The Rise of Ransom City (6 page)

“Copper! Nothing wrong with copper. But it runs out. It costs money and toil to dig it up and it comes up soiled. I’m talking about
Light,
gentlemen. I’m talking about
energy.
I’m talking about the Ransom Process.” I showed them the napkin. They did not understand or appreciate it.

“Professor Ransom, there was a salesman from the Northern Lighting Corporation in town a week ago and—”

“The Northern Lighting Corporation are rogues and villains and I hear tell the Line owns them and they will bleed you dry. I hope you ran him off like you would a vampire. I hope you slapped him like a gnat. You may quote me on that, if there’s any reporters present, and please quote me on this too: What I’m proposing to you is the Melville City Harry Ransom Illuminations, I’m talking about Free Light. . . .”

The smelting-operations gentleman recoiled at the word
Free
. You have to be careful when talking to rich men. Too much talk of
Beauty
or
Liberation
or
An End to Drudgery
raises their hackles, makes them suspicious. You have to speak in their language.

“I’m talking about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it will not come again, to make your name in the history books, I’m talking about
The Future
—”

Three things happened at once. I stood, for effect, and began to pace— a banker harrumphed— and Melville City’s future came crashing down through the ceiling, nose-cone first. There was a shower of brick and plaster and a noise like the end of the world. Parts of a chandelier fell where I had been sitting. My dining companions variously threw themselves to the floor or jumped up and started yelling in outrage. I believe I cursed but otherwise kept my cool.

I got a good long look at the rocket as it fell— it seemed to take forever. Dear reader, wherever and whenever you are, I hope that you live in a time when you are not familiar with the weapons of the Line. I’ll tell you that the thing was drill-like, made of black iron, plates, and rivets, and looked about the size of a mule. It breached the ceiling and fell sideways onto the buffet table like an unwanted wedding guest, drunk and mean and clumsy, spilling silver soup-tureens and bottles of champagne, smashing the neck off a big glass swan. Waiters dropped their trays and screamed.

The rocket groaned, shuddered as if waking from a nightmare, and unscrewed itself. It vented a greasy white gas, which quickly filled the room, put out the candles, made women clutch their pearl-necklaced throats and choke. My dining companions started to go dark in the face and fall over. The diners and waiters surged for the exit, and fell over each other, and with awful inevitability they all blocked the doors.

I seized a bottle, poured wine into a napkin, and held it to my face. I don’t know that this was much of a substitute for a gas-mask, and I would not care to repeat the experiment, but I guess it was better than nothing, because I stayed standing while others fell. No matter how I tried I could not help them to their feet again.

I do not recall that I decided to run, but I just found my feet carrying me to the door, and best not to think about what I was stepping on, the swan’s glass wing shattering underfoot, a woman’s necklace, a man’s outstretched hand, I don’t know what else. I held some woman by the arm as I fled through the kitchens and out into the street where a crowd was waiting, and a cheer went up as she and I tumbled together on the cobblestones. She later turned out to be the President of the Six Thousand Club. I am glad that she survived but I am sorry to report that statistics compiled by the Line’s surveyors tell us that Melville has not yet got above Five.*

I breathed deeply, stood, and started back in again, but then someone grabbed me and wrestled me to the ground. I lay on my back and blinked. My sight is very bad in my left eye at the best of times, though you would not know it to look at me. The other eye was so aggravated by the gas that at first I could hardly make out the face of my trusty assistant, Mr. Carver. He looked concerned for my health and safety, as well he might, because I had not paid him in weeks.

A crowd of Melville’s citizens stood all around us. A man in a heather green suit and a kind of raffish collar with a gold pin on it crouched beside Carver. He put a hand on my knee and said, “It’s hopeless, son. No sense throwing your life away, you can’t save them, nobody can now.” It later turned out he was a reporter for the
Melville Booster.
Light-headed as I was from the wine and the gas I didn’t at first understand what he meant and nearly said, “Save who?” The honest truth is that I had been thinking of running back in for the napkin, which held diagrams of the Ransom Process, and Fortune forbid if it were to fall into the wrong hands. I said nothing. Instead I passed out.

*Nor would it until well past the turn of the century, and long after Mr. Ransom had departed for parts unknown. —EMC

My pluck and daring were much admired. A sketch-artist captured my likeness for the
Booster
. He was kind enough to strengthen my chin and flatten my ears. By the end of the day I could have had investors lining up around the corner. But it didn’t feel right. Carver packed up the wagon and we left town that afternoon.

This was not my story of heroism. It was just one of the things that happened that year. I don’t know why I thought to tell it now.

Adversity breeds ingenuity, that’s what they say. It was a great year for ideas and notions and inventions and grand world-changing schemes. In our various travels and escapes me and Mr. Carver met gentlemen and sometimes ladies who were trying to sell sewing machines, and electrical door buzzers, and a method of hypnotism using magnets, and procedures for rain-making and cloud-seeding and the increase of crops. And of course not least of these grand ideas was the Ransom Process, also known as the Ransom Infinite-Escalation or the Ransom Unmoved-Mover Process, or the Ransom Free-Energy Process, or the Ransom Light-Bringing Engine, or a number of other things from time to time and on various patent applications and sideshow advertisements. Mr. Carver and me, we went from town to town all along the edge of the world, displaying the prototypes, seeking investors. We had what you might call a run of bad luck but remained always hopeful. Or at least I was hopeful, I can’t speak for Mr. Carver.

We traveled alongside inventors of procedures for extracting gold from lead, silver, and scat— dog, beetle, and human— and the inventors of cures for cancer using flowers, crystals, exercise regimes, uranium, and magnets. Magnetism was in style that year. We drank and argued with the inventors of several plausible-sounding alternatives to the Gold Standard, and of two or three new religions, and what seemed to be a kind of rural utopia called
Land-Tax Distributism.
They came out West, like us, looking for territories where the future was still open, where the laws were still unsettled— I mean not least what they call
the laws of nature,
which as everyone knows are different on the Rim.

They drank. I did not. I abstain from drink for the most part— it clouds the mind. Coffee is my only vice, not counting curiosity and pride.

We lunched on bread and cheese at a rugged brown-canvas camp overlooking a sweep of golden valley, talking with a man by the name of Thomas, who’d come out West to hawk the prototype of a hand-cranked contraption that was so complex in appearance you might have guessed it could read the future or puzzle out the stock market or at the very least calculate the primes, but in fact it only peeled apples, and not very well, as you could tell from the bandages on his fingers. The thing was beautiful to him regardless, and I wished him good luck. We met a man in Hillsdale who said he was secret business-partners with a great wizard of the First Folk, and that together they could bottle the magic of those people, including the seven-mile step and the drumming up of storms and the trick of immortality. Mr. Carver spat on the sawdust floor and said “Bullshit. Fucking bullshit.” I had to agree.

So we came to Melville City and we left Melville City in a hurry. We went south to Carlton, where we were nearly press-ganged into the militia. Another story. We fled Carlton for Toro, and Toro for the mining camps at Secchi, and from there south and south-west. Mania had descended all over the western edge of the world. Armies massed on every horizon. The Engines flashed each other paranoid signals from horizon to horizon, and the Guns brooded and schemed in their Lodge. It seemed like every second person sitting at any bar you might care to walk into was a spy for someone or other. Agents of the Gun camped in the woods and sometimes strolled boldly into town, armed openly, larger than life, recognizable from the picture-books and not caring who saw them. It took some fancy footwork just to stay neutral. In the banks and futures-markets in the cities back East there was intense giddy speculation over what would survive when it was done. If you were a bright young fellow but not so bright as to have got to blazes out of that whole unlucky part of the world after the Kloan massacre if not sooner then you could make good money sharing your observations by occasional post with the financial speculators in Jasper City or Cray or even Harrow Cross. I was able to pay off certain debts and settle certain lawsuits surrounding the Process, and to purchase a very fine white suit, and also to purchase a new and gleaming white and more spacious wagon for myself and the Light-Bringing Apparatus and Mr. Carver, in which we joined the stream of refugees heading south out of the ever-expanding war zone.

There were rumors. There were always rumors. It was said that both Gun and Line had come out to that country chasing the same quarry. A deserter. A stolen weapon. Secret intelligence. An old man. A beautiful woman. A general. Some secret of the Folk. The war was nearing its end, people said. This battle was for the prize. Somewhere out there was a weapon that might end the war. Well, I was twenty years old in that year and for as long as I’d been alive people had been saying the Great War was coming to an end, that deliverance was knocking on the door. In my view the armies were there for no particular reason at all. The fighting was a purpose in itself. There were scores to settle, and every week brought a fresh humiliation for one side or the other to revenge. They could not extricate themselves, they could not go on or go back, and what ever brought them there was forgotten. I have cousins on my mother’s side who are like that.

Anyhow it was the late days of summer when we came down into Clementine.