Time Travel Omnibus, page 1106
It’s a big corner office, pure Uppie, with a view of the Farlands across the bay. There are framed posters of old ad campaigns on the walls. Models of Sport Utility Cars hang from the ceiling like stuffed birds in a museum.
On the shiny U-shaped desk is the model Joey wants.
It’s called the Ghengis Khar. Tri-axled and made of balsa wood, it’s a foot long, eight inches high. Small numbers until you consider the scale. 1:35. Seats for ten, with a living area subdivided into two levels.
It seems nothing more than a scaled-up Celestial Adventurer, last year’s flagship model. That is, until Joey rips the model off the base and spots the retractable units at both ends of the vehicle. When you touch a lever on the undercarriage, a row of wooden needles springs out from each bumper. Joey pushes them back in. They are sharp enough to hurt his thumb. Like tiny too-sharp toothpicks.
“Whoa-boy!” he says.
Clearly meant to puncture bike tires.
A clock on the desk pings softly. 8:45. Joey packs the Ghengis Khar into his backpack, cushioning it with Styrofoam. He leaves the office.
Spying two security guards approaching the reception desk, he goes the other way.
He strolls. Uptown his mind is fast but his body’s slower, more resistant to panic. He follows the perimeter of the floor, cubicles on his left, glass-fronted offices on his right. He’s glad this is the 60s, not the 70s. Just a few streets further uptown the offices would be full of white-haired early risers.
He completes the square, passes through the reception area.
“Stop!” shouts Pony-tail. “We got something to ask you!”
Joey presses the down button for the elevator. He waits until he sees Pony-tail hurrying toward him, waving a rolled-up newspaper. “I said stop!”
Joey takes the stairs. Stepping quickly. Here’s a surprise: Pony-tail follows him. Shouting, taking his job far too seriously. The guy’s heavy steps echo in the cement stairwell so it seems there’s more than one of him. Joey maintains his pace. No running. His hips hurt when he turns at the end of each flight.
Pony-tail is suddenly quiet. Joey’s alarmed. He imagines the guy clutching his chest, slumping to his knees on a landing. Some guys aren’t meant to run. At least not when they’re uptown.
Just as he reaches the first floor, he hears Pony-tail shout, “We’re going to get you!”
Joey’s glad the guy’s okay.
Smooth sailing until he gets to his moped.
It’s been torn in half by a Land Yacht. The Yacht’s rear bumper caught the frame behind the steering column, pulling it away from the parking meter. Seat and motor and rear wheel are still attached to the meter, which is bent. The front wheel and steering column are still hooked to the bumper. The Yacht’s parked a few yards down the street, hazards flashing. Its bumper isn’t bent at all.
When Joey pushes the front wheel, it spins freely with a wobble.
He notices the two security guards coming out of the building, Pony-tail behind them.
The passenger-side door on the Yacht is unlocked.
Joey climbs in. He smells leather. He’ll be safer in back. Coming around the passenger seat, he bumps his knee on the dashboard food-tray, setting a bowl of oatmeal to quivering.
He crawls down the carpeted aisle, past two rows of seats. The back’s a bedroom, with a frilly white bed and chiffon curtains and a Leif Garrett poster on one plaster wall. He hides between the bed and the vanity, burying himself beneath teddy bears and stuffed giraffes.
He hears voices outside, but the Yacht is so well insulated that he can’t make out any words.
When he’s sure they aren’t coming into the Yacht after him, he sits up. He thinks things through. He’s grabbed the Model, but has lost his moped. On the street he’d be a pedestrian in a Pick-up Boy uniform. He’d be as conspicuous as a glass tower in kidtown. He could wait until darkness, walk safely down to 43rd Avenue, but it would be hard exchanging the moped for a motorcycle without a moped to produce. Maybe, though, the front half would be acceptable, if he could pry it off the bumper.
He hopes the Yacht owner won’t park in front of the VLM building all day.
He pushes animals off his body, stands, then, with a cry of, “Whoa!” falls onto the bed. His kneecap aches where he bumped the tray. No swelling visible, but that will come. He is proud of his legs. They retain their musculature into the 70s, but the joints, the ligaments and cartilage, became fragile much lower.
He limps to the Yacht’s little fridge. No ice, but he finds a six pack of Uptown Ale (‘You want to get old for it’). He sits on the bed and holds the cold cans against his knee and considers the bedroom inside the Yacht. Pink walls, a seven foot stucco ceiling. Too low. He’d get claustrophobic if he had to sleep here. Sometimes he understands why Uppies always want their SUCs bigger.
He’s started drinking from one can when the Yacht’s horn honks.
He slips down by the animals. A woman gets into the Yacht. “Shit,” she says. She sobs for minutes. Joey’s nervous she’ll never start the Yacht. He finishes the can of ale, which doesn’t help the nervousness, but makes him feel he might float to the ceiling along with the animals. In the 60s, he gets drunk easily.
He falls asleep.
When he wakes, the Yacht’s moving. In the tight space he feels a claustrophobic panic. He cries out as he pushes himself up.
His wrists hurt like nails have been hammered through them. His left hand is clenched closed. His veins are ropy, his skin spotted like a cheetah’s hide. His shorts are loose around his thighs. His knee is an ugly purple.
She’s driving the wrong way.
Further uptown.
Groaning, creaking, hips aflame, he moves to the cab. “Where are you going?”
She stops the Yacht, looks at him skeptically. White hair in bangs and pale blue eyes and the fine pretty features that some Uppies preserve no matter how far up they go. “Why are you in my car?”
“Look!” He points toward the passenger-side mirror. “You broke my moped.”
She squints. “Oh, dear.” He sees now she has twin worry lines, deep along the bridge of her nose.
Eyes watering, she turns away.
Joey was expecting harsh words. Or at best money pushed at him. Not this.
They are at 88th and Eon. There’s a green windowed pyramid in the street in front of them. Part of a mansard roof. Maintenance standards are low this far uptown.
The woman regains her composure. “You should get out.”
“But you wrecked my moped. I don’t have wheels now.”
“These wheels aren’t going the way you want to go.”
“I just need to get to 43rd.”
“Let me rephrase. I’m not going south.”
“But—” he points “—nobody goes further uptown than this. You could have a heart attack. You could lose your mind.”
“I thought bike boys raced uptown to prove how tough they were.”
“Not this far.”
“Please get out.”
“I’m not walking forty blocks.” Joey sits in the passenger seat. “Don’t you owe me at least a ride?”
“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t say about what—the moped, her attitude. She drives around the pyramid. They pass abandoned cars, rusty but intact. Up here few have the strength to lift hubcaps, let alone wheels. She maneuvers around office furniture and broken glass fallen from an International Style tower. At 89th Avenue, she stops. “Get out.”
“Are you punishing yourself?” Joey asks. “For wrecking my moped?”
She stiffens. “Get out.”
He’s hit a nerve. Not that it’s the moped. Sometimes Uppies get afflicted with a conscience. They’ll drive small SUCs, overtip couriers, even slum it downtown for a day or two. But nothing drastic like this.
“This seat’s comfy,” Joey says. He doubts she’ll go much further if he stays aboard. “I’ll ride with you.”
She shrugs and crosses 89th.
Joey wonders: why try to save her? Is he soft this far up? Or is it that he thinks she’s cute?
A post-modern building’s collapsed. He can tell by the rubble blocking the street: the window panes like Fresnel lenses, the curves in the structural beams, the copper gargoyle, whose face is unmistakably Mickey Mantle’s. No way past this. She’ll have to turn around.
She puts the Yacht into four wheel drive.
She takes them up a slope of bricks and sparkling glass. The bricks shift beneath the Yacht’s weight. Joey expects the hill to topple, drop the Yacht then crush it. But she handles the vehicle expertly. They crest the hill then follow the easier far slope down.
Safe on asphalt, they pass 90th.
“Why do this?” Joey asks.
A vein, delicate and green, pulses in her temple.
Joey says, “If something’s broken, if something’s wrong, you can always go back and fix it.”
“No, I can’t. It’s too late. Life’s not just bodies.”
“Too late for what?”
Tears brim in her eyes. The nose lines are so deep you wonder if they touch bone.
He pats her shoulder. “Too late for what?”
She blinks. “At VLM. It was gone.”
“What?”
“This year’s model. The Ghengis Khar!”
Midtown Joey might freak, jump out of the car, but up here his body’s slow enough he can think of eight or ten things to say to calm himself before his nerves take over. And things to say to her. “You’re in trouble—because it’s gone?”
“I’m not in trouble. You bike boys are in trouble!”
Is she accusing him? “I don’t follow.”
“I thought bike boys had spies! I’m the prototype artist. I build balsa models. Usually to the specs engineers give me. But this time was different.”
“How?”
“Carla Dakota wanted APS! The engineer didn’t!”
“APS?”
“The Aggressive Pathway System. Blades that extend from the bumpers. They’re going to market them as debris catchers. When it’s obvious that what they’ll do is slash bike tires and carve up legs!”
“Oh boy,” Joey says. Partly because the leg-carving possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Partly because he is seeing four women instead of one. “So there was controversy.”
“Even some hawks were appalled by the idea. The engineer sent me specs without the blade. But Carla made it clear the model should have it!”
It is his right eye. If he closes it, he just sees one woman. “And so you added the leg-carvers.”
“Yes! I added the blades, and delivered the model late Friday. Then I decided I should stand up to Carla!”
Things click for Joey. He has a cataract. And: “You went in because you wanted to take the model back. But it was gone.”
“I was going to fix it! I was going to break off the APS units! But Carla must have taken it home!”
“No, she didn’t,” Joey said.
She stops the Yacht. Intersection of 92nd and Eon. The traffic light is stuck on yellow. A little past the avenue, four trees grow side-by-side in the center of the street. Correction. One tree.
She’s weeping. With his clawed left hand Joey touches her shoulder: it’s hunched, raised higher than the other. Joey feels tears in his own eyes. God, the indignities of age. “We stole it. Me and another bike boy.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t believe you.”
“We took it this morning. He’s got it now.”
“You’re lying.” She pushes his hand away. She’s stronger than he is. She drives forward, slowly.
“I’m not. We went in at 8:30 and I grabbed it while my partner talked to the receptionist.” Joey’s voice is tinny. With his right eye open he sees eight trees. “My partner’s got it now. You’ve got no reason to feel guilty.”
“You lie,” she says. “I bet he’s at 43rd Avenue, isn’t he?”
“He’s downtown.” It was true enough that he and his roommate Wayne lived on 24th Avenue. Their apartment doubled as the City-Wide Headquarters of the Bike Defense League, and Wayne, Chairman of the BDL, was expecting the model.
They’re approaching the trees. Joey thinks of kites and picnics and the toothpicks used to hold together club sandwiches. Toothpicks. “When you hold it you push a disk and these toothpick things come out.”
She cries harder. There’s a roar like a waterfall as they reach the trees, and then suddenly she’s turning the Yacht around them, all of them at once, and just for a second, at the apex of the turn, Joey sees uptown not just trees but a welcoming green forest.
There’s nothing like a drive toward downtown to make you feel better. Joey’s eye clears, his hand unclenches, his calves regain definition and he fills his shorts again. He pissed them uptown. He can smell that now.
“You drank my beer,” the woman says.
“You wrecked my moped.”
“True,” she says. She’s not weepy anymore. Her nose lines don’t cut so deep. She’s tough like you expect Uppies to be. But there’s also something friendly in her eyes. Gratitude, maybe. “Why steal it?”
“To figure out something protective. We knew VLM was going to put something dangerous on the new model.”
She says nothing, but doesn’t cry either.
At 67th they hit traffic. Stop ’n’ go, cacophony of horns, exhaust fumes so thick they tint the aluminum towers blue. She turns on the Yacht’s air filter. She turns off the hazards, which had been blinking the entire ride.
A guy in a Pillager pick-up opens his door as a lane-splitting bike boy approaches it. The bike boy leans hard left, almost falling into the car in the next lane, but passes under the Pillager’s door. He recovers to vertical the other side.
“Hey!” Joey says. “Great technique!”
“I’m sorry he had to use it.”
“Not your fault.”
“You don’t know how many times I’ve given Carla exactly the designs she wanted.”
“Designs don’t matter as much as assholes,” Joey says.
At 66th they see why there’s a traffic jam so late. Police cruisers are parked in front of VLM.
She turns east onto 66th, follows it to Temporal Park, but instead of joining the traffic going south on Fleet, she drives into the park.
“Wow!” Joey says. She plows through brush, she fords streams, she scrapes the base of the vehicle against stones. They might be the only Yacht in the park, though, as they are driving up a hill of birch trees and crabgrass, they pass a stretch limo with tank tread wheels coming down.
“Shit!” she says.
“What?”
“Executives hate trespassers.”
“Let them pout.”
“Don’t you see? They’ll call the cops.”
They follow the park to its end at 53rd. Joey’s alert and adrenalized. There’s no doubt about why now. Her hair is turning brown. She’s not so thin anymore, especially in the chest. And she’s brave and breaks the rules and acts more like a Downster than an Uppie.
Joey leans over and kisses her cheek.
She pushes him away. “Let me drive.”
Midtown. Where Uppies and Downsters mingle. Where bounders burn their savings on three-bedroom brownstone flats. Where Uppies down on their luck or desiring to improve their souls by living like a Downster rent those same flats once the bounders are evicted. Where Joey first realizes he might get laid today, if he can get her downtown to his apartment.
But first they go to the Exchange Building, on 43rd. They don’t have much choice. The Land Yacht couldn’t make most turns south of 40th. And Joey needs a motorcycle.
Joey gives her his address, an address on 24th Avenue, at Tick-Tock Square. “Offices of the BDL. The Bike Defense League. My partner Wayne’s got the model. Let’s meet there.”
He’s afraid she’ll think he wants to abandon her. But he must be sweating sex hormones by the liter. “Okay,” she says. “What are you carrying in that?”
“Floppy disks,” he says, putting on the backpack. He gets out of the Yacht so she can join the queue for the valet.
The Exchange Building is a granite Neo-Classical structure fronted by big marble columns. Bike boys and office messengers, word processors and janitors, waitresses and plumbers, are riding their machines (moped, bike, or motorcycle) up a cement ramp toward the building’s entrance. Joey takes the staircase. His knee’s sore but his calves are bulging. The Exchange’s dusty inside smells of fumes and motor oil and is raucous with the sound of motorcycle engines being gunned. Joey forgoes the lines of people with machines and walks to the end of the long counter, where there’s a placard reading special situations.
“I need a motorcycle. My moped was wrecked.”
The clerk arches his pierced eyebrow. “I don’t see the moped.”
“Most of it’s uptown. I’ve got the front wheel outside.”
“I need the whole moped for a trade. Unless you want a bike.”
Joey takes a sturdy twelve-speed. Coasting down the exit ramp, he passes Pony-tail, who’s sitting on the staircase eating his lunch from a paper bag.
“You!”
Joey starts off. Slaloming around other bikes, standing as he pedals because the bike’s in a high gear, he follows the ramp down, then rides the sidewalk. He reaches the Land Yacht, which is at the front of the valet line.
The woman’s in the cab.
“What are you doing?” she says.
He points back at Pony-tail, who’s slim and sprinting after him. He motions for her to get out, and when she doesn’t, he opens the passenger door, lifts the bike—“Take it!”—then climbs into the cab.
“What the hell?” she says.
“Why aren’t you in a new car?”
“They said they had to notify the insurance adjuster because of the moped wheel.”
Pony-tail pounds the window.
“Go! They were probably calling the cops.”
“And now they will for sure,” she says, starting off.
They take 42nd east, then The Split Second Parkway south. Joey, pressing the bike against the dash so it doesn’t fall on him, feels the great energy of the chase and the even greater one of love. He wants to stroke her brown shiny hair, kiss her long-lashed eyelids. She’s preoccupied with driving, though. Split Second’s the widest road midtown, but still the Yacht’s too big for a single lane. She flattens the mirrors of the little SUCs in the lane over, makes a thump on Joey’s side of the Yacht.
