(FORTUNE Magazine) – CAR RENTAL TERMINAL If you love ATMs, wait until you see Budget Rent a Car's Remote Transaction Booths (RTBs). These three-by-five-foot machines allow anyone with a driver's license and major credit card to rent from such convenient locations as shopping malls and hotels. You talk by phone to a reservation clerk about terms and rates, insert your card and license, sign the contract, and wait for your keys to pop out. Total time: about five minutes. Oh, yes: you're on video -- a camera records you throughout the transaction. You then pick up your car at a nearby lot. Budget tested its RTBs in Dallas and Fort Worth for 18 months; one shopping mall booth was so popular that Budget opened a staffed operation. Look for RTBs in Minneapolis, Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco, Seattle, Oahu, and Vancouver by January.

EXECUTIVE PUZZLE Picture this on your desk, or your Christmas gift list. Sculptor Richard Hunt, whose work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, has put aside his mammoth steel and bronze structures long enough to create a jigsaw puzzle. Called ''Landscape Variations,'' the design was inspired by ground patterns Hunt observed on cross-country flights. The three-pound art objects are available in bronze, sterling silver, and silver and gold plate on bronze for $150 to $1,500. Hunt signs sterling models; puzzles are due from Chicago's SEL/Hunt-Kennedy in late October.

GE GAS TURBINE Could this be an OPEC basher? For decades small so-called combined-cycle thermal power plants, which use both natural gas and steam turbines, have been producing electricity efficiently for factories and utility backup systems. After ten years of development, General Electric has built a gas turbine large enough for a combined-cycle plant that can meet the needs of 150,000 people. The main breakthrough: new materials and cooling systems that allow hotter operating temperatures. In the combined cycle, burning natural gas drives turbine blades to turn a generator. The exhaust, which would be wasted in a conventional plant, is used to produce steam for the second turbine, generating about 33% more electricity. GE has installed the first one, rated at 214 megawatts, in Virginia Power's Chesterfield plant, where it has proved 10% to 15% more efficient than conventional plants. The price is undisclosed, but the company is so pleased that it has ordered a second unit. Says Del Williamson, a GE vice president: ''There are going to be a lot more like this one.''

DOCUTECH PRODUCTION PUBLISHER It's a $220,000, two-ton copy monster, and everyone's talking about it. Xerox's DocuTech Production Publisher combines printing, scanning, and network computing. It takes documents and images from workstations and turns them into print-shop quality reports in minutes. The 15-foot machine can produce 135 prints per minute on both sides of paper as big as 11 by 17 inches, and store the equivalent of up to 2,000 pages of text and graphics. Xerox will rent it to companies that don't have the purchase price lying in a safe somewhere. Analysts think the machine will be too large for most companies, which are heading toward decentralized computing and printing. But for those who still think big, says Eugene G. Glazer, senior vice president at Dean Witter Reynolds, ''it's very, very impressive in its capabilities.''