Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  Dr. Schonberg was pessimistic at the next meeting of the executive committee. “We didn’t expect this. The computers predicted decentralization, not a return to horse-and-buggy days.”

  The chairman laughed. “Our programming didn’t take into account human ingenuity. Let’s face it. Cities, metropolises like Los Angeles, are part of our civilization. They have enormous advantages over what Lenin called the idiocy of rural life. No one would willingly give up those advantages without a struggle. Horses are only a makeshift, a passing fad. What counts is that individually driven automobiles will soon disappear completely, to be replaced by mass urban transit. And since 90 percent of the smog is caused by automobiles here, the air will get cleaner and cleaner. After all, that was the major goal of our project, wasn’t it?”

  Dr. Villanova, the treasurer, was worried. She was an economist. She said, “If the computers were wrong in one direction, they may be wrong in another. Perhaps the whole industrial and commercial structure of the country will be damaged by this local change in ecology. I know we planned to finance CAP by buying up tire company stock during the initial phase, selling it for a quick profit, and then selling the stock short. So far we’ve been very successful financially. But we may have been too shortsighted. What about the rubber workers in Ohio who are unemployed? And the shutting down last week of Kelsey-Hayes and other auto-parts makers? And the layoffs in Detroit?”

  “And what about Los Angeles itself?” added Dr. Nittunkel. “Buses can’t use the freeways, and we can’t plant trees on every street and byway in the city. Traffic goes so slowly now that staggering of work hours will certainly follow, and that means more night work with its consequent neuroses and disruption of family life.”

  Dr. Grundorfer nodded. “We tossed a pebble into the center of the lake, expecting it to sink without a trace, but we didn’t count on how the waves spread in every direction. Decentralization was what we hoped for, not further urban glut.”

  The chairman remained sanguine. “I’m sure all will turn out well as soon as the subway is opened. I’ve seen the plans. It will combine the best features of the Paris Metro, the Moscow subway, and the London Underground. Superfast, quiet, comfortable trains, express and local service, escalators so that no one will have to walk more than a few steps, and so laid out that anyone in Los Angeles can get to any other part of the city in less time than it formerly took on the freeways. And with no contamination of the air and with no loss of life or limb in accidents.”

  “But truckers can’t use the freeways, either,” Dr. Villanova pointed out. “And the railway system is too archaic to take up the slack. All we’ve done is transfer pollution from the freeways to the streets. Horses can never take the place of trucks.”

  “That’s where American inventiveness will take over,” said the chairman. “Now we’ll see a spurt in research on other than internal-combustion engines. I foresee that in a year the first electrically driven truck will be commercially available.”

  In spite of his confident remarks, the committee voted to postpone the projected plantings elsewhere for another six months.

  The chairman was right and was wrong. The completed subway became one of the wonders of American technology. Los Angeles residents boasted of its efficiency. No point was more than half an hour from any other point, incredibly faster than the previous travel time on the freeways. Used automobiles began to be sold in such quantities in the Los Angeles area that their price was depressed in the rest of the country. Even the poorest family in Appalachia could now afford a car, with the result that traffic congestion and air pollution increased in all but Los Angeles at a fearful rate. Furthermore, the availability of such a cheap form of individual transportation speeded up the flight from the central city cores to the surrounding suburbs and countryside. Then followed the spread of trucking goods and food to the urban sprawl, and inevitably the building of new highways to expedite traffic.

  The air in Los Angeles was once more breathable. Eye irritations, asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema diminished to such an extent that some specialists in those disorders turned to geriatrics because people began to live longer. Unfortunately the morbidity and mortality rate in the rest of the state and country went up more than enough to cancel the improvement in Southern California.

  The executive committee read the accumulated statistics with dismay. They put off all plans to plant more trees for two years until they had ample time to digest the data and communicate their findings to the general membership.

  The freeways were deserted. Grass grew in tiny cracks, splitting the pavement. But since man, as well as nature, abhors a vacuum, a demand rose that all freeways be opened to pedestrian and horsedrawn vehicles. The Highway Authority acceded to the demands. For a few weeks hiking enthusiasts, joggers, and just plain strollers used the freeways, but when their sneakers and rubber-soled shoes gave out after a mile or two, they went back to their former routes.

  The freeways again became empty of all but commercial wagons with metal-rimmed wheels.

  While CAP was reprogramming its computers for a more thoroughgoing prediction of the results of nationwide planting, an intelligent high-school student from Encino undertook a special-credit project in inductive logic. He gathered all the data available from various governmental and industrial research agencies having to do with rubber deterioration in Los Angeles. He arranged his facts: a, b, c, d, e . . . for time of onset of the tire trouble, age of the freeway, type of cement and concrete used, and so forth. He came to the conclusion that the trees had something to do with tire destruction. A few simple experiments, and he had the answer. He showed without question that the yellow powder released when the pods were crushed destroyed both natural and synthetic rubber.

  Like Columbus’s egg, everyone said, “Of course!” Aided by a generous grant from the automobile industry, the Highway Authority uprooted and destroyed every offending tree.

  The freeways were again opened to motor vehicles, but traffic changed its character. Only a few individuals used the freeways; most preferred the convenience, safety, and lower cost of the subway. The freeways were used mainly by truckers, school and chartered tourist buses, and ambulances. Draft horses again became a rarity.

  The convenience of fast truck transportation, now that private cars no longer got in the way, gave an impetus to the development of ipdustry in the farthest reaches of Los Angeles County. Efficient lobbies, using ecology arguments, succeeded in having the freeways closed to all but commercial traffic. Slowly, slowly the air once more became polluted.

  CAP was dissolved. “It was fun while it lasted,” said the chairman in his final speech, “but it didn’t last long enough. One thing I’ve learned—the Lady Bountiful technique of doing good to others doesn’t work with ecology. People have to want the good to be done to them for results to be permanent.”

  THE MARY CELESTE MOVE

  By Frank Herbert

  One of the great benefits claimed for the Age of the Automobile is the freedom it has provided for many of us. The ability to get up and get away, to leave problems behind for a few hours (which can also be accomplished by reading a book like this one), to go “wherever I want, whenever I want,” has made the car a precious commodity for many people, especially adolescents, and there is little doubt that it has been a major factor in the erosion of parental authority.

  However, we need to ask ourselves if what we are really talking about in regard to the automobile isn’t dependency, not freedom—a societal dependency as much as a personal one. Some people can’t function without their cigarettes or their drinks, and for many, many people the automobile is a habit.

  In this story, Frank Herbert, the award-winning author of The Dune Trilogy and The Dosadi Experiment gives us a glimpse of people who have lost their freedom.

  Martin Fisk’s car, a year-old 1997 Buick with triple turbines and jato boosters, flashed off the freeway, found a space between a giant mobile refueling tanker and a commuter bus, darted thro
ugh and surged into the first of the eight right-hand lanes in time to make the turnoff marked “NEW PENTAGON ONLY—Reduce Speed to 75 ”

  Fisk glanced at his surface/air rate-of-travel mixer, saw he was down to 80 miles per hour, close enough to legal speed, and worked his way through the press of morning traffic into the second lane in plenty of time to join the cars diverging onto the fifth-level ramp.

  At the last minute, a big official limousine with a two-star general’s decal-flag on its forward curve cut in front of him and he had to reduce speed to 50, hearing the drag-bar rasping behind him as his lane frantically matched speed. The shadow of a traffic copter passed over the roadway and Fisk thought: Hope that general’s driver loses his license!

  By this time he was into the sweeping curve-around that would drop him to the fifth level. Speed here was a monitored 55. The roadway entered the building and Fisk brought his R-O-T up to the stated speed, watching for the code of his off-slot: BR71Dd. It loomed ahead, a flashing mnemonic blinker in brilliant green.

  Fisk dropped behind an in-building shuttle, squeezed into the right-hand lane, slapped the turn-off alert that set all his rim lights blinking and activated the automatics. His machine caught the signal from the roadway, went on automatic and swerved into the off-slot still at 55.

  Fisk released his control bar.

  Drag hooks underneath the Buick snagged the catch ribbands of the slot, jerked his car to a stop that sent him surging against the harness.

  The exit-warning wall ahead of him flashed a big red “7 SECONDS! 7 SECONDS!”

  Plenty of time, he thought.

  He yanked his briefcase out of its dashboard carrier with his right hand while unsnapping his safety harness with his left and hitting the door actuator with his knee. He was out onto the pedestrian ramp with three seconds to spare. The warning wall lifted; his car jerked forward into the down-elevator rack to be stored in a coded pile far below. His personal I-D signal to the computer-monitored system later would restore the car to him all checked and serviced and ready for the high-risk evening race out of the city.

  Fisk glanced at his wrist watch—four minutes until his appointment with William Merill, the President’s liaison officer on the Internal Control Board and Fisk’s boss. Adopting the common impersonal discourtesy, Fisk joined the press of people hurrying along the ramp.

  Some day, he thought, I’ll get a nice safe and sane job on one of the ocean hydroponic stations where all I have to do is watch gauges and there’s nothing faster than a 40 mph pedestrian ramp. He fished a green pill out of his coat pocket, gulped it, hoped he wouldn’t have to take another before his blood pressure began its downslant to normal.

  By this time he was into the pneumatic lift capsule that would take him up in an individual curve to easy walking distance from his destination. He locked his arms on the brace bars. The door thumped closed. There was a distant hiss, a feeling of smooth downward pressure that evened off. He stared at the familiar blank tan of the opposite wall. Presently the pressure slackened, the capsule glided to a stop, its door swung open.

  Fisk stepped out into the wide hall, avoided the guide-lanes for the high-speed ramp and dodged through thinning lines of people hurrying to work around him.

  Within seconds he was into Merill’s office and facing the WAC secretary, a well-endowed brunette with an air of brisk efficiency. She looked up from her desk as he entered.

  “Oh, Mr. Fisk,” she said, “how nice that you’re a minute early. Mr. Merill’s already here. You can have nine minutes. I hope that’ll be enough. He has a very full schedule today and the Safety Council subcommittee session with the President this afternoon.” She already was up and holding the inner door open for him, saying: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could invent a forty-eight hour day?”

  We already have, he thought. We just compressed it into the old twenty-four-hour model.

  “Mr. Fisk is here,” she said, announcing him as she stepped out of his way.

  Fisk was through to the inner sanctum then, wondering why his mind was filled with the sudden realization that he had driven out of his apartment’s garage lift one hundred miles away only thirty-two minutes before. He heard the WAC secretary close the door behind him.

  Merill, a wiry redhead with an air of darting tension, pale freckled skin and narrow face, sat at a desk directly opposite the door. He looked up, fixed his green eyes on Fisk, said: “Come on in and sit down, Marty, but make it snappy.”

  Fisk crossed the office. It was an irregular space of six sides about forty feet across at its widest point. Merill sat with his back to the narrowest of the walls and with the widest wall at an angle to his right. A computer-actuated map of the United States covered that surface, its color-intensity lines of red, blue and purple showing traffic density on the great expressway arteries that crisscrossed the nation. The ceiling was a similar map, this one showing the entire western hemisphere and confined to the Prime-1 arteries of twenty lanes or greater.

  Fisk dropped into the chair across the desk from Merill, pushed a lock of dark hair back from his forehead, feeling the nervous perspiration there. Blast it! he thought. ”I’ll have to take another pill!

  “Well?” Merill said.

  “It’s all here,” Fisk said, slapping the briefcase onto Merill’s desk. “Ten days, forty thousand miles of travel and eighteen personal interviews plus fifty-one other interviews and reports from my assistants.”

  “You know the President’s worried about this,” Merill said. “I hope you have it in some kind of order so I can present it to him this afternoon.”

  “It’s in order,” Fisk said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  “Yeah, well I was prepared for that,” Merill said. “I don’t like much of what comes across this desk.” He glanced up suddenly at a strip of yellow that appeared on the overhead map indicating a partial blockage on the intercontinental throughway near Caracas. His right hand hovered over an intercom button, poised there as the yellow was replaced by red then blue shading into purple.

  “Fourth problem in that area in two days,” Merill said, removing his hand from the button. “Have to work a talk with Mendoza into this morning’s schedule. Okay.” He turned back to Fisk. “Give me your economy model brief rundown. What’s got into these kooks who’re moving all over the landscape?”

  “I’ve about twenty interlocking factors to reinforce my original hunch,” Fisk said. “The Psych Department confirms it. The question is whether this thing’ll settle into some kind of steady pattern and even out. You might caution the President, off the record, that there are heavy political implications in this. Touchy ones if this leaks out the wrong way.”

  Merill pushed a recording button on his desk, said: “Okay, Marty, put the rest on the record. Recap and summate. I’ll listen to it for review while Pm reading your report.”

  Fisk nodded. “Right.” He pulled sheaves of papers in file folders out of the briefcase, lined them up in front of him. “We had the original report, of course, that people were making bold moves from one end of the country to the other in higher than usual numbers from unlikely starting places to unlikelier destinations. And these people turned out to be mostly mild, timid types instead of bold pioneers who’d pulled up their roots in the spirit of adventure.”

  “Are the psych profiles in your report?” Merill asked. “Pm going to have a time convincing the President unless I have all the evidence.”

  “Right here,” Fisk said, tapping one of the folders. “I also have photostats of billings from the mobile refueling tankers and mobile food canteens to show that the people in these reports are actually the ones we’ve analyzed.”

  “Weird,” Merill said. He glanced at another brief flicker of yellow on the overhead map near Seattle, returned his attention to Fisk.

  “State and federal income-tax reports are here,” Fisk said, touching another of the folders. “And, oh yes, car ownership breakdowns by area. I also have data on drivers’ license tra
nsfers, bank and loan company records to show the business transactions involved in these moves. You know, some of these kooks sold profitable businesses at a loss and took up different trades at their new locations. Others took new jobs at lower pay. Some big industries are worried about this. They’ve lost key people for reasons that don’t make sense. And the Welfare Department figures that . . .”

  “Yeah, but what’s this about car ownership breakdowns?” Merill asked.

  Trust him to dive right through to the sensitive area, Fisk thought. He said: “There’s a steep decline in car ownership among these people.”

  “Do the Detroit people suspect?” Merill asked.

  “I covered my tracks best I could,” Fisk said, “but there’re bound to be some rumbles when their investigators interview the same people I did.”

  “We’d better invite them to review our findings,” Merill said. “There’re some big political contributors in that area.

  What’s the pattern on communities chosen by these kooks?”

  “Pretty indicative,” Fisk said. “Most of the areas receiving a big influx are what our highway engineers irreverently call “headwater swamps’—meaning areas where the highway feeder routes thin out and make it easy to leave the expressways.”

  “For example?”

  “Oh . . . New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles.”

  “That all?”

  “No. There’ve been some significant population increases in areas where highway construction slowed traffic. There’ve been waves into Bangor, Maine . . . Blaine, Washington . . . and, my God! Calexico, California! They were hit on two consecutive weekends by one hundred and seventy of these weird newcomers.”

  In a tired voice, Merill said, “I suppose the concentration pattern’s consistent?”