Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  But it swerved and he fell forward, and he was borne upon that engine, blazing like a god’s catafalque, to meet with his third death as they crashed into the fence together and went up in flames.

  There was much dispute over the final corrida, but what remained of the tailpipe and both headlights were buried with what remained of him, beneath the sands of the Plaza, and there was much weeping among the women he had known. I say that he could not have been afraid or known pity, for his strength was as a river of rockets, his thighs were pistons, and the fingers of his hands had the discretion of micrometers; his hair was a black halo and the angel of death rode on his right arm. Such a man, a man who has known truth, is mightier than any machine. Such a man is above anything but the holding of power and the wearing of glory.

  Now he is dead though, this one, for the third and final time. He is dead as all the dead who have ever died before the bumper, under the grill, beneath the wheels. It is well that he cannot rise again, for I say that his final car was his apotheosis, and anything else would be anticlimactic. Once I saw a blade of grass growing up between the metal sheets of the world in a place where they had become loose, and I destroyed it because I felt it must be lonesome. Often have I regretted doing this thing, for I took away the glory of its aloneness. Thus does life the machine, I feel, consider man, sternly, then with regret, and the heavens do weep upon him through eyes that grief has opened in the sky.

  All the way home I thought of this thing, and the hoofs of my mount clicked upon the floor of the city as I rode through the rain toward evening, that spring.

  TRAFFIC PROBLEM

  By William Earls

  The Long Island Expressway at 4:00 p.m. on a weekday has been called “the world’s longest parking lot ” All of us have at one time or another been caught up in rush-hour traffic that was so incredible in its pandemonium, heat, and stench that we thought that this must surely be what hell is really like. And the worst part is the knowledge that when we finally got to where we were going we would probably have to engage in a mad struggle to find a parking place. Our cities often seem to be turning into oceans of concrete and rivers of asphalt.

  And if you think it’s bad now, just read on.

  “Road crew, Mac.” The big man tried to push him aside and Davis flashed the badge.

  “This is still my office,” he said. He crossed to the control board, buzzed the Director.

  “Davis in,” he said.

  I suppose the old bastard will want a report already . . .

  “Right,” the Director’s secretary said, “I’ll tell him.”

  Leingen waved at him from the casualty table and he trotted over, flashed the badge and Leingen nodded. He was off duty now, officially relieved—and he looked relieved.

  Lucky bastard will be home in three hours—if he makes it . . .

  The casualty report was horrendous, up 4.2% over the day before—with 17 dead on the United Nations area overpass alone. He dialed Road Service.

  “Road,” the voice on the other end said.

  “Traffic Manager. Send a bird. Tm going up for a look.” He checked some of the other reports—two breakdowns on the fifth level of the Tappan Zee bridge, both ’79 Fords. Goddam people had no right driving two-year-old cars on the roads anyway. He buzzed Arrest Division.

  “All ’seventy-nine Fords off the roads,” he said.

  “Rog.” On the board he watched the red dots that were the Fords being shuttled off to the waiting ramps, clogging them. He flipped a visual to one of them, saw the cars jamming in and the bulldozers pushing them closer. The din around him was increasing and pieces of plasta-plaster were starting to fall from the ceiling.

  “Slap up a privacy screen,” he ordered. He received no answer and looked at one of the workmen driving the rivets for the girders. Jones wasn’t there, he thought suddenly. Of course not, that girder is where his desk was. He’d miss Jones.

  “That ain’t a priority job, buddy,” the workman said. “You want materials, get ’em from Construction.”

  Davis growled, checked his watch. 0807. Things were just moving into the third rush period. Almost on cue the building began to quiver as the lower echelon office workers hurtled by in their Lincolns and Mercuries to obscure little jobs in obscure little offices.

  A short buzz came from the main phone. The Director. “Yes, sir,” Davis said.

  “Davis?” the palsied voice said. Die, you old bastard, Davis thought. “Casualties are up all over.”

  “The roads are jammed, sir.”

  “You’re Manager. Do something.”

  “We need more roads. Only you can authorize ’em.”

  “We don’t have any more roads. But that traffic must move. Do what you have to.” The voice went into a coughing spasm. “When you’re Director, you build roads.”

  “Yes, sir.” He punched off. All right, he’d move the traffic. Say this for the Director—he’d back a Manager all the way.

  “The bird’s here,” the intercom said.

  “Smith,” Davis said. His assistant looked up from the main board. “You’re in charge. I’m going up.” He moved to the elevator, bounced up, flipped his telecorder to audio, caught the information as he hurtled toward the tenth floor.

  “Major pileup at Statue of Liberty East,” the speaker barked. “Seventeen cars and a school bus. Ambulance on the scene. Structural damage on Fifth level East, Yankee Stadium Speedway. More accidents on Staten Island One, Two, Four, Ten, Thirteen, and Twenty-Two; East Side Four, Nine, and Eleven—” Davis punched off. Matters were worse than he had thought.

  On the fifth floor he changed elevators to avoid the ramp from the exact-change lane to the fourth level, zipped to the roof and the waiting helicopter.

  “Fifty-car pileup on Yankee Stadium Four,” the helicopter radio screamed and he punched the button to Central.

  “Davis.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What’s the time on next-of-kin identification?” he asked.

  “Twenty-three minutes, sir.”

  “Make it nineteen. Inform all units.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lift off,” he growled at the pilot. He threw his eyes out of focus, watching the cars hurtling by the edge of the roof.

  I could reach out and touch them—and have my arm torn off at 100 miles an hour . . .

  He coughed. He always forgot to don his gas mask for the short trip from the elevator to the bird and it always bothered his lungs.

  The smog was fortunately thin this morning, and he could see the gray that was Manhattan below him. Southward he could make out the spire of the Empire State Building rising forty stories above the cloverleaf around it and beyond that the tower of the Trade Center and the great hulk of the parking lot dwarfing it.

  “Hook right,” he ordered the pilot, “spin down along the river.”

  There was a pile-up at the Pier 90 crossover, and he saw a helicopter swooping down to pick up the mangled cars at the end of a magnet, swing out across the river to drop them into the New Jersey processing depot.

  He buzzed the Director as he saw the wrecks piling up in front of the three big crunchers at the depot. They were hammering broken Fords and Buicks into three-foot lumps of mangled steel, spitting them onto the barges. The barges were then being towed out to Long Island Sound for the new jetport. But fast as the crunchers were, they were not fast enough. With a capacity of only 200 cars an hour apiece, they could not keep pace with the rush-hour crack-ups.

  “Yes, Davis,” the Director wheezed.

  “Would you call U.S. Steel,” Davis asked. “We need another cruncher.”

  “Well, I don’t know if we really do—but I’ll call.”

  Davis punched off angrily.

  His practiced eye gauged the flow of traffic on the George and Martha Washington Bridges. The cars were eighty feet apart and he ordered a close to seventy-two, effectively increasing the capacity by ten percent. That was almost as good as another level—but not
good enough.

  The traffic lane above the piers was packed and smoke from ships was rising between the two twelve-lane sections. Trucks loaded with imports paused for a moment at the top of the ramps where steam catapulted into the traffic. He saw one truck, loaded with what looked like steel safes, hit by a Cadillac, go out of control, hurtle over the edge of the roadway, and fall one hundred feet—five levels—to the ground. The safes went bouncing in every direction, slamming into cars on every level. Even two hundred feet above the scene he could hear the scream of brakes and the explosions as the autos crashed and burned. He punched for Control.

  “Scramble an ambulance to Pier Forty-six, all levels,” he said.

  He smiled. It was always good to be the first to report an accident. It showed you hadn’t forgotten your training. He had reported four one morning, a record. But now there were bounties for accident reporting and it was rare when a traffic man could actually turn one in. At one time traffic accidents had been reported by the police, but now they were too busy tracking down law violators. An accident was harmful only in that it broke the normal traffic flow.

  Traffic was heavy on all levels, he saw—he could actually see only three levels down and there were as many as eight below that—and the main interchange at Times Square was feeding and receiving well. The largest in Manhattan, it spanned from 42nd Street to 49th and from Fourth to Eighth Avenues. There had been protests when construction had started—mostly from movie fans and library fanatics—but now it was the finest interchange in the world, sixteen lanes wide at the 42nd Street off ramp, with twelve exact change lanes. Even the library fans were appeased, he thought: it had been his idea to move the library lions from the old site—they would have been destroyed with the rest of the building had he not spoken—to the mouth of the Grand Central speed lane to Yankee Stadium.

  The helicopter banked, headed down the West Side parkway toward the Battery interchange and the Statue of Liberty crossover. It had been clever of the design engineers to use the Bedloe’s Island base of the statue for the crossover base—it had saved millions over the standard practice of driving piles into the harbor water. The copper had brought a good salvage price, too.

  Of course, the conservationists, the live-in-the-past-people, had objected here, too. But, as always, they were shouted down at the protest meetings. The traffic had to roll, didn’t it?

  Below the helicopter, Manhattan was a seething mass of speeding cars—reds, blacks, blues, and this month’s brilliant green against the background of concrete and asphalt. There were quick flashes of brake lights, frightened blurs as a tie rod snapped or a tire blew. Dipping wreckocopters swooped in to pluck cars and pieces of cars from the highways before the lanes jammed. The island was 200 lanes wide at the top, widened to 230 at the base with the north-south lanes over the sites of the old streets running forty feet apart, over, under, and even through the old buildings. It was the finest city in the world, made for and by automobiles. And he controlled, for eight hours a day anyway, the destiny of those automobiles. He felt the sense of power he always had here in the helicopter, swooping above the traffic. It passed quickly—it always did—and he was observing clinically, watching the flow.

  “There,” he said to the pilot, indicating the fifth lane on the pier route. A dull red Dodge was going sixty-five, backing up the traffic for miles. There was no room to pass, and, with the traffic boiling up out of the tunnels and bridges onto the road, a jam was inevitable. “Drop,” he ordered, moved behind the persuader gunsight, lined the Dodge in the cross hairs.

  He fired and watched the result. The dye marker smashed on the Dodge’s hood, glowed for a moment. Warned, the driver moved to a sane 95. But the dye stayed and the driver would be picked up later in the day—the dye was impossible to remove except with Traffic-owned detergent—and sentenced. For first clogging, the fine was only $200, but for later offenses, drivers were banned from the road for five to 100 days, forced to ride the railways into town. Davis shuddered at the thought.

  Battery Point and Bedloe’s Island looked good and the copter heeled. He used the binoculars to check the Staten Island Freeway, saw that it was down to sixteen lanes coming into New York from the high of twenty-two. The main rush was almost over and he could start preparing for the early lunch rush.

  There was still a pileup at the Trade Center. The one tower—two had been planned—was standing high above the highways around it, with the great bulk of the parking lot building rising above it, the smog line lapping at the seventy-ninth floor. He saw the red lights in the first 92 floors of the lot signifying full, knew that the remaining 40 floors would not take all of the cars still piling in from the twenty-five feeder lanes. He buzzed Control.

  “Yes, sir?” the voice said.

  “Davis. Get me Parks and Playgrounds.”

  “Parks and Playgrounds?” The voice was incredulous.

  “Right.” He waited and when a voice answered, spoke quickly, did his best to overpower the man on the other end.

  “Traffic Manager Davis,” he snapped. “I want Battery Park cleared. I’m preparing to dump two thousand cars there in five minutes.”

  “You can’t—”

  “The hell I can’t! I’m Traffic Manager. Clear the park—”

  What there was left of it—the grass fighting for air against the exhaust fumes, dying in the shadow of the interchange above it, stomped to death as the millions of city dwellers flocked to the only green in eleven miles—Central Park had been a bastion for a long time, but it was too open, too convenient. It was buried now under a rising parking lot and seven levels of traffic. As a concession to the live-in-the-pasters the animal cages had been placed on the parking lot roof and stayed there for two weeks until they had been hit by a drunk in a Lincoln. There had been a minor flap then with the carbon-monoxide drugged animals prowling the ramps until they had been hunted down by motorcyclists.

  “What about the people?” Parks and Playgrounds asked.

  “Sorry about that. They have four and a half minutes.” He punched off, buzzed Beacons and Buzzers.

  “Davis,” he said. “Re-route Battery Five, ramps two through ten, into Battery Park.”

  “Right.” He buzzed Lower City, ordered Wall Street closed for seven blocks. Later in the day they’d have to reroute the traffic around it. No matter, the tie-up lasted for four hours anyway.

  The big pile-up, as always, was at the Empire State Building, where the main north-south curved twelve lanes out of the way to avoid the huge building. And, as they curved, tires skidded on the pavement, cars clawed to the side and, day after day, car after car lost control on the comer, went plunging over the side to shatter on the ramps below. It was, in many ways, the best show in town, and office workers crowded the windows to watch the cars spin out of control. Today the traffic looked almost good and he clocked the pack at 110 on the corner, 115 coming out of it. Still not good enough, though—they were braking coming into the corner, losing time, and the line was thin as they came out of it. He watched a Buick skid, hit the guardrail, tip, and the driver go flying out of the convertible top, land in the level below, disappear in the traffic stream. The car rolled, plummeted from sight.

  “Home,” he said. The helicopter dropped him on the roof and he gagged against the smog, trotted to the elevator, dropped. The building was shaking from the traffic noise and the hammering of rivets. He coughed on the dust.

  He checked the casualty lists, initialed them. Above normal, with the Empire State section running 6.2% ahead of last week. He was listed as reporting the pier pile-up, and there was a report stating Battery Park was filled—there was also a note saying that the Director was catching hell for parking cars there. To hell with him, Davis thought. There was another complaint to his attention from Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Agnew. Two of their board members were caught in the Wall Street jam and were late for work. He threw it into the wastebasket. Outside (inside?)—hard to say with no wall on one side of the building—t
he workmen were throwing up the steel plates for the ramp, stinting on the bolts to save time.

  “Put the damn bolts in,” Davis roared. “That thing will shake enough anyway.”

  The din was tremendous even now, with seven ramps of traffic passing within thirty feet. It would be worse when the spur route was finished. He hoped that they would put the wall back on the office. He buzzed Smith, asked for a readout on the Empire State complex.

  “Fourteen fatalities since nine o’clock.”

  It was now 10:07 and the pre-lunch rush was due to start in four minutes.

  “Damn Empire anyway,” he said. The United Nations interchange board went red and he went to visual, saw a twelve-car pileup on the fourth level, the bodies and pieces of bodies, the cars and pieces of cars falling into the General Assembly. Damn! he could expect another angry call from the Secretary General. Damn foreigners anyway, when did they get the idea that their stupid meetings were more important than traffic?

  The red phone rang—the Director—and he lifted it. “Davis.”

  “Everything’s running higher,” the Director wheezed. “What’s the story?”

  “Empire’s the big tie-up,” Davis said. “That and some construction.”

  “Do something. I gave you the authority.”

  “Get rid of Empire,” Davis said. “Get another forty decks on the Trade parking lot, too.”

  “Can’t be done.” The hell it can’t, Davis thought. You’re just afraid of the conservationists. Coward. “Do something.”

  “Yes, sir.” He waited until the phone clicked dead before he slammed it down. He took a deep breath of the air in the office—it was even better than smoking. Then he began to bark orders over the All Circuits channel.

  “Scramble another ten wreckocopters,” he snarled. With half again as many copters, wrecks would be cleared that much faster. “Cut next-of-kin time to fifteen minutes.” He was going out on a limb there, but it would speed the processing of accidents through Brooklyn and New Jersey. Now, with the rush hour just over and another beginning, wrecks were piling up outside the receiving centers and the crunchers were idle half the time. “Up minimum speed five miles an hour.” That would make it at least 100 miles an hour on every highway, 65 on the ramps. He flipped to visual, saw Beacons and Buzzers post the new speeds, saw the cars increase speed. Wrecks and Checks flashed the going aloft of the ten copters and he breathed easier, flipped to visual at Empire, saw the day’s third major pile-up on the third level, cursed. He closed the 34th Street cutoff, ordered three payloaders to dump all wrecks right there, flashed a message to Identification to have a team posted. By midnight, when the traffic eased, they could begin moving the cars and bodies to New Jersey.