Apparently this replica didn't spend all its time in the amusement park mentioned on its mother truck, but at least occasionally traveled around to be displayed at fairs and supermarket openings and other gala events. The specially equipped truck was itself an indication of that, as was the fact that the wheels were suited to the standard gauge of today's tracks.
The locomotive came complete with its own tender, a boxlike wooden affair like a dinette on wheels. On the original the tender was usually full of coal, but in the replica it was empty except for a green-handled push-broom leaning against one corner.
Chefwick was at the controls as Tom Thumb came slowly down the ramp and effected the tricky transition from one set of rails to another, and he was in seventh heaven, smiling and beaming around in sheer delight. In his mind he hadn't been given a full-size locomotive, he himself had been miniaturized. He was running a model train in person. He beamed out at Dortmunder and said, "Toot toot."
"Sure thing," Dortmunder said. "Up a little more."
Chefwick eased Tom Thumb forward a few more feet.
"That's good right there," Dortmunder said and went back to help Greenwood and Kelp slide the ramp back up into the truck. They shut the truck doors and hollered to Murch, who hollered back and drove the truck around in a wide loop that left it once more off the road. So far, there'd been no other traffic at all.
Chefwick and Greenwood and Kelp were already in their wet-suits, the black rubber gleaming and glistening in the sun. They weren't wearing the gloves or face masks or headpieces yet, but otherwise they were completely encased in rubber. So much for electrified fences.
Dortmunder and Greenwood and Kelp all climbed aboard the tender, and Dortmunder called forward to Chefwick, "Go ahead."
"Right," said Chefwick. "Toot toot," he called, and Tom Thumb began to perk along the track.
The other wet suit was waiting for Dortmunder in the tender, on the arms case. He put it on and said, "Remember. When we go through keep your hands over your faces."
"Right," said Kelp.
Tom Thumb traveled faster than seventeen miles an hour, and they reached the Clair de Lune Sanitarium in no time, where Chefwick pulled to a stop just before the turnoff where the old tracks angled away toward the sanitarium grounds. Greenwood jumped down, went over to the switch beside the tracks and turned it to the spur position, and then climbed back aboard.
(It had taken two nights of oiling and straining and heaving to get the old switch to work again. It's too expensive for railroads to remove all their old unused equipment, and it doesn't hurt anything to leave it all lying there, which is why there are so many abandoned stretches of track to be seen around the United States. But there's nothing wrong with most of it except rust, which had been the only problem here. The switch now turned like a dream.)
They all put on their headpieces and gloves and face masks, and Chefwick accelerated over the bumpy orange track toward the sanitarium fencing. Tom Thumb, tender and all, was still lighter than the Ford from which his engine had come, and he accelerated like a go-cart, hitting sixty before he hit the fence.
Snap! Sparks, sputters, smoke. Live wires whipping back and forth. Tom Thumb's wheels shrieking and squealing along the twisty old rails, then shrieking even louder when Chefwick applied the brakes. They'd breached the fence like a sprinter breasting the tape, and now they screamed and scraped to a stop surrounded by chrysanthemums and gardenias.
In his office on the opposite side of the building, Chief Administrator Doctor Panchard L. Whiskum sat at his desk rereading the piece he'd just written for the American Journal of Applied Pan-Psychotherapy, entitled "Instances of Induced Hallucination among Staff Members of Mental Hospitals," when a white-jacketed male nurse ran in shouting, "Doctor! There's a locomotive in the garden!"
Doctor Whiskum looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He said, "Sit down, Foster. Let's talk about it."
In the garden, Dortmunder and Greenwood and Kelp had emerged from the tender in wet-suits and skin divers' masks, carrying tommy guns. All over the lawn, white-garbed patients and blue-garbed guards and white-garbed attendants were running back and forth, up and down, around in circles, shouting at each other, grabbing each other, bumping into each other. Bedlam was in bedlam.
Dortmunder pointed his tommy gun in the air and let go with a burst, and the silence after that was like the silence in a cafeteria just after somebody has dropped a thousand metal trays on a tile floor. Silent. Very silent.
The lawn was full of eyes, all of them round. Dortmunder looked among them and finally found Prosker's. He pointed the tommy gun at Prosker and called, "Prosker! Get over here!"
Prosker tried to make believe he was somebody else, named Doe or Roe. He kept on standing there, pretending Dortmunder wasn't looking at him.
Dortmunder called, "Do I shoot your ankles off and have somebody carry you? Get over here."
A lady doctor in the foreground, wearing black horn-rims and white lab coat, suddenly cried, "You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you realize what you're doing to the reality concepts we're trying to instill in these people? How do you expect them to differentiate between illusion and reality when you do something like this?"
"Be quiet," Dortmunder told her and called to Prosker, "I'm losing my patience."
But Prosker continued to stand there, feigning innocence, until all at once a guard near him took a quick step and shoved him, shouting, "Will you get over there? Who knows if his aim is any good? You want to kill innocent people?"
A chorus of yeahs followed that remark, and the tableau of people - Living Chessboard is what it mostly looked like - turned itself into a sort of bucket brigade, pushing Prosker on from hand to hand all across the lawn to the locomotive.
When he got there, Prosker suddenly became voluble. "I'm not a well man!" he cried. "I've had illnesses, troubles, my memory's gone! I wouldn't be here, why would I be here if I wasn't a sick man. I tell you, my memory's gone, I don't know anything about anything."
"Just get up here," Dortmunder said. "We'll remind you."
Very reluctantly, with much pushing from behind and pulling from in front, Prosker got up into the tender. Kelp and Greenwood held him while Dortmunder told the crowd to stay where it was while they made their escape. "Also," he said, "send somebody to put that switch back after we're gone. We don't want to derail any trains, do we?"
A hundred heads shook no.
"Right," Dortmunder said. He told Chefwick, "Back her up."
"A-okay," Chefwick said, and under his breath he said, "Toot toot." He didn't want to say it aloud with a lot of crazy people within earshot, they might get the wrong idea.
The locomotive backed slowly out of the flower beds. Dortmunder and Kelp and Greenwood surrounded Prosker, grabbing him by the elbows and lifting him a few inches into the air. He hung there, pressed in by wet-suits on all sides, his slippered feet waggling inches above the floor, and said, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"
"So you don't get electrocuted," Greenwood told him. "We're about to back through live wires. Cooperate, Mr. Prosker."
"Oh, I'll cooperate," Prosker said. "I'll cooperate."
"Yes, you will," Dortmunder said.
6
Murch stood beside the tracks, smoking a Marlboro and thinking about railroad trains. What would it be like to drive a railroad train, a real one, a modern diesel? Of course, you couldn't change lanes when you wanted, but it nevertheless might be interesting, very interesting.