The green haze over New City stank of burnt oil mixed with sulfur fumes from Compton
Paperworks. A lone balloon lifted off Compton's tower trailing a large sign advertising
something. All Pigeon could see was Clara's face and her long arm draped across the copy.
Clara could sell anything.
He checked the time on his pocket watch: quarter past.
The portal opened behind him with a belch of steam. The destination: the Badlands. The
goal: to drag that fool Roosevelt back to New City. The means: this time and space folding
technological wonder that may not work.
It did.
Great title. And wonderfully detailed and atmospheric, as always. I really do hope you are writing a novel.
ReplyDelete(And I went down a rabbit hole when I DuckDuckGoed "Compton Paperworks" and Arthur Compton dominated the results. I am still wandering around this bit from Wikipedia: Compton championed the idea of human freedom based on quantum indeterminacy, and invented the notion of amplification of microscopic quantum events to bring chance into the macroscopic world. In his somewhat bizarre mechanism, he imagined sticks of dynamite attached to his amplifier, anticipating the Schrödinger's cat paradox, which was published in 1935.)