Andy pointed at the tracks. “If the width between the rails is the same as the width between the tires on the car, then we can let some of the air out of the tires and put the car up on the tracks and drive on in. But it probably isn’t the same, and we can’t get the car in here anyway, so why are we talking about it? Why don’t we just walk?”
“I wore the wrong shoes,” John said, but then he shook his head and walked around the barrier, and the three of them set off along the old line toward the reservoir.
As they walked, trying to adjust their pace to the distance between the old half-rotted ties, Wally said, “Andy? What did you mean, Tom Thumb?”
“It was a locomotive,” Andy explained. “One time, John and me and some other people, we had to get into a place with an electrified fence, and there was an old track like this, and we got a locomotive from a circus—pretty locomotive, painted all different colors, called Tom Thumb—and we drove right through the fence.” To John, he said, “Things worked out that time, too.”
“Later on they did,” John admitted grudgingly. “Kind of.”
Wally wanted to know what place they had to get into that had an electrified fence and why they had to get into that place, but he didn’t exactly know how to ask, and he suspected anyway that Andy wouldn’t tell him. Andy was very cheerful and open and everything, but then later on you realized he told you as much as he wanted to tell you and then he stopped. Wally imagined the bright-painted locomotive crashing through the electrified fence. “Were there sparks?”
“You bet!” Andy said, and laughed. “The crazy people were running everywhere!”
“I guess they must have been,” Wally agreed, hoping for more.
But John interrupted, saying, “Isn’t this two miles?”
“John,” Andy said, “we can still see the barrier back there.”
“I don’t know why I wore these shoes,” John said.
Then they walked in silence for a while, Wally contemplating the fact that an accent had been wrong in that last thing Andy had said about the train and the electrified fence. He should have said, “The crazy people were running everywhere,” but what he’d said was, “The crazy people…” Why?
“Fence ahead,” Andy said.
It was a chain-link fence, eight feet high, with three strands of barbed wire at the top, and it crossed the railroad line from left to right. When they neared it, they saw the expected sign.
NO ADMITTANCEVILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY
“Gosh,” Wally said. “What do we do now?”
“I’m gonna sit down,” John said, and went over to a nearby log and sat on it.
Meantime, Andy approached the fence, took a pair of wire cutters out of his inner jacket pocket, went down on one knee, and started snipping the fence from the bottom. Wally goggled: “You’re cutting the fence!”
“Well, we’re not going over it,” Andy said, snipping away, “and I didn’t bring a shovel to dig under it, so this is pretty much what’s left.”
Wally looked at the official sign: NO ADMITTANCE. In games, sometimes, it was necessary to do shortcuts across the regular routes; so this must be the real-life equivalent. And when Wally stopped to think about it, what startled him mostly was not what Andy was doing, but his calm while doing it. Whenever Wally set out on an adventure in the computer, the excitement was what it was all about; but Andy and John did adventures as though they were jobs.
“There,” Andy said, straightening, putting the wire clippers away. “John? You wanna go first?”
John sighed, got up from the log, and came across to study the fence. Andy had snipped a vertical line up about four feet; it barely showed at all. John said, “That isn’t enough.”
“Sure it is,” Andy told him. “Wally, you pull that side in. I’ll push this side out. Plenty of room to get through.”
There was barely room enough, as it turned out. With Wally pulling and Andy pushing, it was like opening an envelope. John slithered through, complaining, and then he took over Wally’s role while Wally grunted and squeezed past, not quite ripping any of his clothing, and then Wally and John held the fence for Andy, and there they were on the other side.
But still some distance from the reservoir. They walked and walked, with John complaining from time to time and Andy pointing out pretty flowers or oddly shaped tree limbs, and at last they saw the bright glint of sunlight reflecting from water out ahead.
That was very strange. The railroad tracks ran straight into the reservoir, under the water and gone. On both sides, tangled brush and small trees made an impassable obstruction right down to the water’s edge, with no path or cleared shoreline in either direction.
Andy pointed to the left along the overgrown bank, saying, “That’s where we went in last time, way over there. So we’re farther from the dam now.”
“Don’t remind me of the last time,” John answered. Turning to Wally, he said, “You’re sure this goes all the way down in there to the town.”
“Oh, sure. And out the other side,” Wally promised him, pointing to the far shore. “But over there, it’s a lot farther from Putkin’s Corners.”
Andy, looking dubious, said, “I dunno, John, I guess we could go look at the tracks on the other side, if you think we ought to.”
“No,” John said. “What matters is what happens underwater, and we can’t know that until we…” another long sigh, accompanied by a headshake “… go down there.”
“Well,” Andy said, “the point of the trip was to see are the tracks here, and do they go into the water. They are, and they do.”
“And they go all the way across underneath,” Wally assured them.
“Well,” John said, “I look, and I look, and I just can’t find any reason not to do it. So I guess that’s it.”
Excitement leaped in Wally’s breast. They were going to try again. Maybe this time, he thought, they’d let him come along. Not to go down into the reservoir, he had no desire at all to do anything like that, but just to be one of the people up here on the bank, helping out, waiting, doing whatever the people up here did while John and Andy were down there in the cold and the dark and the wet. Trying not to sound too eager, he said, “Well, John? What do you do now?”
“Now,” John said, “I talk to Tom about more money.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Dortmunder kept squinting. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the light in here, which was ordinary enough, it was knowing about all that space out there, sensing it, just the other side of these blank walls. In here, in an airport terminal building in the unnecessarily large, flat, tan state of Oklahoma, Dortmunder stood against one of the walls with two small suitcases at his feet, hurrying travelers eddying around him as Tom, at one of the chest-high counters across the way, rented a car (again!) from a robot shaped like a short smiling girl. Dortmunder had shown his driver’s license to this automaton, since he would be driving the car when rented, but then he had retreated to this distant vantage while Tom handled the repellent commercial aspects of the transaction.
Finally finished, Tom stepped across the stream of travelers as though they weren’t there, causing several people to bump into one another but none to bump into him, and picked up his bag from beside Dortmunder’s left foot. “Okay,” he said. “We go out and wait for the bus.”
“No cars?” Dortmunder asked.