“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 in to 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 beanery number four for supper. You can reach me by calling ten-six-six.”
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 achievement of cheap sun power and the installation of the first mechanized 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 1955 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. Eighty million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speeds, 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 that 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 cancelled out the possibility.
In 1955 Federal Highway #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 project to stimulate heavy industry; it had an unexpected by-product. The great cities of Chicago and St. Louis stretched out urban pseudopods toward each other, until they met near Bloomington, Illinois. The two parent cities actually shrunk in population.