Read Book 10 - Angry Lead Skies for Free Online Page B

which I didn’t know what they were. He
had a hundred unidentifiable projects going. As soon as we walked
in he grabbed a file and went to work on notches in a round metal
plate about eight inches in diameter. It took him only a few
seconds to become totally focused.
    “What the hell?” I asked.
    Playmate shrugged. “I don’t know. Part of one of his
machines. I can show you the picture he had me draw.”
    “I meant, how come he suddenly goes from being something
you have to keep on a leash to being somebody who’s blind to
the whole damned world?”
    Another expressive shrug. Playmate showed me into his forge
area, which had expanded considerably since my last visit and which
was an amazing clutter of junk and what looked like things
half-built. I wondered how he got any shoeing done.
    From some niche Playmate produced a leather folder filled with
dozens of sheets of good linen paper. He shuffled through
unsuspectedly good bits of artwork until he located the piece he
wanted. I glimpsed my own likeness in passing. “Now that was
a good-looking young man.”
    Playmate grunted. I think that was meant to be neutral but
failed to sound like it when he observed, “The operative word
being ‘was.’ ”
    There were more portrait sketches. They were all good. I
recognized several people.
    How many hidden talents did Playmate have? He surprised me every
few months.
    The portfolio contained more sketches of devices than of people.
Some were really complicated, highly unlikely mechanisms. And a few
didn’t seem complicated at all. One of those was a little
two-wheeler cart with a pair of long shafts sticking out in front.
A man had been sketched in as pulling it, conveying another seated
in the cart.
    Something like that, without the shafts, sat about ten feet from
where I stood. “You’re trying to build some of these
things?”
    “Unh? Oh. Yeah. All of them, eventually. But
there’re problems. With that thing I’m having trouble
finding long enough poles that’re still light. But we did
test it. It’ll work.”
    “Why?”
    “Because we have an extremely lazy complement of wealthy
people in this town. And a lot of unemployed young men who need
something to keep them out of trouble. My notion is to build a
fleet of those things and rent them out at nominal fees so some of
those young men have a way to make a living. Which will keep them
out of trouble at the same time.”
    Having a way to make a living didn’t keep me out of
trouble.
    That was Playmate, though. Finding a way to get rich doing good
deeds. Except that then he would end up giving away any wealth he
acquired.
    Next to the cart stood a second mechanism. I could not figure it
out. It had three wheels. Two were about a foot in diameter and
were mounted at the ends of a wooden axle. The other was about two
and a half feet in diameter, turning on a hardwood pin which passed
through the ends of a two-lined wooden fork. That rose through the
upper end of an arc of hardwood that curved down to the two-wheel
axle. A curved crossbar above the hardwood arc allowed the larger
wheel to be turned right and left.
    I did not see a sketch of that in Playmate’s folio.
“What is that?”
    “We just call it a three-wheel. Let me finish showing you
this. Then I’ll let you see how it works. Here. Check this.
It’s a two-wheel. It’s a more complicated cousin of
that.” He extracted a drawing.
    This mechanism had two wheels of equal size, fore and aft, with
a rider perched amidships, as though astride a horse.
“I’m not sure I get this.”
    “Oh, I don’t, either. Kip explains these things when
he has me draw them but I seldom understand. However, everything he
finishes putting together does what he says it will do. And
sometimes it seems so obvious afterward that I wonder why nobody
ever thought of it before. So I take him on faith. This
engine—and that one there—gets around on power provided
by the rider’s legs. If you want to know much more than