Nov. 25th, 1960 fell on a Saturday. It was on this date,—Now as historic and unforgettable as the Dec. 7th 1941,—that the series of maddening events began which later became so erroneously labelled: "The Amuck running of The Brain" when in truth they should have passed into history as "The Mutiny of The Brain."
It all started like a thunderclap from a clear sky as the shocked people of America,—and all the world,—heard directly from the White House of this appalling, this unprecedented, this incredible thing:
The President of the United States had disappeared....
The still more shocking truth that the President had been kidnapped became not known, of course, until after the rescue. But even so the disappearance of its President shook the nation.
Then an unprecedented series of traffic disasters hit the United States.
A big transcontinental "Flying Wing" crashed into a mountain in Montana; nothing like this had ever happened since air traffic had become fully automatic and coordinated by The Brain. The death toll was 78 and amongst their tragic number was Senator Mumford, whose last official act had been the vote he had cast against the "Brainpower-Extension-Bill."
Near Jacksonville Fla. that same night there occurred a head-on collision between a crack train and a freight. The only surviving engineer by some miracle had been hurled clear, across fifty yards of space into a pond which broke his impact; this engineer told the express, one of the first to be equipped with the "automatic pilot", had never even pulled its brakes as if deliberately smashing into the other train.
Also that night one of the big new Radar-operated Hudson ferryboats collided with an incoming liner which cut it in two. Amongst those drowned in the icy waters was Frank Soskin, union leader and one of the most determined opponents of Brain-control.
And as if these large-scale disasters were not yet enough there were numbers of smaller accidents which normally would have made the headlines because in almost every case they involved some prominent personality, who had been opposed to the "Brainpower-Extension-Bill."