Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

"No indeed," Preen Chand said. "But where is everybody?" Their being early was no reason for the eastbound side of the station to be empty, they had been in sight quite a while.

Where were the men and tame sims to unload the train's freight? Where were the people coming to meet arriving passengers? Where were the ostlers, with fodder and water and giant currycombs for the elephants?

Come to think of it, where had the smal boys who always gawked at the train disappeared to?

Preen Chand tapped Caesar's left shoulder, as far down as he could reach.

The hairy elephant obligingly raised its left leg. Preen Chand shinnied down to the broad, leathery foot, then dropped to the ground.

A passenger stuck his head out the window of a forward wagon.

"See here, sir," he cal ed to the elephant driver, "what is the meaning of this? I am an important man, and expect to be properly greeted. I have business to transact here before I go on to Cairo." He glared at Preen Chand as if he thought everything was his fault.

"I am very sorry, sir," Preen Chand said politely, which was not at all what he was thinking. "I will try to find out."

At that moment, a door in the station house opened. Finally, Preen Chand thought, someone's come to take a look at us. It was George Stephenson, the stationmaster, a plump little man who always wore a stovepipe hat that went badly with his build.

"What is the meaning of this?" Preen Chand shouted at him, stealing the pompous passenger's phrase. "Where are the men to take care of the elephants?" To a driver, everything else was secondary to that.

Stephenson should have felt the same way. Instead, he blinked; the idea did not seem to have occurred to him. "I'll have Wil ie and Jake get round to it," he said grudgingly. "Get round to it?" Preen Chand clapped a hand to his forehead in extravagant disbelief. "How else will they make enough money for their whiskey?

What is wrong with this town today? Has everyone here gone out of his mind?"

"Not hardly," Stephenson said. He was looking at Caesar and Hannibal in a way Preen Chand had never seen before. Was that pity in his eyes?

"We've just seen the future, is al . Maybe you better take a peep too, Preen, so as you and Paul there can start hunting' out a new line of work."

Then Preen Chaud did know what had happened, knew it with a certainty that gripped his guts. Even so, he had to make Stephenson spell it out.

"You mean, ?"

"Ayah, that's right, Preen. One o' them newfangled steam railroad engines has done come to Springfield. How do you propose outdoin' a machine?"

The pennant tied to the front of the steam engine called it "The Iron Elephant." To Preen Chand, the name was an obscene parody. The upjutting smokestack reminded him of Caesar's trunk, yes, but that trunk frozen in,rkgor mortis. Painting the boiler red-brown to imitate a hairy elephant's pelt did not disguise its being made of non. And the massive gears and wheels on either side of that boiler seemed to Preen Chand affixed as an afterthought, not parts of the device in the way Caesar's great legs were part of the elephant.

Besides, the thing stank. Used to the clean, earthy smel of elephant, Preen Chand's nostrils twitched at the odors of coal smoke and damp, cooling iron.

Had he been able to get closer, he thought, he probably would have been able to find other things to dislike about the Iron Elephant. As it was, he had to despise the contraption at a distance. Almost everybody in Springfield had jammed into the westbound side of the station to stare at the steam engine.

Stephenson turned to Preen Chand, saying, "I know you'll want to meet Mr. Trevithick, the engine handler, and compare notes. He's been waiting here for you. Come on, I'll take you to him." He plunged into the crowd, using his weight to shove people aside.

Meeting this Trevithick person was the last thing Preen Chand wanted. He also had a schedule to keep. He grabbed Stephenson by the shoulder. "Of course he's been waiting, he only has that damned engine. Me, I have an entire train to see to. You have my elephants fed, this instant. You have them watered. You unload what comes off here, and get your eastbound freight on board. Get your passengers moving. If I am one minute late coming into Cairo on the New Nile, I will complain to the company, yes I will, and with any luck we will bypass Springfield afterwards."

He knew he was bluffing. Likely Stephenson did too, but he could not afford to ignore the threat. Without a rail stop, Springfield would wither and die. With poor grace, he started pul ing station hands out of the crush and shouting for passengers to get over to the eastbound track. The press of people thinned, a little.

"Satisfied?" the stationmaster asked ironical y.

'Better, at any rate," Preen Chand said.

"One fine day soon you won't be able to throw your weight around just on account of you drive elephants, Preen. When steam comes in, we won't need stables, we won't need the big hay yards. This operation'll run on half the people and a quarter the cost. " Stephenson rubbed his hands at the prospect.

"And what do you do, pray tell me, when one of these engines breaks down? Whom will you hire? How much will you have to pay him?

More than your ostlers or a leech, I would wager. And how long will the repairs take? Caesar and Hannibal are reliable. What sort of schedule will you be able to keep up."

"The Iron Elephant's reliable too," Stephenson insisted, though Preen Chand's objections made him sound as if he were also trying to convince himself. But his voice steadied as he went on. "It's steamed all the way out from Boston in Plymouth Commonwealth without coming to grief. I reckon that says something'."

In spite of himself, Preen Chand was impressed: that was more than I,300

miles. Still, he said scornfully, "Yes, hauling nothing but itself and its coal-waggon." No passenger coaches or freight waggons stood behind the Iron Elephant. "How will it do, pulling a real load?"

"I don't know anything about that. Like I told you before, fellow you want to talk to is the engine handler. Come on, Preen, you may as well.

You know they'll be a good while yet over on the other side."

"Oh, very well." Preen Chand followed Stephenson as the stationmaster forced his way through the crowd, which had thinned more while they argued.

"Mr. Trevithickl" Stephenson called, and then again, louder, "Mr.

Trevithickl" A pale, almost consumptivelooking young man standing by the traveling stem engine lifted his head inquiringly. "Mr. Trevithick, this here is Mr. Preen Chand, the elephant driver you wanted to see."

"Ahl" The engine handler broke oft the conversation he was having, came hurrying over to pump Preen Chand's hand. "They spoke very well of you in Cairo, sir, when I was arranging permits to travel this line, said your Caesar and Hannibal were first-rate beasts. I see they were right; you're here a good deal ahead of schedule." Like any railroad man, Trevithick always had a watch handy.

"Thank you so very much, sir." Preen Chand saw he was going to have to work to dislike this man; Trevithick was perfectly sincere.

Looking into his intense blue eyes, Preen Chand suspected he was one of those people who always said just what they thought because it never occurred to them to do anything else.

"Call me Richard, couldn't stand going as Dick Trevithick, you know. And you're Preen? Shouldn't be any stuffiness between folks in the same line of work."

Again Preen Chand realized that he meant it. As gently as he could, he said, "Richard, it is a line of work that you and that, thing", he could not make himself call it the Iron Elephant, "are trying to get me out of."

'Am I? How?" Trevithick's surprise was genuine, which in turn surplised Preen Chand. "Who better to work the railroads under, than someone long familiar with them as an elephant driver?