Bolt placed his clear face mask over his head and turned his back, knowing that there were still more questions. But these would be answered in a moment. He had wooden stands built for the board of directors, very much like those in a football stadium. He wondered if they would raise him to their shoulders and carry him off the field when the experiment was done.
Almost tripping on the padding over his shoes, Bolt waved an arm. A score of workmen advanced on the cars with spray nozzles. Pink and lavender clouds filled the air.
Then there was fire-engine red and living-room beige. Mushroom and melon. Daisy and chartreuse. The paint hissed onto the cars moist and glistening.
With a control radio, Reemer Bolt, who had purchased a new scrambler system, contacted a technician back at Chemical Concepts. He had purposely kept from this technician the exact nature of the experiment. He had disguised it as something financially meaningless, like saving the air for people to breathe.
The device was now secured under a small office. When the technician heard the signal, he lifted the red shield over the initiating button. The floor above the device opened. The roof of the building opened.
Sunlight poured in over the device-now reduced to the size of a desk-with a five-foot chrome nozzle pointing upward; much like a small cannon. Except this cannon had two storage drums, and an iron beam generator that acted like a sluice for the fluorocarbons, transferring them just short of the speed of light up to the ozone shield.
The roof closed, the floor above the device closed, and the machine had done its work. It was now down to less than five seconds in operating time. The directional problems had been overcome at the Malden experiment. The duration time, namely protecting the remaining parts of the thin globe-girdling shield, had been determined in the first; Salem, New Hampshire, experiment. The technician knew by the almost upright angle of the generator that the experiment point had to be very close.
Up in the treeless valley near Chester, New Hampshire, a miraculous blue light opened up above. For five seconds it seemed to bubble and then it closed rapidly. The fifty cars and trucks did absolutely nothing. Wettish reds, pinks, blacks, browns, grays, and blues glistened from the cars.
Reemer Bolt took off his mask. He signaled the board of directors to do the same.
"Is it safe yet?" asked one.
"Safe," said Bolt. He glanced up at the sky. The ring was now down to a circle. The technicians had even gotten the ozone shield to close faster. The air smelled faintly of burned grass. Small plops like bags of candy could be heard hitting the field. Birds caught again.
Bolt's feet crushed dried dead grass. The ground itself felt brittle underneath.
"C'mon," he called out to the board of directors. "It's safe."
He signaled the workmen to stand off. In case they didn't move fast enough, one of his dummy corporations had hired guards. They moved the workmen away. With great ostentation he nodded to a man with a control box sitting to the right of the stands. With so many people in glistening silver shield uniforms, it looked as though Martians or other spacemen had landed in this little valley in Chester, New Hampshire, where the device had been used for the third time.
Despite careful instructions the workmen tended to mill about confused, and the man at the sound shield box looked the most confused.
"Turn it on," yelled Bolt. He had been assured that certain sound waves obliterated other waves. He had been assured that even the CIA was just getting this device. He was assured that a person could yell five feet from another person and not be heard if the sound shield was in effect. The man at the box shrugged.
"I said turn on the damned sound shield," yelled Bolt. The man mouthed the word:
"What?"
Reemer saw one of the delivery cars take away a batch of workers who would no longer be needed. He saw the cars cough out exhaust and move silently along the woodland road out of sight. The man at the sound shield box was turning red in the face mouthing the word "What?"
But he wasn't mouthing.
"Perfect," said Reemer with an extra big grin and an extra-obvious nod. "Perfect."
And then the men who had provided the money and his future:
"Nothing we say here must be heard by other ears."
"There is nothing about a bunch of paint-wet cars that I care to keep secret," said the chairman of the board. If he knew nothing else, Bolt knew drama. He took the hand of the chairman of the board and forced it down into the glistening pink of a sedan roof. The chairman yanked it back and was about to wipe it off when he realized it was dry. He rubbed the car again. Glistening and dry. He rubbed another car. The other directors rubbed metal that shone with a luster they had never seen in an auto showroom.
Now Reemer spoke, hushed and precise.
"We can take three hundred dollars off the price of any top-grade auto finish. We can transform the cheapest grades of paint into top quality. In brief, gentlemen, we can hold the entire auto industry hostage to our cheaper method of applying finish paint. In brief, gentlemen, to the robots of Japan, to the workers of Detroit, to the technicians of Wiesbaden, Germany, we say: your car-painting days are over. There is one finish worthy of the name, and only we can apply it."
The chairman of the board hugged Reemer Bolt like a son. He would have adopted him at that moment. "Don't applaud. Don't carry me away from here. Very quietly, as though this was routine, walk to the cars I have rented for you and leave."
They nodded. A few gave Reemer Bolt a wink. One of them said the hardest thing in his life at that moment was not jumping for joy.
"And on your way out, tell that sound-shield guy to turn it off."
When wonderful was made in this world, Reemer, thy name was you, thought Bolt. On his face was the delicious glow of magnificent success. Reemer Bolt loved the world at that moment. And why shouldn't he? He planned to own much of it soon.
Suddenly he heard noise from the cars leaving and knew the sound shield was off. In a few moments he was alone. He waited, whistling. The next phase was about to begin.
Buses pulled up, chugging to a halt. Fifty people got out, some men, some women. Each with a ticket. They poured out onto the field, a few of them stumbling because they were reading their tickets.
The ones who had driven in the cars were gone before the paint went on. The ones who would drive them out would not know that they were freshly painted.
Bolt unpeeled his suit when he realized he was getting glances. He would go out with the last car, and then be dropped off at a nearby town two blocks from where another driver in a normal car would pick him up.
It was massive. It was brilliant. It was, thought Bolt, Boltian, expressing audacity, complexity, and most of all success. And then the little idiots just sat in their cars doing nothing.
"C'mon. Move along," he said. But they just sat there staring at their wheels, straining with something. Reemer went to the closest car and flung open the door. A young woman was at the wheel.
"Start it," he said.
"I can't," she said.
"Well, try turning the key," he said.
She showed him her fingers. They were red. "I have been," she said.
"Move over," he said.
Outside of Kathy O'Donnell, all women were good for only one thing, he thought. He turned the key. There wasn't even a groan. He turned the key again. Not a flicker on the dashboard. The car was still.
"See," said the young woman.
"Proud of yourself, I bet," said Bolt, and he went to a man's car. Again nothing. Not in the Beige Buick or Caramel Chrysler. Not in the Peppermint Pontiac or Sun Shimmer Subaru. Not in the Tan Toyota, the Mauve Mustang. The Porsche, the Audi, the Citroen, Oldsmobile, Bronco, Fairlane, Thunderbird, Nissan, Datsun, or Alfa Romeo.
Even the Ferrari was dead. Dead. Reemer Bolt's fingertips were bleeding as he told everyone they would be paid, just get in the darn buses and go. Go, now. "You can do that, can't you?"