He turned and opened his mouth to yell a curse at Lopez, the mover's driver. His mouth stayed open, but no sound came out of it; Lopez was up in the control cabin of the big machine, wrenching at the levers and wheel—and obviously having no luck.
Less than no luck. Suddenly he gave a screech of pain and threw himself out, falling ten feet onto the mud and just barely missing the right-side caterpillar tread as the machine lumbered forward.
The machine dropped its bucket and began to scoop up earth as it moved toward the foundation hole. Eddie shouted at the crew to get out, now, and swore in frustration when they just looked up stupidly. Lopez limped up to stand beside him, bellowing in Spanish and waving toward the ladders.
Finally the men seemed to see the huge earthmover and began to move. Eddie turned to look at it, and to him it seemed the thing lurched toward him. He stumbled backward and found himself falling, landing with his leg twisted under him. If it wasn't broken then it was at least dislocated. The pain was excruciating and he screamed like a woman. Eddie grayed out and lay on his back, absolutely unable to move.
He opened his eyes to see the earthmover shove a full scoop over the edge. Maybe it was a mercy that after that he couldn't see the machine itself fall.
* * *
RT 10, TEXAS
Mary Fay Skinner leaned over to adjust the radio again. The stupid thing just couldn't seem to hold a station. She made a mental note to take the SUV in to get it checked.
Damned if I'm gonna pay over twenty thousand dollars and not have tunes, by God.
Tex, her golden retriever, whined pitifully in the backseat, breathing the smell of dog food on the back of her neck.
"Easy boy, we're almost home," she said.
Mary Fay shook her head. The dumb dog hated the SUV and had to be dragged into it. Maybe he knows something I don't, she thought. She found herself disliking the overpriced behemoth more and more. Even though—except for the radio—it tended to perform all right.
She drove down the highway, idly contemplating her mild dissatisfaction with this mobile status symbol. Then the wheel began to turn on its own and the speed increased; her mouth went dry as she wrenched at the corrugated surface of the wheel, harder and harder, until her nails broke and her skin tore. The taste of vomit was sour at the back of her throat as she struggled, stamping on the brakes with both feet.
"Stop!" she shouted, voice halfway between a scream and a sob. " Just stop! Just fucking stop, do you hear me?"
Then she screamed high and shrill as the SUV swung off her side of the highway, crossed the median, and aimed itself at a yellow school bus.
The last thing she saw was the horrified face of the bus driver, swelling until it seemed to loom over her like the face of a terrified, middle-aged god.
On impact the air bag did not deploy. The last thing she heard before her face smashed into the wheel was the Yipe! as Tex hit the windshield.
* * *
AUSTRIA
The tour bus was sparkling new. Heidi Thalma had been a tour guide much longer than the machine had existed, and she needed less than half her attention to tell the tourists—mostly Japanese, this time—what they were seeing.
"And if you look below," she said, pointing over the edge of the cliffside road and down to where the river made a silver thread through the meadows and pine forests, "you will see the Schloss, the castle, of the famous Mad Baron von Trapp—"
I wish I never had to give this spiel again, she thought.
A second later the driver cursed in guttural Turkish, and the bus swerved right in a curve that put it on two wheels. It toppled then, and only missed smashing down on its side because it crashed through the roadside barrier and over the cliff an instant too soon.
Heide Thalman had nearly two thousand feet of fall to take back her wish.
* * *
ALASKA
Sarah leaned back in her chair, balancing on the two rear legs and sipping at her coffee as the reports scrolled across her screen. A little of the Alaskan spring seeped in around the edges of the window, raw and chill—the Connors, and for that matter Dieter, were competent carpenters, not masters. Wind ruffled the puddles in the mud of the lane way as it disappeared off through tossing pines.
An amazing number of freak accidents involving vehicles of various kinds, she thought. The buses seemed to be wreaking the most havoc. But then, the number of passengers inevitably made them more horrible.
There weren't quite as many construction site accidents, but those there were sent a shudder down her spine. That turned literal, as she felt the tiny hairs down the center of her back trying to stand erect in a primate gesture of defiance and terror.
She could remember the first time she'd been conscious of that sensation— the moment when the first Terminator's laser-aiming dot had settled on her forehead.
"Come with me if you want to live," she murmured to herself.
"I did, but you didn't, Reese. And now it's me looking out for John."
Time to write this up, she thought, and began gathering information. She paid particular attention to those reports that offered an explanation. Most of the time, roughly 87 percent, investigation of the vehicle had turned up no mechanical reason for the accident and so operator error was generally the leading cause. Or else they called it deliberate suicide.
God knew people were capable of unbelievably stupid behavior. As my own experience has shown. But this was mounting up to be quite a wave of "errors," and if it was suicide then the earth was undergoing an epidemic.
So what, if anything, did these perfectly fine vehicles have in common? she wondered.
"Okay, let's do a sort. By date of manufacture. Aha." None of the vehicles in the oddest accidents were more than two years old.
"Now let's check on who manufactured them. Using my own nasty, paranoid-bitch search parameters."
Their most vital computer components had been made in automated factories that were only minimally under human direction. And each of these accidents was firmly in the 90
percent that were being blamed on their operators.
"Shit," she said, with quiet sincerity.
With a few key taps she pulled up a report she'd already written about the automated factories. Some of their informants had sent photos of some secret military facilities in remote parts of the United States and overseas. They'd apparently started as U.S. military facilities and then, somehow, had proliferated.
Sarah wondered if any information about these facilities had been declassified, and went to work. Three hours later she found good reason to cut loose with a litany of curses that would have impressed even the far-traveled Dieter. Buried in an insignificant memo dated three years earlier, and written to request information about a shipment of rebar, was a casual mention that Paul Warren had complained that the shipment was very late and he'd like to know why.
Paul Warren was president of Cyberdyne Systems.
* * *
Dieter stared at her for so long that Sarah began to fidget.
"Well?" she demanded. "What do you think?"
He shrugged. "Shit," he said.
"That's what I thought," she said, and rubbed her nose. "Shit."
John looked from one to the other, frowning. "Could it possibly be," he asked with exaggerated patience, "that we're forcing the facts to fit a particular premise?"