think you’ve just. proven it, Donald. Your father couldn’t pre-
vent it, but perhaps he’s given us an instrument for repairing
it.”
“Meaning me?”
“Yes. Ringer or no ringer, the blood you carryand the
geneshave been with us from the beginning, and I know
how they show their effects. I see them now. Sit down, Don-
ald. I begin to hope. What shall we do?”
“First of all,” Sweeney said, “please, please tell me what
this colony is all about!”
It was a difficult assignment.
Item: the Authorities. Long before space travel, big cities
in the United States had fallen so far behind any possibility
of controlling their own traffic problems as to make purely
political solutions chimerical. No city administration could
spend the amount of money needed for a radical cure, with-
out being ousted in the next elections by the enraged drivers
and pedestrians who most needed the help.
Increasingly, the traffic problems were turned over, with
gratitude and many privileges, to semi-public Port, Bridge
and Highway Authorities: huge capital-investment ventures
modelled upon the Port of New York Authority, which had
shown its ability to build and/or run such huge operations
as the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the George Washington
Bridge, Teterboro, LaGuardia, Idlewild and Newark airports,
and many lesser facilities. By 1960 it was possible to travel
from the tip of Florida to the border of Maine entirely over
Authority-owned territory, if one could pay the appropriate
tolls (and didn’t mind being shot at iq the Poconos by embat-