There was something lying on the ground in front of the bench that had looked like just a random piece of junk, but in her state of extreme boredom the girl found herself looking at it. It was like a toy cabinet from a dollhouse, but it had knobs on the front, like an Etch-a-Sketch. After a minute of looking at it she remembered where she’d seen a thing like it before: in old cartoons. It was what people had used to think radios looked like.

Well, that was something. She could listen to some music. After a glance at her mother to make sure she was still busy… there was nothing wrong with listening to music and it wasn’t like the radio belonged to anything, but mothers seemed to have a thing about things picked up off the ground… she leaned way down and grabbed it up off the ground.

There were two knobs. She could read well enough to know what they said. The first one especially, because it was a word she knew: VOLUME. The TV and her real radio and even the computer speakers all said that. She twisted the volume knob up in case that was how you turned it on. No sound came out of the radio, but the platform got a lot noisier as suddenly it seemed like a lot of people showed up all at once. She turned the knob down about halfway. The station remained more crowded than it had been before, when it had just been her, her mother, and a few other people, but it wasn’t so noisy she couldn’t stand it.

The other knob said TUNE. She had to sound that out, but when she did she knew what it meant. Tunes were music, of course. She gave that knob a twist.

She was looking at the radio, so the first thing she noticed was the bench. She felt like it tried to buck her off, and when the seat of her pants landed on it again it wasn’t a hard metal bench but one of old splintery wood. The train platform wasn’t concrete anymore… it, too, was made out of wood. The train waiting on the tracks looked more like a real train now, the kind they had in the movies, with a real engine that wasn’t just a car with a snub nose on it, and a real caboose, and in between them cars that looked like carriages. The crowd around them had changed, too. All the ladies were wearing dresses and all the men were dressed like cowboys. Her dress had changed, too, into something itchy and heavy. The ribbon in her hair had turned into a bonnet.

She liked the train better but she didn’t like the clothes. She turned the knob back in the other direction, watching as things slided back to normal. She turned it some more, slowly. The light changed as first she found herself on a covered platform, then in an enclosed one, and then in a real proper indoor train station. Then she was underground looking at a subway train. She kept spinning the dial, watching the subway become a monorail like the one at Disney and then something that looked like something from a space movie or Japan. She kept turning the dial.

She’d completely forgotten her boredom, completely forgotten that she’d ever hoped to get mere music out of the little box… she’d completely forgotten her mother, until the woman abruptly vacuum-sealed her travel pouch and turned to regard her and the object she held.

“What are you doing? What do you have there?” she said.

“Nothing! I didn’t do anything, I just found it on the ground!” the girl said.

“Well, leave it there, it’s probably some… some alien thing,” her mother said. “Now, we have to get on board. They’re almost finished establishing the jump matrix now.”

“But I have to put it back…”

“Yes, put it back, right now,” her mother said, ripping the box out of her hands and then taking her by the wrist. “And come along, before we miss the transit!”

Like clockwork they clattered around their tracks, reaching each destination exactly at the appointed minute and hour. Not a second sooner. Not a second later. The Yeats™ brand entropy engines were powered by the flow of time itself, whose inexorable passage could not be halted or even slowed appreciably.

At least, not at the speeds at which the trains traveled.

There were few problems at first. But then some undesirable aspects of this relentless efficiency became apparent. That the trains could not be halted was as much a curse as it was a blessing. Any time there was an accident down track, it became a race against time to prevent the arrival of the next implacable locomotive from compounding things. Once the schedules were set, it was impossible to alter the railroad timetables in the slightest… the 8:15 from Newark would always be the 8:15 from Newark. If this was no longer convenient or desirable for the men who had built the train, it was necessary for them to bend around it, altering their schedules and even clocks and calendars.

Time, after all, waits for no man.

As inconvenient as these small things were, they were nothing compared to the trouble that loomed. One of the selling points of the entropy engine project had been to reduce the dependency on non-renewable energy sources, but no one has the luxury of assuming they have unlimited time. Time may be running out. Many of the busier rail lines are already running on borrowed time.

But say what you will… at least the trains run on time. Would anybody willingly go back to the old way, now?