The Best of Margaret St. Clair

For the first time, Freeman grinned. “Pretty good, isn’t it?” he replied, also in a whisper. He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. “Get in. We’re going for a ride. Remember, no noise.”

The other man obeyed. Freeman started the car—it had a very quiet motor—and watched until a lull in the traffic gave him a chance to swing out from the curb. He stepped on the accelerator. The landscape began to move by.

Cars passed them. They passed some cars. Dickson-Hawes looked for the speedometer on the dashboard and couldn’t find it. A garage, service station, a billboard went by. The sign on the garage read : WE FIX FLATTEDS. The service station had conical pumps. The tomatoes on the billboard were purple and green.

Dickson-Hawes was breathing shallowly. He said, “Freeman—where are we?”

Once more, the other man grinned. “You’re getting just the effect I mean to give,” he retorted in a pleased whisper. “At first, the customer thinks he’s on an ordinary freeway, with ordinary people hurrying home to their dinners. Then he begins to notice all sorts of subtle differences. Everything’s a little off-key. It adds to the uneasiness.”

“Yes, but— what’s the object of all this? What are we trying to do?”

“Get home to our dinners, like everyone else.”

“Where does the—well, difficulty come in?”

“Do you see that car in the outer lane?” They were still conversing in whispers. “Black, bullet shaped, quite small, going very fast?”

“Yes.”

“Keep your eye on it.”

The black car was going very fast. It caught up with a blue sedan in front of it, cut in on it and began to crowd it over to the curb. The blue sedan tried to shake off the black car, but without success. If the driver didn’t want to be wrecked, he had to get over.

For a while, the two cars ran parallel. The black car began to slow down and crowd more aggressively than ever. Suddenly it cut obliquely in front of the sedan and stopped.

There was a frenzied scream of brakes from the sedan. It stopped with its left fender almost against the black bullet-shaped car. The bodies were so close, there was no room for the sedan driver to open his door.

Freeman had let the car he was driving slow down, presumably so Dickson-Hawes could see everything.

For a moment there was nothing to see. Only for a moment. Then two—or was it three?—long,, blackish, extremely thin arms came out from the black car and fumbled with the glass in the window of the sedan. The glass was forced down. The arms entered the sedan.

From the sedan there came a wild burst of shrieking. It was like the flopping, horrified squawks of a chicken at the chopping block. The shrieks were still going on when the very thin arms came out with a—The light hid nothing. The three very thin arms came out with a plucked-off human arm.

They threw it into the interior of the black car. The three arms invaded the sedan once more.

This time, Dickson Hawes had turned neither white nor greenish, but a blotchy gray. His mouth had come open all around his teeth, in the shape of a rigid oblong with raised, corded edges. It was perfectly plain that if he was not screaming, it was solely because his throat was too paralyzed.

Freeman gave his passenger only a momentary glance. He was looking into the rear-view mirror. He began to frown anxiously.

The shrieking from the blue sedan had stopped. Dickson-Hawes covered his face with his hands while Freeman drove past it and the other car. When the group lay behind them, he asked in a shaking whisper, “Freeman, are there any more of them? The black cars, I mean?”

“Yeah. One of them’s coming toward us now.”

Dickson-Hawes’s head swiveled around. Another of the black cars was hurtling toward them through the traffic, though it was still a long way behind.

Dickson-Hawes licked his lips.

“Is it— after us?”

“I think so.”

“But why? Why—us?”

“Part of the game. Wouldn’t be horrid otherwise. Hold on. I’m going to try to shake it off.”

Freeman stepped down on the accelerator. The eggplant-colored sedan shot ahead. It was a very fast car and Freeman was evidently an expert and nerveless driver. They slid through nonexistent holes in the traffic, glanced off from fenders, slipped crazily from lane to lane, a shuttle in a pattern of speed and escape.

The black car gained on them. No gymnastics. A bulletlike directness. But it was nearer all the time.

Dickson-Hawes gave a sort of whimper.

“No noise,” Freeman cautioned in a fierce whisper. “That’ll bring them down for sure. Now!”

He pressed the accelerator all the way down. The eggplant-colored car bounced and swayed. There was a tinkle of glass from the headlights of the car on the left as the sedan brushed it glancingly. Dickson-Hawes moaned, but realized they had gained the length of several cars. Momentarily, the black pursuer fell behind.

They went through two red lights in a row. So did the black bullet. It began to edge in on them. Closer and closer. Faster and faster.

Dickson-Hawes had slumped forward with his head on his chest. The black car cut toward them immediately.

Freeman snarled. Deliberately, he swung out into the path of the pursuer. For a second, it gave ground.

“Bastards,” Freeman said grimly.

The black car cut in on them like the lash of a whip. The sedan slithered. Hubcaps grated on concrete. The sedan swayed drunkenly. Brakes howled. Dickson-Hawes, opening his eyes involuntarily for the crash, saw that they were in a safety island. The same safety island, surely, from which they had started out?

The black car went streaking on by.

“I hate those things,” Freeman said bitterly. “Damned Voom. If I could—But never mind. We got away. We’re safe. We’re home.”

Dickson-Hawes did not move. “I said we’re safe,” Freeman repeated. He opened the car door and pushed the other man out through it. Half shoving, half carrying, he led him to the door from which they had entered the freeway. It was still the time of day at which nervous motorists turn on their parking lights.

Freeman maneuvered Dickson-Hawes through the door. He closed it behind them and fastened the padlocks in the hasps. They were out in the corridor again—the corridor on whose wall somebody had written horrer howce.

Freeman drew a deep breath. “Well. Worked better than I thought it would. I was afraid you’d yell. I thought you were the type that yells. But I guess the third time’s the charm.”

“What?”

“I mean I guess my goddamn luck has turned at last. Yeah. What did you think of it?”

Dickson-Hawes swallowed, unable to answer.

Freeman regarded him. “Come along to my office and have a drink. You look like you need one. And then you can tell me what you think of this setup.”

The office was in the front of the house, down a couple of steps. Dickson-Hawes sank into the chair Freeman pulled out for him. He gulped down Freeman’s dubious reddish bourbon gratefully.

After the second drink he was restored enough to ask, “Freeman, was it real?”

“Certainly not,” the other man said promptly.

“It looked awfully real,” Dickson-Hawes objected. “That arm…” He shuddered.

“A dummy,” Freeman answered promptly once more. “You didn’t see any blood, did you? Of course not. It was a dummy arm.”

“I hope so. I don’t see how you could have made all the stuff we saw. There’s a limit to what machinery can do. I’d like another drink.”

Freeman poured. “What did you think of it?”

Color was coming back to Dickson-Hawes’s cheeks. “It was the most horrible experience I ever had in my life.”

Freeman grinned. “Good. People like to be frightened. That’s why roller-coaster rides are so popular.”