Los Angeles

by Philip Wylie

  “These men are not interested in logic, even sanity, let alone mankind—in any long-term future. I’d say they can’t even think for a longer future than ten years, if that. This is the basic flaw in them, us, America—our ‘fiscal year’ mental limits, our ‘get-it-now’ views, our unconcern, our obliviousness to posterity, our own, anybody’s.

  “It’s almost a Biblical thing. Our concentration on ‘temporal things’ has finally cost us all awareness of lasting values, let alone, eternal ones. Beyond growth in population, expansion and increase of goods and services, luxuries, too, and income, of course, as well as ‘security’ (whatever can be measured by money), the American people actually have no positive goal of any scope or size. This is the flaw. The Boiling Wells meeting merely showed how it is served by men whose goal is the same, bigger profits from bigger companies, because that is the only business there is, actually, in their minds. Any of their social or economic or extranational contributions are regarded far less as duties, far more as advertising, as ‘image-making,’ worth the (small) cost.

  “This is a general view. I now shall try to record as many specific statements—with attribution to the speaker—as I can. To do this I have delayed my drive to L.A. But it will be useful to you to know ‘who said what’ and this, I wish to enter while it’s fresh in my head.”

  Glenn began doing that.

  It was an appalling list, a record of truly criminal intentions of leading citizens—a word-of-mouth assassination—or a program for that—of their own nation’s future, for their own, and everybody’s brief, immediate prosperity—and despite the ultimate calamity thereby assured.

  Glenn entered a hundred quotes, plans, schemes, promises, agreements, connivings, with their spokesman or innovator, by name. It was, even to him, an incredible thing. Neither he nor his people would ever have so acted or guessed these others would.…

  Glenn jerked himself upright. He realized he had been listening to a trailing, dull voice, his own. So his interval of keenness had been limited. Now, he was more tired than he could remember being. Sleepy—as if he’d taken pills. He peered at the. rest area. Kids were playing in the shade. A baby was being nursed by a pretty—from this distance—mother. He stared at that scene and couldn’t think why: a sort of haze was rising over the barren land. Dust-devils ran little, scarey routes and vanished. The smoke from a passing double-trailer eddied toward and around his car.

  He told himself he should get out and move around. But to what good, in that molten landscape? He told himself that a short nap would be refreshing. It was a pleasing thought. He wondered, briefly, if something was wrong with his car—if carbon monoxide was anaesthetizing him. He saw his sleepy face in the rear-view mirror and there was no flush, so, no CO danger. His head lolled slightly. No sleep to speak of, last night. And that was his last conscious thought.

  A voice woke him.

  He experienced the common sensation on awakening in a strange environ: he couldn’t think where he was.

  A second voice was louded. “Yeah, a guy, in there!”

  The rest area, Glenn thought, and looked ahead to certify that recollection. It had changed so much that he thought, for a second, it was another place. There were cars in parking slots but they looked to be rusted wrecks. No children. The neat signs had faded or vanished. The quite charming cactus-and-rock landscaping was buried in sand. That scan took only seconds. In a next second he realized no cars were passing, none were even audible. It had to be a dream, or a hallucination. The two voices drew his eyes to the side, finally. They’d sounded—what? Excited? Alarmed? Hostile?

  Emotional, at least. And as he turned he saw the pair. His stupefaction was complete.

  Big men. They wore plastic or glass helmets and suits of some unfamiliar fabric. On their backs were dazzling cylinders, and their belts held several unfamiliar objects, weapons? a pair of small loud-speakers? handcuffs?

  Maybe he was insane.

  The thought left him inert. What he saw happening could not happen and so, he devoted what reason he had left to an inner effort, a silent battle, to recover his senses. He began to perspire and realized his light clothes smelled musty. The Toronado wasn’t silver-gray now, but golden-brown, covered with an inch of fine dust. Only one window and the windshield were even fairly clear, as if the wind had kept them swept, more or less.

  The Martian characters now reached a door and peered.

  Their voices were amplified, so they could hear each other through the big, glass bubbles over their heads.

  Other things were wrong, too. No sunshine. Where had the sun gone? Was it that late?

  Glenn struggled harder than most men would be able to, in his effort to resolve this scene. It couldn’t be real. Maybe having a stroke was like this.

  And what did the beefy pair want? Plainly, they were closing on his car and him.

  He almost panicked when he asked himself if he could move. Find out. The engine wasn’t running. The car, however, was chilly—again, impossible. He leaned and raised the door lever so that a shove opened it wide.

  Then he blacked out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A TRIP TO TOWN

  When the door of the Toronado swung wide and Glenn lost consciousness, the two men stopped short.

  “Guy’s alive,” one said, dully—a slow man’s reaction to the impossible.

  “Get the portable, Gregg, or he soon won’t be!”

  Gregg, under orders, was quick. He ran towards a van hidden from the Toronado by the ruins of what had been a spacious rest room. The vehicle was boxlike, painted white and bore the words, on both sides: LAPD EXTERIOR PATROL. The policeman, then, opened a chamber at the side of the van, took out a neatly packaged and quite heavy object, a bundle, with which he ran back to the car.

  Without words or delay, the two men opened the wrapped case, withdrew a face mask attached to a flexible hose, clapped the mask over Glenn’s mouth and moved a lever that sent air hissing from a small tank. Gregg’s Chief, Swenton, made sure that the noseclamps held and the bite plate kept the stranger’s mouth open. He then checked the man’s pulse, grinned a little, though bleakly, and gave a next order. “Pull up the Aero and get out a stretcher.”

  Two minutes after that, Glenn, on the stretcher, was carefully hoisted through an airlock and placed on a frame which held it above the flooring. Doors were shut, both men climbed into the front of the vehicle, both gave a long glance back at their rescued stranger and Swenton switched on the radio. He was recognized by a familiar voice, that of the Captain. “Yes, Swenton? Find anything?”

  “Yeah. But not an animal like the chopper people thought they saw. A man.”

  There was a silence. “You boys been doping up?”

  “No, skipper. Guy was in a car should be a museum piece. Right off the old road where they said there was a goat, or deer, or what the hell ever, it wasn’t.” He stopped.

  “Go on, man. A character outside, in a car that stopped back then. Alive. Who, for God’s sake?”

  “Nobody from L.A. Not by the clothes. Your great grandpa maybe wore his kind. Wasn’t suited. No air supply in the old car.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Something is. He pushed his door open and, of course, passed out. We put him on the portable, loaded him in the Aerowagon and”—after a look at Gregg—“we’re set to unsuit. Fully cleared and ready.”

  “Then, come on in. If this is a joke, you’ll never make another. Wait! Papers?”

  Swenton glanced guiltily at Gregg, who shrugged. “Yeah,” he lied.

  “Okay. Come in.”

  Gregg knew the next order before it was spoken. With a shrug, he shot through the door which closed fast and trudged across to the Toronado. He wondered why they’d not thought about papers. Once in a while, some looney did get outside. But with papers. This dreek was from some other city. Or if there were any, unknown but habitable holes, from one such. Outside patrol was, Gregg felt, a foolish thing, way to bring a man down a notch. You
never picked up anybody, or almost. He hadn’t heard of an escapee brought back for—three years? Dead, of course. He leaned into the front part of the car. Keys in place. Gregg was mechanical to the extent he had any marked capability. He understood the situation and quickly found the key that opened the glove compartment. He had seen the tape recorder and recognized it for what it was. There was a brief case behind the front seat. He took everything.

  When he had returned to the vehicle and it had been flushed by compressed air till it could be set on “Normal,” which made a faint hissing only, Swenton started the electric motor and pulled onto the road. Going was slow for the first few miles as the area lay in the outer limits of search. Sand had made small dunes on the battered and potholed pavement and there were places that had to be skirted as flash floods had torn away the original one-lane-each-way pavement. When they came up on what had been Interstate 15, they made better time. A single lane was kept fairly open on that venerable road and any hampering damage was repaired, at least in time and to a degree.

  The vehicle began to travel at thirty miles an hour, it’s motor whining faintly, air supply singing in, the two officers, by then, “desuited” and comfortable.

  Once, the sun came out. That startled them both. Of course, it had happened before, and been reported by other patrols, but to Swenton, at least, it seemed that this sudden surge of light was more intense (and lasted longer) than any he’d experienced or any others had described.

  Air clearing a little? Could be.…

  Glenn Howard had recovered consciousness soon after the van had turned into the feeder-road.

  He heard the two talk. He found he could see clearly through the sides of the vehicle, but didn’t know they were opaque from the other side. He raised on his neck far enough to check the fact that the pair of nightmare bubble-heads he’d assumed to be dream-figures, weren’t. One drove and the other manipulated gadgets. Something hissed, the motor wasn’t an internal combustion kind, and his sense of threat in the first view of the pair, together with his blackout when he opened the door, made him wary.

  He felt it would be a mistake to announce his recovery, at least right away. From the soon-overheard radio discussion, he gathered more information, all coherent and yet unfathomable. He slid his eyes to the side and looked out at the desert.

  It was the same.

  It was—until he saw objects that should have been “the same” but were not.

  Power poles were down.

  Here and there, he spotted a car or truck, off the road, and looking like wrecks. Rusted, fabric rotted, tops collapsed, signs on commercial vehicles faded, flaked, unreadable. For a brief stretch they passed a railroad siding and on it, he saw a few freight cars. Empty, save for one in the open doors of which were burst bales of, perhaps, cotton. And beside these, almost certainly, the bones of human legs and ribs with a skull—if any—in the darker interior.

  When the vehicle swung onto the Throughway, Glenn identified that. But Interstate 15 was not really recognizable. Deceased and rusted vehicles lay in tangles on both sides of the cleared track the truck followed. Here and there, retaining wall sections had fallen. At first he imagined the vehicular straggle was the result of long-ago chain collisions. In a little while he realized these decaying heaps had been shoved aside to make the open surface they were using.

  He concentrated.

  It seemed clear that something was wrong with him.

  He told himself to lie limp because he needed time. He feared any attention.

  A dream? Impossible. He was awake and knew it.

  Mania? He had never heard of this vivid and coherent kind of madness.

  Bodily dysfunction? Toxemia?

  He checked his nervous command, muscles, senses, by a progression of little acts. Nothing seemed impaired.

  He then went over the past hours and days. He recalled the Boiling Wells interlude perfectly. Remembered, verbatim, what he’d said to Lenore. As far as he was able to discern, his memory, his other senses and bodily functions were intact.

  It was everything else that was wrong.

  The two cops, if they were that, in bubble-heads. Like the fancied “little men from flying saucers.” The thought even amused him somewhat, despite his confusion. He had never had any patience with the “flying saucer” people, “addicts,” he called them, “faithsickeners, not healers,” “mind-blowers.” Now, his own mind had been blown, so to speak.

  Assume his observations were correct. What were the then-logical inferences?

  The bubble-cops were, in that case, breathing portable air. Ergo, the outside air was not breathable. It had been the thing that knocked him out as the car door opened.

  Or, had it?

  There’d been no time for outside air to reach him. So, then, the air in his car had done the job. Absurd! But what other explanation—granting his present line and approach were of any use?

  He was on Interstate 15 and, he judged, near the Barstow bypass. When his senses told him they’d turned into it, he risked raising his head higher—for seconds, only, and while some impediment occupied the attention of the two in front—a fall of bricks, he gathered.

  Barstow wasn’t much help. There were profiles of its downtown buildings, vague stretches of houses, a glimpse of some sort of factory, but it was unsatisfactory.

  There was a lot of dust in the air over the city, especially. There was a general haze that blurred distance, even, in a half mile. The sun hit the hot land in freeform patches but it looked weak, save for one or two brilliantly illuminated but undefined spots. The sky, which he could glimpse from either side, was pretty cloudy, smoggy, maybe, and, even where the overcast seemed minimal, not as blue as it ought to have been.

  In short, wrong. Further, they—he, anyhow—hadn’t seen one other vehicle or one living person. Just those bones in that aged and useless freight car. Metal was rusted in every place he’d seen it, chrome flaked off bumpers, rails thick and orange-brown. As if, and his heart skipped, the world were dead.

  I am not superstitious.

  He grinned when he realized he’d insisted on that inner assertion about ten times.

  What else to do?

  Wait, he thought, and see.

  In time, at least something happened. One of the two men up front talked into a mike.

  “Patrol Six, now approaching Los Angeles, East Gate Entrance with captive.”

  (Captive!)

  “Come in, Patrol Six! We are ready!”

  When the van stopped, at last, one man had put on his helmet and gear. He stepped down and talked to another, out of Glenn’s view. He caught a word or two but not enough to make sense. The man jumped aboard again, the van moved ahead and, for a moment, Glenn had a glimpse of a sort of enclosed guardpost and a large sign that read:

  LOS ANGELES EAST GATES AND LOCKS

  2013

  He couldn’t make anything of that. The broad but hardly typical daylight went dark. The vehicle had entered a tunnel. No other way to figure. It stopped. There was a sound of heavy duty motors at work and of heavy objects moving slowly. A clang. Much hissing followed. They moved ahead a short way. Then the machine-and-weighty-object routine was repeated.

  Again, the van finally stopped and its front door was opened. Both men left, without their helmets. Now, the rear portal yawned and one of his “captors” called, “You come to, yet, Mac?”

  He almost answered. But he decided instead to feign unconsciousness a bit longer. Whatever was happening, these two morons wouldn’t be much help. Somebody higher up would be needed.

  Playing limp, eyes shut to slits, Glenn perceived that he was in a tunnel, all right, a poorly lighted one. The van—a sort of minimal ambulance, was standing beside a ramp. The ramp led up to a pair of double doors, metal and heavy, Glenn thought, and behind them, as they opened, he saw several people dressed in white, like surgeons and nurses.

  The two geeks carefully slid out the stretcher and its bewildered occupant. They were lifted on
to a hospital-like table under the gauze-masked and staring-eyed gaze of this crew in white. It was appalling. They began trundling him down a dim corridor—for what?

  Nothing pleasant.

  He had to be hallucinating.

  Change that!

  Time to get talking and stop this horror!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHAT MAN CAN ORCHESTRATE HIS DREAMS

  Glenn waited only till his cart was trundled into a bright room which was, clearly, meant for surgical procedures. Six or seven white-clad, masked figures hovered around him and began, silently, to take places and select instruments for some purpose he could not imagine.

  He opened his eyes and sat up.

  The effect was odd. Everybody stepped back as if in fear.

  “My name is Glenn Howard,” he said calmly, but that, by effort. “President of Howard and Associates. I am on my way to Los Angeles and my mission is of national and top priority. Where am I? What is all this? I demand an explanation!” They listened to that with no visible reaction. Men and women, so white-swathed that only their eyes gave clues to what they felt. And their eyes were not quieting.

  There was a short silence before one of them spoke, a man, with a cold and unemotional stare.

  “I’m Dr. Forret, head of this team. As you must know, having been outside, you survived. You were rescued. Now, we must decontaminate you and, since you apparently have no proper permit or papers, we must also ascertain your physical state to be sure you can be maintained here, at all. You surely understand?”

  “I do not. Nothing! I am in perfectly good health. I had a complete check-up in December, last year, nineteen-seventy—”

  Somebody snickered.

  “Please lie down,” Dr. Forret said.

  Glenn did not. “Look here! For your own sakes, check on me! I may seem confused—but you’re more sol”

  “He’s slightly ‘confused.’” The ironic voice of a nurse.