Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  “But I won’t leave you,” she said determinedly. I had heard English girls were faithful, and I was rather terrified. I told her she would not want to walk with me along forest tracks, for I knew that now, once I left this mechanical contrivance behind, there would be no more fans who would offer me crayfish soup and oysters. I would have to live primitively, and that does not foster love.

  She found that out herself. We walked along for three hours below the highway embankment. Above us flashed the headlights. I did not want to hail anyone any more. I wanted to get to the nearest telephone.

  “But this is stupid. Let me climb up to the road, and even the American Ambassador will stop for me. We played a sort of game in class. I won every time,” she said, and stuck out her breasts proudly. They were nice.

  “But you run the risk that a car from the Vampire Firm will stop again . . .” Once again she scoffed and refused to face the facts, seeing nothing but the immediate, ephemeral advantages of technological civilization. In the end we quarreled. She was wearing thin slippers and must have felt every stone. It had taken a pretty big effort for her to stick with me on that three-hour march. I shouted at her too, knowing it was the only way we would part and forget each other, the only way I would free myself from this girl. Then I lifted her up onto the embankment. I heard the squeal of brakes. The headlights stopped in front of her and illuminated her figure from all sides, and I saw her last as she shaded her eyes, looking like a beautiful blind girl.

  In the morning I finally came to a town. Only by daylight did I realize that the main highway purposely skirted populated areas to make for greater speed. The town was called Old Georgetown. Such coincidences belong to dreams . . . It was a Windsor-type town, with a crumbling country mansion, little children in school uniforms and men in exceedingly wide trousers. So this was my car’s hometown. Indeed it must be a dream. I searched for Number 26.

  “James Stuart has been dead since thirty-two, sir,” the old secretary with a blond bun told me after I had found her in an office. “Since then this place has been closed. I take care of it for the bank. They can’t find a buyer, you see.” She pointed through a broken window into a yard. It was a racing-car graveyard. Incomplete units, cars damaged on the racetrack, shells and hoods. Among them all were hens and ducks, and knee-high grass.

  “And what happened to his cars?” I asked.

  “Not one of them is running any longer,” said the old lady bitterly, and sat down at her typewriter, an Underwood from the turn of the century, on which the letters moved instead of the whole carriage. “Not one of those famous veterans which Caracciola himself once drove. They won all the races,” she fumed, as though I had been arguing with her, and showed me some dusty trophies on the wall. “The Depression brought us to our knees. There were no longer many rich people who could afford to buy a specially hand-made car. Mr. Stuart completed the last car the day before the bank took over his property. He left Old Georgetown in it, alone, and no one has heard of him since . . .” In a yellowed photo I saw Mr. Stuart standing beside my limousine. But he wasn’t that thin man from London. God knows how many people had already had their blood sucked by the machine.

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said in my bad English, “and I know where his last car is.” That seemed to startle her a little.

  “It’s the best car in the world. It has sixteen speeds. Two spare brakes on each wheel. Acceleration no one has equaled to this day.”

  “But it’s lethal,” I told her.

  “It will win you every race in the world, get you into the top social circles, you’ll live without the least effort, only for your sport . . .”

  “And die.” She could not understand that, though she obviously knew all about the car. Maybe she had even helped Mr. Stuart to take his revenge on the society which had ignored his marvelous ideas. “Here are the keys,” I said, and I placed them on the table. “I don’t want your car. And in return I would very much like to phone Bolster . . .”

  “You are a foreigner?” she asked, once she had the keys in her hand—as though that would explain everything. I nodded and waited for the connection to Bolster. I had to spell out my friend’s name, and still they got it wrong. It took half an hour before they located him at the hotel. He promised to send someone for me. At first he was surprised and then annoyed. But even so, I was looking forward to meeting him again.

  I waited in the yard of Stuart’s workshop. And the Marchioness of Nuvolari found me there.

  “So here is our Chiron,” she said, “and don’t tell me you’ve never raced before. I’d like to have your touch—and your car. You’re right—I’m going to sell my Cunningham. I don’t know how it’s possible, but the Americans don’t seem to have the flair for making sports cars. I want your car. How much?” I sent her into the office. Perhaps the sale would help the old lady to get a better typewriter. As the Marchioness carried off the keys victoriously, I cautioned her, “I’ll tell you where the car is standing, of course, but I warn you—this machine will kill you,” and I described all I’d discovered.

  “How interesting,” she said politely.

  “It’s a vampire, I tell you—it sucks your very blood through the accelerator.” She smiled.

  “Then it really is worth the money. What did you think—that racing was run on some other fuel? With what do you think I pay for my gas, how do I come to own the cars? I’ve had to sacrifice myself to get these machines. And it’s all so complicated, too. This car will simplify everything. After all, I want nothing more than to win Le Mans once in my life, in front of all the aces. Then I can die in peace. I’ll win it. I calculated your speed yesterday. It’s a splendid car. I’ll win for sure.”

  “You’ll kill yourself.”

  “It won’t be important then.”

  Now I understood why no one had returned the limousine since ’32, why everyone gladly submitted to this technological devil and let himself be sucked by a vampire. It was just to be able to get ahead of everyone else.

  And afterward, when Marchioness’s servant drove me to Bolster in her old Cunningham, it seemed to me that all the cars on the six-lane highway were racing in a great race with unwritten rules, in which death is of secondary importance.

  I arrived at Bolster before the first meeting began. My colleague had not yet rung the Embassy. Everything turned out all right, except that I did not have time to shave. And I never met Susan again.

  A PLAGUE OF CARS

  By Leonard Tushnet

  The motor-vehicle population explosion continues, even though it is probable that the number of cars will slowly fall in the near future. At present there are well over 120,000,000 motor vehicles of all types, including increasing numbers of so-called “recreational vehicles”—campers, motor homes, trail bikes, and snowmobiles—in use in this country.

  One of the most serious problems is what to do with the millions of vehicles that “expire” each year. The present solution is the automobile graveyard, one of the ugliest manifestations of technological man. We obviously need an alternative solution, and fortunately, the late Dr. Leonard Tushnet has given us one.

  My name is Cooperman, Al Cooperman. Pm executive secretary of the New Falls Merchants Association, a job which, in spite of the good salary, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Not that New Falls is any different from any other city in what’s called the urban crisis. Sure, downtown’s dying out, good housing goes up too slow, teachers and policemen holler for more pay, but that’s not my main trouble.

  Mine is Martin Smith, the president of the Association. Personally he’s a fine man, would give you the shirt off his back, but as for progress, he’s not with it. Summer concerts on shopping nights—no! A pre-Christmas parade—no! Flower boxes on High Street—no! No is the easiest thing he can say. He’s always looking to save money. He doesn’t understand that nowadays in order to get more you have to spend more. He’s a stand-patter if there ever was one. And that’s who’s president of the Association. Permanen
t president, besides, him being the head of Smith

  Fabricators, our largest industry, as well as principal stockholder in our two big department stores, and the top contributor to Community Chest.

  Take the abandoned automobiles, for instance. I don’t even like to think about them. You know in every city there are spots near cemeteries where nobody goes or like now areas where houses are tom down for slum clearance. And in every city on the streets in those places are broken-down cars just left there by their owners because it wouldn’t pay them to tow the cars to a wrecker or to a junkyard. What happens to the cars? The windows get broken, vandals strip whatever they can, the upholstery rots. The abandoned cars are an eyesore besides being dangerous to kids who play in them.

  So why don’t the city take them away? Expense and jurisdictional disputes. The sanitation men say it’s not ‘their’ work, and if they do it they want to get paid extra even though it’s on city time. The county dump don’t want the wrecks because they take up too much room. Towmen ask an arm and a leg because nearly 90 percent of the cars have no tires and more than half don’t even have wheels. So the cars sit there and sit there, a menace to traffic and general safety, until when they have time (which is seldom) the police department tows away a couple.

  We had a particularly bad situation here in New Falls right around where the new City Hospital was going up. Somebody started a fire in a car and one kid was burned to death inside. And near the Catholic cemetery the cars became a hangout for bums who slept in them and people going to the cemetery complained. It got so bad that the City Council hired an out-of-town concern to remove the cars. But then some crusader discovered that the company was making money on the salvage besides overcharging the city. Furthermore, the company had set up an auto graveyard right at the edge of town where the highway begins, a terrible introduction to New Falls for any newcomer.

  Well, for once Smith decided that this job was one for the Association, more likely to beautify the city than planting trees in shopping centers. I got estimates from a dozen wreckers, but when I showed them to Smith, he hollered, “Robbery!” So then I wrote a letter to the editor of Municipal Government, which they published, asking for suggestions from its readers. No replies.

  The situation was static, as they say in politicalese, until one day my secretary brings me in a card, PETER HAMILTON, Ph.D.—REMOVALS. She giggles and says, “He can solve the car problem, he told me to tell you. Wait till you see him!”

  She ushers in a hippie type. Tall, thin, a digger hat, hair to his shoulders, Pancho Villa mustache, bright blue embroidered shirt, red slacks, barefoot sandals, and a guitar slung over his back, ‘natch. This character shakes my hand and says in a very cultured voice, “Sir, I can remove all the abandoned cars from New Falls in one week.”

  “What are you? Some kind of nut?” I ask him. “Do you know how many there are?”

  “Yes, sir,” he says. “A total of nine hundred and eighty-six. I have made a survey. I guarantee results. I will charge only ten dollars a car.”

  Well, I questioned him pretty closely, but he didn’t give me too many details. Said he had a new technique. Said he was a former professor of organic chemistry, now a dropout, and he needed the money to finance a bunch of communes he wanted to set up for love children. Not bastards. Love children, kids who wanted to drop out of society like him. He said he’d give me a demonstration.

  I called Smith, who wouldn’t believe the price. He said if it could be done for that, he’d gladly pay half so the Association wouldn’t have a long debate about it. We arranged the demonstration for the next morning, which was a Tuesday.

  Smith and I waited where we’d agreed on at the street near the old canal. Six dead cars were on the street, not one with wheels or intact glass, stuffing from the upholstery floating all around, and the motors thoroughly gutted. Along comes a big truck, Hamilton driving. He stops, lets down the tailboard like a ramp, and rolls out his equipment and a small pay-loader. “Where are your helpers?” I call out to him.

  “Don’t need any,” he yells back. Smith looks at me and „ raises his eyebrows making like he doesn’t believe this fellow can do what he says.

  The equipment consists of a couple of drums of chemicals, a rack of bottles, a covered mixing tub, yards of hose, and a power sprayer. Hamilton opens one drum, takes out a measured amount of what looks like greenish granules, adds it to some black liquid he takes from the other drum, stirs it up with a wooden paddle, and covers the mixing tub. He plays a few bars on his guitar. “Timing it,” he says. Then he attaches the hose to an opening in the cover and to the power sprayer. He takes three bottles from the rack and with a glass pipette measures some of the stuff from the bottles and drips it in to a pinpoint opening in the cover, which he then seals with tape. He sits on the cover and plays “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” right through. Smith keeps looking at me, sore-like, throughout all this, as though to say, “Why’d you take me away from my business to watch a con man?”

  Hamilton finishes his song, takes the power sprayer, and starts to spray the wreck nearest us, what once was a snappy Corvette, although you wouldn’t think it to see it now. A sort of orange foam covers the car. He’s very thorough about it, making sure the foam reaches every area, even underneath. When the car is covered, he stands back and says, “Watch.”

  The foam seems to puff up and get solid and at the same time sort of bubbly, like that white stuff florists use to stand flowers in. You don’t see any part of the car any more. In about five minutes the puffing up stops. “Might as well do another one for good measure while we’re waiting. I’ve got enough gook,” he says, and pulls his sprayer over to an old Ford across the street. He does the same thing to that one.

  Meanwhile, Smith has been staring at the first car. He calls me over. “Touch, but be careful,” he says. I do and jump back, sucking the blister that’s rising on my finger. That foam was red-hot. He nudges me. “Look.”

  Did you ever see a balloon collapse slowly? Or better yet, a snowman gradually melt in the winter sun? It was like that, what was happening to the foam-crusted car. It quivered and it shook and it little by little contracted. Not uniformly. Irregularly until it began to take on a spherical shape. Then it got smaller faster, shaking constantly until it was about the size of one of those super-large plastic beach balls. And all the time it was giving off more and more heat so that we had to stay a good ten feet away from it.

  “How do you like that?” Hamilton asked, coming over to stand with us. Meanwhile, the Ford across the street was going through the same process.

  Smith shook his head. “I don’t understand what’s happening. And what are you going to do with that—that ball now?”

  “I’ll answer your question first. As soon as it cools down enough—and on the regular work I hasten the cooling by spraying on water at this stage—I’ll use the pay-loader to get it on the truck and I’ll cart it away to the dump. It’ll make good clean land-fill.”

  “But what did you do?” Smith walked around and around the ball.

  “Used a little applied chemistry,” Hamilton said. “That foam is my own variation of what I suppose you’d call a polyesterurethane derivative.” He got very talkative, proud of what he’d done. As best as I can recall this is what he said, and remember I had only one chemistry course in college. “The foam is a special boron-nitrogen ladder-type polymer with bulky heterocyclic side-chains, and some of the side-chains have molybdenum atoms in them. That accounts for the orange color.”

  “Clear as mud,” I said. “What’s the process?”

  “I added an activator to the monomer in the drum to start polymerization, and when I sprayed it the oxygen in the air acted as a catalyst to change the polymer into a very long chain with what I suppose you’d call hooks on the sides to form a fibrillary network. It hardens quickly and then just as quickly gives up the attached hydrates. That makes it contract like a film of albumen contracts on exposure to the air. When it reaches a more
or less spherical shape, the result of complex van der Waals forces, of course, the contracting process speeds up. The heat generated by the reaction reduces all fibers to charcoal and the metals get close enough to their melting points to allow of deformation and collapse into a smaller space. The internal pressure breaks the charcoal down into carbon granules and cracks up the metal. The special qualities of the polymer allow it to be rigid and yet withstand the heat. You see the end product. Do I get the contract?”

  Smith pumped his hand. “Yes, you do. You can start right now, as a matter of fact. I guarantee payment. I’ll even add a bonus. A flat rate of $10,000 if every car is removed in one week, and I’ll arrange to let you use the water hydrants for your cooling stage. I’ll call the Mayor about that as soon as I get back to the office.”

  “Done!” Hamilton clapped his hands. “I’ll get right on the job. Next Tuesday morning I’ll be at the Association office for my check.”

  One thing I can say, Hamilton wasn’t lonely while he worked. Crowds came to watch him. By Thursday he no longer had to remove the heavy spheres himself. People came with all sorts of machinery and rigs to cart those boulders away. Some used them for front-lawn decorations, others as parts of fences, still others for their kids to climb on. Old man Ochs, from Beaver Chemicals, spent an entire morning arguing with Hamilton. He offered him $30,000 a year and was willing to go much higher if Hamilton came to work for him, but Hamilton wasn’t interested. “I don’t want to get involved in any part of the Establishment,” he said. “There’s always the chance that my work will be used for anti-human purposes. I prefer to remain a free soul.”

  Nothing goes a hundred percent smoothly, of course. The heat generated in the process burned away some grass and shrubbery near the cemetery and melted the asphalt on some streets, but those were minor problems. The work went ahead steadily. I rode around checking on Hamilton. I had police cooperation to tell me where every abandoned car was. By Saturday afternoon 992 cars had been removed, the extra six being those left in the few days since Hamilton had started.