The Project Gutenberg EBook of X Marks the Pedwalk, by Fritz Leiber
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Title: X Marks the Pedwalk
Author: Fritz Leiber
Illustrator: John Pederson
Release Date: August 11, 2016 [EBook #52776]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK X MARKS THE PEDWALK ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
X MARKS THE PEDWALK
BY FRITZ LEIBER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
This is how it all began--the terrible
civil strife that devastates our world!
Based in material in Ch. 7--"First Clashes of the Wheeled and
Footed Sects"--of Vol. 3 of Burger's monumental _History of
Traffic_, published by the Foundation for Twenty-Second
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-black automatic. She held it in both fists, riding the recoils
like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.
Aiming at the base of the windshield, just as a big-game hunter aims
at the vulnerable spine of a charging water buffalo over the horny
armor of its 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 car pool. Bursting through the
laminated glass, the steel-jacketed slug had traversed the neck of
Phipps-McHeath and buried itself in the skull of Horvendile-Harker.
Braking 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 mudguard 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 Horvy and Phipps and
quietly mopped up their blood, he frowned and shook his head.
"They oughtn't to let old ladies carry magnums," he murmured.
Witherspoon-Hobbs nodded agreement across the front-seat corpse. "They
oughtn't to let 'em 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 inveighed against the White-Walled Fascists
of 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 Sunnyside Crematorium, to which the bodies of Phipps and Horvy
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 prey. 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 matrons' runabouts which never ventured
more than six blocks from home.
Simultaneously squadrons of young suburban motorcycles and scooterites
roared through the outermost precincts 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 tacks 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 24-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 ornament were mounted under hoods, illegal
scythe blades were welded to oversize 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 webwork of secret tunnels and hidden doors, distributing
heavy-caliber small arms and spike-studded paving blocks, piling
cobblestones on strategic roof-tops 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 hoarded
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 Smythe-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 Smythe-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 the Chief Motorist exchanged cautious winks and drew
aside.
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 illumined 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 _compos 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 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'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 changed 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 loudspeakered and posted. Detachments of police and psychiatric
social hoppers centipedaled and pogoed through the Slum Ring, seizing
outsize 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, in-chanting a conformist
serenity and stripping illegal armament from cars. On the advice of
a rogue psychiatrist, who said it would channel off aggressions, a
display of bull-fighting was announced, but this had to be canceled
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 Center. 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 the little old lady's slug had made in the windshield.
A brick bounced off the roof. Bullets pattered against the side
windows.
Smythe-de ran a handkerchief around his neck under his collar and
smiled.
A block ahead children were darting into the street, cat-calling and
thumbing their noses. Behind one of them limped a fat dog with a spiked
collar.
Smythe-de 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 tire 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 always have a
little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just
enough to brace you."
Witherspoon-Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its center was
discolored by a brownish stain ribbon-tracked by tires.
"That's where you bagged the little old lady, Smythe-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 witchlike face growing rapidly larger, her
jerking shoulders in black bombazine, the wild white-circled eyes. He
suddenly found himself feeling that this was a very dull day.
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