Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  The hilltop provided a splendid view of a wooded lake fed by a small stream. On the other side of the lake, the fence of a nudist reservation shattered the slanted rays of the sun, and beyond the fence, the figures of nudists could be seen moving about the streets of one of the reservation villages. Owing to the distance, they were hardly more than indistinguishable dots, and at first Arabella was only vaguely aware of them. Gradually, though, they penetrated her consciousness to a degree where they pre-empted all else.

  “It must be horrible!” she said suddenly.

  “What must be horrible?” Howard wanted to know.

  “To live naked in the woods like that. Like—like savages!”

  Howard regarded her with eyes as blue—and as deep—as the wooded lake. “You can hardly call them savages,” he said presently. “They have machines the same as we do. They maintain schools and libraries. They have trades and professions. True, they can only practice them within the confines of the reservation, but that’s hardly more limited than practicing them in a small town or even a city. All in all, Pd say they were civilized.”

  “But they’re naked!”

  “Is it so horrible to be naked?”

  He had opened his windshield and was leaning quite close to her. Now he reached up and opened her windshield too, and she felt the cool wind against her face. She saw the kiss in his eyes, but she did not draw away, and presently she felt it on her lips. She was glad, then, that she hadn’t drawn away, because there was nothing of Mr. Upswept in the kiss, or of Harry Fourwheels; nothing of her father’s remarks and her mother’s insinuations. After a while she heard a car door open, and then another, and presently she felt herself being drawn out into the sunshine and the April wind, and the wind and the sun were cool and warm against her body, cool and warm and clean, and shame refused to rise in her, even when she felt Howard’s car-less chest pressing against hers.

  It was a long sweet moment and she never wanted it to end. But end it did, as all moments must. “What was that?” Howard said, raising his head.

  She had heard the sound too—the whirring sound of wheels—and her eyes followed his down the hillside and caught the gleaming tailgate of a white convertible just before it disappeared around a bend in the road. “Do—do you think they saw us?” she asked.

  Howard hesitated perceptibly before he answered. “No, I don’t think so. Probably someone out for a Sunday drive. If they’d climbed the hill we would have heard the motor.”

  “Not—not if there was a silencer on it,” Arabella said. She slipped back into her car-dress. “I—I think we’d better go.”

  “All right.” He started to slip back into his pickup, paused. “Will—will you come here with me next Sunday?” he asked.

  His eyes were earnest, imploring. “Yes,” she heard her voice say, “I’ll come with you.”

  It was even lovelier than the first Sunday had been—warmer, brighter, bluer of sky. Again Howard drew her out of her dress and held her close and kissed her, and again she felt no shame. “Come on,” he said, “I want to show you something.” He started down the hill toward the wooded lake.

  “But you’re walking ,” she protested.

  “No one’s here to see, so what’s the difference? Come on.”

  She stood undecided in the wind. A brook sparkling far below decided her. “All right,” she said.

  The uneven ground gave her trouble at first, but after a while she got used to it, and soon she was half-skipping along at Howard’s side. At the bottom of the hill they came to a grove of wild apple trees. The brook ran through it, murmuring over mossy stones. Howard lay face down on the bank and lowered his lips to the water. She followed suit. The water was winter-cool, and the coolness went all through her, raising goose bumps on her skin.

  They lay there side by side. Above them, leaf shoots and limbs arabesqued the sky. Their third kiss was even sweeter than its predecessors. “Have you been here before?” she asked when at last they drew apart.

  “Many times,” he said.

  “Alone?”

  “Always alone.”

  “But aren’t you afraid Big Jim might find out?”

  He laughed. “Big Jim? Big Jim is an artificial entity. The automakers dreamed him up to frighten people into wearing their cars so that they would buy more of them and turn them in more often, and the government co-operated because without increased car-turnover, the economy would have collapsed. It wasn’t hard to do, because people had been wearing their cars unconsciously all along. The trick was to make them wear them consciously—to make them self-conscious about appearing in public places without them; ashamed, if possible. That wasn’t hard to do either—though of course the size of the cars had to be cut way down, and the cars themselves had to be designed to approximate the human figure.”

  “You shouldn’t say such things. It’s—it’s blasphemy! Anyone would think you were a nudist.”

  He looked at her steadily. “Is it so despicable to be a nudist?” he asked. “Is it less despicable, for example, to be a dealer who hires shills like Harry Fourwheels to sway undecided women customers and to rough up their purchases afterwards so that they can’t take advantage of the twenty-four-hour clause in their sales contract? . . . I’m sorry, Arabella, but it’s better for you to know.”

  She had turned away so that he would not see the tears rivuleting down her cheeks. Now she felt his hand touch her arm, creep gently round her waist. She let him draw her to him and kiss her tears away, and the re-opened wound closed again, this time forever.

  His arms tightened around her. “Will you come here with me again?”

  “Yes,” she said. “If you want me to.”

  “I want you to very much. We’ll take off our cars and run through the woods. We’ll thumb our noses at Big Jim. We’ll—”

  Click, something went in the bushes on the opposite bank.

  She went taut in Howard’s arms. The bushes quivered, and a uniformed shape grew out of them. A cherubic face beamed at them across the ripples. A big square hand raised and exhibited a portable audio-video recorder. “Come on you two,” a big voice said. “Big Jim wants to see you.”

  The Big Jim judge regarded her disapprovingly through the windshield of his black Cortez when they brought her before him. “Well, that wasn’t very nice of you, was it?” he said. “Taking off your clothes and cavorting with a nudist.” Arabella’s face grew pale behind her windshield. “A nudist!” she said disbelievingly. “Why, Howard’s not a nudist, He can’t be!”

  “Oh yes he can be. As a matter of fact, he’s even worse than a nudist. He’s a voluntary nudist. We realize, however,” the judge went on, “that you had no way of knowing it, and in a way we are to blame for your becoming involved with him, because if it hadn’t been for our inexcusable lack of vigilance he wouldn’t have been able to lead the double life he did—going to a nudist teachers’ institute days and sneaking out of the reservation nights and working in a used-car lot and trying to convert nice people like yourself to his way of thinking. Consequently, we’re going to be lenient with you. Instead of revoking your license we’re going to give you another chance—let you go home and atone for your reprehensible conduct by apologizing to your parents and by behaving yourself in the future. Incidentally, you’ve got a lot to thank a young man named Harry Fourwheels for.”

  “Have—have I?”

  “You certainly have. If it hadn’t been for his alertness and his loyalty to Big Jim we might not have discovered your dereliction until it was too late.”

  “Harry Fourwheels,” Arabella said wonderingly. “He must hate me very much.”

  “Hate you? My dear girl, he—”

  “And I think I know why,” Arabella went on, unaware of the interruption. “He hates me because he betrayed to me what he really is, and in his heart he despises what he really is. Why . . . that’s why Mr. Upswept hates me too!”

  “See here, Miss Grille, if you’re going to talk like that, I may have to reco
nsider my decision. After all—”

  “And my mother and father,” Arabella continued. “They hate me because they’ve also betrayed to me what they really are, and in their hearts they despise themselves too. Even cars can’t hide that kind of nakedness. And Howard. He loves me. He doesn’t hate what he really is—any more than I hate what I really am. What—what have you done with him?”

  “Escorted him back to the reservation, of course. What else could we do with him? I assure you, though, that he won’t be leading a double life any more. And now, Miss Grille, as I’ve already dismissed your case, I see no reason for you to remain any longer. I’m a busy man and—”

  “How does a person become a voluntary nudist, Judge?”

  “By willful exhibitionism. Good day, Miss Grille.”

  “Good day . . . and thank you.”

  She went home first to pack her things. Her mother and father were waiting up for her in the kitchen.

  “Filthy hussy!” her mother said.

  “To think that a daughter of mine—” said her father.

  She drove through the room without a word, and up the ramp to her bedroom. Packing did not take long: except for her books, she owned very little. Back in the kitchen, she paused long enough to say good-bye. Her parents’ faces fell apart. “Wait,” said her father. “Wait!” cried her mother. Arabella drove out the door without a single glance into her rearview mirror.

  After leaving Macadam Place, she headed for the public square. Despite the lateness of the hour, there were still quite a few people. She took off her hardtop hat first. Next she took off her car-dress. Then she stood there in the winking radiance of the Big Jim sign in the center of the gathering crowd and waited for the vice squad to come and arrest her.

  It was morning when they escorted her to the reservation. Above the entrance, a sign said:

  UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT.

  A line of fresh black paint had been brushed across the words, and above them other words had been hastily printed:

  WEARING OF MECHANICAL FIG LEAVES PROHIBITED.

  The guard on her left glowered behind his windshield. “Some more of their smart-aleck tricks!” he grumbled.

  Howard met her just inside the gate. When she saw his eyes she knew that it was all right, and in a moment she was in his arms, her nakedness forgotten, crying against his lapel. He held her tightly, his hands pressing hard against the fabric of her coat. She heard his voice over the bleak years: “I knew they were watching us, and I let them catch us together in hopes that they’d send you here. Then, when they didn’t, I hoped—I prayed—that you’d come voluntarily. Darling, I’m so glad you did! You’ll love it here. I have a cottage, with a big back yard. There’s a community swimming pool, a woman’s club, an amateur-players group, a—”

  “Is there a minister?” she asked through her tears.

  He kissed her. “A minister, too. If we hurry, we can catch him before he starts out on his morning rounds.” They walked down the lane together.

  EAST WIND, WEST WIND

  By Frank M. Robinson

  Frank M. Robinson is best known as the co-author of a number of realistically portrayed disaster novels. Here he again writes of disaster, its logical aftermath, and of the love of a man for a machine.

  It wasn’t going to be just another bad day, it was going to be a terrible one. The inversion layer had slipped over the city four days before and it had been like putting a lid on a kettle; the air was building up to a real Donora, turning into a chemical soup so foul I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been trying to breathe the stuff. Besides sticking in my throat, it made my eyes feel like they were being bathed in acid. You could hardly see the sun—it was a pale, sickly disc floating in a mustard-colored sky—but even so, the streets were an oven and the humidity was so high you could have wrung the water out of the air with your bare hands . . . dirty water, naturally.

  On the bus a red-faced salesman with denture breath recognized my Air Central badge and got pushy. I growled that we didn’t make the air—not yet, at any rate—and finally I took off the badge and put it in my pocket and tried to shut out the coughing and the complaints around me by concentrating on the faint, cheery sound of the “corn poppers” laundering the bus’s exhaust. Five would have gotten you ten, of course, that their effect was strictly psychological, that they had seen more than twenty thousand miles of service and were now absolutely worthless . . .

  At work I hung up my plastic sportscoat, slipped off the white surgeon’s mask (black where my nose and mouth had been) and filled my lungs with good machine-pure air that smelled only faintly of oil and electric motors; one of the advantages of working for Air Central was that our office air was the best in the city. I dropped a quarter in the coffee vendor, dialed it black, and inhaled the fumes for a second while I shook the sleep from my eyes and speculated about what Wanda would have for me at the Investigators’ Desk. There were thirty-nine other Investigators besides myself, but I was junior and my daily assignment card was usually just a listing of minor complaints and violations that had to be checked out.

  Wanda was young and pretty and redhaired and easy to spot even in a secretarial pool full of pretty girls. I offered her some of my coffee and looked over her shoulder while she flipped through the assignment cards. “That stuff out there is easier to swim through than to breathe.” I said. “What’s the index?”

  “Eighty-four point five,” she said quietly. “And rising.”

  I just stared at her. I had thought it was bad, but hardly that bad, and for the first time that day I felt a sudden flash of panic. “And no alert? When it hits seventy-five this city’s supposed to close up like a clam!”

  She nodded down the hall to the Director’s office. “Lawyers from Sanitary Pick-Up, Oberhausen Steel, and City Light and Power got an injunction—they were here to break the news to Monte at eight sharp. Impractical, unnecessary, money-wasting, and fifteen thousand employees would be thrown out of work if they had to shut down the furnaces and incinerators. They got an okay right from the top of Air Shed Number Three.”

  My jaw dropped. “How could they? Monte’s supposed to have the last word!”

  “So go argue with the politicians—if you can stand the hot air.” She suddenly looked very fragile and I wanted to run out and slay a dragon or two for her. “The chicken-hearts took the easy way out, Jim. Independent Weather’s predicting a cold front for early this evening and rising winds and rain for tomorrow.”

  The rain would clean up the air, I thought. But Independent Weather could be bought and as a result it had a habit of turning in cheery predictions that frequently didn’t come true. Air Central had tried for years to get IW outlawed, but money talks and their lobbyist in the capital was quite a talker. Unfortunately, if they were wrong this time, it would be as if they had pulled a plastic bag over the city’s head.

  I started to say something, then shut up. If you let it get to you, you wouldn’t last long on the job. “Where’s my list of small-fry?”

  She gave me an assignment card. It was blank except for See Me written across its face. “Humor him, Jim, he’s not feeling well.”

  This worried me a little because Monte was the father of us all—a really sweet old guy, which hardly covers it all because he could be hard as nails when he had to. There wasn’t anyone who knew more about air control than he.

  I took the card and started up the hall and then Wanda called after me. She had stretched out her long legs and hiked up her skirt. I looked startled and she grinned. “Something new—sulfur-proof nylons.” Which meant they wouldn’t dissolve on a day like today when a measurable fraction of the air we were trying to breathe was actually dilute sulfuric acid . . .

  When I walked into his office, old Monte was leaning out the window, the fly ash clinging to his bushy gray eyebrows like cinnamon to toast, trying to taste the air and predict how it would go today. We had eighty Sniffers scattered throughout the city, all computerized and deliv
ering their data in neat, graphlike form, but Monte still insisted on breaking internal air security and seeing for himself how his city was doing.

  I closed the door. Monte pulled back inside, then suddenly broke into one of his coughing fits.

  “Sit down, Jim,” he wheezed, his voice sounding as if it were being wrung out of him, “be with you in a minute.” I pretended not to notice while his coughing shuddered to a halt and he rummaged through the desk for his little bottle of pills. It was a plain office, as executive offices went, except for Monte’s own paintings on the wall—the type I liked to call Twentieth Century Romantic. A mountain scene with a crystal clear lake in the foreground and anglers battling huge trout, a city scene with palm trees lining the boulevards, and finally, one of a man standing by an old automobile on a winding mountain road while he looked off at a valley in the distance.

  Occasionally Monte would talk to me about his boyhood around the Great Lakes and how he actually used to go swimming in them. Once he tried to tell me that orange trees used to grow within the city limits of Santalosdiego and that the oranges were as big as tennis balls. It irritated me and I think he knew it; I was the youngest Investigator for Air Central but that didn’t necessarily make me naive.

  When Monte stopped coughing I said hopefully, “IW claims a cold front is coming in.”

  He huddled in his chair and dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief, his thin chest working desperately trying to pump his lungs full of air. “IW’s a liar,” he finally rasped. “There’s no cold front coming in, it’s going to be a scorcher for three more days.”

  I felt uneasy again. “Wanda told me what happened,” I said.

  He fought a moment longer for his breath, caught it, then gave a resigned shrug. “The bastards are right, to an extent. Stop garbage pick-ups in a city this size and within hours the rats will be fighting us in the streets. Shut down the power plants and you knock out all the air conditioners and purifiers—right during the hottest spell of the year. Then try telling the yokels that the air on the outside will be a whole lot cleaner if only they let the air on the inside get a whole lot dirtier.”