shivered. He might well have led Caesar straight into the trap.
He got down from the hairy elephant, walked over to the hole in the ground. The rails had buckled as they tried and failed to support the Iron Elephant. It was tilted at a steep angle, almost nose down in the pit. A real elephant, which did not carry its weight on the rails, would have taken a worse fall.
A dead sim lay half in, half out of the pit. Preen Chand looked down into it. 'Hel o, Preen, very good to see you indeed,' Richard Trevithick said. He held a pistol clubfashion in his bandaged left hand; his right arm hung limply. 'I'm afraid you'll have to help me out of here. I think I broke it. Oh, and congratulations, you seem to have won the race.'
'I had not even thought of that,' Preen Chand said, blinking. He turned to his crew. 'Get me a length of rope. Tie one end to Caesar's harness and toss the other down to me.' He slid into the pit.
In India, he thought, hazily remembering his grandfather's stories, there would have been sharpened stakes sticking up from the bottom.
Luckily, the sims had not thought of that. , He got to his feet, brushed off himself and Trevithick. 'You shot the sim up there?'
The engine handler nodded. 'Yes, and then spent the rest of the fight hiding under the Iron Elephant, while another of the creatures tried to kil it.' He laughed ruefully. 'Not very glorious, I'm afraid. But then, neither was falling out of the cab when the engine went down. If I hadn't been Ieaning back for another shovelful of coal, I never would have got this.' He tried to move his arm, winced, and thought better of it.
'But you would have been out in the open, then, and the second sim might have speared you instead of your machine,' Preen Chand poinoed out.
'Something to that, I suppose.'
A rope snaked into the hole. Preen Chand tied it around Trevithick's body under his arms. 'Is it hooked up to Caesar?' he cal ed.
'Sure is,' a brakeman answered.
'Good. Mall-mal !'
The rope went taut. Preen Chand helped Trevithick to scramble up the sloping side of the pit while the elephant pulled him out. The engine handler yelped once, then set his teeth and bore the jouncing in grim silence. Preen Chand yelled 'Choro!' as soon as Trevithick was out, then crawled slowly after him.
'You didn’t need to get us clean the first time,' Trevit hick remarked.
'You are quite right. My apologies. I will dirty you again, if you like,' Preen Chand said, deadpan.
Trevithick's expression was half grin, half grimace. Then he looked around, and dismay replaced them both. Down in the pit, he had not been able to see the fight that had raged up and down the length of his train. Most of the bodies spilled on the ground, most of the blood splashed on waggons and grass, belonged to sims, but not all.
'Oh, the poor lads,' the engine handler exclaimed.
Some of the survivors of his crew had joined Preen Chand's men in pursuit of the sims, which made his losses appear at first even worse than they were. But Trevithick, pointing with his left hand, counted four bodies, and one of his brakemen added, 'Pat Bailey and One-eye Jim is dead but we can't find 'em nowheres.'
“Filthy creatures,' Trevithick muttered.
Preen Chand knew he was not talking about the missing men. Trying to give what consolation he could, he said 'This sort of thing will not happen hereabouts much longer. Soon this part of the country will be too thickly settled for wild sim bands big enough to attack a train to flourish. '
'Yes, of course. That's been happening for more than I50 years, since settlers came to Virginia and Plymouth. It does little good for me at the moment, however, and even less for One-eye Jim and Patrick Bailey.'
Preen Chand had no good answer to that. He led Trevithick over to Paul Tilak, who knew enough first aid to splint a broken arm. Ignoring an injured man's howls Tilak was washing a bleeding bite with whiskey.
'Don't be a fool,' he told the fellow. 'Do you want it to fester?'
'Couldn't hurt more'n what you just done,' the man said sullenly.
'That only shows how little you know,' Tilak snorted.
He moved on to a brakeman with a torn shirt and blood running down his chest. 'You are very lucky. That spear could as easily have gone in as slid along your ribs.' He soaked his rag at the mouth of the whiskey bottle. The brakeman flinched.
'There's one attention I won't regret being spared,' Trevithick said, waiting for Tilak to get round to him.
'I do not doubt that.' Preen Chand's eyes slipped back to the Iron Elephant. 'Richard, may I ask what you will do next?'
The engine handler fol owed his rival's glance. 'I expect we'll be able to salvage it, Preen, with the help of your elephants. The damage shouldn't be anything past repair. ' His face lit with enthusiasm.
'And back in Boston, my brother is working on another engine, twice as powerful as the Iron Elephant. If I'd had that one here, you never could have stayed close to me!'
'In which case, you and your crew probably would al be dead now,' Preen Chand said tartly.
But in spite of his sharp comeback, he felt a hollowness - inside, for he saw that the future belonged to Trevithick. As surely as humans displaced sims, steam engines were going to replace hairy elephants: it was much easier to make an t engine bigger and stronger and faster than it was an elephant.
A way of life was ending.
He let out a long sigh.
Trevithick understood him perfectly. 'I told you once, Preen, it won't be so bad. There will always be railroads, no matter what pulls the trains.'
