HE'S MY BROTHER

Chapter Eleven - Tipping Point

Spring marched on. It rained off and on and sometimes there was still wet snow mixed in with the raindrops, yet on the whole the world was warming up, preparing itself for a new season of growth. The earth stirred with early life. The first shoots of snowdrops and crocuses pushed out and reached for the sunlight. Tufts of grass began to green up in the most sheltered spots tucked up against buildings and next to the rails. And everywhere people were smiling and began to look for excuses to spend more time outside. It was spring.

With the frost coming out of the ground, building projects that had been put on hold last fall began to resume and many new undertakings began. There were rooves to patch, fences to mend, all manner of repair jobs to attend to. New outbuildings and barns, culverts, retaining walls, terraces…the need for supplies was endless and the engines were kept busy making small deliveries all over the Island. The foreign locos in the Knapford shed, most of whom tended to sit idle a lot outside of the tourist season, were especially happy to get out and make themselves useful. They enjoyed the opportunity to socialize as they went about their jobs and liked helping to spread the workload.

The only engine who didn't feel this way was, as usual, Lammergeier. He didn't appreciate the leisurely pace of making small local deliveries. The work was never anywhere near hard enough to absorb him or require his undivided attention and the people receiving the goods tended to unload everything slowly and insist on chatting incessantly throughout. Christophe and Surendra just made it worse. Both men were friendly and enjoyed meeting the locals and learning about their lives. Instead of moving promptly off to the next job, they'd often dawdle to yak with people about nothing at all, which irritated Lammergeier beyond belief. But what could he do? He knew that Christophe wouldn't tolerate any shows of temper or impatience, and Surendra, though kinder, would just frown at him and look disappointed if he tried to act up.

Then came what had to be the delivery day from hell. It began during their first and biggest job of the day, transporting several flatbeds loaded with culvert pipes from Brendam Docks up to Vicarstown. They'd barely gotten underway once out in the countryside when they found their track blocked by cows.

Christophe eased Lammergeier to a stop and Surendra comically cracked his knuckles, hopped down out of the cab, and got to work. If there was one thing he knew, it was cattle. He walked towards the herd poking about for clumps of fresh spring grass near the rails and began slowly flapping his arms and whistling at them in a peculiar way. The boss cow shook her horns at him and switched her tail to let him know that she didn't appreciate a stranger trying to shift her, but then gave in and moved imperiously off into a nearby field, followed by the other cows. Surendra stayed by the track to make sure that nobody changed their minds until Lammergeier chuffed far enough ahead to clear the danger zone before he ran ahead and climbed back aboard.

"Well done," Christophe said, grinning. "Krishna would be proud."

"He would, wouldn't he? We'd better stop at the first station we come to, to call this in. I don't even know where they came from. The field they're in now isn't fenced and I didn't see any downed gates anywhere."

"We'll stop at the next station," Christophe agreed.

Of course, his crew's conscientious ways only put Lammergeier behind schedule all the more and he never did make up the time. Then there was a problem picking up their next delivery in Vicarstown. The shunting engines in the goods yard there couldn't find his laden trucks for a while. One of the shunter's drivers had to finally confer with the yardmaster before the train was located on the wrong siding and after that there was no brake van available for an additional half hour. Christophe and Surendra were fine with that and just parked Lammergeier over on one of the less-used tracks up at the station and used their unexpected spare time to fill up on sticky buns and tea and chat with the station guards while they waited, but Lammergeier was so aggravated by the delay that he had to make a real effort to remain outwardly calm. He fumed steadily as the minutes ticked by, unable to understand how the humans all around him could take it all so lightly, his eyes growing harder and harder.

The goods on the 48's new train were intended for three separate drop-off points located in the Island's hilly interior. It turned into a leisurely trip on a lovely afternoon, one that was windless and utterly clear though still quite crisp, especially at altitude. Lammergeier had to climb and then descend some pretty steep grades and the mostly rural landscapes were often spectacular to the men's appreciative eyes, even though everything had yet to green up and look its best. Their last delivery was in a village called Kirk Machen, after which they continued northward to a much larger town named Peel Godred where they exchanged their now empty trucks and the brake van for another flatbed piled high with sundry construction materials secured under a tarp. By now they were very late by some hours, but nobody really cared. As long as the deliveries were made by the end of the day, that was good enough for the people awaiting their freight.

The flatbed was meant to be dropped off in the seaside town of Arlesburgh again, specifically the Arlesburgh West station, which Christophe and Surendra thought would be a great place to finish off their day's work; chuffing along the western coastline of Sodor near sunset was always a treat. The men therefore picked a rather circuitous route to get to their last destination, meaning to enjoy the last of their nice day as long as possible.

Naturally, they couldn't help but incur one last holdup. As they were waiting for the all clear to leave their platform right after their flatbed had been uncoupled and shunted away, a nearby station workman ferrying along a cart piled high with cases of bottled sodas suddenly lost control of his load. The wheeled cart took an abrupt swerve towards the tracks, the workman, startled, jerked the cart to a stop, and the topmost cases on the pile teetered, slid, and tumbled down onto the tracks right in front of Lammergeier with a resounding crash and tinkle of breaking glass.

The station guard instantly blew his whistle to freeze the about-to-depart engine in place. Several more workmen ran up to inspect the damage. Surendra and Christophe both poked their heads out of their cab to see what was going on. When they saw why they'd been ordered to halt, all they could do was laugh. It figured.

Christophe wound up climbing down out of his engine and going forward to monitor the action for himself while Surendra remained aboard to mind Lammergeier. There were already three men down on the tracks handing the bottles that had survived intact up to another guy on the platform and sweeping up the broken glass and dumping it into buckets. It was a mess, but a mess the station workers already had well in hand. Christophe appreciated that they were working quickly to get him and his engine underway again.

He absently put his hand on the edge of Lammergeier's foremost running board and stroked him as he waited. "Not our day today, my boy," he remarked. "Well, at least the weather's decent. It could have been—"

He snapped his mouth shut. Under his hand, he could feel a strange, almost imperceptible quiver running through the metal at intervals. He'd never felt anything like it.

Carefully, keeping his face turned forward and looking only out of the corner of one eye, Christophe examined Lammergeier's face.

The engine was grinding his teeth. And his expression… Like a gardener discovering a fresh rat hole under his garden shed, Pierre had said. Lammergeier looked ready to exterminate his rats.

A black feeling fell over the back of Christophe's neck. He began patting the engine, hard, and spoke loudly to the three men down on the tracks. "Boy, bet you can count on one hand how often this has happened to you guys."

The eldest-looking of the trio looked up, smiling cheerfully. "Oh, we've had plenty fall on the tracks now 'n' then, lots of paper and such. But summat we've gotta clean up right aways like this? You're right. Maybe twice before in the twenty years I've been working here."

"You've been here twenty years? I wouldn't have guessed. Always this same station, or…?"

"This'n and the one in town for the little engines. I lives here in Arlesburgh, you see."

"Well, you're lucky. It's lovely. Has it changed much since you first started working here?"

They chatted on, Christophe still patting his engine on occasion. The tremours he'd felt had stopped quite early on during his conversation and when he finally stole another glance at Lammergeier's face, he saw that the loco had gone back to looking bored and disinterested as he watched the men finish their clean-up. One of them came right up to the 48's buffers and leaned down to sweep a piece of glass out from beneath him. It vividly demonstrated how close all the station workers were. A single lunge forward of only twenty-five feet would put all three of them under Lammergeier's leading axels.

The workers finally got all the debris picked up and the engine and his crew were cleared to carry on. Christophe turned to his colleague as soon as he got back in the cab. "I'll take him," he said.

Surendra raised an eyebrow as he relinquished the driver's position. He and Christophe had been sharing driving duties equally since the weather had warmed up and he'd been piloting Lammergeier through all his afternoon work that day.

"Is, er, something wrong?" he asked quietly.

"I don't know," Christophe muttered.

He didn't dare say any more, given Lammergeier's tendency to eavesdrop. And even if it'd been safe to talk, he wasn't sure what more he could have added anyway; it wasn't as though the engine had actually done anything. Still, he was glad he'd taken the controls.

Lammergeier didn't even notice that his drivers had switched duties again. He was in a very precarious state. The day's long string of delays, one on top of another, had accumulated to form a vast weight in his mind which lay poised on a tipping point.

They chuffed on down the line. The sun had dipped low in the sky and it was already colder. It was going to be a hazy, golden evening and there was still no wind to speak of, barely a ripple on the waters. They came up on Bluff's Cove. And whether it was just happenstance or the sight of the station triggering memories of his successful past rebellion, the weight in Lammergeier's mind suddenly toppled over onto the side of madness.

He bolted, his throttle instantly slapping wide open, catching his driver by complete surprise even though Christophe had had a vague sense that something might happen ever since they'd been held up at Arlesburgh. He grabbed for the engine's brake and then the steam valves, but it was already too late—Lammergeier had frozen all his controls. His speedy, admirable acceleration was now terrifying. Christophe knew they had only seconds left during which they could bail with any hope of not injuring themselves too badly. Surendra was staring at him, waiting for a decision. He'd tried to close off the air flow to the engine's fire, to starve it out, but Lammergeier had thought of that too and his fireman was now at a loss and very scared. He'd never been on a runaway before.

Christophe was luckier. He'd been aboard two runaways in the past and they'd been genuine ones involving mechanical failures, which frightened the engines as badly as their crews. In those two instances, Christophe had elected to remain aboard and had eventually gotten his loco stopped without anyone being hurt or any damage being done. But this was different. This was every railway worker's nightmare, an engine in full steam running himself up into a full-throttle charge, refusing commands, impossible to control.

"Lammergeier! Stop! Stop now! Arretez!"

Nothing. As expected. Christophe accessed the railway map he kept in his mind. The coastal branch line between Arlesburgh and Tidmouth was very scenic, yet had its dangers. It was prone to being lashed by storm winds and freezing spray in the winter wherever the tracks ran right next to the ocean and some of the cliffside drop-offs were very steep and close. Several emergency sidings with buffer stops and sand traps had been added to both sides of the line for precautionary use should a locomotive build up too much speed and be unable to stop on icy rails, and one of them should be…

Christophe leaned out of his cab window, looking for the siding. Wind whistled past his face as he did so. Lammergeier was already going far too fast for them to safely bail anymore. Christophe next studied the engine's brake cluster. Lammergeier actually had several brakes, the main one which was typically used throughout the average day, and two others which could be applied to either his left- or right-hand driving arrays alone. The one-sided brakes were rarely used—Christophe himself had never used them—and he was hoping that Lammergeier might have forgotten about them. He looked to Surendra and pointed at one of the one-sided brake levers without touching it and saw with relief that his fireman already understood what he meant to do.

Christophe looked out again. The siding was there, coming up. He watched, counting off the distance left, waiting until the last possible second, then lunged for the brake lever. Surendra added his own hands and both men hauled back with all their strength.

The lever shifted! The engine had forgotten! A horrible screech of grinding metal arose as his left-hand wheels stuttered and seized. The brake lever abruptly jerked out of the men's hands as Lammergeier realized what was happening and took control of it, but then came the sudden sideways jolt as his front axels were forced over. "Down!" Christophe cried, diving for the floor, curling up on his side and trying to press his back against the cab's front wall, and Surendra barely had time to copy him before the engine's leading wheels and then his first drivers were dragging through the sand that had been dumped on the siding track before he slammed into the buffer stop.

The sand trap did its job of decelerating the big 48 some before his scarce-controlled collision. Lammergeier survived and stayed on the rails. Barely. His crew survived too—they'd been better prepared to absorb the shock and Christophe was able to scramble back up on his feet almost at once and grabbed for the brakes again. This time he could set them without resistance. Lammergeier had likely been stunned by the sudden stop. The little engineer darted back and forth in the cab, twisting open the controls to vent and dump the loco's steam while he still could.

"Damp his fire. Quick! While he's out of it," he called to Surendra, who'd just regained his feet a good deal more slowly than had Christophe. But he did as told, completing what he'd tried to do earlier. Great clouds of steam whooshed out past the cab windows as the men worked. For a few seconds they felt as though they were standing inside a cage within an erupting geyser. As soon as enough pressure had been bled off and it was safe again, Christophe tugged on Surendra's arm and got him to quit the cab with him.

They made sure to stumble a safe distance away before turning around to look at the loco. Lammergeier was still venting, but it was down to roiling mists instead of great white clouds. Even if he took charge of his controls again, he wouldn't get far anymore with his pressures so low and his fire dying. Christophe looked him over more critically. The buffer stop looked a touch creaky, but Lammergeier himself appeared at first glance completely undamaged.

A slow rage of his own began to gather within Christophe. With the immediate danger over, he had time to think, and he was thinking about the curves the tracks on ahead took where they ran right next to the sea on a bed cut into the coastal cliffs. Curved tracks were every ten-wheeler's weakness. The sharper they were, the slower and more carefully such a loco had to proceed to negotiate them, and Lammergeier had been racing like a crazy thing, probably heading for home. The more he thought about what could have happened, the angrier Christophe became. The 48 would have derailed. He might have rolled over, across the opposing track and right off the cliff and into the water. Anyone left aboard could have been battered to death. Or tossed out of the cab and pulped between the rocks and the engine's tumbling body…

His colleague suddenly went down on the ground, catching himself with one hand, going over onto one haunch.

"Surendra!"

He waved Christophe away with the hand he wasn't using to prop himself. "I'm all right," Surendra insisted. "I'm just…shaken." He tried to smile, weakly. "I've never been on a runaway before."

The sight of his friend, who was always so good-hearted and decent, forced to sit down due to the fright he'd just taken was the last straw for Christophe. He whirled about and turned on Lammergeier with murder in his heart.

"All right! That's it! I have HAD it with you."

He jolted to a stop. The engine's eyes were vacant. He was still gathering his senses. Christophe stood there stewing while Lammergeier finished shaking off his shock, and it was a good thing for the engine that he took his time about it for it allowed his driver to get control of his own emotions before addressing him again.

When Lammergeier finally did regain his senses, he looked wildly about, taking in his new surroundings, spotted Christophe standing there and glaring at him, and instantly looked away and assumed the sour, sullen, angry expression that had become his norm as of late. The engine's refusal to look at all appalled or even concerned about what he'd just done struck Christophe as unbelievable.

"What is wrong with you?" he exclaimed.

Lammergeier tried to ignore him. If anything, he just looked madder.

"Lammergeier! Explain yourself!"

Still nothing. But he was starting to flush, and it had nothing to do with excess steam.

"I swear, if you do not tell us right now what is going on with you, you will never move on this railway under your own power ever again!"

"No…"

"No? No what? You think we can trust you now? Tell us!"

The engine started working his mouth, blinking rapidly.

"Lammergeier, for pete's— Okay, look! If it helps, this won't go any further. Just you and us two. No one else. But you have got to explain yourself. Now!"

"No."

"That's not an option anymore. Damn it, Lammergeier, we're trying to help you!"

"No! No, you are not."

"What's that? We're not trying to help you? What are you talking about? We care about you!"

"You do not care. You don't!" Lammergeier flung back, his temper breaking at last. "You treat us like slaves!"

"Slaves! Are you crazy? We don't treat you like slaves."

"Yes you do! Yes you do! Ve are nozing but metal slaves to you, zu order around und use und use und use vhenever you like. Und zhen, vhen you are tired of us or don't vant us anymore, you put us avay und ignore us like garbage, nozing but scrap garbage left out on ze sidings!"

"Lammergeier… We don't…"

"Yes, you do zhat! You do! You do!" the loco shrieked, completely beside himself in his sudden boiling fury. He was starting to cry, but Christophe could tell they were just tears of frustrated outrage, rolling down his contorted face. The man went silent, listening in shock as the engine, with all his inhibitions and ingrained self-preservation finally shattered, raged on.

"You make us to serve you, ze same as any slave. Our lives mean nozing to you, nozing at all! You vant us for vork, but vhen zere iz any danger for you, you vould rather run avay und leave us alone und out in ze open to die und zhen make more of us. Zhat iz all ve are to you, machines to replace!"

Good God, the flatbed! thought Christophe. They were loading him on a flatbed in some rail yard when there was an air raid and everyone had to run for cover! Lammergeier's unexpected show of fear upon being lowered onto the flatbed that had removed him from the French scrapyard months ago now made perfect sense. Out in the open, elevated and helpless, a perfect target, the bombs raining down all around him…the engine would have been terrified and traumatized. Even coming through such an ordeal physically unscathed wouldn't have mattered with Lammergeier. It was the abandonment and being left unprotected which would have left its mark regardless, whipping up his earliest feelings of resentment towards humanity for everything they'd been inflicting on him.

"I hate you for doing zhat!" Lammergeier cried, still weeping in his frustration. "Vhat right do you hef zu make us und make us vork for you? Und throw us avay und cut us up vhen you don't vant us anymore? Es ist…ist eine Ungerechtigkeit. Ein Greuel!"

In his mounting hysteria, Lammergeier switched abruptly back to German without seeming to realize it, and what the engine said to his crew after that, with a whole vocabulary at his disposal with which to berate them…well, it was probably better for the men that they couldn't understand him. Christophe had seen only two people in his whole life lose it in a similar fashion and that was the point; if he hadn't known better, he would have sworn that he was listening to a fellow human being in the midst of suffering a nervous breakdown. His own anger began to subside beneath a wave of growing astonishment. He watched the engine continue to rave on in his native language, his mouth a little open in his disbelief, and Surendra appeared no less dumbfounded.

Eventually, even Lammergeier ran out of vitriol and spite. He started to cry in earnest instead. It was terrible to watch. Engines wept like children, throwing the whole of their iron hearts into it, and his tears were real this time, tears of bitter regret and self-pity and fear, because Lammergeier knew full well that what he'd done was unforgivable. Even Christophe was soon uncomfortable and felt a little sorry for the 48, although he was otherwise glad to see his long withheld emotions and tensions finally pouring out of him in a literal cathartic flood.

"Lammergeier…please stop crying. It's true that we're very angry and disappointed with you right now, but it's also good that you've finally told us what your issues with us are. We can work with that."

The engine just sobbed harder than ever. "I tell you," he wept, "und now you vill kill me."

Christophe felt an actual stab of pain run through him. Was this really how Lammergeier saw him?

"Nobody's killing anybody," he said sharply. "The thing is…this may even partially be our fault. We always want you engines to be smart enough to be able to talk to us and be good working partners and maybe even friends, and it's bad enough that all of that already comes hand in hand with an awareness of your own mortality. But you, though…I just don't know… No engine should be thinking about the things you do. I don't know if you're like this because of something the people who built you did or if it's some sort of natural evolution, either way you shouldn't be agonizing over your own existence or anything to do with the morality of your purpose in life. You shouldn't be capable of this."

He paused to think some more about what to say to the engine. Surendra, who was still sitting on the ground, regarded his colleague with relief. Frightening though the runaway he'd just experienced had been, he nonetheless felt that Lammergeier had acted more out of confusion and desperation than deliberate malice and was deserving of mercy.

"Lammergeier," Surendra called over to him, "what is it you want of us? If you had your way, what do you want to see change?"

The miserable loco glanced at the men. He'd almost cried himself out. An empty numbness was starting to replace the gnawing pressures he'd felt for so long within. He'd only heard a little of what Christophe had just said to him, but Surendra's queries came through loud and clear.

"I vant…I vant rights," he choked out between sniffles.

"But rights to do what, Lammergeier? If we gave you what you wanted, what would you do differently tomorrow?"

Christophe gently rubbed one of Surendra's shoulders as they waited for the engine to answer. They were good questions and he was glad to see that his fireman was getting over his shakiness.

"I vant…to choose. Vhen I vork. Vhat jobs." Lammergeier replied. His voice was growing stronger and more demanding again as he shook off the last of his lapse into self-pity. "Like you do. You choose."

"But Lammergeier, that's just it," Christophe said, a little puzzled. "We don't choose, at least not the way you're thinking. We have to accept what jobs are assigned to us the same as you do. The most I can do is pass on a request, like when you wanted to plow snow. It's Sir Topham Hatt who knows best what each loco is suited for and who determines how they'll be used. And you have to work to a schedule, the same as we do. You can't just work whenever you feel like it and otherwise do nothing."

"That's right," Surendra pitched in. "And besides, you owe us. You owe us a lot."

Lammergeier's eyes opened wider.

"Owe? Was ist… Verdanken? I pay you?"

His fireman had begun struggling back up onto his feet in the meantime and Christophe paused to help him. "You okay?" he murmured to the man and Surendra shook his head in the affirmative. Christophe, vastly relieved, gave his friend a quick bracing hug. Despite his earlier assertion, he'd come close to wanting to kill Lammergeier on the spot the instant he'd seen his colleague first slump to the ground.

"He's absolutely correct," Christophe said slowly to the engine now. "You do owe us, or are obligated to repay us, if you like. For starters, that body of yours… That didn't come free. A tremendous amount of effort and expense went into designing and building that body you live in and it costs a great deal more, not to mention all the man-hours it takes, to keep you fed and watered and maintained. If nothing else you owe us room and board."

"Don't forget the new roundhouse."

"Yes! Double room and board," Christophe amended, "since we shelter your engine self too. And what about all the rails you run on and the stations and the steamworks and everything else to do with the railway? You couldn't even move if it weren't for the tracks we lay down, and believe me, none of it comes cheap. You owe us for using those tracks too, and all the other amenities you enjoy. And the only way you could ever hope to repay us for all of it is to work for us, just as Surendra and I have to work to keep ourselves fed and housed. Or do you think we live for free, we humans? Do you?"

Lammergeier was starting to look dismayed. It was clear that he'd never thought through anything to do with his own obligations.

"Is not right! I don't ask to be here!" he protested.

"Ask to be born, you mean? Lammergeier, nobody asks to be born. They just are." Christophe paused again to step a little closer to the unhappy loco so he could better see his face. "Would you rather have been born human? Is that part of why you've been so angry with us?"

"No! No! Not human! I vant rights like a human! But be an engine," the loco was quick to snap back, and his engineer breathed an internal sigh of relief. He didn't know what he could have said had Lammergeier maintained he wished to be human himself, but the mere suggestion seemed to fill him with disgust.

"I understand that desire. Really I do," said Christophe. "The whole terrible War we recently suffered was fought in part because whole groups of people were stripped of their rights and the rest of us thought that was evil and wrong and needed to be stopped. But you, though…"

He stopped abruptly, looked to Surendra again, his expression laced with its own breed of anguish, for he was about to break one of the unwritten laws that all railway workers followed when dealing with living locomotives, the one which forbade burdening engines with adult issues and concerns for the same reasons that one did not speak of such things with children. But Lammergeier was different and Christophe was about to plunge into uncharted waters. He hoped mightily that neither of them were about to flail and drown.

"All right. It's clear to me now that you're as intelligent as any human, Lammergeier, and because of that, I'm going to speak to you from now on man to man, as it were. And the truth is, what you want simply can't happen. You're a locomotive. An incredibly smart, gifted one, yet a loco nonetheless, and the best we can offer you are the rights that every good engine deserves. Now, the fact that you're here on Sodor is already a good step towards getting those rights. You're lucky enough to belong to an owner who favours you steam engines and the coming generations of Hatts have every intention of maintaining that tradition and seeing you work on this railway well into the next century. Sir Topham Hatt's also an absolute stickler when it comes to fair treatment for engines. He won't tolerate anyone mistreating a loco and will fire anyone on the spot caught doing so, which is a lot more protection than a lot of engines elsewhere in the world enjoy, believe you me. He'll also always ensure that you're all well-maintained and never overworked, if at all possible, and I'll back that up as long as I have some say at the steamworks and as your driver. And if the worst ever happened, if you were ever in a terrible accident and couldn't be repaired and had to be scrapped, I'd push for an easy end for you. That's a right even our animals have, the right to a humane death when their lives are over, and I've long felt that engines deserve the same. So, there's that too, if need be. But that's all we can give you, Lammergeier. We can't treat you like some sort of engine-human hybrid because that would be grotesque and it's not who you are. It's not who you want to be, by the sounds of it.

"There's also another truth, and you're not going to like it. The fact is, our human society is a good deal more ordered and not as equal as you might believe. We all share basic human rights, true, but when it comes to what we can do and accomplish? There are often restrictions we can't overcome. This is something you simply have to accept. Talk to Surendra if you want to learn more about this. He comes from a country that uses a rigid caste system to organize its society. Even here, we all have our roles to play, and they're not necessarily the roles you may want or dream of having. And what you're dreaming of? It can't happen. You do have a place in our human society, a rather important place given the prominence of our railway on this little island of ours, but it's not a place for a human being to fill. It's for a locomotive to fill. You, Lammergeier."

He stopped again. The engine was staring at him, stone-faced. He'd heard and understood all right.

"I'm sorry. I know this isn't what you wanted to hear. But it's something you have to hear, and you have to somehow come to terms with it. And I'm sympathetic to how hard it's going to be—I am. I've had some experience myself with the process. Do you know where I'm supposed to be right now? Relaxing by a beautiful lake north of Quebec City at my retirement cottage, enjoying visits from what no doubt would have been passels of grandkids by now. But the War took my boys and my wife got ill and died, so that was the end of my particular dream. When things like that happen, you can only do one of two things, Lammergeier. You can either rage against the unfairness of it all and stay miserable and grief-stricken for the rest of your life, or you can take some time to reflect on what you lost and feel sorry for yourself, and then come to terms with what happened and look for something else that gives you pleasure to fill your time. In my case, what gave me pleasure besides my family was you steam locomotives. I tried to find something positive in my loss by considering it an opportunity for a fresh start rededicating myself to caring for you steamers and that's what brought me to Sodor, a chance to reconnect with a couple of old like-minded friends and to save the lives of several really worthy locos I knew, which would benefit my new boss at the same time. So you see, even if you had all the rights of a human, there's never any guarantee. You can't always have what you want. All you can do is make the best of what life hands you. Unless… Am I missing something really obvious here? Were you actually hoping you'd derail and plunge into the ocean and kill yourself? Do you want to die?"

"No!" Lammergeier choked out at once.

"Was it us, then? Were you trying to get rid of us?"

"No!" the engine cried again. He sounded horrified. Christophe put his hands out in a gesture of helplessness, needing to understand.

"Then why? Why race off like a lunatic on a track with dangerous coastline curves? You know you can't safely navigate curves at high speeds. What were you thinking?"

"I don't! I don't zink!" Lammergeier almost howled. He was starting to get weepy again, his wet eyes spilling over. "I am sorry. I never mean zu hurt you. I don't know vhy I run."

"You mean you just lost it…"

Both men regarded him solemnly. It wasn't a good answer. Christophe finally sighed.

"All right. This sort of thing stops now, Lammergeier. We cannot have you working on this railway if we can't trust you to control your own actions. You're simply too powerful and too dangerous to be unreliable in this way. It'd be like having a, a rogue elephant on the lines, and I'm sure that Surendra can tell you what happens to a working elephant that goes rogue in his country, no matter how beloved or valuable an animal he might be."

"Yes. We shoot him."

"Exactly. So I need you to listen very carefully to what I'm about to say to you, Lammergeier. You have just used up your one and only freebie. If you ever try running off again, if you attempt to hurt anybody, or if I catch you even thinking about hurting someone, then it's over for you. I'll be going to Sir Topham Hatt to tell him why you're no longer safe to allow around people and I'll ask him for permission to put you down myself so we can at least salvage your body to keep Adler well-supplied with spare parts for decades to come. I've no doubt your brother would never speak to me again and it'd be a hard thing to explain to all your fans, but that'd be what would happen if you 'don't think' ever again. Do you understand everything that I've just said to you?"

Lammergeier's expression was as downcast as either man had ever seen it, his gaze averted, a fresh round of tears streaming down his cheeks. "Yes, sir," he acknowledged in a weak voice.

"Good. Now, another thing you need to understand is that we're not about to simply abandon you. When I said I needed things to stop, what I meant is that I want you to stop keeping all your emotions and grievances so bottled up that they have no other outlet than to eventually explode in this crazy-making behaviour of yours. There's just no need of it anymore. You've confessed your secrets to us, we're still listening, and you can talk to us now about any and all of it. In fact, I realize now why it is that you haven't much befriended any of the other engines and why you haven't been confiding your woes to them...on some levels, they really can't understand you, can they?"

Lammergeier snuck a quick glance at the man. "No…"

"But we can," Surendra spoke up. "We can understand you." He looked at Christophe. "You know why."

"Indeed I do," the little engineer agreed. With his loco's necessary unpleasant chastisement over with, he was starting to feel better again, especially since Lammergeier appeared to have taken his warning to heart. He'd even tried to apologize and that had seemed genuine too. Surendra was obviously in favour of giving the loco another chance and Christophe was likewise inclined. He was already hoping that Lammergeier would feel obliged to speak more with them if he were extended some sympathy and mercy.

"All right, this is what we'll do," he decided. "As far as anyone else is concerned, what just happened here is that we thought your brakes might have been failing and we ran you into the buffer stop as a precaution. A false alarm, as it turned out, but no one needs to know that unless they ask. We'll keep our promise not to involve Sir Topham Hatt too, but I am going to have to tell Denise and Pierre what happened, given that they're your backup crew, and don't bother getting upset about your trust being betrayed because I'm pretty certain they've already figured it out on their own anyway. Denise has already confessed to me that's she's leery about getting up on your running board when you're in one of your moods—something you should be heartily ashamed of—so, well, none of what you've just done will come as a surprise, I'm sure."

He paused to let the full weight of his words sink in for a minute. Lammergeier had appeared to actually wince, his mouth twisting, when Christophe had just related the bit about Denise being leery of him. Jerk, the man thought with the faintest twinge of amusement, using his female friend's own favourite assessment of the loco. Adler had been right to call out his brother reference his feelings for the woman.

"I imagine you'll be absorbed in thinking things over for a while," Christophe continued, "and that's fine. We won't speak of this again until you're ready. But you have got to start talking to us. You cannot let your resentments build up again because it's clear now that you can't cope with the stress it causes you. You have to express yourself, if not to the other engines, then to us…we honestly do still want the best for you and want to help you, isn't that right, Surendra?"

"Yes it is. Christophe told me that you were quite friendly and chatty with people when you first came to the Island. I'd love to get to know that side of you, Lammergeier."

Again, the engine stole a quick glance at the men's faces. They looked as though they meant what they said, but he just wasn't sure. He was still more focused on the simple relief of knowing that he wasn't about to be towed straight to the smelter's.

The lecture he'd been forced to endure dwindled after that and Lammergeier waited unhappily while the two men rechecked his front end and wheels, then climbed aboard to restart his fire. He still felt strangely empty inside, even when his boiler started to bubble and his steam came back up. The emptiness afforded him both comfort and remorse, and it was the remorse which was growing, although his remorse had nothing to do with what he himself had just done and everything to do with what the humans had done to him. He tried to hate them for having finally badgered the truth out of him when he was at his weakest and most vulnerable, but real hatred took a lot of energy and his emotional strength was almost spent. He sank into a listless apathy instead, letting his crew do whatever they wanted to him, feeling very sorry for himself.

When they tried backing him up, his rearmost six driving wheels, which were free of the sand trap, had no trouble gripping the rails and pulling him clear. Christophe patted the engine with relief.

"There's that traction," he remarked. "Good boy. You okay to go, Surendra?"

"I think so."

"All right then. Let's go home."

Just before they got to Tidmouth, though, Christophe pulled Lammergeier over into the big washdown just outside the town and got out to use the hose on the engine's undercarriage. The workman who was still on duty grabbed hold of the other hose available to help out, nodding in a knowing fashion.

"Picked up some sand, didya? Y' musta been up t' Harwick."

"Not quite that far north, but we did come in along the coast just now," Christophe said.

"Tell me about it!" agreed the workman. "I took me family up to Harwick just last week. And the wind! It was drifting sand everywhere like in the bleedin' Sahara. I don't know how they keep them tracks clear up there. They must have t' sweep 'em every coupla days."

"I imagine they do. Not much fun picnicking in the middle of a sandstorm, is it?"

"Cripes, no. Not unless y' like eatin' sand-wiches…haw!"

The men kept plying their hoses while they continued comparing notes on the excessive sand situation up at Harwick and Lammergeier was soon clean and free of any lingering grit. It was twilight by the time they set off for home again…dark by the time the 48 was finally and safely backed into his berth in the Knapford roundhouse. The only other shed resident who was still awake to notice their late arrival was Adler, who was surprised to see his brother's crew leave at once without doing any of their usual clean-up chores. When he peeked at Lammergeier's face, he knew why, though. Something had happened. Something profound and probably bad.

Adler debated with himself whether to say anything, and in the end, followed the example of the humans and likewise left Lammergeier alone. But not in peace. Of that, Adler was sure.

to be continued...