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Just remember that tcnveyujh is now accepting applications. Urgently, so they added an exclamation point in bold & red!

Old Time radio

The Whistler:

Wait a minute - there's a problem because they couldn't find the body in your "perfect" murder?

Well, now I'm just completely confused.

X-Minus One: "The Roads Must Roll" 1/4/56

by Robert Heinlein.

The entire country is connected through conveyor belts, because all cars have been outlawed (traffic jams were hell). You step on a belt, then keep going to faster belts until you're going 100 mph.

I'm a little confused as to how people can just stand there and go 100 mph w/out constantly getting their faces smeared w/bugs. And what do they do in rainstorms?

Anyway, the plot is about a bad union man who plans to shut down/blow up a section of the road as blackmail.

At the same time, there's a visitor coming from another country who wants to see how it all works: they have people picked to go through the engineer's academy who have all been chosen to be loyal and mentally/emotionally stable. During the course of the story, the main engineer supersedes the authority of the city's mayor & contemplates calling the President.

Interested in the sci-fi; freaked out by the social & political implications.

And, of course, "The roads must roll" reminds me of Dune & "the spice must flow." In fact, someone says at one point, "Those who control the roads, control the country!" ["He who controls the spice, controls the universe!"] Seems like Frank Herbert had heard Robert Heinlein. I'm not surprised.

The Shadow

I don't know who's playing The Shadow right now, but he doesn't sound like any actor I've ever heard playing him. Maybe Orson Welles had a bad cold.