Now, sadly, the old astronaut was unaware of all this. He sat beside Franklin in the front seat, his blanched eyes open behind the glasses but his mind set to some private time. Even the motion of the speeding car failed to rouse him, and Ursula had to hold his shoulders as he tottered like a stuffed toy into the windshield.
‘Go on, doctor — he likes the speed…’ Sitting forward, she tapped Franklin’s head, wide eyes fixed on the speedometer. Franklin forced himself to concentrate on the road, conscious of the girl’s breath on his neck. This highway madonna, with her secret dream of speed, he found it difficult to keep his hands and mind off her. Was she planning to abduct her father from the clinic? She lived in the small commune that had taken over the old solar city up in the hills, Soleri II. Every morning she cycled in, bringing Trippett his ration of raisins and macrobiotic cheer. She sat calmly beside him like his young mother as he played with the food, making strange patterns on his paper plate.
‘Faster, Dr Franklin — I’ve watched you drive. You’re always speeding.’
‘So you’ve seen me? I’m not sure. If I had a blackout now…’Giving in again, Franklin steered the Mercedes into the centre of the road and eased the speedometer needle towards fifty. There was a flare of headlights as they overtook the weekly bus to Las Vegas, a medley of warning shouts from the passengers left behind in a tornado of dust. The Mercedes was already moving at more than twice the legal limit. At twenty miles an hour, theoretically, a driver entering a sudden fugue had time to pass the controls to the obligatory front-seat passenger. In fact, few people drove at all. The desert on either side of the road was littered with the wrecks of cars that had veered off the soft shoulder and ended up in a sand-hill a mile away, their drivers dying of exposure before they could wake from their fugues.
Yet, for all the danger, Franklin loved to drive, illicit high-speed runs at dusk when he seemed to be alone on a forgotten planet. In a locked hangar at the air base were a Porsche and an antique Jaguar. His colleagues at the clinic disapproved, but he pursued his own maverick way, as he did in the laboratory, shielding himself behind a front of calculated eccentricity that excused certain obsessions with speed, time, sex… He needed the speed more than the sex now. But soon he would have to stop, already the fast driving had become a dangerous game spurred on by the infantile hope that speed in some way would keep the clock hands turning.
The concrete towers and domes of the solar city approached on their left, Paulo Soleri’s charming fantasy of a selfsufficient community.
Franklin slowed to avoid running down a young woman in a sari who stood like a mannequin in the centre of the highway. Her eyes stared at the dust, a palaeontology of hopes. In an hour she would snap out of it, and complete her walk to the bus stop without realizing that time, and the bus, had passed her by.
Ursula sombrely embraced her father, beckoning Franklin to accelerate.
‘We’re dawdling, doctor. What’s the matter? You enjoyed the speed. And so did Dad.’
‘Ursula, he doesn’t even know he’s here.’
Franklin looked out at the desert, trying to imagine it through Trippett’s eyes. The landscape was not so much desolate as derelict — the untended irrigation canals, the rusting dish of a radio-telescope on a nearby peak, a poor man’s begging bowl held up to the banquet of the universe. The hills were waiting for them to go away. A crime had been committed, a cosmic misdemeanour carried on the shoulders of this fine old astronaut sitting beside him. Every night Trippett wept in his sleep. Spectres strode through his unlit dreams, trying to find a way out of his head.
The best astronauts, Franklin had noticed during his work for NASA, never dreamed. Or, at least, not until ten years after their flights, when the nightmares began and they returned to the institutes of aviation medicine which had first helped to recruit them.
Light flickered at them from the desert, and raced like a momentary cathode trace across the black lenses of Trippett’s glasses. Thousands of steel mirrors were laid out in a semi-circular tract beside the road, one of the solar farms that would have provided electric current for the inhabitants of Soleri II, unlimited power donated in a perhaps too kindly gesture by the economy of the sun.
Watching the reflected light dance in Trippett’s eyes, Franklin turned the car on to the service road that ran down to the farm.
‘Ursula, we’ll rest here — I think I’m more tired than your father.’
