Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  “Right down the line. They’re all of middle age or past, drove well-preserved older cars, are afraid to travel by air, are reluctant to explain why they moved such long distances. The complexion of entire areas in these headwater regions is being changed. There’s a sameness to them—people all conservative, timid . . . you know the pattern.”

  “I’m afraid I do. Bound to have political repercussions, too. Congressional representation from these areas will change to fit the new pattern, sure as hell. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Fisk saw that he only had a few minutes more, began to feel his nervousness mount. He wondered if he’d dare gulp a pill in front of Merill, decided against it, said: “And you’d better look into the insurance angle. Costs are going up and people are beginning to complain. I saw a report on my desk when I checked in last night. These kooks were almost to a man low-risk drivers. As they get entirely out of the market, that throws a bigger load onto the others.”

  “I’ll have the possibility of a subsidy investigated,” Merill said. “Anything else? You’re running out of time.” Running out of time, Fisk thought. The story of our lives. He touched another of the folders, said, “Here are the missing persons reports. There’s a graph curve in them to fit this theory. I also have divorce records that are worth reviewing—wives who refused to join their husbands in one of these moves, that sort of thing.”

  “Husband moved and the wife refused to join him, eh?”

  “That’s the usual pattern. There are a couple of them, though, where the wife moved and refused to come back. Desertion charged . . . very indicative.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Merill said. “Okay, HI review this when . . .”

  “One thing more, Chief,” Fisk said. “The telegrams and moving company records.” He touched a thicker folder on the right. “I had photocopies made because few people would believe them without seeing them.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The moving company gets an order from, say, Bangor, to move household belongings there from, for example, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The request contains a plea to feed the cat, the dog, the parrot or whatever. The movers go to the address and they find a hungry dog or cat in the house—or even a dead one on some occasions. One mover found a bowl of dead goldfish.”

  “So?”

  “These houses fit right into the pattern,” Fisk said. “The moving men find dinners that’ve been left cooking, plates on the table—all kinds of signs that people left and intended to come back . . . but didn’t. They’ve got a name for this kind of thing in the moving industry. They call it the ‘Mary Celeste move’ after the story of the sailing ship that . . .”

  “I know the story,” Merill said in a sour voice.

  Merill passed a hand wearily across his face, dropped his hand to the desk with a thump. “Okay, Marty, it fits,” he said. “These characters go out for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon drive. They take a wrong turn onto a one-way access ramp and get trapped onto one of the highspeed expressways. They’ve never driven over 150 before in their lives and the expressway carrier beam forces them up to 280 or 300 and they panic, lock onto the automatic, and then they’re afraid to touch the controls until they reach a region where the automatics slow them for diverging traffic. And after that you’re lucky if you can ever get them into something with wheels on it again.”

  “They sell their cars,” Fisk said. “They stick to local tube and surface transportation. Used-car buyers have come to spot these people, call them ‘Panics.’ A kook with out-of-state licenses drives in all glassy-eyed and trembling, asks: ‘How much you give me for my car?’ The dealer makes a killing, of course.”

  “Of course,” Merill said. “Well, we’ve got to keep this under wraps at least until after Congress passes the appropriation for the new trans-Huron expressway. After that . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.” He waved a hand to dismiss Fisk, bent to a report-corder that folded out of the desk, and said, “Stay where I can get you in a hurry, Marty.”

  Within seconds, Fisk was out in the hallway facing the guidelines to the high-speed ramp that would carry him to his own office. A man bumped into him and Fisk found that he was standing on the office lip reluctant to move out into the whizzing throngs of the corridor.

  No, he thought, I’m not reluctant. I’m afraid.

  He was honest enough with himself, though, to realize that he wasn’t afraid of the high-speed ramp. It was what the ramp signified, where it could carry him.

  I wonder what my car would bring? he asked himself. And he thought: Would my wife move? He dried his sweating palm on his sleeve before taking another green pill from his pocket and gulping it. Then he stepped out into the hall.

  X MARKS THE PEDWALK

  By Fritz Leiber

  Each year, something like 55,000 Americans lose their lives in auto accidents and more than 4,000,000 are injured. Automobile travel is by far the most dangerous form of transportation when compared with bus, rail, and air travel. A substantial proportion of these victims are members of that endangered species called the “pedestrian” Are we walkers all just going to continue to take this lying down? Or are we going (as in this delightful tale) to rise up and do something about it?

  Based on material in Ch. 7—“First Clashes of the Wheeled and Footed Sects”—of Vol. 3 of Burger’s monumental History of Traffic, published by the Foundation for Twenty-Second Century Studies.

  The raggedy little old lady with the big shopping bag was in the exact center of the crosswalk when she became aware of the big black car bearing down on her.

  Behind the thick bulletproof glass its seven occupants had a misty look, like men in a diving bell.

  She saw there was no longer time to beat the car to either curb. Veering remorselessly, it would catch her in the gutter.

  Useless to attempt a feint and double-back, such as any venturesome child executed a dozen times a day. Her reflexes were too slow.

  Polite vacuous laughter came from the car’s loudspeaker over the engine’s mounting roar.

  From her fellow pedestrians lining the curbs came a sigh of horror.

  The little old lady dipped into her shopping bag and came up with a big blue-black automatic. She held it in both fists, riding the recoils like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.

  Aiming at the base of the windshield, just as a big-game hunter aims at the vulnerable spine of a charging water buffalo over the horny armor of its lowered head, the little old lady squeezed off three shots before the car chewed her down.

  From the right-hand curb a young woman in a wheelchair shrieked an obscenity at the car’s occupants.

  Smythe-de Winter, the driver, wasn’t happy. The little old lady’s last shot had taken two members of his car pool. Bursting through the laminated glass, the steel-jacketed slug had traversed the neck of Phipps-McHeath and buried itself in the skull of Horvendile-Harker.

  Braking viciously, Smythe-de Winter rammed his car over the right-hand curb. Pedestrians scattered into entries and narrow arcades, among them a youth bounding high on crutches.

  But Smythe-de Winter got the girl in the wheelchair.

  Then he drove rapidly out of the Slum Ring into the Suburbs, a shred of rattan swinging from the flange of his right fore mudguard for a trophy. Despite the two-for-two casualty list, he felt angry and depressed. The secure, predictable world around him seemed to be crumbling.

  While his companions softly keened a dirge to Horvy and Phipps and quietly mopped up their blood, he frowned and shook his head.

  “They oughn’t to let old ladies carry magnums,” he murmured.

  Witherspoon-Hobbs nodded agreement across the front-seat corpse. “They oughtn’t to let ’em carry anything. God, how I hate Feet,” he muttered, looking down at his shrunken legs. “Wheels forever!” he softly cheered.

  The incident had immediate repercussions throughout the city. At the combined wake of the little old lady and the girl in the whee
lchair, a fiery-tongued speaker inveighed against the White-Walled Fascists of Suburbia, telling to his hearers, the fabled wonders of old Los Angeles, where pedestrians were sacrosanct, even outside crosswalks. He called for a hobnail march across the nearest lawn-bowling alleys and perambulator-traversed golf courses of the motorists.

  At the Sunnyside Crematorium, to which the bodies of Phipps and Horvy had been conveyed, an equally impassioned and rather more grammatical orator reminded his listeners of the legendary justice of old Chicago, where pedestrians were forbidden to carry small arms and anyone with one foot off the sidewalk was fair prey. He broadly hinted that a holocaust, primed if necessary with a few tankfuls of gasoline, was the only cure for the Slums.

  Bands of skinny youths came loping at dusk out of the Slum Ring into the innermost sections of the larger doughnut of the Suburbs, slashing defenseless tires, shooting expensive watchdogs and scrawling filthy words on the pristine panels of matrons’ runabouts which never ventured more than six blocks from home.

  Simultaneously squadrons of young suburban motorcycles and scooterites roared through the outermost precincts of the Slum Ring, harrying children off sidewalks, tossing stink-bombs through second-story tenement windows and defacing hovel-fronts with sprays of black paint.

  Incidents—a thrown brick, a cut comer, monster tacks in the portico of the Auto Club—were even reported from the center of the city, traditionally neutral territory.

  The Government hurriedly acted, suspending all traffic between the Center and the Suburbs and establishing a 24-hour curfew in the Slum Ring. Government agents moved only by centipede-car and pogo-hopper to underline the point that they favored neither contending side.

  The day of enforced non-movement for Feet and Wheels was spent in furtive vengeful preparations. Behind locked garage doors, machine-guns that fired through the nose ornament were mounted under hoods, illegal scythe blades were welded to oversize hubcaps and the stainless steel edges of flange fenders were honed to razor sharpness.

  While nervous National Guardsmen hopped about the deserted sidewalks of the Slum Ring, grim-faced men and women wearing black arm-bands moved through the web-work of secret tunnels and hidden doors, distributing heavy-caliber small arms and spike-studded paving blocks, piling cobblestones on strategic roof-tops and sapping upward from the secret tunnels to create car-traps. Children got ready to soap intersections after dark. The Committee of Pedestrian Safety, sometimes known as Robespierre’s Rats, prepared to release its two carefully hoarded anti-tank guns.

  At nightfall, under the tireless urging of the Government, representatives of the Pedestrians and the Motorists met on a huge safety island at the boundary of the Slum Ring and the Suburbs.

  Underlings began a noisy dispute as to whether Smythe-de Winter had failed to give a courtesy honk before charging, whether the little old lady had opened fire before the car had come within honking distance, how many wheels of Smythe-de’s car had been on the sidewalk when he hit the girl in the wheelchair and so on. After a little while the High Pedestrian and the Chief Motorist exchanged cautious winks and drew aside.

  The red writhing of a hundred kerosene flares and the mystic yellow pulsing of a thousand firefly lamps mounted on yellow sawhorses ranged around the safety island illumined two tragic, strained faces.

  “A word before we get down to business,” the Chief Motorist whispered. “What’s the current S.Q. of your adults?”

  “Forty-one and dropping,” the High Pedestrian replied, his eyes fearfully searching from side to side for eavesdroppers. “I can hardly get aides who are halfway compos mentis.”

  “Our own Sanity Quotient is thirty-seven,” the Chief Motorist revealed. He shrugged helplessly. “The wheels inside my people’s heads are slowing down. I do not think they will be speeded up in my lifetime.”

  “They say Government’s only fifty-two,” the other said with a matching shrug.

  “Well, I suppose we must scrape out one more compromise,” the one suggested hollowly, “though I must confess there are times when I think we’re all the figments of a paranoid’s dream.”

  Two hours of concentrated deliberations produced the new Wheel-Foot Articles of Agreement. Among other points, pedestrian handguns were limited to a slightly lower muzzle velocity and to .38 caliber and under, while motorists were required to give three honks at one block distance before charging a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Two wheels over the curb changed a traffic kill from third-degree manslaughter to petty homicide. Blind pedestrians were permitted to carry hand grenades.

  Immediately the Government went to work. The new Wheel-Foot Articles were loudspeakered and posted. Detachments of police and psychiatric social hoppers centi-pedaled and pogoed through the Slum Ring, seizing outside weapons and giving tranquilizing jet-injections to the unruly. Teams of hypnotherapists and mechanics scuttled from home to home in the Suburbs and from garage to garage, in-chanting a conformist serenity and stripping illegal armament from cars. On the advice of a rogue psychiatrist, who said it would channel off aggressions, a display of bull-fighting was announced, but this had to be canceled when a strong protest was lodged by the Decency League, which had a large mixed Wheel-Foot membership.

  At dawn, curfew was lifted in the Slum Ring and traffic reopened between the Suburbs and the Center. After a few uneasy moments it became apparent that the status quo had been restored.

  Smythe-de Winter tooled his gleaming black machine along the Ring. A thick steel bolt with a large steel washer on either side neatly filled the hole the little old lady’s slug had made in the windshield.

  A brick bounced off the roof. Bullets pattered against the side windows. Smythe-de ran a handkerchief around his neck under his collar and smiled.

  A block ahead children were darting into the street, catcalling and thumbing their noses. Behind one of them limped a fat dog with a spiked collar.

  Smythe-de suddenly gunned his motor. He didn’t hit any of the children, but he got the dog.

  A flashing light on the dash showed him the right front tire was losing pressure. Must have hit the collar as well! He thumbed the matching emergency-air button and the flashing stopped.

  He turned toward Witherspoon-Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction, “I like a normal orderly, world, where you always have a little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just enough to brace you.”

  Witherspoon-Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its center was discolored by a brownish stain ribbon-tracked by tires.

  “That’s where you bagged the little old lady, Smythe-de,” he remarked. “I’ll say this for her now: she had spirit.”

  “Yes, that’s where I bagged her,” Smythe-de agreed flatly. He remembered wistfully the witchlike face growing rapidly larger, the jerking shoulders in black bombazine, the wild white-circled eyes. He suddenly found himself feeling that this was a very dull day.

  WHEELS

  By Robert Thurston

  It is said that pets and cars are extensions of their owners’ personalities, and we have all seen bulldogs and sheepdogs that looked like their masters. Although the cause-and-effect relationship is somewhat cloudy here (people could, after all, be extensions of their pets’ personalities) there seems to be some truth to the generalization.

  But what about cars? Does an owner’s personality come through in the kind of car he drives? Does this mean that since there are no more convertibles being produced in this country there are no more open people? Technology has provided many things for people. Here Robert Thurston speculates on the possibility of a machine helping a man to find himself.

  Got to have wheels. No other out, no other escape from this. Lincoln Rockwell X says he can get me a car. Only catch, I got to go to the ghetto for it.

  I might get wheels all right, but I might drive out dead. Still—if I don’t do anything about it now, I’ll be too old when I can.

  I’ll never get a safedry license anyhow. You got to be the son of a safedry. They�
�ll shove you that crap about safedry’s high life expectancy, being hereditary, just to hide what’s true, that it’s all kissass games. My father’s screwed me royal. He’s a known traffic vile. I been turned down now seventeen times for a learner’s permit. Bureau clerks laugh among themselves when I come in.

  I want to have wheels, I go to the ghetto. Today.

  Bus clerk, bastard, turned me down. No seats available. Had to walk crosstown. Three or four carloads of punk safedrys out cruising. They shout insults at me. Can’t offer to fight them ’cause I’m alone. Crummy bastards, they drive through the streets, their windows locked tight when they’re not throwing out challenges, when they’re not throwing out rocks, their bodies moving to music we can’t hear through the soundproofing.

  At least it’s not night. At night, in areas police cars avoid, they search us out and scare us by backing us against walls with their cars. They come up on the pavement after us. We steal their license plates when we can. We bend them out of shape and bury them in the ground.

  Street debris clings to my trousers. Dust flies into my eyes. I need something different. My whole life needs a kick in the balls. Work is sleepwalking from desk to desk. Home is sneaking looks at my father sneaking drinks. Play is dodging the traps, play is bumping bodies to drumbeats you can’t hear. Sex is just bumping bodies. The cops may crack me for illegal driving. But they got to catch me first.

  Easy time slipping past the pig line, crawling across the rubble of the abandoned buildings. I walk through the sniper zone unscathed (a distant shot keeps me alert) and meet Lincoln Rockwell X at the designated streetcorner. Blackfolk stare at me but leave me alone. Only an idiot sneaks into their territory, Lincoln Rockwell X says, and they don’t think it’s Christian to maim idiots. Don’t let them know you’re not an idiot, he says. I walk along with my tongue sticking out the comer of my mouth.