imported_GabrieL
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- Haziran 20, 2012
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Garson Thayer didn't like driving at night, but since his internal clock, an expensive Swiss gadget, sent signals to the effect that it wasn't officially night yet, he kept going.
He was on his way to do a job for Strategic Air Command. He worked for them fairly often, couldn't help wondering why they paid stratospheric consultation fees yet refused to spring for drivers. The US Military had a near-infinite pool of uniformed serfs with valid military licenses and civilian hot rod/speedway experience. He could've used expensive travel time to review classified documents and equipment diagrams in the back seat, in a cone of light from some highly engineered inner-automobile reading apparatus.
He also wondered why SAC never sent him to Hawaii.
The answer was obvious. The missiles were aimed the other way. So he was driving to an officially uncharted location near Barrow, in the upper reaches of the USA's freezer cabinet, at three in the afternoon, according to the aforementioned internal timepiece. The dashboard clock and radio announcer expressed agreement, but the charcoal-gray outer darkness said the timely information was a lie. Night was coming. Night was already there. Night was outrageously cold.
The bulky extreme low-temperature Olive Drab snorkle coat, Gov't Issue, which he'd found neatly folded on the webbing seat next to his on the transport airplane, sat humped in the back seat of the car. Its coyote-fur ruff shimmered in warm breezes from the auto heater. The minimal movement caught Garson's eye in the rearview mirror. He reached back and scrunched the parka down. Didn't want a spectral, vaguely human-shaped presence looming behind him.
He turned up the radio. Faraway civilization sent weak music signals. 'Try to see something grand or majestic in these bleak surroundings,' he thought. 'Think where you are. Top of the world. Maybe they'll take you up in a spy plane again, to allegedly survey the Brooks Range.'
Most military outpost honchos had a decent sense of humor about squandering taxpayer dough on senseless, even ridiculous outings that sounded good on official reports, on the off-chance such reports were ever demanded or, when delivered, scrutinized. Military types had exceptionally low regard for taxpayers in general. Even though military personnel and high-end experts occasionally on the payroll had to pay taxes without fail, too.
< 2 >
The gray-lit spaces in the car's beaming eyesight were punctuated with grim, straight, black trees. Garson tried to picture the forest he was traversing in godly overview. Best fringe-benefit of the SAC gig was streaking over topography at near-light speed in flying machines the tax-paying general public wasn't allowed to see yet. A forest on the Earth was like fur on an animal. Maybe the trees were firs. In any case, no shortage of trees, in Alaska. But the military-industrial complex would take care of the unregulated abundance soon enough. Plenty oil underground, beneath ungodly snow, ice, frost and white.
The radio frazzed out. No use jiggling the dials. No more signal. Didn't make sense. Air base management took the trouble to disguise the vehicle as non-GI for civilian consultants to transport themselves, but couldn't, or didn't bother to, equip said vehicle with a military-spec radio.
Approximately 200 dismal miles stretched between his current position and the cryogenic void of Barrow, which was either an Eskimo whaling port, a desolate polar bear scavenging grounds or paradise vacation spot for penguins. Garson had never visited the place, probably wouldn't get a chance, this time around. He pictured an Eskimo brothel in an off-limits igloo. Inuit croupiers at a high-stakes roulette game paid off stacks of snowflake-shaped chips while Inuit maidens in leopard seal-fur bikinis served frosty drinks in an under-the-Tundra casino. Eskimo rockers in glitter parkas churned out bland covers of the Stones, Cream, Hendrix.
Arctic Circle daydreams blossomed brighter as the surrounding forest and roiling sky darkened.
Alaska's undeniable beauty involved the silence wrought by cold. Garson slowed down. Maybe the car he was driving could sustain a cruising speed of 100 mph, but it didn't make sense to risk engine trouble in the middle of frozen nowheresville. Maybe stateside speed limits worked on the same physical principles as internal clocks.
Something moved in the rearview mirror again. Garson thought the snorkle coat must've filled with warm air and returned to blimp-like life, reached behind to scrunch it down again, felt nothing. The coat had fallen to the car floor. He checked the mirror again and saw a dark shape in motion.
< 3 >
Not car-shaped. And cars move forward without any appearance of motion. The wheels roll while the body of the vehicle bobs with the occasional road-contour. Animal organisms are transformed by motion. Their shapes change in obedience to a dynamic law, move or die.
The rearview mirror took on the fascination of a movie screen. What is this shadowy bolus behind me? Garson slowed down further, instead of turning to look out the back window. His eyes twitched and darted to keep tabs on the road ahead.
Puffs of steam floated from a snout slightly less dark than what was around and behind it. A mouth opened to take in more air, eject more steam. Flash of indecently huge yellow fangs. A bear, galloping like a horse.
Without thinking, for no reason, Garson Thayer groped the dashboard and turned the car's faintly whirring heater off. He didn't want distraction, thought he might be able to hear the drumbeat of the bear's paws on the asphalt, hear the animal pant as it galumphed and loped, with surprising grace, astonishing speed and power, down the black band that vanished into the vertical lines of the forest. A bear in motion is practically round, a rolling ball of disembowelment.
Instinct said, speed the fuck up, get us out of here, bears mean business and we're on this monster's turf. But Garson backed his engineer boot off the accelerator. He wanted to watch the bear grow in the rearview mirror's glass TV screen, wanted to see its face.
Undersized murderous black holes over a maw packed with yellow knives. There was some dog-dick town in Alaska called Yellow Knife...or maybe that was Canada, somewhere to the right of here, and slightly south. Maybe some motorist was being stalked by a bear in Yellow Knife, too. Happens all the time, here in the Yukon, stranger. The bear's little round eyes spoke of hard times, hunger and something darker, deeper.
Garson's brown eyes slipped to the glowing gas gauge. Reassuring needles and dials said 3/4 tank left and only 180 miles to go before the air base. Barely a calibrated microsquare on the Alaskan radar screen. Continent-sized mass of ice, forest and buried oil glowed green in oscilloscope-shaped instruments in a darkened war room under the tundra.
< 4 >
So he wasn't really in any danger.
'What's this dumb bear going to do, even if he catches up?' Garson thought. 'Pop a claw like a switchblade and use it like a can-opener on unrecycled Detroit steel?'
He slowed to just over 40 mph, wanted to figure out how fast an adult male grizzly could lope, rumble or charge or whatever it is bears do when intent on murder and dinner. He was fairly sure the bear was male. Females would be busy nursing cubs or telling them bearish bedtime stories.
TV documentary-style slo-mo sequences played in his head. Colossal, practically prehistoric mammals slapped salmon onto dry land as they struggled up waterfalls, enslaved by senseless, suicidal biological imperatives. A bear attacked a wild-eyed moose, felled the ungainly elk like a four-legged tree. Bear locked in life-or-death struggle with a snarling, spitting, raised-fur indignant puma, the animal equivalent of Mexican wrestling. Garson looked in the rearview mirror again. Obviously, everything he thought he knew about bears was strictly show biz. Just wasn't logical that a bear would chase an automobile with anything like food in mind.
The bear, according to the car's odometer, maintained a steady 38 mph.
Garson wondered if Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds could gallop that fast. Engineer's curiosity overcame him. How long could the bear maintain this insane pace? How much did the critter weigh? Running style better suited to the open plain than extreme low-temperature tarmac. Claws grab the dirt like linebackers' cleats, sprinters' spikes.
If moose, salmon and mountain goats could only learn to drive, their populations would increase, and all the world's bears would starve to death.
A world without bears wouldn't be much fun, he thought. Playboy bunny stretched out pale, pink and wiggling in print, sprawled on a snarling bearskin rug. Snobbish guardsmen in preposterous towering headgear. Northwest Indian shaman dancing a slow frug at the prow of an aircraft-carrierly war canoe, decked out in a bear costume with cartoonish wooden eyes and claws. Garson could practically hear the roar and growl of the Bear Dance chant.
< 5 >
The GI consultant transport vehicle wasn't equipped with an external temperature gauge. Freeze-ass cold was as precise an estimate as Garson Thayer could figure. The car wasn't quite a refrigerator on the inside yet. That could be fixed. On an impulse, steadying the steering wheel with his knees, he reached back and grabbed the dorky green snorkle-coat parka from the car floor.
A parka next to every seat, but no stewardesses on the plane out. No pretty, chatty women handing out joke-sized exact miniature replicas of popular brand booze-bottles. Near-empty C-5A cargo plane contained bleary faces going over blueprints, or dozing, snoring. Ocean of white rolling by below. The occasional snowed-over farms had given way to agriculturally inappropriate prairie, then a jagged mountain range.
He shimmied into the ugly Army-Navy Store wrap, then rolled down the windows. The fur in his nostrils froze instantly. A lightning-charged oil slick of cold and blackness barged into the car's cockpit. He leaned into the mirror's viewpoint, saw a gray-furred greenish oaf-thing, its facial features obscured. He checked the coat's pockets to see if GI extreme cold weather gear included complimentary OD mittens. Negative mittens. Negative mukluks.
After a few minutes, Garson couldn't feel his fingers or toes. Goddamn engineer boots may look tough and hold up on oily gas station surfaces, but separated from motorcycle engines, they insulate not.
He didn't want to roll up the windows. That'd be cheating. The bear got warmer as he ran. Hot bear-blood coursed full-speed through veins and arteries the diameter of a man's legs. Blood launched in the search for bloody fuel in the battle for life earned through death. Windows open and frozen foot on accelerator seemed fair enough. Give the bear a chance to prove his primitive point. Garson wasn't about to stop the car, get out and run for it, though. Wouldn't be fair to himself. Just hope the engine doesn't overheat and seize up right now.
'Scuse me, Mister Bear, sir, but would you mind waiting while I fix this flat tire? Maybe give the tire-iron a swat to loosen up them lug-nuts, all frozen stiff? Then we can resume the chase on an equal footing.
< 6 >
He was on his way to do a job for Strategic Air Command. He worked for them fairly often, couldn't help wondering why they paid stratospheric consultation fees yet refused to spring for drivers. The US Military had a near-infinite pool of uniformed serfs with valid military licenses and civilian hot rod/speedway experience. He could've used expensive travel time to review classified documents and equipment diagrams in the back seat, in a cone of light from some highly engineered inner-automobile reading apparatus.
He also wondered why SAC never sent him to Hawaii.
The answer was obvious. The missiles were aimed the other way. So he was driving to an officially uncharted location near Barrow, in the upper reaches of the USA's freezer cabinet, at three in the afternoon, according to the aforementioned internal timepiece. The dashboard clock and radio announcer expressed agreement, but the charcoal-gray outer darkness said the timely information was a lie. Night was coming. Night was already there. Night was outrageously cold.
The bulky extreme low-temperature Olive Drab snorkle coat, Gov't Issue, which he'd found neatly folded on the webbing seat next to his on the transport airplane, sat humped in the back seat of the car. Its coyote-fur ruff shimmered in warm breezes from the auto heater. The minimal movement caught Garson's eye in the rearview mirror. He reached back and scrunched the parka down. Didn't want a spectral, vaguely human-shaped presence looming behind him.
He turned up the radio. Faraway civilization sent weak music signals. 'Try to see something grand or majestic in these bleak surroundings,' he thought. 'Think where you are. Top of the world. Maybe they'll take you up in a spy plane again, to allegedly survey the Brooks Range.'
Most military outpost honchos had a decent sense of humor about squandering taxpayer dough on senseless, even ridiculous outings that sounded good on official reports, on the off-chance such reports were ever demanded or, when delivered, scrutinized. Military types had exceptionally low regard for taxpayers in general. Even though military personnel and high-end experts occasionally on the payroll had to pay taxes without fail, too.
< 2 >
The gray-lit spaces in the car's beaming eyesight were punctuated with grim, straight, black trees. Garson tried to picture the forest he was traversing in godly overview. Best fringe-benefit of the SAC gig was streaking over topography at near-light speed in flying machines the tax-paying general public wasn't allowed to see yet. A forest on the Earth was like fur on an animal. Maybe the trees were firs. In any case, no shortage of trees, in Alaska. But the military-industrial complex would take care of the unregulated abundance soon enough. Plenty oil underground, beneath ungodly snow, ice, frost and white.
The radio frazzed out. No use jiggling the dials. No more signal. Didn't make sense. Air base management took the trouble to disguise the vehicle as non-GI for civilian consultants to transport themselves, but couldn't, or didn't bother to, equip said vehicle with a military-spec radio.
Approximately 200 dismal miles stretched between his current position and the cryogenic void of Barrow, which was either an Eskimo whaling port, a desolate polar bear scavenging grounds or paradise vacation spot for penguins. Garson had never visited the place, probably wouldn't get a chance, this time around. He pictured an Eskimo brothel in an off-limits igloo. Inuit croupiers at a high-stakes roulette game paid off stacks of snowflake-shaped chips while Inuit maidens in leopard seal-fur bikinis served frosty drinks in an under-the-Tundra casino. Eskimo rockers in glitter parkas churned out bland covers of the Stones, Cream, Hendrix.
Arctic Circle daydreams blossomed brighter as the surrounding forest and roiling sky darkened.
Alaska's undeniable beauty involved the silence wrought by cold. Garson slowed down. Maybe the car he was driving could sustain a cruising speed of 100 mph, but it didn't make sense to risk engine trouble in the middle of frozen nowheresville. Maybe stateside speed limits worked on the same physical principles as internal clocks.
Something moved in the rearview mirror again. Garson thought the snorkle coat must've filled with warm air and returned to blimp-like life, reached behind to scrunch it down again, felt nothing. The coat had fallen to the car floor. He checked the mirror again and saw a dark shape in motion.
< 3 >
Not car-shaped. And cars move forward without any appearance of motion. The wheels roll while the body of the vehicle bobs with the occasional road-contour. Animal organisms are transformed by motion. Their shapes change in obedience to a dynamic law, move or die.
The rearview mirror took on the fascination of a movie screen. What is this shadowy bolus behind me? Garson slowed down further, instead of turning to look out the back window. His eyes twitched and darted to keep tabs on the road ahead.
Puffs of steam floated from a snout slightly less dark than what was around and behind it. A mouth opened to take in more air, eject more steam. Flash of indecently huge yellow fangs. A bear, galloping like a horse.
Without thinking, for no reason, Garson Thayer groped the dashboard and turned the car's faintly whirring heater off. He didn't want distraction, thought he might be able to hear the drumbeat of the bear's paws on the asphalt, hear the animal pant as it galumphed and loped, with surprising grace, astonishing speed and power, down the black band that vanished into the vertical lines of the forest. A bear in motion is practically round, a rolling ball of disembowelment.
Instinct said, speed the fuck up, get us out of here, bears mean business and we're on this monster's turf. But Garson backed his engineer boot off the accelerator. He wanted to watch the bear grow in the rearview mirror's glass TV screen, wanted to see its face.
Undersized murderous black holes over a maw packed with yellow knives. There was some dog-dick town in Alaska called Yellow Knife...or maybe that was Canada, somewhere to the right of here, and slightly south. Maybe some motorist was being stalked by a bear in Yellow Knife, too. Happens all the time, here in the Yukon, stranger. The bear's little round eyes spoke of hard times, hunger and something darker, deeper.
Garson's brown eyes slipped to the glowing gas gauge. Reassuring needles and dials said 3/4 tank left and only 180 miles to go before the air base. Barely a calibrated microsquare on the Alaskan radar screen. Continent-sized mass of ice, forest and buried oil glowed green in oscilloscope-shaped instruments in a darkened war room under the tundra.
< 4 >
So he wasn't really in any danger.
'What's this dumb bear going to do, even if he catches up?' Garson thought. 'Pop a claw like a switchblade and use it like a can-opener on unrecycled Detroit steel?'
He slowed to just over 40 mph, wanted to figure out how fast an adult male grizzly could lope, rumble or charge or whatever it is bears do when intent on murder and dinner. He was fairly sure the bear was male. Females would be busy nursing cubs or telling them bearish bedtime stories.
TV documentary-style slo-mo sequences played in his head. Colossal, practically prehistoric mammals slapped salmon onto dry land as they struggled up waterfalls, enslaved by senseless, suicidal biological imperatives. A bear attacked a wild-eyed moose, felled the ungainly elk like a four-legged tree. Bear locked in life-or-death struggle with a snarling, spitting, raised-fur indignant puma, the animal equivalent of Mexican wrestling. Garson looked in the rearview mirror again. Obviously, everything he thought he knew about bears was strictly show biz. Just wasn't logical that a bear would chase an automobile with anything like food in mind.
The bear, according to the car's odometer, maintained a steady 38 mph.
Garson wondered if Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds could gallop that fast. Engineer's curiosity overcame him. How long could the bear maintain this insane pace? How much did the critter weigh? Running style better suited to the open plain than extreme low-temperature tarmac. Claws grab the dirt like linebackers' cleats, sprinters' spikes.
If moose, salmon and mountain goats could only learn to drive, their populations would increase, and all the world's bears would starve to death.
A world without bears wouldn't be much fun, he thought. Playboy bunny stretched out pale, pink and wiggling in print, sprawled on a snarling bearskin rug. Snobbish guardsmen in preposterous towering headgear. Northwest Indian shaman dancing a slow frug at the prow of an aircraft-carrierly war canoe, decked out in a bear costume with cartoonish wooden eyes and claws. Garson could practically hear the roar and growl of the Bear Dance chant.
< 5 >
The GI consultant transport vehicle wasn't equipped with an external temperature gauge. Freeze-ass cold was as precise an estimate as Garson Thayer could figure. The car wasn't quite a refrigerator on the inside yet. That could be fixed. On an impulse, steadying the steering wheel with his knees, he reached back and grabbed the dorky green snorkle-coat parka from the car floor.
A parka next to every seat, but no stewardesses on the plane out. No pretty, chatty women handing out joke-sized exact miniature replicas of popular brand booze-bottles. Near-empty C-5A cargo plane contained bleary faces going over blueprints, or dozing, snoring. Ocean of white rolling by below. The occasional snowed-over farms had given way to agriculturally inappropriate prairie, then a jagged mountain range.
He shimmied into the ugly Army-Navy Store wrap, then rolled down the windows. The fur in his nostrils froze instantly. A lightning-charged oil slick of cold and blackness barged into the car's cockpit. He leaned into the mirror's viewpoint, saw a gray-furred greenish oaf-thing, its facial features obscured. He checked the coat's pockets to see if GI extreme cold weather gear included complimentary OD mittens. Negative mittens. Negative mukluks.
After a few minutes, Garson couldn't feel his fingers or toes. Goddamn engineer boots may look tough and hold up on oily gas station surfaces, but separated from motorcycle engines, they insulate not.
He didn't want to roll up the windows. That'd be cheating. The bear got warmer as he ran. Hot bear-blood coursed full-speed through veins and arteries the diameter of a man's legs. Blood launched in the search for bloody fuel in the battle for life earned through death. Windows open and frozen foot on accelerator seemed fair enough. Give the bear a chance to prove his primitive point. Garson wasn't about to stop the car, get out and run for it, though. Wouldn't be fair to himself. Just hope the engine doesn't overheat and seize up right now.
'Scuse me, Mister Bear, sir, but would you mind waiting while I fix this flat tire? Maybe give the tire-iron a swat to loosen up them lug-nuts, all frozen stiff? Then we can resume the chase on an equal footing.
< 6 >