He had never had to work so hard; he had done his job as conscientiously well as he had always done any assignment; but it was as if he had worked in a vacuum, as if his energy had found no transmitters and had run into the sands of ... of some such desert as the one beyond the window of the Comet. He shuddered: he felt a moment’s kinship with the stalled engine of the train.
After a while, he summoned the conductor once more. “How is it going?” he asked.
The conductor shrugged and shook his head.
“Send the fireman to a track phone. Have him tell the Division Headquarters to send us the best mechanic available.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was nothing to see beyond the window; turning off the light, Eddie Willers could distinguish a gray spread dotted by the black spots of cacti, with no start to it and no end. He wondered how men had ever ventured to cross it, and at what price, in the days when there were no trains. He jerked his head away and snapped on the light.
It was only the fact that the Comet was in exile, he thought, that gave him this sense of pressing anxiety. She was stalled on an alien rail—on the borrowed track of the Atlantic Southern that ran through Arizona, the track they were using without payment. He had to get her out of here, he thought; he would not feel like this once they returned to their own rail. But the junction suddenly seemed an insurmountable distance away: on the shore of the Mississippi, at the Taggart Bridge.
No, he thought, that was not all. He had to admit to himself what images were nagging him with a sense of uneasiness he could neither grasp nor dispel; they were too meaningless to define and too inexplicable to dismiss. One was the image of a way station they had passed without stopping, more than two hours ago: he had noticed the empty platform and the brightly lighted windows of the small station building; the lights came from empty rooms; he had seen no single human figure, neither in the building nor on the tracks outside. The other image was of the next way station they had passed: its platform was jammed with an agitated mob. Now they were far beyond the reach of the light or sound of any station.
He had to get the Comet out of here, he thought. He wondered why he felt it with such urgency and why it had seemed so crucially important to re-establish the Comet’s run. A mere handful of passengers was rattling in her empty cars; men had no place to go and no goals to reach. It was not for their sake that he had struggled; he could not say for whose. Two phrases stood as the answer in his mind, driving him with the vagueness of a prayer and the scalding force of an absolute. One was: From Ocean to Ocean, forever—the other was: Don’t let it go! ...
The conductor returned an hour later, with the fireman, whose face looked oddly grim.
“Mr. Willers,” said the fireman slowly, “Division Headquarters does not answer.”
Eddie Willers sat up, his mind refusing to believe it, yet knowing suddenly that for some inexplicable reason
this
was what he had expected. “It’s impossible!” he said, his voice low; the fireman was looking at him, not moving. “The track phone must have been out of order.”
“No, Mr. Willers. It was not out of order. The line was alive all right. The Division Headquarters wasn’t. I mean, there was no one there to answer, or else no one who cared to.”
“But you know that that’s impossible!”
The fireman shrugged; men did not consider any disaster impossible these days.
Eddie Willers leaped to his feet. “Go down the length of the train,” he ordered the conductor. “Knock on all the doors—the occupied ones, that is—and see whether there’s an electrical engineer aboard.”
“Yes, sir.”
Eddie knew that they felt, as he felt it, that they would find no such man; not among the lethargic, extinguished faces of the passengers they had seen. “Come on,” he ordered, turning to the fireman.
They climbed together aboard the locomotive. The gray-haired engineer was sitting in his chair, staring out at the cacti. The engine’s headlight had stayed on and it stretched out into the night, motionless and straight, reaching nothing but the dissolving blur of crossties.
“Let’s try to find what’s wrong,” said Eddie, removing his coat, his voice half-order, half-plea. “Let’s try some more.”
“Yes, sir,” said the engineer, without resentment or hope.
The engineer had exhausted his meager store of knowledge; he had checked every source of trouble he could think of. He went crawling over and under the machinery, unscrewing its parts and screwing them back again, taking out pieces and replacing them, dismembering the motors at random, like a child taking a clock apart, but without the child’s conviction that knowledge is possible.
The fireman kept leaning out of the cab’s window, glancing at the black stillness and shivering, as if from the night air that was growing colder.
“Don’t worry,” said Eddie Willers, assuming a tone of confidence. “We’ve got to do our best, but if we fail, they’ll send us help sooner or later. They don’t abandon trains in the middle of nowhere.”
They didn’t used to,“. said the fireman.
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 make-up 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. He felt like the captain of an ocean liner in distress, who preferred to go down with his ship rather than be saved by the canoe of savages taunting him with the superiority of their craft.
Then, suddenly, he felt the blinding surge of a desperate, righteous anger. He leaped to his feet, seizing the throttle. He had to start this train; in the name of some victory that he could not name, he had to start the engine moving.
Past the stage of thinking, calculation or fear, moved by some righteous defiance, he was pulling levers at random, he was jerking the throttle back and forth, he was stepping on the dead man’s pedal, which was dead, he was groping to distinguish the form of some vision that seemed both distant and close, knowing only that his desperate battle was fed by that vision and was fought for its sake.