The Cordwainer

  Chapter Sixteen

  Li'l Bean

  “I knew that was you!” Sophie said across her kitchen table the next evening, as she sipped at a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette. I'd stopped by to test the waters about bringing Sophie in on Mitty's Plan. I'd left Fluky and Mitty behind – they would have been of little help – and I'd just filled her in on my progress so far. Sophie was smirking. The explosion in Pottersville, my HTP engine, it all amused her. “What were you thinking?”

  “You see, Mitty has this plan,” I began.

  “And Fluky, too?” she interrupted. “Of course. Those two would have to be behind it.”

  “No, it's not like that.” I tried.

  “Anytime anything explodes, guaranteed, Fluky is behind it. After High School? After almost costing you college? You're still palling around with those dummies?”

  “No, you see-”

  “You guys could have killed yourselves,” she scolded.

  “Yeah, but we didn't!” I raised my voice. Alan was in the living room, listening to the radio. I didn't need his input on this conversation, so I lowered my voice back down to a sensible level. “Look, the HTP engine,” I continued. “I think the idea is sound. Now, my implementation was wrong, but I was thinking...”

  “What?” Sophie looked at me, suddenly suspicious.

  “Well, you were always the engineer in the family. Maybe if you took a look at my design.” I produced Form 24-01 from my breast pocket, unfolding it. I handed it to her and she barely glanced at it, dropping it onto the table.

  “Well, that won't work,” she dismissed.

  My heart sank.

  “If you'll just look-”

  “You created a low pressure catastrophic event in your fuel cell, didn't you?” she said, and I realized she had looked at it. I picked up my schematic and looked it over.

  “Yes, maybe...” I studied my own design. It was suddenly alien to me.

  “But that's secondary,” she continued. “Your basic principle is flawed. It's a pedestrian design, attempting to adapt an existing technology to a fundamentally new concept of an engine. No wonder you almost killed yourselves.”

  “What?” My feelings were hurt. “What's wrong with it?”

  Sophie shook her head and stood up from the table. She walked over to the coffee pot and refilled her cup, “Best to forget about it,” she said.

  “But...” I swallowed hard, collecting myself. I needed to remember the reason I was there. “But you – you could build a working engine?” I asked.

  “What for?” she said in disbelief, returning to the table.

  “Well... To build it...” I tried.

  Sophie paused, the coffee cup halfway to her lips. There were very few souls on earth that that sort of logic made sense to. Luckily, Sophie was one of them.

  Sophie returned her coffee cup to the table, leaned back in her chair, and reflexively rubbed at her stomach. She was glaring at me, weighing me up, attempting to deduce my motivations.

  “And Fluky and Mitty are helping you with this?” she asked.

  “Despite what you think, there's no one better in Boot Hill with tools than Fluky. And Mitty is moral support.”

  “A pervert and an idiot,” she said.

  “We built one engine,” I countered.

  “Yeah, I heard the explosion.”

  I couldn't judge her expression, what was ticking over in her head. I'd intrigued her, at least. There was that.

  “24-01,” she said, nodding at the sheet of paper on the kitchen table.

  “Yeah,” I said, refolding it and returning it to my pocket.

  I left my sister's house without anything really being decided. She asked a few more questions, mostly about Fluky's rolling stock, and I answered to the best of my knowledge. I didn't go into detail about the ultimate goals of Mitty's Plan. I didn't think it relevant, and knowing my sister and her world view, I didn't think it would help.

  But I think I'd managed to touch on something inside her, perhaps that little niece or nephew that my sister was presently incubating. The change to design something revolutionary obviously lit a spark within Sophie. With a long career of motherhood and housewifing stretching out before her, I think the idea of one last... well, accomplishment enticed her. At least, I hoped it did.

  It was three days later, in Zimmerman's shop, when I got my answer. Sophie appeared with a rolled-up sheet of drafting paper in her hands. Fluky, Mitty and myself were working on the rolling stock. We might have lacked an engine, but there was still plenty of work to be done on the two untested freight cars. My sister walked in unannounced. Fluky was the first to see her, freezing on the spot like he'd just seen a ghost. A silly smile formed on his face and Mitty and I had to turn to see what he was smirking at.

  “Sophie?” I asked in disbelief.

  She didn't answer. She walked over to the shop's workbench and started clearing a space.

  “Li'l Bean...” Fluky said like a shy schoolgirl. I didn't think Sophie heard him.

  “Call me that again, and I'm leaving,” She said. She'd heard.

  The three of us walked over to the workbench where Sophie had unrolled her drafting papers. She weighted them down at the corners with tools and stepped back so we could see them.

  It was the most complicated thing I'd ever seen in my life. Meticulously drafted schematics for a... well, I guess it was an engine, but I could hardly make head-nor-tail of the design. It made my schematic, the one drawn on the back of Form 24-01, look like a child's crayon drawing. My jaw fell open.

  “Hell, that's pretty...” Fluky was the first to speak.

  “What is this?” Mitty said around his cigarette holder, looking up at Sophie. “A spaceship?”

  “This is your engine,” Sophie said calmly, her arms crossed in front of her.

  “That?” Fluky pointed an oily finger at the schematics.

  “An engine to take us to the moon?” Mitty looked back at the papers, craning his head.

  “You said you wanted a hydrogen peroxide engine,” Sophie said defiantly. “That's what I have here.”

  “But,” I finally spoke. Some of the design was starting to come into focus. “This is a turbine. We need an engine to haul freight,” I said, flipping a sheet over, looking at another part of the design.

  “Yes,” was all Sophie had to say to that.

  “It would never generate enough torque,” I began.

  “It doesn't generate torque,” she interrupted.

  “Then what-”

  Sophie brushed my hands away from the schematics and flipped through three sheets. Here was a flywheel and a generator and HT tables going to...

  “The HTP is just the primary mover,” she began, “it's ill suited to the task you're attempting to use it for: Cargo. It is well suited, however, in a turbine design to power traction motors, as you see here.” She pointed to the schematics.

  “It's electric?” I asked.

  “Electric motors provide the torque.”

  “Where we gonna get electric motors?” Fluky interjected.

  “I have some ideas...” Sophie didn't elaborate.

  “What's this?” Something about the schematic caught my eye. A tank, secondary to the peroxide tank, bypassing the catalyzer.

  “Diesel,” Sophie said without fanfare.

  “What? Diesel?” I squinted and stared hard at the drawing.

  “For shorts bursts of power. H2O2 reacts to create H2O and O2.. I think you understand. It makes a perfect oxidizer. Diesel may be scarce, but I believe Fluky has a ration. When extra performance is necessary, diesel can be injected into the turbine, tripling output.”

  “It's diesel powered, too?” Mitty looked confused.

  “Yes, in a way.”

  The three of us looked down at the drawings, attempting to find anything there that we could remotely understand.

  “Hell, there ain't no way we can build this,” Fluky finally said.

  I looked up from the draw
ing, up to my sister, and smiled.

  Yes we can, I realized.

  “Yes we can,” I said.