Teancum Read Free Page A

good clip,
bobbing up and down as they went like they were picking worms out of the
soil.   They weren’t as fast as the Jim
Smiley on a straight flat road, of course,
but the chicken-like legs and claws meant that the things could run like wild
animals across the landscape, leaping irrigation ditches, high-stepping over
tangled brush, and vaulting wooden fences.   Occasionally, one of the pilots cut it too close and a big
metal claw reduced a shed, or a root cellar, or a gate, to splinters and rubble
in a single blow.
    The Mexican machines were impressive, but Sam was pretty
sure they couldn’t swim.   The Jim
Smiley had them there.
    The big metal chickens headed closer to the mountains,
looming up like shadowy giants to block out the stars.   Sam had seen plenty of mountains back
east, but nothing like these enormous sprawling Himalayans.   It wasn’t just the fact that they were
tall that made them imposing, it was the fact that they were suddenly tall—they sprang out of the valley floor and
shot another mile or more nearly straight up into the sky, like a row of teeth
around an immense cultivated tongue.
    Pffffffft-ankkkh!
    In the absence of a binnacle, Sam watched the stars to keep
his bearing, more by habit than by necessity, since the mountains were such
unavoidable landmarks.   They
circled around the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake City (Sam could see the
blue glow of the city center’s many Franklin Poles from miles away), staying
off the roads and away from farmhouses where light showed.   Crossing the farmland at a run showed
Sam the vastness of the Mormons’ network of irrigation canals and small roads,
and he was duly impressed.   He was
a man who prided himself on valuing industry almost as much as he valued
innovation.
    The Mormons had both, in spades.   It was too bad, he thought, that they were so hopelessly
strange.   They might have made good
Americans.
    The night sky was clear, but as the Striders veered left
across the wide, flat benches of the mountains’ foothills, turning to come at
the city on its east side, Sam chanced to look to the south and saw what he
took for flashes of lightning, striking over and over again in the same spot,
high up in the air.
    “That’s a queer-looking storm,” he observed.   The sight of the city coming closer
made the Jim Smiley feel imminent, and
he could almost taste a Cohiba on his tongue.   “It’s awfully local to the top of that mountain.   Maybe there’s a vein of metal up there
attracting all the electricity.   You ought to send prospectors, Mr. President.”
    “That’s no storm,” Rockwell growled.   “That’s Timpanogos.”
    Sam gulped.   “Pratt’s place?”   He watched
the lightning flash some more, and realized that the ‘storm’ was even more
local than he had at first imagined—the lightning appeared to be striking
over and over again in exactly the same place.   “Is it possible those flashes are our comrades, putting an
end to the threat of an airborne assault upon Chicago?”
    “Your Irishman’s a lightning wizard, then, is he?” the dwarf
asked belligerently.   “O’Franklin,
was that his name?   Now he’s jest
shooting lightning bolts at Pratt and his airships?   That’s quite a show, then, and I’m sad I’m missing it.”
    “It’s possible,” Young said.   His voice was cold and hard.   “There’s a darker possibility.”
    “That’s how he charges up the air-ships,” Rockwell offered.  
    “With lightning bolts?”   Sam was dumbfounded.   Most electricks were powered by some sort of generator that turned
motion into small amounts of electricity—the motion of a turning,
steam-powered engine, for instance, or the motion of falling water.   To reach out and harness the fire of
heaven directly was a Franklinesque act, if not a downright Promethean
one.   He felt no small amount of
awe, and his teeth ground upon each other over and over where by rights a good
Cohiba should have