Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (36 page)

Mr. Gudeint bit his lip. He put his arm around his father-in-law, gripping him under the arm and absorbing enough of the weight that the old man’s body could stretch back to its full six feet of height. “We’re ready for your picture now, Professor,” he said. Across the room the camera lens winked, and the Professor’s bright eyes winked above it.

Carl and his father returned from the barn together for breakfast. The three older sons were already at their pancakes, along with Professor Erlenwanger and Molly. Mr. Gudeint called into the front room, “George? Come on in and sit with us, will you? Your birds can take care of themselves for a while. I want to rig a pole and winch to load bales into the barn, and I figure you can help.”

Grandpa Roseliep walked slowly into the kitchen on his crutch-headed cane. “You know, Frederick,” he said, “I am no longer a woodworker.”

Carl’s father grunted. “I know you can figure how to make a piece of wood do everything but talk,” he said. “We’ll do the muscle work, me’n’the boys, if you’ll tell us what to do. For that matter, we’re not talking about fancy work—and I don’t know but what swinging a hammer’d loosen your joints up some. But that’s up to you.”

The big farmer took his usual place at the head of the table and noticed for the first time that all the place settings were china. He poured milk into the wine goblet beside his coffee cup and said with half-humor, “Professor John K. Erlenwanger, hey? From the way Maxine’s acting, I’d judge the ‘K’ must stand for ‘king.’”

Erlenwanger touched his napkin to his lips. “Kennedy, sir. To my parents, a greater man than any king could ever be.” Mr. Gudeint looked puzzled, but before he could speak the Professor added, “Last night you thought it would be possible to take my daughter and me into town to purchase supplies. Is that still the case?”

Carl’s father nodded with his mouth full of pancake and molasses. “Sure, the boy can haul you along when he carries the milk into the dairy after breakfast. But I’d have thought you’d just fly?”

“I prefer to avoid built-up areas,” Erlenwanger explained. “The appearance of my airship would arouse more interest than I desire at this time, and maneuvering a construct as large as
The Enterprise
becomes a . . . difficult proposition in close quarters.” The shadow of the great, gray cylinder darkened the dining room, lending weight to the stranger’s shrug.

“Look,” said George abruptly, “I’ll carry the milk in today instead of the kid.”

Carl jumped to his feet, flushing, and cried, “Look, I’m going to take them in. And get off this ‘kid’ business—I’m eighteen and I’m as much a—”

“Carl, sit down!” Mr. Gudeint snapped. “And George, you be quiet, too. I’ll decide who’s going to do what around here.”

“Though I was rather hoping that Carl would drive us to town, as you’d said,” Molly interjected unexpectedly. She gave a nervous smile to Mr. Gudeint, who blinked at her. She was wearing a bengaline cotton dress with vertical stripes of green and olive this morning. The silk threads gave it a sheen like that of her black hair.

“The boy’ll do it,” Carl’s father said. “It’s his chore.” He turned to Carl. “About time you got started, isn’t it? The Sun’s high enough, though you don’t see it with that great metal thing out in the yard.”

“Yes, sir!” said Carl, bolting the last of his breakfast and washing it down with his milk. To the visitors he added, “I’ll have the wagon loaded in two flips of a lamb’s tail. I’ll holler when it’s ready.”

It was killing work to hand the heavy, tin-plated milk cans up to Danny on the wagon bed. Carl finished the job in record time, however, and without any spillage past the pressure-fitted lids. Erlenwanger and Molly came out of the house just as Danny ran the safety rope across the box of the wagon to keep the cans from oversetting on the bumpy ride. “Just in time,” Carl called to them. “I’ll get the horses and we’re off.”

Molly sat between Carl and Erlenwanger as the pair of bays plodded along the familiar trail with only voice commands. A light breeze from the south kept the worst of the road dust from the travellers, but a plume rose behind the wagon like smoke from a grass fire. “It’ll be all over us coming back,” Carl said.

“And you have to drive this every day?” Molly asked. “There’s so much work on a farm.”

“Not enough for four sons,” Carl said gloomily. He caught himself and added, before anyone could follow up his earlier comment, “I guess you need food, hey?”

“Not at this point, I think,” Erlenwanger replied. “What we particularly need is lamp oil.”

“Lamp oil?” repeated Carl. “Good Christ, Professor—sorry, miss—we’d have given you lamp oil if you’d spoken. We’re not electrified out where we are!”

The older man smiled past Molly’s bonnet. “Not a hundred gallons, I think.”

“Good Christ—oh hell, I’m sorry again,” Carl blurted. “What on earth do you want with that much lamp oil?”

“It’s for our motor,” Professor Erlenwanger explained. “Other researchers into directed airship flight are concentrating on petrol-burning motors of the Benz type. This is a serious error, I believe. Compression-ignited kerosene engines built to the design of Herr Rudolph Diesel are far more efficient. In addition, lamp oil is available at even the most out-of-the-way farmstead in a pinch, no small recommendation on a journey which crosses the very continent.”

The city limits were marked by a metaled road. It was bright with the rich yellow limestone gravel crushed out of the bluffs on which the city was built. A bicyclist passed the wagon, free-wheeling with the momentum he had picked up coming down a side street. “Darn fool,” Carl grunted, noting Molly’s attention to the speedster. “In town, a gadget like that’s good for nothing but running you under a wagon. Now I’ve rode ’em, but it was at Starways Rink where they belong.”

Carl turned onto Central Avenue, letting the horses ease along despite his desire to oblige the Professor. The brick avenue was slippery, and it would be easy to throw a shoe if haste brought nothing worse. Carl pulled around the yellow-brick building of the dairy and backed expertly to the loading dock, clucking to his team. “Won’t be a moment,” he said to his passengers. He poised on the wagon seat, then vaulted over the milk cans to land on the pine bed with a crash. “Charlie!

“Jess,” he shouted into the dairy. “Lend me a goddamn hand! I’m in a hurry.”

Erlenwanger and his daughter watched with silent interest. Carl rolled the heavy cans on their rims up the loading gate to the dock where the two dairymen manhandled them into the building. His muscles rippled, but the familiar effort did not even raise sweat-stains on his shirt. “Christ, you guys’re slow,” Carl grumbled as he rolled the last can onto the dock. “I’ll hook out the empties myself.” It took him two trips, carrying a pair of the heavy cans in either hand each time. They would be hauled back and refilled the next day. Life was an endless cycle of milk cans and horse butts, Carl thought savagely to himself.

As he settled back onto the wagon seat, Carl noticed for the first time that the Professor’s two camera cases were on the shelf beneath. “Frummelt’s is just down Central,” he said. “Say, you carry that camera most everywhere, don’t you?”

“I do indeed,” Erlenwanger agreed. “No amount of trouble in carrying the apparatus along is too great to be justified by the capturing of one scene that cannot be duplicated. And compared to the effort of bringing the apparatus . . . to the vicinity . . . any trouble to be endured on the ground, so to speak, is nothing.”

Carl pulled in through the gate in the green-painted hoardings, into the yard of Frummelt’s Coal and Ice. It was crowded with delivery wagons. Carl locked wheels with one and traded curses with the Irish driver as he angled into a place at the dock.

“We need twenty cans of coal oil,” Carl shouted to the squat loading master.

The Frummelt employee cocked an eyebrow at them, lifting the brim of his bowler. “Christ, boy,” he said, “I see why you came here steada’ the front. If it’s charge, you’ll have to go up to the front anyhow, though.”

“It’s cash,” said the Professor, balancing his weight carefully as he stepped onto the dock with his camera. He reached into his coat and brought out a purse from which he poured silver dollars into his left palm. One of the coins slipped and rang on the concrete. Carl knelt and handed it back to the older man. It bore an 1890 date stamp, but the finish was as bright and clean as if the coin had just been issued. Carl’s eyes narrowed, but the loading master took the payment without comment. He counted a quarter and two dimes from the change-maker on his belt and shouted an order to a pair of dock hands.

“I wonder if I might photograph you and your men at work?” Erlenwanger asked as he watched the load of lacquered rectangular cans being rolled out on a hand truck.

“Good God, why?” demanded the loading master, ignoring the driver of an ice wagon waiting for orders.

“Today, this is the petroleum business,” the Professor explained obliquely. “If a time comes during which all carts and wagons are replaced by self-powered vehicles, the whole shape of the world will change. You and your men here will be important in the way the first lungfish to scramble onto dry land to snap at an insect was important. Your feelings, your sense of place in the world—this will never come again.”

The loading master touched the right curl of his handlebar moustache. “You can’t get all that in a picture,” he said.

“What I call my photographs capture more than one might think,” Erlenwanger responded.

“Then go ahead and waste your time,” grunted the squat man as he turned away. “So long as you stay clear of the wheels and don’t waste my time too.”

As the bays plodded back along Bluff Road, Carl said, “I’ve thought about what you were saying back at Frummelt’s, Professor.”

“And?” the older man prompted.

Carl turned and saw Molly’s intent smile instead of the Professor. He lost his train of thought for a moment. At last he said, “Well, it won’t happen. The wagons with motors, I mean. Not in Iowa, at least.” He gestured toward the road in front of them. “When it rains, this’s mud. Two, sometimes three feet deep, up to the bed of a wagon. I’ve seen traction engines get stuck in fields in a wet year and us have to hitch the plow horses, three teams all told, just to get the milk to town. They’ll never make an engine that’ll handle mud like a good team will.”

Professor Erlenwanger nodded seriously. “There’s reason in what you say, Carl. Many men much older and better educated would say the same thing. But one of the most important lessons that people must learn if they are to deal with the coming age is that nothing, whether good or bad, cannot happen. If there is something to do with the way humans interact with their world, it probably will happen. It is only when we all recognize that as a fact that we have a chance to guide some of the change that will occur anyway.”

The Professor waved as Carl had at the track of rich, black earth pulverized by horse hooves and the iron wheels of wagons. “No one today—or a century hence—will find it conceivable that sane human beings would build roads of concrete a hundred feet wide in place of this. Such roads would be to the benefit of self-moving vehicles and the detriment of everything else, humans in particular. Yet, if it shall have happened, the humans of the twenty-first century will have to accept it as true; and the humans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will bear the burden of failing to have guided and controlled a development which they thought was impossible—until it became inevitable.”

Carl looked at the horses ahead of him. He licked his lips, ignoring from long familiarity the gritty taste of the dust on them. “Professor,” he said without turning around, “I want to come with you. On your airship.”

“Molly and I can use another hand on
The Enterprise,”
Erlenwanger said mildly, “and there is ample room and lifting capacity, to be sure. But have you considered just what leaving home will mean to you?”

Carl risked a glance. Molly was looking straight ahead, twisting her ungloved hands in her lap. The Professor was leaning forward with a bland expression. Carl nodded, his throat tight. “I’m leaving, that’s decided,” he explained. “I thought it was going to be the Navy, is all. You see, it’s not that I don’t love my folks . . . or them love me, for that matter. But I’m the little kid. I’m eighteen and I’m the little kid. So long as I live and even one of my brothers lives, I’ll be the little kid—if I don’t get out now. Maybe after I’ve made my own way for a time, I can come back. Maybe I could even work the farm again, though I don’t guess I’d want to. But for now, I’ve got to cut the traces.”

“Very well, Carl,” said the Professor. “I won’t insult you by questioning your decision. If I did not think you were capable of soundly assessing a situation, I would not have considered making you the offer. You no doubt realize that we will leave as soon as
The Enterprise
has been refueled?”

“Oh, that’s best,” breathed Carl in double relief. “I’ll bundle my clothes and . . . say what needs to be said. Then it’ll be best all ’round if I leave.” His eyes sought the Professor’s, caught Molly’s instead. They both looked away.

Carl’s mother came into the room her two youngest sons shared. Carl was rolling the extra set of dungarees around the rest of his meager belongings. He tied the bindle off with twine. Mrs. Gudeint said nothing. Carl glanced at her, saw her tears, and looked away again very quickly. She was in the doorway and Carl was finished packing. Looking out the window, he said, “Mom, I brushed down the horses before I came in. I’m not going to stay here, I never was—you know that. So just kiss me and don’t . . . all the rest.”

Turning very quickly, the boy pecked his mother on the cheek and tried to swing around her in the same motion. She clung to him, her face pressed against his blue cotton work shirt. At last she said, “You’ve told your father?”

“I’ll be back one day soon and I’ll tell him,” Carl said. He squeezed his mother closer and, in the instant that she relaxed, disengaged himself from her. “Mom, I love you,” he said. He reached the staircase in one stride and was down its ten steps in three great jumps. He did not look back after the screen door banged behind him.