to figure: If he armed it for this train, and ran, she'd go off
while we were on location and we'd be drenched in searchlights and spray
guns. Already, through his fingers, I felt the hum in the rails that
every tank-town-reared kid knows. I turned up my ICEG. "All right,
Clyde, get back. Arm it when she's gone past, for the next one."

I felt him grin, felt his lips form words: "I'll do better than that,
Willie. Look, Daddy-o, no hands!" He slid over the edge and rested
elbows and ribs on the raw tie ends.

We're all acrobats in the Corps. But I didn't like this act one little
bit. Even if he could hang by his hands, the heavy train would jolt him
off. But I swallowed my thoughts.

He groped with his foot, contacted a sloping beam, and brought his other
foot in. I felt a dull, scraping slither under his moccasin soles.
"Frost," he thought calmly, rubbed a clear patch with the edge of his
foot, put his weight on it, and transferred his hands to the beam with a
twist we hadn't learned in Corps school. My heart did a double-take; one
slip and he'd be off into the gorge, and the frost stung, melting under
his bare fingers. He lay in the trough of the massive H-beam, slid down
about twenty feet to where it made an angle with an upright, and wedged
himself there. It took all of twenty seconds, really. But I let out a
breath as if I'd been holding it for minutes.

As he settled, searchlights began skimming the bridge. If he'd been
running, he'd have been shot to a sieve. As it was, they'd never see him
in the mingled glare and black.

His heart hadn't even speeded up beyond what was required by exertion.
The train roared around a shoulder and onto the viaduct, shaking it like
an angry hand. But as the boxcars thunder-clattered above his head, he
was peering into the gulf at a string of feeble lights threading the
bottom. "There's the flywalk, Willie. They know their stuff. But we'll
get it." Then, as the caboose careened over and the searchlights cut
off, "Well, that gives us ten minutes before the patrol comes back."

* * * * *

He levered onto his side, a joint at a time, and began to climb the
beam. Never again for me, even by proxy! You just _couldn't_ climb that
thing nohow! The slope was too steep. The beam was too massive to
shinny, yet too narrow to lie inside and elbow up. The metal was too
smooth, and scummed with frost. His fingers were beginning to numb.
And--he _was_ climbing