"Slow down, Mister Stockwell! Slow down!" Christopher Blaylock banged his fist on the lengthy desk. Gentlemen of note in the rotund lecture hall at the Paladin Men's Club found their slumber averted by the calamity. Chester Stillfield grumbled to life. William Atwell's eyes winked in and out of awareness. Paul Bleaker and many others realized the lecture continued unabated. In a corner at the back, old Edwin Bedford Seer, cloudy hair and sideburns sticking straight back as if it were terrified of styling, cleaned his spectacles while muffling a laugh.

Samuel Stockwell tipped back on his heels as he raised a stick of chalk to the blackboard. It helped to stand, for the bandages about his midsection would not allow him to lean over. He resisted the urge to scratch the back of his neck, where last night the tendril of an enemy had found its way into his brain. Compounded by a relentless headache, the pains of last night's debacle had the inventor pleading to heaven for relief. So far, however, his negatrite (or negatricity, both terms were floating around in the local debates) induced brain refused to be silenced.

After twenty minutes of napping at four in the morning, he awoke to another ninety-seven complete and distinctly different thoughts on various matters, ordered his men in the Foundry to begin repairing and improving upon Steam's Vassal (notations taken before said nap), ate five slices of toast with raspberry preserves and polished off his notes for the lecture. He was off to a rather slow start.

He drank from a glass half filled with water. Its tepid succor resuscitated a dying throat. "Fine!" The clenching force of Samuel's temper took a large bite out of his audience. First blood was his, though he failed to notice for want of sleep. "I will slow down my explanation, and drag out this masquerade of a scientific study another hour or two. Would that satisfy you, Mister Blaylock?" Samuel tapped the chalk on the board, making tiny white dots across his almost indecipherable calculation on the effect of solar radiation on the Earth's atmosphere. His lower writings, the cause of the current upset, remained intact.

"Do you expect us to believe," began Parker Maddox, "in your suggestion, your scribbling, that matter is constructed of more than atoms, things smaller than electrons?" Maddox chuckled, looking to the assemblage of his peers for support and finding many in agreement. But then again, Parker Maddox was an Edison man from New Jersey, and New Jerseyans are a tough crowd to please even in lighter matters.

Samuel let his finger encircle the rim of the glass. "No. What I expect of you gentlemen is to pay attention to one, I repeat, one, simplistic fact. The atom, with its appropriate number of electrons, must be made of some form of matter on an even smaller scale. Otherwise, how did they come to be?"

"The churchgoer would point to the Lord, but we heathens wouldn't have the faintest." The sarcasm earned Blaylock uproarious laughter and applause.

Stockwell fumed, his face beet red, blond hair practically venting steam. He rubbed his jaw, a five o'clock shadow he never shaved, and groaned.

"Or is it that jealousy has ruined your capacities for true scientific reasoning?"

Judgmental guffaws changed course into a sea of loud insults. Samuel waved off the crowd of 'experts' and made his way for the lecture hall's double doors. Edwin Seer at last completed the long cleansing of his brass-rimmed spectacles, and followed Samuel down the hallway, leaving the men of science behind.

"Yes, that's the problem! Jealousy plain and simple! Since my mind was opened by the Blue Silence, I'm seeing things, thinking things, far beyond their understanding and they don't like it!" Stockwell screamed it more at the hallway than to his supposed peers.

Seer considered the rant with his head cocked to his right, thinking cap on. A straight brown pipe made its way into the corner of a mouth draped by a stiff cloudy mustache. He struck a match, lit the tobacco, and began to puff. "Hmm, it could be they simply have no comprehension of what you're saying."

Shoes squeaked on polished tiles. "So you're on their side?" The strength of Stockwell's voice echoed his resentment across the building, stopping old men from their leisured imbibing of bourbon in crystal glasses. The glass in the Men's Club trophy case (gold medals for rowing, pugilism and bronze trophies in horsemanship) vibrated. Edwin blinked once before raising his eyebrows slowly skyward. His mustache wriggled as his lips pursed.

"No, my friend. I'm trying to help you see the minds of men, common men, fear the unknown. You're power of deduction is an unknown, as are your calculations."

"We can't rush the world forward to technological advancement wasting our time on these- these troglodytes!" Samuel snapped his red suspenders twice. "I see it clear as day, the reality of it before me in my mind, in my rest, when I can get it!"

Pipe smoke made the air smell like a tiny forest fire. "Friend, the human race is an imperfect animal, slow to learn, even slower to adapt to things visible only on a blackboard. Shall we find someplace to eat? Perhaps a full stomach will subdue your cantankerous defenses."

Stockwell eyed this ever calm man with the fluffy gray sideburns and wrinkled face, the brown suit that hung a little over a body shrunken with age. He wondered if the calm could be manufactured in a laboratory. He pondered the center of the sun and realized its workings, knew how to vastly improve upon his armor, solved the enigma of making a plausible vessel to lift a man into orbit, and fought against the desire to punch the trophy case.

"Yes! I'm famished!"

Edwin Seer noticed a weary Samuel ate his meal in an angry fashion. "If you could not, eh..."

Samuel scraped the knife against the plate a third time. "If I could not, eh, do what?"

The knife screeched once more as Edwin cringed. "Stop scraping the plate, Samuel."

"Okay, Old Timer." Samuel raised his eyes, but not his head, in Edwin's direction. A casual glare at the closest patrons of Muldroon's seemed to suggest they were pleased with the old man's order. Stockwell cast a cold observation of his half eaten roast with rosemary mashed potatoes and thick brown gravy. The setting of Muldroon's made for peace of mind, and explained Edwin's love of the place. Arched entryways of slate stone, curved chandeliers lit by candles instead of noxious gas and many of the tables draped in purple velvet curtains provided a measure of privacy, a calm port in a chaotic city.

Samuel did not like the place. The people were stuffy, these same self-righteous snobs who denied the funding for his war wagon, the improved lighting station and other innovations he had never completed. But now, with a brain made superior to everyone else thanks to that blue element in the earth's bowels, he was not only completing inventions, but powering into whole new realms of reason. Carefully, he put down his fork and knife.

"You're not eating?"

"If I can't eat my own way, why eat at all?" He stretched, back cracking, before reaching into his waistcoat pocket for a match and cigar. Lighting it, he took three swift huffs, licked his lips, and put the question before his old friend. "So, how about we forgo the table manners of the British and get to some real discussion."

Edwin cut the final end of his steak in a cautious, balanced line, as if he were plowing a field laced with nitroglycerin. "And what, pray tell is that?"

"The one Alexander told me about. He said it shook you to the core."

"Oh, do you mean my dreams of the clouds?"

Sam stifled an urge to punch the table. He hated that. "Must you do that every time?"

"Do what?" A perfect rectangular piece of steak entered Edwin's mouth. He chewed as if literally counting thirty-seven bites. Stockwell clenched the tablecloth.

"Play the role of the dummy before making me, or anyone else in the Guild of Honor, look like fools."

"Well," Seer wiped the corners of his mouth with a huge mauve Muldroon's napkin. "My attempts to explain precognitive insights to you all have fallen on deaf ears. You young ones can well believe in superior strength, moving objects with the mind or exhaling volcanic ash, but not that. An ability, if I may say so, is well commented on since antiquity. Best to teach by example." Edwin offered a winning smile under his hearty gray mustache, a smile that brought forth many a wrinkle to his face. He pushed his spectacles up his thin nose.

"Uh-huh," Sam licked the cigar flavor off his lips. Its faint vanilla hint did nothing to calm him. "If I even believed one man could see the myriads of tomorrows, much less see the one true tomorrow our actions are leading us toward, then I'd be even richer than I will be once my varied designs see the light of day. Steam heaters are making me some profit, but not enough. But please, enlighten me of this dream of clouds you keep having while sleeping the day away in your clock shop." He knitted his fingers together, casting a quizzical gaze at his fellow thinker, friend and (though he'd never admit it) father figure.

Edwin Seer took a staggered breath. That alone changed Samuel's mood from doubtful sarcasm to humbled spectator. Seer was a lot of things: clockmaker, amateur scientist, theologist, debater, even a lumberjack (for a month). But he did not exaggerate his moods. The very table seemed to take on a grim texture. "As you know, since the Blue Silence changed us on Black Sand Hill, I've slept more. Honestly, I am surprised to find I am awake now. But the dreams, at first, were of things closest to me. I saw that Alexander would return to us after he went missing following the Silence, and he did. I saw my dear Edna speaking to me of the cloud dream. She did just so three weeks ago, sitting in the same chair, while knitting the exact same quilt. Many others followed, pertaining to special circumstances that would help the Guild and the Rail as days passed on. But the clouds..."

"Go on." Samuel leaned in, smoke from the cigar burning his eyes forcing him to squint.

"Mud is ever present. The young men keep yelling at me to get down. I jump into the hole where they are, a trench would be a more precise term. But, it is an endless trench, a black scar that if one were to enter the center of it, one would fall forever. Explosions occur always, neverending. My ears are bleeding...but a young man in a wide tin hat tells me the bleeding is the truth, that I should learn to get used to it. Some of the boys have insect faces, clutching their ears when the bombs strike. The boy tells me they can't take the truth, for the Twentieth Century's truth is hell and bombs...fear over terror." Edwin pauses to rub his hands together. His chest heaves. Samuel notices the real physical effects of this story on the old man, and dumps a heap of cigar ash into a standing ashtray to his left.

"What about the clouds? What do the clouds have to do with...?"

Seer cuts off the inventor. "Right before my eyes the boys grow older as the sky shifts. The sun and moon rise and fall so fast they look like two lines in the atmosphere, their rapid passing generates a buzzing in the background, a spine tingling irritation. We remain in the trench, the bombs continue to fall and my ears bleed to form puddles on the rat and lice covered ground. Dust blows over the trench, obscuring our vision. Many boys can't take it. They, um...shoot... themselves." The Old Timer pauses. He and Samuel absorb the difficult silence. "I want to cringe, but the boy who stays with me warns that, if I do, I'll miss the final truth. So, I stand my post, though I have no idea what that means."

The cigar dies. Sam lights another, and a third which he hands to Edwin. Holding one steadies the old clockmaker's hand.

"People fall into the trench. Not soldiers like us in olive green, but women in aprons, children in adult clothing, old persons. They all fall into the endless pit in the center of the trench, their eyes are burned out by the real truth. The boy with me points to them as they fall saying, 'they looked at the truth! Good on them!' It rains wet soot and bullets for days on end, but the people keep falling in. Starved, shot, sickened, withered people plummet away to nothing with the bullets and the creosote rainfall in the trench made muddy."

Edwin gulps. Samuel puffs on, nervous but fascinated. His brain is caught between the urge to shut down, to heal from last night's traumas, or to rise up and decipher the dreams of a paranormal man. He waves his hand, rubs exhausted eyes silently urging Seer on.

"A light rises over the war, and the last thing I see is the boy grinning from ear to ear. He is so entranced, so in love with the light. 'The real and final truth! Oh thank you! Thank you!' The light ends everything, it even blocks out sound, melts the falling rounds of ammunition, the rain of mankind, the sooty water. I can't hear for the light, can't feel or think. I have a rifle in my hand, one not invented yet. It bears the name of Stockwell and Company on the wooden grip. The rifle rips like paper inside the light, a silent tearing. Its parts flitter away like a million butterflies that fly off to oblivion. My fingers do the same, along with the rest of me. And then, I'm free. Like the truth has sent me up into the air with the clouds. But the clouds are funny. They too, are made of light, tall, thin light clouds that cap off into mushroom shapes high above everything. As soon as I see the clouds, I hear the noise, the incessant booms of matter ripped out of existence. Cities blow away like sand grains against the breath of a playful child."

Edwin Seer is not dreaming. My God, he's seen what will be...

"Just as swiftly, the day changes to a world, a world of such steam engines one cannot imagine, small, powerful devices. People dressed well going about their day in a terminal made of unbreakable glass." He swallows, wipes a brow that has begun to perspire. "Children play while dark ships fly in the air without a sound. There is war in the distance, but peace close at hand. I wander about, tipping my hat to ladies and young misses, wondering what day it is. The same boy from the trench approaches me, his face is gone, replaced by a wooden mask with a false nose and eerie grin, yet I know it is him telling me there is always a war somewhere, but 'tide rises, and tide falls'. 'Which one?' he asks me. 'With the clouds or without the clouds. Which one is the lesser of the two?'"

Edwin ends his story by lifting his eyes. Samuel is transfixed. Seer extends a hand, tapping his friend on the forearm.

"Samuel?"

"What?! Yes! Ah, let me mull it over. I have things to work on back at the Foundry. Heck, I've still to finish improving the Foundry even! I'll be in touch Old Timer. Waiter, where's the doggone bill?" Stockwell doesn't walk away from the table. He flees. Edwin Seer reclines with the cigar, lost in the place where illusion and reality merge.

The Foundry is a German style barn with stone foundation over red-painted wooden boards. To the casual observer, it is unremarkable, a farmer's store shed in the midst of a forest altered from its expected green and brown shades. There is the taint of the color blue in its flora, a hint of purple, the continuous texture of dread. The Frontier holds the Foundry and the Stockwells' home. The driver who runs Samuel to and from his home demands exorbitant fees to venture down the one road going into the Frontier. Humans don't survive out there. Samuel finds it comforting, a natural barrier to ward off competitors and the spies of other inventors (he knows negatrite must have improved upon other minds). His wife Martha, and his young sons Virgil and Simon, think otherwise.

Opening the door, Samuel finds his shop bustling with men working. His mind is only partially aware of the banging steam hammers, the lullaby bee buzz of cutting saws. Samuel's mind is reeling from the portent of Edwin Seer, of how to upgrade the Steam's Vassal armor and whether or not he can focus light into a heat beam. But something is amiss.

Theodore Thunderchild is a Lenape native, Delaware some call them, well built and bronze in skin tone. His ebony hair is straight, cut at the base of his skull. A pair of welding goggles rests over Thunderchild's eyes. People rarely see the man's eyes, only the rock solid complacency of his unmoving face. When Samuel met Thunderchild, he found in the man a kindred spirit, a lover of mechanics. The Blue Silence changed the native also. Whatever Theodore Thunderchild sees someone do, he can do, only better. The Foundry is run and operated by the two smartest minds on Earth.

"What's eating you this morning?" Stockwell slams his goggles down on a work table, grabbing some additional lenses filled with liquid.

"Nine of your men have quit," Thunderchild said, his tone rich with a baritone cool.

The goggles are picked up and slammed down again. "Quit? Quit! That's the second set of ingrates in a week! What was their excuse?"

"Stone Bear wandering around out back while they were sipping whiskey."

"So? Why didn't someone activate the Gatling? It's on a turret, and can reach the back." Stockwell resumed the work of placing added lenses to his goggles, but kept returning to slapping and rubbing his face in frustration. The Foundry was hot, a dry, skin burning heat from so many torches, steel being processed in an improved Bessemer cauldron rigged up two weeks ago. The heat made the skin itch even more at the neck, made Samuel mad enough to want to fight.

"I did, and the bear departed. But that did not make them feel any safer."

"Well, there are plenty of men in the Rail who would kill for work, especially with what I'm paying! Send someone to Lower Lakeside and hire ten or twelve Negroes, a couple of Italians or whoever down there comes running."

"Agreed. I will go there myself right now." Thunderchild turned and headed for the barn doors. Stockwell rubbed his eyes. They burned from heat, from restlessness. He watched his brother in mechanics walk away, watched the armor in its pieces receive thorough inspections from strong Irish hands and wary glances. He built this place from nothing, and in the past month alone, transformed it from a struggling dream into a burgeoning enterprise. The same men who laughed at his inability to complete a project now shook his hand after signing off on substantial checks. Steam heaters and coolers, exceptionally efficient ones, were being churned out by hired men to warm buildings in winter, cool them in summer. Working around the clock became a necessity. Money allowed Stockwell to invest in the market, a game he was now an expert at with the talent of a multitasking mind. Things were looking up for him and his family.

Keeping employees, this machine going well, that was another thing all together.

And now, he would hire black men, and pay them very good wages. That would cause more men to quit. Fine, he thought. Let them. I need the work to progress, but apparently they need only to whine about the small things in life. It was bad enough hearing the sobs of grown men who did not take kindly to having an Indian as their foreman. Subconsciously he had finished the goggles and, finding they worked very well to provide vision of the unseen, slapped the table with glee. The goggles displayed rhythmic bands of consistent energy in the air, minute traces of waves, with the strongest point of origin being from the north. The direction pointed Samuel into the proper conclusion:

I can see magnetism. Heh! What a wondrous sight...

"Mister Stockwell?" Baxter Brown, a short brunette man in a torn shirt, ruined the revelation.

The table wobbled from Stockwell's fist. "Brown! Can't you see I'm working? What do you want?"

"Sir, you demanded this morning to be notified when we were ready to test the machine-mortar engine link." Brown stated the terms in slow motion, as if the words hurt his tongue. He jumped back as his boss leaped forward. Any news about the armor made Samuel jerk ahead at a full gallop, pushing pat his workers. He did just so with Brown, shoving him aide to stomp across the busy Foundry, ducking under beams, evading the arcing sparks of welding torches and the legs of men on their knees doing any number of laborious tasks. The heat intensified with every step, but he had to make it to the rear.

Steam's Vassal had already become a household name in Railroad City. Last night's battle with the Industrial Man expounded on the legend. But for now, the machine was, at best, a piecemeal skeleton. From the moment he returned, the armor had been stripped. Even now, the top half was bubbling in the cauldron, being recycled and refined into a better grade of steel.

Only the Intelligent Engine remained, its many counters ticking away on a table full of machine molded weights, punch cards and measuring rods. The Engine, with its front row of numerical counters from one to zero and a second row containing the letters of the alphabet, now had its copper wires insulated with rubber, and attached to the firing mechanism of a rotating set of five elephantine gun barrels resting inside of a three-foot diameter steel drum decorated in brass and silver etchings of a smoking steam train (beneath were the words, in silver: 'FORGED IN THE RAILROAD CITY-MISSOURI by STOCKWELL and COMPANY').

Stockwell gripped the shoulder of a thin, white-haired man wearing telescoping goggles. "Links! Is it ready?"

Links turned to face the boss. He responded by displaying a grin of black stained teeth and a visible wad of chewing tobacco. His hand gestured to a switch, a simple brass lever with a rubber tip. "Fire when ready, Boss," he yelled over the din of machinery.

Samuel picked up the lever, laying it in his left palm. He gazed at it as if it were his third child, newly born into the cold world. At the lever's base sat a dial with degrees. By rolling the dial to the right, the machine-mortar turned on a turret to the right. Stockwell nearly jumped for joy. He turned the weapon with the dial until the main barrel of five, each one a four-inch bore, faced an opening at the barn's rear. In the distance, a stack of straw, painted with red circles, rested between two blue maples swamped in pulsating vines.

"Fire in the hole!" Stockwell threw the switch. The mortar fired one round, making a hollow 'bomp' sound. Compelled forward by an experimental amount of rocket propulsion, the round sizzled in the bright daylight, a blunt black globe. It struck the straw target in the upper right corner, not a bull's eye, but a strike nonetheless. For half a second, nothing happened. The rocket firing fizzled out. Birds returned to singing. Men working at the band saws stopped to take a peek.

Then the entire backyard trembled as the men in the Foundry watching the show went blind from the erupting bomb. Stockwell put the goggles over his eyes, watching as the ripple of magnetic waves disappeared in an electromagnetic fog before returning. Brilliant colors spread out to titillate his vision. He smiled while men ducked for cover. The maple trees shattered, but remained standing. Pulsing vines flew out of sight. The target was no more. Only a charred set of earth in a black hole remained. Straw set aflame entered the Foundry. Precious seconds of elation were enjoyed before the boss took notice.

"Links! Baumgarner! Get the sand pails! Double time! Double time!"

The men ran and drowned infant flames in sand and water. Stockwell watched them tackle the disaster in fine fashion. He patted the machine-mortar like an obedient child. He realized it would increase the armor's ability to contend with the growing number of paranormals, those who felt power granted immunity from the laws of the land. He would not allow these persons to crush the hard work of others, to feign superiority. He would never allow children to suffer the knowledge that their fathers were criminal, or their brothers, mothers and so on. No one would have to live with that, like he continued to do. Samuel felt this to the depth of his being.

A trickle of blood dripped from Stockwell's left nostrils, a trickle he wiped away with a hemp rag.

And just as quickly, the mind of Samuel Stockwell deviated to other, more complex, thoughts.