“Thattaboy, Sandy. You’ve still got your ear for American lingo. Basically every two-bit Libertarian free-range asshole you’ll ever meet is just waiting for someone to talk to them in Default Cop.”
Eke grunted. He waved the horses back along the road. Journeyman couldn’t know whether he’d overheard Todbaum’s editorializing. Eke had an air of baffled deference. He might simply be language-hurt, after a long day’s exposure to Todbaum’s filibuster from the supercar’s mouth hole.
Once Todbaum was satisfied by the slackening of the noose of Cordon men that ensnared him, he instructed Journeyman to move to what would have been the passenger side of an ordinary car. Journeyman heard a pop, as if a soda can had unsealed. Todbaum’s bubble cockpit didn’t raise. Instead, a large aperture dilated open, like a camera lens, just below the line of the cockpit. From out of the supercar’s smooth-armored thorax, beneath where Journeyman stood, ladder-rung handholds slid out from beneath hidden panels. The ladder ascended to that weird open lens. Journeyman could climb, as if into a tree house. He did. He climbed into surely that most abhorrent of things, a mixed metaphor. For his name-seeking brain fell sick, the nearer it drew to the intoxicating machine. Was the supercar a camera, an insect, a jet plane, a tree house, a soda can? Since the Arrest, Journeyman tended to believe, things had only been themselves. The supercar was itself and everything else at once.
“Come right in.” Todbaum spoke as if resplendent at the open door of his study, offering brandy or choice of cigars. Journeyman bent from the topmost rung, conscious of his own comic vulnerability to the men watching from below. He squirmed into the portal. The fit was tight, but the passage was just a foot’s thickness through the wall of the machine. He plopped onto the floor of the bright-lit capsule, at Todbaum’s feet.
Journeyman smelled, he could swear, coffee.
Todbaum sat in a low bucket seat in front of the console that operated the car: blinking meters and sonar search screens, camera feeds showing the road and the horsemen and bikers in bug-lensed panorama, any number of mysterious bright-lit buttons and levers. Power. Electricity. Juice.
Using Time Averaging, Journeyman made the skinny, lined face into that of Peter Todbaum. The last time Journeyman had seen him, Todbaum had been fat. Like so many others, he’d gone on the Arrest diet.
Like no others anymore, he sat in a grotesque and intoxicating electrical machine, the power source of which was as yet unknown.
Like no one ever before on Earth, he was Todbaum. And so, seated high in his grotesque machine, steeping in the luxuriant absurdity of their reunion, and oblivious of the hostile men that surrounded his vehicle, Todbaum grinned at Journeyman and said, “I can read your mind, Sandman. You don’t even have to speak.”
“What am I thinking?” Journeyman replied, helplessly.
He pressed two fingers against one temple, miming ESP. “You want an espresso,” he said. “You want it like nobody ever wanted a coffee before.”
“You really have coffee?”
Todbaum showed Journeyman his demitasse. Empty, but with a fresh grime that made Journeyman’s mouth instantly water. “Just a sec.” He pushed it into a designated niche and pressed a button. A nozzle steamed and guttered. The cup filled. “Hope you don’t mind sharing.”
15.
Things Todbaum Told Journeyman About the Blue Streak
LATER JOURNEYMAN TOOK NOTES FOR his file, collecting things he heard Todbaum say that first day. Not all of them in the fifteen or twenty minutes that he spent nursing the espresso. Some Todbaum told him once they began moving down the road.
That, yes, Todbaum drove the thing from his home in Malibu. That he set out not quite a full year ago. Ten months.
That before embarking he’d survived the first three years of the Arrest without leaving Malibu. There, he and several others had for a time employed a private security force and survived as a kind of armed compound.
That nevertheless, through that time, he’d had the car already prepared, secretly waiting. “When every other fucking paranoid billionaire was sinking it all into private islands or safe houses or private islands with safe houses or underground Dr. Strangelove spider holes, I said to myself, why be a sitting duck? Who in God’s name wants to sit around in meetings, with people you didn’t even like when they had money, deciding what to do the day the last sack of rice runs out?”
That, as he claimed to have predicted, the private mercenaries had in greed and desperation turned on the Malibu consortium. That only he had gotten out alive.
That the car could go almost seventy miles per hour on open highway, but that very little open highway was to be found between there and here anymore. That he’d had to go many times deep off-road, across fenced prairie and open desert and into forested mountain passes, all of which the car was equipped to traverse but at minimal speeds.
That at other times he’d sequestered in a simpatico community for a period of days or even weeks—in Boulder, Colorado; in Bloomington, Indiana; by a rural lake near Oberlin College in Ohio—and shared the benefits of the car with those who by dint of kindness he’d felt deserved it, but that invariably he’d grow rightly paranoid as plots began to encircle him, and so he’d hotfoot it out and on his way.
That he’d always, no matter the situation he’d discovered in his travels—and “hoo boy were there some stories” he’d tell—had Spodosol Ridge Farm in mind as an ultimate destination. That he’d known, somehow, that he’d find Journeyman and Madeleine intact there, “riding out the Arrest in style.”
That it was called “the Blue Streak.” That Todbaum had named it after a car in a story that his father used to tell him serially at bedtime. That the bedtime story was obviously extemporaneous—i.e., in Todbaum’s phrase, a “bullshit shaggy-dog thing where he didn’t have a fucking clue about where it was going, day to day.”
That the Blue Streak was powered by a self-contained nuclear reactor. That it was retrofitted into the exoskeletal structure of a machine that had earlier been used to bore tunnels under the ocean. That it never needed fuel, and had not once needed repair. (“I wouldn’t know the first thing about it. I’d probably just hit self-destruct and call it a wrap, game over, stick a fork in me.”) That it was impossible to shut it off once it had been fired up. That Todbaum had been influential in the inception of the supercar project, suggesting it to its designer, based on a favorite film of his childhood called Damnation Alley. (Journeyman remembered he’d seen it, once Todbaum mentioned it. It starred George Peppard.) That its designer had built only three such machines before being kidnapped and never heard from again. (“Russia, gotta be.”) That it cost Todbaum fourteen million dollars. That he didn’t know who owned the other two.
That when he situated the machine in what he’d judged as a safe place, he could trigger a drill that sought groundwater to replenish his reserves. That before disengagement for travel it would by the same method bury his stored waste deep underground so that like prey it left no traceable spoor for anyone tracking. (Journeyman didn’t point out that it sounded as though this meant he went everywhere contaminating potable aquifers that others might rely on.) The image of the Blue Streak planting its sucking tube where it landed made Journeyman see it, briefly, as a gigantic mosquito.