Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [72]
Part of the problem was the lack of a speed limit on the autobahns. Keeping up with the traffic flow, which resembled a modern racetrack more than anything else, sent Peter off course much faster than he would have liked to drive. Every time he took a wrong turn on the autobahn, he’d be twenty or more miles down the road before he could get himself turned around. But when he finally abandoned the autobahn all together, deciding to proceed on the much slower, and much saner, backcountry surface roads, he ran into another problem. In mid October, Germany was in the waning days of Oktoberfest, a nationwide celebration that seemed to be dedicated to the single proposition of keeping everyone as gloriously drunk as possible. In every small town and village where he stopped to ask directions, the happy townsfolk would press giant complimentary mugs of beer on him, as an essential prerequisite to even the most cursory of conversations.
He drove past farmlands and through forested valleys in a pleasant, if occasionally frustrating fog of steady, low inebriation, eventually finding his way to Hamelin by late dinnertime.
The modern Hamelin of the mundy world turned out to be quite different from the sprawling, medieval version of the same town of his youth, back in the lost world of the Hesse. It wasn’t just a matter of the streets full of cars, the ubiquitous electric lights and modern construction, though that was certainly part of it. It was more the attitude of preserving the old ways by fiercely embracing the new. When Peter found a restaurant near the gates into the old part of town that looked like it might provide a decent supper, he quickly discovered that there was literally no place to park. Parking wasn’t allowed anywhere on the street — in order to preserve a more picturesque downtown, he later learned — but there wasn’t a parking garage to be found either. Eventually a policeman directed him to the nondescript entrance of what turned out to be an underground parking facility where huge, computer-powered robot arms took his car and stored it in a tiny metal slot, which was one of hundreds of such slots in what looked like a giant, subterranean missile silo. The complex was more than twenty levels deep, and Peter stood at the top of it for more than an hour, watching in fascination as the robot arms slid up and down the sturdy central rail, continuously storing and retrieving cars, never making an error, never so much as scratching one of the vehicles.
“I thought I’d be coming home in a way, but this version of Hamelin is no place I ever knew,” Peter said, watching the slots loaded and unloaded in a matter of seconds.
“Excuse me?” the garage’s computer operator said.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
After dinner, Peter retrieved his car and drove to the hotel he’d booked the night before from Frankfurt. It was located just a block outside of the walled old section of the city, on the eastern side of town. It was a four-star hotel called The Mercury, and was reputed to be the most elegant place to stay in Hamelin. But, as Peter discovered when he drove into its lot, it looked like a jumbled, haphazard construction of a learning-disabled child’s building blocks.
“Too much modernity for me for one day,” Peter explained to the desk clerk, when he stepped inside to cancel his reservation. He had the clerk book him instead into the best room available at The Hamelschenburg, a converted medieval castle, just a few miles out of town.
“This at least resembles the other Hamelschenburg Castle I remember from my home world,” he said, while driving into its courtyard, with no one else in his car to overhear him and perhaps wonder at his meaning. “Maybe a touch smaller though.”
That night Peter had trouble