“Maybe New Jersey,” I said, and took another white pill.
* * * *
We went on to another place and she said suddenly, “I figured something out. The way you keep looking around.”
“What did you figure out?”
“Well, part of it was what you said about the other fellow getting New Jersey. This is New Jersey. You don’t belong in this section, right?”
“Right,” I said after a minute.
“So why are you here? I know why. You’re here because you’re looking for somebody.”
“That’s right.”
She said triumphantly, “You want to find that other fellow from your crew! You want to fight him!”
I couldn’t help shaking, white pills or no white pills. But I had to correct her.
“No. I want to kill him.”
“How do you know he’s here? He’s got a lot of states to roam around in, too, doesn’t he?”
“Six. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland—all the way down to Washington.”
“Then how do you know—”
“He’ll be here.” I didn’t have to tell her how I knew. But I knew.
I wasn’t the only one who spent his time at the border of his assigned area, looking across the river or staring across a state line, knowing that somebody was on the other side. I knew. You fight a war and you don’t have to guess that the enemy might have his troops a thousand miles away from the battle line. You know where his troops will be. You know he wants to fight, too.
Hutta. Hutta.
I spilled my drink.
I looked at her. “You—you didn’t—”
She looked frightened. “What’s the matter?”
“Did you just sneeze?”
“Sneeze? Me? Did I—”
I said something quick and nasty, I don’t know what. No! It hadn’t been her. I knew it.
It was Chowderhead’s sneeze.
* * * *
Chowderhead. Marvin T. Roebuck, his name was. Five feet eight inches tall. Dark-complected, with a cast in one eye. Spoke with a Midwest kind of accent, even though he came from California—“shrick” for “shriek,” “hawror” for “horror,” like that. It drove me crazy after a while. Maybe that gives you an idea what he talked about mostly. A skunk. A thoroughgoing, deep-rooted, mother-murdering skunk.
I kicked over my chair and roared, “Roebuck! Where are you, damn you?”
The bar was all at once silent. Only the jukebox kept going.
“I know you’re here!” I screamed. “Come out and get it! You louse, I told you I’d get you for calling me a liar the day Wally sneaked a smoke!”
Silence, everybody looking at me.
Then the door of the men’s room opened.
He came out.
He looked lousy. Eyes all red-rimmed and his hair falling out—the poor crumb couldn’t have been over twenty-nine. He shrieked, “You!” He called me a million names. He said, “You thieving rat, I’ll teach you to try to cheat me out of my candy ration!”
He had a knife.
I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything and that was stupid, but it didn’t matter. I got a bottle of beer from the next table and smashed it against the back of a chair. It made a good weapon, you know; I’d take that against a knife any time.
I ran toward him, and he came all staggering and lurching toward me, looking crazy and desperate, mumbling and raving—I could hardly hear him, because I was talking, too. Nobody tried to stop us. Somebody went out the door and I figured it was to call the cops, but that was all right. Once I took care of Chowderhead, I didn’t care what the cops did.
I went for the face.
He cut me first. I felt the knife slide up along my left arm but, you know, it didn’t even hurt, only kind of stung a little. I didn’t care about that. I got him in the face, and the bottle came away, and it was all like gray and white jelly, and then blood began to spring out. He screamed. Oh, that scream! I never heard anything like that scream. It was what I had been waiting all my life for.
I kicked him as he staggered back, and he fell. And I was on top of him, with the bottle, and I was careful to stay away from the heart or the throat, because that was too quick, but I worked over the face, and I felt his knife get me a couple times more, and—
And—
* * * *
And I woke up, you know. And there was Dr. Santly over me with a hypodermic needle that he’d just taken out of my arm, and four male nurses in fatigues holding me down. And I was drenched with sweat.
For a minute, I didn’t know where I was. It was a horrible queasy falling sensation, as though the bar and the fight and the world were all dissolving into smoke around me.
Then I knew where I was.
It was almost worse.
I stopped yelling and just lay there, looking up at them.
Dr. Santly said, trying to keep his face friendly and noncommittal, “You’re doing much better, Byron, boy. Much better.”
I didn’t say anything.
He said, “You worked through the whole thing in two hours and eight minutes. Remember the first time? You were sixteen hours killing him. Captain Van Wyck it was that time, remember? Who was it this time?”
“Chowderhead.” I looked at the male nurses. Doubtfully, they let go of my arms and legs.
“Chowderhead,” said Dr. Santly. “Oh—Roebuck. That boy,” he said mournfully, his expression saddened, “he’s not coming along nearly as well as you. Nearly. He can’t run through a cycle in less than five hours. And, that’s peculiar, it’s usually you he— Well, I better not say that, shall I? No sense setting up a counter-impression when your pores are all open, so to speak?” He smiled at me, but he was a little worried in back of the smile.
I sat up. “Anybody got a cigarette?”
“Give him a cigarette, Johnson,” the doctor ordered the male nurse standing alongside my right foot.
Johnson did. I fired up.
“You’re coming along splendidly,” Dr. Santly said. He was one of these psych guys that thinks if you say it’s so, it makes it so. You know that kind? “We’ll have you down under an hour before the end of the week. That’s marvelous progress. Then we can work on the conscious level! You’re doing extremely well, whether you know it or not. Why, in six months—say in eight months, because I like to be conservative—” he twinkled at me—“we’ll have you out of here! You’ll be the first of your crew to be discharged, you know that?”
“That’s nice,” I said. “The others aren’t doing so well?”
“No. Not at all well, most of them. Particularly Dr. Gilvey. The run-throughs leave him in terrible shape. I don’t mind admitting I’m worried about him.”
“That’s nice,” I said, and this time I meant it.
He looked at me thoughtfully, but all he did was say to the male nurses, “He’s all right now. Help him off the table.”
It was hard standing up. I had to hold onto the rail around the table for a minute. I said my set little speech: “Dr. Santly, I want to tell you again how grateful I am for this. I was reconciled to living the rest of my life confined to one part of the country, the way the other crews always did. But this is much better. I appreciate it. I’m sure the others do, too.”
“Of course, boy. Of course.” He took out a fountain pen and made a note on my chart; I couldn’t see what it was, but he looked gratified. “It’s no more than you have coming to you, Byron,” he said. “I’m grateful that I could be the one to make it come to pass.”
He glanced conspiratorially at the male nurses. “You know how important this is to me. It’s the triumph of a whole new approach to psychic rehabilitation. I mean to say our heroes of space travel are entitled to freedom when they come back home to Earth, aren’t they?”
“Definitely,” I said, scrubbing some of the sweat off my face onto my sleeve.
“So we’ve got to end this system of designated areas. We can’t avoid the tensions that accompany space trave
l, no. But if we can help you eliminate harmful tensions with a few run-throughs, why, it’s not too high a price to pay, is it?”
“Not a bit.”
“I mean to say,” he said, warming up, “you can look forward to the time when you’ll be able to mingle with your old friends from the rocket, free and easy, without any need for restraint. That’s a lot to look forward to, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said. “I look forward to it very much,” I said. “And I know exactly what I’m going to do the first time I meet one—I mean without any restraints, as you say,” I said. And it was true; I did. Only it wouldn’t be a broken beer bottle that I would do it with.
I had much more elaborate ideas than that.
CODE THREE, by Rick Raphael
The late afternoon sun hid behind gray banks of snow clouds and a cold wind whipped loose leaves across the drill field in front of the Philadelphia Barracks of the North American Continental Thruway Patrol. There was the feel of snow in the air but the thermometer hovered just at the freezing mark and the clouds could turn either into icy rain or snow.
Patrol Sergeant Ben Martin stepped out of the door of the barracks and shivered as a blast of wind hit him. He pulled up the zipper on his loose blue uniform coveralls and paused to gauge the storm clouds building up to the west.
The broad planes of his sunburned face turned into the driving cold wind for a moment and then he looked back down at the weather report secured to the top of a stack of papers on his clipboard.
Behind him, the door of the barracks was shouldered open by his junior partner, Patrol Trooper Clay Ferguson. The young, tall Canadian officer’s arms were loaded with paper sacks and his patrol work helmet dangled by its strap from the crook of his arm.
Clay turned and moved from the doorway into the wind. A sudden gust swept around the corner of the building and a small sack perched atop one of the larger bags in his arms blew to the ground and began tumbling towards the drill field.
“Ben,” he yelled, “grab the bag.”
The sergeant lunged as the sack bounced by and made the retrieve. He walked back to Ferguson and eyed the load of bags in the blond-haired officer’s arms.
“Just what is all this?” he inquired.
“Groceries,” the youngster grinned. “Or to be more exact, little gourmet items for our moments of gracious living.”
Ferguson turned into the walk leading to the motor pool and Martin swung into step beside him. “Want me to carry some of that junk?”
“Junk,” Clay cried indignantly. “You keep your grimy paws off these delicacies, peasant. You’ll get yours in due time and perhaps it will help Kelly and me to make a more polished product of you instead of the clodlike cop you are today.”
Martin chuckled. This patrol would mark the start of the second year that he, Clay Ferguson and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot had been teamed together. After twenty-two patrols, cooped up in a semiarmored vehicle with a man for ten days at a time, you got to know him pretty well. And you either liked him or you hated his guts.
As senior officer, Martin had the right to reject or keep his partner after their first eleven-month duty tour. Martin had elected to retain the lanky Canadian. As soon as they had pulled into New York Barracks at the end of their last patrol, he had made his decisions. After eleven months and twenty-two patrols on the Continental Thruways, each team had a thirty-day furlough coming.
Martin and Ferguson had headed for the city the minute they put their signatures on the last of the stack of reports needed at the end of a tour. Then, for five days and nights, they tied one on. MSO Kelly Lightfoot had made a beeline for a Columbia Medical School seminar on tissue regeneration. On the sixth day, Clay staggered out of bed, swigged down a handful of antireaction pills, showered, shaved and dressed and then waved good-by. Twenty minutes later he was aboard a jet, heading for his parents’ home in Edmonton, Alberta. Martin soloed around the city for another week, then rented a car and raced up to his sister’s home in Burlington, Vermont, to play Uncle Bountiful to Carol’s three kids and to lap up as much as possible of his sister’s real cooking.
While the troopers and their med officer relaxed, a service crew moved their car down to the Philadelphia motor pool for a full overhaul and refitting for the next torturous eleven-month-tour of duty.
The two patrol troopers had reported into the Philadelphia Barracks five days ago—Martin several pounds heavier courtesy of his sister’s cooking; Ferguson several pounds lighter courtesy of three assorted, starry-eyed, uniform-struck Alberta maidens.
They turned into the gate of the motor pool and nodded to the sentry at the gate. To their left, the vast shop buildings echoed to the sound of body-banging equipment and roaring jet engines. The darkening sky made the brilliant lights of the shop seem even brighter and the hulls of a dozen patrol cars cast deep shadows around the work crews.
The troopers turned into the dispatcher’s office and Clay carefully placed the bags on a table beside the counter. Martin peered into one of the bags. “Seriously, kid, what do you have in that grab bag?”
“Oh, just a few essentials,” Clay replied “Pate de foie gras, sharp cheese, a smidgen of cooking wine, a handful of spices. You know, stuff like that. Like I said—essentials.”
“Essentials,” Martin snorted, “you give your brains to one of those Alberta chicks of yours for a souvenir?”
“Look, Ben,” Ferguson said earnestly, “I suffered for eleven months in that tin mausoleum on tracks because of what you fondly like to think is edible food. You’ve got as much culinary imagination as Beulah. I take that back. Even Beulah turns out some better smells when she’s riding on high jet than you’ll ever get out of her galley in the next one hundred years. This tour, I intend to eat like a human being once again. And I’ll teach you how to boil water without burning it.”
“Why you ungrateful young—” Martin yelped.
* * * *
The patrol dispatcher, who had been listening with amused tolerance, leaned across the counter.
“If Oscar Waldorf is through with his culinary lecture, gentlemen,” he said, “perhaps you two could be persuaded to take a little pleasure ride. It’s a lovely night for a drive and it’s just twenty-six hundred miles to the next service station. If you two aren’t cooking anything at the moment, I know that NorCon would simply adore having the services of two such distinguished Continental Commandos.”
Ferguson flushed and Martin scowled at the dispatcher. “Very funny, clown. I’ll recommend you for trooper status one of these days.”
“Not me,” the dispatcher protested. “I’m a married man. You’ll never get me out on the road in one of those blood-and-gut factories.”
“So quit sounding off to us heroes,” Martin said, “and give us the clearances.”
The dispatcher opened a loose-leaf reference book on the counter and then punched the first of a series of buttons on a panel. Behind him, the wall lighted with a map of the eastern United States to the Mississippi River. Ferguson and Martin had pencils out and poised over their clipboards.
The dispatcher glanced at the order board across the room where patrol car numbers and team names were displayed on an illuminated board. “Car 56—Martin-Ferguson-Lightfoot,” glowed with an amber light. In the column to the right was the number “26-W.” The dispatcher punched another button. A broad belt of multi-colored lines representing the eastern segment of North American Thruway 26 flashed onto the map in a band extending from Philadelphia to St. Louis. The thruway went on to Los Angeles in its western segment, not shown on the map. Ten bands of color—each five separated by a narrow clear strip, detailed the thruway. Martin and Ferguson were concerned with the northern five bands; NAT 26-westbound. Other unlighted lines radiated out in tangential spokes to the north and south along the length of the multi-colored belt of NAT 26.
This was just one small segment of the Continental Thruway system that spanned North America from coast to coast and crisscrossed
north and south under the Three Nation Road Compact from the southern tip of Mexico into Canada and Alaska.
Each arterial cut a five-mile-wide path across the continent and from one end to the other, the only structures along the roadways were the turretlike NorCon Patrol check and relay stations—looming up at one-hundred-mile intervals like the fire control islands of earlier-day aircraft carriers.
Car 56 with Trooper Sergeant Ben Martin, Trooper Clay Ferguson and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot, would take their first ten-day patrol on NAT 26-west. Barring major disaster, they would eat, sleep and work the entire time from their car; out of sight of any but distant cities until they had reached Los Angeles at the end of the patrol. Then a five-day resupply and briefing period and back onto another thruway.
During the coming patrol they would cross ten state lines as if they didn’t exist. And as far as thruway traffic control and authority was concerned, state and national boundaries actually didn’t exist. With the growth of the old interstate highway system and the Alcan Highway it became increasingly evident that variation in motor vehicle laws from state to state and country to country were creating impossible situations for any uniform safety control.
* * * *
With the establishment of the Continental Thruway System two decades later, came the birth of the supra-cop—The North American Thruway Patrol, known as NorCon. Within the five-mile bands of the thruways—all federally-owned land by each of the three nations—the blue-coveralled “Continental Commandos” of NorCon were the sole law enforcement agency and authority. Violators of thruway law were cited into NorCon district traffic courts located in the nearest city to each access port along every thruway.
There was no challenge to the authority of NorCon. Public demand for faster and more powerful vehicles had forced the automotive industry to put more and more power under the touch of the ever-growing millions of drivers crowding the continent’s roads. Piston drive gave way to turbojet; turbojet was boosted by a modification of ram jet and air-cushion drive was added. In the last two years, the first of the nuclear reaction mass engines had hit the roads. Even as the hot Ferraris and Jags of the mid-’60s would have been suicide vehicles on the T-model roads of the ’20s so would today’s vehicles be on the interstates of the ’60s. But building roads capable of handling three hundred to four hundred miles an hour speeds was beyond the financial and engineering capabilities of individual states and nations. Thus grew the continental thruways with their four speed lanes in each direction, each a half-mile wide separated east and west and north and south by a half-mile-wide landscaped divider. Under the Three Nation Compact, the thruways now wove a net across the entire North American continent.
The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack Page 43