Metzger's Dog

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.”