"C. M. Kornbluth & Donald A. Wollheim - Interplane Express" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

He held out a fistful of Swojian coins after the cap was hack on; the station man took a discriminating
assortment and sped him on his way.
He couldn't read any of the signs, and there was damned little scenery to inspect. But it was plain
where he was going when the Swojian disappeared from the markers to he replaced by strings of circles
of different sizes.
McFee speeded up again. Signs flashed past, one of them, big and blackly printed, in Swojian. He
marvelled, and as the car plunged into a tunnel took out his handbook, turned to the section on highway
signs.
Leafing through them, paying little attention to the driving, he murmured: "AhтАФlooks like itтАФ" and
turned to the translation on the next page:

BRIDGE OUT

There was a shattering crash; McFee plunged down, far down, conscious of bodily and mental
agony, feeling the steering-wheel come loose and come off in his hand while he wrestled with it. It was
like a skid but many times worse. The lights of the tunnel had gone out for him; he wondered if his eyes
had been crushed.
No, not that, for patches of roadway were falling up past him; he saw that plainly. For a moment he
hung suspended in mid-air, then dropped heavily to the ground. Spike fell beside him at a few yards
distance a moment later with a ponderous, crunching noise, then exploded into flames as McFee
scrambled for shelter beside a railway trestle's big girders.
Sadly he considered while his car burned into embers. The girders shook in his hand as a train
passed overhead. He looked around for markers; he had fallen into some damned gully or other; cars
were whizzing past on a hill road half up the side. He mournfully shook his head as the West Virginia
State Police bounced a motorcycle over the rocks of the valley and yelled:
"Anybody hurt?"
"Nope," he called hack. "Only me, and I'm all right." The trooper had him make out an accident form
and wanted to know what the hell had happened. McFee didn't bother to explain. He went from the
highway patrol's cabin to a railroad station and returned to New York only long enough to buy a new
Cadillon Eight and shoot up to Springfield.
The Interplane Highway was gone; there was a new road crew there who had been recently
transferred to Springfield from Oregon. They didn't know anything except that they were supposed to
keep their mouths shut. Also they were being paid by checks on the Department of Justice instead of the
Department of Labor.
McFee returned to New York after a fruitless week scouting New England to read in the papers of
the arrest for graft of the Connecticut Highway Commission. He observed quietly while the case was
jammed through in record time and the Commission sent to Alcatraz.
He noticed also the resignation of the Secretary of StateтАФ"for reasons of health." He noticed that the
Secretary immediately undertook the running of the utilities system of Los Angeles, a full-time job which
he performed to perfection.
Some years later McFee noticed that the Highway Commission, officially in Alcatraz, was seen in
Panama having a riotously fine time on brand-new money.
And just the other day McFee was in Washington on business. He noted, in the parking-lot attached
to the new State Department building, a car of curious make. On the hood he discerned, imperfectly
scratched out, peak-and-valley characters.
"They tried again," he said to himself. "And this timeтАФit went through!"
He was last seen in a new Cadillon Eighteen, studying a road-map to Springfield.