then thousands as the towers of iron and concrete go up and the drills go deeper and deeper down, relentlessly in search of anything that might smell like oil.
Along with the factories would come the gray-haired women of the assembly lines, endlessly grinding up the earth and spilling out goods and necessities.
“This will happen, boy. It has to happen. The Line does what it does. First, after the soldiers, they’ll send the merchants, the traders . . .”
In fact, the traders were already there, like they were waiting in the earth all along and the Line’s passage had ground them up from it, spilled them out like slag or mine tailings. They came in classes and grades like standardized engine parts. Some of them were low nervous men in shabby patched coats, trading shoddy and damaged goods out of battered suitcases; they would get sent out to Gooseneck, and to the farms around Fairsmith, where the hicks would be thrilled to see so much as a dented tin kettle, or maybe a sharper kind of plow or something. Lowry didn’t know the details. Some were sober men in gray suits already poking around Kloan’s streets, teams of surveyors and engineers in tow, site-scouting for the coming workshops and factories. A few were flamboyant. Strange as it seemed, the Line sometimes had to produce flamboyance and color, because the hicks loved it so: so a few of the traders sported silk ties, silver watches, tall black hats, waistcoats in purple and gold. They brought with them little bright flocks of showgirls. They’d go out to Greenbank and World’s End and put on a song and dance to sell medicines, and watches, and eyeglasses; or ephemeral factory-milled luxuries like cigarettes or chocolates. Or spun sugars and ices, dyed bright unnatural shades of gold and cobalt blue and cadmium red, refined in the processing towers of Angelus Station or Arsenal.
“How does that sound? Sounds good? Well, boy, the factories aren’t built yet. In time. For now, the goods come by Engine and by truck. Bulk. Cheap. Cheap as we care to make ’em. The smallest youngest Station of the Line produces more goods in its factories in an hour—produces more goods by mistake every day—than Kloan and Greenbank and Gooseneck would ever have produced in ten years, in twenty. You can’t compete. As you are to the Folk, we are to you. Right where you’re standing, boy, there’s going to be a moving-picture vault. I marked the spot personally. Things you’ll never have imagined you might see.”
Lowry crouched to look the boy in the eye. “So it’s time to decide, boy, whether you’ll stand in the way and be ground down, or go forward. Join up. Think about it. You have to choose, boy, and you have to choose—”
The boy slipped Lowry’s grasp and ran off across the fields.
A gray numbness descended on Lowry’s vision.
Thernstrom coughed.
Lowry got to his feet. “What are we waiting for? Let’s move.”
He strode out across the fields. The crops were dead. Now Kloan’s fields sprouted huge new tuberous growths: motor trucks and flatbeds and earthmovers and Heavier-Than-Air Vessels and armored cars of various hulking kinds and the jutting stalks of heavy mortars.
He climbed into a truck. Thernstrom followed. He banged the sides. “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
He watched the assault through a telescope, from an elevated position, at a safe distance, under heavy guard.
The day before, one of the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels had reported sighting a camp in the hills a few miles south of Greenbank. It contained at least two men and one woman. They were concealed from casual detection by the shelter of a tall arch of rock and a stand of pines; they were not well hidden from aircraft. Each of them was armed. They had no cattle, no cargo, no other signs of legitimate employment.
Lowry had not doubted for a second that they were Agents of the Enemy.
He ordered no further approach. Nothing that would spook them. He’d dispatched troops and Ironclads to cordon off the roads in all directions, at a distance from the camp of a mile or more. He’d had Heavier-Than-Air Vessels moved into positions where they could strike quickly at all possible points in a mile’s radius around the camp’s location. He’d had mines and barbed wire laid, mortars readied.
Now the targets were on the move, heading northeast across open country, and Lowry watched them. They were specks on a vast empty red brown landscape, until he tightened the scope’s focus and