Authors: Thomas Perry
“Not a bad idea, Bobby. Just don’t try it in the old Byrdmobile. I didn’t wear my hard hat today, and I don’t want to feel anything heavier on my bald head today than a kiss.”
“Not much chance, Danny, so you might as well put the hat back on. I’m on my way south now to check some of the other bad spots.”
“We’ll be checking with Bobby Byrd from time to time in case we run out of bad news. In the meantime, the CHP is advising everyone who doesn’t have to drive today to please stay home.”
Kepler drove on. It was becoming more difficult now. It was seven-fifteen, and the inbound lanes were stopped completely. He had to pass three blocked intersections before he found one with enough space between cars to make a left turn.
When a commercial for transmissions was over, the disk jockey said, “In case you haven’t noticed it yet, today is a good day to write somebody a letter. A motorcycle policeman just drove up the sidewalk, no less, to tell us that there is a problem with the telephone equipment at the downtown switching station. So if you’re waiting for a call from that special someone, don’t bother, go have an affair instead. If you’re beautiful, have an affair with your favorite radio personality, who signs off at ten.”
Kepler could see the Ventura Freeway ahead. It was awesome. He could see thousands of cars, all twelve lanes packed with cars—even the shoulders beside the freeway were full of cars. Overhead, police helicopters hovered, the chopping drone of their engines the only sound. On the pavement of the freeway, among the shining and useless metal shapes of the cars, he could see the figures of people walking, sitting on hoods and fenders and roofs, standing in groups to talk.
As he stopped at the light beside the freeway entrance three girls walked down the entrance ramp, passing within inches of the line of cars stopped there waiting to merge with the unbroken, unmoving line of stalled vehicles.
A man in a Mercedes leaned on his horn and yelled, “Get the hell back to your car! What if it starts moving again?”
One of the girls stopped beside the man’s window. Her face was calm and expressionless and sincere. “It can’t, see? I have the keys.”
27
Porterfield held the small slip of blue paper. “What time did this come in?”
“The call was logged in Langley at eight forty-five, a little over a half hour ago. Quarter to six Los Angeles time. That’s where it came from. Los Angeles.” The young man seemed pleased to be able to say something that sounded like information. His small, glittering eyes narrowed as he waited.
Porterfield spoke in a quiet, measured tone. “Get copies of this to Deputy Director Pines, Mr. Kearns, and Mr. Goldschmidt, then do what they tell you to.” The young man turned on his heel like a military orderly and leaned forward as he took the twelve strides to the door.
Porterfield didn’t care for the young man, but he was a necessary annoyance while the Donahue matter was unresolved. The young man’s real name was Carpenter, but he was listed on the Seyell Foundation’s payroll as Karl Burndt, a name that didn’t seem to fit and which Porterfield needed to make an effort to remember.
Into the telephone Porterfield said, “I need a line to the Los Angeles main office, highest priority, secure if possible, but don’t waste time waiting for a scrambler. If nothing else works, I’ll take a commercial line.”
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. While he waited, he read the message again. “619352. You spoiled the picnic.”
C
HINESE
G
ORDON PULLED HIS CHAISE LONGUE
next to Margaret’s and stepped forward to adjust the television where it rested on the welding table. Then he moved to the wooden stairway and accepted a can of beer from Kepler, who was sitting on the ice chest.
Kepler scratched his stomach. “You’re right, Chinese. It’s ten degrees cooler in the shop than upstairs, and that’s ten degrees cooler than outside.”
“It’s the concrete floor,” Chinese Gordon said. “Even the animals know that.” He turned to see the big dog climbing up off the floor and settling himself on the empty chaise longue beside Doctor Henry Metzger.
“Here it is, Chinese,” Margaret called. Chinese Gordon sauntered up behind her and leaned on the cool metal side of the van.
The television screen showed a display of cars stopped on the freeway. The telephoto lens made them look as though they’d been squashed together, and they shimmered in the heat waves so that in the distance the cars seemed to be submerged in gelatin.
Printed across the picture were the words “Disaster! The Odds Catch Up with Los Angeles.” The staccato opening of the
Noon News
theme hammered its electric urgency like a coded message, then swelled into a deep, sweeping flourish of importance. Then there were Gene Turton’s curly white hair and pale paraffin face. “The biggest traffic tie-up in the history of the world, a near-total cutoff of communication, and hundred-degree temperatures make this a special day in the Southland. More after this.” Gene Turton was replaced by a group of young people pouring impossible quantities of soft drinks down their throats, their heads tilted toward the sun.
“I hate that Southland thing,” said Kepler. “The Southland is way down upon the Suwannee River, not southern California. The man is an ass. If I had him here I’d—”
“Kepler!” said Margaret.
Gene Turton was back. “This morning within a period of less than thirty minutes major accidents slashed into at least seventeen key spots on the Los Angeles freeway system and put a stranglehold on traffic, marooning millions of commuters and choking the life out of the city.”
“Calm down, Gene,” said Chinese Gordon.
“At the same time, what appears to be a freak accident at the South Grand Avenue switching station knocked out the telephones of some ten million homes and businesses in Los Angeles County, leaving the Southland deaf and dumb. A
Noon News
minicam team cornered the mayor in his office only an hour ago, and he had this to say.” Gene stared at something off-camera for several seconds, and then the mayor appeared in a glare of lights that threw black shadows behind him on the wall and made his eyes shine like those of an animal caught in a car’s headlights.
“I’m asking the governor for emergency assistance, in the hope that he will ask the President to declare the county a disaster area. This will make possible the use of the National Guard to help get us out of this mess, and might also make the business community eligible for economic assistance if they suffer significant damage from this day’s events. It’s only eleven, and we’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
A reporter’s arm appeared and a microphone was thrust under the mayor’s chin. “Have you communicated with the governor yet?”
The mayor scowled. “No, I haven’t. The telephones don’t work. Remember?”
Gene Turton’s face appeared again. “For the first time ever, all flights are being diverted from Los Angeles International Airport because of what’s happening here on the ground.
Noon News
has learned that, because of the monumental traffic problems, nobody has been able to get in or out of LAX for several hours. The terminals are already full of stranded passengers, and the airlines are now afraid that if they do land they’ll have to take off empty.” Gene Turton’s eyebrow lifted slightly as he stared into the camera. “No one could be reached to tell us how passengers were to be transported from the Ontario, Burbank, and Orange County airports, or how the airlines expected people booked on outgoing flights to get there.”
Chinese Gordon patted the dog’s head. “Can I sit down, boy?” The dog stared at him but didn’t move.
Gene Turton continued. He was gazing earnestly into the camera, which zoomed so close that his face nearly filled the screen. “There are unsubstantiated reports of a bus drivers’ strike, and other major stories that broke this morning. Throughout the day we’ll have camera teams in helicopters on the spot wherever news is happening, but it may take days to sort out everything that’s happened. We do know a few things that we can pass on. One is, don’t try to drive anywhere unless it’s a genuine emergency. By ‘emergency’ I mean that someone’s life is in danger. There are over four million automobiles stuck out there now. Don’t let yours be one of them. In the meantime, be patient and keep your sense of humor. In a day or two we’ll laugh at this the way people in New York laugh at the 1965 blackout, and people in Buffalo laugh at the blizzard of ’77. Let’s show the world that Los Angeles is a place where people help each other, hmm?”
28
Porterfield listened to the Director’s voice, holding the telephone an inch from his ear. With the other hand he poured himself a half glass of Scotch and put the bottle back in the desk drawer. His eyes were on the television set built into the bookcase.
“I asked the man to play it down, and he wouldn’t do it. You’ve got to remember I didn’t tell him to kill it, I asked him not to make a big deal out of it on national news, as a favor to—”
Porterfield interrupted. “That wasn’t a very good idea.”
“What are you talking about? It was the man’s duty as president of the network. Schenley is supposed to be a responsible man. For God’s sake, I’ve let him into Langley for briefings.”
“That wasn’t a good idea either. He’d castrate himself on camera if a sponsor would pay for it.”
There was a pause, then the Director said, “Well, it’s coming on. I’ll talk to you later.”
The print on the television screen said “Special Report.” The face was Gilford Bennett’s. Porterfield sipped his drink. It would have to be Bennett, the network’s veteran commentator, who had stayed on the radio after the others had pulled the plugs and gone home because he hadn’t believed that Dewey had defeated Truman. He was retired now, but he appeared a few times a year to interview heads of state or narrate special reports about the space program. His familiar old face with the scholarly, serious eyes and the thin, pinched nose like a pigeon’s bill held the usual sardonic expression as once again he returned to view with lofty amazement one of the difficulties mankind had failed to solve for itself since he’d ceased to take a personal interest.
“This hastily prepared special report is about a disaster—a disaster of massive proportions that hit the second largest city in America today. It was real enough to cause economic, political, and social consequences that will be felt for some time to come. But it was different from other disasters, because thus far there have been no casualties. There has been very little physical damage, and nearly all of that was to property owned by public entities and giant corporations that can take their losses without blinking an eye. The disaster? Why, the disaster is that nothing happened.”
Porterfield stared at the screen. A camera in a helicopter showed a stretch of several miles of freeway with cars parked on it, and people sitting on them and waving.
Gilford Bennett said, “This is the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles, California, at two o’clock today. It was blocked by several major accidents at about six-thirty this morning, and nothing on it has moved since then. Traffic jams are nothing new for Los Angeles, the city that invented freeways, but this jam is different. What you’re seeing is not a special sight today, because at this time every major freeway in Los Angeles County, a metropolis approaching eleven million people, looks just like this. Most of these people have been with their cars on the freeway since around seven this morning. People who left for work later than that aren’t down there because there wasn’t room for them on the freeway. Instead they took surface streets, and this was the result.”
The scene changed to a residential street lined with tall palm trees. The street was crammed with parked automobiles. People walked among them, talking. Others sat in their cars, staring glumly forward through the windshields. “This is Riverside Drive, a few blocks from the network’s studios in Burbank. Our producers didn’t exactly pick it, they just didn’t have the use of enough helicopters to get a camera crew any farther away than walking distance.” At that moment a dark green Jaguar sedan abruptly pulled out of line, bounced over the right curb, and drove over front lawns and across driveways and through hedges. A battered Ford station wagon followed it, and then other cars tried, until something too far up the street for the camera to catch blocked them. A Volkswagen Rabbit, the last car to leave the street, sat absurdly in the middle of a bed of bright purple flowers.
“If you didn’t see any reason to join your friends and neighbors in the biggest traffic jam since Hannibal brought the elephants over the Alps, you could have called up your boss and told him you weren’t coming to work, right? Wrong, because in Los Angeles today a freak accident has also closed down the telephone system. Public transportation? Los Angeles has never had a very good system to begin with, and it consists entirely of buses that don’t do as well in the traffic as these automobiles. But even so, today happened to be the day Los Angeles bus drivers went on strike. The reason? We don’t know, because none of the union leaders could be called on the telephone, and none could be located physically. Chances are, they’re out there somewhere, caught in the traffic with everyone else.”
Gilford Bennett’s face reappeared, and his expression was the one he used while interviewing engineers about NASA hardware. “We have Mayor Quentin Sample of Los Angeles in the studio of our Los Angeles affiliate right now, waiting to speak with us. Mr. Mayor, what can you tell us about the worst day in your city’s history?”
“Well, Gil, we have teams of inspectors and assessors all over the county right now trying to tally up the damage. We don’t have anything like a real estimate, just examples. So far nobody seems to have been killed, but it’s a hundred and three degrees out there, and we’ve had reports of police in helicopters evacuating a number of people to hospitals with heat exhaustion, and at least one possible heart attack. Other than that the only real damage is economic, thank God.”
“You mentioned examples. Can you give us a few?”
“Every industry in Los Angeles has lost a day of business. On an annualized basis that’s a half percent of the year’s output for the entire region. But that would be an optimistic way of putting it. I’ll give you a few examples. Tied up on the freeways would be approximately ten to twenty thousand trucks carrying perishable food, which will be garbage by the time they can move again. At this time studios have filed permits for twenty-three major motion pictures in production this week. Some of them have shooting budgets in excess of a million dollars a day. The costs don’t stop if they don’t shoot. Los Angeles is the center of the record industry, the aerospace industry, the television industry, and has a huge proportion of the nation’s insurance and banking business. I could go on for hours, but you get the idea. The economic losses will be incalculable.”
“I may as well put the questions to you that you’ll be hearing from now on. What caused it, and what are you going to do about it?”
“What caused it seems to me the frightening part. It was just chance—the odds. Every day of the week some freeway in the area is jammed by breakdowns, or something. Today seventeen major accidents occurred all at once just before the busiest time of the day, and at the same time an equipment failure cut off telephone service. We’ve had every one of these problems before, but not all at once.”
“But I’d been told you were asking the governor to apply for federal aid on the grounds that Los Angeles had been hit by a natural disaster.”
“What has hit Los Angeles is a force of nature that is exactly the same as a flood or a fire or an earthquake. It’s the natural law of probability. Given four to five million vehicles traveling on those freeways each day, a certain number of accidents will happen. It was mathematically unlikely that one would happen at each of seventeen major interchanges simultaneously on any given day, but the odds caught up with us. Mathematics is a force of nature too.”
“An interesting idea, but it certainly contradicts some of the tenets of insurance law.”
“All right. I don’t care if the President or anybody else agrees with me philosophically. We’ve got a disaster, and it doesn’t matter what caused it. If this same disaster had been caused in some other way, the federal government would help with the cleanup, emergency loans, and so on. What if it had been something else? A minor earthquake would have about the same results. If this had happened in San Salvador or Mexico City the check would already be in the mail.”
The telephone was already ringing. Porterfield picked up the receiver. “Yes, I heard it. No, it’s only a coincidence. Don’t worry. There are only a certain number of municipal disasters he would think of. It was just a matter of time—you know, the odds.”