Free Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat by John Eubank Page B

“She handles that.” It was true. She’d taken care of this before her disappearance, but still, he felt bad not telling the whole story. He had to exert himself not to blurt out more.
    Ahmed handed Will a card. “When your mother gets back, have her call me.”
    “That’s it?” Waverly deplored, aghast. “No arrests? No citations? How do you expect her to call, anyway? They’re completely off the grid!”
    “It’s legal to be off the grid,” Jane, the Assistant Health Inspector, said defensively.
    Waverly flared and attempted to skewer her with an intimidating gaze, but the official didn’t budge.
    “Is it legal,” Mrs. Norman challenged, “not to have a hookup to the sewage main? Is it legal to raise children swimming in filth?”
    “No sewage main comes out here, ma’am. They’re on a septic tank and leach line system, just like you.”
    “ What ?”
    “All houses on this street are.”
    Waverly’s eyes opened wide with shock, and her glasses almost slid off her nose. “You mean our sewage just leaks into the yard?”
    “Into the soil, where microorganisms consume it. It’s perfectly sanitary.”
    “Perfectly revolting!” Waverly shuddered. “What about that mountain of manure in their back yard? And that smokestack belching out foul vapors! They’re causing global warming, I tell you!”
    “I’ll admit that’s a peculiar chimney,” Jane said, “but they have the right to burn wood and keep livestock. These lots aren’t zoned.”
    “You mean you’re going to just let them off, like this Ahmed character’s done?”
    “Wait,” said Jane, scanning through records. “Young man, where does your water come from?”
    “The faucet?” Will said.
    “How does it get there? You’re not on our line, and you’ve never applied for a water well inspection.”
    He almost told her they pumped it from a hand dug well in their back yard, but he became suspicious. What if that broke the county rules? To his horror, he couldn’t fight off an urge to blurt out something.
    “A reservoir,” he said, panicking. “Ask my father. He’ll be back later. Good bye!”
    He darted inside and slammed the door. This time he locked it and ran upstairs to watch from a window. The large woman with the strange hair berated Ahmed and Jane a while, but they grew tired of her and drove off.
    Scowling at Beverkenhaas, Waverly Norman turned and stormed across the street. Will sighed. This was no victory, he knew. Something told him that Mrs. Norman was just getting started.
    He faced his sister and cousin. “We’ve got problems.”
     
    ***
     
    “Sir?” said a short, wiry man into a brass speaking tube. He had long, thinning black hair and oily skin. “Activity in the aether. The Steemjammers have opened another verltgaat.”
    Staas Floombach sat on a hard stool in a cold, dimly lit basement laboratory, carefully monitoring a series of oddly configured, steam-powered devices that were scientific in nature. Shivering, he buttoned his wrinkled black lab coat.
    Because his great great uncle had married a Rasmussen, Staas was marginally part of the Greater Rasmussen Protectorate, as they’d started calling it. Had he actually been descended from a Rasmussen, his standing would have been much greater. As it was, he was barely a grade above servant.
    “Where?” demanded a stern voice with a slight English accent on the other end of the speaking tube. Staas cringed as he recalled the frightening face that went along with it: Clyve Harrow, a Rasmussen - even though he didn’t have the surname - and the man in charge of the complex where he worked.
    “It didn’t last long enough to get a fix, sir,” Staas said. “Somewhere in New Amsterdam. I’ll see if I can get a position, anyway.”
    “Let’s see that you do.”
    Staas shuddered. They’d been working hard to improve their detection technology, and his superiors now thought that it should work. If he failed, he was one step closer to another trip to the