So they eventually called, for no specific reason, their taciturn fellow railwayman. This nickname—given him, incidentally, without any malicious intent—somehow blended so well with the person of the engine driver that even the authorities tolerated it in orders and decrees. In this manner people made note of his distinct character.

The machine worked hard, breathing out every moment puffs of fluffy, ruffled smoke. The steam, constantly fanned by the zealous hand of the stoker, was overflowing the blowpipes along the skeleton of the iron colossus, pushing valves, struggling with pistons, driving wheels. Rails rattled, gears creaked, frantic cranks and plates roared….

Momentarily, Grot woke up from his reveries and glanced at the pressure gauge. The needle, marking the arch, was nearing the fatal number thirteen.

‘Release steam!’

The stoker stretched out his hand and pulled on the valve; a prolonged, piercing whistle resounded, while at the same time a tiny milk-white funnel bloomed from the side of the machine.

Grot folded his arms across his chest and once again sank into reveries.

‘“Engineer Grot” — ha, ha! A most accurate nickname! People don’t even suspect how accurate!’

Suddenly, the engine driver saw in the distant, hazy vista of years gone-by a quiet, modest little house in a suburb of the capital. In the bright centre room stands a large table covered with piles of diagrams, strange drawings, technical sketches. Leaning over one of these is the flaxen head of Olek, his younger brother. Beside him stands he, Christopher, running his finger along a sapphire line circling elliptically over some mathematical plane. Olek nods, corrects something, explains….

This is their workshop—this is their secret interior from which was hatched the bold idea of an airplane that, flying freely about space, would have conquered the atmosphere and broadened man’s mind, lifting it to the beyond, to infinity. Not much more time was needed to finish off the work: a month, two months—three, at most. All of a sudden the war came, then recruitment, the march, a battle, and…death. Olek’s bright-haired head dropped to his blood-stained chest, his blue eyes closed forever….

Grot remembered that one moment, that horrible moment of scaling to the top of the enemy fort. Olek had dashed forward heroically and was seen from a distance at the front of the detachment. His drawn sabre was shaving with its blade cuttings of colourful proportion, his manly hand was seizing his flag-staff in a victorious grasp. Suddenly a flash came from the ramparts, a swirl of smoke jetted from the fort’s stronghold, a hellish explosion rocked the battlements. Olek reeled, wavered under the glimmering rainbow of the released sword, and tumbled down—on the threshold of battle plans, at the very moment of soldierly realizations, at the moment of reaching the goal….

His death affected Christopher badly. For many months Christopher Grot was laid up with malignant fever in a field hospital. Afterwards, he returned to civilian life a broken man. He abandoned his old ideas, his revolutionary concepts, his plans of conquest: he became an engine driver. He sensed the compromise, he understood the travesty, but he had no more strength left; he was content to deal in miniature. Soon the substitute ideal completely replaced the original one, covering with its narrow, dull framework the previously wide horizon: he now conquered space on a new, smaller scale. But he had entreated the railway authorities for only express rides—he never drove ordinary trains. In this manner, gaining in this terrain, he at least came closer to the original concept. He was intoxicated with a wild ride on far-spanning lines, dazed by the conquest of considerable distances within a short period of time.

But he could not stand return journeys; he detested the so-called tour-retour trips. Grot only liked speeding on to what was ahead of him—he loathed any repetitions. That is why he preferred to return to the inevitable point of departure by roundabout routes, by a line circular or elliptical, anything but the same one. He understood perfectly the deficiency of curves that revert back to themselves, he felt the unethicalness of these continually inbred roads, but was saved by the appearance of progressive motion; he had the illusion, at least, that he was going forward.

For Grot’s ideal was a frenzied ride in a straight line, without deviations, without circulations, a breathless, insane ride without stops, the whirling rush of the engine into the distant bluish mist, a winged run into infinity.

Grot could not bear any type of goal. Since the time of his brother’s tragic death a particular psychic complex had developed within him: dread before any aim, before any type of end, any limit. With all his might he fell in love with the perpetuality of constantly going forward, the toil of reaching ahead.