GLUG-GLUG-SQUELCH!
A giant twenty-ton Dry-Well Spirit-Tractor painted bright yellow rolled off the stone railway ramp onto the edge of World 32 (Black-Bog Planet)—and immediately sank up to its headlights in bubbling, tar-black swamp mud!
“Whoa! Reverse! Hit the reverse gear!”
Inside the cab, the young tractor driver pulled the reverse lever with all his might. The six-foot-tall iron wheels spun furiously, flinging gobs of stinky black mud fifty feet into the air, but instead of backing up, the heavy tractor sank another three feet like a rock dropped into a bowl of warm oatmeal!
“Turn off the engine before the exhaust pipe sucks in mud!” General Tie Zhan yelled from the elevated train platform. He swung a thick braided-iron tow cable like a lasso, hooked the front bumper of the sinking tractor, and braced his boots against the stone pillar. “One, two, HEAVE!”
With his Rank 8 Early muscle power, Tie Zhan yanked the twenty-ton tractor straight out of the black bog with a loud, wet SCHLOOOORP! that sounded like a giant pulling his boot out of a pigsty.
Standing on the bamboo stilt-walkways beside the bog, several thousand thin, mud-splattered local farmers let out a collective sigh of relief and wiped their foreheads.
