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 andFooted Sects"--of Vol. 3 of Burger's monumental History ofTraffic, published by the Foundation for Twenty-SecondCentury Studies.
The raggedy little old lady with the big shopping bag was in the exactcenter of the crosswalk when she became aware of the big black carbearing down on her.
Behind the thick bullet-proof glass its seven occupants had a mistylook, 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 venturesomechild executed a dozen times a day. Her reflexes were too slow.
Polite vacuous laughter came from the car's loudspeaker over theengine'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 bigblue-black automatic. She held it in both fists, riding the recoilslike a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.
Aiming at the base of the windshield, just as a big-game hunter aimsat the vulnerable spine of a charging water buffalo over the hornyarmor of its lowered head, the little old lady squeezed off three shotsbefore the car chewed her down.
From the right-hand curb a young woman in a wheelchair shrieked anobscenity at the car's occupants.
Smythe-de Winter, the driver, wasn't happy. The little old lady'slast shot had taken two members of his car pool. Bursting through thelaminated glass, the steel-jacketed slug had traversed the neck ofPhipps-McHeath and buried itself in the skull of Horvendile-Harker.
Braking viciously, Smythe-de Winter rammed the car over the right-handcurb. Pedestrians scattered into entries and narrow arcades, among thema 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 shredof rattan swinging from the flange of his right fore mudguard fora trophy. Despite the two-for-two casualty list, he felt angry anddepressed. The secure, predictable world around him seemed to becrumbling.
While his companions softly keened a dirge to Horvy and Phipps andquietly 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. "Theyoughtn'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 thecombined wake of the little old lady and the girl in the wheelchair,a fiery-tongued speaker inveighed against the White-Walled Fascistsof Suburbia, telling to his hearers, the fabled wonders of old LosAngeles, where pedestrians were sacrosanct, even outside crosswalks. Hecalled for a hobnail march across the nearest lawn-bowling alleys andperambulator-traversed golf courses of the motorists.
At the Sunnyside Crematorium, to which the bodies of Phipps and Horvyh