CHAPTER 3

DANBURY SPUR
Edward took up the thread, “Now again, as to the train, it is exactly that – a train, that is to say, a linked succession of rolling compartments like this car. It is similar in concept to a supply train, or an ammunition train.”

“At the head of the train is the engine, which is also a rolling car, only with an engine strong enough to turn not only its wheels but also to haul all the rest of the cars and we in them. You are correct in that, originally, the engines used descended from Watt’s, but this train uses oil-burning motors.”

Franklin asked, “What do you mean, ‘oil-burning motors?’”

“Ah yes … oil, of the type known as petroleum. Is that word familiar to you?”

“Yes, so these motors burn petroleum?”

“A refined form of it, yes. In fact, the fuel for my car’s internal-combustion engine is also a refined form of petroleum.”

“How is it that you come by all this petroleum? In my time, it was quite rare to find it.”

“Are you referring to the appearance of petroleum seepages at the earth’s surface?” asked Edward.

“Yes, have you developed a means of artificially manufacturing it?”

“Alas, no, or at least none that is of practical use. Instead, we drill wells for it,” said Edward.

“These must be prodigious deep wells!” exclaimed Franklin.

“How do you know?” asked Edward, but Franklin had barely heard him. He was becoming distracted by the crowd of ten and twenty story buildings that was downtown Stamford.

“Astonishing,” said Franklin. “And this is present-day Stamford?”

“Yes, and most of this buildup has taken place in just the last twenty years,” replied Edward, adding, “A buildup which is much regretted by many of the city’s longtime residents, who vastly preferred what they thought of as the “old” Stamford.”

“Which, in turn, bore no resemblance to the village that I passed through during my life … and times,” added Franklin, with a quick look round him as he tacked on the last two words.

Deciding that he could be as brazen as he pleased and still be confident that not one fellow passenger would raise an eyebrow, Edward assured Franklin, “I would not be concerned. They are listening, but they simply do not believe what you are saying.”

“Oh! Well, come to think of it, why would they? However, that was not what gave me pause when I referred to, ‘My times.’ What passed through my mind, and not for the first time since I happily made your acquaintance, sir, is the perplexity of how I might return to my times.”

So, there it was, right out on the table. Edward, who had been about to speak, stopped with his mouth open. And was it only his imagination again, or had the compartment suddenly quieted? Their seatmate gave all appearance of continuing to read his paper, but his faced seemed to have stiffened a little.

Then again, suppose it to be true that all ears bent toward them, might that not be attributed to the behavior of an audience becoming intent on some entertainment, as at the theater? There need not be even the faintest beginnings of a feeling of belief that this was the real Franklin.

And yet, what was foremost in Edward’s mind was that, though he might be as free with his tongue as he wished when it came to the strangers surrounding them, yet a person in Franklin’s position deserved some sensitivity.

“Sir, please accept my apologies for being so insensitive,” Edward hastened to say.

“Not at all, sir, not at all.”

“And let me say,” added Edward, “that I will not rest until we have solved this perplexing problem.”

“Thank you. Well then, you have asked how I know that you must be drilling at great depths to be able to recover such vast quantities of petroleum. My answer is based on my knowledge of the depths where water is usually found in our deepest wells. I couple my knowledge of water wells with the fact that petroleum is only very rarely found in conjunction with water – even in those rare locations where there is petroleum upwelling of its own accord. Therefore, I surmise that you must have to go to deeper, perhaps down 200 feet, for petroleum.”

“Sir, our thirst for petroleum is such that we go literally to the ends of the earth to find it, and we drill many times deeper than the deepest groundwater. Oil is tapped at depths ranging from 200 feet, as you guessed, to more than 10,000 feet.”

“So, here we have yet another new field of knowledge, presumably with its own wonders in terms of equipment?” asked Franklin.

“That is true, that is true,” said Edward. “Perhaps we should again make a choice as to the direction our line of inquiry will take?”

But at that moment, Edward saw that the conductor was approaching them, checking tickets and greeting the more jocular of the regular commuters. (Edward was normally anything but, preferring to sleep his way in and, sometimes out of the city.)

Franklin saw Edward glance up and did likewise, just in time to receive a greeting that seemed to reflect the unsaid assumptions of everyone else in the car.

“Morning! Where’re you going and what’s the costume for?”

Edward looked at Franklin with confidence that this was a challenge that Ben would be able to handle without missing a beat.

“Ah yes, my attire. Well, you see sir, it is simply what suited my mood this morning when I opened my clothes closet,” then Franklin turned to Edward – there was still the question of ‘where.’

“Grand Central,” said Edward, handing over a twenty and his own monthly pass (and thinking what a treat it would have been for Franklin to see a hundred).

Surprise had passed across the conductor’s face for the briefest of moments, but he quickly recovered his morning aplomb, made change and moved on.

“Well,” said Ben, “to discuss the extraction of petroleum would be fascinating, but my sense is that so much is going by outside these windows that we owe it to ourselves to confine our discussion to what is right before our eyes.”

“I couldn’t agree more, sir. Well then, we had progressed to the point of my very inadequate explanation of the train’s oil-burning engines. Would it convenience you were I to let that cover the subject of the railroad for the time being and instead give you what I know of the present-day environs we are now passing through?”

“It would.”

“Let me state the context a bit more broadly than just Westchester County. All in all, the population of the New York area, including, in one continuous urban, or, as we say, suburban landscape, the island of Manhattan, the Long Island boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and the western half Suffolk to where the remaining farms begin, Staten Island, the New Jersey counties of Bergen, Hudson, Union, Middlesex and Monmouth, and, of course, northward through the Bronx and Westchester to our present location and on into Fairfield County in Connecticut, is some fifteen million.”

“Astonishing, but still, no more so than the transformation of the countryside that was so evident before we descended into this ditch.”

“A ditch that we will emerge from only for a few seconds before descending into a tunnel,” added Edward.

“If that is the population of present-day New York, then what is the population of the country?”

“Approaching three hundred million.”

“Then, the suburban landscape, as you term it, must stretch along the whole coast!”

“No, for the country has grown in terms of land area as well as population, so much so that there are still vast empty spaces. You may think of the United States geographically as a westward extension of itself in your day – all the way to the Pacific coast.”

All the way?” exclaimed Franklin, then, recovering his composure, “But then, that makes sense, doesn’t it, based on the beginnings in my day, under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance?”

“That has largely been the process, treaty and purchase, with one exception in which the Mexican possessions were taken by conquest in 1845.”

“And what of the British possessions to the north, is Canada also coast-to-coast, parallel to us?”

“Yes, and another one of your shrewd guesses, I see. However, not only are we coast to coast, but we have leapfrogged north to purchase the whole of Alaska from Russia as our forty-ninth state and extended into the Pacific to include Hawaii as our fiftieth, again by conquest, though some would claim by settlement.”

Fifty states? And thirty-five still to account for … however, I should consult a map, not make you enumerate them. But what was that you said – Hawaii? Was that not where Cook met his fate?”

“It was indeed. But before his misfortune, his visit there revealed a nation, settled centuries before by intrepid sailors of outrigger canoes, of the Polynesian ethnic group.”

“So I recall from accounts I received of what came back to England in his diaries, but where comes the claim of settlement on our part?”

“Some Christian missionaries from Massachusetts sailed there several decades after Cook. The Hawaiians allowed them to remain to introduce European religion to the King and his people. From that point, the island became more open to trade, and later, to settlement, including European agriculture. The pineapple crop in particular became quite valuable, inducing the United States to call it a territory about a century ago, after an interlude in which their queen attempted to re-establish the realm of her forebears.”

“A sad story, if I correctly follow the meaning behind your understated account of it,” said Franklin.

“So that is how we come to have fifty states. That is, skipping over the story of, as you say, thirty-five of them. But perhaps I should get back to our immediate surroundings?”

“Yes, it is hard not to digress, isn’t it?” said Franklin, but at that moment, a fellow passenger, having come up the aisle from behind them, leaned over, saying “Excuse me,” to their companion in the aisle seat, and held out a folded bundle of paper which Edward recognized as a road map.

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