Wheels [antikvár]

ONEr'The president of General Motors was in a foul humour. He had slept badly during the night because his electric blanket had worked only intermittently, causing him to awaken several times, feeling cold. Now, after padding around his home in pyjamas and robe, he had tools spread on his half of the king-size bed where his wife still slept, and was taking the control mechanism apart. Almost at once he observed a badly joined connexion, cause of the night's on-again off-again performance. Muttering sourly about poor quality control of blanket manufacturers, the GM president took the unit to his basement workshop to repair.His wife, Coralie, stirred. In a few minutes more her alarm clock would sound and she would get up sleepily to make breakfast for them both.Outside, in suburban Bloomfield Hills, a dozen miles north of Detroit, it was still dark.The GM president - a spare, fast-moving, normally even-tempered man - had another cause for ill humour besides the electric blanket. It was Emerson Vale. A few minutes ago, through the radio turned on softly beside his bed, the GM chief heard a news broadcast which included the hated, astringent, familiar voice of the auto industry's arch critic.Yesterday, at a Washington Press conference, Emerson Vale had blasted anew his favourite targets - General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. The Press wire services, probably due to a lack of hard news from other sources, had obviously given Vale's attack the full treatment.The Big Three of the auto industry, Emerson Vale charged, were guilty of 'greed, criminal conspiracy, and self-serving abuse of public trust'. The conspiracy was their continuing failure to develop alternatives to gasoline-powered automobiles -