Like a Wisp of Steam by Thomas Roche (best reads of all time txt) 📕

time, performing a complex array of sequential tasks—walking and bowing and swinging his arms or lifting half-ton weights, or even more complex activities. He really was a marvel of engineering, though in the ten years since his construction the technologies had been improved, or abandoned in favor of newer, cheaper advances.

He belched stinking steam in the pauses between actions, the great curling plumes rolling up from the many joints in his body. His face was modeled on Benjamin Franklin's (thus his name), but whoever had done the shaping had been a poor hand at metalwork. The lower jaw was wide and pronounced, turning the infamous, modest grin into something sinister.

Benjamin's movements were awkward at best, but he wowed the crowd.

Too bad his life expectancy, so to speak, was so small.

However, he certainly caught attention. That was the problem.

On the last night of the Show's run outside Brisbane, Heck Lansdale received an unusual visitor. He called himself Black Paul, and he led nearly a dozen desperadoes. If he had come during the day, then any number of the Show's people could have dealt with him. As it was, he waited for the libations to flow—and flow they did, as Brisbane was a none too modest mining town, not quite so large as Silver City, say, but large enough to reward sweet coin and foodstuffs to a show that captured their hearts. So it was with the crew well-oiled and unfit to mount a defense that the Show's master had himself a visit from an outlaw.

The first Trista heard about it was when a stranger found and told her that "Lansdale" needed to see her.

The man was a scowling, scarred fellow. Trouble, if Maggie had ever seen it. She did not argue. As they walked to Heck's wagon, she saw others prowling among the shadows, arms filled with firearms and weapons that had been taken from her crewmates. They're pacifying us.

In Heck's wagon, Trista found a very nervous show boss sitting with a portly, unshaven man with greasy black hair and a sour complexion. "Uhm, Trista," Heck said by way of introduction, "This is Black Paul, and he has a bit of a, uhm, proposition. How fast can you get Benjamin up and running?"

She had seen the posters with an artist's rendering of the man before, though the pictures did not capture the cold fire of desperation beaming out of his piggish eyes, nor the lusty grimace that twisted his lips when he saw her. Or a shirt wet with the blood of a recent gunfight.

"Well," he said, "Aren't you a s-s-s- sight?" Had she heard that correctly? Yes. Black Paul, the accused murderer and robber and general ne'er-do-well, the scourge of law and propriety, suffered from a bad stutter. Still, she found no humor in it, with the silver six guns on the table in easy reach.

"He wants old Benjamin," Heck explained, "and so long as we cooperate, he won't hurt anyone."

"You're probably w-w-w-wuh- wondering,"—the words that tripped him up, came forcefully when he finally got them out—"w-wuh- why you should trust m-muh- me. I'm a m-muh-muh- man of m- my w-wuh- word." A sweat broke out across his forehead. He angrily gestured to one of his men, a stern-faced fellow with wrists no thicker than tent spikes.

"Black Paul gives his word," the man said. "The big steam man, he will do a job for us, and then we will leave you in peace. Your Mister Heck has agreed to do as we say, and so long as no one here tries to thwart us, then we will not kill everyone in the Show. We are not completely without honor."

Black Paul showed a set of filthy teeth in a feral smile as though to demonstrate his honesty.

Heck 's eyes never once left Black Paul's pistols. "Do what they say."

She had no choice. At least, not at the moment. "I will," she said, ashamed of the weakness in her voice. She wanted to be like Maggie, wanted to make these men tremble at her strength. She was the one trembling.

Black Paul enjoyed her fear, savoring it like a heady wine.

"G-guh- good g-guh-g- girl."

* * * *

Trista discovered how little actual intelligence or foresight was required to become an outlaw when she heard Black Paul's plans.

"You want to use Benjamin to rob a bank?" She could not keep the incredulity from her voice. It seemed a preposterous suggestion, the likes of using shotgun blasts to kill a particularly pesky horsefly.

"That is what we wish," the thin-wristed man, named Sykes, replied.

"I don't think this is going to work." Before the outlaws'

scowls could turn deadly, she added, "Benjamin does not ...

think. No matter how it looked in the Show. He follows very specific instructions. That's all he's capable of doing. His actions are all determined in advance. He is not a real man, he—"

"No problem," Sykes explained. "We have a map of the bank we wish robbed. Scaled to the last inch. He need only walk through a door, down to the safe, rip the door from its hinges and then ... We can come in after him."

Trista wondered if an earlier attempt on this same bank was when Black Paul had been injured. Benjamin would be impervious to those same bullets that could fell a man. He need only be a walking target for any sheriff's men, she realized. Was it something she could do?

Yes.

For the safety of the Show folks, her family these last six months, she could. For Maggie, she could. However, using Benjamin for such a thing ... It offended her, not merely for the crime being perpetrated, but the perversion of science to do it ... If a man wanted to risk catching a bullet for a pocketful of loot that was likely to be lost in bottles or whorehouses, then who was Trista to stand in his way? No Sheriff she. Yet, the attempt to use science to make such a dangerous lifestyle somehow less life-threatening was ... It really