Pressure Man

Chapter One

If he had been asked to rely on public transport he would have refused to make the trip. He hated the crowded, clanking, sooty, coal-burning multicarriers with their surly Civil Service attendants. He hated surface travel in general, finding the contrast between the clean, empty reaches of space and the decaying planet to be almost nauseous.

He did not, as did many spacers, hold a belligerent contempt for old Earth. She was, after all, the source, the only source of many things, the mother of all, home. She reeked and rotted and continued to condone the overproduction of Goethe’s man, so admirable in the individual, so deplorable in his masses. He did not feel contempt for Earth herself, only her people. He showed his impatience by growling obscenities as he was forced to the blown dunes at the side of the two remaining lanes of what once had been a four-lane superhighway to allow passage of a big drone cargo carrier.

He mopped perspiration from his forehead as he waited for the drone to clear, then steered the antique auto back onto the potholed road. The auto’s air-conditioning unit had been removed, not too neatly, leaving a gaping hole in the dash. Most of the lining had been torn from the vehicle’s roof, leaving only a thin layer of metal between him and the desert sun. The engine, modified to burn methane, stank, coughed, wheezed, and strained as he tried to regain speed. The poorly engineered tank on the back of the car was definitely not aerodynamic. The dry cross wind made handling a nightmare when, by coaxing and cursing and pushing to the limit, he once again attained fifty miles per hour.

When he reached the low mountains the auto inched its way upgrade and bucketed downgrade with the heavy tank trying to fishtail. He growled grand and manly profanities at the car, the hot sands, the barren rocks, the decaying road. He saved a few choice words for the Department of Space Exploration and all those involved in sending him into the heat of the desert in a ground car which should have been scrapped a decade ago.

A drone, the second he’d met since leaving the city which sprawled over every available inch of land from the desert to the sea, screamed a warning siren at him.

He found a lay-by, just in time, and the drone rumbled by, antennae wriggling like the feelers of a giant insect.

He could see the crest of the low range of hills. He eased upward, the radiator on the verge of boiling.

Then it was downhill, the engine cooled, and the speed created an illusion of coolness as wind whipped his hair into his face.

Heat waves shimmered over the flat lands. He met an auto, a relatively new model, probably one of the last production run, making it less than ten years old. It displayed a government seal on hood and doors. The driver was the first human he’d seen since leaving the city. He felt a childish desire to wave.

With easier driving, he allowed his mind to wander from the chore of keeping the shock-worn vehicle on the road and speculated about the reason for his being ordered to DOSEWEX, Department of Space Exploration West. His conclusion was that he had no idea. He was an engineer. He was a spacer. It was a good bet that he was not being called into the desert to be reprimanded. His record, for the past two years at least, was clean. He hadn’t slugged a superior officer since then, and he had served his restriction time for that one. He’d spent one full year with all the little extras forbidden, one year during which his special rations had been divided among the other crew members, one full year without ground leave, not even on Moon Base. Then, just when he thought he was set for a holiday, and was making good progress with that long-legged communications officer in L.A. Operations, he got orders to report, in all haste, to DOSEWEX, way to hell and gone in the New Mexico desert.

The sun was low behind him when he reached the outer perimeter of the base. He got out of the car, stretched, knocked dust off his uniform, and allowed a detection machine to snoop him. He stood aside as the vehicle was searched and snooped. It was standard operating procedure. You couldn’t control every yoyo in a population of three hundred million potential nuts, but you could limit their access to prime areas.

When he was passed through the perimeter guard post, he saw only more barren country ahead, but he was near enough to be able to look forward to a drink, a bath, a meal, in that order. A robot flagman slowed him. He steered the auto around a line of construction machines moving slowly in his own direction. Halfway past the group of large machines the flagman signaled him to pull in and he found himself directly behind a huge transport mounting a hefty crane. The crane transport seemed to be the control vehicle for the entire convoy of diggers and earthmovers. It was manned. He blew his horn, asking for a little cooperation in being allowed to pass. The base was near. He could see, off to his right, the profile of a low building. He inched forward to be in position to use the auto’s feeble acceleration when he was given the go-ahead to pass, bringing the hood of his vehicle under the overhanging boom of the crane.

The operator of the transport seemed to be deaf. He leaned out the window and yelled, blowing his horn. He checked the shoulder, to see if he could pull off and pass on the right. He caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye.

On a scale of ten his reaction time was a ten plus. It was one of his best-known abilities, his quickness. More than once lightning reflexes had served him well, and they served him again as he slammed on the brakes, rocking the old vehicle on its worn shocks. At the same time, foot still pressed on the brake, he threw himself to his right and hit the floorboard just as the falling boom of the crane crushed the flimsy roof. The auto was being dragged forward as the crane transport continued to move. There was a grinding sound as metal folded and tore. Smoke came from the locked tires of the auto. It went on for perhaps thirty seconds before the boom pulled off the crushed roof to bend the hood. The cooling fan clanked against metal. The engine sputtered and died. The car was motionless.

He sighed and relaxed. Then he was jolted as the drone earthmover behind him rammed the car, continued pushing until the car slewed sideways to the blade of the earthmover. He could hear the car falling to pieces. There was a scrape of protesting metal and another jolt as the forward motion stopped, the auto rammed up under the boom against the rear of the crane transport, crushed, held tightly.

Once again he relaxed. He was alive. He was lying in a constricted space, the roof of the car pushed down to the seat bottom, the sides pushed in toward him. He smelled escaping methane and felt a tightening of every muscle in his body, but when seconds passed without an explosion, he tried to peek through a tiny slit which had once been a window. He heard movement outside. He had glass shards on his face and he was afraid to blink his eyes lest he cause glass splinters to fall from his hair and eyebrows into them.

“Are you all right?” a voice asked, from outside the crushed vehicle.

“The gas is leaking,” he yelled. “Get some foam on this crate.”

Footsteps moved away, not fast. He had a piece of jagged metal punching into his back. He tried a move to ease it. He was not badly hurt. He could move legs, arms, his back, his neck. Part of the seat back was on top of him. He pushed on it until he could see out of the slit of crushed window. He heard footsteps coming back.

“Get some foam on this wreck before it blows,” he yelled.

He could see legs in blue work pants and service shoes. The man was standing quite near.

“Yeah, just take it easy,” the voice said.

He heard a clank, a loud hiss. He froze. Gas was now escaping rapidly from the tank at the rear. And there were more sounds. He froze, not believing it. A small pop. The workman had just activated a self-igniting cutting torch.

“Turn that thing off, you dumb bastard,” he screamed. “The gas is leaking.”

“Yeah,” the workman said.

The blue-clad legs moved. He saw the flame at the tip of the cutting torch and knew what was going to happen. He braced the back of his neck against the caved-in roof of the auto and pushed, momentarily panicked. He heard the methane ignite, whooshing into flame. He felt the heat immediately, and the rank odor of combustion was in his nostrils. Like millions, billions before him, he was thinking, “No, not me. Not now. Not yet.”

Burning paint filled the crushed cab with smoke. The heat was a blast furnace. Evil black tendrils of heavy smoke snaked up into the small area in which he was trapped. A sheet of flame sprang up outside the slit of the window, cutting off his view of the world.

His mind was surprisingly clear. In a few seconds the entire tank of gas would go. At least it would be quick, one massive blow as the explosion fireballed up. At least it would be quick.