber Shop, the Palace Refreshment Stand, and the Palace Clothes and Equipment Mart, on the first floor. Beside a broad flight of stairs to the second floor was a sign in the shape of an arrow, with the letters D.U.K.E.
The second-floor porch, running completely around the building, had a variety of doors opening off it. To Brian’s right as he left the steps was a door marked D.U.K.E. Against the wall nearby was a large grandfather clock, plainly put there as a hint to people to come and leave on time. The clock now said three minutes before eight. On the other side of the door from the clock stood a guard, who watched them with no particular expression.
“We’re early,” Brian commented. “If we go in now, he’ll be mad. Let’s walk around for a few minutes.”
Smitty grunted. “Good idea.”
The guard paid no special attention as they took the lucky opportunity to walk around to the opposite side of the building, where the porch looked down over the two-story building that they thought must house Cardan and his men. As they watched, a broad, powerfully built man with a frayed cigar stub clenched in the corner of his mouth opened the door at the end of the building, and nodded to someone within.
Unnecessarily, Carl murmured, “That’s Cardan.”
From within, a tall blond man, and a sharp-featured man with dark hair, stepped out carrying a box containing dull whitish oblongs about four inches long by three wide.
Smitty said in a low voice, “Soap.”
Brian caught his breath.
Just then, there was the sound of a door closing around the corner of the building, and the Duke’s voice was low but clear.
“My dear,” said the Duke, “I could end your resistance very easily. But I want your decision to be freely made.”
Anne’s voice carried a trace of exasperation. “I’ve already told you my decision.”
“But that’s the wrong decision. You don’t know what you’re trying to throw away. I offer you position which no one else in this world can offer. Don’t smile. Already I control this base and the outlying camps. I have brought peace and order to a region that would have been lost to starvation and murder. This is only the beginning. Through the entire country, there’s a crying need for peace, order and central direction. There is a need, and I supply the lack. What you see now is just the beginning of a snowball.”
The voices were coming closer.
Brian and his companions went quietly down the porch in the opposite direction, and were waiting outside the Duke’s office when, looking exasperated but stubborn, he walked in and was immediately all cordiality as he invited them inside and congratulated them on putting the steam engine together. He pulled aside a curtain on the wall to reveal a map of the roads and railroads of the state. The eastern part of the map was thickly crisscrossed with lines indicating tracks.
“As of now,” said the Duke, “there are three means of rapid transportation here: horse, bicycle, and diesel truck started by compressed air. The horse has a top speed of, say, thirty-five miles an hour, and can’t sustain it for more than a few minutes. The bicycle can go fifty miles an hour downhill, and up the same hill it goes one mile an hour with the rider pushing. Neither can carry much of anything as baggage, and in a storm the rider is fully exposed to the weather. The diesel truck can go fifty or sixty miles an hour over a long distance, carrying a considerable load, but we have a certain amount of difficulty supplying suitable fuel, and this will get worse before it gets better.
“In addition, the same thing that now blocks electricity seems to weaken the metal itself, and this engine relies for power on a rapid series of violent explosions inside the cylinders. As a result, the engines have to be pulled apart every few days. In short, we have nothing but unreliable means of rapid transportation at our disposal. This limits the radius of effective control of any military force we can form. It means that the only practical defense against anarchy is the creation of many small independent units, each self-sufficient and capable of defense against roving gangs of arsonists and murderers.”
The Duke’s fist banged on the desk. His eyes flashed. As Brian and the others waited alertly for an explosion of temper, the Duke beamed upon them.
“It won’t do. I visualize in its place a mighty organization of steam locomotives, each capable of fueling by coal or wood, knitting together a network of armed camps under my own control, devoted to keeping order, eliminating karb, and bringing in supplies and recruits throughout a continuously expanding region. Such locomotives, pulling short trains, could average between forty and forty-five miles an hour, and travel, if need be, a thousand miles a day. They could do it without excessive strain or wear on the metal, and they could easily carry loads that would be too heavy for transportation by road. They would enable me to switch troops from one place to another very rapidly, and to unite a large region under one centralized control.” He leaned back and beamed upon them. “The people who did the work that put this tool at my disposal would be very liberally rewarded.”
Brian and the others went back to their little building with a clear picture of what the Duke had in mind.
“That So-and-So,” said Smitty, “sees himself as a dictator, with a fleet of locomotives carrying his private army around the country from one place to another.”
“Sure,” said Carl. “And he can do it, too. People will be so glad to get the gangs off their necks that they won’t realize they’ve been taken over till it’s too late.”
Brian said, “Anne’s father was right. We’ve got to find out if there’s some piece of America left somewhere, and join up with it.”
“Remember, he’s got Anne,” Carl reminded.
“We know where she is, anyway—and where Cardan is,” said Smitty.
Brian glanced out the window at the double fence, “We’ve got to find some way to get in touch with them.”
Outside their door, there was the crash of metal.
Smitty swore.
The door opened. One of the Duke’s men said, “This came out of an old lumber mill. Duke wants it working again. You get your water when she works. Let us know if you need anything.”
Outside was a formidable heap of scrap that made what they’d worked on the night before look brand-new.
In the next few weeks, Brian, Carl and Smitty repaired eight old steam engines. Food, fuel, clothing, special privileges—and water—were their rewards. The first thing any of them knew of a new job was the sound of its being unloaded and the announcement that they would get water when they had it finished. They took to hoarding water in the sinks and washtubs, but there was a limit to the amount they could store, while there was no limit to the rusted, stuck, cracked, corroded antique engines they were supposed to repair.
At night, when they were between jobs, Brian, Smitty and Carl tested the fences around their part of the camp, and discovered an ingenious system of spring-loaded bells that immediately announced any attempt to get over the top. They could not cut the fence itself without it being discovered the next day, and the bottom of the fence turned out to be set in concrete. After a great deal of nighttime exploration, they finally found a weak place under the fence leading to a space between the outer wall and the fence surrounding the Duke’s “palace.” At the other end of this narrow passage was the place where Brian had seen Cardan, Maclane and Donovan; and here, too, was a spot where the fence could be burrowed under. While Smitty stayed behind in case a guard should come on one of the infrequent checks, Brian and Carl succeeded one cloudy night in getting under both fences, making their way through the darkness to Cardan’s building, easing open the door, and getting in, only to be immediately knocked senseless for their pains.
Brian opened his eyes in a room lighted brightly by a kerosene lamp, with blankets over the windows, and the harsh flat planes of a man’s face regarding him through a cloud of cigar smoke.
Brian recognized Cardan and, behind him, the sharp features of Maclane.
Brian dizzily sat up. His voice came out in a croak. “Hello, Chief.”
Cardan answered with a bare grunt and glanced at Carl, who was looking around dazedly.
Brian sniffed, aware, through the smell of cigar smoke, of a complex of faint odors that might conceivably come from glycerin and a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids at work.
He risked a guess. “I hope you’re keeping it cool.”
Cardan looked at him, then glanced at Donovan. “How’s this batch coming?”
“Slow, as usual. We don’t want any accidental reactions.”
“When are you planning to get out?” Brian asked.
Cardan looked thoughtfully at the glowing tip of his cigar and considered the question. “Possibly next week. Do you have any plans?”
“First we wanted to get in touch with you. We’re too worn out pounding on antique steam engines to plan very far ahead.”
“That explains why the pressure on us has let up a little,” Cardan said.
Brian asked, “What can we do to help?”
“There isn’t much you can do,” said Cardan, “except to keep caught up on your work and do nothing to make them suspicious. As for how we’re going to get out, you may have noticed a big piece of wheeled machinery on your way in.”
Brian shook his head. “It’s black as pitch out there.”
“Well,” said Cardan, “there’s an antique steam tractor out there. This so-called Duke wants it rebuilt and fitted with a blade—to make a kind of steam-powered bulldozer. We plan to distract attention with several dynamite blasts on the far side of the camp, use the bulldozer to shove the wall into the ditch, and get away in the steam cars and diesel trucks that are in for repairs at the time. We can’t tell just what night will be right, but we’ll let you know when it comes.”
“What about Anne?”
Cardan took the cigar out of his mouth. “Is she here?”
Brian told what had happened, and Cardan thought a moment. “We could rig up something to immobilize the stretched wires that work that alarm system, then we could cut the fence, put a ladder up the side of that building and get her out that way. First, we’ll have to find out what room she’s in, but I’m sure we can do that.”
Brian didn’t like the idea of standing aside while the others did the work, but Cardan insisted.
“This has been planned for a long time, and we can’t change it now. Don’t worry. Just keep on as you have been. Don’t do anything to arouse suspicion. We want to keep them happy till we blast our way out of this place. Just go on as you are till our man crawls in and tells you to clear out.”
***
Doing as Cardan said and sticking to their usual routine was maddening, and to avoid thinking of the escape, they worked harder than ever. The Duke was delighted with them.
Soon they were at work in a large machinery shed, newly built between the palace and the watchtower. Here everything seemed to go wrong. Boilers were clogged, mechanical power-transmission lines tore themselves loose, engines vibrated, safety valves stuck, then let go with a roar and refused to close, governors ran the engines fast, then slow, then fast again, in a maddening rhythm that drove them to distraction; and in the midst of this chaos, the Duke came in covered with soot and dragged them outside for a look at their half-collapsed smokepipe. Only gradually did they begin to straighten out the chaos. And then one night Brian woke to hear Carl say urgently, “Come on, Brian! The chief says we’re leaving!”
Brian stumbled to his feet, dressed rapidly, and stepped to the door. As he went out, there was a dull impact at the back of his head, a burst of dazzling lights, and he felt himself falling.
His last conscious thought as he spiraled into blackness was the realization that Carl had done it again . . .
***
Somewhere, there was a heavy explosion, shouts, and the sound of running feet. Then there was another explosion, the sound of shouts, a raining of dirt, pebbles, the thud of falling rocks, shouted orders, and a blast that seemed to go on forever.
A glare of light appeared, and a rough voice said, “There’s one, Duke! There’s one that didn’t get away!”
Rough hands gripped Brian by the arms.
An open hand slapped him stingingly across the face.
The light glared in his eyes, and the Duke was looking at him with a cold intensity.