Then, as they emerged from a storm of daffodil petals, Halloway nearly collided into a large industrial tractor moving along the roadway in front of him. Pulling to a halt behind its high rear assembly, he flung Olds on to the dashboard. Halloway switched off the engine, and watched this massive tracked vehicle lumbering slowly through the haze of petals. A hydraulic ram was mounted in front of the motor, fitted with an immense claw that now held a single automobile, carried in the air fifteen feet from the ground.
In the control cabin a dark-haired man in a black plastic jacket emblazoned with silver studs was operating the steering levers. His face was barely visible through the whirling petals, and he seemed unaware of the truck stalled behind him. However, when Halloway restarted his engine, intending to overtake the tractor, the driver swung his claw to the right, blocking Halloway with the swinging automobile. Looking up at the man’s handsome face, with its hard mouth like a piece of gristle, Halloway was certain that it was this driver, and this terrifying machine, which had destroyed the garment store mannequins the previous day.
Halloway began to reverse the truck down the street, but Olds held his arm warningly.
Follow him. Stillman needs to be given his own way.
As Halloway moved forward, following the tractor, Olds sat back. He had switched off the calculator, and seemed to have forgotten their exhilarating race through the flowers, his mind moving elsewhere, bored by the prospect of whatever was to come.
They emerged into ai open square, set in the heart of one of the oldest sections of the city, an area of theatres, bars and cheap hotels. Rising from the centre of the square was the largest of the eccentric memorials to Twentieth-Century technology that Halloway had seen so far. At first glance it resembled a gothic cathedral, built entirely from rusting iron, glass and chromium. As they crossed the square, following the tractor, Halloway realized that this structure was built entirely from the bodies of automobiles. Stacked one upon the other, they formed a palisade of towers that rose two hundred feet into the air.
A group of heavy cranes and a buttress of scaffolding marked out the working face, overlooked by an observation platform reached by a simple elevator. Standing at the rail, and waiting for the tractor to carry its latest contribution to the memorial, was a small, pugnacious man of advanced age. Although well into his eighties, he was dressed like a physical education instructor in immaculate white sweater and well-creased trousers. Inspecting Halloway’s glider with a critical eye, he picked up an electric megaphone and began to call out instructions in a high voice to the driver of the tractor.
Olds was gazing up at the monument of cars, shaking his head as if ruefully aware that he and this odd old man were in the same business. He switched on the calculator.
I’ll wait for you here. You’re about to meet Mr Buckmaster. Viceroy, czar, and warden of this island.
Halloway waited as the driver climbed down from his cab. Deliberately taking his time, he sauntered over to Halloway, pointing to his red, white and blue sneakers, yellow trousers and shirt covered with petals.
‘The Rainbow Kid — you come down from the sky and have yourself a time…’
Although twice Halloway’s age, with slicked-back hair and a pale skin that would always appear dirty, he had a lazy, youthful aura, as if a large section of his life had passed in his absence and he himself had never aged beyond his twenties. For all his sarcastic manner, he seemed watchful and ready to ingratiate himself at a moment’s notice. With his self-directed aggression and stylized swagger he was a type Halloway had never known at Garden City, but which all his reading confirmed was a classic specimen of metropolitan man.
‘Take the elevator,’ he told Halloway. ‘Mr Buckmaster has been waiting to meet you. He’ll want to induct you into his workforce.’
‘This monument — and the others? He built them all?’
‘I built them. Buckmaster merely dreamed up the whole mad idea. Homage to the Chrysler Corporation, Datsun and General Motors. When we’ve finished, the spirit of Karl Benz will be laid to rest under a million driver’s licences and parking tickets.’
He slammed the elevator grille in Halloway’s face and punched the ascend button.
The old man in his whites was waiting for Halloway when he reached the observation platform. On a card-table lay a set of blueprints, and Halloway could see that if ever completed the structure would rise some four hundred feet into the air.
The old man beckoned Halloway to the rail. Everything about him, his quick eyes and mouth, his restless hands, was in a hurry. He talked to Halloway as if he had known him for years and was resuming a conversation interrupted only a few seconds earlier.
‘It looks a mess, eh? Just a pile of automobiles, a million junkyards are full of them. What do I think I’m doing? Wait and see.’ He pointed to Halloway’s glider on the back of the truck, where Olds was already tearing away the torn fabric. ‘Is that a glider or a power-plane? During the war I built thirty thousand fighters for the government, we were turning them out so fast the Air Force kept the war going just to get rid of them. And that was on top of a hundred airships, cargo-submarines and enough spare parts to give every man on this planet his own robot-assembly kit. Then I re-tooled and flooded the world with wristwatch TVs, compressed paper houses, a million gimmicks. Techniques of mass production raised to the nth power. Do you remember my protein synthesizer?’ He glanced at Halloway, who nodded promptly. ‘No, you’re too young. No bigger than a suitcase, you put it under your bed at night and it ran off your sweat and body temperature. Somehow it didn’t catch on, but I would have fed a starving world, lifted the population of this planet to fifty billion in comfort. I was ready to build them super-cities, the first conurbation conglomerates, the mega-metropolis larger than any individual nation-state. I designed the first collapsible city, interchangeable parts moving around on gigantic rails. Makes sense — if a theatre isn’t being used by day, wheel it off and roll on an officeblock. Instead of which’ here he raised his ancient hands eloquently to the empty streets — ‘they all just gave up and faded away. Goodbye, C20 Man, hello Arcadia, that timid world of waterwheels and solar batteries. Not that there’s an unlimited future for tidal power. Every time one of those pontoons nods its head the planet slows down a little. The days are getting longer..
He turned away from the rail, and put a hard arm around Halloway’s shoulder. ‘Now, you’ve come to work for me? It’s too late, I closed down my last design office ten years ago.’ He steered Halloway to the elevator, nodding sagely to himself as they rode down together. ‘A pity, you could have done great things with those hands. Anyway, you can work for Stillman, there’s more than he can do.’
‘Well…’ Halloway glanced at the black-jacketed driver, standing beside the tractor with one hand on the automobile suspended in the air over his head. ‘I was thinking of setting up on my own.’
‘Good for you — but it’s all over. There’s nothing to do now but close it down. Give it a humane burial, put up a monument here and there to Twentieth-Century technology, to all those things we took for granted tyres, engines, TVs, kitchen appliances, automobiles…’
His voice wavered for the first time and then stopped, as he gazed up wistfully at his cathedral of cars. Waiting for this strange old man to start again, Halloway remembered that he had seen his combative jaw and dreamer’s eyes in the architecture textbooks in his grandfather’s library. Buckmaster had been the last of the great entrepreneur-industrialists, part architect and engineer, part visionary, driven on by old-fashioned crankiness, ceaseless originality and a welldeveloped talent for seizing the headlines. Grandiose projects started all over the world and then abandoned to rivals and pupils, a succession of wives, the third of whom died in a mysterious scandal, lawsuits against any number of governments, plans for the first trans-Atlantic bridge — these were elements in a stormy career spanning nearly seventy years. Although Buckmaster was clearly living a century too late there was something about his unflagging energy and resolve that fired a response in Halloway’s mind. He couldn’t help contrasting Buckmaster’s limitless appetite for steel, power, concrete and raw materials with the self-denying, defeatist lives of the engineers and architects at Garden City. There was even a fringe group of scientific fanatics — the so-called ‘heliophiles’ — whose ambition was to return energy to the sun by firing off all the old missiles with nuclear warheads, repaying the sun for its billion-year bounty.