Nothing happened.
She frowned, tapped it twice against her palm, and tried again—harder.
Somewhere in the unseen valley below came a muffled shout, followed by the sharp thwack of an unidentified projectile.
Wanton barely had time to lower the whistle before something small and spherical whizzed through the mist and struck Euclid directly in his philosophic posterior.
The ram went rigid, his pupils dilating with existential fury.
Then, with the tragic certainty of a creature betrayed by reason, Euclid bolted.
Plato and Diogenes, never ones to resist groupthink, hurled themselves after him.
The cart jolted forward, rattling down the incline with alarming velocity.
Meanwhile, bagpipes wailed from the valley, the sound swelling into what Wanton could only describe as aural encouragement.
“Excellent!” she cried. “External acoustic stimuli increase ovine momentum exponentially!”
The rams, however, had stopped listening to science. They were listening to destiny.
The cart lurched forward so violently that Wanton’s map leapt from her hands and into history.
“Ah!” she gasped, clutching the reins. “At last—initiative! Excellent, Euclid, that’s the spirit of scientific enterprise!”
They hurtled down the slope. Pebbles flew, wind screamed, and her bonnet strained to emancipate itself.
She fished for her pencil with one hand, notebook with the other.
“Velocity increasing… splendid consistency of gait… potential Royal Society commendation (posthumous).”
Her words bounced with every jolt and her handwriting resembled a seismograph’s confession.
“Maintain trajectory, my fluffy instruments of destiny!” she cried. “We are pioneers of motion!”
Through the mist below, she glimpsed movement—tents, banners, a crowd.
The Glenravish Highland Games.
Her pulse quickened. “Perfect! We shall arrive on time after all.”
They burst from the ridge like a wool-powered cannonball and punctured a stretched banner. Color exploded before her eyes, the gleam of sunlight on polished cabers and whisky bottles. Drums pounded somewhere to her left. The scent of peat smoke and roasted meat rolled through the air in defiance of moderation.
Men cheered. Dogs barked. Someone hurled a hammer the size of her self-control.
It was, by every measure, the most magnificent research site she had ever crashed.
“Though perhaps,” she said faintly as the rams surged downhill, “this time the crash is a bit too enthusiastic.”
She yanked the reins. The rams ignored her.
The bagpipes thundered three long, heroic notes that could raise the dead or, as it turned out, accelerate sheep.
“Good heavens,” she muttered, spotting the crowd, “so many observers. I hadn’t planned a demonstration.”
Men scattered. Barrels rolled. A dog barked in Gaelic.
She waved frantically. “Apologies! Merely passing through your physics!”
