Enigmatic Pilot by Kris Saknussemm Read Free Book Online Page A

say nothing. The story that went into circulation was that Grady had been angry with his father for a licking and so had lit out on an adventure. Then, dirty and tired of living on carp and branch water, the dumb nut had slunk home to take his medicine, only to find that his razor-strop father was too glad to have him back to whip him.
    Lionel Smeg never made good on his threat to burn down the Sitturds’ barn, but he did stir up a hornet’s nest about the money Hephaestus owed, and racial tensions that had long been suppressed began to simmer. The lame inventor’s creditors knew of his Millerite leanings and the talk around Zanesville began to suggest that maybe the oddball blacksmith was going to run up as big a bill as he could, and then he and his brood were going to drink hemlock on the End of the World Day (a sensational fear implanted by anti-Adventist forces throughout the country), leaving everyone he owed high and dry.
    The autumn harvest came early, and a snake-oil salesman showed up in a bright wagon covered in pictures of rajas and angels. He said his name was Professor Umberto, and he hadtwo assistants, a squirrel monkey in a black swallowtail coat, and a fancy house woman he called Anastasia, who wore a champagne-colored ball gown. She never said a word, but strutted around playing a squeezebox and helped out with the magic tricks he did between pitches. She was especially clever at disappearing and then reappearing someplace else. Even Lloyd was impressed by that feat. He also liked the way her bosom always seemed ready to burst out of her gown.
    The professor sold Indian root pills, white-eye alcohol in bottles with a picture of Saint George skewering a dragon on the side, and some expensive jars full of stuff for men that he claimed came from “the business end of a Bengal tiger.” It didn’t help or heal anyone for long, of course, but it made a big dent in Rapture’s income. Every time Hephaestus went to town he got cold stares and dirty looks. Legal-looking notices started piling up, and a man who claimed to work for the town council came out to the property and prowled around. After that, Rapture started insisting that anyone who rode past the house was a “puhlicitor.” It was humiliating and posed severe problems for the completion of the Time Ark (which, with so many people poking around, Hephaestus was forced to roll inside the forge). The mood grew darker as the days counted down.
    Hephaestus had held such high hopes for the Ark based on the “magnetic properties” of the material, some of which had come from bits of what he thought were meteorites that he had unearthed. Lloyd’s concept was to build a spiral track and to mount the sphere on a shaft set into a swiveling frame so that it was capable of spinning 360 degrees, driven by the force of an elaborate series of sails and windmills. While rotating thus independently in one axis, the frame, which was attached to flanged wheels that sat on the rails, would propel the entire sphere along the spiral track.
    Between comments from his father regarding gyrostats and luminiferous ether (which Lloyd was disinclined to believe in),the boy produced a number of foolscap pages with fine duckquill blueprints and infinitesimal calculations, as well as several attempts at working models—along with the pregnant speculation that “seen from the sphere, the past might lie beyond the future.” But it was all to no avail. The iron of the Ark was hopelessly heavy and dense. It was all wrong. Everything.
    Frustrated to the point of violence, Lloyd could not work out how to maintain a constant speed along the track, or the more difficult technical issue of how to sustain the spiral motion of the sphere without the source of power, the sails and windmills, impeding the action. He needed more and better equipment—more tools, more resources—more than what the rank barn and the dust trap of Zanesville had to offer. Ever so much more. In his young