Manalone Read Free Page B

aspect of the high-speed Hover-line operation which was still amenable to human judgement.
    Then he felt the punch of the acceleration forcing him back into his seat as the car’s jets screamed with the urgency of trying to insert it accurately into a safe position on the high-line between a series of already speeding cars. The car, travelling now like an ambitious bullet, left the pre-entry section and climbed straight into position astride the highspeed rail, its jet-scream dying as the linear motors took hold and wound them up to their final speed. The insertion had been accomplished.
    As terminal velocity was reached, the acceleration pressures ceased. Manalone undid his safety belt and waited for the hostess to make her round. He ordered black coffee, because he needed to think, then settled down to review the evening in detail, utilizing his capacity for almost total recall.
    As before, he was unable to explain the photo-play which he had seen. He had the feeling that even when he had analysed the data, he would still be no nearer an answer. He had developed that acute technological sense of knowing intuitively what an answer should look like, and was beset by a feeling that a great many pieces were missing from the puzzle. The problem was not that there were missing pieces, but exactly what was the nature of the puzzle from which they were missing.
    Paul Raper was a journalist and scientific editor of a national daily newsfax. The latter post he held largely due to Manalone’s ability as a part-time scientific sleuth. Raper decided the line of enquiry, and Manalone ghosted a lot of the best copy. The journalist had the contacts and the ideas, whilst Manalone patiently supplied the facts and the interpretation. Alone, neither of them would have achieved much notice, but together they had achieved new standards in scientific reporting.
    This time,Manalone felt he had drawn a blank. Unless analysis revealed something that his trained intuition had failed to find, the result of his evening’s work was due to be relegated to the ever increasing store of background material which provided the fund of insight from which he worked. No information gained was ever wasted – but a great many things, of themselves, would produce no copy.
    The request to re-fasten seat belts meant they had slipped the coastal highline and begun to decelerate into Bognor Terminal. At first this was manifest as a gradual lessening of the linear motor’s thrust, but as they reached the station the car’s jets went into retro to positively arrest their momentum and fetch the car to a safe halt precisely on the exit ramp.
    Outside the Bognor Terminal he hurried to a tramcall post and signalled for an autram. Long gone were the days when private individuals could find roadspace to operate their own vehicles. Now only a few trades and essential services were permitted autonomous vehicles. For the rest of the population there was no alternative to the speedy, economic autrams, whose small size and integrated computer control made the best use of the available roadspace in a traffic situation which would otherwise have congested itself to a complete standstill a century ago.
    In less than a minute a small driverless tramcar, diverging from the mainstream traffic to follow the particular sub-loop wire buried beneath the surface of the road, drew up before him. He climbed in, tended his ComCredit card to the card reader, and dialled his destination code. The route-box muttered to itself uncertainly, then rejected his figures and displayed a sequence of its own devising.
    Surprised, Manalone checked the new readout against the area map, and saw that the vehicle was proposing to set him down at the end of his turning, rather than deliver him to his door. It was then that he remembered that due to the massive clearance for re-building in the area adjacent to his home, the local street sub-loops became inoperative from two hundred thirty hours till dawn to