by Jerry eBooks
“Really? Why not?”
“The country had become economically dependent on the roads. They were the principal means of transportation in the industrial areas—the only means of economic importance. Factories were shut down; food didn’t move; people got hungry—and the president was forced to let them roll again. It was the only thing that could be done; the social pattern had crystallized in one form, and it couldn’t be changed overnight. A large, industrialized population must have large-scale transportation, not only for people, but for trade.”
Mr. Blekinsop fussed with his napkin, and rather diffidently suggested: “Mr. Gaines, I do not intend to disparage the ingenious accomplishments of your great people, but isn’t it possible that you may have put too many eggs in one basket in allowing your whole economy to become dependent on the functioning of one type of machinery?”
Gaines considered this soberly. “I see your point. Yes—and no. Every civilization above the peasant-and-village type is dependent on some hey type of machinery. The old South was based on the cotton gin. Imperial England was made possible by the steam engine. Large populations have to have machines for power, for transportation, and for manufacturing in order to live. Had it not been for machinery the large populations could never have grown up. That’s not a fault of the machine; that’s its virtue.
“But it is true that whenever we develop machinery to the point where it will support large populations at a high standard of living we are then bound to keep that machinery running, or suffer the consequences. But the real hazard in that is not the machinery, but the men who run the machinery. These roads, as machines, are all right. They are strong and safe and will do everything they were designed to do. No, it’s not the machines, it’s the men.
“When a population is dependent on a machine, they are hostages of the men who tend the machines. If their morale is high, their sense of duty strong—”
Someone up near the front of the restaurant had turned up the volume control of the radio, letting out a blast of music that drowned out Gaines’ words. When the sound had been tapered down to a more nearly bearable volume, he was saying:
“Listen to that. It illustrates my point.”
BLEKINSOP turned an ear to the music. It was a swinging march of compelling rhythm, with a modern interpretive arrangement. One could hear the roar of machinery, the repetitive clatter of mechanisms. A pleased smile of recognition spread over the Australian’s face. “It’s your field artillery song, ‘The Roll of the Caissons,’ isn’t it? But I don’t see the connection.”
“You’re right; it was ‘The Boll of the Caissons,’ but we adapted it to our own purposes. It’s ‘The Road Song of the Transport Cadets,’ too. Wait!”
The persistent throb of the march continued, and seemed to blend with the vibration of the roadway underneath into a single timpano. Then a male chorus took up the verse:
“Hear them hum!
Watch them run!
Oh, our job is never done,
For our roadways go rolling along!
While you ride;
While you glide;
We are watching down inside,
So your roadways keep rolling along!
“Oh, it’s Hie! Hie! Hee!
The rotor men are we—
Check off the sectors loud and strong!
ONE! TWO! THREE!
Anywhere you go
You are bound to know
That your roadways are rolling along!
KEEP THEM ROLLING!
That your roadways are rolling along!”
“See?” said Gaines, with more animation in his voice. “See? That is the real purpose of the United States Academy of Transport. That is the reason why the transport engineers are a semimilitary profession, with strict discipline. We are the bottle neck, the rina qua nan, of all industry, all economic life. Other industries can go on strike, and only create temporary and partial dislocations. Crops can fail here and there, and the country takes up the slack. But if the roads stop rolling, everything else must stop; the effect would be the same as a general strike—with this important difference: It takes a majority of the population, fired by a real feeling of grievance, to create a general strike; but the men that run the roads, few as they are, can create the same complete paralysis.
“We had just one strike on the roads, back in two. It was justified, I think, and it corrected a lot of real abuses—but it mustn’t happen again.”
“But what is to prevent it happening again, Mr. Gaines?”
“Morale—esprit de corps. The technicians in the road service are indoctrinated constantly with the idea that their job is a sacred trust. Besides, we do everything we can to build up their social position. But even more important is the academy. We try to turn out graduate engineers imbued with the same loyalty, the same iron self-discipline, and determination to perform their duty to the community at any cost, that Annapolis and West Point and Goddard are so successful in inculcating in their graduates.”
“Goddard? Oh, yes, the rocket field. And have you been successful, do you think?”
“Not entirely, perhaps, but we will be. It takes time to build up a tradition. When the oldest engineer is a man who entered the academy in his teens, we can afford to relax a little and treat it as a solved problem.”
“I suppose you are a graduate?” Gaines grinned. “You flatter me—I must look younger than I am. No, I’m a carry-over from the army. You see, the war department operated the roads for some three months during reorganization after the strike in ’60. I served on the conciliation board that awarded pay increases and adjusted working conditions, then I was assigned—”
The signal light of the portable telephone glowed red. Gaines said, “Excuse me,” and picked up the handset. “Yes?”
Blekinsop could overhear the voice at the other end. “This is Davidson, chief. The roads are rolling.”
“Very well. Keep them rolling!”
“Had another trouble report from the Sacramento Sector.”
“Again? What this time?”
Before Davidson could reply he was cut off. As Gaines reached out to dial him back, his coffee cup, half full, landed in his lap. Blekinsop was aware, even as he was lurched against the edge of the table, of a disquieting change in the hum of the roadway.
“What has happened, Mr. Gaines?”
“Don’t know. Emergency stop—God knows why.” He was dialing furiously. Shortly he flung the phone down, without bothering to return the handset to its cradle. “Phones are out. Come on! No! You’ll be safe here. Wait.”
“Must I?”
“Well, come along then, and stick close to me.” He turned away, having dismissed the Australian cabinet minister from his mind. The strip ground slowly to a rest, the giant rotors and myriad rollers acting as flywheels in preventing a disastrous sudden stop. Already a little knot of commuters, disturbed at their evening meal, were attempting to crowd out the door of the restaurant.
“Halt!”
There is something about a command issued by one used to being obeyed which enforces compliance. It may be intonation, or possibly a more esoteric power, such as animal tamers are reputed to be able to exercise in controlling ferocious beasts. But it does exist, and can be used to compel even those not habituated to obedience.
The commuters stopped in their tracks.
Gaines continued: “Remain in the restaurant until we are ready to evacuate you. I am the chief engineer. You will be in no danger here. You!” He pointed to a big fellow near the door. “You’re deputized. Don’t let anyone leave without proper authority. Mrs. McCoy, resume serving dinner.”
GAINES strode out the door, Blekinsop tagging along. The situation outside permitted no such simple measures. The hundred-mile strip alone had stopped; twenty feet away the next strip flew by at an unchecked ninety-five miles an hour. The passengers on it flickered past, unreal cardboard figures.
The twenty-foot walkway of the maximum speed strip had been crowded wh
en the breakdown occurred. Now the customers of shops, of lunch stands, and of other places of business, the occupants of lounges, of television theaters—all came crowding out onto the walkway to see what had happened. The first disaster struck almost immediately.
The crowd surged, and pushed against a middle-aged woman on its outer edge. In attempting to recover her balance she put one foot over the edge of the flashing ninety-five-mile strip. She realized her gruesome error, for she screamed before her foot touched the ribbon.
She spun around and landed heavily on the moving strip, and was rolled by it, as the strip attempted to impart to her mass, at one blow, a velocity of ninety-five miles per hour—one hundred and thirty-nine feet per second. As she rolled she mowed down some of the cardboard figures as a sickle strikes a stand of grass. Quickly, she was out of sight, her identity, her injuries, and her fate undetermined, and already remote.
But the consequences of her mishap were not done with. One of the flickering cardboard figures bowled over by her relative moment fell toward the hundred-mile strip, slammed into the shockbound crowd, and suddenly appeared as a live man—but broken and bleeding—amidst the luckless, fallen victims whose bodies had checked his wild flight.
Even there it did not end. The disaster spread from its source, each hapless human ninepin more likely than not to knock down others so that they fell over the danger-laden boundary, and in turn ricocheted to a dearly-bought equilibrium.
But the focus of calamity sped out of sight, and Blekinsop could see no more. His active mind, accustomed to dealing with large numbers of individual human beings, multiplied the tragic sequence he had witnessed by twelve hundred miles of thronged conveyor strip, and his stomach chilled.
To Blekinsop’s surprise, Gaines made no effort to succor the fallen, nor to quell the fear-infected mob, but turned an expressionless face back to the restaurant. When Blekinsop saw that he was actually reentering the restaurant, he plucked at Gaines’ sleeve. “Aren’t we going to help those poor people?”
The cold planes of the face of the man who answered him bore no resemblance to his genial, rather boyish host of a few minutes before. “No. Bystanders can help them—I’ve got the whole road to think of. Don’t bother me.”
Crushed, and somewhat indignant, the politician did as he was ordered. Rationally, he knew that the chief engineer was right—a man responsible for the safety of millions cannot turn aside from his duty to render personal service to one—but the cold detachment of such viewpoint was repugnant to him.
Gaines was back in the restaurant. “Mrs. McCoy, where is your getaway?”
“In the pantry, sir.”
Gaines hurried there, Blekinsop at his heels. A nervous Filipino salad boy shrank out of Gaines’ way as he casually swept a supply of prepared green stuffs onto the floor, and stepped up on the counter where they had rested. Directly above his head and within reach was a circular manhole, counterweiglited and operated by a handwheel set in its center. A short steel ladder, hinged to the edge of the opening, was swung up flat to the ceiling and secured by a hook.
Blekinsop lost his hat in his endeavor to clamber quickly enough up the ladder after Gaines. When he emerged on the roof of the building, Gaines was searching the ceiling of the roadway with a pocket flashlight. He was shuffling along, stooped double in the awkward four feet of space between the roof underfoot and ceiling.
He found what he sought, sortie fifty feet away—another manhole similar to the one they had used to escape from below. He spun the wheel of the lock, and stood up in the space, then rested his hands on the sides of the opening, and with a single lithe movement vaulted to the roof of the roadways. His companion followed him with more difficulty.
They stood in darkness, a fine, cold rain feeling at their faces. But underfoot, and stretching beyond sight on each hand, the Sun-power screens glowed with a faint opalescent radiance, their slight percentage of inefficiency as transformers of radiant Sun power to available electrical power being evidenced as a mild induced radioactivity. The effect was not illumination, but rather like the ghostly sheen of a snow-covered plain seen by starlight.
THE GLOW picked out the path they must follow to reach the rain-obscured wall of buildings bordering the ways. The path was a narrow black stripe which arched away into the darkness over the low curve of the roof. They started away on this path at a dogtrot, making as much speed as the slippery footing and the dark permitted, while Blekinsop’s mind still fretted at the problem of Gaines’ apparently callous detachment. Although possessed of a keen intelligence, his nature was dominated by a warm, human sympathy, without which no politician, irrespective of other virtues or shortcomings, is long successful.
Because of this trait he distrusted instinctively any mind which was guided by logic alone. He was aware that, from a standpoint of strict logic, no reasonable case could be made out for the continued existence of the human race, still less for the human values he served.
Had he been able to pierce the preoccupation of his companion, he would have been reassured. On the surface, Gaines’ exceptionally intelligent mind was clicking along with the facile ease of an electromechanical integrator—arranging data at hand, making tentative decisions, postponing judgments without prejudice until necessary data were available, exploring alternatives. Underneath, in a compartment insulated by stern self-discipline from the acting theater of his mind, his emotions were a torturing storm of self reproach. He was heartsick at the suffering he had seen, and which he knew too well was duplicated up and down the line. Although he was not aware of any personal omission, nevertheless the fault was somehow his, for authority creates responsibility.
He had carried too long the superhuman burden of kingship—which no sane mind can carry light-heartedly—and was at this moment perilously close to the frame of mind which sends captains down with their ships. But the need for immediate, constructive action sustained him.
But no trace of this conflict reached his features.
At the wall of buildings glowed a green line of arrows, pointing to the left. Over them, at the terminus of the narrow path, shone a sign: “Access down.” They pursued this, Blekinsop puffing in Gaines’ wake, to a door let in the wall, which gave into a narrow stairway lighted by a single glow tube. Gaines plunged down this, still followed, and they emerged on the crowded, noisy, stationary walkway adjoining the northbound road.
Immediately adjacent to the stairway, on the right, was a public telebooth. Through the glassite door they could see a portly, well-dressed man speaking earnestly to his female equivalent, mirrored in the visor screen. Three other citizens were waiting outside the booth.
GAINES pushed past them, flung open the door, grasped the bewildered and indignant man by the shoulders and hustled him outside, kicking the door closed after him. He cleared the visor screen with one sweep of his hand, before the matron pictured therein could protest, and pressed the emergency-priority button.
He dialed his private code number, and was shortly looking into the troubled face of his engineer of the watch, Davidson.
“Report!”
“It’s you, chief! Thank God! Where are you?” Davidson’s relief was pathetic.
“Report!”
The senior watch officer repressed his emotion, and complied in direct, clipped phrases: “At 7:09 p.m. the consolidated tension reading, Strip 20, Sacramento Sector, climbed suddenly. Before action could be taken, tension on Strip 20 passed emergency level; the interlocks acted, and power to subject strip cut out. Cause of failure unknown. Direct communication to Sacramento control office has failed. They do not answer the auxiliary, nor commercial. Effort to re-establish communication continues. Messenger dispatched from Stockton Subsector 10.
“No casualties reported. Warning broadcast by public announcement circuit to keep clear of Strip 19. Evacuation has commenced.”
“There are casualties,” Gaines cut in. “Police and hospital emergency routine. Move!”
“Yes, sir!” Davi
dson snapped back, and hooked a thumb over his shoulder—but his cadet officer of the watch had already jumped to comply. “Shall I cut out the rest of the road, chief?”
“No. No more casualties are likely after the first disorder. Keep up the broadcast warnings. Keep those other strips rolling, or we will have a traffic jam the devil himself couldn’t untangle.”
Gaines had in mind the impossibility of bringing the strips up to speed under load. The rotors were not powerful enough to do this. If the entire road was stopped, he would have to evacuate every strip, correct the trouble on Strip 20, bring all strips up to speed, and then move the accumulated peak-load traffic. In the meantime, over five million stranded passengers would constitute a tremendous police problem. It was simpler to evacuate passengers on Strip 20 over the roof, and allow them to return home via the remaining strips.
“Notify the mayor and the governor that I have assumed emergency authority. Same to the chief of police and place him under your orders. Tell the commandant to arm all cadets available and await orders. Move!”
“Yes, sir. Shall I recall technicians off watch?”
“No. This isn’t an engineering failure. Take a look at your readings; that entire sector went out simultaneously. Somebody cut out those rotors by hand. Place off-watch technicians on standby status—but don’t arm them, and don’t send them down inside. Tell the commandant to rush all available senior-class cadets to Stockton Subsector Office No. 10 to report to me. I want them equipped with tumble-bugs, pistols, and sleep-gas bombs.”
“Yes, sir.” A clerk leaned over Davidson’s shoulder and said something in his ear. “The governor wants to talk to you, chief.”
“Can’t do it—nor can you. Who’s your relief? Have you sent for him?”
“Hubbard—he’s just come in.”
“Have him talk to the governor, the mayor, the press—anybody that calls—even the White House. You stick to your watch. I’m cutting off. I’ll be back in communication as quickly as I can locate a reconnaissance car.” He was out of the booth almost before the screen cleared.
