Free Typecasting by Harry Turtledove Page A

centered on the field: a gold pan marked with two X’s. They stood for the double crosses Jefferson had endured from Salem and Sacramento till its people finally got a bellyful and formed their own state.
    After the War to End War, self-determination was all the rage in Europe. People in what had been southern Oregon and northern California grabbed it, too, grabbed it and ran with it. That neither Salem nor Sacramento was exactly broken-hearted to see them go didn’t hurt, either.
    Bill’s car waited in the driveway by the flagpole. He fondly called the bronze 1974 Cadillac the Mighty Mo. It wasn’t quite the size of a battleship, but it came close. That was the last model year when Detroit could build for size without worrying about mileage. Then the first oil embargo hit, gas prices zoomed like a moon rocket, and cars got small faster than unpreshrunk jeans in a hot dryer.
    The Mighty Mo was six years old now. It was getting elderly—cars aged faster than dogs. Bill aimed to keep it running as long as he could. He didn’t know of anything newer that could replace it. It guzzled gas the way a wino gulped muscatel, but what could you do? Economy and sasquatch size didn’t go together.
    Bill dug out his keys and opened the trunk. It was big enough to hold a squad of little-people Marines. His suitcase and Louise’s vanished into its depths as if they had never been. The cavernous trunk seemed to say Is that all? Since that was all, Bill slammed the lid.
    Then he opened the right front door and slid the right front seat as far forward as it would go. The Mighty Mo’s right front seat moved on a special track that let it slide forward a long, long way. Bill slammed the right front door and opened the right rear door. He waved Louise into the car. With the seat all the way forward, she didn’t fit badly. He closed the door. She locked it.
    He walked around to the left rear door and got in himself. There was no left front seat. The Mighty Mo had an extra-long steering column so he or someone else his size could drive it. He stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The enormous engine under that prairie of a hood rumbled to life.
    â€œReady to go?” he asked.
    â€œWould I be sitting here next to you if I wasn’t?” Louise answered reasonably.
    â€œOkay.” Bill put the Eldorado in gear, swung his size-32 right foot from the brake to the accelerator, and headed for the northbound onramp to the I-5.
    Yreka had been the state capital for longer than he’d been alive, but it still wasn’t what anyone would call a big city. The governor’s mansion lay only a few blocks from the interstate. The Mighty Mo rolled past the Capitol and the state government office building next door to it.
    The Capitol was splendidly neoclassical, with colonnades and a gilded dome. The office building was a Depression-era WPA special, square and ugly and functional. The wonder was that it had gone up at all. Gilbert Gable, who was governor then, did all he could for his home town of Port Orford and as little as he could get away with for Yreka.
    Bill waited in the left-turn lane till he got a green arrow. Then his foot mashed the gas pedal again. The Cadillac zoomed forward. It was twice as heavy as a nice, economical compact car, but it had twice the motor, too. At least twice.
    More and more of the cars that share the interstate with it were compacts, Datsuns and Toyotas and Hondas and Pintos and Vegas and Gremlins. They were a lot cheaper to run than the dinosaur-burning monster he piloted. He wouldn’t have minded having one himself, if only he could have driven it from anywhere forward of the trunk.
    Hardly anyone on I-5 took the Federally mandated speed limit of fifty-five seriously. Bill sure didn’t. The Mighty Mo’s mileage was atrocious even at the double nickel. If it got a little worse at seventy or seventy-five, so what? He got where he was going