A Scanner Darkly

Barris, in his regular voice, but still grinning widely, said, “You’ve got a bent choke shaft. The whole carb should be rebuilt. Otherwise the choke’s going to shut on you while you’re driving along the freeway and then you’ll find your motor is flooded and dead and some asshole will rear-end you. And possibly in addition that raw gas washing down the cylinder walls—if it goes on long enough—will wash the lubrication away, so your cylinders will be scored and permanently damaged. And then you’ll need them rebored.”

“Why is the choke rod bent?” Arctor asked.

Shrugging, Barris resumed taking apart the carb, he did not answer. He left that up to Arctor and to Charles Freck, who knew nothing about engines, especially complex repairs like this.

Coming out of the house, Luckman, wearing a snazzy shirt and tight high-style Levi jeans, carrying a book and wearing shades, said, “I phoned and they’re checking to see what a rebuilt carb will set you back for this car. They’ll phone in a while, so I left the front door open.”

Barris said, “You could put a four-barrel on instead of this two, while you’re at it. But you’d have to put on a new manifold. We could pick up a used one for not very much.”

“It would idle too high,” Luckman said, “with like a Rochester four-barrel—is that what you mean? And it wouldn’t shift properly. It wouldn’t upshift.”

“The idling jets could be replaced with smaller jets,” Barris said, “that would compensate. And with a tach he could watch his rpms, so it didn’t over-rev. He’d know by the tach when it wasn’t upshifting. Usually just backing off on the gas pedal causes it to upshift if the automatic linkage to the transmission doesn’t do it. I know where we can get a tach, too. In fact, I have one.”

“Yeah,” Luckman said, “well, if he tromped down heavy on the step-down passing gear to get a lot of torque suddenly in an emergency on the freeway, it’d downshift and rev up so high it’d blow the head gasket or worse, a lot worse. Blow up the whole engine.”

Barris, patiently, said, “He’d see the tach needle jump and he’d back right off.”

“While passing?” Luckman said. “Halfway past a fucking big semi? Shit, he’d have to keep barreling on, high revs or not; he’d have to blow up the engine rather than back off, because if he backed off he’d never get around what he was trying to pass.”

“Momentum,” Barris said. “In a car this heavy, momentum would carry him on by even if he backed off.”

“What about uphill?” Luckman said. “Momentum doesn’t carry you very far uphill when you’re passing.”

To Arctor, Barris said, “What does this car …” He bent to see what make it was. “This …” His lips moved. “Olds.”

“It weighs about a thousand pounds,” Arctor said. Charles Freck saw him wink toward Luckman.

“You’re right, then,” Barris agreed. “There wouldn’t be much inertia mass at that light weight. Or would there?” He groped for a pen and something to write on. “A thousand pounds traveling at eighty miles an hour builds up force equal to—”

“That’s a thousand pounds,” Arctor put in, “with the passengers in it and with a full tank of gas and a big carton of bricks in the trunk.”

“How many passengers?” Luckman said, deadpan.

“Twelve.”

“Is that six in back,” Luckman said, “and six in—”

“No,” Arctor said, “that’s eleven in back and the driver sitting alone in front. So, you see, so there will be more weight on the rear wheels for more traction. So it won’t fishtail.”

Barris glanced alertly up. “This car fishtails?”

“Unless you get eleven people riding in the back,” Arctor said.

“Be better, then, to lead the trunk with sacks of sand,” Barris said. “Three two-hundred-pound sacks of sand. Then the passengers could be distributed more evenly and they would be more comfortable.”

“What about one six-hundred-pound box of gold in the trunk?” Luckman asked him. “Instead of three two-hundred—”

“Will you lay off?” Barris said. “I’m trying to calculate the inertial force of this car traveling at eighty miles an hour.”

“It won’t go eighty,” Arctor said. “It’s got a dead cylinder. I meant to tell you. It threw a rod last night, on my way home from the 7-11.”

“Then why are we pulling the carb?” Barris demanded. “We have to pull the whole head for that. In fact, much more. In fact, you may have a cracked block. Well, that’s why it won’t start.”

“Won’t your car start?” Freck asked Bob Arctor.

“It won’t start,” Luckman said, “because we pulled the carb off.”

Puzzled, Barris said, “Why’d we pull the carb? I forget.”

“To get all the springs and little dinky parts replaced,” Arctor said. “So it won’t fuck up again and nearly kill us. The Union station mechanic advised us to.”

“If you bastards wouldn’t rappity-rap on,” Barris said, “like a lot of speed freaks, I could complete my computations and tell you how this particular car with its weight would handle with a four-barrel Rochester carb, modified naturally with smaller idling jets.” He was genuinely sore now. “So SHUT UP!”