hidden springboard. The pit Lloyd had captured Grady in was an example of taking advantage of a natural asset. The hole was part of a seam of clay and had been excavated years before. All that had been required was to disguise it and lead the quarry there. Lloyd set down one of the well buckets to pick up a few stones along the path. A long summer twilight was settling in, full of whip-poor-wills and spoon frog chirping. But there was another sound as Lloyd approached the pit, which he had covered with a section of mite-ridden thatching. A plaintive moaning.
“Any bones broken?” he called, lifting the thatching.
“Hey!” bellowed Grady from below. “Yoo li’l weasel. Ah’ll git yoo! Let me up! I mean it!”
“I’m sorry, Grady,” Lloyd answered. “You need to learn a lesson. Three days should do it.”
“Three days! Yoo lissen to me!”
Lloyd dropped one of the stones he had picked up along the path.
“Aw! Sheet! Damn thang hit me.”
“I have plenty more,” Lloyd assured him. “Now, if you want some water-and believe me you do, then you’re going to say you’re sorry for what you did to my windmills.”
“Sorry? Yoo goddamned mongrel!”
Another stone fell, with similar results. Then another.
“Hey! Hey! All right, Ah give. Ah’m sorry for breakin’ up yer toys.”
“They’re not toys,” Lloyd hissed. “They’re
The creature in the pit was very quiet now, bruised and hoarse and completely bamboozled. But the sploshing bucket came down, as promised, on a length of rope, and there followed a slurping sound of relief.
Lloyd waited for the darkening hole to go almost silent again before he unbuttoned his britches and pulled his peter out. At first the trickle of fluid provoked no reaction. Then, when it dawned on the boy imprisoned below what was happening, the yelping was louder than that caused by the stones. But there was no one else around to hear. Lloyd had made sure of that.
CHAPTER 2. A New Kind of Animal
GRADY SMEG DID INDEED LEARN A LESSON, AND LLOYD WAS CORRECT in his prediction that the bully would 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 had two 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 heart, he raged for precision instruments, a proper assembly space, books (books!), ideas, materials, money-and, most of all, someone to talk to, someone who truly had his wits about him. Someone of his own ilk.
Most infuriating of all, he thought he had seen the solution in a dream. Hephaestus was sympathetic in this regard. How often had he woken just before their rooster in a helpless panic at the fading vision of some grand new invention! That was what had happened to the High Speed Chicken Plucker and the Musical Millet Grinder.
Being a blacksmith who fancied himself an engineer, and a modern man of fire and steel, once he had recognized the need for power and motion Hephaestus felt that the question could be resolved with steam, and so set about collecting boilerplate and rocker arms and designing a shining piston-driven beast that looked like a cross between a grasshopper locomotive and a calliope. But the harder he worked and scratched his head, the thirstier he got for elderberry brandy and the more he realized that time was running out. Their money already had. He was trying to build the prototype for a new form of power, and day by day the hourglasses emptied themselves, the beeswax candles burned down-and one day the grandfather clock fell over in an exhausted clash of chimes, glass, and splintered wood.
But where it all came unglued once and for all was the fair to mark the reopening of the local school (which Mabel Peanut, the earnest Episcopalian school marm, dubbed “A Celebration of Progress”). The owners of the flour mill, the pottery factory, and the new tool-and-die works had all chipped in to offer a cash prize in honor of Brazilla Rice, the first brickmaker in Zanesville, to be awarded to the youngster with the best scientific exhibit-with the exception of Lloyd.
Lloyd’s exclusion was phrased subtly but unmistakably, based on a condition of entry the family could not argue with: the number of days of school attendance in the past calendar year. No one was in doubt, however, about the real reason. If Lloyd was allowed to enter, there would be no contest. The other children would look ridiculous and the school itself would be revealed for the backwater log chink box of birds and mud pies that it was.
And there was another point at issue-one that no one involved, not even Lloyd, saw at the moment. Although progress was being celebrated, there was an inherent fear of it as well. Throughout all America this was true-but nowhere was that fear sharper than in a realm like Zanesville, which was neither an eastern bastion of culture and emerging convenience nor a frontier town anymore, on the edge of the wilderness. It was a crossroads town, torn between two worlds, resentful and anxious regarding them both.
The Sitturds were stung by the unfairness. The prize money seemed a small fortune to them, and any award for
