actually made their way on foot. Those
who remembered how to steer by hand, mainly persons with obsolete
cars, were able to travel by using back country roads. It was almost
like old times, when we used to have accidents.

Meanwhile, I kept getting radio calls from motorists whose cars were
trapped on the highway. They were unable to turn off anywhere, even at
the wrong exit. The magnetic propellers forced them to continue
traveling a circular route for hours. I don't know what they expected
_me_ to do about it.

They tried to say I tampered with the controls, but I had no such
orders. There was nothing in the Traffic Officer's Manual to cover
this situation, so I naturally did nothing.

Anyway, I think that the trouble lay with the direction-finders in the
cars rather than with the Highway Controls. For several days
previously, a great many cars no matter how the automatic
direction-finders were set, had been known to head for water if they
weren't watched. Because of the fact that so many motorists had formed
a habit of snoozing, once the car was in motion, there were a number
of drownings. If we could have done anything to prevent them, we
probably would have, though that wasn't our job.

3

MY name is Elder, sound director for Station 40 N 180.

We had noticed nothing unusual about our broadcasts until the third
day of the Calamity. That was the first time one of our
ultra-sensitive microphones began to pick up and broadcast speeches
from unknown sources.

Our third assistant monitor was the first to notice. He called and
told me that interference was disrupting the program. A few minutes
later, he said that the sponsor's message, as broadcast, did not
conform to the copy which had been put on the tape. (To eliminate
studio errors, all our broadcast programs were first recorded on
electro-magnetic tape and edited before they were released.)

[Illustration]

We checked and found that none of the commercial messages were going
through properly. The fact is that they were broadcast very
improperly.

I tested the microphone myself and was reported as saying, "What
difference does it make?" I had used the conventional testing phrases,
"One, two, three, four," yet all three monitors swore that the other
sentence had been uttered in my voice.

We switched at once to broadcasting music exclusively as an
alternative to verbal programs, but the microphones continued to
pickup vocal interference. The voices