“You’d better fly, then.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking too,” said the little man. “What’s available fast?”
“Could have given you a nice Persian job, but it’s out having its tassels restrung. But you don’t care much for carpets anyway, do you? I forgot.”
“Don’t trust ’em in thermals,” said the little man. “I caught an updraft once in Sikkim and I was halfway up the Himalayas before I got things under control. Looked for a while like I’d end up in orbit. What’s at the stable?”
“Well, some pretty decent jobs, There’s this classy stallion that’s been resting up all winter, though actually he’s a little cranky—maybe you’d prefer the bay gelding. Why don’t you stop around and decide for yourself?”
“Will do,” the little man said. “You still take Diner’s Club, don’t you?”
“All major credit cards, as always. You bet.”
Norton was in southern Illinois, an hour: out of St. Louis on a foggy, humid morning, when the front right-hand tire blew. He had been expecting it to go for a day and a half, now, ever since he’d stopped in Altoona for gas. The kid at the service station had tapped the tire’s treads and showed him the weak spot, and Norton had nodded and asked about his chances of buying a spare, and the kid had shrugged and said, “It’s a funny size. Try in Pittsburgh, maybe you can find some.”
He tried in Pittsburgh, killing an hour and a half there, and hearing from several men who probably ought to know that tires just weren’t made to that size, nohow. Norton was beginning to wonder how the previous owner of the car had managed to find replacements. Maybe this was still the original set, he figured. But he was morbidly sure of one thing: that weak spot was going to give out, beyond any doubt, before he saw L.A.
When it blew, he was doing about 35, and he realized at once what had happened. He slowed the car to a halt without losing control. The shoulder was wide here, but even so Norton was grateful that the flat was on the right-hand side of the car; he didn’t much feature having to change a tire with his rump to the traffic. He was still congratulating himself on that small bit of good luck when he remembered that he had no spare tire.
Somehow he couldn’t get very disturbed about it. Spending a dozen hours a day behind the wheel was evidently having a tranquilizing effect on him; at this point nothing worried him much, not even the prospect of being stranded an hour cost of St. Louis.
He would merely walk to the nearest telephone, wherever that might happen to be, and he would phone the local automobile club and explain his predicament, and they would come out and get him and tow him to civilization. Then he would settle in a motel for a day or two, phoning Ellen at her sister’s place in L.A. to say that he was all right but was going to be a little late. Either he would have the tire patched or the automobile club would find a place in St. Louis that sold odd sizes, and everything would turn out for the best. Why get into a dither?
He stepped out of the car and inspected the flat, which looked very flat indeed. Then, observing that the trunk had popped open again, he went around back. Reaching in experimentally, he expected to find the tire chains at the outer edge of the trunk, where he had left them. They weren’t there. Instead his fingers closed on a massive metal bar.
Norton tugged it part way out of the trunk and discovered that he had found a jack. Exactly so, he thought. And the spare tire ought to be right in back of it, over here, yes? He looked, but the lid was up only eighteen inches or so, and he couldn’t see much. His fingers encountered good rubber, though. Yes, here it is. Nice and plump, brand new, deep treads—very pretty. And next to it, if my luck holds, I ought to find a chest of golden doubloons—
The doubloons weren’t there. Maybe next time, he told himself. He hauled out the tire and spent a sweaty half hour putting it on. When he was done, he dumped the jack, the wrench, and the blown tire into the trunk which immediately shut to the usual hermetic degree of sealing.
An hour later, without further incident, he crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis, found a room in a shiny new motel over-looking the Gateway Arch, treated himself to a hot shower and a couple of cold Gibsons, and put in a collect call to Ellen’s sister. Ellen had just come back from some unsuccessful apartment-hunting, and she sounded tired and discouraged. Children were howling in the background as she said, “You’re driving carefully, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am.”
“And the new car is behaving okay?”
“Its behavior,” Norton said, “is beyond reproach,”
“My sister wants to know what kind it is. She says a Volvo is a good kind of car, if you want a foreign car. That’s a Norwegian car.”
“Swedish,” he corrected.
He heard Ellen say to her sister, “He bought a Swedish car.” The reply was unintelligible, but a moment later Ellen said, “She says you did a smart thing. Those Swedes, they make good cars too.”
The flight ceiling was low, with visibility less than half a mile in thick fog. Airports were socked in all over Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. The little man flew westward, though, keeping just above the fleecy whiteness spreading to the horizon. He was making good time, and it was a relief not to have to worry about those damned private planes.
The bay gelding had plenty of stamina. He was a fuel-guzzler, that was his only trouble. You didn’t get a whole lot of miles to the bale with the horses available nowadays, the little man thought sadly. Everything was in a state of decline, and you had to accept the situation.
His original flight plan had called for him to overtake his car somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. But he had stopped off in Chicago on a sudden whim to visit friends, and now he calculated he wouldn’t catch up with the car until Arizona. He couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel again, after all these months.
III
The more he thought about the trunk and the tricks it had played, the more bothered by it all Sam Norton was. The chains, the spare tire, the jack—what next? In Amarillo he had offered a mechanic twenty bucks to get the trunk open. The mechanic had run his fingers along that smooth seam in disbelief.
“What are you, one of those television fellers?” he asked. “Having some fun with me?”
“Not at all,” Norton said. “I just want that trunk opened up.”
“Well, I reckon maybe with an acetylene torch—”
But Norton felt an obscure terror at the idea of cutting into the car that way. He didn’t know why the thought frightened him so much, but it did, and he drove out of Amarillo with the car whole and the mechanic muttering and spraying his boots with tobacco juice. A hundred miles on, when he was over the New Mexico border and moving through bleak, forlorn, winter-browned country, he decided to put the trunk to a test.
LAST GAS BEFORE ROSWELL, a peeling sign warned. FILL UP NOW!
The gas gauge told him that the tank was nearly empty. Roswell was somewhere far ahead. There wasn’t another human being in sight, no town, not even a shack. This, Norton decided, is the right place to run out of gas.
He shot past the gas station at fifty miles an hour.
In a few minutes he was two and a half mountains away from the filling station and beginning to have doubts hot merely of the wisdom of his course but even of his sanity. Deliberately letting himself run out of gas was against all reason; it was harder even to do than deliberately letting the telephone go unanswered. A dozen times he ordered himself to swing around and go back to fill his tank; and a dozen times refused.