Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl Read Free Page A

don’t know, Tommy. I’ve never been to America. Which part are you heading for?”
    Tommy reached into the bag again and pulled out a magazine, then bit his lip. “Oh. This is yours.” It was an old edition of World Marvels & Wonders that Gideon had lent Tommy. The boy had a skill for drawing and liked to copy the illustrations of Captain Trigger’s adventures.
    “That’s all right. It’s the one with the Bowie Steamcrawlers, isn’t it?”
    Tommy nodded enthusiastically. “Captain Trigger teams up with Louis Cockayne, the American adventurer, and they defeat the Texan rebel Jim Bowie and his steam-powered armored desert-wagons. I thought I’d go there, see the Mason- Dixon Wall they built to keep the Texans from attacking the pioneering families.”
    Tommy separated another sheet from the magazine, a map he’d clipped from an old book. “Do you know where that would be? It isn’t on this map.”
    Gideon took it from him. “Let me see . . . here on the East Coast is British territory, Boston and New York. Over here on the West Coast, that’s ruled by the Japanese, or the son of the old emperor, at any rate. Nyu Edo.”
    “That’s New Spain,” said Tommy, pointing to the south. “And Ciudad Cortes. I learned that at school.”
    Gideon jabbed his finger in the middle of the map. “Then this must be where the adventure took place, north of the Texan strongholds, where they keep slaves and make them dig for coal.”
    Tommy frowned. “Would they make me dig for coal?”
    “Possibly. If they caught you. Might be best to go somewhere else first, maybe New York? They have tall buildings there called skyscrapers.”
    “Taller than the ones in London?”
    “So they say,” said Gideon.
    Tommy put the map and magazine back into his bag. “I’ll go to New York, then.”
    Gideon stood up, then put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “One more thing,” he said, pointing out to sea. “That’s east. America is west. You need to be on the other side of the country if you’re going to sail there.”
    Tommy’s shoulder slumped under his hand. “Really?”
    Gideon nodded. “Sorry.”
    Tommy looked out to sea, then shrugged. “I don’t really like pickle, anyway. Maybe I should go home.”
    Gideon nodded. “Me, too.”
    “Is it cold for July, or is it these old bones?” asked Gideon’s father. Gideon grunted noncommittally as he cleared away the dishes from their supper and lit half a dozen candles and small oil burners.
    Gideon retrieved the July 1890 issue of World Marvels & Wonders, its cover depicting a fearsome ape-beast menacing a lithe, heroic figure with brilliantined hair and impeccable moustache, framed within a Union Flag border. He kept his penny dreadfuls stacked in piles in his bedroom, where he could, in summer, get the rays of the sinking sun to light his bedtime reading. World Marvels & Wonders was always his first choice, if only for the adventures of Captain Lucian Trigger.
    This adventure was called The Man- Monsters of the Forty- Ninth Parallel, sandwiched between a lurid account of the latest victims of Jack the Ripper, who was slicing up streetwalkers in the capital, and a slew of advertisements for laborsaving kitchen devices and telescopes that could see the craters on the moon. Gideon read breathlessly aloud to his father in the flickering flames how Trigger had been dispatched by Queen Victoria herself to investigate reports of Frenchie bandits running amok on the border between Britain’s interests in the New World and Canada. His father’s eyelids began to droop after half an hour, so Gideon retired to bed to complete the story, reading with wide-eyed amazement how Captain Trigger had uncovered a conspiracy going back to Paris, but had been betrayed and abandoned in the frozen wastes. Near death, he had been discovered by a pack of grotesque, hair-covered demihumans, known to the local Red Indian aboriginals as sasquatch . Despite their horrific appearance they had proved benign,