“The way everyone has been staring, they should be paying us.”
But Morton, oblivious, slid from the seat onto the sawdusted floor, refolded his paper napkin, and, reaching up, set it on the table, after which he gave the robotic franchise service module a grin and slapped it percussively on the back. “Maybe something better,” he said to that plastic encasement of silicon chips, “is just around the corner.”
The vogue for jet packs, Noelle told Morton in the van on the way over the mountain pass, dated back about ten years. She was trying to change the subject; she was trying hard, wondering why she had agreed to drive Morton out here, and why Koo had allowed him to go, excepting the fact that at the omnium gatherum no one would give him a second look. And she realized he’d never seen a jet pack, but in online reports and infomercials. She told him: once the traffic problem got to where you could be parked on Sixth Street in Rio Blanco for an hour, trying to get to the interstate, having a leisurely conversation with the people in the vehicles fore and aft, the automobile became no longer the engine of the national economy. Although what truly put an end to Detroit, to a business sector that had been rescued by the government twice in the past twenty years, was the depletion of the Middle Eastern petroleum supply. Old-time fuel became astronomically expensive. Even the electric-cell cars were pretty expensive, since they required a generating plant somewhere in the supply chain. Electric cars, Noelle was saying, also became more expensive than most people could afford, and those little death contraptions only went so far on a charge and could be totaled at five miles an hour, and still there was a lot of traffic, and so people just started moving toward the idea of the jet pack. If you couldn’t get through the traffic, why not go over it?
At first, it was just hobbyists. Guys in Hawaiian-print shirts in backyards, swilling cough syrup, monkeying with lawn mower engines. So many of these hobbyists were lost in the pursuit of the dream, she told Morton. They’d lift off above the subdivision, jet a couple hundred yards, and then lose control, dropping into a grove of cholla. The Southwest was full of these stories. White guys who had nothing more going for them, Noelle told Morton, than their jet packs. They couldn’t get proper jobs, and their wives had left them. Kids loved these guys. Kids loved jet packs. Search and rescue would pluck one kid off Finger Rock, and another off Mount Lemon, and by the time they’d ferry these little ones to safety, there’d be another one stranded up there. The kids had altitude sickness too. No pressurized air with a jet pack, you know. They’d be throwing up everywhere when they arrived at the hospital.
“There’s one there.” She pointed. The chimpanzee looked out the window of the departmental van, and he saw what looked like a surface-to-air missile go horizontal, blazing over Rio Blanco Peak.
There were a lot of reservations, safety concerns, from an air traffic point of view, about the jet packs. In Rio Blanco, in the early years of the jet pack fad, six or seven guys got sucked into the backdraft of jet planes. Imagine, Noelle told Morton. You’re in a window seat, and you’re looking out through the double panes, and you see some guy in a jet pack, with a pair of goggles on, waving. The plane is coming in to land, and this unregulated jet pack enthusiast is gesturing at the plane, taking his hand off the throttle, as he tries to veer away, and then this guy is getting inhaled right into the back of the engine. The desert, the expanse of rose-tipped mountaintops, crimson cloud cover on the horizon, neglected citrus groves, all laid out before you, and then there’s an explosion of food-processed human parts spraying out the back of the jet, down the side of the fuselage, onto the desert below.
Probably, this was why the jet pack designers were given notice that they were not to equip their jet packs with enough liftoff to get the machines over a hundred and fifty feet in altitude. Not much higher than the highest building in the vicinity. The same difficulties were being played out in all the cities of the West, cities designed for the automobile. Of course, there was a green aspect to the debate over the jet pack. It had to do with the kinds of fuel that were required. Any kind of natural gas, or petroleum-based product, or solid rocket fuel, that kind of stuff was just prohibitive, especially if all you were going to do was help some teenage kid get to the top of the Catalina range without having to hike.
It was the hydrogen reaction that really allowed the jet pack market to take off, and it was some old countercultural octogenarian in northern California who came up with the technical solution, the hydrogen-fueled jet pack. You didn’t need that much in raw materials, and you were giving off eco-friendly exhaust — water, which is no problem in the desert. So what was the problem? The initial models cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which made for a rental market, initially, but as always with this stuff, you know, prices came down, especially when the Sino-Indian conglomerates got involved in manufacture. Also, it was obvious that the jet pack was good for border jumping, for felonies great and small, and so law enforcement had to get jet packs too, and anyone living in rural anywhere had to get a jet pack, and if it weren’t for the fact that most people just couldn’t afford them, then probably everyone would have one.
It’s sort of hypocritical, Noelle told Morton, the way that people in the omnium gatherum, who were supposed to be all back to the land and into inaugurating the new dark ages, all of that stuff, were completely obsessed with getting jet packs, because jet packs were the symbol of old outlaw culture. Like with old-fashioned motorcycles, jet packs were unsafe, they were dangerous, and they used up huge amounts of fuel. “Worth it?” Noelle asked Morton. “People can get anywhere they want now pretty fast, but it’s once or twice a week that you’ll see somebody fall out of the sky, like they’ve been picked off, and I guess some of them have been shot, or Tasered, and then the body parts just get flattened on one of the highways or service roads.”
Perhaps their price was the best thing about them, Noelle continued, because it kept the jet packs out of the reach of the drunken and most careless segment of the population. The federal, state, and local regulations didn’t work. What would be more attractive to rebels without causes, loaded to the tips of their dendrites on OxyPlus or polyamphetamine, than the idea of flight? They were all would-be Icaruses, heading straight for the sun.
“And in a way, that’s sort of what we’re getting tonight. There are always all these different mythemes, you know, ideas, stories, colliding at any omnium gatherum event. It’s supposed to be tribal, there’s supposed to be dancing, but what there is instead is a bunch of middle-aged guys trying to loft themselves up over the desert at the same time, and although none of them says he wants to be the guy who goes the very highest, higher than all the other jet packs, it’s like that anyway. There’s always a competition among these guys who had a couple of good ideas about counterculture a million years ago and now all they have is liver damage, or they are on their third case of melanoma, and big patches of their face have been removed, and nobody wants to have anything to do with them, except at omnium gatherum, because there they can wear a mask. They can go on another thirty years like this.”