to him, even through the bubble, and he’d see Gerry’s face as he’d seen it that last time less than an hour before she was killed, the view itself no more than a flash, two or three seconds at most, as she looked at him and her stepmother with loathing and disgust before she wheeled and ran back through the house and they’d heard the Porsche go snarling out the driveway. It hadn’t burned; that wasn’t why the word ‘napalm’ had triggered it. It was her sense of outrage at the use of it, the bombing, the whole Vietnam war. She’d be proud of him now, too, he thought, and then wondered which now he meant, which manifestation of her father’s talents, the nonstop drunk or the automated lover.
‘Did they come up with a revolutionary new deodorant just recently?’ he asked Haggerty. ‘It seems to me I read about it. The go-go funds discovered them, and the stock went up thirty points in a week.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, that was Sparm, Inc. And another spin-off from R and D and the white whale. But it wasn’t a deodorant; it was a revolutionary new filter that reduces tar and nicotine sixty-seven percent. It’s made of the baleen, mixed with sintered yak wool. He made a lot of money out of it by exercising his stock options, but sometimes I get the impression he’s married to that whale. And when he does get home—’
'I know, that damn wooden leg,’ Goddard said. ‘It must be awkward.’
‘It’s not really wood,’ Haggerty said. ‘Except for a Circassian walnut ferrule. Van Cleef and Arpels makes it. It’s anodized titanium with inlays of jade and Mexican opal, and the socket is lined with the belly fur of an unborn agouti. On a special order you can have it fitted with a jeweled clasp to carry your key to the executive washroom.’
He told her about the underground skyway, and how he had discovered this sanctuary, this peaceful subculture existing within the larger, hostile culture of the automobile dwellers. He was a writer, he said, doing research for an article for Reader’s Digest, ‘New Hope for the Living: Never Leave the Airport.’ And while this was aimed at any sector of the populace which might have a cursory interest in survival, it would be of particular interest to serious drinkers.
In all bars except those in airports, you were marooned, he went on. You were safe enough as long as you were inside because the natives were disarmed at the doorway; this tradition had been established in the Old West even before the invention of the automobile, perhaps in anticipation of it, some prescience or foreboding that the day would come when there would be much more sophisticated weapons abroad in the land than the primitive and relatively harmless Peacemaker Colts and Frontier .45’s checked at the door in that happy era. And a Californian, forcibly shucked from his automobile and separated from it for any length of time, while prey to the same vague feelings of resentment and unease as an oyster removed from its shell, will, like the oyster, seldom attack. But, inevitably, bars close, or you have to leave one and move to another to escape some bore, and they’re out there by the hurtling millions, armed with Fords and Chevrolets and, for only dollars a month more, with Cadillacs. But from the airport bar you simply stepped out back, boarded a jet, and went to the one next door in San Diego, Portland, or Los Angeles, at thirty thousand feet.
Of course, at that altitude you did miss some of the beauties of the countryside, the beaneries, filling stations, used-car lots, neon, asphalt, smog, billboards, the proliferating acne of tract housing, and murmuring sylvan streams freighted with condoms and empty beer cans, but that was a small price to pay for being wafted from one sanctuary to another across four hundred miles of hostile territory whose populace was forever torn between devout but conflicting desires to maim you or sell you something. The ecology was simple; all airports had bars, nearly all had hotels, and all you needed was a drip-dry wardrobe and a few credit cards. And there was just enough challenge to keep it interesting; you had to look sober enough to get aboard the airplane in the first place and to buy the two drinks they allowed you during the flight, but still far enough from it to obviate any possibility you might really dry