'Where is the Dollar agency desk, please?'


'You have to call them from the Courtesy Phone.'


'Where is that?'


'Over there,' said the woman behind the Alamo agency counter. She lifted her chin in the direction of an illuminated console advertising various hotels and car rental agencies that found it more economical not to maintain a presence at the airport, gateway to Colorado Springs.

It's a Habitation Module

With its moving walkways, electronic doors, flashing lights, and echoing public announcements, Colorado Springs International Airport has the air of an ultramodern habitation module on the surface of a remote planet. Triangular architectural construction in a nouveau 30s style, with matching windows that illuminate the airport interior and give a view. It is a view across the flat plain of concrete runways and service buildings, to the Rockies in the distance. Smaller scale habitation modules mark the foothills of the Rockies, as so many clusters of self-replicating warts mark the back of a badly infected hand. At least the airport is coherent in its design.

Getting Directions

'Go outside the terminal, turn right, and wait by the flagpole,' said the faint Afro-American voice at the other end of the telephone, his voice made unintelligible by another announcement from the public address system.


'By the flagpole?'


'Yes, our driver will be there in ten minutes.'


'Thank you.'

Brief Contemplation

A gentle air, warm and moist, wafting by the flagpole; weather less fierce than that found in the Indian Territories two hours earlier. When travelling, Fu-Manchu recommends resignation to the journey and to remain as calm as possible amidst the turbulent sea of people on the move. Travel has become an ignominious rush of fits and starts. Everywhere in the United States of America is much the same as everywhere else that is an urban sprawl, a cancerous spread of humanity that has no notion of living in harmony with its surroundings.

Shuttle-bus Arrives

Within five or ten minutes, the Dollar shuttle-bus zoomed to a stop.


'Hey! How's it going? Have you waited long?'


'No, about five or ten minutes.'


'You're the best customer I've had today?'


'Oh yes!'


'Yeah, man. I've only just come on and from the get-go everybody has bin mad as hell, saying they've bin waiting for an hour; I don't know what's got into people today; I'm disabled . . .' said the driver holding up an aluminium walking stick, '. . . got my foot crushed and they took some bones out; already I've got a headache; haven't had my sugar medicine; the kids got hold of the bottle and I couldn't find it this mornin. . . .' The driver steered the shuttle-bus into the parking lot of a strip-shopping centre and drove up to the storefront of the Dollar car rental agency.

Impression

On South Circle Drive, the Sheraton Inn has the shabby air of an ageing hotel. It sits overlooked by Pike's Peak and Cheyenne Mountain with its bristling topknot of antennas. In the belly of Cheyenne Mountain NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, makes its home. Seen from this perspective Colorado Springs presents a jumble of structures that look as though they are made of packing cases. Vehicles whizz up and down the roads, at the side of which festoons of wire droop from thousands of tarred pine poles. In its entirety, seen from on high, Colorado Springs looks like a town of unkempt shanties. As a whole it offers nothing pleasing to the eye, just the eyesore scars of human habitation.

Why?

What madness brought Fu-Manchu to Colorado Springs? A course of training, DOORS the Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System that is manufactured by QSS, a company started by Dr Richard Stevens in England. DOORS, it need hardly be said, is a software programme that is run on computers that use the Microsoft Windows Operating System. Learning to be a doorman though is better than defenestration¹ by Windows. One large problem facing industry, especially when procuring the machinery of world domination, is an inability to manage the requirements of a project and to verify that all the requirements are met by the implementation. Dr. Stevens noticed this and decided to bring some computer automation to a problem that it was usual to manage by hand with a traceability and verification matrix. After two days slamming DOORS Fu-Manchu decided that requirements can be better managed with a knout².

That Driver Again

Back at the Dollar Car Rental Agency storefront Fu-Manchu was conveyed by shuttle-bus to the airport terminal building.


'How's the foot?'


'It still hurts,' the driver was subdued; perhaps he had found his sugar-medicine. He took baksheesh³.

Airports in General

Airports are today as railway terminals were in the heyday of the railroads, a broad cross-section of the population passes through them during the course of each day. At least, a broad cross-section of the more affluent population passes through an air terminal. A bus terminus can offer a view of an entirely different people.

People in Particular

Leaving Colorago Springs, Fu-Manchu noticed at the airport a man and his daughter; a tall, broad shouldered man of considerable heft, not flabby, rather a man who has accustomed himself to regular visits to the gymnasium. He wore his black hair slightly long at the back, but not too long. In his visage there resided that nobility of feature characteristic of the Native Indian Chief. Nattily dressed in slacks, shirt and tie, he was reminiscent of a salesman, the kind one might find in a new-car dealership. He had that air of prosperity that it is wise for the successful salesman to cultivate. It was not the man that drew attention in the Colorado Springs habitation module on the flat plain with the scape of mountains in the distance.

Daughter of the man was a thin, gangling girl of six or seven years of age. She had black hair like her father, but long and clasped behind by a barrette⁴ at the nape of her neck. In the inchoate⁵ features of her face it was possible, already, to discern the dominating influence of her father's genetic material. Like her father neat, she wore a thin cotton dress printed with bright yellow and black sunflowers, from which descended thin legs articulated by knobbly knees, ending in feet clad in white ankle-socks and black patent leather sandals of the kind that have a strap over the arch of the foot with a buckle to the side.

She exhibited a trans-dimensional ability. While her father conducted negotiations at the ticket counter, she stayed with the luggage. She pushed the cart forward a few inches, and walked round to take off her child's plastic roll-around luggage; she undid the velcro buckle and removed her handbag from the main bag and then put it back on and re-fastened the velcro strap; then rolled the cart a few inches and played with the bags a little more. She was with us and not with us. Her bodily presence was visible, yet she roamed her interior dimension far and wide. Her play was conducted in silence. Though silent, she seemed to sustain a world of conversation on the other side of the rift between the two universes. Soon her father concluded his business.

At the gate there was Father and Daughter. Again, she occupied herself with her luggage as he checked-in with the gate-agent. He placed the strap of a clear plastic bag over his daughter's head; the plastic bag hung level with her chest and displayed the air-ticket. She was going to travel alone. Her father said something to her and started to walk away from the gate-area. Hurriedly she struggled with her plastic luggage and became entangled with her roll-around bag as she tried to run after her father. She succeeded in disengaging herself and, with a hop and a skip, went off at a very quick walk dragging her luggage after the retreating back of the man.