THIRTY-THREE

Real life. Wally sat in the front seat of the baby-blue Lincoln Continental, the road maps on his round knees, and directed everything. Andy was at the steering wheel beside him, while John slumped on the backseat and frowned to himself like a person doing multiplication problems in his head. Directly in front of Wally was the windshield, like technology’s largest and most true-fidelity monitor screen, displaying endlessly… the real world.

A cellular telephone was mounted on the floor hump between Wally’s knees and Andy’s knees, and for some time as they drove north out of the city it intermittently rang; fifteen or twenty rings, and then silence for a while, and then another six rings, and silence, and so on. When it first happened, Wally said, “Andy? What’s that? Should I answer it?”

“In my experience,” Andy answered, “it’s usually the doctor, wanting his car back. So I tend to leave it alone.”

Wally digested that, while the phone stopped ringing, and then started again. But no Greek was ever as obsessed by the cry of the Sirens as the average American is by the ringing of a telephone; any telephone, anywhere. In this respect, at least, Wally was a true American. There was no way this phone call could be for him, since it was neither his phone nor his car, and yet his left hand twitched with the need to reach out and pick the thing up. After a while, a bit plaintively, he said, “Andy? Are you sure? Maybe it’s something important.”

“Important to who?”

“I guess so,” Wally said, still pensive.

Andy shrugged. “It’s up to you, Wally,” he said. “If you want to hear an angry doctor make a lot of empty threats, go ahead, pick it up.”

Wally kind of visualized that doctor. He was in a long white lab coat, holding the phone in one hand and a scalpel in the other, and boy, was he mad! Wally thought it over and decided he probably didn’t need to hear what the man had to say, and shortly after that the phone stopped ringing for good. Either the doctor had given up, or they’d moved out of range.

They were quite far north now. Big green signs announced North Dudson as the next exit from the Thruway. Wally, suddenly nervous, began to rattle his maps, self-conscious and shy. He had maps for the area as it was now, and maps for the area from before the reservoir was put in, and the reservoir was only one of the changes that had taken place in the intervening years. Wally felt the awful weight of his responsibility, to guide these people and this car through the modern map to one specific spot on the old map. And to do so without revealing his own extra knowledge of the terrain.

None of the others knew about that private trip of his up here; not telling them about it had been another part of the computer’s advice. In fact, the whole trip had been at the advice of the computer. After Wally had input the story of the unknown women following them around in circles, the computer had said he should definitely find out who those people were.

The hero must identify his helpers.

The hero must know his enemies.

All players in the game must be aware of one another.

So he had gotten out his little old yellow VW Beetle that he only drove four or five times a year and that he kept otherwise in a Department of Transportation garage on Twelfth Avenue rent-free (arranged through his computer access), and he’d putt-putted all the way up to North Dudson—the farthest he’d ever gone in that car—and he’d driven around and around looking for a black Ford Fairlane, knowing that even in a town like this there couldn’t be more than one such vehicle, and when he saw it at last—just got a glimpse of it, really—at the end of a driveway, in front of an old-fashioned two-door garage, being washed by an angry-looking old lady, the rest had been easy.

Wally, who was almost always tongue-tied and shy with other people—especially girls—had partly by luck and partly out of a sense of self-preservation begun his conversation with Myrtle Jimson on the one topic that would permit him to be fluent, even eloquent: computers. By the time they were through with that, some level of rapport had been established, and he was even confident and relaxed enough to ask her to join him for lunch.

All through lunch at Kitty’s Kountry Kitchen on Main Street they’d just talked. Wally told her about growing up in Florida, and she told him about growing up in North Dudson, and there was just nothing in any of what she told him to explain the car-following incident.

Was she even related to Tom Jimson? But the name couldn’t be a coincidence, it just couldn’t. In the first place, coincidence does not exist in the world of the computer. [Randomness (a.k.a. chance) has been factored into some of the more sophisticated games, but coincidence (a.k.a. meaningless correspondence other than junk mail) violates the human craving for order. Which is why puns are the pornography of mathematicians.] But knowing the computer would be just as confused as he when he reported back to it (and it was) didn’t help Wally’s mood much.

Myrtle had insisted on paying for her own lunch, and then he’d walked her back to the library, where she’d promised to keep using her computer terminal from now on, and where he’d gotten back into his yellow VW and putt-putted away to the city. And this was the first time he’d been back among the Dudsons since. “It’s our next exit, Andy,” he said, rattling his maps.

“I know that, Wally,” Andy said, amiably enough. “The State of New York spent three hundred thousand dollars to put up a sign there to tell me so.”

“Oh,” Wally said. “I wasn’t sure you saw it.”

“Thanks, anyway, Wally,” Andy said.

So Wally subsided again, as Andy steered the Lincoln Continental expertly off the Thruway and around the ramp and down the narrow road into North Dudson.

As usual, the town was full of people who’d forgotten why they were driving. In a pleasant voice, Andy made speculative remarks about such people’s ancestry, education, brain power, and sexual bent, while Wally, scandalized, his ears burning (his earlobes actually felt hot, so suffused with blood from his blushing were they), blinked obsessively at his maps, double-checking and triple-checking his projected route, and from the backseat John gave an occasional long sigh. His sighs didn’t seem to comment on Andy’s language or the quality of North Dudson’s drivers so much as on life itself.

“Pilot to navigator,” Andy said, as pleasant as ever.

Wally jumped, rattled, the maps sliding from his knees to the floor. “What? Me?”

“We’re out of that charming village,” Andy pointed out. “It’s time to give me directions, Wally.”

“Right! Right!”

“Turn right?”

“Not yet!” Wally was scrabbling about for his maps. “Stay on this road until, uh, uh…”

“Take your time,” Andy said, and John sighed.

Wally found his maps and his place. “We turn right,” he said, “at, uh, where the road says to Dudson Falls.”

“Check,” Andy said, and a few miles later made the turn, and all the subsequent turns Wally told him about, as they maneuvered their way through the spider web of back roads; these roads, already a planless catch-as-catch-can hodge-podge by the middle of the twentieth century, had only been made more complicated when the reservoir was dumped in their midst.

“It should be around here somewhere, shouldn’t it?” Andy asked as they bumped over an old railroad track.

Wally stared at him to be sure he wasn’t joking. “Andy? That was it!”

Andy frowned at the rearview mirror. “What was it?”

“We’re looking for the railroad,” Wally reminded him. “We just drove over it, Andy.”

“By God, you’re right,” Andy said, and swung the Lincoln off the road to wait for an oncoming bulk milk truck to pass. “I think what it is, Wally,” he said, “I never went looking for anything so short before.”