The Nameless Something

CHAPTER I Jalopy With Wings

BUD GREGORY was something there isn't any word for. He bet on a dirt-track automobile race in the State of Colorado, and won twelve dollars. Simultaneously, a certain European Power made a very polite apology to the Icelandic Government for the falling of a rocket-projectile near Reykjavik. In so doing, it advertised publicly that it had long-range guided missiles capable of flights of over two thousand miles.

Next day, Bud Gregory bet on a second dirt-track race and won six dollars more. At very nearly the same instant, Izvestia published a bellicose article which practically called for war on the United States—UNO or no UNO—and a middle European nation offered a calculated, uncalled-for insult to its United States ambassador. The day after, Bud Gregory sat in the bar of a motor-tourist camp and drank beer contentedly all day long.

Two days later still, on a mountain highway in the Rockies, the driver of a sixteen-wheel Diesel truck came booming to a sharp curve which had a cliff on one side and a four-hundred-foot drop on the other.

The truck thundered around that curve—and ran slap into a rattletrap car with a flapping fabric top and an incredible load of children and household goods. Ran slap into it, that is, to the extent that a collision was inevitable. The jalopy was on the wrong side of the road.

The truck could not turn out, nor the jalopy turn in, in time. So the truck-driver froze, and saw the rattletrap vehicle swerve out still farther on the wrong side of the road—ride out until only its inner wheels were on the highway and its outer wheels spun merrily over vacancy.

It should have toppled instantly and horribly, only it didn't. It rode exactly as if there were an invisible highway surface over emptiness. The Diesel driver saw it swerve placidly back into the road behind him, and go on. And he braked his monster truck to a stop and had a perfectly good fit of the shakes. He made up his mind to take a week off to be spent in rest and quiet. He did.

On that day, it was said in Washington that a grave international crisis threatened, and eminent statesmen went about in spectacular silence, refusing to speak for publication but privately tipping off their favorite newspapermen to monstrous events due to occur.

ON YET another day Bud Gregory arrived at yet another place where further dirt-track automobile racing was in progress, and attempted negotiations with a dejected driver who had not been in the money for weeks. The driver laughed at him, bitterly, and Bud Gregory was indignant. He bet on the races and lost two dollars.

On the same day, four satellite nations of a certain European Power revealed that for several months they had been running atomic piles, and now had a sufficient stock of atomic bombs for their own defense. The rest of the United Nations erupted into frenzied protests—which cut off short when they realized it was too late to object.

And after three more days, Bud Gregory drove into Los Angeles in a car which was in the last stages of dilapidation. It contained himself, his wife, and an indeterminate number of tow-haired children. Also it contained two hound-dogs, several mattresses, many packages, innumerable parcels, had strapped-on cots fastened to its running-boards, and was further festooned with gunnysacks containing stocks of vegetables and canned foods.

It was flagged down by a motorcycle cop beside the highway. But Bud Gregory did not stop. The decrepit car plunged ahead. The motorcycle cop mounted his steed and pursued. The decrepit car moved more swiftly. It looked as if an asthmatic twenty miles an hour would be its limit. But it hit forty within seconds of the cop's attempt to halt it. It was making eighty when it ran into Los Angeles traffic. And still it did not stop.

The motorcycle cop sweated blood, envisioning catastrophe. He gave his motorbike everything it would take, blaring his siren continuously and shrilling his whistle when he passed policemen on foot in the hope that they would telephone on ahead.

The next fifteen minutes gave a dozen members of the traffic police—who joined in the chase—gray hairs and a tendency to babble quietly to themselves. The dilapidated car left all pursuit behind. It ran into traffic in which it should have smashed up fifty times over. It left behind it a stream of crashes and collisions and nerve-racked pedestrians, but it did not even touch another vehicle or a single individual.

The collisions came from other cars swerving frantically to avoid it as it rocketed through Los Angeles' swarming streets. Half the time it rode on the wrong side of the highway, cutting in and out, speeding up with an incredible acceleration, slowing down with completely impossible abruptness, and turning corners at a rate which even those who saw it did not believe.

On Wilshire Boulevard it reached a climax of preposterous performance. It came streaking through traffic at something like ninety-two miles an hour. It left a mounting uproar behind it. And it came to a crossing where a red light had halted everything, came eeling down the wrong side of the street, swerved so that it should have turned somersaults, but observers said that it ran as if its wheels were glued to the ground, and—there in front of it, in the only space by which it could move on—was a monstrously fat woman in the act of crossing the street as the light permitted.

Women fainted on the sidewalk after it was all over. There was no time to faint before. The dilapidated car headed for the fat woman at ninety-eight miles an hour. Then, when it could not possibly stop in time, it began to slow.

Some witnesses said that it stopped in fifteen feet. Certainly it stopped so suddenly that the gunnysacks dangling from its top-supports swung and stood out stiffly before it, and one of them burst and potatoes shot out before the stopped car like bullets. A small one—a cull—smacked the fat woman smartly, in a highly, indecorous manner. She shrieked and leaped, and the rattletrap shot through the space she had vacated.

IN TWENTY feet it was traveling sixty miles an hour. In forty, it was going better than ninety again, and it went on out of town like a bat out of a belfry. No motorcycle cop came anywhere near it. Not even the two policemen on the farther side of town who took up the chase on a clear highway. One of them pushed his bike—so he claimed—up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

The decrepit jalopy, which should have collapsed far below the speed limit, left him behind as if he were standing still, and a towheaded child poked its head through the flapping back-curtain and stuck out its tongue at him as it went on.

On that same day the Government of the United States received a very blunt note from the European Power whose satellites had revealed their possession of atomic bombs and which had itself sent apology to Iceland for landing a guided missile near Reykjavik.

The note was not an ultimatum in form, of course. But it expressed the desire of the European Power to negotiate with the United States regarding changes in the American form of government, which changes were necessary to make the European Government feel that the United States was sincerely desirous of peace.

In other words, the European Power had decided that democracies were dangerous to it, and amiably offered America the choice of surrendering to a small, fanatical party within its borders, or of facing an atomic war.

And that night Bud Gregory drove into a tin-can-tourist camp and he and his family settled down for a comfortable stay, as soon as he made sure that the dirt-track races nearby were still going on.