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Long Odds 02: The Helper · Long Odds

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Long odds.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Episode two The Helper.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Part one.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: At one in the morning on Wednesday, Femi Adayami sat in his car in the parking lot of a records annex outside Washington, with the engine off and both hands on the wheel, and did the arithmetic again.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: One hit in eleven.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: He had known the answer before he did the math.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: He did the math anyway, because that was who he was, and because doing math was better than the other thing he could feel coming up behind it, which was something a lot closer to grief.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: He had worked for the survey for nine years, and for six of them, the number that kept him up at night had been the same number.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: One in ten, more or less, one in eleven, as of the midnight window, when a short report had come home from Hannah Whitlock's team, from a world right next door to the one they had aimed for.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Confirmed Miss Hall in progress?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hannah had volunteered for that test before he finished asking, and she hadn't said why, and she hadn't needed to.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: At twenty past one he called Walt Sobieski at home.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Walt answered on the second ring, the way a man answers when he has run a secret program long enough to stop expecting a full night's sleep.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a miss, Walt said.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a question.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a miss.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Walt, Team two goes out from Nevada today.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Dial four.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I know when Team two goes out.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I signed for the cells.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Pat's home with the flu.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a seat.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: There was a long pause.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Femi could hear a clock ticking somewhere in Walt's house and a dog sighing in its sleep.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: You want to ride along on a blind jump, Walt said slowly.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: To a world you can't pick, at a distance you've never been, with a crew you barely know.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I want to take a reading at Dial four.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've only ever measured the signature at one and two, where the stations are packed in like sardines.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole problem.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has ever measured how crowded it is farther out, because the field teams don't care.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I've never been out there to look.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: He stopped.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Walt, I've never asked you for anything.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Nine years.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's very annoying.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Another pause.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: First flight out of Dulles.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Ada's in charge.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: If she tells you to sit in the circle and touch nothing, you sit in the circle and touch nothing.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Femi, go home and take a shower first.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: You sound like a man who's been sitting in a car.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: He caught the six o'clock out of Dulles with a change in Denver, and somewhere over Kansas, with a cup of airline coffee going cold on the tray, he read about the Nobel Prize.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It had been announced the day before, while Hannah's team was walking down a ridge in Maryland, and Femi was too busy watching a needle to notice anything else.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: The physics prize had gone to Francis Halsen, a Belgian American physicist eighty two years old, for the Ice Cube Observatory at the South Pole, a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice strung with light sensors, built to catch neutrinos, the ghost particles that pass through the whole Earth without touching anything.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first time since nineteen ninety two that the physics prize hadn't been shared.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Femi read the story twice, a man who had spent his life listening deep in the ice, for the faintest possible signal from something almost nothing can detect.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Femi felt a kinship so strong that it embarrassed him, and he put the phone away.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: In Reno, he rented a car and drove east into the desert.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty minutes out he passed the data center campus, low gray buildings the size of airports set back in the sagebrush behind berms and chain link, with electrical substations humming beside them.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then the long empty miles and the river, and two and a half hours after the airport, Winnamucca, and a dirt road north of town that ended at a gate.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Nevada site was a fenced quarter acre on a low hill above the Humboldt River, with a steel shed, a propane tank, a weather mast, and a survey disc set in concrete.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: From the top you could see the river winding through its valley like a dropped rope, and the interstate beside it, and beside the interstate the railroad.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ada Brennan met him at the gate with a mug of tea and a half finished scarf on her knitting needles.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: She was forty six, grey at the temples, and had spent twenty years in the Coast Guard, much of it in the Bering Sea, which was where she said she had learned patience and lost all sympathy for anybody who complained about the cold.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Adayemi, she said, Walt says you're a passenger.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Walt also says you've crossed exactly once at Dial one, in twenty nineteen, and that you threw up on a senior physicist.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was standing very close.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: That got the smallest smile.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Walker, she called.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our passenger's here.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Walker Dunn came around the shed carrying both cases, one in each hand, which Femi had not known was physically possible.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was enormous and soft spoken, a former army engineer with a woodworker's hands, and he set the cases down as gently as eggs, nodded once to Femi, and went back for the packs, without a word.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: He likes you, Ada said.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell because he didn't say anything.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Femi had brought one instrument of his own, and it had taken him a month of paperwork years ago to make it legal.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was a chart recorder, a gray metal box the size of a toaster that drew a single ink line on a slow roll of paper, the kind of machine that had recorded earthquakes and heartbeats for half a century.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing newer than about nineteen eighty five was allowed to cross, and Femi liked that about the recorder.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody in any world who found it would see a box that drew a wiggly line and shrug.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: He clipped its leads to the posts on case one while Ada watched.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me what that does, she said.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: In words a Coast Guard officer can use.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: When the case tunes, it listens across the dial for a match.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Close to home, the stations are crowded so tight that when you try to tune back to one, you get its neighbors.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's the ten percent.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: This draws the shape of the station we land on.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: If the line comes out fat and fuzzy, it's a crowd.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: If it comes out thin and sharp, it's alone on its part of the dial.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: He hesitated.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's alone, maybe we can find it again.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the odds it comes out thin?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: sixty forty against, Femi said.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe sixty five.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: He locked his phone and wallet in the shed.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: In his shirt pocket he put a photograph, a small square print with a white border, of a tall man in a railway cap beside a black steam engine under a white sky.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: His grandfather.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: He had checked the rules twice.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: A photograph was allowed.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Walker set the dial to four.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Ada turned the key.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The case hummed in Femi's back teeth.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: The needle swung and wandered and settled, and the pen on his recorder twitched and began to draw.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody in, Ada said.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Pressure in the ears cold up through the boots, a little over a second.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then Femi was on his hands and knees in the sagebrush, being sick.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Walker held his shoulders with one enormous hand until he was done, then handed him a canteen, and didn't say anything, and Femi decided on the spot that Walker Dunn was the finest human being he had ever met.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: When he could lift his head, the first thing he noticed was the smell.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sage and dust and cold, clean desert air, and under all of it, faint and sharp and unmistakable, coal smoke.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing was the sound.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: From the valley below came a long, deep chord, three notes at once, rising and falling and echoing off the hills.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Femi had never heard that sound in person in his life, and he knew it the way you know your own name.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was a steam whistle.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Part two They crawled to the lip of the hill on their bellies, the way Ada insisted they do everything on a new world until they knew who was watching, and looked down into the valley.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: The interstate was gone.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: In its place ran a wide graded road of packed gravel, empty except for one wagon behind two mules crawling west.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: The river was where it belonged, and along the river, exactly where it ran at home, ran the railroad, except that at home it was two tracks, and here it was four, side by side and gleaming, with telegraph poles marching beside them until they disappeared into the heat shimmer.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: On the nearest track, coming toward them out of the east, was a train.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Femi had seen pictures of big steam locomotives all his life, his grandfather's engines in Nigeria, the famous American giants in museums.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: This was not a picture.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It came up the valley like a moving building, black and enormous and low, an engine and then a second section nearly as long behind it, a wall of slatted radiator panels with great fans spinning on its roof, and behind that the train, car after car after car, until Femi lost count and started over.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: What it did not have was the great white plume of steam that every picture had taught him to expect.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: There was only a thin smudge of grey coal smoke from the stack, and a ripple of heat over the fans, and a sound that wasn't the chuff chuff chuff of old movies at all, but a deep, steady roar, like a waterfall that shook the ground under his elbows.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the steam?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Walker said quietly.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first thing Femi had heard him say.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's keeping it, Femi said.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: He realized he was whispering, as if the train might hear.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: That second section with the fans is a condenser, a giant radiator.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It takes the steam after it's done its work, and cools it back into water, and sends it back to the boiler, over and over, instead of blowing it out the stack.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: The South Africans built engines like that in our world in the nineteen fifties, to cross a desert where there wasn't any water.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: They could go hundreds of miles without a drink.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then everybody switched to diesel, and the idea just he made a small gesture with one hand.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Stopped.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not here, Ada said.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not here.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: The train was passing below them now, close enough to feel the warmth coming off it.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Femi had started counting cars again out of pure habit.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: He reached one hundred and forty with no end in sight.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's coal, he said.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Most of it.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hoppers full of coal going west, thousands of tons of it, to feed things like this.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ada had her notebook out and was writing steadily in a small square hand.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Walker had a heavy old film camera with a long lens, and he shot carefully.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: A frame, a pause, another frame.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: The way you shoot when you have six rolls of film and a whole world to cover.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: For a while, nobody spoke.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Then Ada looked up from her notebook and frowned at the sky.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: What's wrong with it?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: she said.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Fanny looked up.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: It took him a moment, then he couldn't stop seeing it.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: The sky was empty.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not just cloudless, though it was that too, a high hard autumn blue all the way to the mountains.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was empty in a way he had never seen a sky be empty in his life.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: No white lines, no contrails crossing and spreading and fading.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: No glint of a plane anywhere.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: At home, over this valley, at any hour, there would be four or five airliners drawing chalk lines toward Salt Lake or San Francisco.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here there was nothing at all.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just blue and one hawk.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: No planes, Walker said.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: No planes, no highway, no trucks, Femi said.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe no cars.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: He looked down at the wagon on the gravel road and its two patient mules.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Dial four.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: History bent hard.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: They hid case two in a cleft between two boulders under a juniper, a hundred yards down the back slope, and Walker stacked stones in front of it so naturally that Femi, standing three feet away, couldn't have said where it was.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Before they powered it down, Femi checked his recorder.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: The ink line from the crossing had dried on the paper.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: He tore the strip off and folded it into his notebook without looking at it closely.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't want to know yet.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was afraid that if he looked now, he would want it too much to read it right.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then they walked down toward town, along the edge of the sagebrush, three people in canvas work clothes and wool jackets, which Ada said looked like nothing in particular in most of the worlds she had been to, and which was the highest compliment she knew how to give a set of clothes.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Part three Winnamucka was where it belonged, and it was not the town Femi had driven through that morning.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: The main street was paved in brick, red and worn and swept, and the side streets were packed gravel.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were horses everywhere, saddle horses at a rail, a team pulling a lumber wagon, a gray mare asleep on her feet outside a feed store.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: But what stopped Femi on the corner were the wagons with no horses at all.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Low, boxy delivery wagons on rubber tires, painted in company colours, rolling quietly along the bricks, with a driver up front, and nothing pulling them but a faint electric hum.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: A bakery wagon, an ice wagon, a wagon full of milk cans.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: One of them stopped outside a hotel, and the driver climbed down, unhooked a cable from a post at the curb, and plugged it into the side of his wagon, the way you'd hitch a horse.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Battery wagons, Femi breathed, they've got battery wagons.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't we have those?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Walker said.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: A long time ago?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: We had those in nineteen ten.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Electric cars were everywhere in nineteen ten.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then gasoline got cheap and the roads got paved, and they were gone in fifteen years.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: He watched the driver swing a block of ice onto his shoulder.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Here, nobody gave them a reason to die.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: There were electric lines on poles and electric street lamps, and a telegraph office with a blue sign, and somewhere a radio playing a fiddle tune through an open window.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: There was a Basque hotel with a long table visible through the front glass, and a sign promising family style dinner at six.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: By the tracks stood a coal yard with a great black tipple over it, and beyond that the round brick bulk of an engine house with a turntable in front of it, like a giant's lazy Susan.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Everything wore a thin film of soot, the window sills and the awnings and the leaves of the cottonwoods, the way old photographs of mill towns did.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: The air smelled of coal smoke and horse and hot oil, and baking bread all at once, which wasn't unpleasant exactly, but which Femi suspected he would smell in his clothes for a week.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: People looked at them the way people in any small town look at strangers, which is to say briefly, and then not at all.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: The clothes passed.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: The faces passed.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: A boy on a bicycle stared at Walker, but boys on bicycles stared at Walker in every world.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Ada had decided on the hill what their one planned contact would be, and she didn't change her mind in town.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: The depot was a long, handsome building of yellow brick with a clock tower, and inside, under a pressed tin ceiling, there was a newsstand.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Ada bought a newspaper out of Reno, a printed timetable for the railroad, and a thick paper bound almanac with a locomotive on the cover.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: She paid with three silver dimes from the roll in her pocket.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: In the worlds that had drifted farther from home, the survey carried its money as metal.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Dimes from before nineteen sixty five, when dimes were still silver, and a few small gold coins, because silver and gold spend almost anywhere if you're willing to be cheated a little.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: The man behind the counter turned one of the dimes over in his fingers.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Haven't seen this design, he said.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Where's this from?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Back east, Ada said pleasantly.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: My grandmother's jar.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: He weighed on his palm and shrugged.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Silver's silver, he said, and gave her change in coins Femi had never seen, with a locomotive on one side.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: They read on a bench under the cotton woods behind the stockyards, out of the wind, passing pages back and forth.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ada took the newspaper.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Walker went through the timetable page by page, more trains in a day through this one desert town than Femi would have believed, freights and locals and expresses, and a night train each way between San Francisco and Chicago with a name.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Femi took the almanac and turned to the section on transportation, and read one line three times before he said it out loud.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Motor carriages registered in the United States, he said.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Forty one thousand.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Ada looked up.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Forty one thousand what?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Cars in the whole country.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Femi did the arithmetic because he couldn't help it.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: At home there are about two hundred ninety million.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's about seven thousand of ours for every one of theirs.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: You could park every car in this entire country in the lots of three or four football stadiums.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Walker let out a low whistle.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Ada said.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's the switch?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody shoot Henry Ford?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Femi turned pages.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Coal production, in numbers so large he read them twice.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Railroads, more miles of them than he had thought possible.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Petroleum, one small line near the bottom of a page, mostly lamp oil and lubricant.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing that said why.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there is a switch, he said slowly.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there's ever one switch.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a hundred thumbs on the scale.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: The oil comes in a little later, or a little smaller.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: The railroads have a little more pull in Washington the year somebody wants to build roads.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: A price goes the wrong way at the wrong moment.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them a small thing.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time you add them up, a whole country has built itself on coal and iron, and nobody wants to tear it all up for a noisy little engine that runs on lamp oil.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Ada wrote that down in her notebook, word for word.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then she looked at the newspaper and the timetable and the almanac stacked on the bench, and sighed.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Walt's going to love this, she said.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Two charge cells worth of reading material.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Femi barely heard her.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: He was looking past her, at the engine house by the tracks, where a smaller, older locomotive stood on a side track outside the doors, with a wisp of steam leaking from a valve.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Not one of the giant condensing engines from the valley.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: A different kind entirely.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Tall driving wheels, side rods, a cylinder at the front the size of a water heater.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of engine his grandfather had driven.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go look at that, he said, and got up before anybody could tell him not to.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Part four.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: The engine stood on a short spur outside the air.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: of the engine house, with a low hiss coming from somewhere inside it, the way a big animal breathes in its sleep.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Up close it was bigger than it had looked from the bench.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: The driving wheels were taller than Femi, black and spoked, with counterweights like half moons, linked by steel rods as thick as his arm.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: It smelled of hot oil and coal and wet iron.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: A number was painted in white on the cab thirty seven twenty one, and on a brass plate under the window, someone had polished a single word until it shone Helper.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Femi stood at the edge of the cinders with his hands in his pockets, touching nothing, and looked at it the way other men look at the ocean.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: She won't bite, said a voice above him, not unless you get between her and her coal.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: A man was leaning out of the cab window.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: He was about seventy, with a grey walrus mustache, a striped cap pushed back on his head, and forearms like hams, and he looked at Femi without any suspicion at all.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was the long amused look of a man who has seen a great many people stare at his engine, and has a pretty good idea what kind of person is doing it.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, Femi said.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just looking I can see that.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: You've been looking for ten minutes.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the face.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: The man swung down out of the cab as easily as a younger man and wiped his hands on a rag.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Joe Etchivery I run her Femi They shook.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Joe's hand was like gripping a warm saddle.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: You a railroad man, Femi?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, my grandfather was.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Femi heard himself say it before he had decided to, and once it was out, he didn't want to take it back.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: He drove steam engines, a long way from here, in Nigeria, on the line from Lagos, up to Cano for thirty years.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up on his stories, he kept the whistle from his last engine, and he used to blow it on his porch for me, and tell me it was the only voice he ever had that the whole country could hear.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Joe looked at him for a long moment.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Then he looked at the engine and back at Femi, and something in his face eased.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: My granddad herded sheep in these hills, he said.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Came over from the Basque country with nothing but a dog and a rifle.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Never rode a train in his life.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Said they were too loud to think in.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: He patted the engine's flank like a horse.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: This here's a helper.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: When the big freights come through heavy, they need a push to get over the grade east of town.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: So she couples on the back and shoves them up to the summit and comes back down light.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Twice a day forty years me too.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: He paused.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Last year though, for both of us, comes spring, they're giving this grade to the battery boxes.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's a town over in Utah named Helper, you know.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Named for engines like her.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Good pie.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then he said I've got a freight to push in forty minutes.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Up the grade and back couple of hours.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: You want to ride along?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Femi opened his mouth and closed it, and opened it again.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Behind him gravel crunched.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Walker had come up quietly, the way he did everything, and stood a respectful distance back, with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the engine with an expression Femi couldn't read.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is my friend Walker, Femi said.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: Bring him, Joe said.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Room in the cab for two more if you don't mind standing.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Forty minutes.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: She won't wait, and neither will the dispatcher.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Femi walked back to the bench with Walker beside him, and Ada was already on her feet with her arms crossed, because she had watched the whole thing from a hundred yards away, and could read people at that distance the way most people read a menu.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, she said.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ada One planned contact we had it.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was a newsstand.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: You just made a second one, unplanned, with a man who will remember your face.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And now you want to ride off into the desert with him in a machine I can't stop, on a schedule I don't control, past a comms window, on a world we've been standing on for three hours.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's a railroad engineer, Femi said.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's seventy years old.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: He thinks I'm a foreigner with a train hobby.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he's right No.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Femi looked down at his boots.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then he took the photograph out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: A tall man in a railway cap, beside a black engine, under a white sky.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: He drove engines like that one for thirty years, he said.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: He died when I was fourteen.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I never rode in a cab with him.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't let children ride, and then the steam engines were gone.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then he was I have spent nine years of my life trying to get a needle to find the same place twice, and nine times out of ten we can't even find our way back to a porch in Maryland.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: I will never be anywhere like this again.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not this world not this engine not this man.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: He swallowed two hours Ada looked at the photograph for a long time.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I had a ship once, she said finally.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: A cutter three hundred seventy eight feet.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was her executive officer for three years in the worst water in the world, and I knew every sound she made.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: They decommissioned her in twenty nineteen and sold her for scrap.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And right now some of her is a fence post somewhere, and some of her is a soup can.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: She handed the photograph back.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: I never got to say goodbye to her either.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: She turned to Walker.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: You go with him you don't leave his side.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't touch anything and he doesn't give that man anything from home not a coin, not a pen, not one word he doesn't need to say You're back on this bench before dark.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not, I'm walking up that grade after you and you do not want that.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, ma'am, Walker said.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Femi Ada sat back down and picked up her knitting.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Bring me something worth two charge cells Part five The cab of thirty seven twenty one was the loudest, hottest, most alive place Femi had ever stood.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was smaller than it looked from the ground, crowded with valves and gauges and handles, brass and iron, every surface warm, though Femi didn't touch any of them.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the middle of it all, behind a pair of round iron doors was the fire.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: When the fireman cracked the doors to look, the light that came out was white and gold and nearly liquid, and the heat hit Femi's face like an open hand.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: The fireman was a lanky young man named Cody, who nodded once when Joe introduced him and didn't say another word the whole trip.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't shovel.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: A great iron screw turned in a trough in the floor, carrying coal forward from the tender all on its own, and Cody's job was to watch the fire and the water glass and nudge a row of valves with the care of a man tuning a piano.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: They rolled out onto the main line and backed down gently against the rear of an eastbound freight, a long string of refrigerator cars full of California produce packed in ice, bound for Chicago.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: There was a bump and a clank, and Joe leaned out and gave two short blasts on the whistle, and from somewhere a mile ahead the front of the train answered with two of its own.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's hello, Joe said.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: And let's go.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then he opened the throttle, and the engine began to work.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Femi had read about it all his life.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing had prepared him.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: The engine didn't so much start moving as gather itself, like an animal getting its legs under it, and then the exhaust began to bark out of the stack, slow at first and enormous, each beat a punch of sound that Femi felt in his breastbone, and then faster and faster, until it was a steady drumming roar, and the whole cab shook with it, and the desert began to slide past the open window.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Fire boils the water, Joe shouted over the noise cheerfully, as if he were explaining it to a grandchild.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: Water makes steam.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Steam shoves the pistons.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Pistons shove the rods, rods turn the wheels.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's all there is to it.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Everything else is just keeping her from killing you.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: The grade began.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Femi felt it before he saw it, a change in the engine's voice, a deeper, harder labor in every beat.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ahead, the long train curved away up the valley like a snake on a hillside.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Once the drivers slipped on the rail with a scream of spinning steel, and Joe eased the throttle and opened a valve, and sand hissed down onto the rails, and the wheels bit, and the engine dug in and kept climbing.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Walker, standing behind Femi, with one hand on a grab rail, was grinning, which Femi had not known Walker's face could do.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: The new ones, Femi shouted.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: The big ones in the valley, with the fans?
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Are they like this?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Turbines, Joe shouted back.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Steam turbines turning generators, running electric motors on the wheels.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Big as a city block and quiet as a church.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: In here you can't hear yourself think, and out there you can't hear anything at all.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: My nephew runs one.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Says it's like driving a library.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: He laughed.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're better.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know they're better.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't love them.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Femi knew the type exactly.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: In his world, a railroad had tried steam turbine engines in the nineteen thirties and given up on them.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Here, somebody hadn't given up.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the battery helpers, he shouted.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: The ones taking this grade in the spring.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: How long do the batteries last?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: thirty years, they say Edison cells, nickel and iron.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: My granddad had one in his sheep camp lantern, and the darn thing outlived him.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Joe shook his head.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Charge them every night off the turbine plants.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Push all day, every day for thirty years.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Can't argue with that thirty years, Femi thought, charged every night.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: He thought of his own charge cells back home, four months to build each one, and each one spent in a single crossing, gone in a little over a second.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: Huh, he said.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Walker glanced at him.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Femi didn't explain.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't sure he could have.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: Near the top of the grade he worked up his courage and took a small cassette recorder out of his jacket, a scuffed thing from nineteen eighty four that he had carried everywhere since graduate school, and asked Joe if he minded.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Mind, Joe said.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: Forty years, and nobody ever asked to record her.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: At the summit, where the land opened into a wide high basin gone gold with evening light, the freight drew away from them, and Joe closed the throttle, and the engine's roar dropped to a deep panting breath.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Joe reached up and put the whistle cord in Femi's hand.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Go on, he said, she's earned it.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: So's your granddad.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: Femi pulled.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: The sound came up out of the engine and filled the whole sky.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Three notes, deep and round and mournful and enormous, rolling out across the basin and coming back off the far hills a second later.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Softer, like an answer.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was the sound his grandfather had made with a brass whistle on a porch in Lagos when Femi was six years old, except a thousand times larger, and real, and coming out of a living machine, and Femi was the one holding the cord, the only voice he ever had that the whole country could hear.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: He held the cord until the note ran out, and then he let go, and stood there with tears running down his face.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Joe Etchevery looked out his side window with great interest at a jack rabbit, and Walker looked out the other window at nothing at all, and nobody said anything for a while.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: They drifted back down the grade in the long gold light.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: Halfway down they were held in a siding, while a westbound passenger train went by, the night train to San Francisco, its windows already lit, and in the dining car Femi saw white tablecloths and little lamps, and people at dinner, and a girl of about seven with her face pressed to the glass, staring at their engine.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: She waved.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Femi waved back before he could stop himself.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Then she was gone.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: At the engine house, after dark, Joe climbed down with them, reached into the tender, and came back with a lump of coal the size of a fist, black and glittering in the light from the shop windows.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Rock Springs coal, he said.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Best in the West.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Take it back to your granddad's people.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: Ada had told him not to give anything.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Ada had said nothing about taking.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Femi took it in both hands.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Joe.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Joe said.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Last year on this grade, glad somebody came to see her.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Part six Ada was on the bench under the cottonwoods with her knitting in her lap, and a cold look on her face, and Femi could see her doing the arithmetic on exactly how late they were.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Nineteen minutes, she said.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: We were held for the passenger train.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: I heard it.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: I also heard a whistle up on that grade about an hour ago that the whole county heard.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: She looked at his face, which he suspected was still showing everything.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: That was you That was me.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ada looked at him a moment longer.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Good, she said, and put her knitting away and stood up.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go home.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: They climbed the hill by starlight and slept on the ground in bags among the sagebrush, and Femi lay on his back and found the second empty sky of the day.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: The stars were brilliant, the Milky Way a smear of light from one horizon to the other.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: But nothing moved.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: At home, on a clear night over the desert, you could lie on your back and count the satellites sliding across the stars like slow sparks.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: A dozen two dozen sometimes a whole train of them in a line.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Here there was not one moving point of light in the whole sky.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: He took out his notebook and a small flashlight and finally unfolded the strip of chart paper from the crossing.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: He had spent six years looking at these lines.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: At dial one and dial two they were always the same a fat, ragged hump with shoulders on both sides, like a crowd photographed from far away.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: A station surrounded by its neighbors.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: This was not that this was a single thin line, straight up and straight down, sharp as a needle.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: He looked at it for a long time Well?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: said Ada out of the dark it's thin, Femi said.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: His voice didn't sound like his own It's very thin it's alone Meaning meaning it's one reading and one reading is a rumor, not a law.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning I need a dozen more before I'll say a number out loud to anybody.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: He folded the paper carefully along its old creases.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: And meaning it might be true that the farther out we go, the easier it is to come back.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: That the world's next door are the ones we can't find again, and the strange ones are the ones we can.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's backwards, Walker said from his sleeping bag.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most backwards thing I've ever hoped for.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody said anything for a while.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: A coyote called somewhere down by the river, and another one answered You know what happens if you're right, Ada said quietly Back home.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who have been waiting a long time for a world they can find twice to study.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them she was silent a moment.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Not all of them want to study it Femi didn't answer.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: He lay looking up at the still sky and thought about Hannah Whitlock and a porch in Maryland and how the worlds a person might love most were the ones next door, the crowded ones the ones you could never find again.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the ones you could find were out here, where the sky was empty, and even the trains had different voices, he fell asleep, holding the lump of coal.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: At dawn before they crossed, Walker set a brass disc into the boulder by the juniper, stamped two hundred ninety five, and Femi watched him do it like a man watching somebody plant a tree.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: Femi was sick again on the way home.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: Walker held his shoulders again.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: When Femi lifted his head there was the steel shed and the weathermast, and the smell of diesel coming up off the interstate, and the hard blue morning sky over the valley was crisscrossed with contrails, four, five, six of them, spreading and fading toward Salt Lake and San Francisco, and Femi sat in the dirt and laughed out loud at them like an idiot.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Quarantine was a trailer behind the shed with three narrow bunks, a sink and a speaker phone, and Clara Benning called from the annex a little after nine, dry as toast.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome home, nobody touch your face.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm told you brought me a lump of coal It was a gift.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sample.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: It stays with me for seventy two hours.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm running a museum now.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a jar of peach preserves on one shelf and a lump of coal on the other A pause Hanna's fine by the way.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're all fine, bored and fine.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Clara, will you tell her something for me, Femi said.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Tell her I took a reading at dial four, and the line was thin.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: She won't know what that means She will, Femi said.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've explained it to her a dozen times.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: That night, in his bunk, he wrote four words in his notebook under the day's date Edison Cells thirty years.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: He underlined them twice.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then he lay back, took out the cassette recorder, and pressed play very quietly, so as not to wake the others.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: The whistle came out of the little speaker small and tinny and far away.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: Three notes in the dark then the beat of the exhaust then Joe's laugh.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then from outside from the real valley came another sound a real freight on the real track along the Humboldt, the same rails, the same river, the same curve of the hills.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: Its horn sounded for a crossing somewhere down by the highway.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: Two longs, a short and a long, flat and loud and modern and perfectly ordinary.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: Same track, Femi thought, different voice.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: He lay in the dark and listened to them both until the freight was gone, and then he played the whistle one more time for his grandfather, and went to sleep World two hundred ninety five Dial setting four one night on the ground.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Brought home six rolls of film, a Reno newspaper, a railroad timetable, an almanac, a cassette tape of a steam whistle, a lump of Rock Springs coal, currently in quarantine, and a strip of chart paper with a very thin line on it.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: Return test, none attempted.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: Return odds at dial two, one hit in eleven.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: At dial four, one reading, and for the first time anyone can remember, Femi won't say a number.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: You have been listening to Long Odds Episode two, the Helper.