The Gone-Away World Read Online Free PDF Page A

world).
    â€œWe can fix all that,” the pencilneck said. “You have to come,” he leered, “and see the
trucks.
” And that time he made it sound like your first orgasm, or maybe your last.
    So we did. Sally reluctantly, Jim calmly, Gonzo eagerly, Tobemory Trent sidewise like a crab and all the rest of us according to our lights, we went out of the Nameless Bar and into the Nameless Parking Lot. The pencilneck waved his arms, and forward they came with a grumble and a clatter, with a great white light and the smell of fresh rubber and vinyl and engine, and lo, there were trucks indeed.
    But not trucks as we knew them. These were the trucks of legend, the trucks every vehicle with more than six wheels dreams of being. They were black and chrome and they stank of raunchy fuel consumption and throbbing power. If these trucks could have sung, they’d have sung base, deep and slow and full of the Delta. They had leather seats and positioning systems and armoured glass. They were factory new and they had our number plates already on ’em, and there was a hula girl on the dashboard of Baptiste Vasille’s, and a stack of pornographic images in Samuel P.’s, and Gonzo’s truck had flames on the side and Sally Culpepper’s had a red suede dash. Someone out there understood us, our needs, our mad little schticks, the things without which we weren’t the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding), we were just guys and girls in pound shop clothes.
    In other words, this was a honey trap. If you’re giving guys like us kit like that to do a gig like this, it’s because either 1) you’re going to make a ton of profit or 2) you don’t think we have a rat’s chance of coming back alive. Most like, it’s both.
    But then again that was hardly news. If they could have done it themselves—if they hadn’t been too damned scared to take on what needed to be done, for fear of their silk-socked lives—they never would have come to us. The Free Company was on the clock and there were only three commandments: look after your friends; do the job; come out richer. To these the pencilneck was adding an apocrypha of penalties for excessive damage and materials overspend which we fully intended to ignore, because he was the tool of a litigation-wary softass outfit and they were afraid not only of death but also of flesh-eating lawyers and class actions and angry investors and antitrust and whatall, and the first and second commandments forbid stinting during a run. Thus we gazed upon his many provisos and codicils, and we said “bah.”
    Basic plan:

    1. go to place A (depot) and pick up item X (big box go boomboom)
    2. take it to place B (the pumping station), which is undergoing state Q (on fire,
v. v. bad
)
    3. introduce item X to place B (big box go boomboom, burning pumping station; burning pumping station, big box go boomboom.
Shake hands. Didn’t we meet once over at van Kottler’s place? Gosh, darn,
I believe we did!
) and instigate reaction P (boomboom, bang bang-a-diddly, BOOM) and hence state R (oxygen deprival, pseudo-vacuum,
schlurrrrrp
!) thus extinguishing B (∼Q, ∼P,
so sorry, dear old thing, have
to go, children have school tomorrow, ciao-ciao mwah-mwah
), thus
    4. making enough money to buy a small nation-state, farm watawabas and eat mango all day long (
boo-yah, sing hallelujah, we didn’t die
).

    The question I should have been asking all this time—the thing which we all should have been wanting to know, pressingly and insistently—is this: how the hell did part of the Pipe, the all-ways-up most enduring and secure object ever manufactured by human hands and human engineering; the triple-redundant, safe-tastic product of the most profoundly dedicated collaboration in history; how did this invulnerable thing come to catch fire at all? And when you put it