Car Sinister

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Car Sinister Page 8

by Robert Silverberg


  “All clear. You may open the lanes again.”

  His black car snarled alongside, and he stepped in and was whisked away. Sixty seconds later the first of the traffic whispered past the spot where the incident had occurred.

  The road was open again.

  All the time, traffic had been passing in a long blurred procession of speed on all the other ten lanes, unconcerned, hardly seeing, matter-of-fact.

  Bartram angrily started to call Team Four.

  Steve cut across. “Belaying cutting. Driver dead.”

  Bartram wiped his mouth with a tissue. “Well, you can’t win them all.”

  They packed up and coptered back to the station.

  The white buildings like shoeboxes below tilted as the copter swung for a landing, and Bartram’s earphones said in the voice of the dispatcher: “Incident for HR972. Grid one nine five. Outer quad, three inner lanes.”

  “Up,” said Bartram. Then: “Outer quad—that’s always rough.”

  Grid position lay one point nine five miles from the beginning of their section as it emerged from Sennock Forest. Bartram looked ahead. “Twelve lanes of highspeed death,” he said. “I must be feeling old.”

  This time they hit the road before the auto repair gangs had lifted all the cars. The outer quad was the high-speed quad. Two hundred, two hundred fifty miles an hour, strictly lane controlled. A pile-up could telescope a hundred cars, radar alarms locked to brakes or no damn radar alarms. Bartram sent support Teams Thirty through Forty to check the cars stopped, undamaged, in back of the incident.

  “Look for internal bleeding, shock, cracked or bruised ribs, general buffeting.” He cracked the whip. “You don’t have to hit a car to damage yourself. Don’t let any through until they’ve been checked.”

  Libby jetted past holding a girl with no legs, her aides with the plastic bags and the pumps hovering beneath.

  The three lanes held a tangle of cars like a child’s toy-car box at bedtime.

  Libby’s voice screamed, “You can’t sew your damn legs until I’ve replaced the liver and pancreas!”

  Gloria, the limb technician, screamed back: “Well hurry it up, Libby! The legs are out of deep freeze, and they won’t wait all day!”

  The swab-up boys were already squirting chemicals to clear off the blood from the road’s neutral gray-green.

  In the hospital box temporarily tethered from the roof, Karl Grecos called down, his mike still worn beneath his surgeon’s mask: “Chief! Unit’s brain damaged too extensively. He’ll never think normally—well, you know! Permission to check out—I’ve a waiting list—”

  “Check him out, Karl.”

  Handlers sheeted out the stretcher, and another unit slid onto the table. Grecos trepanned and operated with an efficiency seldom matched on the road; but even he could not work miracles.

  Gloria had begun attaching fresh legs to the girl, and Libby was deep within the belly of the girl’s father, replacing kidneys that had been smashed like squashed oranges.

  A handler triggered a pick-up truck across. Discarded legs and arms protruded like pencils from a glass. Bartram looked closer, said: “What’s that head doing in there, Bill?”

  “I had the okay on that from Mister Grecos, Chief. Clean decapitation off that roadster. Guy was driving with the top down. Took it off clean as a whistle.

  “Check.”

  Cars were being hauled up to the roof out of the way to await their turn to be lifted through the access panels. The auto repair gangs were sweating it out today. Personnel from HR972, too, weren’t sitting down on the job. Bartram chivvied and chased them. “You haven’t begun the shift yet!”

  “Can you hold that girl—that unit—on intravenous oxy till we hit the station?” Libby asked viciously.

  “Just about.” The nurse aide stepped up the flow.

  “What’s the problem, Libby?” asked Bartram, jetting across.

  “All out of her size capacity lungs, chief. Why do these girls all have the same lung demands, I wonder?”

  “Make a note to carry more spare lungs in that size bracket. I’ll confirm in standing orders.”

  “Check.”

  Some of the choppers lifted off, their red crosses shining bravely against white paintwork. The auto repair gangs cleared their area. The police began to pull in their radar beacons. Police Super Metcalfe’s car spun up, and he jumped out, ready to give the final word.

  “Clear?” he asked Bartram.

  “Clear. Didn’t count the tally.”

  “Not too bad. Fifty cars—we think. Some of the pieces were rather small.”

  “Not as small as some of the bits we pick up.”

  Metcalfe grimaced. “You can keep your job, Bartram.”

  “If people intend to drive on the highways, then someone has to look out for them. What else should we do? Let them bleed to death by the roadside? Let them lose an arm or a leg or a liver and go through life without? When we have banks stuffed with human spare parts?”

  “All right, Bartram. My job is to keep the road open. Your job is to repair the humans on the road. We work together.”

  “So long as we need roads then we’ll be needed.”

  Metcalfe began his ceremonial walk down the white line.

  “Until they design foolproof cars and foolproof roads, you mean.”

  “When they do.”

  “They will, one day.”

  “Speed the day, then.”

  Metcalfe waved his arms, shooing the last of the vacuum cleaners away. He signaled. His black car picked him up. Bartram jetted up to his copter. The road was open again.

  Sixty seconds later traffic flowed past the site of the incident, traveling at two hundred, two hundred fifty miles an hour.

  This time they made it back to the station. At Station HR972 a dynamic energy possessed them as kits were made up to strength, more spare arms and legs, kidneys, livers, jawbones, more plasma, more whole blood. More splints and bandages and vials of rare and costly drugs. More of everything to repair the human frame subjected to force it had not been designed to withstand, forces that would in another place and another time have killed irrevocably.

  Down in the hospital, medics were checking out units that had been processed, seeing them onto the ambulance service stretchers, making sure they brought back their own stretchers and skeletons—stores were touchy about unnecessary waste of material.

  “There they go,” Bartram said to Grecos, watching the ambulances pull away. They ground out in low gear up the service ramps and so out onto the road for conveyance to the city hospitals.

  “Yeah,” said Grecos. “The old pipeline.”

  “All patched up and smiling; they’ll be out on the road again soon. Maybe we’ll even have some of them through here again.”

  “Still and all, you have to have the road. I mean, roads are the lifeblood of our transportation system, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Bartram, rubbing his jaw and remembering. “Sure.”

  “I mean—” Grecos looked his perplexity. “You can’t legislate roads out of existence. I mean—they exist. They have to. How could our civilization exist, else?”

  Bartram checked the flow meters. “Coming through better than fifty a minute now.”

  The alarms screamed. “Incident, HR972. Grid eight five six. Inner two lanes, center quad. Overspill to outer lane, inner quad.”

  “Hell!” said Grecos, running. “That’ll be a coachload of kids. I can smell it.”

  Bartram snapped his transceiver over. “Additional juvenile supplies. Urgent. Get with it.”

  As they climbed into the copter, he said gently: “It’s a quiet one today, Karl. Wait till tomorrow. Holiday. We’ll be busy then.”

  The copter rose, the sun shining on the red crosses. “Yeah. Busy. But I figure I’d rather be here than there.” He jerked a thumb at the road.

  Like a white worm devouring the world, the road thrummed on, uncaring.

  A DAY ON DEATH HIGHWAY<
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  By H. Chandler Elliott

  Coming-of-age in America is directly linked with the automobile. Indeed, maturity is defined for many as being legally able to drive a car. The hot rod and the drag race were burning issues only a few years ago, and the leading test of courage and manhood during one’s high school years was too often the drag or the game of “chicken” However, the blame may not have rested entirely with the kids—witness the behavior of Little League parents and the action of the parents in this story.

  H. Chandler Elliott wrote only a handful of science fiction stories, including “Inanimate Objection” (Galaxy, 1954) and the present selection. We wish there were more.

  I

  Sept 11, 1987

  (Earth time)

  “I want a record of this to go with the stereos I took. I’ve been in history! So I’ve snake-hipped the dicto-type for “homework.”

  “I’ll get off the mark at this lawyer’s office. I was there to get shown my Pop was a dust-eater. Wotta laff! I was right up in the front seat with him, bucking this frame-up. He’s so get-off-the-road, and he wasn’t letting this old shyster pass him. He said nonchalant, “Look, Mr. Craik. I’m retaining you to fight this biased, vindictive judgment, not lecture me on it, to protect my rights.”

  Craik mugged: “That assumes you’ve left me some rights to protect, Mr. Blaire. You haven’t. You are permanently debarred from operation of any power vehicle. I can do nothing further for you.”

  “Appeal! Fix it! I can pay.” And he sure can.

  The old moke tightened his mouth: “I infer you made the money by methods to match your driving record, not by grasp of essentials. Ml try again. This biased, vindictive judgment was handed down by the highest court your case can reach. Can you grasp that?”

  Pop came right back like the great sportsfan he is, “Well, we can contest those two-bit charges I hadn’t time to fight when they were made. I know they can’t debar me finally on uncontested stuff.”

  The old guy looped down his eyelids: “If you’d ever bothered to appear in court yourself, or even read the transcripts, you would also know that all charges have been contested. Apparently you’ve been so cotton-wooled by insurance and connections and smart lawyers, you think you can brush off even child-murder.”

  Pop bounced up, ready to ditch the moke: “Why, you . . .!”

  “Your failure was no thanks to you. Would you have to kill children in actual fact to sober you? The community is not minded to let you try the experiment. This isn’t 1975, you know.”

  The two-timing old right-laner! I’d been told to keep my muffler cut, but there’s times when you surge or burst. I surged, “And don’t we ever get to score? A bunch of mokes get him in a jam, and a fresh cop calls us Flight of the Stumblebum—because we have a yellow ’n’ black zoom. Does my Pop have to take that gravel?”

  Craik looked at me like I was a parking ticket. “Well, I suppose a lad should be loyal to his father. Pity it’s not in a better cause. So, yes, my budding Big Shot, he does. On triple probation, he drove with such dashing irresponsibility that he sheared off three steel guard-posts and barely missed a group of children. He’ll take what anyone calls him, and thank them it wasn’t worse.” He swung back at Pop. “I took your case to pay off a favor to Sam Hardy. I consider I’ve paid in full. And the case is closed.”

  Pop kept a manly silence. Mom took over: “But, Mr. Craik, how can my husband do business without a car? A Plutomat representative can’t walk up to a prospect’s door like a peddler. This destroys my family’s livelihood.”

  “Your husband should have considered that sooner, Mrs. Blaire.”

  My rad just boiled to hear her having to take the old honk-honk from minions of the law. I’ve never been much on girls because Mom is my ideal, and only my young sister Judy comes in that custom model. And I was just a skinny Teener, helpless to defend the family honor. But I sneaked a squeeze of her hand.

  Pop said grimly, “Then these fanatics have ruined me. I have no place to go in this so-called Free World.”

  Craik shrugged: “Then find a Parallel that will take you, and get Translated, Mr. Blaire. That would solve everybody’s problems.” Obviously he was including his own.

  I perked up. Translation, switch to a parallel time, might be good.

  Pop said, “That costs a fortune.”

  Craik shrugged again: “It might cost less than your dauntless career here. I’ll send my account.” He froze us out like trash.

  This record being for posterity, I better give the true facts, which are already being suppressed. Because I’ve boned up on them.

  So, this LLL pest started in 75, the Golden Age of Go. A bunch called the Regular Guys had gotten the laws modernated—“safe and reasonable speed,” nationwide. They backed Bucky Kooznik, who’d been framed in a speed-trap, and won in Supreme Court. They backed Senator Smurge for Vice President—the prince who got a national speed law laughed into the wreckers by tacking on an amendment to make the limit ninety—and got him in.

  Well, this low-octane third party, the Life and Limb League (Lily-Livered Lunks, we called them), tried to buck the traffic. Their candidate, Bob Green, had had a kid killed and had sort of blown his tires. Well, sure, like Pop says, it’s too bad but we can’t all live in bungalows because kids fall downstairs. Anyway, LLL got a loud boff and lost all its deposits. Only Green kept squawking about how highway deaths jumped from 87,000 in 76, to 116,000 in ’78; and he signed up relatives and friends of “victims,” and soreheads who’d got bunged up and couldn’t be sports about it, and natural-born cranks and scaredy-pants. You wouldn’t think people would vote to get themselves traffic tickets. But in ’78, LLL won seats in Congress, and more in ‘80.

  So we stopped laughing and fought back. We sued a paper for a cartoon of Smurge with his arms around a goony driver and a skeleton, saying, “My Buddies!” And the court ratted on us, and it upheld disgusting photos of crashes and libels that said more than “the car went out of control.” So drivers got nervous and the “toll” climbed on.

  Then, in ’84, Green got in, and showed what a fanatic at the wheel will do. Laws, laws, laws. We said “They can’t arrest everybody.” Oh, no? Fines, confiscations, jail for thousands of respectable people. And a Gestapo of Lily-white drivers’d spot you using the old elbow or boomin’ the amber, and you’d get a stinking card that you’d lost points. Twenty-five points got you a fine and a goo-talk about “mental attitudes.” Blah! What about guts and skill and all that?

  Well, we figured there’d soon be enough people sore to give us a comeback. So LLL claimed they’d saved 30,000 lives in ’85. So what the heck, it wouldn’t have been you anyway. But there aren’t many real fighters like Pop, and the Old Cause was driven to the curb.

  Pop had to drive home real humble because if they caught him now, they’d jail him, him, a free citizen. But he was looking stem and unbowed, like a guerrilla hero in tri-di.

  So presently I said, “Pop, let’s do it!”

  Mom chimed in, “Yes, Gail, if you can’t work here, let’s at least ask about it.” Mom’s real practical under the hood.

  Judy was keen too. At fourteen, in Ye Good Olde Daze, she’d have been a zee already. Now, she’d have to wait two years.

  So Pop got into passing gear. And just a week later he came home with his hat cocked and his heels clicking, and summoned us all to the tridiroom. “Well, keeds,” he said, “they sure picked on the wrong man when they picked on ol’ Buck Blaire. Biggest favor anyone ever did us. It seems there’s a world called Jehu (some crackjaw gibberish in their language) after some old prophet. Anyway, Plutomat’s granted me planetary franchise. Izzat good or is it?

  “And tape this, keeds! That planet’s set up for adults. They’re drivin’ fools, wonderful roads, most powerful zooms anywhere, and, get this, nary a traffic law or a traffic court on the planet.”

  Judy puzzled: “But Daddy, they must have some laws, like which side you drive on . . .”

  P
op’s always indulged Judy. “Well, honey, that’s rules; and anyone with sense knows when rules do and don’t matter. Like if I drive on the left on an empty street, whose business is it? See, Judy, put deadheads off the road, leave things to skill and experience, and you’re safe. Their accident-rate’s just about nil—naturally.”

  “Well, it sounds funny to me. You be careful.” Mom said.

  “You been skull-scrubbed by Triple-L, keed? Your never come out front unless you muscle into openings, like fast. That’s the secret of all big operators—Caesar, Napoleon, Buck Blaire—split-second decisions. We’ve gotta take off in a cloud of clamshells, and we can’t wait for a lecture course. But you can vote on it. Now. All in favor of saying Nay, say Aye. Nobody? Carried! Oh, by the way, old Craik ain’t such a bad old moke after all. He tipped me off on this Jehu place himself the other day.”

  “Huh!” I thought. “I wouldn’t trust that pussy-schnook much.”

  But Pop took off with his rubber scorchin’: Plutomat contract, Translation permit, appointment with the movers. The skids and zees in my gang were cynical; but I knew I’d get my own back, and I just sat tight and soaked up Jehuan by hypnophone.

  Came the Day. A crew put up a frame around our lot, higher than the house, and into the ground. I asked the foreman if it marked out the block that was going to be swapped with a block of Jehu.

  “You aren’t as dumb as you look, kid,” he said, “which must be a consolation to your folks. That’s what it does.”

  “Thanx,” I said and strolled off. Gee, I hate a fresh guy!

  Sure, a butterfly-collector could have had a field-day in my stomach, when the fresh foreman called all his gang out and began countdown. Mom and Judy were too bunny to come out, but Pop and I stood on the steps. I felt revved up, then, like beating another zoom around a curve, and at Minus Five I called to all the skids in the crowd watching, “Here go the Regulars. We will Return!” like that historical guy on tri-di. Pop just stood stern and unbowed.

 

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