want him to stop. Or, if she did want him to stop, she didn't let him know it, which amounted to the same thing.
Somebody was coming downstairs: Mary, by the sound of the footsteps. McGregor waited to console her. But, when his younger daughter came into the kitchen, triumph glowed on her face. 'Julia got mean,' Mary said. 'I guess she won't try that again in a hurry.'
Maude gaped in astonishment. So did McGregor. This time, he caught and held his wife's eye. If Mary could triumph against long odds, why couldn't he? That bomb still lay in the barn, hidden below the old wagon wheel. In spite of everything, he might find the chance to place it. He didn't need to do that right this minute. He had time.
Colonel Irving Morrell stood in the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, train station, waiting for the special from Pontiac, Michigan, to come in. His green-gray overcoat held the worst of the cold at bay, though he wished he'd put on a fur hat instead of an ordinary service cap. Soot-streaked snow covered the ground. By the look of the mass of dirty-gray clouds building in the northwest, more would be coming before too long.
Beside him, Lieutenant Lije Jenkins stirred restlessly. 'Everything's gone slower than it should have, sir, I know,' he said, 'but we're finally going to get the prototype for the new model.'
'No, not the prototype.' Morrell shook his head. 'Just a test model, to see how some of the ideas we sent the War Department work out. Most of the parts come from the barrels we used in the Great War, so the test model will run maybe half as fast as it ought to.' He sighed, blowing out a small cloud of vapor. 'Getting the real McCoy built will run half as fast as it ought to, too.'
'When I think what we could have had-' Jenkins angrily shook his head. 'When I think what we should have had by now-the war will have been over three years this summer, and the new model still isn't anywhere near ready to go into production.'
'We're living on borrowed time,' Morrell said. 'Ask any soldier, and he'll tell you the same thing. You can live on borrowed time for a while, but then you have to pay it back-with interest.'
Jenkins stared north and east, across the Missouri. He pointed. 'Don't I see exhaust there, sir? Time's right for that to be the special.'
'So it is,' Morrell agreed. 'We'll know pretty soon, I expect.' He glanced around, then nodded in satisfaction. 'Ah, good. The station boys are on the ball. They've got the heavy ramp ready to unload the barrel from its flatcar. They've helped take barrels off trains before, so they'll know the drill.'
Coal smoke billowing from the stack, the special crossed the Missouri, rolled through Leavenworth, and came north again to the Fort Leavenworth station. It was about the shortest train Mor-rell had ever seen, consisting of a locomotive, a tender, and one flatcar, on which perched a large shape covered by green-gray tarpaulins to shield it from the weather and from prying eyes.
When the train stopped, an officer jumped out of the locomotive and came up to Morrell. 'Colonel Irving Morrell?' he asked. Morrell admitted he was himself. The officer nodded briskly, then saluted. 'Very pleased to meet you, sir. I'm Major Wilkinson; I've ridden down with this beast from Pontiac. As soon as I get your John Hancock on about sixty-eleven different forms here, I can put it into your hands and let you start finding out what it can do.'
Morrell signed and signed and signed. By the time he was through, the signatures on the forms hardly looked like his any more. After he gave the last sheet of paper back to Major Wilkinson, he said, 'Why don't you take the wrapping off so I can see what's in the package?'
'I'll be glad to, sir. If you and Lieutenant-Jenkins, was it? — will come along with me, you can see just what's in there.' Nimble as a monkey, he swung himself up onto the flatcar and untied the ropes that held the tarps in place. Morrell and Jenkins ascended more sedately. They helped him pull away the heavy cloth covering the new barrel.
'Bully,' Lije Jenkins said softly when he got his first look. 'If that's not a machine for the 1920s, I'll be darned if I know what is. Compared to what we had in the Great War, that's a machine from out of the 1930s, by God.'
'Yeah, it's pretty on the outside,' Morrell said, 'but what it reminds me of is a homely girl with a lot of paint and powder on.' He started to rap the barrel's hull with his knuckles, but checked himself; it was cold enough that he'd lose skin on the metal. He contented himself with pointing. 'That's just mild steel, not armor plate, and it's thin mild steel to boot. That makes the barrel lighter, so the one White engine they threw in there can give it even a halfway decent turn of speed. But you couldn't take it into combat; it's not even proof against rifle fire, let alone anything else.'
But even as he spoke, his eyes caressed the test barrel's lines as they did Agnes Hill's whenever he saw her. Here, in metal, was the shape he'd sketched not long after coming to the Barrel Works. The turret cannon and machine gun stared at him. So did the machine gun mounted in the front of the hull.
'It doesn't look as… as busy as one of our regular barrels,' Lieutenant Jenkins said.
'No, I suppose not,' Morrell said, 'but I hope it'll keep the enemy busier than one of the regular sort. And we won't need to put a whole regiment of soldiers inside here when we go into action, either.' He strode to the rear of the flatcar. 'Hurry up with that ramp, if you please, gentlemen.'
'We're just about ready, Colonel,' one of the soldiers replied. A couple of minutes later, he said, 'All right, sir, everything's in place.'
'Do you want to back it off the car, Major?' Morrell asked.
'I will if you want me to, sir,' Wilkinson answered, 'but go right ahead if you'd rather do the honors.'
Morrell needed no more urging. He opened the hatch in the top of the hull that led down into the driver's compartment, then wriggled inside. The controls were identical to those of the older barrels. He'd learned the driver's art since coming to the Barrel Works, but had applied himself to it as he applied himself to everything that caught his interest. His finger stabbed the electric-starter button.
Behind him, the White engine grunted, coughed, and came to life. It was loud. It was not, however, deafening, as the engines in old-style barrels were. That wasn't because the test model had only one, where normal machines needed two. It was because, instead of sitting right there in the middle of the barrel's interior, the engine had a compartment of its own, separated from the crew by a steel bulkhead.
He wished he didn't have to back the barrel down the ramp to get it off the flatcar. Even with his head out of the hatch, even with the rearview mirror the manufacturer had thoughtfully provided (a little bonus that might possibly last thirty seconds in combat), he couldn't see behind himself for beans. That was something he hadn't thought about when he decided on a turret-mounted cannon.
Well, that was what the test model was for: to discover all the things he hadn't thought of, and nobody else had, either. With luck, he'd be able to get rid of them before the new model went into production. He knew perfectly well that he wouldn't find them all; he was human, and therefore fallible. But he'd do the best job he could.
He'd do the best job he could of getting this beast off the flatcar, too. All he had to do was back straight. If he looked ahead, he ought to be able to judge how well he was doing that. And he couldn't keep sitting up here forever. His left foot came down on the clutch. He threw the shift lever into reverse and gave the barrel a little gas.
It was peppier than the ones in which he'd fought the Great War: not peppy like a fancy motorcar, not peppy enough to suit him, but peppier. It went down the ramp faster than he'd expected. Almost before he knew it, he was on the ground. From the flatcar, Major Wilkinson waved and Lieutenant Jenkins gave him a thumbs-up.
'Come on!'' he shouted to Jenkins over the rumble of the engine-which seemed a lot louder with his head out the hatch. The lieutenant jumped down from the train, clambered up the side of the barrel, and scrambled into the turret through a hatch on the roof.
'There's no ammunition in here,' he said indignantly. Morrell snorted-as if anyone would be crazy enough to put ammunition in a barrel that would be traveling by train. Accidents didn't happen very often, but who would take the chance on sending an expensive test model up in smoke? Then Jenkins went on, 'I wanted to shoot up the landscape as we drove along,' and Morrell snorted again, this time on a different note. His subordinate was just acting like a kid again.
Morrell put the barrel into the lowest of its four forward speeds. It rattled over the railroad tracks and off toward the muddy prairie northwest of Fort Leavenworth. He built up to full speed as fast as he could. If the speedometer wasn't lying, he was doing better than ten miles an hour, more than twice as fast as a Great War barrel could manage on similar ground. The power-to-weight ratio of the test model was supposed to be the same
