by Ron Hubbard
The right-angle turn was just ahead. Heller yanked the steering wheel to the left. Tires screamed! A wild skid.
Heller said, as he fought the wheel to point the swerving car straight on the new road, “Ho, ho! Centrifugal momentum about 160 foot-tons per second.”
“What?” yelled Mary.
“You have to counteract it ahead of time,” said Heller, firing the car down the narrow, two-lane country road.
“On this road and U.S. 29, there’s no place they can call ahead and set up road blocks.”
Heller screamed around a curve. The car weaved, spraying headlights against the speeding trees. “A shift to angular velocity can overcome the road friction potential of this machine! Inadequate centripetal force simulation.”
“You better step on it, kid! They’re in shooting range behind you!”
Trees and fences blurred by. The lights of the cop cars glared in the rearview mirror. They were closing!
Mary said, “The county line is up here. Maybe they’ll quit chasing us when we cross it! Step on it, kid! You’re only doing seventy!” A sign flashed by:
CURVES AHEAD
Heller said, “So, by reduction of velocity before the turn, using this foot brake, then stamping on this throttle as you start the turn and releasing the brake, adequate compensating acceleration can be added through the turn. I got it!”
A shot blasted out. It hit the car somewhere in the rear with a jolt.
A steep downslope curve swept away to the left, evading the headlight path. Heller braked!
“I’m getting the hang of this now,” he said.
The engine raced into a scream, the brakes came off! The car leaped into the curve, accelerating madly. The tires screamed but it was less.
The speedometer was racing up to ninety.
Behind them wild tire howls came from the cop cars.
Mary said, “There’s a lot of curves ahead! I’ll see if there’s a road map in this glove compartment!”
“I don’t need any,” Heller said. “It was all on the Geological Survey.”
A new steep curve flashed into view ahead. Heller stamped on the brakes. Mary almost went through the windshield. The engine roared. Off came the brakes, and the car shot around the curve as though fired from a gun.
“Jesus, kid, you’re doing ninety!” A hasty buckling sound. She must be fastening her seat belt.
Heller glanced at trees whipping by. “That’s wrong. It’s only eighty-six.”
He braked and then, accelerating, shot the car around a new curve.
“But I’ll get it up to speed,” said Heller. “Oh!” He looked at the shift lever indicator. “It was on the first drive slot. No wonder we were poking along!” He shifted the lever to high drive.
But they had lost distance. A short, straight stretch was ahead. In the rearview mirror, the leading cop car lights were getting nearer.
Heller said, “They sure build these seats close to the pedals. No leg room.”
“There’s some buttons down on your left that push the seat back.”
Above the roar of the engine, the seat motor whirred.
A shot flash flared in the rearview mirror. It must have hit the road: the ricochet whine-yowled away, overtaken by the blast of the shot.
“Come on, you chemical-fuel Cadillac Brougham Coupe d’Elegance,” said Heller. “Do I have your brake lever on?” He glanced down. It was off.
The car surged over a rise, almost lifting from the ground. A big sign flashed by:
YOU ARE LEAVING HAMDEN COUNTY
A moment later, Mary said, “Those (bleepards)! They’re coming right on across the county line. Don’t they know it’s illegal?”
The cop cars were not so close. The lead one turned on a searchlight.
A barn whipped by.
Heller braked and fired the car into a new curve. “What are all those buttons on the panel? You got an instruction book in there?”
“No.” Her hand came into view in the tail of his eye.
“But I can show you. This is the air conditioning. This is the heater. This dial is where you set the interior temperature. This is the aerial for the radio but it goes up automatically when you turn the radio on. This is the radio tuning control.”
The car flashed across a cattle guard with a sharp roar. The yell of the cop cars was loud.
“This is the automatic station selector. These are the preset station push buttons. You tune in the station then you pull one out and push it in and it repeats the station whenever you push it.”
“You sure know a lot about cars,” said Heller.
“I had one once.”
A truck was turning out from a gate, dead ahead.
Heller yanked the steering wheel. They hit the gravel on the edge. The car swerved widely. He yanked it back on the road.
He said, “You’re not from around here, are you. I can tell by your accent.”
I hastily made a note. Since he had begun to talk to her, his own accent was fading into New England! Aha! A Code break?
He was negotiating, with brake and accelerator, a new series of curves. Fences were whipping by. He had accidentally found the floor dimmer switch and turned the lights up.
The cop cars were a few hundred yards behind, holding their noisy own.
“Oh, I’m a tried-and-true first family of Virginia all right,” she said. She was swabbing at her streaming eyes and nose with the hem of her skirt. “My people were farmers. They didn’t want me to have such a hard life.”
They howled into a new curve.
“I sure got to get a fix,” she said, swabbing some more. “Anyway, my father and mother skimped and scraped and sent me to Bassardt Woman’s College: that’s up the Hudson from New York.”
They roared across a wooden bridge and streaked up the hill on the far side. The roar of the cop cars on the bridge sounded hot behind them.
“You look like an honest kid,” she said. “I got some advice for you. You be sure to finish college. You be sure to get your degree. It isn’t what you know that gets you the job. It’s the diploma, the sheepskin. That’s what talks. Nobody will listen to anything you say unless you have that piece of parchment!”
“Got to have a diploma before anyone will listen to you,” said Heller, taking careful mental note of it.
A cop car had sped up. It got its hood even with the rear wheels of the Cadillac. A bullhorn roared!
“PULL OVER, GOD (BLEEP) YOU! YOU’RE UNDER ARREST!”
Heller weaved the Cadillac’s rear over toward the cop car’s front wheels. The cop car frantically braked. Heller straightened out the Cadillac’s swerves and fed it more accelerator.
“Well, did you get your diploma?” said Heller.
The Cadillac plunged down to where the road crossed an open creek bed. Water rocketed to the right and left. The engine screamed as he went up the far slope.
“Oh, yes,” said Mary. “You have to graduate to amount to anything. I’m a full-fledged Doctor of Philosophy. I even got my sheepskin in my bag. I’ll show you. Psychology, you know.”
My ears tingled! Ah, this dear girl! A psychologist! Empathy flooded through me.
The car almost left the ground over a rise.
“Psychology?” said Heller. “What’s that?”
“A lot of horse (bleep). It’s a con game. They try to make you think you’re nobody, just a bunch of cells, an animal. They can’t do anything. They teach that you can’t change anybody. They even have total consciousness that they’re fakes. So why bother to practice it?”
I went catatonic with shock!
My newly formed empathy shattered utterly into non-rapport! A heretic! A foul nonbeliever! She had no reverence whatever for the sacred! Absolute antisocial negation!
The Cadillac was racing down a bumpy lane. The screams of the cop cars got louder.
“I was an A student,” said Mary, “but every time any of the professors (bleeped) me, they’d say I should be more libido oriented. That’s
why they kept putting me on drugs. Listen, if psychology is so good, why are all the psychology professors so crazy?”
Heller slued the Cadillac across a muddy stretch of road. The speedometer said one hundred.
Mary swabbed at her running nose and eyes. “They preach free love just so they can get it free.”
Another shot hit the road and ricocheted away.
“They’re all bad (bleeps), too. I suppose it’s the constant overstimulation of the erotic sensory capacity that causes the consequent response deterioration. But they say it’s a lot of hard work to turn every college dorm into a whorehouse. You just missed that cow.”
Heller said, “But if you got your diploma, why couldn’t you get a job?”
A huge sign whipped by. It had said:
WARNING-SLOW DOWN JUNCTION WITH U.S. 29 STRAIGHT AHEAD
Heller braked. The engine screamed. He let off the brakes and shot into the four-lane U.S. 29, heading north.
“The public won’t have anything to do with a psychologist. They know better. The only people who employ psychologists are the government. They think they need them to teach kids, to defend the bankers and wipe out dissidents. The government thinks the psychologists can keep the population under control. What a laugh!”
The cop cars had entered U.S. 29 behind them.
A sign said:
LYNCHBURG 20 MILES
“I sure hope I can get a fix in Lynchburg,” said Mary.
Heller started letting the Cadillac out.
Heller said, “Did the government offer you a job?”
The Cadillac engine was screaming at such a pitch, it became hard to hear what they were saying.
“They sure did,” she said. Then she swabbed at her nose and frantically tried to yawn. Then she leaned forward to look at him intensely. “Listen, kid. I may be a thief. I may be a totally hooked dope addict. I may be a whore. I might have some incurable disease. But don’t think I’ve sunk so low as to work for the God (bleeped) government! Do you think I want to be a paranoid schizophrenic like those guys?”
I thought to myself, remembering Lombar, well, she has a point there. I began to take a more tolerant view of her, apostate though she might be. I suddenly recalled how clever and cunning she had been in doing Harvey “Smasher” Lee out of his favorite and vitally fetish-worshipped Cadillac. The psychology training had vividly shown through. Hadn’t she used blackmail? Ah, well, my faith in psychology was totally restored.
The four-lane highway had a wide divider in the center. At intervals a gap in the abutments showed through where one could do a U-turn.
U.S. 29 was undulating at this point, with many rises and dips. As it went over the tops, the Cadillac tended to float.
“Now, you chemical-engined Cadillac Brougham Coupe d’Elegance, it’s time you started to move!”
A sign flashed by:
JUNCTION STATE HIGHWAY 699 1 MILE
The cop cars were in sight in the rearview mirror. The Cadillac engine was winding up to a shriek. “Jesus!” said Mary. “You’re doing over 120.” The speedometer was stuck at the top. “We’re doing 135,” said Heller. A sign:
55 MPH SPEED LIMIT
Another sign:
RADAR PATROLLED
They flashed by the junction of State Highway 699.
The opposite lane had some truck traffic in it.
They soared over a rise. All four wheels of the Cadillac left the ground!
It hurtled down the hill.
The cop cars had vanished, hidden by the rise.
Heller was watching the center dividers for an opening.
“HOLD ON!” yelled Heller.
He stamped on the brakes.
Mary slapped a hand against the cowling.
Heller floorboarded the accelerator. He yanked the wheel to the left.
The car, in a skidding scream, spun through the divider opening.
It shot ahead in the opposite lanes, going now in the other direction.
A big truck was just ahead in the passing lane.
Heller stamped on the brakes and brought the car to the right of the truck!
The Cadillac came down to a shuddering fifty-five.
On the opposite side of the highway, the two police cars screamed over the rise and down the hill, still heading for Lynchburg as though the world were on fire.
Their yowls and chortles faded away to the north.
“Now,” said Heller, pointing as they ambled quietly along, “we’ll turn over to State Highway 699.” The junction was right there. They turned sedately. “We’ll go over to U.S. Highway 501 and then up into Lynchburg.”
“Jesus,” said Mary, “I hope so. I sure need a fix.”
Chapter 5
As they headed up U.S. 501, I laughed.
What an amateur! They’d have his license number spread through Lynchburg and all the states to the north. And here he was, tamely rolling along to the first town where he’d be expected. I knew they’d spot and catch him there or somewhere up the line for sure!
Fleet combat engineer! Never trained for anything really important. Anyone with any sense would have headed in the other direction. Even for California! Fast! Yet there he was, driving at a leisurely pace into the northern side of the town.
A big neon sign said:
BIG RAINBOW MOTEL VACANCY
Heller pulled in beside the office.
Mary swabbed at her nose with her skirt. “I better go in.”
Heller unlatched the door for her and helped her out. He went in with her. Just what I wanted.
The clock on the office wall said it was 11:45.
A clerk with his sleeves rolled up had his gray head lowered over some bookkeeping. He reminded me of Lombar’s chief clerk, so I expected him to be nasty.
Mary went to the desk. She sure looked awful. “Mister,” she said, “could you tell me where I could buy a dollar bag or tell me where I could get one? I need it awfully bad!”
The clerk looked up and fixed her with a gimlet eye. “Aw, Ah’m terrible sorry, ma’am. Ah jus’ cain’t.” He turned to Heller apologetically. “It’s the local Feds. They grabbed all the hard stuff in sight jus’ las’ week. They said they’s holdin’ it to shoot up the price afore they puts it back on the mahkut. You know how the God (bleeped) narcos is.” He turned back to Mary. “Ah’m terrible sorry, ma’am, Ah shorely is!”
Mary was shuddering. The clerk turned back to Heller, “But Ah c’d rent you a room, though. You c’d tear yourself off a piece.”
“A room w’d be fahn,” said Heller.
The old man got a key. “You want it jus’ foah a hour or a night? This lady don’t look up to much but Ah c’d make it real cheap a night.”
“A night,” said Heller.
“That be fohty dollahs, then.”
Heller gave him the money and the old clerk handed him the key. “Numbuh thutty-eight, clear t’other end this buildin’. Have a good tahm.” And he simply went back to his books!
(Bleep) him! No registration card! Oh, I knew his type. He was in business for himself. A crook! Gypping his owner out of a night’s room rent. I knew I had been right in spotting his resemblance to Lombar’s chief clerk. He’d done me in! Heller’s fancy new name and car license would neither one appear! I was really enraged with him and justly so. He was dishonest!
Heller drove the car down and after figuring out how to reverse it, parked it in the open-ended garage. It was a bit long and the tail stuck out.
Mary was in bad shape. She was yawning convulsively. She felt her way down the side of the car. Then she looked at the tail and seemed to recover a bit. “Wait,” she said, “the end of the car is sticking out. Somebody can see the license.”
(Bleep) her! She fumbled around and found a newspaper on the dirty floor. She had Heller open the trunk and she put the newspaper, spread, half in and half out of it so it looked like carelessness in unloading. But it covered the license plate! “Whores know all about motels,” she said.
&nbs
p; Heller was kneeling at the back of the car. He lifted the newspaper. “Hello! There’s a bullet hole in this identotag.” He bent around. “Doesn’t seem to have hit anything else.” He stood up. “So that’s what a bullet hole looks like.”
I wished I could show him one in Mary’s head! Or in his own!
He let Mary in and then hauled in the baggage. The place had twin beds. Mary was taking off her shoes. She made some ineffectual attempts to undress further, gave it up and groggily got into bed. “I’m so sleepy,” she said. “You can have it if you want it, kid: I haven’t felt anything for a year. But I’d advise against it. You’re a good kid and I think I might have some disease.”
“Look,” said Heller. “You’re in pretty bad shape. Aren’t there doctors or hospitals or something on this planet?”
Oho! I said and hastily noted the Code break down. He’d slip up really bad sooner or later. He was so untrained!
“Listen,” he persisted, shaking her by the shoulder gently. “I think you need some attention. Can’t I take you to a hospital? They must have them. The people look so sick!”
She rose up with sudden ferocity. “Don’t talk to me about doctors! Don’t talk to me about hospitals! They’d kill me!”
He backed up at that.
The sudden burst of energy carried forward. She got her suitcase and opened it. She got out a needle kit and sank down on the edge of the bed. She opened it with shaking hands. She took the plunger out of the syringe. She put her little finger into the cylinder. She tried to scrape something off but there was nothing to scrape. She tried to suck at a needle and stuck herself.
“Oh,” she shuddered, “I did all that yesterday. There’s not even a tiny grain left!” She threw the kit down on the floor.
“What is this stuff, this fix you need?” said Heller.
“Oh, you poor dumb kid! It’s blanks, Harry, joy powder, ka-ka, skag, caballo, Chinese red, Mexican mud, junk, white stuff, hard stuff, the big H! And if I don’t get some I’m going to die!”