Between comments from his father regarding gyrostats and luminiferous ether (which Lloyd was disinclined to believe in), the boy produced a number of foolscap pages with fine duckquill blueprints and infinitesimal calculations, as well as several attempts at working models-along with the pregnant speculation that “seen from the sphere, the past might lie beyond the future.” But it was all to no avail. The iron of the Ark was hopelessly heavy and dense. It was all wrong. Everything.

Frustrated to the point of violence, Lloyd could not work out how to maintain a constant speed along the track, or the more difficult technical issue of how to sustain the spiral motion of the sphere without the source of power, the sails and windmills, impeding the action. He needed more and better equipment-more tools, more resources-more than what the rank barn and the dust trap of Zanesville had to offer. Ever so much more. In his young heart, he raged for precision instruments, a proper assembly space, books (books!), ideas, materials, money-and, most of all, someone to talk to, someone who truly had his wits about him. Someone of his own ilk.

Most infuriating of all, he thought he had seen the solution in a dream. Hephaestus was sympathetic in this regard. How often had he woken just before their rooster in a helpless panic at the fading vision of some grand new invention! That was what had happened to the High Speed Chicken Plucker and the Musical Millet Grinder.

Being a blacksmith who fancied himself an engineer, and a modern man of fire and steel, once he had recognized the need for power and motion Hephaestus felt that the question could be resolved with steam, and so set about collecting boilerplate and rocker arms and designing a shining piston-driven beast that looked like a cross between a grasshopper locomotive and a calliope. But the harder he worked and scratched his head, the thirstier he got for elderberry brandy and the more he realized that time was running out. Their money already had. He was trying to build the prototype for a new form of power, and day by day the hourglasses emptied themselves, the beeswax candles burned down-and one day the grandfather clock fell over in an exhausted clash of chimes, glass, and splintered wood.