THE TRAIN RATTLED east
across the prairie toward Springfield. Preen Chand kept his rifle across his knees, in case of sims. From his perch atop Caesar, the lead hairy elephant, he could see a long way over the grassland.
'We should make town in another hour,' Paul Tilak called from Hannibal, the trail beast. 'An easy trip, this one.'
Preen Chand turned around. 'So it is, for which I am not sorry.'
He and Tilak were both small, light-brown men with delicate features.
Their grandfathers had come to America when the English decided to see if elephant handlers from India could tame the great auburn-haired beasts of the New World.
The two dozen waggons stretched out behind the pair of elephants showed that the answer was yes, though the Federated Commonwealths had been free of England for a generation. With people even then beginning to settle west of the New Nile, no country aaoss the sea could hope to enforce its will on its one-time colonies.
'Sim' Tilak shouted suddenly. 'There, to the north!' Preen Chand's head whipped round. He followed his friend's pointing finger.
Sure enough, the subhuman was loping along paral el to the train, about three hundred yards away. Preen Chand muttered something unpleasant under his breath. Sims might have no foreheads to speak of, but they had learned how far a gun could shoot with hope of accuracy.
'Shall we give him a volley?' Tilak asked.
'Yes, let us,' Preen Chand said. Three hundred yards was not quite impossibly long range, not with more than a dozen rifles speaking together. And the sims arrogant confidence in its own safety irked the elephant driver.
He waved a red flag back and forth to make sure the brakemen posted on top of every other car saw it. Tilak peered back over his shoulder.
'They're ready.'
Preen Chand swung the flag down, snatched up his rifle.
It bellowed along with the others, and bucked against his shoulder. The acrid smell of gunpowder fil ed his nose.
The hairy elephant beneath him started at the volley. It threw up its trunk and let out a trumpeting roar almost as loud as the gunshots.
Preen Chand shouted, 'Choro, Caesar, choro: stop, stop!' Elephant commands were the only Urdu he still knew. His father had preferred them to English, and passed them on to him.
He prodded Caesar behind the ear with his foot, spoke soothingly to him. Being on the whole a good-natured beast, the elephant soon calmed. Tilak's Hannibal was more excitable; the other driver had to whack him with a brass ankus to make him behave. Hannibal's ears twitched resentfully.
Preen Chand peered through the smoke to see whether all that gunfire had actual y hit the sim. It hadn't The subhuman let out a raucous hoot, shook its fist at the train and bounded away.
Preen Chand sighed. 'I do not like those pests, not at al .
One day I would like to unharness Caesar and go hunting sims from elephant-back.'
'Men only began settling hereabouts a few years ago,' Tilak said resignedly. 'Sims will be less common before long.'
'Yes, but they are so clever it's almost impossible to root them out altogether. Even on the eastern coast, where the land has been settled for a hundred-fifty years, wild bands still linger. Not so many as here west of the New Nile, true, but they exist.'
'Mere vermin fail to worry me,' Paul Tilak said. He put a hand to his forehead to shade his eyes. 'We should be able to see Springfield soon.''
'Oh, not yet,' Preen Chand said. But he also looked ahead, and saw the thin line of black smoke against the sky. Alarm flashed through him.
'Fire!' he shouted. 'The town must be burning!'
He dug his heels into Caesar's shoulders, yelled, 'MAIImal : go ant' He heard Tilak using the elephant goad to urge Hannibal on. The two beasts had to pull hard to gain speed against the dead weight of the train.
Preen Chand hoped the brakemen were alert. If he had to slow suddenly, they would need to halt the waggons before they could barrel into the elephants ahead of them.
The line of smoke grew taller, but no wider. Preen Chand scratched his head. Funny kind of fire, he thought.
'What's burning?' a farmer called as the train rolled by, farms sprouted like mushrooms along the tracks close to town, though they were still scarce farther away. Preen Chand shrugged. Even then, in the back of his mind, he might have known the truth, but it was not the sort of truth he felt like facing before he had to.
Then he could see Springfield in the distance. Its wooden buildings looked quite intact. The smoke had stopped rising. The prairie breezes played with the plume, dispersing it.
Houses, stables, a church, warehouses passed in swift succession.
Preen Chand guided Caesar gto the last turn before the station.
'Choro!' he called agalg. Caesar slowed. The brakemen worked their levers. Sparks flew as the waggons' iron wheels squealed on the track.
The train pulled to a halt.
'Seventeen minutes ahead of schedule,' Paul Tilak said with satisfaction, checking his pocket watch. 'No one will be able to complain we are late on this run, Preen.'
