Ross looked up. “My God,” he said. A gigantic metal sign with the legend, Buy Smogs——You Can SMOKE Them, was being hoisted across the street ahead. The street was nominally closed to traffic by cheerfully inattentive men with red flags; a mobile boom hoist was doing the work, and quite obviously doing it wrong. The angle of the boom arm with the vertical was far too great for stability; the block-long sign was tipping the too-light body of the hoisting engine on its treads....
Ross made a flash calculation: when the sign fell, as fall it inevitably would, perhaps two hundred people who had wandered uncaringly past the warning flags would be under it.
There was a sudden aura of blue light around the engine body.
It tipped back to stability. The boom angle decreased, and the engine crawled forward to take up the horizontal difference.
The blue light went out.
Helena choked and coughed and babbled, “But Ross, it couldn’t have because——”
Ross said: “It’s them!”
“Who?”
Excitedly: “The people behind all this! The people who built the cities and put up the buildings and designed the machines. The people who have the answers! Come on, Bernie. I just seem to antagonize these people—I want you to ask the boom operator what happened.”
The boom operator cheerfully explained that nah, it was just somep’n that happened. Nah, nobody did nothin’ to make it happen. It was in case if anything went wrong, like. You know?