Once in a while, the engineer raised his grease-smeared face to look at the grease-smeared face and shirt of Eddie Willers. “What’s the use, Mr. Willers?” he asked.
“We can’t let it go!” Eddie answered fiercely; he knew dimly that what he meant was more than the Comet... and more than the railroad.
Moving from the cab through the three motor units and back to the cab again, his hands bleeding, his shirt sticking to his back, Eddie Willers was struggling to remember everything he had ever known about engines, anything he had learned in college, and earlier: anything he had picked up in those days when the station agents at Rockdale Station used to chase him off the rungs of their lumbering switch engines.
The pieces connected to nothing; his brain seemed jammed and tight; he knew that motors were not his profession, he knew that he did not know and that it was now a matter of life or death for him to discover the knowledge. He was looking at the cylinders, the blades, the wires, the control panels still winking with lights. He was struggling not to allow into his mind the thought that was pressing against its periphery: What were the chances and how long would it take—according to the mathematical theory of probability—for primitive men, working by rule-of-thumb, to hit the right combination of parts and re-create the motor of this engine?
“What’s the use, Mr. Willers?” moaned the engineer.
“We can’t let it go!” he cried.
He did not know how many hours had passed when he heard the fireman shout suddenly, “Mr. Willers! Look!”
The fireman was leaning out the window, pointing into the darkness behind them.
Eddie Willers looked. An odd little light was swinging jerkily far in the distance; it seemed to be advancing at an imperceptible rate; it did not look like any sort of light he could identify.
After a while, it seemed to him that he distinguished some large black shapes advancing slowly; they were moving in a line parallel with the track; the spot of light hung low over the ground, swinging; he strained his ears, but heard nothing.
Then he caught a feeble, muffled beat that sounded like the hoofs of horses. The two men beside him were watching the black shapes with a look of growing terror, as if some supernatural apparition were advancing upon them out of the desert night. In the moment when they chuckled suddenly, joyously, recognizing the shapes, it was Eddie’s face that froze into a look of terror at the sight of a ghost more frightening than any they could have expected: it was a train of covered wagons.
The swinging lantern jerked to a stop by the side of the engine. “Hey, bud, can I give you a lift?” called a man who seemed to be the leader; he was chuckling. “Stuck, aren’t you?”
The passengers of the Comet were peering out of the windows; some were descending the steps and approaching. Women’s faces peeked from the wagons, from among the piles of household goods; a baby wailed somewhere at the rear of the caravan.
“Are you crazy?” asked Eddie Willers.
“No, I mean it, brother. We got plenty of room. We’ll give you folks a lift—for a price—if you want to get out of here.” He was a lanky, nervous man, with loose gestures and an insolent voice, who looked like a side-show barker.
“This is the Taggart Comet,” said Eddie Willers, choking.
“The Comet, eh? Looks more like a dead caterpillar to me. What’s the matter, brother? You’re not going anywhere—and you can’t get there any more, even if you tried.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t think you’re going to New York, do you?”
“We are going to New York.”
“Then... then you haven’t heard?”
“What?”
“Say, when was the last time you spoke to any of your stations?”
“I don’t know!... Heard what?”
“That your Taggart Bridge is gone. Gone. Blasted to bits. Sound-ray explosion or something. Nobody knows exactly. Only there ain’t any bridge any more to cross the Mississippi. There ain’t any New York any more—leastways, not for folks like you and me to reach.”
Eddie Willers did not know what happened next; he had fallen back against the side of the engineer’s chair, staring at the open door of the motor unit; he did not know how long he stayed there, but when, at last, he turned his head, he saw that he was alone. The engineer and the fireman had left the cab. There was a scramble of voices outside, screams, sobs, shouted questions and the sound of the side-show barker’s laughter.
Eddie pulled himself to the window of the cab: the Comet’s passengers and crew were crowding around the leader of the caravan and his semi-ragged companions; he was waving his loose arms in gestures of command. Some of the better-dressed ladies from the Comet—whose husbands had apparently been first to make a deal—were climbing aboard the covered wagons, sobbing and clutching their delicate makeup cases.
“Step right up, folks, step right up!” the barker was yelling cheerfully.
“We’ll make room for everybody! A bit crowded, but moving—better than being left here for coyote fodder! The day of the iron horse is past! All we got is plain, old-fashioned horse! Slow, but sure!”
Eddie Willers climbed halfway down the ladder on the side of the engine, to see the crowd and to be heard. He waved one arm, hanging onto the rungs with the other. “You’re not going, are you?” he cried to his passengers. “You’re not abandoning the Comet?”
They drew a little away from him, as if they did not want to look at him or answer. They did not want to hear questions their minds were incapable of weighing. He saw the blind faces of panic.
“What’s the matter with the grease-monkey?” asked the barker, pointing at Eddie.
“Mr. Willers,” said the conductor softly, “it’s no use...”
“Don’t abandon the Comet!” cried Eddie Willers. “Don’t let it go! Oh God, don’t let it go!”
“Are you crazy?” cried the barker. “You’ve no idea what’s going on at your railroad stations and headquarters! They’re running around like a pack of chickens with their heads cut off! I don’t think there’s going to be a railroad left in business this side of the Mississippi, by tomorrow morning!”
“Better come along, Mr. Willers,” said the conductor.
“No!” cried Eddie, clutching the metal rung as if he wanted his hand to grow fast to it.
The barker shrugged. “Well, it’s your funeral!”
“Which way are you going?” asked the engineer, not looking at Eddie.
“Just going, brother! Just looking for some place to stop... somewhere. We’re from Imperial Valley, California. The ‘People’s Party’ crowd grabbed the crops and any food we had in the cellars. Hoarding, they called it. So we just picked up and went. Got to travel by night, on account of the Washington crowd... We’re just looking for some place to live... You’re welcome to come along, buddy, if you’ve got no home—or else we can drop you off closer to some town or another.”
The men of that caravan—thought Eddie indifferently—looked too mean-minded to become the founders of a secret, free settlement, and not mean-minded enough to become a gang of raiders; they had no more destination to find than the motionless beam of the headlight; and, like that beam, they would dissolve somewhere in the empty stretches of the country.
He stayed on the ladder, looking up at the beam. He did not watch while the last men ever to ride the Taggart Comet were transferred to the covered wagons.
The conductor went last. “Mr. Willers!” he called desperately.
“Come along!”
“No,” said Eddie.
The side-show barker waved his arm in an upward sweep at Eddie’s figure on the side of the engine above their heads. “I hope you know what you’re doing!” he cried, his voice half-threat, half-plea. “Maybe somebody will come this way to pick you up—next week or next month! Maybe! Who’s going to, these days?”
“Get away from here,” said Eddie Willers.
He climbed back into the cab—when the wagons jerked forward and went swaying and creaking off into the night. He sat in the engineer’s chair of a motionless engine, his forehead pressed to the useless throttle.