Bonnie was about to go on by herself. Smith took her arm for a moment. “You stay close, honey,” he told her, “only concentrate on looking and listening; let me and George do the hard work. Take the hard hat off so you can hear better. Okay?”

“Well,” she agreed, “for the moment.” But she wanted a bigger share of the action later. He agreed. Share and share alike. He showed her where to find the steps that led to the open cab of an eighty-five-ton Euclid mountain mover. She sat up there, like a lookout in a crow’s nest, while he and Hayduke went to work.

Busywork. Cutting and snipping, snapping and wrenching. They crawled all over a Caterpillar D-9A, world’s greatest bulldozer, the idol of all highwaymen. Put so much sand in the crankcase that Hayduke couldn’t get the dipstick reinserted all the way. He trimmed it short with the rod-and-bolt cutter. Made it fit. Sand in the oil intake. He climbed into the cab, tried to turn the fuel-tank cap. Wouldn’t turn. Taking hammer and chisel he broke it loose, unscrewed it, poured four quarts of good high-energy Karo into the diesel fuel. Replaced the cap. Sat in the driver’s seat and played for a minute with the switches and levers.

“You know what would be fun?” he said to Smith, who was down below hacking through a hydraulic hose.

“What’s that, George?”

“Get this fucker started, take it up to the top of the ridge and run it over the rim.”

“That there’d take us near half the night, George.”

“Sure would be fun.”

“We can’t get it started anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“There ain’t no rotor arm in the magneto. I looked. They usually take out the rotor arm when they leave these beasts out on the road.”

“Yeah?” Hayduke takes notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket, turns on his flashlight, makes notation: Rotor arms. “You know something else that would be fun?”

Smith, busy nullifying all physical bond between cylinder heads and fuel injection lines, says, “What?”

“We could knock a pin out of each tread. Then when the thing moved it would run right off its own fucking tracks. That would really piss them.”

“George, this here tractor ain’t gonna move at all for a spell. It ain’t a-goin’ nowheres.”

“For a spell.”

“That’s what I said.”

“That’s the trouble.”

Hayduke climbed down from the cab and came close to Smith, there in the black light of the stars, doing his humble chores, the pinpoint of his flashlight beam fixed on a set screw in an engine block the weight of three Volkswagen buses. The yellow Caterpillar, enormous in the dark, looms over the two men with the indifference of a god, submitting without a twitch of its enameled skin to their malicious ministrations. The down payment on this piece of equipment comes to around $30,000. What were the men worth? In any rational chemico-psycho-physical analysis? In a nation of two hundred and ten million (210,000,000) bodies? Getting cheaper by the day, as mass production lowers the unit cost?