Deseret by D. J. Butler Page B

flattened into valley floor.   He didn’t think they could have arrived
yet and, out of curiosity, Absalom stood and walked to the rail.   To the left and right, tar-paved roads
curled around the circumference of the enormous valley, punctuated by brass
towers, brick farmhouses and irrigated fruit orchards.   Ahead, the road plunged directly into
the city, swallowed immediately by the steel, brick, brass and plascrete of
tall buildings.   In the center of
the crossroads stood a small hut with a man hanging out of its doorway, waving
a little red flag at the Liahona .
    “What is it?   Don’t you know I’m badly behind schedule as it is?” Captain Dan Jones
bellowed from the rail at the man.   Burton stuck to the man like his own shadow.   Absalom kept his distance, but stayed within earshot.
    “You’re diverted!” the semaphorist yelled back, and he waved
something in his other hand that looked like it might be a glass tube with a
bit of paper inside.   “Everyone is,
they even sent riders around to the farms!”
    “Is it Indians?” Jones roared.   He looked like he didn’t care if it was Indians or not, and
if the flag-waver told him that the Great Salt Lake City was being invaded by
the Ute, Paiute, Gosiute, Shoshone, Navajo, Blackfoot, Crow and Apache peoples
simultaneously, he still wasn’t going to change his course.   “Fire?   Crickets?”
    “I don’t know!”   The gateman tossed his flag inside the little booth and shut the
door.   “All I know is it’s got
something to do with the Twelve, and you’re the last traffic I’m expecting down
the Canyon.   Can I get a ride to
the Tabernacle?”
    The Liahona crawled
to the center of the Great Salt Lake City.   The problem was that all the traffic—or very nearly
all of it, anyway—was going the same direction.   Horse-drawn carriages and wagons competed with steam-trucks
and even the occasional clocksprung beast for the same space on the tar, and
Absalom thought that the pedestrians walking (again, in the same direction) on
the sparkling plascrete walkways would arrive before he did.   They walked with a sense of urgency,
and constantly looked at pocket watches.
    He looked ahead for the brigade of American cavalrymen, but
they were nowhere in sight.   A slow
tide of top hats, frock coats, buckskin jackets, boots and wheels and buckles
and horseshoes and gears seeped along, bearing him with it, disappearing into
something that looked like a giant plascrete egg, a vast bald genius skull
sprouting patches of green vegetable hair in zigzagging rows and propped up
with a wild whirl of pipes running straight out from it in every
direction.   He looked down side
streets and saw that all the traffic everywhere was bound for the same place.
    Good, he thought.   No, excellent .   If everyone in the Great Salt Lake City
was in the same place, it should be very easy to find Abigail, or at least
figure out how to find her.   And
her husband, that scoundrel Orrin Porter Rockwell, was a famous man.  
    Unexpectedly, the Liahona lumbered right, dropped down a steep ramp and went underground.   Absalom, along with all the other
passengers on the deck other than that obstinate ruffian Dick Burton, ducked,
but the top of the entrance was several feet over the top of the wheelhouse and
the sudden collective cringe was unnecessary.   It was an enormous gate, and the space it opened into was a
mammoth Avernian shed full of steam-trucks of every size and description.
    The Liahona shuddered
to a slow halt.   “Get everybody
off!” Captain Jones shouted to crewmen on the deck and then he was first down
the ladder.   Anxious to find the
little boy, Absalom thought, and he admired the man’s doggedness and integrity.
    The big steam-truck had come to rest in a vast plascrete
hangar, surrounded by smaller craft.   A gleaming brass arch gave egress, two lines of inlaid brass text
pounded into the stone above it presumably both identifying the