Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. Page B

him.
    “You didn’t run!” a voice boomed from Buckle’s right. “And it was a crackerjack good thing you didn’t! Crackerjack!”
    Buckle snapped a look to his right. A young, thin man roughly equal to his height and age was approaching. He wore a brown leather motorcycle cap festooned with eyewear, a long white double-breasted coat, and dark-brown boots agleam with rows of polished buckles. Long leather gloves encased his hands nearly up to the elbows, and both forearms were crowded with straps loaded with unusual devices. He held some sort of little-box invention studded with winding handles and gears.
    “I suspect I could have outrun your little friend, here,” Buckle said, trying to sound calm.
    “Ha!” the young Alchemist huffed as he arrived alongside the robot. “You run, you get incinerated. A simple formula with an inevitable result.” The young Alchemist’s face lit up with a lopsided but enthusiastic smile from beneath his thick mustache. He had ruddy skin that looked scrubbed and healthy, and friendly olive eyes set deep under his bushy eyebrows. His dense russet-colored hair jutted out in every direction from beneath his cap, which accommodated a forest of different goggles and lenses, each and every one designed to swing smoothly into position in front of his eyes with the tap of a lever.
    “The proof is always in the proverbial pudding!” the young Alchemist shouted. He twisted a number of switches on the control box he held, and it issued a series of odd noises. “Let’s have an exhibition, shall we?”
    The robot jerked its shoulders back with a
clank
, its chest turbine accelerating as it heaved out its left arm, which was the one cuffed with the circular ring of small blackbang cannons. The arm straightened, locked, adjusted its aim slightly, and fired a thundering volley in a volcano of black smoke. Buckle instinctively ducked. The echo of the blast boomed across the mountains. He heard a resounding
crack
and turned to see a tall tree fifty yards away collapsing into a fire-ringed hole in its trunk. It toppled in a crash of splintering wood and a shattering of the ice that had long encased it.
    The robot swung its smoking arm back to its hip and swiveled its head, attentively watching the young Alchemist.
    “Crackerjack!” The young Alchemist chuckled. “Impressive! Am I right? Of course I am right. Eight portable cannons, self-loading, fired singly or in salvo. Explosive rounds. And that’s just for starters.”
    “Impressive,” Buckle said. It was what this fellow obviously wanted to hear. And it
was
impressive. He paused, trying to cook up a decent story. He could say he was a Crankshaft ambassador on a diplomatic mission, and needed assistance to return to his home territory. But ambassadors never traveled alone—and not by parachute. And if the Alchemists smelled a lie in his story he would be clapped in irons as a spy.
    “Look…” Buckle began, uncertain of what he might say next.
    “So,” the Alchemist blurted, interrupting, “you’re a Cranker, are you?”
    “Crankshaft. Yes,” Buckle replied.
    “And the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
is your gunship,” the young Alchemist stated, grinning wickedly.
    “It is. Yes,” Buckle answered, uncertain.
    “That was a colossal scrape you had with that tangler,” the young Alchemist continued, affectionately patting the robot’s massive iron hip with his gloved hand as he spoke. “Knocked you off your gasbag and still you survived. The odds on squeaking out of that fix still breathing would have to be astronomical, yes?”
    Buckle’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
    The Alchemist pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then pointed them at the sky. “Always watching, Cranker. Watching. We have big eyes down here: telescopes of tremendous proportions and magnifying capacities. We observe, study patterns, collect information.”
    “Information on who?” Buckle asked.
    The Alchemist’s face soured for a moment—a