took them west-southwest toward the border of Illinois, a straight
multi-lane avenue carved out of the flatlands of America. It was a
convenient, fairly safe, controlled access throughway made for fast
travel, designed for a nation always in a hurry. Though Doyle was,
himself, in a hurry, anxious to be with Courtney again, he shared some
of Colin’s dissatisfaction with their route. Though simple and quick,
it was characterless.
Fields of spring wheat, short and tender and green, began to fill the
open spaces on both sides of the highway. Initially, these crisp green
vistas and the complex of irrigation pipelines that sprayed them proved
moderately interesting. Before too long, however, the fields grew
boringly repetitious.
Despite his professed pessimism about the long morning which lay ahead
of them, Colin was in a particularly garrulous mood, and he made their
first two hours on the road pass most pleasantly and swiftly.
They talked about what it would be like to live in California, talked
about space travel, astronauts, science fiction, rock-and-roll, pirates,
sailing ships, and Count Dracula-this last, chiefly because Colin was
wearing a green-and-black Count Dracula T-shirt today, his narrow chest
gruesomely decorated with a menacing fierce-eyed, fanged Christopher
Lee.
As they passed the Indiana-Illinois border, there was a lull in the
conversation, at last. With Doyle’s permission, Colin unbuckled his
seatbelt long enough to slide forward and locate a new radio station.
To make certain that nothing was coming up on them too fast while the
boy was in such a vulnerable position on the edge of the seat, Alex
looked in the rear-view mirror at the light flow of traffic on the broad
throughway behind them.
That was when he saw the Chevrolet van He looked quickly away from it,
looked at the road ahead.
At first he did not want to believe what he had seen, he was sure it
must be his imagination. Then he argued with himself that since there
were thousands of Automovers on the roads of America, this was most
likely another of them, not at all the same vehicle that had hung behind
them on the first leg of the journey.
Colin slid back onto his seat and buckled his seatbelt without
argument. As he carefully smoothed down his T-shirt, he said, “Is that
one okay?”
“What one?”
Colin tilted his head and stared curiously at Doyle. “The radio
station, naturally. What else? ”
“Sure. It’s fine.”
But Alex was so distracted that he was not actually aware of what sort
of music the boy had selected for them. Reluctantly he glanced at the
rear-view mirror a second time.
The Automover was still cruising in their wake, no mere figment of his
overworked imagination to be lightly dismissed, hanging back there a
little less than a quarter of a mile, well silhouetted in the morning
sun, nevertheless darkly sinister.
Unaccountably, Doyle thought of the service station attendant whom they
had encountered near Harrisburg, and of the stout anachronism behind the
desk of the Lazy Time Motel. That familiar and uncontrollable shudder,
the embarrassment of his childhood which he had never fully outgrown,
started in his stomach and bowels and seemed to generate, of itself, a
quiet and possibly irrational fear. However, deep down inside, Doyle
admitted to himself what he had been first forced to face up to more
than twenty years ago: he was an unmitigated coward. His pacifism was
not based on any real moral precepts, but on an abiding terror of
violence. When you really thought about it, what danger did that van
pose? What injury or threat of injury had it done? If it seemed
sinister, the blame was in his own mind. His fear was not only
irrational, it was premature and simple-minded. He had no more cause to
be frightened by the Chevrolet than he had to be frightened by Chet or
the woman at the Lazy Time.
“He’s back there again, isn’t he?” Colin said.
“Who?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” the boy said.
/’Well, there is an Automover behind us.”
“It’s him, then.”
“Could be another one.”
“That’s too coincidental,” Colin said, quite sure of himself.
For a long moment Doyle was silent. Then: “Yes, I’m afraid you’re