Gilbert Keith-Worthing was Chalmers’ guest, for no reason that either of them could discover. He was a British novelist of world fame, who had been popular thirty years ago; since then, nobody bothered to read what he wrote, but everybody accepted him as a walking classic.
He had been considered profound for uttering such things as: “Freedom? Do let’s stop talking about freedom. Freedom is impossible. Man can never be free of hunger, of cold, of disease, of physical accidents.
He can never be free of the tyranny of nature. So why should he object to the tyranny of a political dictatorship?”
When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he had preached, he came to live in America. Through the years, his style of writing and his body had grown flabby. At seventy, he was an obese old man with retouched hair and a manner of scornful cynicism retouched by quotations from the yogis about the futility of all human endeavor. Kip Chalmers had invited him, because it seemed to look distinguished. Gilbert Keith Worthing had come along, because he had no particular place to go.
“God damn these railroad people!” said Kip Chalmers. “They’re doing it on purpose. They want to ruin my campaign. I can’t miss that rally! For Christ’s sake, Lester, do something!”
“I’ve tried,” said Lester Tuck. At the train’s last stop, he had tried, by long-distance telephone, to find air transportation to complete their journey; but there were no commercial flights scheduled for the next two days.
“If they don’t get me there on time, I’ll have their scalps and their railroad! Can’t we tell that damn conductor to hurry?”
“You’ve told him three times.”
“I’ll get him fired. He’s given me nothing but a lot of alibis about all their messy technical troubles. I expect transportation, not alibis. They can’t treat me like one of their day-coach passengers. I expect them to get me where I want to go when I want it. Don’t they know that I’m on this train?”
“They know it by now,” said Laura Bradford. “Shut up, Kip. You bore me.”
Chalmers refilled his glass. The car was rocking and the glassware tinkled faintly on the shelves of the bar. The patches of starlit sky in the windows kept swaying jerkily, and it seemed as if the stars were tinkling against one another. They could see nothing beyond the glass bay of the observation window at the end of the car, except the small halos of red and green lanterns marking the rear of the train, and a brief stretch of rail running away from them into the darkness. A wall of rock was racing the train, and the stars dipped occasionally into a sudden break that outlined, high above them, the peaks of the mountains of Colorado.
“Mountains...” said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction.
“It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man.” What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building—compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train.”
“Why should it choose to crumble?” asked Laura Bradford, without any particular interest.
“I think this damn train is going slower,” said Kip Chalmers. “Those bastards are slowing down, in spite of what I told them!”
“Well... it’s the mountains, you know...” said Lester Tuck.
“Mountains be damned! Lester, what day is this? With all those damn changes of time, I can’t tell which—”
“It’s May twenty-seventh,” sighed Lester Tuck.
“It’s May twenty-eighth,” said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, glancing at his watch. “It is now twelve minutes past midnight.”
“Jesus!” cried Chalmers. “Then the rally is today?”
“Yep,” said Lester Tuck.
“We won’t make it! We—”
The train gave a sharper lurch, knocking the glass out of his hand.
The thin sound of its crash against the floor mixed with the screech of the wheel-flanges tearing against the rail of a sharp curve.
“I say,” asked Gilbert Keith-Worthing nervously, “are your railroads safe?”
“Hell, yes!” said Kip Chalmers. “We’ve got so many rules, regulations and controls that those bastards wouldn’t dare not to be safe!... Lester, how far are we now? What’s the next stop?”
“There won’t be any stop till Salt Lake City.”
“I mean, what’s the next station?”
Lester Tuck produced a soiled map, which he had been consulting every few minutes since nightfall. “Winston,” he said. “Winston, Colorado.”
Kip Chalmers reached for another glass.
“Tinky Holloway said that Wesley said that if you don’t win this election, you’re through,” said Laura Bradford. She sat sprawled in her chair, looking past Chalmers, studying her own face in a mirror on the wall of the lounge; she was bored and it amused her to needle his impotent anger.
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“Uh-huh. Wesley doesn’t want what’s-his-name—whoever’s running against you—to get into the Legislature. If you don’t win, Wesley will be sore as hell. Tinky said—”
“Damn that bastard! He’d better watch his own neck!”
“Oh, I don’t know. Wesley likes him very much.” She added, “Tinky Holloway wouldn’t allow some miserable train to make him miss an important meeting. They wouldn’t dare to hold him up.”
Kip Chalmers sat staring at his glass. “I’m going to have the government seize all the railroads,” he said, his voice low.
“Really,” said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, “I don’t see why you haven’t done it long ago. This is the only country on earth backward enough to permit private ownership of railroads.”
“Well, we’re catching up with you,” said Kip Chalmers.
“Your country is so incredibly naive. It’s such an anachronism. All that talk about liberty and human rights—I haven’t heard it since the days of my great-grandfather. It’s nothing but a verbal luxury of the rich. After all, it doesn’t make any difference to the poor whether their livelihood is at the mercy of an industrialist or of a bureaucrat.”
“The day of the industrialists is over. This is the day of—”
The jolt felt as if the air within the car smashed them forward while the floor stopped under their feet. Kip Chalmers was flung down to the carpet, Gilbert Keith-Worthing was thrown across the table top, the lights were blasted out. Glasses crashed off the shelves, the steel of the walls screamed as if about to rip open, while a long, distant thud went like a convulsion through the wheels of the train.
When he raised his head, Chalmers saw that the car stood intact and still; he heard the moans of his companions and the first shriek of Laura Bradford’s hysterics. He crawled along the floor to the doorway, wrenched it open, and tumbled down the steps. Far ahead, on the side of a curve, he saw moving flashlights and a red glow at a spot where the engine had no place to be. He stumbled through the darkness, bumping into half-clothed figures that waved the futile little flares of matches.
Somewhere along the line, he saw a man with a flashlight and seized his arm. It was the conductor.
“What happened?” gasped Chalmers.
“Split rail,” the conductor answered impassively. “The engine went off the track.”
“Off... ?”
“On its side.”
“Anybody... killed?”
“No. The engineer’s all right. The fireman is hurt.”
“Split rail? What do you mean, split rail?”
The conductor’s face had an odd look: it was grim, accusing and closed. “Rail wears out, Mr. Chalmers,” he answered with a strange kind of emphasis. “Particularly on curves.”
“Didn’t you know that it was worn out?”
“We knew.”
“Well, why didn’t you have it replaced?”
“It was going to be replaced. But Mr. Locey cancelled that.”