• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 145 0

but valuable part of your prodigal brother that does not think or talk or daydream but instead notices, and that is probably how come I have been out here zipping from town to town on the frontier in the war zone for a year and not died. Anyway, that part of your brother noticed two things. First, Flood was not really angry, but only playing at anger, like the whole thing was a game. Second, when I said thirty-seventy just for a moment Flood was annoyed and his hand flashed to his belt, where he wasn’t wearing a gun but you could tell at once that he usually was. Once again, May, if you wish to say a little prayer I wouldn’t say no, this time for my own safety out on Big Witch.

Yours,

Harry.

P.S. I suppose by the time you get this and consider praying it will all be over one way or the other. But if I think too much about that I will start thinking about Time again and never sleep, and tomorrow is a busy day.

IV. On Big Witch

Dear Mr. Baxter.

You do not know me. I imagine you get a lot of letters that begin that way. I have heard of your exploits for a long time, and admired you. They say you are the richest honest businessman or the honestest rich businessman in Keaton City. Either of those seems to me to be a good thing to be. I am an entrepreneur and an inventor, too. My particular line of work is Electricity and Light. I have gone out to the edge of things to make my name and my fortune, and sometimes it seems the whole world is against it, because it does not want to become a better place. I once read where you were talking to a newspaper reporter about the obstacles you overcame when you were a young man, and it lifts my spirits to think about it, and helps me to forget about the fact that I am trapped in this pit.

The obstacles in my case are somewhat larger than they were in yours. As I recall your father did not believe in you. In my case the issue is that I have stumbled into a war zone. The fighting between Line and G_n is very bad in this part of the world. The Line has its machines and its legions, and the enemy has its Agents and whatever else, its saboteurs and arsonists and poisoners and blackmailers and I do not know what else but I do not like it. They say it has something to do with something that happened at a Hospital, I do not know what. The War cost me my Apparatus, and now it looks like that is not all it will cost me. To me the War seems like a great Mountain between us and the Future, like the first pioneers must have crossed to get here. Anyway I hope that if I somehow get out of this godd_mn pit one day I may make it to Keaton City and you & I can talk business.

Yours sincerely,

“Professor” Harry Ransom, Lightbringer, Inventor of the Ransom Process for Perpetual Energy

Out on Big Witch

Carver:

If you find this note I guess things have gone badly for me but at least you are okay and you have come back. Two things. First, send a letter to my sisters saying something nice about what happened to me. Second, watch out for Flood, he is trouble.

Harry.

To Whom it May Concern:

I have never before written to an Officer of the Line, or imagined that I ever might. But I am stuck in this pit and I still have my writing paper, and more ink than water. Your Vessels are circling overhead around & around on their great iron wings, and I can see their spyglasses glinting blood-red in the light of the sun as it sets. Perhaps they are waiting for night to fall. Sooner or later they will find me, or if they wait too long and I am dead of thirst they will find my body and this letter. This letter contains VALUABLE INTELLIGENCE AND YOU SHOULD READ IT. Get to the point, you will be thinking, because your kind are nothing if not efficient. Well, tough. There is still light to write by and I have nothing else to do.

I have been out on Big Witch for about three days. I started out from a town to the southeast of here, called Disorder, and the first thing I want to say is that no one in the town of Disorder knew any of what I’m telling you here. All they knew was that Flood & I were coming