"It isn't when it goes past," Sam said, in a quiet tight voice. He
talked at the window, his back to the other two, his words meant
mostly for himself.
"It's not its going by. That doesn't bother me," he repeated. "It came
by my old place five or six times, I remember. That's why I finally
asked to be transferred out here, where it hardly ever goes by. But I
could have gotten used to it. I mean, you don't have to look at it, or
anything. It's just another car. Old, sure, but there's no difference.
A car goes by, that's all. Only...."
"You mean it's real?" the woman asked, in a low voice.
Her husband's eyes were looking out, toward the empty road, following
Sam's look.
"The Traveler," he said, without looking at his wife. "Sure, it's real.
Why'd you think they don't make that model of car any more? It's real.
I knew somebody who saw it, once."
"There might even be two or three Travelers," Sam said, watching the
distant glitter of light. There was certainly a car coming. Just a
car ... although it was still too far away to tell for sure.
"A haunted car!" the woman said, her eyes wider. "Gee!"
"It isn't a haunted car," her husband said. "It's just one of the
earliest makes of automatic highway cars. Everything automatic,
steering, destination set ... just like any car is, nowadays. Only it
wasn't quite perfect, somehow."
"They got into their car," Sam said, his eyes picking out distant,
microscopic details. The high flaring fins, the double headlamps ...
lit up, although it was broad daylight on the road. He knew what the
rest would be. It was moving so slowly. But it always moved slowly,
barely thirty miles an hour. As if somebody wanted you to look and
see....
"They just got in, the way anybody would do," Sam said. "They set a
destination, and the windows closed up, and the airconditioner went on,
and the car went out on the road."
"Only it never got there," the other man said. "Wherever it was going
to go."
"But ..." the woman looked puzzled. "Wouldn't anybody stop it? I mean,
wouldn't it run out of fuel, or ... well, how did the people in it get
out?"
"It does just what any car does," her husband told her. "It gets fuel
when it needs it. You can't just stop a robot control device. Not till
it's good and ready."
"But the people in it," she said. "They'd starve, or something...."
The car called the Traveler, rolling at the stately thirty miles an
hour it always held, was coming down the road now, and the two men
stood, watching. The woman, a little behind them, watched too, her face
growing whiter. No one said anything as the old fashioned car rolled
by, straight and steady down the highway, holding the center of the
lane as sharply as it always did.
There was a film of dust inside the windows, though the Traveler was
clean and shining outside. But the film did hide the white bone faces,
the despairing hands that had long ago stopped trying to break through
those closed windows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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