On the wide Central Way there now stood a double row of trains. The buildings, which had seemed so different as homes and shops, with their canopies and stairs and flowers, now proved all to be of the same size and shape. Cars in a large train, connected together and uniform. Twelve cars to a train, and each train headed by an engine. An incredible engine.
Big. At times Jan still found it hard to believe that a power plant this size could actually move. And power plants they were for all of the time they were off the Road. Jacked up and stationary, their atomic generators producing all the electricity the city and farms could possibly need, waiting patiently for their transformation back into the engines they really were.
Big. Ten times bigger than the biggest truck Jan had ever seen before coming to this planet. He slapped the tire of one as he passed, solid and hard, the top of the tread so high above his head that he could not reach it. Lug nuts the size of dinner plates. Two steerable wheels before, four driving wheels in back. Behind the front wheels were the rungs up to the driving compartment. Fifteen of them, climbing up the burnished golden metal of the solidly riveted side of the beast. In front the battery of headlights, bright enough to blind a man in an instant, if he were fool enough to stand and look at them. There was a glitter of glass from the drivers’ compartment, high above. Out of sight on top were the banked rows of tubes and fins that cooled the atomic engines. Engines large enough to light a small city. He couldn’t resist slamming his hand against the hard metal as he passed. It was something to drive one of these.
Ivan Semenov was waiting by the lead train.
“Will you drive engine one?” he asked.
“That’s your job, Ivan, the most responsible one. The Trainmaster sits in that seat.”
Ivan’s grin was a little twisted. “Whatever titles are given, Jan, I think we know who is Trainmaster on this trip. People are talking. Now that the work has been done, they think you were right. They know who is in charge here. And Hem has few friends. He lies in bed and rubs the cast on his arm and will talk to no one. People pass his car and laugh”
“I’m sorry I did that. But I still think it was the only way.
“Perhaps you are right. In any case they all know who is in charge. Take engine one.
He turned on his heel and walked away before Jan could answer.
Engine one. It was a responsibility that he could handle. But there was an excitement there as well. Not only to drive one of these great brutes — but to drive the very first. Jan had to smile at himself as he walked faster and faster down the lengths of the trains, to the first train. To the first engine.
The thick door to the engine compartment was open and he saw the engineer bent over the lubrication controls. “Stow this, will you,” he said as he slung his bag in through the doorway. Without waiting for an answer he grabbed the rungs and pulled himself up onto the first. To his left was the empty Road surrounded by the barren farms, more and more of the Road appearing as he climbed higher. Behind him the dual row of trains, solid and waiting. He pulled himself through the hatch into the driving compartment. The co-driver was in his seat leafing through his checklists. In the adjoining compartment the communications officer was at his banked radios.
In front, the expanse of the armored glass window, a bank of TV screens above it. Below this, row after row of instruments and gauges that fed back information on the engine and the train it towed, and the trains behind that.
In front of the controls the single, empty chair, solid steel with padded seat, back and headrest. Before it the wheel and the controls. Jan slid slowly into it, feeling its strength against his back, letting his feet rest lightly on the pedals, reaching out and taking the cool form of the wheel in his hand.
“Start the checklist,” he said. “Ready to roll.”
Five
Hour after frustrating hour passed. Although the trains appeared to be joined up and ready to begin the trek, there were still hundreds of minor problems that had to be solved before the starting signal could be given. Jan grew hoarse and frustrated shouting into the radiophone, until he finally slammed the headset back into the rack and went to see for himself. Fitted into a niche at the rear of the engine was a knobby-tired motorcycle. He unclamped it and disconnected the power lead to the battery — then found both tires fiat. Whoever should have checked it hadn’t. There was more delay while the engineer, Emo, filled a compressed air cylinder. When he finally mounted the cycle, Jan had the pleasure of twisting the rheostat on full and hearing the tires shriek as they spun against the road surface and hurled him forward.
As Maintenance Captain, Jan’s responsibility had been to keep the machinery repaired and in preparation for this day. Physically, it was impossible for him to do alone, and he had had to rely on others to carry through his orders. Too often they had not. The multiple connectors on the thick cables that connected the cars should all have been sealed with moisture-proof lids. Many of them had not. Corrosion had coated them with nonconducting scale in so many places that over half of the circuits were dead. After crawling under car after car himself he issued an order to all the trains that all connectors were to be opened and cleaned with the hand sandblasts. This added another hour to their departure.
There were steering problems. The lead wheels of every car could swivel, turned by geared-down electric motors. These wheels were controlled by the engine computer in each train so that every car followed and turned exactly as the engine had done, moving as precisely as if they were on tracks. Fine in theory, but difficult in practice with worn motor brushes and jammed gear trains. Time trickled away.
There were personal difficulties as well, with everyone jammed into a fraction of the normal living space. Jan heard the complaints with one ear and nodded and referred all problems to the Family Heads. Let them earn their keep for a change. One by one he tracked down the troubles and saw them tackled and solved. The very last thing was a missing child, which he found himself when he saw a movement in the corn field nearby. He plunged in with the bike and restored the happy toddler, riding before him, to its weeping mother.
Tired, yet with a feeling of satisfaction, he rode slowly back between the double row of trains. The doors were sealed now and the only people in sight were the few curious faces peering from the windows. Emo, his engineer, was waiting to stow the cycle while he climbed back up to the driving compartment.
“Pre-drive checklist done,” his co-driver said. Otakar was as efficient as the machine he commanded. “Full on-line power available, all systems go.”
“All right. Get readiness reports on the other trains.” While Jan threw switches and went through his driver’s checklist, he heard the reports from the other trains in his earphones. There was a hold with thirteen, a red on the safety standby circuits, which turned out to be an instrument readout failure which was corrected easily enough. They cleared one by one.
“All trains ready, all drivers ready,” Otakar said.
“Good. Communications, give me a circuit to all drivers.”
“Through,” Ryzo, the communications officer, said.
“All drivers.” As he spoke the words Jan had a sensation stronger than anything he had ever felt before. Mountain climbing, sailing, making love — each of them had produced moments of pure pleasure, of emotions both wonderful and indescribable. Only drugs had made him feel this way before, drugs that he had stopped taking because they were an easy shot, something that anyone could buy and share. But they could not share this with him because be was alone. In control of everything. Right at the top. More in control than he had ever been at any time back on Earth. He had had responsibility, more than enough of it, but never this much. Out in front, the very first, with the population of an entire world waiting for his decision to be made.