such was the reason I was sent to you.'
'Yes, I did, in a general way. I don't know just what it is that you wish to find out.
I suppose that you have heard about our roadtowns, how they came about, how they operate, and so forth.'
'I've read a good bit, true, but I am not a technical man, Mr. Gaines, not an engineer. My field is social and political. I want to see how this remarkable technical change has affected your people. Suppose you tell me about the roads as if I were entirely ignorant. And I will ask questions.'
'That seems a practical plan. By the way, how many are there in your party?'
'Just myself. My secretary went on to Washington.'
'I see.' Gaines glanced at his wrist watch. 'It's nearly dinner time. Suppose we run up to the Stockton Sector for dinner. There is a good Chinese restaurant up there that I'm partial to. It will take us about an hour and you can see the ways in operation while we ride.'
'Excellent.'
Gaines pressed a button on his desk, and a picture formed on a large visor screen mounted on the opposite wall. It showed a strong-boned, angular young man seated at a semicircular control desk, which was backed by a complex instrument board. A cigarette was tucked in one corner of his mouth.
The young man glanced up, grinned, and waved from the screen. 'Greetings and salutations, chief. What can I do for you?'
'Hi, Dave. You've got the evening watch, eh? I'm running up to the Stockton Sector for dinner. Where's Van Kleeck?'
'Gone to a meeting somewhere. He didn't say.'
'Anything to report?'
'No, sir. The roads are rolling, and all the little people are going ridey-ridey home to their dinners.'
'O.K.—keep 'em rolling.'
'They'll roll, chief.'
Gaines snapped off the connection and turned to Bleckinsop. 'Van Kleeck is my chief deputy. I wish he'd spend more time on the road and less on politics. Davidson can handle things, however. Shall we go?'
They glided down an electric staircase, and debouched on the walkway which bordered the north-bound five-mile-an-hour strip. After skirting a stairway trunk marked 'Overpass to Southbound Road,' they paused at the edge of the first strip.
'Have you ever ridden a conveyor strip before?' Gaines inquired. 'It's quite simple.
Just remember to face against the motion of the strip as you get on.'
They threaded their way through homeward-bound throngs, passing from strip to strip. Down the center of the twenty-mile-an-hour strip ran a glassite partition which reached nearly to the spreading roof. The Honorable Mr. Blekinsop raised his eyebrows inquiringly as he looked at it.
'Oh, that?' Gaines answered the unspoken question as he slid back a panel door and ushered his guest through. 'That's a wind break. If we didn't have some way of separating the air currents over the strips of different speeds, the wind would tear our clothes off on the hundred- mile-an-hour strip.' He bent his head to Blekinsop's as he spoke, in order to cut through the rush of air against the road surfaces, the noise of the crowd, and the muted roar of the driving mechanism concealed beneath the moving strips. The combination of noises inhibited further conversation as they proceeded toward the middle of the roadway. After passing through three more wind screens located at the forty, sixty, and eighty-mile-an-hour strips, respectively, they finally reached the maximum-speed strip, the hundred-mile-an-hour strip, which made the round trip, San Diego to Reno and back, in twelve hours.
Blekinsop found himself on a walkway, twenty feet wide, facing another partition.
Immediately opposite him an illuminated show-window proclaimed: JAKE'S STEAK HOUSE No. 4 The Fastest Meal on the Fastest Road!
'To dine on the fly Makes the miles roll by!'
'Amazing!' said Mr. Blekinsop. 'It would be like dining in a tram. Is this really a proper restaurant?'
'One of the best. Not fancy, but sound.'
'Oh, I say, could we—'
Gaines smiled at him. 'You'd like to try it, wouldn't you, sir?'
'I don't wish to interfere with your plans—'
'Quite all right. I'm hungry myself, and Stockton is a long hour away. Let's go in.'
Gaines greeted the manageress as an old friend. 'Hello, Mrs. McCoy. How are you tonight?'
'If it isn't the chief himself! It's a long time since we've had the pleasure of seeing your face.' She led them to a booth somewhat detached from the crowd of dining commuters. 'And will you and your friend be having dinner?'
'Yes, Mrs. McCoy. Suppose you order for us—but be sure it includes one of your steaks.'
'Two inches thick—from a steer that died happy.' She glided away, moving her fat frame with surprising grace.
With sophisticated foreknowledge of the chief engineer's needs, Mrs. McCoy had left a portable telephone at the table. Gaines plugged it into an accommodation jack at the side of the booth, and dialed a number. 'Hello— Davidson? Dave, this is the chief.
I'm in Jake's Steak House No. 4 for supper. You can reach me by calling 10-L-6-6.'
He replaced the handset, and Blekinsop inquired politely: 'Is it necessary for you to be available at all times?'
'Not strictly necessary,' Gaines told him, 'but I feel safer when I am in touch.
Either Van Kleeck, or myself, should be where the senior engineer of the watch—
that's Davidson this shift—can get hold of us in a pinch. If it's a real emergency, I want to be there, naturally.'
'What would constitute a real emergency?'
'Two things, principally. A power failure on the rotors would bring the road to a standstill, and possibly strand millions of people a hundred miles, or more, from their homes. If it happened during a rush hour, we would have to evacuate those millions from the road—not too easy to do.'
'You say millions—as many as that?'
'Yes, indeed. There are twelve million people dependent on this roadway, living and working in the buildings adjacent to it, or within five miles of each side.'
The Age of Power blends into the Age of Transportation almost imperceptibly, but two events stand out as landmarks in the change: The invention of the Sun-power screen, and the opening of the first moving road. The power resources of oil and coal of the United States had— save for a few sporadic outbreaks of common sense— been shamefully wasted in their development all through the first half of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, the automobile, from its humble start as a one- lunged horseless carriage, grew into a steel-bodied monster of over a hundred horsepower and capable of making more than a hundred miles an hour. They boiled over the countryside, like yeast in ferment. In the middle of the century it was estimated that there was a motor vehicle for every two persons in the United States.
They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed, are more destructive than war. In the same reference year the premiums paid for compulsory liability and property damage insurance by automobile owners exceeded in amount the sum paid the same year to purchase automobiles. Safe driving campaigns were chronic phenomena, but were mere pious attempts to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. It was not physically possible to drive safely in those crowded metropolises. Pedestrians were sardonically divided into two classes, the quick and the dead.
But a pedestrian could be defined as a man who had found a place to park his car.
The automobile made possible huge cities, then choked those same cities to death with their numbers. In 1900 Herbert George Wells pointed out that the saturation point in the size of a city might be mathematically predicted in terms of its transportation facilities. From a standpoint of speed alone the automobile made possible cities two hundred miles in diameter, but traffic congestion, and the inescapable, inherent danger of high-powered, individually operated vehicles canceled out the possibility.
Federal Highway No. 66 from Los Angeles to Chicago, 'The Main Street of America,' was transformed into a superhighway for motor vehicles, with an underspeed limit of sixty miles per hour. It was planned as a public works
