‘Halloway, time to go…’Already he had decided to leave the city and make his way home. Once he had crossed the river he would be safe.

When the streets were quiet again, and the cloud of petalled dust had drifted away down the avenue, Halloway set off, leaving the monument of typewriters and telex machines behind him. He ran silently through the field of poppies, as the last petals fell through the unsettled air around him.

When he reached the side-street he found the roadway littered with human figures. Masonry and broken glass, sections of store window as large as his sailplane’s wings, lay among the crushed flowers. Most of the clothing stores that lined both sides of this narrow street had been attacked, their glass fronts and window displays ripped out by some giant implement.

Everywhere the plastic mannequins lay in the sunlight, limbs crushed by the tracks of the machine, polite expressions looking up from the glass and masonry.

Frightened for the first time by the sight of violence, Halloway ran towards the river, and by luck found the open span of a large road-bridge that carried him away from the city. Without pausing to look back, ears listening for any sound of the machine, he sprinted along in his coloured sneakers. Halfway across the bridge he slowed down for the first time to catch his breath. The cloud of petals was still drifting eastwards between the office blocks. Halloway searched the northern suburbs for the mirror-sheathed building into which he had crashed, regretting that he would have to leave the sailplane among these anonymous streets patrolled by this violent machine.

Angry with himself, he pulled off his fleece-lined jacket and hurled it over the balustrade. It fell into the dead water like a sad, brilliant bird. Already he looked forward to his return to Garden City, with its civilized people and sane behaviour. Thinking back, his aggressiveness at the gliding championships embarrassed him.

‘…too eager for action at any cost,’ he reproved himself as he strode along. ‘In future check that, Halloway…’

He left the bridge and set off eastwards past the dockyards and warehouses. He had entered an area of single-storey factories and cheap housing, chemical tank-farms and electrical sub-stations. All around him, as well, were the monuments. He was crossing a plain of these memorials, pyramids of domestic appliances and car tyres, machine tools and office furniture that had been erected on any available patch of waste ground. Ignoring them, and their ambiguous flowers, Halloway pressed on. Already he could see the collapsed suspension bridge that marked the gateway to the Sound.

Shortly before noon, when the river crossing was three miles behind him, Halloway came across the airport. As he approached the perimeter fence he could see the control tower, and the tails of parked airliners as high as three-storey buildings. The entire surface of the airport, the concrete runways and grass verges, was covered with thousands of automobiles. Variants of no more than two or three models, they stretched away in a huge metallized dream.

Curious to see the airliners, Halloway followed the perimeter fence towards the entrance. He guessed that the cars had been new models fresh from the production line, stored here by the manufacturers when the oil tap had been turned off. With luck, one of the cars might start for him.

Now that he had left the city, Halloway began to relax again. The airport was a zone that he found curiously reassuring, and in some obscure way made up for the loss of his sailplane. He visualized his father landing and taking off in one of the single-engine aircraft parked nose-to-tail on the other side of the perimeter fence.

At the airport entrance, in the centre of a traffic island, Halloway found the largest of the pyramids he had seen so far. Well over one hundred feet high, the memorial had been constructed entirely from automobile radiator grilles, a tour-de-force of ironic humour. Row upon row, the grilles rose to the apex, cunningly welded together to form staircases and internal galleries. For once, the tropical flora had barely gained a purchase on the base of the pyramid, and the still-gleaming chrome formed a brilliant lacework.

Impressed by the structure, Halloway made his way around it into the airport. Service roads led in all directions to the terminal buildings and air-freight offices. Fuel tankers and breakdown vehicles blocked the narrow lanes. Losing himself in this maze, Halloway decided to climb to the roof of a ten-storey car park whose canted floors spiralled up into the air behind the terminal buildings.

As he passed the elevators on his way to the staircase, Halloway without thinking touched the call button. To his surprise, the doors promptly responded, opening without any hesitation on well-oiled castors. The interior of the elevator was clean and well-maintained, the control panel freshly polished.

Listening to the faint drumming of an electric generator somewhere above the shaft, Halloway gathered his courage together. There was something seductive about this immaculate compartment, and already he was becoming impatient with himself for turning tail and leaving the city at the first alarm. Sooner or later he intended to come to terms with whatever creature prowled its deserted canyons, and this car park would make a good observation post.

Stepping into the elevator, he inspected the control panel and pushed a button at random.

Within less than a minute he had ridden to the seventh floor and stepped out into what he soon discovered was a museum of automobiles. At first glance the cars were indistinguishable from the thousands of vehicles he had passed that day. But as he walked through the dim light, seeing his reflection in the burnished cellulose and waxed leather, he realized that he had stumbled on to a unique private museum. The sixty or so cars on this canted deck were all exhibition pieces, sitting squarely on inflated tyres, antique coachwork lovingly restored.

‘Pierce Arrow… Bugatti… Hispano-Suiza… Chevrolet Impala..

Aloud, he read out the names from the manufacturers’ medallions. Many of the cars dated back well over a century to the dawn of the automobile age, huge perambulators of brass and steel with high seats and coaching lamps larger than their diminutive engines. Others, slab-decked saloons and limousines, were as new as the models that covered the runways of the airport.

Cord. Stutz. ChryslerImperial. Halloway climbed the deck to the eighth floor. More cars, all lovingly waxed and polished, faced each other through the gloom.

The one exception was parked in the centre of the ramp, a grimy six-wheeled breakdown truck with a heavy crane mounted on its rear platform. The engine cowling was still warm. Halloway opened the driver’s door; on the seat were a toolkit and a set of maps of the city marked off into various zones. Ignition keys hung from the dashboard, and from the whole compartment came the raw but potent odour of carbonized oil, gasolene and engine coolant.

Sitting behind the steering wheel, Halloway felt the controls, trying to remember something of the casual expertise with which he so easily impressed the gang of ten-year-olds who watched him demonstrate how to drive.

Suddenly the engine was alive, thundering out between the concrete decks as if trying to shake itself apart. The heavy vehicle was vibrating fiercely, and the unlatched door bumped against Halloway’s elbow. A blaze of lights lit up the dashboard. Gripping the wheel cautiously, Halloway released the handbrake and let the truck roll forward down the concrete incline, pressing the accelerator as the vehicle moved along at a steady two miles an hour.

Within thirty minutes he was driving around the airport at speed, roaring along the perimeter roads and down the one exposed section of runway. Flocks of startled ducks and geese rose from the reservoirs to the east of the airport, fleeing from the noise of the careening vehicle. When he first emerged from the car park the truck had come to a halt, and it had taken Halloway some time to discover that the gear lever was in neutral. He soon learned to engage it, and set off at breakneck pace, slamming in and out of the parked cars. The heavy truck and its wildly swinging crane, steel hook lashing about, sent up a spray of rust from the cars kicked out of their way. The forward power of the vehicle, after the agile but passive motion of the sailplane, astonished Halloway. The slightest pressure of his foot on the accelerator sent the truck hurtling ahead. It was the raw energy of the machine that most impressed him, this gut-driven dynamo totally at one with the city across the river.

Carried away by his new-found determination, and confident that he could take on any opponent now, Halloway headed out of the airport. As he left the main gates he was already moving at sixty m. p. h. Too late, he released the accelerator as the road veered off to circle the traffic island with its pyramid of radiator grilles. Trying to slow down, he plunged across the grass verge, the concrete kerb almost rolling the truck on to its side. It hurtled forward, the crane’s hook and heavy chains thrashing the cabin behind Halloway’s head. He clung to the wheel, face hidden behind his arms, and felt himself flung across the cabin as the truck struck the lowest tier of the pyramid. It tore out a dozen radiator grilles, which hung like trophies from the dented fenders as it swerved away, ran head-on into the steel pylon of a route indicator and came to a halt on its side, cabin buried in the soft earth.

Вы читаете The Complete Short Stories
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