by James Gunn
Gavin saw by Elaine's dilated nostrils that she, too, had smelled the bread. “Come on,” he said, and scrambled down the ditch beside the highway and through the barbed-wire fence on the other side.
They walked through dryland grasses that rustled against their legs like whispers of the land. Meadowlarks were singing. Once a fieldmouse started up and ran in front of them. A few moments later a skunk walked imperiously across their path, tail high. It was as if this portion of the earth had never heard of man.
Finally, however, they came to a fence. Behind it was a railroad track, and another fence on the other side. They walked along, following the protected tracks, until they came within sight of the building Gavin had seen from the highway. Here the smell of baking bread was almost irresistible. Gavin's mouth was watering, and his stomach was growling as they came to a point where the fence turned at right angles, admitting the train tracks but keeping out Gavin and Elaine.
The building within the fence was made of sheet metal enameled brown, probably prefabricated and brought to this lonely spot in sections. Gavin and Elaine stood outside the tall, chainlink fence that enclosed the four sides of the building, and looked at it longingly. On the front of the building were letters that had not been visible from a distance and not readable until they were at the fence. The sign said: FRONTIER AUTOMATED BAKERY. Underneath that, in even smaller letters, was: TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN. And underneath that: PROTECTED BY WatchComp, Inc.
The same legend was printed on metal plaques attached to the fence at regular intervals. The fence was unbroken, except where the railway tracks entered, and there the fence trailed off into the distance like the tail of a spermatozoon. Some fifty yards away a railway car stood against the side of the building. The end of the car was humped, as if to contain a motor and perhaps a small computer director.
But all that, and the bread, too, was on the inside, and they were on the outside. Gavin swallowed hard and said, “I'm going to get in somehow.”
“Is that wise?” Elaine asked. “Couldn't we get fed easier somewhere else?”
“It wouldn't be the same,” Gavin said. The disappointed hunter within him growled for bread. “Are you coming?”
“Lead on,” she said.
Gavin started around the periphery of the fence again and stopped a few hundred yards around the corner. “Look!” he said. The sandy soil had been dug out around the base of the fence by some animal, perhaps a gopher or a prairie dog. Gavin attacked the hollow with his hands and soon had a space scooped out big enough for him to wiggle through on his back. Elaine followed him.
“Now,” he said, and trotted back toward the railway track.
The railway car still was standing at the bakery wall, one entire wall of the car raised high against the building. The fit between the car and the building was so tight that not even the gopher or the prairie dog could have squeezed through. When they pressed their ears to the side of the railway car, they could hear rumblings and scrapings, as if something were being loaded.
As they walked past the car, they noticed other openings in the wall above the railway track marked: BUTTER, EGGS, MILK, FLOUR, SALT, SUGAR, YEAST, and so forth. All the openings were too small for human entry, even if they had not been sealed. The tracks disappeared into a wing of the building closed by a large railway-car-sized door. The door was immovable.
As they inspected it, the railway car behind them moved. Gavin whirled and ran toward it. Even as he turned, the big door they had been inspecting rattled. He glanced back as he ran. The door was going up. Another railway car was emerging. He almost stopped, but then he noticed that the car ahead had exposed a tall opening in the side of the building, about five feet up the wall.
The gap was still widening as he approached. Inside the dark opening he could glimpse what seemed like a clear space, and behind that the looming presence of something bulky and shadowed. He leaped at the opening and hauled himself up.
The railway car which had come out of the building was rolling down the track toward the opening in which Gavin stood. He reached down a hand to Elaine and hauled her up beside him just before the new car slid across the part of the opening in front of him. The inside of the building was lighted only by the sunlight coming through the narrowing loading door. Before it closed completely, Gavin saw in front of him a rack not two feet away, and beyond that belts and machinery. To his left, under a network of wires, under slotted strips of metal, Gavin saw an open space, and he ducked into it, pulling Elaine after him.
And then the railway car closed the doorway; only daggers of light entered where the fit with the building was not perfect. After the brilliance of the Colorado morning, Gavin couldn't see enough to locate himself in the omnipresent gloom. He felt, however, that the room was big and filled with incomprehensible machinery performing mysterious functions. He could hear it rustling and whispering and ratcheting, and he stood there in the dark, holding Elaine's cool hand, smelling the hot crusty odor of baking bread.
“Well, Mr. Mastermind,” Elaine said, “what now?”
Indeed, what now? He hadn't thought about it, but an automated factory needed no light. It could work as well in the dark, perhaps better without the unnecessary and unregulated waste heat from light bulbs. Somewhere there might be lights for human inspection and maintenance, but he had no chance of locating the switches even if they were not locked.
And even as he thought about them, the lights went on. A giant voice shouted at them from above, like the voice of God, “This is WatchComp, and you are trespassing on the premises of Frontier Automated Bakery. Stay where you are until you are given permission to move.”
Silence fell over them like fear. Elaine looked at Gavin. “They're going to send someone out from Denver,” he said, putting on a confidence he did not feel. “If they think we're going to wait for them...”
By the lights in the ceiling he could see the process of automated baking. Apparently the openings in the outside walls led to storage bins. Pipes led from the bins to large closed kettles made of gleaming copper; a larger pipe led from each kettle to nozzles above a moving belt entirely composed of loaf-shaped tins. As he watched, three globs of dough oozed from as many nozzles, filled three tins, and the line moved forward. Three metal disks sliced open the top of the dough. Butter sprayed from jets, and then the moving belt vanished into an opening in a wall.
Out of another rectangular opening came other tins, but these bulged with bread, their tops mounded with steaming brown crust. The moving belt reversed itself over a horizontal roller, and loaves of bread dropped like manna upon another belt, which moved the loaves toward them. The loaves were caught by slotted plates, sliced by a series of knives, and shoved into plastic bags held open by plastic fingers and a jet of air. Metal arms twisted plastic around the neck of the bag, and the wrapped loaves slid into racks that inched upward from the floor to accept them. As soon as the rack was full, it shoved its contents into the waiting racks of the railway car and slid down out of the way of the next rack.
The process had come a long way from the banks of the Euphrates. But hunger had not. Gavin grabbed a loaf of bread from the rack nearest him. The railway car was nearly full, and its racks left no room for Gavin and Elaine.
The car began to move. Light entered past its near end like a bright curtain.
“Be ready,” Gavin said.
As the loading door widened to the width of a person, Gavin stepped into the space between the racks and the door, and then, still holding Elaine's hand, onto the humped housing on the rear of the car. Elaine had to jump, but the housing was big enough for both of them. They clung to air vents on the rear of the car as it picked up speed, passed beyond the line of the fence around the factory, and entered the long tunnel of fencing that led, Gavin believed, toward Denver.
Gavin tore the top off the load of bread with his teeth and offered the open loaf to Elaine. She took a handful of slices, held them to her nose and inhaled the aroma, and laughed.
“Sometimes,” she said, “the simple pleasures are the best.”
Clinging to the back of the car as it rolled clacking through the bright, cool, clear Colorado morning, they stuffed themselves with hot bread.
The car slowed as it reached the outskirts of Denver. Gavin nodded at Elaine and jumped off. He ran alongside the car to catch her as she jumped. They stopped between the multiple sets of tracks and looked around as they caught their breath.
They were in a sort of manmade gully with stoneblock walls on either side. Just a few hundred yards farther along, the tracks disappeared into a dark tunnel.
Gavin and Elaine climbed the nearest stone wall to street level. The area nearby was dominated by the massive concrete bulk of a stadium, a complete bowl pierced with dark openings for entrance and exit; ramps wound their ways up the sides to upper levels.
The stadium was surrounded by broad black expanses of parking lot, now filled with a multihued harvest of electric cars. The air was thick with the rise and fall of massed human voices shouting their pleasure and displeasure, and the inhuman sound of engines and of bending and rending metal.
Elaine pointed out the camera surveillance on the pillars at the corner of each lot and the warning signs of the ubiquitous WatchComp, and they walked around the periphery of the stadium lots until they reached an area where a few old cars were parked and there were no pillars.
“This time let's get an electric,” Gavin said, “and solve the fuel problem.”
Most of the cars, however, were old steam turbines, and a few, even older, seemed to be internal-combustion models, more suited to a museum or a junkyard than a parking lot. Finally, however, they found an antique electric, much battered but apparently still sound. After some difficulty, Gavin wedged open the door on the driver's side and kicked open the equally stubborn door on the passenger side. Elaine looked around cautiously and got in. There was no one in sight, and the only reminder of human presence was the sound of enthusiasm and disappointment rolling like surf over the stadium walls.
Gavin settled himself into the driver's seat and stared at the steering wheel, or rather, where the steering wheel should have been. There was no steering column, no dashboard, no accelerator, no brake pedals. In their place was a black box about two feet square. It was humming.
“Let's get out of here,” Elaine said.
But it was not that easy to get the doors open again, and before Gavin could force them, the car was in motion, rolling toward the stadium. It turned automatically into a large, ground-floor stadium entrance, through a dark, underground tunnel, and into the brilliance of an arena strewn with sand and filled with automobiles charging like maddened bulls. Others lay ruined upon their sides or hunkered down at the edge of the stadium, oil streaming from their tortured sides into the sand.
Gradually the confused scene sorted itself out in Gavin's mind. Tractors dragged some hulks from the field. The cars still in motion were circling a large ball, hitting it with their bumpers or sides toward goals at either end of the long field. The cars were of many kinds, a few smooth-gliding electrics and a larger number of hissing steam turbines, but mostly snorting, fuming internal-combustion cars which had been outlawed from the highways.
Smoke and dust obscured the field, rolling aside periodically to reveal a moment of action or a scene of mechanical violence. Over everything hung the ancient and exhilarating fumes of gasoline, burning oil, and smoking rubber.
All this Gavin had a chance to sense as he struggled with the doors inside an automobile intent upon carrying them into the midst of carnage and massacre. He heard the audience cheer as their car merged into the melee, and then, as he and Elaine peered out, pounding on the windows, waving in an effort to make their presence known, the audience cheered louder, capering in the aisles of the stadium, standing on their seats, gesticulating gratefully toward the heavens.
“They like it,” Gavin shouted at Elaine, trying to be heard above the sounds of whining tires and grinding gears, roaring engines and smashing metal. “They want us in here.”
Something struck the side of his door, buckling it toward him, and something hit the car from behind, snapping his head back against a restraint. Their car rebounded and then wove more skillfully through the swerving, swiveling cars, to strike the ball a solid blow that sent it rolling over the hood of another car and far down the field where a car, timing its movement perfectly, hit the ball at the precise angle to send it spinning through goalposts and into a net.
The milling cars made wide, erratic circles in the sand, blasting their horns and revving their engines, as if celebrating a victory, and ended, in perfect precision, facing each other in two straight rows.
All the other cars were empty.
In a desperate burst of strength, Gavin forced open the bent door next to him and emerged into the dusty sunlight, surrounded by panting metal monsters. The crowd exploded. Men, women, and children threw hot dogs and hubcaps into the arena, cheered madly, shouted words that were lost in the general insanity.
As he helped Elaine out on the other side, the impossible levels of noise and excitement rose even higher. Gavin took her hand and ran through the oil-soaked sand toward the side of the stadium, but the sight and sound of the crowd deterred him as he neared the tall concrete barrier, and he swerved left, running around the perimeter of the arena, searching for a way out without risking the manic enthusiasm of the mob above. He looked, he thought, like a runner taking his victory lap, or a bullfighter making a stately march around the ring to accept his tribute.
Just after Gavin had begun to despair of escape, they came to the dark tunnel from which their automobile had emerged, and they dashed into it, seeing at the far end the promise of uncomplicated sunlight, like an entrance into arcadia. But before they reached it, a barred gate rolled down to block their way.
“Here!” someone shouted at them. “This way!”
A white hand motioned to them out of the darkness like the spectral hand that had led many an unwary traveler to his doom. Gavin went through a doorway, Elaine close behind him. A hand caught Gavin's left arm and guided him down a dark hallway. He emerged at last into a small room. It was an office with an old metal desk and swivel chair, a couple of battered metal filing cabinets, and a wastebasket. On the other side of the room was another door.
Even as he saw all this, Gavin was turning to the person who had grasped his arm. “What's all this about?”
A woman released his arm and Elaine's at the same time. She closed the door behind them, and the sounds of the stadium were muffled, as if they were transmitted now through five hundred thousand tons of concrete. She laughed. It was the low, hearty laugh of a big woman.
“I should ask you,” she said.
She was big. She was nearly as tall as Gavin, and perhaps almost as heavy, but she wasn't fat. She was a colorful woman. When Gavin looked at her, it seemed as if all the rest of the world had been created in black and white. She was a mature woman, all formed, and well-formed, at that. There was nothing tentative about her, from her pink trousers to her red hair. In between there was a sensual breadth of hips, a firm waist, and a dramatic projection of bosom. Her throat was smooth and unlined, her chin forceful, her mouth red and generous, her nose ample, her eyes blue and certain, her eyebrows thick and red and mobile.
She was, Gavin thought, a threatening woman, with appetites to match her Amazonian build, and a presence that challenged a man to measure himself against her femaleness.
“After all,” she said, “it's not every substitute that comes rolling into the stadium bringing a load of refugees.” She smiled at them, exposing white, perfect teeth. They looked capable of breaking bones to get at the marrow.
“We were looking for a car,” Gavin said.
“To steal,” Elaine added.
The woman laughed from the pit of her stomach. “And you poor ninnies picked a computer-controlled car for the game. Oh, golly! Oh, gee! Oh, me-me-me-me-me!” Her laughter finally fade
d into gasps for air.
Gavin and Elaine looked at each other. “If that's the door to the outside,” Gavin said, “we'll thank you for leading us here and be on our way.”
The woman wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I wouldn't think of it,” she said. “You poor kids need a place to stay, I'll bet, and a meal. Come on,” she said, as if she were accustomed to having her suggestions treated like orders, “I'll take you home to my family.”
“But who are you?” Elaine asked.
The woman took them by the arms again and moved them effortlessly toward the outer door. “Why, darlings, my name is Sally Grandjon, and people call me ‘High-livin’ Sal, the cybernated gal,’ and I'm the rootinest, tootinest, shootinest woman in the Rocky Mountains, but, kids, I've got a warm heart, a heart big enough to take in all the strays in Denver.”
Gavin opened the door with his free hand, overwhelmed by her forcefulness. “All right,” he said as he went out into the brightness of the day.
“Good,” Sally said, giving him a look as openly appraising as the one he had given her earlier. “Here's the car. Get into the back, you two.”
The car was a big black limousine of an electric. Gavin had never seen an electric that big. Sally half-helped them, half-pushed them into the back seat. “There, now,” she said. “Get comfy. We don't have far to go.”
