The used car gave up thirty miles out of Alexandria. The intense turbine temperature melted a concealed crack that had been patched with solder. It blew out with finality. The car had been a gamble that hadn't paid off.
Wilson knew the car had been wrecked. That was the only reason he could pick it up for less than two hundred dollars. But he had hoped that the turbine was as sound as it seemed.
Thoughtfully Wilson crawled out from under the hood just as a sun-yellow Cadillac slid to a stop beside him, its brakes screaming in pain. He had seen the driver before. Her hair matched the car, and she had driven along beside the train that morning.
"Turbine gone?" she called cheerfully.
"Utterly," Wilson said.
"What are you going to do?"
Wilson shrugged. "Walk, I guess, unless some kind driver takes pity on me."
"Don't look at me with those big, brown eyes, guy," she said. "I got a heart like a ripe cantaloupe. Where you going?"
Wilson cast away caution. "New Orleans."
The Cadillac door nearest him slid open. "Hop in, That's where I'm going."
Wilson got in. The door slid shut behind him. Immediately the car began to accelerate quietly, swiftly. Within seconds they were rolling along the tollway at 100 miles per hour.
"Do you do this often?" Wilson asked dryly. "Pick up strangers, I mean?""
She gave him a swift, sidelong glance. "Sometimes. When they have big, brown eyes."
"Then you've lived a fine, full life, and I'm surprised it's lasted so long."
"So am I," she said softly. "But then the world is going to hell in a worn-out hack, and who cares?"
The wind had her hair and streamed it out behind, a bright, golden scarf tugging at her head. Her blue eyes were young and alive; her lips looked soft and warm; her throat was a smooth, white column.
She was no older than 25 or 26. A child. Her fingers were bare.
Wilson frowned and looked at the unwinding ribbon of tollway. He had thought all that was finished with Sylvia, but life went on, uncaring.
There was always something just a little phony about blondes, he thought, even the real ones: a reputation, perhaps, that they had to live up to. But there was nothing phony about this one.
Maybe he was just susceptible.
The girl's theta rhythms were swift, and the speaker buzzed in his ear. But there was little oscillation; she just lived faster.
"I've never been in a Cadillac before," he said.
"Poor man?"
"I guess. I never thought about it."
"Good. Nothing different about a Cadillac—got a turbine and four wheels just like a Ford. Fancier is all."
"I've heard they'll go two hundred," Wilson said.
Laughter crinkled her eyes as she glanced at him. "I've had this to two fifty myself. Watch!" She pushed on the accelerator. The car leaped forward. Wind resistance lifted the nose until the rocketlike hood ornament was pointed above the horizon and the car seemed about to take off. The tires whined on the cracked, worn pavement.
The speedometer needle moved swiftly past 150—175—200. At 225, it began to slow. It came to a stop a little past 250.
Wilson tore his eyes away from the broad, pockmarked ribbon of concrete leaping toward him and diving under the car, and he looked at the girl. She was staring straight ahead, her lips parted, her theta rhythms elated.
Over the noise of the wheels, Wilson shouted: "Aren't you afraid the tires will blow?"
"Why?" she shouted.
He shrugged.
"Bother you?" she asked.
She swung out to pass a truck, and Wilson's eyes swiveled involuntarily back to the road. The car rocked perilously on two wheels before it decided to settle back.
"I'm not in this much of a hurry," he said calmly.
"Okay," she shouted and let up on the accelerator. When the needle had dropped back to 100, she said, "You're all right. When the speedometer reaches two hundred, lots of men reach for the wheel, and when it passes two fifty, pass out."
"I know why it doesn't worry you to pick up strange men off the tollway," he said grimly. "If they get dangerous you can scare them to death."
She laughed gleefully and looked very young. "My name's Pat Helman. I'm old Mark Helman's only child, and I have a guilt complex a runway long."
"What have you got to feel guilty about?"
"About being the daughter of a man who cared more about building rocketports and artificial satellites than building a sound society, who put more into the conquest of space than into the conquest of himself. Sometimes, in this car, I can almost outrun my guilt, and then I feel guilty about being a girl who tries to escape from problems instead of staying to solve them."
"Well, then," Wilson said with a brief smile, "hello, Pat Helman." He took a chance. "My name is John Wilson."
"I know," she said. "My job was to watch for you along the tollway."
The sun-yellow Cadillac hurtled southeast along the old tollway toward New Orleans, and Wilson sat back, wordless. Finally he said, "Was it smart to tell me?"
She smiled. "I didn't say I was smart."
"What's to stop me from knocking you out and taking over the car?"
"At one hundred or—" her foot pushed against the accelerator—"one fifty? A Lowbrow might, but you're a sensible man, Dr. Wilson. You know we'd both be killed if you tried that. And that wouldn't be sensible."
"You give me too much credit," Wilson said gloomily.
"But if you were a Lowbrow I'd tell you I had the evil eye." She twisted one blue eye into a malicious squint. "Behave or I'll strike you dead. Actually there's a hypodermic under the seat loaded with ten cubic centimeters of a fast-acting anesthetic. If I touch the horn, you'll get a shot that will put you out for three to four hours. I don't want to do that, Dr. Wilson."
He moved uneasily on the yellow-plastic seat. "Why not?"
"I like you; I want to help you."
"Help me into the hands of Senator Bartlett?"
"No."
"Who are you working for? The local police? The F.B.I.?"
"No. And I can't tell you who I am working for or what they want with you. I'm just an errand-girl, and I don't know enough. Even if I did, I might say the wrong thing. My job is to deliver you to the people who can tell you."
"And because you've been honest twice I'm supposed to trust you this time."
She shook her head. "You're supposed to come along because you must—because we're both in the same car and you can't get out."
"I don't trust you," Wilson growled. "No one who uses force can be trusted."
"Sometimes force is necessary. When a child is about to walk off a cliff or a homicidal maniac gets his hands on a loaded gun, there's no time to argue."
"I'm neither one nor the other," Wilson said stiffly.
The tires sang to them, and the tollway spun away beneath the tires. Pat glanced at Wilson sideways and said: "This is the world, isn't it? A high-powered car rocketing down the tollway carrying its human passengers willy-nilly toward an unknown destination. The car is human civilization, and I'm the driver. I built it, too, me the scientist, the engineer. I kept streamlining the car and souping up the horsepower; I didn't know where the car was going either, but I wanted to get there in a hurry. Destinations weren't my job. My job was to build a faster car."
"That's right," Wilson said firmly. "It isn't the scientist's job. His job is to find the facts and seek the truth. He can't concern himself with goals because his only reality is what he can locate and what he can measure. Goals can't be measured; they're problems for philosophers."
"And if there are no philosophers or the philosophers are wrong and you know they are wrong, what then, scientist? But you aren't the scientist now. You're the mass of humanity being hurtled along in a juggernaut you don't understand toward a destination you can't imagine. The driver knows the car is going in the wrong direction, too—just as you know, John Wilson, that New Orleans is the wrong direction for you—but, you see, he isn't really driving. The steering wheel doesn't work.
"The passenger doesn't know that, but he knows that the driver is lost, too. You are the passenger. You were fascinated by sheer speed, for a while, but at last you know that something is wrong.
"You react blindly to stop the ear in the only way you know. You reach over and grab the driver by the throat and start choking him. You've finally realized that this person at the wheel holds your life and death in his hands. You didn't choose him. He usurped that power by the nature of his inherited gifts and his education: he can betray you to the enemy, steal your job or wipe out the necessity for the job, change your society with his inventions, destroy the Earth itself."
"Nobody asked for it," Wilson muttered. "Nobody wanted it."
"It was the inevitable result of humanity's search for truth. Truth is power, and truth is a weapon against society. Society is built on conventions, not truth, and it must protect its vital falsehoods or die. Society is a stable thing. It isn't going anywhere; it is where it's going.
"A society is exactly what it is; it's the only thing it could be under the external and internal forces that acted on it. And whatever it is is good, whatever it does is right and proper, whether it's building pyramids, crucifying an agitator, tearing the breasts off a mother of heretics, or burning witches. Society's function is to protect what it has, to preserve stability above all things."
"But that's static stability," Wilson argued, "and if there's any basic law of the Universe that law is—Change!"
"And the creative thinker is the biggest changer of all. He doesn't maintain values; he destroys them as Henry Ford's flivver obsoleted the horse, impoverished the railroads, and developed an entirely new concept of city. The airplane, the atomic powerplant, solar power, something new every day to wipe out the capital investment of another industry, another trade."
"Western culture endured this turmoil for more than two hundred years because of the frontier; change was inevitable, and the creative thinker was useful in making change orderly. But the frontier is gone, and society can no longer afford the creative thinker. He threatens what is, and society cannot tolerate a threat. And so the passenger tries to stop the driver and slow down the car to a speed at which he can jump off."
"And he'll only succeed in wrecking the car and killing them both," Wilson said.
"It's too bad," Pat mused, "that the driver of that car doesn't have a hypodermic under the passenger seat of his car. Then he could anesthetize the passenger and pull over to the side of the road until he could figure out the psychology of this passenger of his, how to control him, and where the devil the car was going. Maybe he could develop a dynamic society that could tolerate creative thinkers because it had dynamic stability, and dynamic security that would keep it from flying all to pieces when change applied speed."
The speaker squealed in Wilson's ear as the girl's thumb touched the car horn. Wilson's body jumped. For a moment he stared at her with startled eyes.
"You—" he began accusingly, and leaned toward her, his hands lifting toward her throat. Then they would go no higher. His eyelids dropped; he toppled toward her.
She fended him off with one hand and pushed him over against the right hand door. "There now, Dr. Wilson," she murmured, "that didn't hurt much, did it."
Not much, he thought behind closed eyelids, not much at all. Next time don't warn your victim!
It was almost noon when they reached New Orleans. As the long, shiny Cadillac coasted to a silent stop at a red light on Tulane Avenue, Wilson leaped over the side of the car and stepped quickly to the sidewalk.
He turned, grinning, and waved at the wide-eyed girl in the Cadillac. "Good-by, Miss Helman. Give my regards to the Senator. And thanks for the ride."
He turned and disappeared into the crowd.