Giants (A Distant Eden Book 6) (2 page)

Life, in the barn, was beyond good, it had a special quality that was somewhere between real and surreal that wove itself into the brain, making us feel like we and the machines were all part of each other, sometimes indistinguishable from each other. In the barn, everything was possible.

# # #

Pa put a pot of coffee on one of the furnaces to boil. Pa drank coffee from the time he woke up to the time he slept – it was as important to Pa as steam was. Even when we worked out in the field with the cattle, Pa had a fire going nearby with a coffee pot on. Sometimes I think I was raised on coffee as a baby instead of milk, and might well have been, as much as I loved it. While the coffee brewed, Pa and I cleared off the “thinking table,” a big table that was “sturdy enough for a herd of elephants to dance on,” as Pa had once said. The top was smooth, steel plate, sanded and buffed to a fine shine so that a sheet of paper could be laid directly on it and a pencil would make a line as fine as frog hair. It was also strong enough to take quite a beating without being marred, and it often did as we worked on smaller parts for the inventions.

When the coffee was ready, we sat at the table with our cups and looked at each other for a while. Pa eventually said, “Your Ma ain’t moving, that’s a certified fact.” When Pa did his problem solving he graded information along the spectrum of “complete guess” to “estimate”, to “probable fact” to “fact” to “certified fact”. A certified fact was only granted to certain things like gravity and sunrise – and Ma when she made her mind up. So when Pa said Ma wasn’t moving was a certified fact, that meant there wasn’t any point in wasting time trying to change that “fact”. So we wouldn’t.

Pa continued on, slipping into the tone of voice I recall using when I was little and played “make believe” with some of the neighbor’s kids. One of us would say “Let’s pretend that we’re Indians,” or “What if we were Indians?” or “Let’s make believe we’re Indians.” Whichever of us kids it was that uttered those words always said them in a certain tone of voice, with a special kind of inflection and a sing-song pace. It was like introducing a hypnotic state to the rest of the kids, and what we believed, we believed completely, regardless of physics or anything else. When Pa began working on a problem he often talked in that same kind of tone of voice. As though he was in a state of awareness somewhere about half-way between reality as we know it, and reality as he would have it be.

I knew Ma was right. Once Pa wrapped his mind around moving that giant, well that giant was as good as moved. Pa could do things no normal person would conceive of as possible, and do them off-handedly at that. When it came to the truly impossible, it took him just a little bit longer, that was all. That giant was a good as moved and I waited with a smile of eager anticipation to find out just how we were going to make it happen. I knew an adventure when I had one smack me in the face, and what twelve year old boy doesn’t love an adventure? One thing about life with Pa, there were always adventures a-plenty.

Pa stared off into the distance outside one of the large open doors. “What do we know about giants?”

I already had the paper and pencil ready, I knew the drill: First we would define the problem. I had already written down the problem. I always took notes. Not that Pa really needed them, but I kept them like other people keep a diary. I had stacks and stacks of books of notes from where Pa and I had begun working on a problem and tracking the progress through to completion. Even at an early age I knew that Pa was extraordinary, and that these diaries would be worth keeping.

I had already written, “Problem – giant coming, Ma won’t move.” I knew the solution was eventually to move the giant’s line of march, but we hadn’t officially arrived at it yet, so I didn’t pre-suppose. Pa had taught me not to jump to conclusions before I was out of diapers I think. He had a way of seeing the un-obvious, conceiving of results that seemingly came from nowhere.

# # #

Pa and I began listing all the things we knew about giants. Thirty-foot tall. Weigh eight thousand pounds. Covered in thick, steel armor plating. Extremely fast-moving, faster than any animal on the planet by a factor of ten when aroused. Normal pace was something like a fast horse running. Will not be diverted from their path. Many attempts had been made using various ideas and theories, all had failed. We had approximately five days – or a bit less – before it arrived.

And that was about all that we knew. So then we started putting a grade next to each fact, and then putting a priority list of actions together, then sorting the actions by priority. It was a short list that contained two things – ascertain actual path of giant, and if necessary divert giant. We talked about that for a minute.

Then Pa said, “There’s not enough time to ascertain the actual path; in this instance we are just going to assume that the path will be directly through our living room. Any other assumption could lead to disaster, and there’s no point in wasting time on it. So we’ll consider that a certified fact for this exercise.”

After a short pause he continued, saying something that took me by surprise, which was a common occurrence because, as I said, he didn’t think like most people – although I must say that in the past couple of years I had gotten a lot better at foreseeing how he would solve a problem. Either I naturally thought like him, or I was learning to think like him. Either one would do, and I was pleased with it, and so was Pa.

He said, “There’s no evidence that a giant can be turned from his path, but that’s not really the problem is it? I’m sure we can turn him, but then what happens? We interfere with fate. As it is the giant’s path has been chosen, we assume, by the giant or some force of nature we don’t comprehend. Anyone in that path is a victim of fate as much as they are a victim of the giant.

“Now suppose we divert its path. The victims along the new path become as much our fault as the giant’s. We turn the giant and we have a share in the guilt of whatever mayhem the giant creates. We become as guilty as the giant. And you know what that means don’t you?”

I looked up from the notes I was taking and I said. “It means we have to stop the giant permanently in its tracks’ cause Ma still ain’t going to move. It means we have to kill the giant, and no one has ever come close to doing that, ever.”

# # #

Pa looked at me with approval. “You’re getting better at logic than I had hoped, son; you’re way ahead of me when I was your age, and that’s a certified fact.”

I felt a swelling of pride, as I so often did around Ma and Pa. They had ways of making a body feel good about himself. But I also knew about pride going before a fall – I could have personally been the poster child of that old saying – so I tamped that pride down, pushed it way back and out of the way. But even from the hidden corner I had shoved it into, even in spite of my efforts not to, I felt its warming glow.

“Pa, do we know for sure if anyone has tried to kill a giant, and if so, how they tried and what failed? We could learn something from that.”

Pa replied, “We know for sure it has been tried numerous times, and we know of a few ways it was tried. The most popular attempt seems to be shooting at them with cannons. But the cannon balls just bounce off the armor, hardly leaving a scratch. No one’s had time to fire a second shot either. Once the giant is in cannon range, is too close and much too fast for second shots. In a couple of instances, multiple cannons were fired, hitting the giant several times simultaneously. One giant was hit so many times and so accurately, that they say he was slowed down for a half second. Others have tried explosives placed in the giant’s path, trying to blow it up as it stepped on them. That’s been tried several times and it’s not clear why it doesn’t work – but living witnesses are rare, and the few that survive are often a bit balmy from the experience. But the word is that it doesn’t work at all. My guess is that the giants have a sense of smell that detects explosives. But, all speculation aside, we can pretty much assume that there is no point in trying what’s already been tried and failed to work. We’ll have to do something else entirely.”

And so the planning process began. Pa drew up what he intended to build. Not only did he draw it up, but he drew it up in pieces along with manufacturing processes for each piece. That way he and I could be working on separate pieces without me having to ask a hundred questions. This would speed up production considerably.

While Pa was working on the drawings, I fired up the various boilers and forges so that we could get to work as soon as possible. As I finished getting the fires going Pa called me over and showed me the various drawings.

His final drawing was of the assembled machine, so that I could see how the pieces worked in the whole, which answered many questions immediately. Pa didn’t particularly need these drawings, he had it all in his head, but I needed them so he made them. It was much more efficient.

He gave me the simpler parts to build and as he got going with the construction, he said, “But first you need to get some sleep, you’re dead on your feet and I need you fresh. You go lie down on the cot and I’ll wake you in a few hours.”

# # #

So I fell into a deep sleep that only seemed to last a minute, but once Pa woke me up I felt worlds better. The first thing I had to do was to gather the various materials I needed. Pa and I had built up an enormous inventory of metal shapes. We routinely went on scavenging trips to the ancient oil fields and towns. Before the collapse – when a series of large meteorites had plummeted to earth, raining death and destruction – there had been working oil pumps everywhere around here and thriving industries. Few had survived the meteorites, or the fifty years of winter that followed, but those that did were tough as nails. Some said the cataclysm had caused the giants – some kind of mutation, or something – but no one really knew for sure. In the dry West Texas air metal components fared well. Pa and I took teams of mules, and dragged everything we could get our hands on home, and piled them up.

There were also old automobiles to scavenge, old workshops, and best of all libraries. We’d hauled home tens of thousands of books from every library we could find, and once traveled a thousand miles from home when we heard of a big one. Our books took up a full quarter acre, under cover of course. Pa and I built a separate addition to the barn for our library. It took a lot longer to build all the shelves than it did the building itself. Ma and Pa had been making me read for four hours every day since I was one year old. I have read an awful lot of books.

It didn’t matter to them what I read, as long as I read. I went through periods of interest, mostly fiction when I was younger but slowly changing to non-fiction instructional books. I could read in eight languages. I could only speak in two of course, never having heard anything other than English and Tex-Mex actually spoken. Pa could read in twelve languages. He said I would be reading in more languages than him by the time I got my growth.

Ma brought lunch to us, then supper, then breakfast, keeping us fed throughout. We worked without sleep, not needing any sleep at all now that the heat of inventing was on us. Both of us were wide awake, with the need to get the machine finished in time to make good use of it.

The inside of the barn was like something from a bad dream, or at least a bad dream for most folks. For Pa and me it was a haven, a place of wonder and contentment. It was lit primarily by the glow of the furnaces and boilers and forges, a red glow that managed to suffuse into every corner, bright enough to work by, but was also easy on weary eyes.

The heavy smell of burning coals clung to every breath until it became so constant that the mind no longer noticed it. Heat poured from so many places that we moved from hot spot to hot spot, while the spots in-between were only somewhat less hot, certainly nothing that could be called cool. All of the metal in the shop eventually soaked up this heat and then began reflecting it back. The constant sound of metal being beat into shape assaulted the ears until it, too, became too ordinary to pay attention to. Pa and I wore ear-plugs anyway, so we worked in a muted form of silence, enforced by the constant clangoring of external noise.

The combined effect of the heat, the noise, the red ambient light and the odors caused a state of mind that closes in on you like hypnosis, or a trance perhaps. Pa and I conferred occasionally, mostly when I needed to ask a question or he checked on my work and suggested refinements. In those moments we surfaced from that hypnotic trance, but not all the way up. If this had been a hallucination – and in many respects it resembled one – it was a shared hallucination, and neither of us could or would have pulled the other out of it.

# # #

Not until the machine was finished that is. And we finished it with a day to spare. That didn’t mean we could sleep, though. We still had to ride out and gauge the giant’s direction of travel, then move the machine into position, arm it, and wait for that one shot that we would get. We hadn’t had time to test the machine, everything should work, the logic of the diagrams was indisputable.

Should work, should work, should work.
Those two words ran through my mind like a mantra during those final hours. Well, we had one chance to find out, and if it didn’t work we’d be dead pretty darn quick right after. Pa didn’t show even a hint of doubt. If there were any words like mine running through his head he gave no sign of it. I knew there weren’t though.

The machine was mounted on the back of a flatbed wagon made from an old freight truck. This we pulled by a steam-powered tractor. Years ago Pa had combined parts from old tractors, converting a salvaged internal combustion engine to work off steam power. It was a fairly inefficient tractor because of the conversion, but all things considered it could still do considerable work. In this case, it was better than horses or mules because they’d be afraid of the giant and thus hard to control. We fired up the tractor and pulled the machine out of the barn and about a mile to the west of our house. Ma watched us from the porch, waving as we moved into the distance. I watched her until the dust and haze made her impossible to see. She sure meant it when she said she wasn’t moving just because a giant was coming.

Pa left me to make the final adjustments to the machine while he rode ahead to check on the giant. He didn’t come back until just as the sun rose the next morning.

“He’s four hours behind me, we need to move the wagon south three hundred yards. Over on that little rise will do just fine.”

Once again we fired up the boiler on the tractor and soon had the machine poised atop the small rise. Pa moved the wagon back and forth, getting the alignment just-so, clearly with some plan in his head. Then we fired up the boiler on the machine itself and stoked it until it was red hot and making live steam. When the machine fired, it was going to instantly release a tremendous amount of steam, and we had to stand next to it to operate it. Pa broke out our steam suits – these were essentially leather ponchos that covered us from the neck down like big sacks, but leaving our arms free. We next pulled on leather arm covers, then gloves.