‘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.
