nearly got through an entire decade without being involved in a serious traffic accident, but not quite. While passing through the Nigerian rain-forest one day he killed a human child. It wasn’t his fault—the little girl ran right out in front of him, and even though he braked with maximum effect, controlling the resultant zigzag with magnificent skill, he couldn’t avoid her. The locals wouldn’t accept that, of course; they claimed that he should have steered off the road, and would have done if he hadn’t been more concerned about his load than his victim, but he was fully exonerated by the inquest. He was only off the road for a week, but he was more shaken up by the experience than he dared let on to Audrey Preacher.
“I’m not depressed,” he assured her. “It’s the sort of thing that’s always likely to happen, especially to someone who regularly does longitudinal runs through Africa. Statistically speaking, I’m unlikely to avoid having at least one more fatal in the next ten years, no matter how good I am. It wouldn’t have helped if I’d swerved—she’d still be dead, and I could have easily killed other people that I couldn’t see, as well as damaging myself.”
“You were absolutely right not to swerve,” the robopsychologist assured him. “You obeyed the Highway Code to the very best of your ability. It could have been worse, and you prevented that. The Company can’t give you any kind of commendation, in the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve one. You mustn’t brood on those archival statistics, though. You mustn’t start thinking about accidents as if they were inevitable, even though there’s a sense in which they are.”
Robopsychologists, Tom thought, talk too much exhaust gas—but he was careful not to give any indication of his opinion, lest it delay his return to the road.
The same archival statistics that told Tom that he would probably have another serious accident within the next ten years told him that he wasn’t at all likely to have another before his first decade of service was concluded, but statistics, like robopsychologists, sometimes talked exhaust gas. Tom, had been back on the road for less than a month when the worst solar storm for two hundred years kicked off while he was driving north through the Yukon, heading for Alaska and the Behring Bridge with a load bound for Okhotsk.
The electric failures prompted by the storm caused blackouts all along the route and made a mess of communications, but Tom didn’t see any need to worry about that. While the news was still flowing smoothly it was pointed out that the Aurora Borealis would be putting on its best show in living memory, and that the best place from which to view the display would be the middle of the Behring Bridge, where surface-generated light-pollution would be minimal. Tom was looking forward to that—and so, it seemed, were lots of other people. All the way through Alaska the northwest-bound traffic was building up to unprecedented levels, to the point where the few broadcasts that were getting out began to advise people not to join the rush. It wasn’t just the aurora; thousands of people who had always intended to take a trip over the world-famous living bridge one day, but had not yet found a good reason for going to Kamchatka, took advantage of the excuse.
The bridge had seven lanes in each direction, but Tom had the best position of all. The Highway Code required him to stick to the slowest lane, which was on the right-hand side of the bridge, facing north and the Aurora. Many of the other vehicles slowed down too, so the traffic in the lanes immediately to his left wasn’t going much faster, but the vast majority of drivers had put their vehicles on automatic pilot so that they could watch the aurora, and the automata were careful to maximize the traffic flow, thus keeping speeds up to sensible levels in the outer lanes. The bridge was very busy, but not so busy that there was any threat of a traffic jam.
Tom had eyes enough to watch the aurora as well as the road, and attention enough to divide between the two with some to spare, but he seemed to be one of very few vehicles on the bridge that did—there were no other giants he could see, ahead of him, behind him or traveling in the other direction. Even if the other drivers who were on the bridge had noticed what he noticed, therefore, they would not have been sufficiently familiar with the living bridge to realize how profoundly odd it was.
It was not the mere fact that the bridge as moving that was odd—it was, after all, a living bridge, and the sea was becoming increasingly choppy—but the way it was moving. Although a shorter vehicle might not have noticed anything out of the ordinary, Tom had no difficulty discerning what seemed to be slow long-amplitude waves of a sort he had never perceived there before. There was nothing violent or febrile about them at first, though, so he was not at all anxious as he rooted idly through his archive in search of a possible explanation.
The archive could not give him one, because it could not piece together the links in an unprecedented chain of causality—but it brought certain data to the surface of Tom’s consciousness that allowed him to put two and two and two and two together to make eight when the vibration began to grow more violent, at a rapidly-accelerating pace. By the time he saw the rip opening up in the centre of the bridge’s desperate flesh, he had a pretty good idea what must be happening—but he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it, or whether there was anything at all that he could do. He reported it, but there was nothing the traffic police or Company HQ could do about it either; neither of them had time even to advise him to slow down and be careful.
What Tom had reasoned out, rightly or wrongly, followed from the fact that, in addition to their other effects, the showers of charged particles associated with solar storms caused flickers in the Earth’s magnetic field. Such flickers could, if the subterranean circumstances happened to be propitious, intensify and accelerate long-range magma flows in the mantle. Intensified long-range magma flows in the mantle could, if conditions in the crust were propitious, cause long-distance earth-tremors. Because it was a living structure, the Behring Bridge was able to react to minor earth-tremors in such a way as no negate their effects on its traffic, and was bound to do so by its programming. Long-distance tremors were not problematic in themselves. Unfortunately, long-distance tremors caused by long-range magma flows could build up energy at crisis-points, which could result in sudden and profound tremors that were, in seismological terms, the next worst things to detonations.
If any such crisis-point happened to be located directly beneath one of the bridge’s holdfasts, it was theoretically possible for the bridge’s own reflexive adjustments to cause an abrupt breach in its fabric. The living structure was, of course, programmed to react to any breach in its fabric with considerable alacrity—but adding one more “if” to a chain that was already awkwardly long suggested to Tom that sealing the breach and protecting the traffic might not be at all easy while the energy of the tremor at the crisis-point was spiking.
It would be highly misleading to suggest that Tom “knew” all this before the instant when the Behring Bridge began to tear, even though all the disparate elements were present in his versatile consciousness. It would be even more misleading to report that he “knew” how he ought to react. Nevertheless, he did have to react when the situation exploded, and react he did.
According to the Highway Code, what Tom should have done was to brake, in such a fashion as to give himself the maximum chance of slowing to a halt before he reached the breach in the bridge caused by the diagonal tear in its fabric. That would give the active parapet of the living bridge the best possible chance to throw a few anchors over him and hold him safely while the rent was repaired—if the rent turned out to be swiftly repairable.
Instead, Tom swerved violently to his left, cutting across the six outer lines of westbound traffic and snaking through the central barrier to plant his engine across the outer lanes of the eastbound carriageway.
The immediate effect of Tom’s maneuver was to cause a dozen cars to crash into him, some of them at high velocity—thus racking up more serious accidents within two or three seconds than a statistical average would have allocated to him for a century-long career.
One
