Posted on 04/12/2026 6:34:46 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
Magazine Cover
Story Snapshot 
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 and Footed Sects"--of Vol. 3 of Burger's monumental History of Traffic, published by the Foundation for Twenty-Second Century Studies.
The raggedy little old lady with the big shopping bag was in the exact center of the crosswalk when she became aware of the big black car bearing down on her.
Behind the thick bullet-proof glass its seven occupants had a misty look, 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 venturesome child executed a dozen times a day. Her reflexes were too slow.
Polite vacuous laughter came from the car's loudspeaker over the engine'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 big blue-black automatic. She held it in both fists, riding the recoils like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.
Aiming at the base of the windshield, just as a big-game hunter aims at the vulnerable spine of a charging water buffalo over the horny armor of its lowered head, the little old lady squeezed off three shots before the car chewed her down.
From the right-hand curb a young woman in a wheelchair shrieked an obscenity at the car's occupants.
Smythe-de Winter, the driver, wasn't happy. The little old lady's last shot had taken two members of his car pool. Bursting through the laminated glass, the steel-jacketed slug had traversed the neck of Phipps-McHeath and buried itself in the skull of Horvendile-Harker.
Braking viciously, Smythe-de Winter rammed the car over the right-hand curb. Pedestrians scattered into entries and narrow arcades, among them a 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 shred of rattan swinging from the flange of his right fore mudguard for a trophy. Despite the two-for-two casualty list, he felt angry and depressed. The secure, predictable world around him seemed to be crumbling.
While his companions softly keened a dirge to Horvy and Phipps and quietly 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. "They oughtn'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 the combined wake of the little old lady and the girl in the wheelchair, a fiery-tongued speaker inveighed against the White-Walled Fascists of Suburbia, telling to his hearers, the fabled wonders of old Los Angeles, where pedestrians were sacrosanct, even outside crosswalks. He called for a hobnail march across the nearest lawn-bowling alleys and perambulator-traversed golf courses of the motorists.
At the Sunnyside Crematorium, to which the bodies of Phipps and Horvy had been conveyed, an equally impassioned and rather more grammatical orator reminded his listeners of the legendary justice of old Chicago, where pedestrians were forbidden to carry small arms and anyone with one foot off the sidewalk was fair prey. He broadly hinted that a holocaust, primed if necessary with a few tankfuls of gasoline, was the only cure for the Slums.
Bands of skinny youths came loping at dusk out of the Slum Ring into the innermost sections of the larger doughnut of the Suburbs slashing defenseless tires, shooting expensive watchdogs and scrawling filthy words on the pristine panels of matrons' runabouts which never ventured more than six blocks from home.
Simultaneously squadrons of young suburban motorcycles and scooterites roared through the outermost precincts of the Slum Ring, harrying children off sidewalks, tossing stink-bombs through second-story tenement windows and defacing hovel-fronts with sprays of black paint.
Incident—a thrown brick, a cut corner, monster tacks in the portico of the Auto Club—were even reported from the center of the city, traditionally neutral territory.
The Government hurriedly acted, suspending all traffic between the Center and the Suburbs and establishing a 24-hour curfew in the Slum Ring. Government agents moved only by centipede-car and pogo-hopper to underline the point that they favored neither contending side.
The day of enforced non-movement for Feet and Wheels was spent in furtive vengeful preparations. Behind locked garage doors, machine-guns that fired through the nose ornament were mounted under hoods, illegal scythe blades were welded to oversize hubcaps and the stainless steel edges of flange fenders were honed to razor sharpness.
While nervous National Guardsmen hopped about the deserted sidewalks of the Slum Ring, grim-faced men and women wearing black armbands moved through the webwork of secret tunnels and hidden doors, distributing heavy-caliber small arms and spike-studded paving blocks, piling cobblestones on strategic roof-tops and sapping upward from the secret tunnels to create car-traps. Children got ready to soap intersections after dark. The Committee of Pedestrian Safety, sometimes known as Robespierre's Rats, prepared to release its two carefully hoarded anti-tank guns.
At nightfall, under the tireless urging of the Government, representatives of the Pedestrians and the Motorists met on a huge safety island at the boundary of the Slum Ring and the Suburbs.
Underlings began a noisy dispute as to whether Smythe-de Winter had failed to give a courtesy honk before charging, whether the little old lady had opened fire before the car had come within honking distance, how many wheels of Smythe-de's car had been on the sidewalk when he hit the girl in the wheelchair and so on. After a little while the High Pedestrian and the Chief Motorist exchanged cautious winks and drew aside.
The red writhing of a hundred kerosene flares and the mystic yellow pulsing of a thousand firefly lamps mounted on yellow sawhorses ranged around the safety island illumined two tragic, strained faces.
"A word before we get down to business," the Chief Motorist whispered. "What's the current S.Q. of your adults?"
"Forty-one and dropping," the High Pedestrian replied, his eyes fearfully searching from side to side for eavesdroppers. "I can hardly get aides who are halfway compos mentis."
"Our own Sanity Quotient is thirty-seven," the Chief Motorist revealed. He shrugged helplessly.... "The wheels inside my people's heads are slowing down. I do not think they will be speeded up in my lifetime."
"They say Government's only fifty-two," the other said with a matching shrug.
"Well, I suppose we must scrape out one more compromise," the one suggested hollowly, "though I must confess there are times when I think we're all the figments of a paranoid's dream."
Two hours of concentrated deliberations produced the new Wheel-Foot Articles of Agreement. Among other points, pedestrian handguns were limited to a slightly lower muzzle velocity and to .38 caliber and under, while motorists were required to give three honks at one block distance before charging a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Two wheels over the curb changed a traffic kill from third-degree manslaughter to petty homicide. Blind pedestrians were permitted to carry hand grenades.
Immediately the Government went to work. The new Wheel-Foot Articles were loudspeakered and posted. Detachments of police and psychiatric social hoppers centipedaled and pogoed through the Slum Ring, seizing outsize weapons and giving tranquilizing jet-injections to the unruly. Teams of hypnotherapists and mechanics scuttled from home to home in the Suburbs and from garage to garage, in-chanting a conformist serenity and stripping illegal armament from cars. On the advice of a rogue psychiatrist, who said it would channel off aggressions, a display of bull-fighting was announced, but this had to be canceled when a strong protest was lodged by the Decency League, which had a large mixed Wheel-Foot membership.
At dawn, curfew was lifted in the Slum Ring and traffic reopened between the Suburbs and the Center. After a few uneasy moments it became apparent that the status quo had been restored.
Smythe-de Winter tooled his gleaming black machine along the Ring. A thick steel bolt with a large steel washer on either side neatly filled the hole the little old lady's slug had made in the windshield.
A brick bounced off the roof. Bullets pattered against the side windows.
Smythe-de ran a handkerchief around his neck under his collar and smiled.
A block ahead children were darting into the street, cat-calling and thumbing their noses. Behind one of them limped a fat dog with a spiked collar.
Smythe-de suddenly gunned his motor. He didn't hit any of the children, but he got the dog.
A flashing light on the dash showed him the right front tire was losing pressure. Must have hit the collar as well! He thumbed the matching emergency-air button and the flashing stopped.
He turned toward Witherspoon-Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction, "I like a normal orderly world, where you always have a little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just enough to brace you."
Witherspoon-Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its center was discolored by a brownish stain ribbon-tracked by tires.
"That's where you bagged the little old lady, Smythe-de," he remarked. "I'll say this for her now: she had spirit."
"Yes, that's where I bagged her," Smythe-de agreed flatly. He remembered wistfully the witchlike face growing rapidly larger, her jerking shoulders in black bombazine, the wild white-circled eyes. He suddenly found himself feeling that this was a very dull day.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
"In March 1915, during World War I (1914-18), British and French forces launched an ill-fated naval attack on Turkish forces in the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey, hoping to take control of the strategically vital strait separating Europe from Asia." British Battleships could fire 60 miles, the Germans' paltry Battleships could only fire 30 miles, (fact check?). In any case, the Germans and Turks stretched a chain across the Dardanelles, only 3/4 to 4 miles wide, shore batteries were pre-targeted, ambushing the largest British Battleship, the Queen Mary, when it tried to come through, trapping the mid-oceanic, superior naval force in the coastal strait confines was like shooting fish in a barrel. ("We've Got to Get the Bismarck 'Cause the World Depends on Us" was merely replaying the last war's lessons, already obsolete.) Of course, today the American admirals realize fully well how much the Aircraft Carrier has the same vulnerability, so they keep them 1,000 miles of the coast of Iran.
The American sea power is a continuation of the British. Foreign owned banks took over Britain early in the 1800s; they made a Hollywood movie about how carrier pigeons were used to convey, presumably encrypted, confidential armaments-investment information between bank branches in London, Paris and Hamburg, for the purpose of playing both sides of the Napoleonic Wars.
The military-naval muscle was merely the extension, of what was at its core, financial power, the way they got their initial leverage; the financial power is called the City of London; it had its predecessors back to the reign of Elizabeth the First, when the real pants were worn by bankers with names were Cecil and Burleigh. The sovereign City of London exploited the discovery of gold and diamonds in Southern Africa in the late 1800s; their political and administrative cover was called The Roundtable, an Arthurian analogy; when they tried to make the organization international, including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and Canada, the Americans wouldn't play along, so it became the British Commonwealth without them. The British wrecked their Empire between the world wars. The Americans are now doing the same.
The nuts and bolts of the British system used their Navy as debt enforcers: Some Sheikh would be persuaded to accept gargantuan loans, which became un-repayable by 80 years on, but it was all part of the master plan. The British Navy would steam up the Sheikhdom's capitol river, bombard his harem, upon which the Sheikh would surrender his country's assets to the City, subjecting his defenseless population to debt slavery. At the American cousins', the Federal Reserve Act and Federal Income Tax were instituted about 1913-14. The Fed prints unlimited amounts of made-up money, loans it to the Govt., you have to work a little past April 15 to pay off the rent from your being allowed to work, all businesses pay about a 40% rent fee on their own investments. The Eye Rain Yians are putting the kibosh on all this, by refusing to trade in dollar denominated oil-based currency, they demand Strait of Hormuz passage toll in Chinese Yuan and Crypto. They Iranians tried to nationalize Anglo-Iranian oil assets in 1953, Operation Ajax run by Teddy Roosevelt's nephew Kermit "Kip" Roosevelt and Stormin' Norman's daddy Norman Schwartzkopf overthrew their attempt at democratic government until 1979. Either the Iranians are the worst baby eaters in history (the worst terrorists are actually Sunni, not Shi'a), or they're highly educated, extremely polite people who, despite "Death to America", love American culture and Americans, and understand that our ordinary people don't run all this. It may not be the wisest course to be so committed to the dominant narrative as to fail to see who the players actually are.
Central banks are financially involved with all wars, revolutions, market crashes, famines, plagues and genocides.
The names on the cover of the magazine were all masters. I never read that story.
I remember reading it in some anthology when I was a kid.
Was post #1 created with an AI system? It seems to contain a large number of errors. Is it meant to be a Science Fiction analogy of today?
I am surprised you didn’t throw Jews in there. Or, was that just implied since “we all know that Jews run all the banks”?
I read that long, long ago. What stuck in my mind was that the Wheels armored their cars against the Feets. E.g., Wheel car hoods and whatnot had blades embedded in them so they could cut thru a sidewalk and disembowel a Feets.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.