Chapter 2
Story number two of three science fiction stories by Fritz Lieber. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. X. Marks the Pedwalk. This story was published in April 1963 in Worlds of Tomorrow. X. Marks the Pedwalk.
Based in material in Chapter 7, First Clashes of the Wheeled and Footed Sex, a Volume 3 of Burgers' Monumental History of Traffic, published by the Foundation for 22nd Century Studies. The raggedy little old lady with the big shopping bag was in the exact center of the crosswalk, when she became aware of the big black car bearing down on her. Behind the thick bullet-proof glass, its seven occupants had a misty look, like men in a diving bell.
She saw there was no longer time to beat the car to either curb. Veering remorselessly, it would catch her in the gutter. Useless to attempt a feint and double back, such as any venturesome child executed a dozen times a day, her reflexes were too slow. Polite, vacuous laughter came from the car's loudspeaker over the engine's mounting roar. From her fellow pedestrians lining the curbs came a sigh of horror.
The little old lady dipped into her shopping bag and came up with a big blue back-automatic. She held it in both fists, riding the recalls like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco. Aiming at the base of the windshield, just as the big game hunter aims at the vulnerable spine of a charging water buffalo over the horny armor of his lowered head, the little old lady squeezed off three shots before the car chewed her down. From the right-hand curb a young woman in a wheelchair shrieked an obscenity at the car's occupants.
Smythe de Winter, the driver, wasn't happy. The little old lady's last shot had taken two members of his carpool. Bursting through the laminated glass, the steel-jacketed slug had traversed the neck of Phipps McKeith and buried itself in the skull of Harvindile Harker. Breaking viciously, Smythe de Winter rammed the car over the right-hand curb. Pedestrians scattered into entries and narrow arcades, among them a youth bounding high on crutches.
But Smythe de Winter got the girl in the wheelchair. Then he drove rapidly out of the slum ring into the suburbs, a shred of rattan swinging from the flange of his right-fore budguard for a trophy. Despite the two-for-two casualty list, he felt angry and depressed. The secure, predictable world around him seemed to be crumbling. While his companions softly keened a dirge to Harvey and Phipps and quietly mopped up their blood, he frowned and shook his head.
They oughtn't let old ladies carry magnums, he murmured. Witherspoon Hobbs nodded agreement across the front seat corpse. They oughtn't to let them carry anything. God, how I hate feet, he muttered, looking down at his shrunken legs. Wheels forever, he softly cheered.
The incident had immediate repercussions throughout the city. At the combined wake of the little old lady and the girl in the wheelchair, a fiery-tongued speaker invades against the white-walled fascist the suburbia, telling to his hearers the fabled wonders of old Los Angeles, where pedestrians were sacrosanct even outside crosswalks. He called for a hobnail march across the nearest lawn bowling alleys and perambulator-traversed golf courses of the motorists. At the sunny side crematorium to which the bodies of Phipps and Harvey had been conveyed,
an equally impassioned and rather more grammatical orator reminded his listeners of the legendary justice of old Chicago, where pedestrians were forbidden to carry small arms and anyone with one foot off the sidewalk was fair-prayed. He broadly hinted that a holocaust, primed if necessary with a few tankfuls of gasoline, was the only cure for the slums. Bands of skinny youths came loping at dusk out of the slum ring into the innermost sections of the larger doughnut of the suburbs, slashing defenseless tires, shooting expensive watchdogs and scrawling filthy words on the pristine panels of matron's runabouts, which never ventured more than six blocks from home.
Simultaneously, squadrons of young suburban motorcycles and scooter-rides roared through the outermost precinct of the slum ring, harrying children off sidewalks, tossing stink bombs through second-story tenement windows and defacing hovel fronts with sprays of black paint. Incident. A thrown brick, a cut corner, monster taxis in the portico of the Auto Club, were even reported from the center of the city, traditionally neutral territory. The government hurriedly acted, suspending all traffic between the center and the suburbs, and establishing a twenty-four-hour curfew in the slum ring. Government agents moved only by centipede-car and pogo-hopper to underline the point that they favored neither contending side.
The day of enforced non-movement for feet and wheels was spent in furtive, vengeful preparations. Behind locked garage-doors, machine-guns that fired through the nose-armament were mounted under hoods, illegal scythe-blades were welded to oversized hubcaps, and the stainless steel edges of flange fenders were honed to razor-sharpness. While nervous National Guardsmen hopped about the deserted sidewalks of the slum ring, grim-faced men and women wearing black armbands moved through the web-work of secret tunnels and hidden doors,
distributing heavy-caliber small arms and spike-studded paving-blocks, piling cobblestones on strategic rooftops, and sapping upward from the secret tunnels to create car-traps. Children got ready to soap intersections after dark. The Committee of Pedestrian Safety, sometimes known as Robespierre's Rats, prepared to release its two carefully-horted anti-tank guns. At nightfall, under the tireless urging of the government,
representatives of the pedestrians and the motorists met on a huge safety island at the boundary of the slum ring and the suburbs. Underlings began a noisy dispute as to whether Smith de Winter had failed to give a courtesy honk before charging, whether the little old lady had opened fire before the car had come within honking distance, how many wheels of Smith de's car had been on the sidewalk when he hit the girl in the wheelchair, and so on. After a little while, the high pedestrian and chief motorist exchanged cautious winks and drew a side.
The red writhing of a hundred kerosene flares and the mystic yellow pulsing of a thousand firefly lamps mounted on yellow sawhorses ranged around the safety island illuminated two tragic, strained faces. A word before we get down to business, the chief motorist whispered. What's the current S.Q. of your adults? Forty-one and dropping, the high pedestrian replied, his eyes fearfully searching from side to side for eavesdroppers.
I can hardly get aides who are halfway compost mentis. Our own sanity quotient is thirty-seven, the chief motorist revealed. He shrugged helplessly. The wheels inside my people's heads are slowing down. I do not think they will be speeded up in my lifetime.
They say the government's only fifty-two, the other said with a matching shrug. Well, I suppose we must scrape out one more compromise, the one suggested hollowly. Though I must confess there are times when I think we're all the figments of a paranoid dream. Two hours of concentrated work, and I'm sure I'll be able to get a good night's sleep. The chief motorist's dream.
Two hours of concentrated deliberations produced the new wheel-foot articles of agreement. Among other points, pedestrian handguns were limited to a slightly lower muzzle velocity and to .38 caliber and under, while motorists were required to give three honks at one block distance before charging a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Two wheels over the curb change a traffic kill from third-degree manslaughter to petty homicide. Blind pedestrians were permitted to carry hand grenades.
Immediately the government went to work. The new wheel-foot articles were loud-speakered and posted. Detachments of police and psychiatric social-hoppers sent peddled and pogoed through the slum ring, seizing outsized weapons and giving tranquilizing jet injections to the unruly. Teams of hypnotherapists and mechanics scuttled from home to home in the suburbs and from garage to garage
enchanting a conformist's serenity and stripping illegal armaments from cars. On the advice of a rogue psychiatrist who said it would channel off aggressions, a display of bullfighting was announced, but this had to be cancelled when a strong protest was lodged by the decency league, which had a large mixed wheel-foot membership. At dawn curfew was lifted in the slum ring and traffic reopened between the suburbs and the centre.
After a few uneasy moments it became apparent that the status quo had been restored. Smythe de Winter tooled his gleaming black machine along the ring. A thick steel bolt with a large steel washer on either side neatly filled the hole a little old lady slug had made in the windshield. A brick bounced off the roof. Bullets pattered against the side windows. Smythe de Winter ran a handkerchief around his neck under his collar and smiled.
A block ahead children were darting into the street catcalling and thumbing their noses. Behind one of them limped a fat dog with a spiked collar. Smythe de Winter suddenly gunned his motor. He didn't hit any of the children, but he got the dog. A flashing light on the dash showed him the right front tyre was losing pressure.
Must have hit the collar as well. He thumbed the matching emergency air button and the flashing stopped. He turned toward witherspoon Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction, I like a normal orderly world where you can always have a little success, but not champagne, had he? A little failure, but just enough to brace you.
Witherspoon Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its centre was discoloured by a brownish stain ribbon tracked by tyres. That's where you bagged the little old lady, Smith de, he remarked. I'll say this for her. Now she had spirit. Yes, that's where I bagged her, Smythe de agreed flatly.
He remembered wistfully the witch-like face growing rapidly larger, her jerking shrewd face, her black signature, her jerking shoulders and black bombazine, the wild white circled eyes. He suddenly found himself feeling that this was a very dull day.
