The Rise of Ransom City (2 page)

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
in Parts,
written on The Road between Here and The Western Rim, and mostly On The Run,
I expect
containing an explanation of sorts and
An Apology
of a
Kind
for Some Recent Events In The Great War
and
some advertisements
for
Ransom City,
soon to rise
In The West, “THE CITY OF THE FUTURE”
and
some interesting facts
regarding
The Ransom Light-Bringing Apparatus and the “MIRACLE AT WHITE ROCK”
and
a sketch of a dinner
with
Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson, formerly of the
Jasper City Evening Post
and
A mammoth
and
a full and fair accounting of the
Crimes
of The Northern Lighting Corporation and of
The Inner Secrets
of Money and Power in this world and a lamentation
for
the
DAMARIS
and
for
Mr. Carver and
for all of
JASPER and
for
Adela and
for Everybody Else I have Forgotten
with some maxims
for
Success In Business and
Some Useful
PRINCIPLES
of
Exercise and Diet and
Some Invaluable
ADVICE
for
What To Do Should You Run Foul of WOLVES.

My name is Harry Ransom. Friends call me Hal or Harry, or by one of a half-dozen aliases, of which I have had more than any honest man should. Don’t let that shake your confidence in me. I was a victim of circumstance. Often I went by
Professor
Harry Ransom, and though I never had anything you might call a formal Education I believe I earned that title. For the last few years it’s been
Excuse me, Mr. Ransom, sir,
from those beneath me and just plain
Ransom
from those above. I never cared for any of that and now I am free and on the road again and nothing but my name and my wits and my words.

If you know my name maybe it’s as the inventor of the Ransom Light-Bringing Process, or maybe you believe in all that secret-weapon stuff they wrote in the newspapers, in which case I intend to set you straight. Or you may know me as the man who lost the Battle of Jasper City, or won it, depending on where you stand in matters of politics. If you’re an Officer of the Line who has intercepted this in the mails, then you know me as a Wanted Person but maybe you know to think twice before coming after me.

If you’re reading this in the future maybe you know me as the man who founded Ransom City. It lies out in the unmade lands, or it will, one day. Maybe as you read this it’s a bright new century and Ransom City is a great and glittering metropolis and there’s a big bronze statue of me in a park somewhere— if I have any say in the matter there will be parks— well, who knows? I am an optimist. Maybe one day these pages will be read by every boy and girl in the West. Your grandfather will look over your shoulder and say,
I remember old Harry Ransom, I saw him back in Nowheresville one time, that was a hell of a show but the bastard still owes me money.

I am writing from no place in particular. All I’ll say is that it is a big red barn not so different in architectural grandeur from one of those old-world cathedrals you see in picture-books sometimes, although I guess more full of straw and dung. I have never been in a cathedral but I have been in a whole lot of barns. There are thousands like it in the Territory. The fields all around and the mountains in the distance are brown like an old coat. The man who owns the barn and the cows and the horses and all the straw and the dung is a good fellow, not educated but one of nature’s Free-Thinkers, and when we strike out West again he will come with us.

I am writing on a typewriter that I salvaged from the old man’s office after Jasper City fell. Naturally it’s the very latest state-of-the-art machine. Nothing but the best was good enough for the old man. There’s a bullet-hole in its casing and some water-damage to its innards. Nobody thought I could get it working again but I did not get where I am today by being a fool, at least not in matters mechanical. In spite of my efforts the letter
R
still sticks one time out of four, and that is no small inconvenience for a man who likes to talk about himself as much as I do. On the other hand the machine types in triplicate, through an arrangement of carbon papers and clever little levers, so that when I type ransom it echoes across one-two-three sheets of white paper. The old man used this device to convey orders with the greatest possible efficiency. I want to talk to a lot of people as I go so this is a great time-saver.

Well, we moved on from the big red barn. One of the Line’s Heavier-Than-Air Vessels was spotted overhead. It circled, writing a kind of black-smoke question mark in the sky. Most likely it had nothing to do with us— there’s fighting not far south of us, or so I hear— but we’re taking no chances. We left by night and took the road west. I am sitting and typing under the shadow of a big old cottonwood tree in a valley of rank grass and blackberry bushes and old tin-plated junk and fat dragonflies. Our numbers have been swelled by the barn-owner’s younger son and two of his friends, and I have just eaten one of his first-rate apricots, but the man himself stayed behind to sell off his furniture and settle his affairs. If all goes well we shall all meet up at a certain location on the Western Rim.

I left a triplicate of letters in his care all about who we are and where we are going and what we are going to do when we get there, by which I mean the founding of Ransom City. We are going West. I waxed eloquent about the glories of the free city of the future and true democracy and the Ransom Process and the parks and the tall buildings I have planned in my mind’s eye and all the rest of it, and how every person who wants should follow us. One of the letters is to go to my onetime friend the famous Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson, formerly of the
Jasper City Evening Post,
* one is to go to the editor of the
Melville City Gazette,
and because I do not know any other journalists, the third is to go to an editor of Mr. Barn-Owner’s choosing.

I thought everything would be easy to explain but it is not. I mean to set the story straight, because a lot of things have been said about me or by me that are not exactly true. It is not easy to tell a true story. Most of my practice with words has been selling things, which is not the same at all, it turns out.

I am not yet thirty but I have had an odd kind of life and I have a lot to say before I go. Anyhow this is my AUTOBIOGRAPHY I guess, and so I will call this CHAPTER ONE, and below that introductions, just like a real honest-to-goodness book.

*Of course, there never was a
Jasper City Evening Post
. I was an
Evening News
man. Mr. Ransom’s memory fails him here, not for the first or last time. —EMC

When I was a boy I read the
Autobiography
of Mr. Alfred Baxter, the late great business magnate of Jasper City. We knew him even in the backwater town of my boyhood, and I read his
Autobiography
half a dozen times if I read it once. The book told of how he came up from nothing to triumph over adversity and become the richest and grandest and free-est man in the world. I read it by candlelight and I learned it like it was sacred Scripture. I can still quote some of it today.

There is a moment in the life of every man of greatness when he sees History clearly;

when the Spirit of the Age stands like a woman before him;

when he can seize the reins of Fortune!

I would not presume to call myself a man of greatness, but as it happens there were a few moments back there when it was my hand that seized the reins of History and Fortune, if only by accident or because nobody else wanted to or while I thought I was doing something else.

Mr. Baxter also liked to say that things come in threes, in business and history and Fortune. I will go the old man one better. By my count I have held history in my hands on four occasions, and if Fortune favors me like they say she favors the bold then the founding of Ransom City will be the fifth.

First I will tell how I saved the lives of the lovely Dr. Liv Alverhuysen and the horrible John Creedmoor and thereby changed the course of the Great War too, not that I meant to at the time.

But of course when Mr. Alfred Baxter sat down to write the story of his life and how he rose from Rags to Riches, as they say, he very sensibly began in the natural place, which is to say with Rags. You do not start right in with History and Greatness and the Future, that is no way to make the sale. And so in Mr. Baxter’s first chapter he told us how he was born in a pauper’s room in the bad part of Jasper City and he was the seventh and hungriest of seven hungry children, and so on and so on. So that’s how I’ll begin too.

I was born in the town of East Conlan, thirty years and a little more shy of the new century. I was the fourth of four children. I do not know the exact day of my birth. My father was scrupulous in his business affairs but did not make note of the date, and my sisters all remember it differently. I like to think my mother would have recalled it had she lived. I believe that I recall my birth as a kind of red light and terrible pressure but when I tell people this they get skeptical, and I do not want to strain your faith in me too soon.

East Conlan is a coal-mining town some four or five days’ ride north of Jasper City, on the northern edge of the Tri-City Territory and not far south of the Line’s lands. There is no West Conlan and so far as I know there never was. There are two mines up on the hills at opposite ends of a long straight road and the town of East Conlan is laid out in the depression between them. When I was a boy one was operated by the Conlan Coal Company and the other belonged to a Mr. Grady, and sometimes when Grady’s men and the CCC’s men met in the middle of town there was fighting, and the myths and epics on which I was schooled as a boy were stories of how Big Joe from the Grady mine had met the Bierce Brothers outside Shad’s Bar and beaten both of them black and blue with a pick-handle for saying . . .

Well the business of coal never interested me. Once when I was a boy no more than knee-high I met Mr. Grady. He was a very old man even then and there was something dry and dusty as coal about him. He had come to my father to make arrangements for someone’s burial— as I remember it the burial in question was his own, though that may be a child’s imagination at work. He patted me on the shoulder and asked if I would come work for him one day. I told him that I would sooner flee town and live wild among the Folk, even at the risk that they might eat me. He asked why and I said that coal-mining was always the same: the going down into the dark and the coming up again, day in day out, since men first set foot in the West, and that a new century was coming and I had my eyes on the future, when men would not toil like beasts. Mr. Grady gave me a quarter-dollar, and told my father that I had a clever tongue but no sense of when to use it, and that that quarter-dollar would likely be the last honest money I would earn.