Jock toed the clutch and shoved the gearshift into fifth. It's engine screaming on the edge of tolerability, the white hiss of its turbocharger tickling at the fringes of his hearing, the old Mazda's speedometer smoothly climbed another 10 mph.
Jock whipped past the triple-trailer rig at 140. In his rearview mirror, Jock saw the semi's headlights flash. If the trucker blew his airhorns, Jock lost the sound in the rotary's scream. Flush against the windscreen and shielded from the driver's sight, the regulation strobe light warned other freeway traffic of the high-speed courier's approach.
Of all the high-performance vehicles in the stables of Turbo Express, the old GXL Turbo was Jock's favorite. Designed for comfort as well as speed and agility, the Mazda was different from the Countachs and Ferraris favored by most of the drivers for the high-speed courier service: The RX-7 had been designed as a car you could play with on the weekend and still drive to work or the grocery store during the week.
Jock did regret that the stock six-way, CD-stereo system had been removed from the center console. Company regulations had required it to be replaced by the video-disk based navigation computer Turbo Express used to minimize routing time for deliveries.
Congestion ahead. Jock dropped back into fourth, frowning as the speedometer swung back to 120. According to the computer he was already seventy seconds behind schedule. Turbo Express offered its customers the advantage of point-to-point delivery, and its prices were lower than any air courier's, but the company's services still weren't cheap. Turbo Express paid a $25 per minute for each minute over the estimated delivery time. Conversely, the driver earned the same amount in bonus pay for each minute under the estimated time.
"Great," Jock thought, as he saw a boat-towing motorhome ahead, insanely trying to pass another triple-trailer rig. "There goes another minute-and-a-half!"
Picking up the CB handset and checking the channel, Jock called in: "TE Base, this is TE-A-7. Running estimated plus one-sixty on ETA. Request advisement."
The CB crackled: "TE Base to TE-A-7. Follow correct procedures. Consult state police per traffic conditions, and attempt optimum arrival time. Out."
Swearing, Jock switched frequencies while willing the Winnebago to complete its pass or drop back. There were always problems with out-of-state drivers who were unfamiliar with the amber strobe of Turbo Express and what it meant.
"Oregon State Police, this is Turbo Express vehicle A-7, requesting traffic advisement for I-5 grid C-fifteen and points south to Roseburg. Over."
"This is OSP Base, Salem," said the CB. "What is your priority rating please, TE-A-7."
Steering with one hand, Jock leaned against his harness and read from the routing slip clipped to the dash. "Priority is Blue-three, OSP Base," he told the dispatcher in Salem. "Cryogenic biologicals for Roseburg Medical: human heart for transplant."
"Roger, TE-A-7. Stand by."
Jock was on the motorhome's tail now, belting along at a breathtaking 58 mph, close enough to read the bumper sticker on the back of the boat trailer: "The worst day fishing is better than the best day working." As the RV ponderously swung back into the right lane, he revved the rotary from below-legal-limit cruising at 3500 rpm to its 10,000-rpm upgraded redline, jammed it back into fourth and popped the clutch with a high-pitched chirp from the 16-inch Pirellis. He shot past the goggling octogenarian tourists at 95 mph and accelerating, a bright black blur of glass and aluminum.
"TE-A-7, this is OSP Base. Clear road from mile-marker two-ten to Roseburg limit, but be advised of field-burning in the Valley near Rice Hill with moderate ground smoke on freeway for approx eight miles. Do you request escort? Over."
Jock thought about it. On any Blue-series run Turbo Express had the option of requesting a state police escort vehicle, usually one of the new Police Special Corvettes, or one of the older Pursuit Mustangs. Jock didn't like the idea of an OSP screamer running in front of him to clear the road. It really wasn't necessary at speeds under 200 mph anyway: he only used escorts when driving one of the Biturbos or Countachs.
"Negative OSP Base, thanks for the smoke warning. TE-A-7 out," he said, flipping the CB to standby.
"Time to get to it!" Jock said aloud. Reaching down to the auxiliary control panel next to the cargo cage which replaced the passenger seat, he advanced the secondary ignition timing by two degrees and cracked the nitrous-oxide feed a notch.
The nitrous injectors paralleled with the stock fuel injectors fed a trickle of the low-flash-point gas to the new-series 13B engine's micro-balanced twin rotors. The tachometer climbed another 500 rpm and the engine's scream took on a higher, manic note.
The technicians at the TE service center recommended against this tactic -- strongly. The increased spread in ignition timing between the leading and trailing spark plugs of the rotary's two-stage combustion cycle did increase the engine's power output by a substantial margin, but it was hell on the rotors' apex seals.
Jock watched the multi-point temperature cluster apprehensively, ready to tone down his modification if the engine couldn't handle it. The display rose by a few digits, then dropped back by one degree at the intercooler as the engine found a new thermodynamic equilibrium.
Jock was now moving at 164 mph, according to the supplementary digital speedometer which cut in at speeds above the 160 mph peg of the stock speedo.
"Better," Jock muttered, as he watched the arrival time projection ripple with revisions on the computer display. "Better." Jock let himself relax and enjoy the ride for a few moments before he hit the Eugene limit. The Mazda's ride was smooth as the flow of molten glass, its response excellent. A far cry from the series of hopped-up Dodges and Chevys he'd owned in his younger years.
At thirty-two, Jock was one of the oldest drivers for Turbo Express, and one of the most successful. It had been only through a combination of skill and luck that he'd landed the job at all when he was twenty-two: Raw skill which had been recognized by the founder of Turbo Express, Tim Woods, when Jock had paced him at an average speed of 120 mph in a scabrous '68 Dodge Charger for over twenty minutes during one of the first commercial runs the company had made; luck that he had never had a speeding ticket and still hadn't killed himself before Woods approached him two weeks later to offer him a job.
The first few years with TE had been good ones. Then there had been a strong feeling of camaraderie throughout the company: Drivers, mechanics and administrators had been a team, right down to the janitor. The rules had been looser, the vehicles less reliable, the runs more exciting. But somehow it just didn't seem to matter as much anymore.
In the early days Jock and the other drivers had been a close-knit group with a pony express "damn the torpedoes" the-mail- must-go-through attitude.
But one by one his comrades had left the company, gone to follow other highways in one sense or another. The best of them had died at the wheel in freak accidents nobody could have foreseen; the less stalwart had retired or just simply moved on. Things had changed after Tim Woods died needlessly in a preventable accident, strewn over a three-mile length of interstate by an explosion when a faulty connector on his Ferrari's nitrous bottle had ruptured.
Everything was formularized now -- routine, boring. (If a job which involved driving at up to four times the speed of surrounding traffic every day could be called boring -- to Jock it had become so.)
The new young-punk drivers were only in it for the money: They wouldn't have risked their necks or bent a single rule to make sure an important delivery got through.
When he hit the Eugene limit (ten miles north of the actual city limits -- the computer alerted him) Jock slowed to 80 mph, a speed deemed safe by the special commission set up by the state legislature when it had first approved the issuance of high-speed licenses to Turbo Express drivers.
Jock was mildly annoyed, but this delay was pre-programmed into the computer and would not count against his schedule. Besides, in the manic environment of onramps, offramps, and merging traffic where the freeway passed through a city, the rule made sense.
The Eugene limit was thirty-eight miles behind him and he was again running at over 160 mph when Jock hit the smoke.
It came first as a thin haze, no darker than the bluish trickle of a cigarette, the evidence of rye grass farmers clearing their fields for the year's second crop.
Within seconds the smoke had thickened and darkened like coastal fog. Jock switched on the headlights as he backed off on the accelerator, watching with dissatisfaction as the computer revised his arrival time upward in blinking digits.
"OK," Jock thought, "Get through the smoke, then really punch it, maybe I'll make it only a few minutes minus. I'd hate to blow the whole fee!"
It seemed to Jock that he had been driving for hours at 45 in third gear when he began to catch glimpses of roadside vegetation again. Suddenly the smoke was gone, as if a hundred Hollywood wind machines had been started simultaneously.
Relieved to see that he had only lost two minutes, Jock slammed the gearshift into fourth and bore down on the accelerator, watching the speedometer glide upward -- 60... 80... 100... the tach hit 10,000 and a buzzer sounded -- redline. At that precise instant, with his foot on the clutch and his arm poised to speed-shift into fifth, Jock saw the car.
In a blink he was past it: A blue Chevy Sprint, upside-down in the black-charred field to his right, sprawled at the end of the furrow it had plowed before coming to rest. He might have caught a glimpse of faces hanging inverted in the windshield as he flashed past -- he couldn't be certain.
Jock hesitated while rocketing down the freeway. The redline alarm sounding in his ears seemed far away, his right foot did not waver on the accelerator, his left did not change position on the clutch pedal. His thoughts tumbled hundreds of times faster than the Mazda flew as he weighed his choices.
Was there anyone still in the car, perhaps injured? Were hypothetical lives any less important than that of the woman in Roseburg who waited in a hospital critical ward for the dead man's heart which rode next to Jock? What about the schedule!
Without conscious direction his body acted: Jock simultaneously rammed in the clutch, slammed on the brakes, and forced the gearshift into second. Cranking the wheel violently, Jock made the Mazda work against its own engineered perfection, forcing the dynamic-tracking rear wheels to break loose from the concrete surface of the interstate as he slewed the car into a high-speed 180.
As its gas pedal ground into the pile carpeting and its clutch abruptly engaged, the car's wheels spun with a high, wavering scream. Blue smoke billowed up behind him, as Jock accelerated heedlessly northward on the southbound side of the freeway.
Somehow there seemed to be no transition between his short burst back up the freeway and the point when Jock popped open the door and released his safety harness. The computer squealed an alarm and an infraction was permanently etched on Jock's record by the electronic watchdog as Jock left the car with the engine running and his harness unfastened. Then he was peering through the windows of the mangled Chevy into a nightmare.
There was blood everywhere: Smeared on the windshield, splattered on the upholstery, pooled on the cream-colored headliner of the subcompact's roof. After he kicked in what was left of a shattered side window, Jock quickly determined that the parents were dead. Wedged against the front seats, the child's safety seat held a pitiful bundle. The little girl couldn't have been more than two years old.
Jock cut himself painfully on the twisted metal of the roof when he saw a movement: The baby was still breathing!
Paradoxically, Jock was smiling as he strapped himself into the Mazda, silencing the tattletale alarm. The old exaltation of the high-speed courier run was back!
Checking the kiddy seat strapped down behind him one more time, Jock slammed the door.
He burned rubber from the comptroller's precious three-hundred-dollars-apiece Pirelli radials through the first three gears. Jock topped the Mazda out 50 mph above its maximum-rated speed of one-hundred-eighty.
He could feel his old comrades around him now: Tony Stannau, who'd bought it on black ice in Portland's Terwilliger curves while trying to deliver a replacement part to one of the local TV stations in time for their morning broadcast; Plucky little Shirl Bronson -- who was better than any man and would by God prove it by drinking him under the table -- lost at 230 mph while avoiding a school bus that had suddenly swerved across her lane with a blown tire. Tim Woods was there too, with his personality that inspired absolute confidence and the contagious enthusiasm which had gone a long way toward winning the legislative battle to make Turbo Express a reality.
Jock could almost feel Tim's brotherly clap on the shoulder, hear his jaunty: "High Revs dude!"
He glanced at the kiddy seat behind him, at the cryo-box with its delicate beads of condensation next to him -- two lives: his responsibility. Jock reached over and switched off the computer. He had a new schedule to keep.