Читать книгу All the Colors of Darkness - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 7

CHAPTER 3

Only one New York paper gave the Universal Transmitting Company’s opening front-page coverage. Other papers across the country treated the announcement as a filler, usually under the terse heading, AGAIN? There was little editorial comment. Even the newspaper editors were tired of pointing out, with suitably cutting sarcasm, that Universal Trans was merely making propaganda to gain itself a temporary respite from the troubles that plagued it.

The average citizen was thoroughly fed up with Universal Trans. He was not just unenthusiastic, he was uncurious to the point of indifference. As a result, the hour of the opening found the Universal Trans terminals everywhere deserted except for employees.

The swank, half-finished New York Terminal on Eighth Avenue south of Pennsylvania Station was no exception. Ron Walker entered at eight-one that Monday morning, and looked about with the sinking feeling that he’d been had. Getting the assignment had been a problem, not because anyone else wanted it, but because his boss wanted no time wasted on Universal Trans, then or ever. The only thing that kept Walker from turning around and walking out was the knowledge that he had wasted twenty minutes of his editor’s time in arguing about the newsworthiness of Universal Trans, and he damned well had to produce some kind of story.

Walker stopped at the information desk and was directed to the mezzanine, where he found a row of ticket windows backed up by ticket agents. He asked for a ticket to Philadelphia. He was sold a ticket to Philadelphia, presented with an artistically printed pamphlet on the joys of transmitting, issued a free fifty-thousand-dollar insurance policy, and directed to a passenger gate.

There he surrendered his ticket, walked through a turnstile and down a short passageway that angled off from it, and seconds later found himself incoherently shouting out his story from a phone booth in Philadelphia. Almost before his startled editor had hung up Walker was back in New York with a follow-up story, and minutes after a messenger reached him with a generous sum for traveling expenses he was on the phone from London. After that performance not even the most hardened skeptic could deny that Universal Trans was in fact open for business.

But the heat-fogged lethargy of the man in the street was not easily penetrated on that sultry July day. By ten o’clock there was only a scattering of pedestrians standing with noses pressed against the towering plate-glass windows of the Manhattan Terminal. A nattily dressed young man waved at them from a platform, stepped through a transmitter, and emerged on another platform eighty feet away, still waving. He moved six feet sideways, stepped through a second transmitting setup, and returned to his starting place.

The average New Yorker watched for three minutes, failed to figure out the gag, and went his way grumbling. Then at ten o’clock a Universal Trans employee with a genius for promotion plucked a shapely brunette from her seat behind a ticket window, sent out for a bathing suit, and set the young man to chasing her from platform to platform. Within minutes the most colossal traffic jam in the entire history of Manhattan was under way.

It required only one final touch of genius to plunge Eighth Avenue into complete chaos. At eleven-thirty the terminal manager supervised the draping of an enormous sign across the front windows, COME IN AND TRY IT YOURSELF—FREE OF CHARGE!

Forthwith the crowd surged into the terminal. The early arrivals may have been more interested in chasing the brunette than in transmitting, but transmit they did, and the brunette was quickly retired as an impediment to traffic. Police fought to keep order in the lobby, and bawled lustily for reinforcements. Cars were abandoned in the street when their drivers, tired of waiting for traffic to clear, fought their way into the terminal to see what all the fuss was about. Lines spread around the huge room in fantastic coils as one New Yorker after another cautiously mounted to the platform, stepped through to the opposite platform, returned, and was forcibly moved towards an exit.

No reliable count was made of the number of people who transmitted that day. Universal Trans claimed a hundred thousand, which was absurd, but one reporter watched for an hour with a stop watch, and stated that a minimum of twenty and a maximum of forty people passed through the lobby transmitters every minute. In midafternoon a change of procedure limited the travelers to a one-way trip across the lobby, thus doubling the number that could be accommodated.

Lines still jammed the lobby at midnight, and business was brisk at the ticket windows. Travelers coming down from Pennsylvania Station to watch the show found their way into the ticket lines, and as a result arrived at their destination hours or days before they were expected. The airlines were receiving an avalanche of cancellations. Wall Street was digging itself out from a panic of late selling that plunged transportation stocks to unheard of lows. Universal Trans stock had probably soared to a spectacular level, but no one knew for sure because there were no sales. The harassed Universal Trans stockholders were gloatingly hanging onto it.

To any point in the world where Universal Trans chose to set up a terminal, the traveling time by transmitter was zero; or, to be precise, it was the time a passenger required to stroll through an entrance gate, down a short passageway, and out of an exit gate. Boards of directors of many corporations were in session that Monday night, bleakly contemplating that fact and weighing its significance. The more farsighted of them found its meaning ominous, and set about balancing inventories, closing factories, ordering retoolings, and bellowing frantically at research divisions for new products.

The age of the automobile, the air age, were finished. Demolished. Brushed aside to crumble into ignoble oblivion.

And for the first time in three years the directors of the Universal Transmitting Company went to bed early and slept well.