But the down-timers were also coming up with new compensatory technologies, one of which now intruded upon Eddie’s reverie. Just down the street from where he stood staring at the house that had been his first haven in this often frightening new version of the Old World, he heard a distant toot. Like a child’s train whistle, but louder. He turned and, already moving far faster than he ever had with his peg leg, Eddie Cantrell hobble-ran in an attempt to catch the new monorail trolley that was approaching the stop on East Main Street, just a block behind him.
The strange vehicle chugged slowly into view: a simple wooden front car that resembled a rough-hewn and vastly shrunken version of a San Francisco cable car. Except there were no cables, and there was only one track, comprised of split logs, their flat-cut centers lying flush upon the ground, their sun-bleached hemicircular trunks facing up. The operator reached down, disengaged the drive-gear, applied brakes. The train slowed and the passengers in the front car swayed, as did the crates and boxes in the high-sided freight car behind it.
Eddie timed his hobble so as to wave his cane and shout when he came down on his good leg. “Hey, wait up!”
If the operator heard him, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he stepped down to help an elderly passenger up into the lead car.
Which, on closer inspection, was a radical departure from any form of up-time rail transportation Eddie had ever seen. In addition to the two, flanged, steel track-wheels—salvaged from small automobiles, and now leather-strapped on their contact surface with the rail—there was, for lack of a better term, a larger wagon wheel attached to the side of the car as an outrigger. It kept the car upright, and ran along the smooth up-time roadbed. The front car’s very small steam engine, puffing faintly, was of entirely down-time manufacture. Not terribly efficient, and both heavy and crude, but none of that mattered: it provided reliable power to the up-time car wheels that pulled the car along the wooden track at a comfortable six miles an hour or so.
“Hey!” shouted Eddie again, and this time, missed the timing with his cane. But his new foot’s spring-compressed heel popped him into his next step, and what should have been a nasty fall turned into an arm-flailing stumble.
Which apparently attracted the attention of the operator. “I wait!” the man assured him loudly, squinting at Eddie’s gait. “We always wait for our soldiers.”
Eddie waved his thanks, noted the driver’s extremely thick accent. Swabian, from the sound of him, likely rendered homeless by the border wars between the up-timers’ first allies—the Swedes of Gustav Adolf—and the upstart dukedom of Bernhard, originally one of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar. As had so many other refugees from all the neighboring provinces of Germany, this driver had probably come to Grantville to find his fortune—and no doubt, from his perspective, had accomplished just that. There was a palpable eagerness as he turned from seating the elderly passenger and came forward to offer a hand to Eddie. The prompt, energetic gesture radiated that special pride particular to those down-timers who operated the new machines that their own artisans had crafted from up-time ideas and inspirations. It was as though they were simultaneously saying, “See? We are helping build this new world with you!” and “Do not discount us: we are just as smart as you are.” In truth, given how little of the up-time science and engineering they understood when Grantville first fell out of the future, and how much of its technology they were now mastering and adapting, it was arguably true that, on the average, the Germans were smarter than the up-timers. Markedly so, in a number of cases.
Eddie smiled his thanks at the driver and accepted the hand up into the passenger car. With only room for twenty, who were currently packed in like sardines, there was no seat left for him. Seeing the unnatural stiffness of Eddie’s left leg, one of the comparatively younger men stood quickly, gestured towards his spot on a transverse bench. Eddie smiled, shook his head with a “Thanks, anyhow,” and held on to the rail as the car lurched forward to resume its journey with a sigh of steam.
The other passengers were mostly mothers with children, older folks, and two other amputees. One of the passengers seemed to be a workman, hand truck tucked tight between his legs. Probably delivering the cargo in the back, Eddie surmised.
They had hardly gone a block when the driver stifled a curse and backed off the steam, letting the little train begin to coast. Seeing Eddie’s interest, he pointed forward. “Another train. I must pull off.”
Eddie saw the oncoming train, almost a twin to the one he was on, approaching from about two blocks away. But there was only one rail. “Um . . . how do we—?”