Reading Rentals utility car

The Reading Rentals utility car is the rented ground vehicle Jill drives to Jubal Harshaw’s home with Valentine Michael Smith stiff and apparently dead in the back seat. Its practical role changes abruptly: it brings Smith to safety, but may also connect the people who transported him to a politically dangerous secret. Harshaw therefore makes the car itself part of his plan to protect the household and obscure Smith’s arrival.

Identity and Arrival

The car is identified by the lettering across its sides: “READING RENTALS - Permapowered Ground Equipment of All Sorts-”. It is a recognizable piece of commercial equipment, not an anonymous vehicle. Jill drives it up the hill toward Harshaw’s house with a young man beside her, and the two stop near Harshaw. The passenger jumps out at once, leaving the car and its contents behind; he tells Harshaw that Jill is there.

The vehicle’s arrival is bound to the alarming condition of its passenger in the back seat. Smith is hidden under a blanket, and Harshaw initially takes him for a corpse. When Jill insists that he is alive, Harshaw and Larry lift him out and lay him on the grass beside the pool. The car has thus served as the means of bringing Smith to the house, but the scene immediately recasts it as evidence to be dealt with: it has carried a vulnerable person into Harshaw’s care and may identify those involved in the rescue.

Disposal and Concealment

After attending to his patients, Harshaw turns from Smith and Jill to the rental vehicle. He asks Larry whether the fence is electrified, then orders him to switch it on and, before dark, polish every possible fingerprint off the car. The sequence is practical and deliberate: the car is to be secured at the house, stripped of traces that could link it to its occupants, and removed only after nightfall.

Harshaw’s instructions specify a circuitous disposal route. Larry is to drive the vehicle to the other side of Reading, preferably almost to Lancaster, and leave it in a ditch; he is then to go to Philadelphia, take the shuttle to Scranton, and return home from there. The route separates Larry’s journey back from the abandoned car’s location. The rental vehicle, useful for the rescue, becomes an exposure risk that Harshaw intends to sever from the people who used it.

Risk and Narrative Function

Larry asks whether Smith really is the Man from Mars. Harshaw answers that Larry had better hope he is not, because if the authorities catch Larry before he dumps the car and associate him with Smith, they will probably interrogate him with a blow torch. Harshaw nevertheless says that he thinks Smith is the Man from Mars. The car’s disposal is therefore not merely routine housekeeping: it responds to the danger of being connected to a person whose identity could provoke coercive government attention.

Larry jokingly asks whether he should rob a few banks on the way home, and Harshaw replies that it would probably be the safest thing he could do. The exchange makes the car’s situation vivid through contrast. A rented utility vehicle, marked with its company’s name and carrying a man presumed dead, has become a liability in a crisis where conspicuous criminality might seem less suspicious than a connection to Smith. Its journey from rescue transport to fingerprint-cleaned, abandoned object marks the household’s first practical effort to keep the authorities from tracing Smith’s arrival.