The Movement

Chapter Five - Part 6

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Troy stood by, awaiting the train’s loud, roaring arrival. He looked down and scraped his shoe on the concrete floor, then looked up. The train appeared without a sound.

How smooth it was! thought Troy.

The train was ultra sleek and silver in color, looking almost like a long, giant bullet. It was double-decked, with one section of the train above the track and the other hanging below it, the track sandwiched in between the two sections. Troy sat down in a seat along the perimeter of the cab.

A female’s microphoned voice politely announced the departure: “Please take your seats, we will be moving in just a short moment.”

Soon after the train began to move, without a sound.

How smooth it was! thought Troy in disbelief.

Troy looked out the window behind him. Lined up along the sides of the track was an endless line of six-foot windmills, each twirling wildly as the train passed by. Stumped, Troy tapped a nearby male passenger who was reading behind his spectacles.

“Excuse me, sir. What do those little windmills along the sides of the train track do?” asked Troy.

The man placed his fingers around the frame of his reading glasses and lowered them so his eyes peered just above the lenses.

“You serious?” he asked.

Troy seemed puzzled by the man’s shock of his obliviousness, which quickly turned into shame.

Blushing beet red, Troy replied, “Yes, sir. This is my first train flight.”

The man removed his reading glasses, folding them up and tucking them into his shirt collar.

“Name’s Carl. Carl Langford,” he introduced. “What brings you to St. Louis?”

“Troy Duckworth,” he replied, extending his arm to shake hands with the man. “It’s nice to meet you. But I’m not exactly sure. I’m a PhD student at Princeton and was just assigned a residency as Barber Hall, I recently received an invitation from President Barber to meet with him, that’s all I know.”

“Wow!” shouted the man with enthusiastic excitement. “You don’t know what you’re going there for?”

Troy couldn’t help but smile at the man’s obvious astonishment.

“No, sir. I wish I did, but I don’t. I just hope it’s for something good, not bad,” said Troy.

“Ha! Well if it were for something bad you’d already been arrested, my friend. I’d bet my bottom dollar it’s for something spectacular. Say, what’re you studying for?” asked Carl.

“Well, I’m studying Environmental Technology, but my two Bachelor’s degrees are in History and Business, with a Masters in Political Science,” explained Troy.

“Well gosh be darn it, son. You’re some kind of genius, aren’t you?” he asked rhetorically.

Troy laughed, blushing once again. He didn’t take compliments well. It embarrassed him.

“Ha! Well, you could say I studied a little bit as a child,” he said.

“So you’s some sort a genius, and you don’t know what them little white windmills are for?” he asked, surprised.

Troy’s blushing continued to darken, almost as dark as the blood beneath his skin. He looked out the window again, eyes squinting as he tried to focus in on the twirling windmills while the train silently and smoothly zoomed by hundreds of thousands of them every few seconds.