The Big Lifters Read online

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

  For Joel Hughes, who surveyed those high Mojave wastes with me; and for Leik Myrabo, who’d rather fly.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Wherever my capering in these pages is across thin ice, I bear all responsibility - because Fred Ullmer taught me how much fun preliminary design can be, and ought to be. Still, I would never have begun matching maglevs with sectional charts, nor existing power grids with orbital paths, had it not been for Professor Leik Myrabo’s visions of future propulsion systems. The Master’s Thesis of Sacheverel Eldrid, with its scramjet vehicle, preceded me as a beacon - from which I strayed at my pleasure and, from an engineering standpoint, probably at my peril.

  I am also in debt to Dr. R. L. Forward for the propulsion data he furnished; and, finally, to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The LLNL, as I ended this book, released its Request for Proposals for Research In Ground-To-Orbit Laser Propulsion. They knew it all the time. . . .

  Plain truth is what happens when people ran out of ideas.

  - Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera

  PROLOGUE

  May, 1965

  Manson Perkins knew the rules, and the tricks, of interstate hauling. Shortly after noon he crossed the New Mexico state line from Texas, taking the bumps and delays of State Highway 88 to avoid that weigh station at Clovis because he didn’t have an overweight permit, wheeling back toward the west onto the main highway in early afternoon at the sun-blistered hamlet of Melrose. After a half-million miles jockeying the Peterbilt, he was tanned on his left forearm, pale under his shirt, and wiry all over. His fingers on both hands showed the marks of maintaining heavy equipment; the bum scar from his Airco welder was hidden by his denim trousers. He had lost count of the times he’d explained that pool of smooth, slick hairless skin to women.

  It was already one hot sonofabitch outside, heat waves squeezing the aroma from a billion late May sage blossoms out there on the hardpan horizon, an aroma musky and mouth-wateringly pervasive that a man’s nose didn’t get used to. Diesel fumes weren’t like that, but Perkins was smelling them now and then. Probably that goddamn fuel fitting he had replaced himself, doing his best with what he had because when you underbid the big outfits, you had to cut your expenses somehow and you weren’t smart to do it by dropping your dues to the National Transport Coalition. Scary things happened to truckers who plied the highways without NTC protection.

  He wished for air-conditioning because it was going to get hotter still, New Mexico blacktop soaking up the heat and feeding it back into those old retreads until, when you stopped for a walkaround, you didn’t touch a tread without gloves, not unless you wanted second-degree bums. If you ever wondered what high speeds and hot blacktop did to tires on an overloaded rig, two minutes of studying any highway shoulder would give you a broad hint. Black curls of shredded rubber, flying explosively from overheated tire casings, lined highways from Maine to California, a few from automobiles but most of them big fat chunks from disintegrating rig tires. Perkins vowed he would keep it down to seventy or so. A tire change out there was murder. And later in August, when migrating tarantulas freckled the blacktop in countless numbers . . but he didn’t want to think about that. Perkins had the knack of forgetting things he didn’t want to think about. It hadn’t killed him yet.

  Caution told him to stop at Fort Sumner for a nap and to recheck the tiedowns on that bodacious load of line pipe he was hauling to a wildcatter near Albuquerque. Perkins popped a pill instead of the nap, peered into his rearviews to satisfy himself about the security of his load, and told caution to go to hell. Time was money.

  The wildcatter knew about time and money; that’s why he had contracted with Perkins, an independent who owned his rig and would bust his ass for a schedule bonus, and devil take the hindmost. The great advantage of an Indy was that, by doing his own maintenance, he came in with low bids. The hidden disadvantage was that while Perkins took no nonsense from straw bosses or ordinary traffic either - what five-thousand-pound Lincoln was going to argue, right or wrong, with a vehicle that weighed the same as eighteen Lincolns? - Perkins might not be much of a safety inspector, especially of his own work. Fuel fittings, for example. Those tiedowns, for another.

  Steel line pipe is heavy stuff, fifty pounds a linear foot, and Perkins was hauling well over a thousand feet of it on the flatbed. Broad tiedown straps kept the bundle secure, cinched up so tight a man could thump it with a finger and hear a note like a bass fiddle. If it didn’t sound like that, you ratcheted the strap another few notches so you wouldn’t have to play pickup sticks with thirty-five tons of steel pipe. But time and dust and a hot sun will have their way with fabric strapping. If Manson Perkins had stopped at Fort Sumner and thumped that strap nearest to the cab, he would have heard only a soft plop like a plugged nickel hitting a pillow.

  * * * *

  Exercising her squint lines into the afternoon sun, Nell Peel judged that she and her grandson, Johnny, would pass Cline’s Comers in a half hour, which would put them in Albuquerque an hour after that. She drove the white Peel VW microbus as she always did on these long arrow-straight stretches, flat-out, knowing the ’59 bus would do that forever although Nell couldn’t exceed the speed limit even if she wanted to. Without a tail wind the bus would do exactly her age, sixty-two, and because her teenage grandson knew vehicles inside out, he wasn’t likely to complain that she was driving at granny-pace.

  “This is a nice one, Gram,” said John Wesley Peel from the passenger seat, holding up a specimen of interlocked gypsum plates to the light. The stone filtered sunlight like alabaster, a gleam the color of flesh, almost the same color as the boy’s blond hair. That specimen would catch every ray when embedded in clear plastic. Unlike most rock hounds, Nell Peel felt that it was cheating to slice into a stone that the good Lord had created with ready-made beauty. Instead, and with her grandson’s help, she had turned a comer of their garage into a workshop where they learned all the tricks of embedding such examples of God’s handiwork. Though he might still want to be a trucker like his dead father, the boy was naturally gifted with his hands. A regular wizard with machinery, too.

  Nell had explained to Johnny that she had misgivings about encasing God-made beauty in man-made plastic, but high technology was no abomination when it was used to reveal a higher way. Johnny had asked, like evangelists on TV? Well, she’d admitted, like some of them. She sold the cubes of plastic, with specimens of quartz or naturally polished agate or gypsum, as paperweights and bookends. Privately, to the boy, she claimed they were prayers of thanks for these delicately shaped natural wonders. A body simply could not understand why men craved flying to the moon, or even into vacuum, when the earth was so obviously made for them. Johnny had argued about that for a while, but eventually he saw it her way.

  Now that her husband, Leonard, had lost interest in her outings - she knew the new TV was his toy, though he denied it - Nell thanked the Almighty every night that the boy was such a willing companion on these overnight trips to the Pecos, or Socorro, or Vaughn. Oh, he had his faults. She knew Johnny dated some suspiciously flippant girls, and cussed when fixing machinery, and his excuses on prayer meeting nights could get mighty creative; but his father, Evan, the only son of Nell and Leonard Peel, had been the same way at seventeen.

  And dead at thirty-four, in Evan’s own eighteen-wheeler with his wife, Ruth, by his side, in a senseless disaster that made headlines. No, not senseless, Nell amended; the good Lord had His reasons, though she suspected it must have been a judgment on Ruth somehow. She never said that to Johnny, though; it was hard enough bringing up a grandson who was half scholar and the other half daredevil, without casting shadows over the sunlit memory of his mother. Pretty little thing,
and completely devoted to Evan and little Johnny, but . . . God’s judgment. How else could you reconcile it?

  In the rearview, which vibrated enough to make images fuzzy, Nell saw the glint of reflection from something miles behind, but catching them. She glanced at her grandson before attending to the highway, noting the way he grinned at the specimens he held. A smile to warm a grandmother’s heart and rock a young girl on her heels, but not with those whiskers. “You should start shaving oftener, Johnny,” she said.

  “I will, if you’ll learn to call me Wes,” he said. “The guys call me Wes, the principal called me Wes when he handed me my diploma. Dad called me Wes,” he finished with the clincher.

  She sighed and turned down the comers of her mouth in that line that said more about disapproval than all the scriptures in the Book. “And everywhere that Evan went, his son is sure to go,” she said, teasing him without malice, glancing at the rearview again. The glint had grown fast, so fast that she estimated its speed at seventy-five or more, and it was not a car that was moving up in the left lane. It was a big rig, with a legend cleverly painted on the bumper so it read correctly in a rearview mirror. Perkins Freight. “I suppose you still intend to follow Evan into an Autocar, like that thing right behind us.”

  The boy craned his neck. “It’s a Peterbilt, Gram,” he corrected, talking louder now because the whine of rig tires and the clatter of a big overtaking diesel was resonating the little VW bus. “Boy, he’s got the hammer down, hasn’t he?” Nell opened her mouth to comment on the way he loved to use trucker jargon, and kept it open as she saw the pronghorn antelope bound onto the highway shoulder. Pronghorns knew better than this, she thought, but all of God’s creatures made mistakes. All she said as she hit the brakes was a faint, dismayed, “Oh!”

  Manson Perkins was already alongside the white VW van, highballing at close to eighty, when he saw the white-marked tan of a pronghorn that just seemed to come from nowhere. For one instant he thought, “Teach the damn’ fool a lesson, he’ll go under the chassis of my Pete,” but he knew it didn’t always work out that way, sometimes a deer leaped at just the wrong instant, and then you were picking bones out of your radiator while your coolant trickled away on thirsty desert soil. Perkins had air brakes, and he used them hard.

  A big rig can stop in an astonishingly short distance if nothing interferes with the process. But the little van was already squealing its brake drums, its blunt rump skidding at a slight angle as the pronghorn turned in panic, leaping in their direction, then away to safety. Over that squeal and the lower-pitched howl of huge retreads ripping at the surface of blacktop came two reports, loud as shotgun blasts. A slowly separating retread can throw the whole tread in no time flat if it is skidding hard under a heavy load at eighty miles an hour. And when that tire goes, on the outside right rear of the trailer, all its load is transferred to the dual adjacent to it. And if that one is none too good to start with . . .

  It had been none too good, and it got worse in a god-awful hurry. The sudden drag of those blown tires caused the trailer to whip viciously, nosing to the right, its inertia trying to whip Perkins and the cab to the left through the swivel mount. Perkins steered to straighten out, the entire rig bucking and shuddering like a skate over a washboard, and the forward tiedown parted then, and instead of slamming the barrier Perkins kept between the pipe and the rear of his cab, that line pipe began to roll sideways as it slid forward.

  Nell and the boy cried out to each other, seeing long shadows a split second before the first section of pipe slithered forward, sideways and down, and then the van’s windshield burst before Nell’s eyes, her door springing partly open as the roof buckled within inches of her head. She screamed and ducked toward Johnny, unencumbered by seat belts that she never wore though the boy always buckled up religiously. Johnny ducked too, but lashed a corded arm out to grab the steering wheel because they were still doing at least fifty.

  And now Perkins felt his rig begin to jackknife, hearing the tolling of huge dull bells as his load started to cascade off the side, and from the comer of his eye he could see lengths of line pipe hitting the highway and flipping. He had time to hope the mass of that fuckin’ Kraut van would be a barrier to keep the flatbed from coming all the way around, knowing it would have to be filled with concrete to do it, but of course the van was so much tinfoil to a rig weighing forty times as much, and Perkins let up on the brakes hoping to power his rig out of this hopeless slide with the flatbed making an L to the cab as it batted the little van.

  John Wesley Peel felt his grandmother’s arms circle his shoulders, her foot no longer on the brake after something huge slammed them forward, and he blinked tiny shards of glass from his eyes as he tried with one arm to steer the VW bus onto the right-hand shoulder. Long gray forms the size of telephone poles, flipping like cheerleaders’ batons, were slamming the bus, one of them sliding across the blacktop, and because it weighed as much as the bus, it forced the little vehicle to slew toward the shoulder. The boy knew that the entire left side of the bus was smashed in, including its top, but the trick was to ride it out without the kind of sudden stop that would catapult his unbelted grandmother through a jag-gedly smashed windshield.

  They might have made it but for the bent length of line pipe that flew completely over the Peterbilt, gouging into blacktop thinner than it should have been, and it was bent flat enough that Perkins’s left front tire actually rode over it. There were still several hundred linear feet of pipe on the flatbed, like arrows left unspent in a quiver.

  With a huge steel pipe buckling and clanging beneath its chassis and the flatbed, a tie-rod buckled and then there was no steering control left, and Manson Perkins flung his door wide as the cab began to tip, hoping to fall free. But the cab lighted itself, slewing sideways, and Perkins cracked his skull against the windshield before falling unconscious into the passenger footwell. The Peterbilt did what it did best, commanding the road, juggemauting over obstacles, coming to rest with a great shudder, still upright. Like many another long-hauler, Manson Perkins owed his life to that massive cab.

  Though famous for its tippiness, the VW bus never actually rolled until after it stopped upright, only to be slammed again by the flatbed, now parted from its cab. The remaining pipes did what round objects do: they rolled off the flatbed, one of them standing vertical and then toppling like a felled tree, very slowly, and an undamaged VW bus might have taken this insult without its roof collapsing very far. But the roof was already creased heavily inward.

  John Wesley Peel screamed “Gram!” as he saw and felt the central roof area mash downward, forcing the little vehicle onto its right side with the boy beneath and his grandmother pinned just above him. The sudden impact at his right hip nearly knocked him unconscious, but the pain kept him awake, and though he could move only his right arm in the long ensuing silence, he could see why his grandmother had not toppled onto him. In fact, he could not turn his head to avoid seeing her, so tightly were they pinned, and very close together.

  Her head had been caught between the collapsed roof and the sturdy steel partition at his seat back, and while her face was turned toward him, it was not a face he had ever seen before but one that he would see again many times for as long as he lived. It did not look like a face at all. It looked like a Halloween mask lying folded on a table, two inches wide, but no Halloween mask ever had such a wealth of detail, the kinds of detail only surgeons would ever see in a well-run world.

  Wes Peel, struggling against madness, thought about the way his world was run for thirty-seven minutes, until the syringe went into his free right arm. It was another fifteen minutes before they got him free, and still later before they realized how thoroughly his hip was smashed. They said he was all through with football, scholarship or no scholarship. They said he would be lucky if he ever walked again.

  ONE

  “Enough of this ‘strange bedfellows’ bullshit,” said Joseph Alton Weatherby, placing one thick-fingered hand on the repo
rt before him so gently that the ash did not drop from his cigar. “Peel is killing us by inches!” Back in the 1980’s, to judge by his heavy breathing, Weatherby would have slammed that hand down; but now, in April 1995, experience had taught him to use violence only as a last resort. Of the nine men surrounding the National Transport Coalition’s boardroom table, not one was a stranger to violence. If you came up through the ranks of interstate trucking - and every member of the NTC Board had, including Chairman Weatherby - you had skinned your knuckles a few times. Or worse.

  Antony Ciano, once called The Jersey Lily for his habit of sending bouquets to the funerals of competitors, flicked his copy of the report with a forefinger. “So find us a better source of short-haul rigs awreddy,” said Ciano, who made it a point never to raise his voice because it implied loss of control. And Antony Ciano controlled a great deal in Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and most of Delaware. “Peel’s short-haul rigs are keepin’ a lot of my teamsters competitive. You want to question your own figures?”

  “I want,” said Weatherby slowly, as a flush crept up his size nineteen neck, “to get off this treadmill to oblivion.”

  Two of the board members leaned back, recognizing the signs. When Joey got his rhetoric cranked up he could steal a phrase from the best. But Joey Weatherby sensed that this brisk Pittsburgh afternoon was not the time for a long filibuster. “I’m telling you guys, it’s not just . . what’d you call it, Ciano? Another shakeout of old-fashioned, big-ticket rigs? There are fewer new rigs on the interstates today, for God’s sake!” He waved toward a broad window and the traffic spanning the Allegheny River in the near distance, and sighed.

  When Weatherby sighed, his entire two hundred and fifty pounds seemed to deflate. “Look at the figures. Peel set up a freight brokerage business that uses railroads a lot; not a fly-by-night scam, but a brokerage the independents can trust. Now Peel’s Hayward plant is expanding like a goddamn cancer and our national ton-mileage is lower. Even our big triplet rigs in Wyoming and Nevada are hurting. Figure it out: Other short-haul suppliers are copying Peel, and more double-stack railroad cargoes are trundling through Cheyenne. What goes by rail doesn’t go by truck. Is that a clear and present danger, or isn’t it?”