Wheelworld

by Harry Harrison

  There were steering problems. The lead wheels of every car could swivel, turned by geared-down electric motors. These wheels were controlled by the engine computer in each train so that every car followed and turned exactly as the engine had done, moving as precisely as if they were on tracks. Fine in theory, but difficult in practice with worn motor brushes and jammed gear trains. Time trickled away.

  There were personal difficulties as well, with everyone jammed into a fraction of the normal living space. Jan heard the complaints with one ear and nodded and referred all problems to the Family Heads. Let them earn their keep for a change. One by one he tracked down the troubles and saw them tackled and solved. The very last thing was a missing child, which he found himself when he saw a movement in the corn field nearby. He plunged in with the bike and restored the happy toddler, riding before him, to its weeping mother.

  Tired, yet with a feeling of satisfaction, he rode slowly back between the double row of trains. The doors were sealed now and the only people in sight were the few curious faces peering from the windows. Eino, his engineer, was waiting to stow the cycle while he climbed back up to the driving compartment.

  “Pre-drive checklist done,” his co-driver said. Otakar was as efficient as the machine he commanded. “Full on-line power available, all systems go.”

  “All right. Get readiness reports on the other trains.”

  While Jan threw switches and went through his driver’s checklist, he heard the reports from the other trains in his earphones. There was a hold with thirteen, a red on the safety standby circuits, which turned out to be an instrument readout failure which was corrected easily enough. They cleared one by one.

  “All trains ready, all drivers ready,” Otaker said.

  “Good. Communications, give me a circuit to all drivers.”

  “Through,” Hyzo, the communications officer, said.

  “All drivers.” As he spoke the words Jan had a sensation stronger than anything he had ever felt before. Mountain climbing, sailing—making love—each of them had produced moments of pure pleasure, of emotions both wonderful and indescribable. Only drugs had made him feel this way before, drugs that he had stopped taking because they were an easy shot, something that anyone could buy and share. But they could not share this with him because he was alone. In control of everything. Right at the top. More in control than he had ever been at any time back on Earth. He had had responsibility, more than enough of it, but never this much. Out in front, the very first, with the population of an entire world waiting for his decision to be made.

  He was in charge.

  The solid frame of the engine beneath him hummed lightly with the still-restrained power of the engine. Heavy couplings and a web of cables connected it to the car behind and to the others behind that. Then there were the other engines and their trains, filled with the goods of this planet and all of its inhabitants. Every person, other than the maintenance crews, was there, waiting for his order. He felt the sudden dampness of his palms and wrapped his hands tightly about the hard steering wheel before him. The moment passed and he was in control again.

  “All drivers.” Jan’s voice was as calm and businesslike as it always was. His internal feelings were still his own. “We’re moving out. Set your proximity radar at one kilometer. No variations permitted above 1100 meters or below 900. Set automatic braking controls for 950. If—for any reason—we have an engine less than 900, and I mean 899 and down, from the train ahead, we will have a new driver. No exceptions. Minimum acceleration on starting up and watch the stress gauges on your couplings. We’re carrying at least twice our normal loaded weight and we can pull those couplings out like rotten teeth without even trying. Right now we are going to use a new maneuver, and I want it used every time we start. Co-drivers, enter it into your checklists. Ready to copy.

  “One. All car brakes off.

  “Two. Set brakes on last car.

  “Three. Select reverse gear:

  “Four. Reverse minimum speed for five seconds.”

  This was a trick he had learned in his cadet days when he was doing maintenance on the freight monorails under the city. Backing up took out all the play in the joints and couplings. Then, when the train started forward, the entire weight of the train would not have to be set into motion at the same time, but bit by bit as the play was taken up. In this way inertia actually aided the starting up, rather than retarding it, as the weight of the cars already in motion was used to accelerate those still at rest.

  With the heel of his hand Jan pushed the gear se- .lector into reverse, then set the speed governor at the first notch. All of the brakes in the train were off except for the red light glowing on car twelve. When he stepped on the throttle with his left foot he felt the acceleration of the gear trains and a heavy shuddering through the metal of the floor. The coupling strain gauges dropped to zero, then reversed. Skid blinked on and off on twelve’s panel, and he killed the power as the digital readout of the clock read five.

  “Prepare to move out,” he said and pulled the gear selector into low range. “Second file of trains hold position until the last of file one has passed. Then fall into position behind. All controls on manual until you are notified different. First stop in nineteen hours. Final stop in Southtown. See you all there.”

  He took the wheel firmly in both hands and let his foot rest on the accelerator.

  “Move out!”

  Jan stepped down slowly and the engine revved up. At speed, the hydraulic clutch engaged and the torque was transmitted to the drive wheels. They turned and the engine moved ahead, car after car being set into motion behind it, until he whole giant train was rolling slowly forward. To his left the lead engine of the second file slid back and out of sight and ahead was only the empty expanse of the Road. The rear scanner mounted on top of the engine showed the train following smoothly after. The screen next to it, hooked to the scanner in the last car, showed engine two dropping behind. Strain gauges were all well into the green. Engine speed and road speed moved up to the top of the low range and he shifted to middle.

  “All green,” Otakar said. He had been monitoring all the other readouts from the co-driver’s seat. Jan nodded and turned the steering wheel to the left, then centered it again to hold the turn. Unlike the smaller ground cars, the powered steering was set by displacement of the wheel and held in position by centering. He then turned the steering wheel right to straighten the wheels again and centered it when they were at zero degrees forward. Then he came right to align the engine in the middle of the Road, centered over the control cable buried under the rock surface. The cars of the train behind each turned at precisely the same spot in the same way, like a monotrain going through switches.

  Jan kept the speed at the top of the middle range until all the trains had begun to move, strung out in position one kilometer apart. The city site and even the farms had vanished behind before the last train was moving. Only then did he accelerate into the highest, road speed range. The tires hummed below, the Road rushed toward him, the featureless sand desert moved by on each side. He held the wheel, driving still on manual, guiding the engine, the train, all of the trains down the Road, south, toward the opposite continent and Southtown, still 27,000 kilometers away.

  One of the few outstanding features in this stretch of desert appeared as a speck on the horizon and slowly grew as they raced towards it. A black spire of rock pointing a dark finger at the sky. It reared up from a ridge massive enough that the Road took a slow swing out and around it. As it passed Jan signaled for the all-driver circuit.

  “Needle Rock coming up on your left. Mark it. As you pass you can go on autopilot.”

  He set the controls himself as he talked, feeding in maximum and minimum speeds with his left hand, max and min acceleration and braking as well. The gridded scope screen on the autopilot showed that he was centered over the central cable. He flipped the switch to on and leaned back, realizing that he was stiff from the strain, kneading his fingers
together.

  “A good start,” Otakar said, still looking at the readouts. “It will project to a good trip.”

  “I only hope you’re right. Take the con while I stretch.”

  Otakar nodded and slipped into the driver’s seat when Jan stood up. His muscles creaked when he flexed his arms and he walked back to the rear compartment to look over the communication officer’s shoulder.

  “Hyzo,” he said, “I want a …”

  “I have a red here,” Otakar called out sharply.

  Jan spun about and ran to lean over the co-driver’s shoulder. A red light had appeared, flashing among the rows of green, and a brief instant later there was a second, then a third.

  “Brake drum heat on cars seven and eight. What the devil can that mean? All brakes are off.” Jan muttered savagely to himself, things had been going too good, and leaned forward to press the readout button. Numbers appeared on the screen. “Up over twenty degrees on both those cars—and still rising.”

  He thought quickly. Should he stop and investigate? No, that would mean halting the entire line of trains, then getting them moving again. There were at least 300 kilometers more of desert road before they hit the foothills, and he wouldn’t be needing brakes at all until that time.

  “Kill the brake circuits in both those cars and see what happens,” he said.

  Otakar hit the switches while he was still issuing the order. Now the two cars no longer had operating brakes, but the safety circuits should have gone dead in the off position. They did. The temperature in the brake drums dropped slowly until, one after the other, the red lights went out.

  “Keep the con,” Jan said, “while I see if I can figure out just what the hell is going on.” He went to the rear and threw up the cover of the hatch down to the engine compartment. “Eino,” he called through the opening. “Pass me up the diagrams and manuals on the car brake circuits. We have a problem.”

  Jan had done maintenance on the brake systems, as he had on all of the machinery, but had never needed to break down and repair one of the systems. Like all the Halvmörk machines, these had been designed to, hopefully, last forever. Or as close to that as possible. With replacement supplies light-years away, rugged design was a necessity. All components were simply designed and heavily built. Lubrication was automatic. They were designed not to fail under normal use and, in practice, rarely did.

  “These what you want?” Eino asked, popping out of the hatch like an animal out of its den. He had diagrams and service manuals in his hand.

  “Spread them out on the desk and we’ll take a look,” Jan said.

  The diagrams were detailed and exact. There were two separate braking systems on the cars, each with its own fail-safe mode. Normal braking was electronically controlled by the computer. When the engine driver hit the brake, the brakes in all the cars were applied at the same time, to the same degree. The brakes themselves were hydraulic, the pressure coming from reservoirs that were supplied by pumps turned by the axles of the car. Strong springs held them in the normally off position. The electronic controls opened the pressure valves to apply the brakes when needed. This was alpha, the active braking system. Beta, the passive one, was for emergencies only. These completely separate brakes were held in on position by their springs until the electric circuits were actuated. When this was done powerful magnets pulled them free. Any break in the electrical circuits, such as an accidental uncoupling of the cars, would apply these brakes for an emergency stop.

  “Jan, two other trains calling in for advice,” Hyzo said. “Sounds like the same trouble, temperature rise in the brakes.”

  “Tell them to do what we did. Cut the power to the alpha systems. I’ll get back to them after I track down the malfunction.” He traced the diagram with his finger. “It must be the alpha brake system. The emergencies are either full on or full off—and we would certainly know if that happened.”

  “Electronics or hydraulics?” the engineer asked.

  “I have a feeling that it can’t be the electronics. The computer monitors all those circuits. If there were an uncalled for on-brake signal it would negate it, and if it couldn’t be cut the computer would certainly report it. Let’s try the hydraulics first. We’re getting pressure in our brake cylinders here. The only way we can get that is if this valve is opened slightly—”

  “Or if something is blocking it so it can’t close completely.”

  “Eino, you’re reading my mind. And what could be blocking it is just plain dirt. The filter in the line here is supposed to be cleaned out after every trip. A nasty, dirty job, crawling around under the cars. A job I remember assigning to a certain mechanic named Decio some years ago. A mechanic so bad that I eventually demoted him right back to the farm. When we stop we’ll drop one of those filters and look at it.”

  Eino rubbed his jaw with a calloused hand. “If that’s the trouble we are going to have to drain each malfunctioning brake system to get the valves out to clean.”

  “No need. These emergency valves, here and here, shut tight if the line is broken. We won’t lose much fluid. There are spare control valves in stock. What we’ll do is replace the first valves with new ones, have the old valves cleaned while we are working and exchange them right down the line. The grades aren’t too bad this first day; we’ll leave the brakes cut out on the few cars with trouble.”

  “Jan,” the co-driver called out. “Mountains in sight, so the tunnel will be coming up soon. Thought you would want the con.”

  “Right. Leave the specs here, Eino, and get back to your engine. We’ll be hitting the slope soon.”

  Jan slid into the driver’s seat and saw the sharp peaks of the mountains ahead, stretching away, unbroken, on both sides. This was the range that kept the interior of the continent a desert, holding all the storms and rain on the far side. Once through the range they would find weather again. The Road ahead began to rise as they entered the foothills. Jan kept the autopilot on steer, but released the other controls. As the slope grew steeper he let up on the accelerator and dropped into the central gear range. He could see the Road rising up ahead and there, above, the dark mouth of a tunnel. He switched on his microphone.

  “All drivers. The tunnel is coming up in a few minutes. Headlights on as soon as you spot it.”

  He switched on his own lights as he said this and the Road ahead sprang into harsh clarity.

  The engineers who had built the Road, centuries earlier, had had almost unlimited energy at their disposal. They could raise islands from the ocean—or lower them beneath the surface, level mountains and melt solid rock. To them, the easiest way to pass the mountain range was by boring straight through it. They were proud of this, too, for the only decoration or non-functioning bit of the entire Road was above the tunnel entrance. Jan saw it now, cut into the solid rock, as the dark mouth loomed closer. A hundred-meter-high shield. The headlights caught it as the Road straightened for the final approach. A shield with a symbol on it that must be as ancient as mankind; a hand holding a short and solid hammer. This was clear, growing larger, until it swept by above and they were inside the tunnel.

  Rough stone wall flashed by gray and empty. Other than the occasional stream of water that crossed the Road, the tunnel was featureless. Jan watched his tachometer and speedometer and left the steering to the autopilot. Almost a half an hour passed before a tiny light appeared ahead, grew to a disk, then a great burning doorway.

  They had gone far enough south, and risen high enough, to have driven into the dawn.

  The massive engine tore out of the tunnel and into searing sunlight. The windshield darkened automatically at the actinic onslaught, opaquing completely before the sun. Beta Aurigae was blue-white and searingly hot, even at this northern latitude. Then it was obscured by clouds and a moment later dense rain crashed down on the train. Jan started the windshield wipers and switched on his nose radar. The Road was empty ahead. As quickly as it had begun, the storm was over and, as the Road wound down out of the
mountains, he had his first view of the acid green jungle with the blue of the ocean beyond.

  “That’s quite a sight,” Jan said, hardly aware he had spoken aloud.

  “It means trouble. I prefer the inland driving,” the co-driver, Otakar, said.

  “You’re a machine without a soul, Otakar. Doesn’t all that twilight monotony get you down at times?”

  “No.”

  “Message from the forward Road crew,” Hyzo called out. “They’ve got a problem.”

  Otakar nodded gloomily. “I told you, trouble.”

  Six

  “What’s happening,” Jan said into the microphone.

  “Lajos here. No big problems clearing the Road until now. Earthquake, at least a couple of years ago. About a hundred meters of Road missing.”

  “Can’t you fill it in?”

  “Negative. We can’t even see the bottom.”

  “What about going around it?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to do. But it means blasting a new road out of the cliff. It’s going to take at least a half day.”

  Jan cursed silently to himself; this was not going to be an easy trip at all if it continued this way. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “About a six hour drive from the tunnel.”

  “We’ll join you. Keep the work going. Out.”

  Six hours. That would mean a shorter day than planned. But they had work to do on the brakes. And there were sure to be other problems as people settled down. Get the brakes fixed, get around the collapsed bit of Road, and press on in the morning. Everyone could use a night’s sleep.

  The Road had dropped down from the mountain slopes to the coastal plain, and as it fell the landscape had changed completely. Gone were the rocky slopes and the occasional bush with a precarious roothold in the scree. It was jungle now, high, thick jungle that cut out all sight of the ocean and only permitted a narrow view of the sky. There was plenty of evidence here that the jungle was trying to retake the Road. Burned trees and vegetation were on both sides now, where they had been bulldozed aside by the tanks that had gone on ahead. There was animal life, too, dark forms glimpsed briefly in the shadows beside the Road. At one point a line of green flying creatures had floated slowly out of the jungle and across the Road. Two of them had smashed into the engine’s windshield, to slowly slide away leaving blue smears of blood behind. Jan washed away the traces with the touch of a button. The engine was back on autopilot and there was little to do except watch the tunnel of the Road open up ahead.