Highways in Hiding by George O. Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📖

intend to forget.

Sincerely,

Steve Cornell.

V

I did not go to the police.

They were sick of my face and already considering me a candidate for the paranoid ward. All I would have to do is go roaring into the station to tell them that I had uncovered some deep plot where the underground was using ornamental road signs to conceal their own network of roads and directions, and that the disappearance of Catherine Lewis, Dr. Thorndyke and the removal of the Harrisons were all tied together.

Instead, I closed my apartment and told everyone that I was going to take a long, rambling tourist jaunt to settle my nerves; that I thought getting away from the scene might finish the job that time and rest had started.

Then I started to drive. I drove for several days, not attempting to pace off miles, but covering a lot of aimless-direction territory. I was just as likely to spend four hours going North on one highway, and then take the next four coming back South on a parallel highway, and sometimes I even came back to the original starting place. After a week I had come no farther West than across that sliver of West Virginia into Eastern Ohio. And in Eastern Ohio I saw some more of the now familiar and suspicious road signs.

The emblem was right side up, and the signs looked as though they had not been up long.

I followed that road for seventy-five miles, and as I went the signs kept getting newer and newer until I finally came to a truck loaded with pipe, hardware, and ornamental ironwork. Leading the truck was one of those iron mole things.

I watched the automatic gear hoist one of the old pipe and white and black enamel roadsigns up by its roots, and place it on a truck full of discards. I watched the mole drive a corkscrew blade into the ground with a roaring of engine and bucking of the truck. It paused, pulled upward to bring out the screw and its load of dirt, stones and gravel. The crew placed one of the new signs in the cradle and I watched the machine set the sign upright, pour the concrete, tamp down the earth, and then move along down the road.

There was little point in asking questions of the crew, so I just took off and drove to Columbus as hard as I could make it.

Shined, cleaned, polished, and very conservatively dressed, I presented myself to the State Commissioner of Roads and Highways. I toyed briefly with the idea of representing myself as a minor official from some distant state like Alaska or the Virgin Islands, inquiring about these signs for official reasons. But then I knew that if I bumped into a hot telepath I'd be in the soup. On the other hand, mere curiosity on the part of a citizen, well oiled with compliments, would get me at the very least a polite answer.

The Commissioner's fifth-under-secretary bucked me down the hall; another office bucked me upstairs. A third buck-around brought me to the Department of Highways Marking and Road Maps.

A sub-secretary finally admitted that he might be able to help me. His name was Houghton. But whether he was telepath or esper did not matter because the Commission building was constructed right in the middle of a dead area.

I still played it straight. I told him I was a citizen of New York, interested in the new road signs, Ohio was to be commended, et cetera.

"I'm glad you feel that way," he said beaming.

"I presume these signs cost quite a bit more than the stark, black and white enamel jobs?"

"On the contrary," he said with pride. "They might, but mass-production methods brought the cost down. You see, the enamel jobs, while we buy several thousand of the plates for any highway, must be set up, stamped out, enamelled, and so on. The new signs are all made in one plant as they are needed; I don't suppose you know, but the highway number and any other information is put on the plate from loose, snap-in letters. That means we can buy so many thousand of this or that letter or number, and the necessary base plates and put them together as needed. They admitted that they were still running at a loss, but if they could get enough states interested, they'd eventually come out even, and maybe they could reduce the cost. Why, they even have a contingent-clause in the contract stating that if the cost were lowered, they would make a rebate to cover it. That's so the first users will not bide their time instead of buying now."

He went on and on and on like any bureaucrat. I was glad we were in a dead area because he'd have thrown me out of his office for what I was thinking.

Eventually Mr. Houghton ran down and I left.

I toyed around with the idea of barging in on the main office of the company but I figured that might be too much like poking my head into a hornet's nest.

I pocketed the card he gave me from the company, and I studied the ink-fresh road map, which he had proudly supplied. It pointed out in a replica panel of the fancy signs, that the State of Ohio was beautifying their highways with these new signs at no increased cost to the taxpayer, and that the dates in green on the various highways here and there gave the dates when the new signs would be installed. The bottom of the panel gave the Road Commissioner's name in boldface with Houghton's name below in slightly smaller print.

I smiled. Usually I get mad at signs that proclaim that such and such a tunnel is being created by Mayor So-and-so, as if the good mayor were out there with a shovel and hoe digging the tunnel. But this sort of thing would have been a worthy cause if it hadn't been for the sinister side.

I selected a highway that had been completed toward Cincinnati and made my way there with no waste of time.

The road was new and it was another beaut. The signs led me on, mile after mile and sign after sign.

I did not know what I was following, and I was not sure I knew what I was looking for. But I was on the trail of something and a bit of activity, both mental and physical, after weeks of blank-wall frustration made my spirits rise and my mental equipment sharper. The radio in the car was yangling with hillbilly songs, the only thing you can pick up in Ohio, but I didn't care. I was looking for something significant.

I found it late in the afternoon about half-way between Dayton and Cincinnati. One of the spokes was missing.

Fifty yards ahead was a crossroad.

I hauled in with a whine of rubber and brakes, and sat there trying to reason out my next move by logic. Do I turn with the missing spoke, or do I turn with the one that is not missing?

Memory came to my aid. The "ten o'clock" spoke had been missing back there near the Harrison farm. The Harrisons had lived on the left side of the highway. One follows the missing spoke. Here the "two o'clock" spoke was missing, so I turned to the right along the crossroad until I came to another sign that was complete.

Then, wondering, I U-turned and drove back across the main highway and drove for about five miles watching the signs as I went. The ones on my right had that trefoil emblem upside down. The ones on my left were right side up. The difference was so small that only someone who knew the significance would distinguish one from the other. So far as I could reason out, it meant that what I sought was in the other direction. When the emblem was upside down I was going away from, and when right side up, I was going toward.

Away from or toward what?

I U-turned again and started following the signs.

Twenty miles beyond the main highway where I'd seen the sign that announced the turn, I came upon another missing spoke. This indicated a turn to the left, and so I slowed down until I came upon a homestead road leading off toward a farmhouse.

I turned, determined to make like a man lost and hoping that I'd not bump into a telepath.

A few hundred yards in from the main road I came upon a girl who was walking briskly toward me. I stopped. She looked at me with a quizzical smile and asked me if she could be of any help.

Brashly, I nodded. "I'm looking for some old friends of mine," I said. "Haven't seen them for years. Named Harrison."

She smiled up at me. "I don't know of any Harrison around here." Her voice had the Ohio twang.

"No?"

"Just where do they live?"

I eyed her carefully, hoping my glance did not look like a wolf eyeing a lamb. "Well, they gave me some crude directions. Said I was to turn at the main highway onto this road and come about twenty miles and stop on the left side when I came upon one of those new road signs where someone had shot one of the spokes out."

"Spokes? Left side—" She mumbled the words and was apparently mulling the idea around in her mind. She was not more than about seventeen, sun-tanned and animal-alive from living in the open. I wondered about her. As far as I was concerned, she was part and parcel of this whole mysterious affair. No matter what she said or did, it was an obvious fact that the hidden road sign directions pointed to this farm. And since no one at seventeen can be kept in complete ignorance of the business of the parents, she must be aware of some of the ramifications.

After some thought she said, "No, I don't know of any Harrisons."

I grunted. I was really making the least of this, now that I'd arrived.

"Your folks at home?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"I think I'll drop in and ask them, too."

She shrugged. "Go ahead," she said with the noncommittal attitude of youth. "You didn't happen to notice whether the mailbox flag was up, did you?"

I hadn't, but I espied back quickly and said, "No, it isn't."

"Then the mailman hasn't been to deliver," she said. "Mind if I ride back to the house with you, mister?"

"Hop in."

She smiled brightly and got in quickly. I took off down the road toward the house at an easy pace. She seemed interested in the car, and finally said, "I've never been in a car like this before. New?"

"Few weeks," I responded.

"Fast?"

"If you want to make it go fast. She'll take this rocky road at fifty, if anyone wants to be so foolish."

"Let's see."

I laughed. "Nobody but an idiot would tackle a road like this at fifty."

"I like to go fast. My brother takes it at sixty."

That, so far as I was concerned, was youthful exaggeration. I was busy telling her all the perils of fast driving when a rabbit came barrelling out of the bushes along one side and streaked across in front of me.

I twitched the wheel. The car went out of the narrow road and up on the shoulder, tilting quite a bit. Beyond the rabbit I swung back into the road, but not before the youngster had grabbed my arm to keep from being tossed all over the front seat.

Her grip was like a hydraulic vise. My arm went numb and my fingers went limp on the wheel. I struggled with my left hand to spin the wheel to keep on the narrow, winding road and my foot hit the brake to bring the car down, but fast.

Taking a deep breath as we stopped, I shook my right hand by holding it in my left at the wrist. I was a mass of tingling pins and needles because she had grabbed me just above the elbow. It felt as though it would have taken only a trifle more to pinch my arm off and leave me with a bloody stump.

"Sorry, mister," she said breathlessly, her eyes wide open. Her face was white around the corners of the mouth and at the edges of her nose. The whiteness of the flesh under the deep tan gave her a completely frightened look, far more than the shake-up could have produced.

I reached over and took her hand. "That's a mighty powerful grip you—"

The flesh of her hand was hard and solid. Not the meaty solidity of good tone, fine training and excellent health. It was the solidity of a—all I could think of at the time was