Comfort Station

11:00 A.M

Through a window high in the United Nations Building overlooking the throbbing megalopolitan core of the Bos-Wash megalopolis complex, General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, right-wing dictator of the tiny South American nation of Guacamole, watched the traffic far below on East 42nd Street, and most particularly the impressive length of the gleaming top of the 42nd Street Crosstown bus. How many of the riders of that bus, he wondered, really understood the changes that were to be brought into their lives by the new megalopolitan construct in city planning and most particularly in the area of high-speed interurban and intraurban mass transit? Very few, he supposed. Although city planners and other concerned individuals in municipal and state and federal governments were undertaking at this very moment a massive effort to educate the general public, the man in the street by and large remained blissfully unaware of the incredible complexity of the changes being wrought with incredible speed in his everyday life by the steady swift advance of incredible technology.

If these seem like unusual reflections for the dictator of an obscure South American nation to be reflecting, let it be pointed out at once that General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, a gross little man with a pencil moustache and an arrogant demeanor, was on the threshold of being the former dictator of Guacamole, that obscure South American nation, partly as a result of the yearning of Guacamolians everywhere to be free, but also as a result of a minor error on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States’ super-hush-hush espionage organization, little known outside the innermost circles of deeply disturbed Washington, which had for the last three years been supplying arms, funds, and mimeograph paper to the insurgents in Guacamole instead of to the Federales Government.

General Tortilla had learned of the upcoming palace revolt just barely in time to make quick arrangements to get out of the country, first converting all his assets within Guacamole into cash, buying diamonds with the cash, and traveling to New York with the diamonds cleverly concealed as decorations spread out on the chest of his red and gold and blue and green and yellow uniform. Most of the money he had bled from his native land over the years now resided, of course, in numbered Swiss bank accounts, but the diamonds swathing his chest accounted for upwards of half a million dollars in addition to the unnumbered millions in the numbered accounts.

He had gotten out of the country by arranging an urgent meeting here at the United Nations Building in New York City, crossroads of a million private lives. The meeting, of course, would not take place. But the revolutionaries back home didn’t know that. They were still there, in green and lovely Guacamole, waiting for him to return so they could lop off his head with their machismos.

New York was to be his new home, at least temporarily, so naturally he was concerning himself now with local problems, of which the knotty one of mass transportation was naturally at the forefront of his mind. So much depends on the quick delivery of people and goods from one spot to another within the growing complexity of the new megalopolis concept. The Boston-Washington complex — familiarly known as Bos-Wash to the city planners struggling to keep up with the dizzy pace of modern technology — was in the forefront of that urban battlefield.

A sound recalled General Tortilla to the present. Turning, he saw entering the room, pistols drawn, three men he knew to be a part of the conspiracy against him, three men he had thought to be safely in South America!

“So,” the three said, as one man. “You thought you would escape the justice of an aroused people, General Tortilla.”

“You got me wrong,” General Tortilla protested, and abruptly flung himself through the connecting door to the next office. Locking the connecting door behind him, he headed for the hallway, pausing only to grab up a black London Fog raincoat hanging on an old friend of his, a research biochemist, standing in the corner. Not only would the raincoat conceal the diamonds winking and sparkling on his chest, there was the further consideration that it was, in fact, raining out, and the raincoat — if the London Fog people could be counted on — would go far toward keeping him dry, should his travels take him outside.

As he was convinced they would. Already a hammering had started at the door he had just locked, and which he had no intention of unlocking and opening. Instead, he hurried to the other door, which led to the hall, and then down the hall to the elevators.

He was just boarding an elevator when he saw the three maddened pursuers in maddened pursuit. They would, he knew, be following him on the very next elevator. Given the Bos-Wash response generally to the mass transit problems within its borders, he doubted that next elevator would be very long in coming.

At ground level, he raced through the opulent surroundings, described in detail in a pamphlet that can be ordered direct from the United Nations, U.N. Plaza, New York, N.Y. Outside into the rain drenching an already-drenched city he raced, looking frantically about for some means of escape.

What was that ahead of him?

The 42nd Street Crosstown bus.

General Tortilla started to run.