Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  The red phone rang, three rings. Double urgent. He grabbed it, barked his name.

  “The Director just dropped dead,” a hysterical voice said. “You’re acting Director.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Acting, hell. There were six hours left on his shift and he could get something done now. He turned to Smith. “You’re Manager now,” he said, “I just got bumped upstairs.”

  “Right.” Smith barely looked up. “Reopen Yonkers Four, lanes one through nine,” he said.

  He had made the transition from assistant to Manager in an instant. Training, Davis thought.

  He took the elevator to the eighth floor, the Director’s office. The staff was quiet, looking down at the body on the floor. There were four boards flashing, a dozen phones ringing. Davis snapped orders quickly.

  “You, you, and you, answer the phones,” he said. “You and you, get the boards. You, drag that body out of here. You—” he pointed at the Director’s—his—secretary—” call a staff conference. Now.”

  He looked at the boards, checked Traffic, Beacons and Buzzers, Wrecks and Checks, Gate Receipts and Identification. Fatalities was doing extremely well—Wellborn was the new Manager here. The crunchers were doing well. Wrecks was reporting above normal pickup time.

  “The Director’s dead,” he told the staff. “I’m new Director.” They all nodded. “Most departments look pretty good,” he said. He looked at Smith. “Traffic flow is lousy,” he said. “Why?”

  “Empire,” Smith said. “We’re losing twenty percent just going around that goddamned building.”

  “How are your crews fixed for a major job?” Davis asked the Construction Manager.

  “Okay.” The Manager ticked off eleven small jobs.

  “The problem is at Empire,” Davis said flatly. “We can’t get around the building.” He looked at Construction. “Tear it down,” he said. “Meeting adjourned.”

  Later that day he looked south from the roof. The Destruction team had the top ten floors off the Empire State Building and a corner cut out of the fortieth floor with a lane of traffic whipping through it. The flow was good and he smiled. He couldn’t remember doing anything so necessary before.

  STATION HR972

  By Kenneth Bulmer

  There are more than 200,000 service stations in the United States. At one time there were substantially more, but the recent energy shortage and the resulting maneuvering by the large oil companies has put thousands of the so-called “independents” out of business. The service station is itself an American institution. We can say without hesitation that it is one of the less aesthetically appealing results of the Age of the Automobile, but for better or worse, high concentrations of stations on busy urban intersections and the lonely pump at a rural crossroads symbolize an important part of American life. In addition, service stations have provided one of the most important sources of employment for our youth and for our stickup men.

  Here Ken Bulmer, at one time one of the most prolific writers in science fiction, shows us a “service station” of the future, where the services provided are somewhat different from those available today.

  Most mornings Bartram would see the crane driver from the auto repair station walk over to HR972 for coffee and a post mortem on the night’s incidents and possibilities for the day. All the time the driver sat blockily in the rest area with his thick fingers cradling the plastic coffee cup, his head would be half-turned, like a bird eyeing a worm, listening on his earphone for the first notes of a call.

  Libby, the torso technician for whose sake he walked the hundred extra yards for coffee, played it cool, daily less shy, daily more inclined to talk about her own handling of units and less to listen to his accounts of rapid crane manipulations.

  The first time Bartram had said: “So long as you maintain your efficiency rating, Libby, I’m prepared to allow you to flirt between incidents.” He’d quirked an eye at the fidgeting driver. “What Samuelson has to say about his crane driver being a clear hundred yards away from his cab is none of my affair.”

  Now he would pass them with a small friendly smile as he went up onto the roof of the station to take his morning observations.

  “Morning, Chief,” the night super, Cy Weiss, a small, dark, intense man with a woman’s charm, would say as Bartram appeared. He’d go through the night’s incidents in a kind of ritual pronouncement: “An easy one.”

  “Bad.”

  “Two fingers is all, didn’t even have to bring her in.” And so on, in a brief, capsulated edition of the night’s news.

  “Morning, Cy.” Bartram would wait until Weiss had left and he had been joined by Karl Grecos, the day super; and then he would cock his head toward the sky, ritually, and say, according to the state of the weather: “Big one today”; or, “Rain. Should slow things”; or, “Clouds clearing, we’ll get them through this afternoon.”

  Grecos had the wide, flat shoulders of an athlete, fair luxuriant hair from his mother, and a quizzical smile that seemed to ask imponderable questions. But his hands never shook when he held a scalpel. He owed this to a fondness for oily food, and his waistline was beginning to advertise this.

  They both leaned on the guardrail and looked out on the road.

  The Road.

  From here the limits of the ten-mile stretch for which Station HR972 was responsible lay on the one hand behind the swell of the hill and on the other lost in a gentle undulation of the land leading up to Sennocke Forest. The road lay across the countryside like a fat white worm. Transparent roofing arched across the twelve lanes, hanging in a cunning curve of convoluting strength, unbuttressed and unguyed, a free overarching sweep of plastic that membraned the artificial environment of the road from nature’s anarchy without.

  Occasionally through whims in the course of the road the northbound twelve lanes could be seen, a silvery-gray rotundity, beyond their own southbound highway. A brooding awareness of waiting sharpened movement on the road, so that the mechanics around the helicopters on the roof landing spots, the medics sitting checking their morning take-over logs in the ready area, the men carrying in supplies, and others carting away the detritus of the night all moved as though imbued with that breath of waiting.

  A few cars spun through the morning light, individual and widely separated on the road.

  On this morning Bartram pushed at his sleeves and said: “I can smell it, Karl. Meteorology gave us twelve full hours of sunshine. No rain. We’ll be busy.”

  “Yeah.” Grecos breathed through his nose, hard. “Cy had it easy. That means—”

  “The road,” said Bartram. “Just look at it. It’s an affront to nature, really—yet . . .”

  “I always think,” Grecos said, turning to lean on the parapet with his elbows angular, “it looks just like an extra-long pipe of spaghetti my kids like to draw out on the table.”

  Bartram laughed. “You mean before they add tomato sauce.”

  After a short splintery silence, Bartram added: “I meant tomato sauce, Karl.”

  “I know you did, Chief. Gets you all ways, the road.” A helicopter’s rotors twanged around with a startling roar and then choked away into whickering gulps of air. The cars speeding like arterial blood cells along the road made little noise. Already the heat of the sun’s reflections was activating anticondensation devices on the roof. Vents opened like anemones as thermocouples reacted.

  Bartram pivoted the pedestal-mounted binoculars and sighted on the auto repair station a hundred yards north. Men over there were working about their copters and cranes.

  “If Samuelson speaks to me about one of my staff luring one of his away—I’ll be hard put to it not to be rude.”

  “Samuelson’s all right, Chief. He’s new on the road. He’ll learn.”

  “If he doesn’t he’ll be back in a breaker’s yard packaging cars into tin cans.”

  The gray-green plastic surface of the road reflected no highlights. Its semitactile tread hugged the cars to it as they sped imper
iously past. Most of the cars so far this morning had selected the inner and center quads. The twelve lanes were divided into three groups of four lanes each, the inner subdivided for heavy trucks and articulateds, and lighter trucks and coaches. Checking the speed radar meters, Bartram saw only six cars traveling at over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, all on the outer two lanes of the center quad.

  An automobile on the inner center quad swept past at ninety miles an hour.

  “The fool!” said Bartram heatedly. Then the high, irritating wail of a police car tailing the laggard telescoped time, and the offending car increased its speed to conform to the law.

  “That’ll cost him a fat fine,” said Grecos with satisfaction.

  The police car cut down the off-staging ramp that swept around beneath the road and emerged again on the service road leading to HR972 and the auto repair station.

  “It’ll be Barney,” said Bartram. “He’ll have the feel of the road by now.” That was part of the ritual too.

  They went down in the elevator, talking quietly. Past the rest area, Bartram saw with a smirk that Libby’s crane-driving beau had gone. The sound of coffee cups being washed swished steamingly from the kitchen.

  The ceremonial quality of those early morning actions, genuflecting through the build-up time of waiting, helped men and women to adjust off-road mentalities to the demands of the motorway. Barney, heavy, muscular, his black patrolman’s uniform creasing sloppily from too much sitting in cars, puffed as he stood up, one hand grasping the car door. Bartram smiled.

  “Morning, Barney. Big one today?”

  “Yeah. That’s for sure. Did you see that creepy-crawly horror? Ninety in the hundred-twenty-five, hundred-fifty lane!”

  “You sireened him smartly.”

  “Sireened him! I’d like to put a boot in his guts!” Walking with Barney back to the rest area for a coffee, Bartram said, “How’s Tommy?”

  At once Barney enthused. “He’s doing just great! Law school suits him. He’ll be a great man one day. One thing’s for sure, I’ll do anything to stop him being a cop on the road, so help me.”

  “He could do a lot worse.” Bartram caught Grecos’ eye and smiled; then they entered the station building; and, with the road out of vision, an unnatural relaxation took possession of them so that they spoke and moved with a louder, more flamboyant gesture.

  Outside the road waited.

  Grecos walked across to check the flow meters.

  “Building up, chief,” he called. “Better than ten a minute and rising.”

  “No worries yet.”

  “I heard tell they were talking about cutting down the distance intervals.” Barney sloshed his coffee around, watching the wave ripples. “They figured they could set the radars to half the distance. Pack more cars in a length that way.”

  “They’re close enough as it is,” Bartram said dourly. “That’s what we say. But they have to move traffic. Ten thousand cars want to hit the road—something has to give.”

  “Yeah. And we know what gives.”

  High atop the station, in every room, in the rest area, in the garages, on the helicopter spots, above the basins in the washrooms, the auto repair alarm shrilled. Hard on that strident call the alarm for HR972 chittered in harsh counterpoint.

  Chairs crashed back. Coffee cups spilled. Feet hammered concrete. Helicopter vanes whirred into shining invisibility. The place emptied as though a time bomb set for now was found between everyone’s legs.

  Bartram’s earphones said: “HR972. Grid six two eight. Center quad, two outer lanes.”

  That was one point two eight miles south of the station, set midway on its ten-mile stretch of road.

  The helicopters rose buzzing. They slanted away steeply, low over the rounded continuous cylinder of the road, jets roaring. Early morning sunshine caught their white paint and dazzled from the red crosses.

  Charlie, the ladder handler, crouched by the open trap in the floor of the chopper. His rough scarred hands grasped the controls, and wind tugged at his white coveralls. Bruce and Pete, the hook men, lay stomach down in front of him, their hands thrust deeply into the gloved remote-control equipment. Bartram glanced back. Everyone in the belly of his lead copter stood at stations, coveralled, helmeted, goggled, packs with their glaring red crosses strapped in regulation positions.

  “Nice and smoothly now,” he said over the intercom. “First today. Let’s set the pattern.”

  The hook men moved their hands with gentle feeling motions. Below them at the end of the stinglike probes mechanical grapnels moved in unison. The copter pilot, Sally, a good flier, said, “Here we go. Hooks!”

  Bruce and Pete struck, hooked the rings in the roof sections below, hoicked.

  Like a bivalve forded open by a marlinspike the transparent roof panels opened upward and outward. Charlie dropped his ladder clean through. It hit the gray-green plastic road beside a red sedan on its side, foam-smothered, rear telescoped. Two roof panels further along, the auto repair gang had their cranes down and were lifting the green roadster. It squealed like a trapped animal as metal tore. Police had sealed off the two outer lanes of the center quad, their furthest light and radar beacon four miles back.

  Bartram turned on his back jets and dropped straight through the hole, boots together, hands on the controls, seeing the flaring jet stabbing below him. His control line sizzled down the ladder. He hit the road hard, staggered a pace, then snapped the link from the ladder and dived at the red saloon.

  His team followed in order, moving smoothly about their work. He saw Libby, calm and unflurried; her jet cut as her feet touched down.

  The auto repair gang had the yellow car and the late-model General Autos sedan, the last in this small, four-car pileup, hoisted away. Only the General Autos sedan could be recognized by make and year; the other cars were merely colored contortions of metal. The sweeping gang were already running their giant vacuum cleaners across the road, the broken shards of metal and glass, the bits of plastic and the odd items of personal belongings pinging as they whirled up into the bags.

  “Hurry it up!” Bartram shouted over his phone. “The auto boys have nearly finished.”

  Team One had cut away the scarlet car’s side. The team leader leaned in with his shears and cut away the driver’s harness in four neat snips. The passengers sat cocooned in the airbags that had inflated around them in the moment of impact as transducers sensed the acceleration rate change. Swift stabbing jabs punctured the bags. Hands and grapnels took the passengers out. By this time the scarlet car, foam dripping, trailing metal and twisted strands of cabling, had been hoisted twenty feet above the road level.

  The teams from HR972 worked either clinging to the car or treading air on their back jets.

  The driver was hoisted away first. The harness had saved his life, and the absence of a dashboard and the deep padding over every projection had saved him from fatal injury. But his ribs were mangled, his pelvis splintered and flattened, his face congested. Libby took over with her assistant torso technicians, was already working on him as they floated up through the hole into the belly of the waiting copter.

  “He’ll do,” she called down flatly.

  The two woman passengers had been bruised from neck to knees. Calmly Bartram stripped their flowery dresses away, snipped and snapped at lacy underclothes, revealed white flesh turning green and blue as he watched. The team took over, cocooning the women, plastic compresses and ointments covering up in soothing balm as antishock injections turned brutal unconsciousness into controlled sleep. Bartram swung away.

  Team Two was working on the green roadster, their white coveralled figures clustering around the car, strung under the roof like white moths around a green lamp.

  Team Three had taken the auto-stretcher-bound driver of the General Autos sedan out, and he was already on his way up to the copter.

  “Team Four!” called Bartram sharply. “What’s the holdup?”

  The yellow car had been concert
inaed. Despite all the cunning guile of automobile manufacturers in transducer-actuated airbags, in padded safety within, in plastic-layered stretch glass, in box-girder construction, the yellow car looked like a cardboard carton that has been smacked between two fists. The road wheels had been taken away from where they had been scattered across the road. But the doors had not opened; their safety locks functioning still under the one hundred gravities stress at the moment of impact.

  Team Four was trying to cut its way in.

  Team Leader Steve said, breathlessly: “Jammed hard. Cutter flame too near driver. Going in from the roof.”

  “Well, get with it, Steve! Everyone else is away.”

  The other three cars had been emptied of casualties, the copters already whirring away back to HR972. Police were retrieving their radar and sight beacons, progressively pulling in to the site of the incident. The four cars hung from the roof, and the auto repair gangs were beginning to take them out through the roof panels.

  Police Super Metcalfe walked slowly up the white line marking the two outer lanes of the center quad. His face looked grave and calm, down-tilted, the light catching the slant of his jaw and the white bristle of his eyebrows. He walked as a captain paces his bridge during a storm. Then he looked up with a sharp, decisive movement.