“Do you want come with me?”
She ran a hand through her unkempt black hair and seemed to think about it. “No, go on. Just let me know what you find out.”
Todd had already turned for Stimpy, too excited to reply.
The locomotive sat ticking and hissing, at a standstill in the Tracy railyards. Sleek like a giant black caterpillar, its wheels and cow-catcher were blazoned in bright scarlet. The ornate hand rail running along the boiler, the hinges, the bell and steam-whistle all shone bright gold. The sooty smokestack flared out in a wide black cone, and all its rivets glittered like brass buttons. In gold-painted letters under the two windows in the engineer’s cab was the name Steam Roller.
Todd led his horse in among the people crowding the tracks. Iris was right—what was the catch? If this one train works, then where are the rest of them?
Other people arrived, walking along the railroad tracks, stepping between the ties. They had seen the locomotive approaching for miles, and they had walked from their homes and their work out in the produce fields. Todd sensed a childish excitement, as if Santa Claus had appeared to them long after they had stopped believing in him.
The locomotive steam whistle blew with a screech that set them all jumping. Todd grabbed Ren’s bridle to keep the horse from rearing in panic. The crowd fell silent as someone stirred in the locomotive’s engine cab and stepped out, squinting in the bright sunlight and looking at his audience. Three other men stayed inside the cab, watching the crowd and allowing their spokesman to meet the spectators alone.
The man wasn’t tall, but his build was massive and bearlike. He had broad shoulders and a muscular chest stuffed inside a cotton engineer’s coveralls. His dark and splotchy complexion hinted at a mixed race; his skin glistened with sweat.
But the most striking feature was that his completely hairless head sat on his shoulders like a bowling balclass="underline" no beard, no mustache—even his eyebrows had been shaved away. As the bald man gripped the door frame with one hand, Todd noticed dark hair sprouting from his knuckles. What would make a man want to shave his entire head like that?
The engineer bellowed at them in a voice that seemed used to giving orders and shouting long distances. “Civilization isn’t dead if you don’t let it die! We can’t give up! With human perseverance, we can bring it all back.”
The man’s words seemed rehearsed, as if he had shouted the same thing at every stop along the track. Still, the speech reflected Todd’s own thoughts. “As more and more of us pitch in, we can make a miracle happen.”
The people standing on each side of the train murmured, as if they didn’t believe him. But at least they listened to the man—he had impressed them just by arriving in his train.
“What’s your name?” Todd shouted.
The dark man looked at him. “Call me… Casey Jones.”
Some of the people snickered, others didn’t get the joke. “Listen to me,” said the man claiming to be Casey Jones. “We got this train running again. Wood-burning locomotives were used long before we became dependent on plastics and fossil fuels. We had to refit some parts, but it was nothing that a little know-how and persistence couldn’t do.
“We’re traveling through central California to collect your extra food, the stuff that’ll decay in your fields. We intend to take this train down to Los Angeles and bring relief to the starving people there.”
“Boo!” someone shouted. “What about ourselves, man? LA deserves what they got—polluting the air, squandering water!”
Casey Jones glared at the audience from his high position on the Steam Roller’s steps and began to speak with the fervor of a revivalist preacher. “They’re cut off down there! They need the supplies. They’re starving. Starving. You’ve got too much here. You can’t use everything in your fields, and you know it.” He held his hands out, pleading, as if he needed this mission to succeed more than the people in Los Angeles did.
“Give me your surplus. We’ll take it down to feed the people. It’s the least we can do. Consider it the first step to reconnecting the United States. How can you argue against that?”
“Screw the U.S! What have they done for us?”
“What will they give in exchange?” the mayor of Tracy asked.
“Who knows?” Casey Jones said, as if angry at the suggestion. “What’s important is we’ll be helping them. On my trip back up, we can haul industrial supplies, things they can’t use. We’ll try to barter as best as we can. How would you like new pieces of sheet glass, or metal, clothes, ceramic parts,?”
“How do we know you’ll bring anything back?” the mayor said.
“You don’t! You’re missing the whole point.”
“I’ll give you some,” a tall, thin man said. Todd recognized him as Marvin Esteban, one of the local farmers. “I’ve got cabbages. I’m already sick of cabbages. We’re going to be eating sauerkraut all winter.” People chuckled.
As a few others chimed in with offers to donate bushels of almonds or tomatoes or fruit, Todd found his mind wandering. This train was making a bee-line down the Central Valley toward Los Angeles… toward Pasadena and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And the solar satellites.
Todd leaned over to pat Ren’s neck, his face burning with excitement. This just might be a chance to do something worthwhile, something that could really make a difference—besides acting as a technical liaison for Doog’s commune. He didn’t know if that crackpot solar-power scheme would work, but just having the chance made it worth the trip. And the fact that it seemed so impossible made it all the more desirable to do. Anything was better than sitting around and growing sprouts.
He grinned and yanked on Ren’s bridle as the horse began to sniff the ground. Todd wondered what he would have to do to talk Iris into going with him.
Back at the Altamont commune, Todd and Iris’s trailer sat on four wheel rims, leveled with concrete blocks. Todd had meant to move out as soon as he found another place, but he never seemed to get around to it.
The trailer had once been hauled around the country by a retired couple from Alexandria, Louisiana. Abandoned in the Altamont and scavenged by Doog, the trailer had begun falling apart long before the petroplague hit. Its sides were white aluminum, bent in places, stained with green traces of moss.
After Todd and Iris had patched the cracks and stuffed rags into the holes left by dissolving insulation, the trailer remained cozy even in the evening chill. Remembering that first night together by the campfire, Todd had suggested they sleep in separate beds. Iris had shrugged, not pushing the issue—and Todd kicked himself, too embarrassed to raise the issue again.
Now, snug inside their trailer with the door closed and the windows shut, Todd and Iris argued far into the night.
Iris talked, her words growing sharper. “Todd, you’re just excited. You’re like a little kid in a toy store and you’re going off half cocked. You can’t save the world by yourself. And all you’d be doing is running away when we need you here.”
“But we’re not doing anything here,” he said in exasperation. “We’re like a bunch of old soldiers who never saw battle, sitting around talking about the war. You worked so hard at Stanford, trying to stop the spread of the petroplague. And now that the world has changed, you just want to roll over and play dead. There’s still a lot more things we can do, and this is one of them! Casey Jones and his train are proof that it’s not as hopeless as we thought. Let’s at least try it.” He hesitated, and said almost as in afterthought, “We can always come back here if it doesn’t work.”