The abrupt and mysterious end of the Automobile Age produced as one of its first effects a sharp increase in the incidence of bicycle theft. Thus, as the gloomy and depressing twentieth century reminds us, there is no wind of change so good and glorious that it plunges nobody into despair. In this case, the greater good threw into relief the personal travails of Rodolfo Salinas, the modern Lucretius.

Perhaps all this requires a modicum of explanation.  Very well. One afternoon, with an estimated fifty years of fossil fuel left in the earth (assuming no change in consumption patterns), all the cars in the world slowed down and then stopped in their tracks, wherever they happened to be. There was no apparent reason for this event.  More mysteriously still, certain motor vehicles were exempt from the general grind to a halt. Trucks delivering food, buses, fire trucks, and ambulances went on running as before. Thus, while some panic followed the sudden change in traffic patterns, it was not exacerbated by widespread hunger or medical disaster.

The virtual absence of panic, the mysterious benignness of the whole affair, was a great surprise and on the whole a welcome one to the modern Lucretius. The ancient Lucretius, the first Lucretius, had been a Roman poet of the first century B.C. His great work was an epic poem in six books (or chapters) called De Rerum Natura (On The Nature of Things), in which he presented such physics as he knew or believed. His hero was Democritus (ca. 400 B.C.), inventor of the atomic theory. Lucretius backed a winner, for the atomic theory is powerful in physics today.

Lucretius glorified reason and deplored human superstition and stupidity. The last book of De Rerum Natura  ends with a description of an epidemic of plague in Athens, and the sad results of human unreason and panic. In another part of his epic, Lucretius says that it is pleasant to watch such horror from a safe distance, and to feel oneself, the rationalist, well out of it and above it.

This sounds rather heartless; but of course Lucretius did not mean it. If he had truly enjoyed watching people kill themselves with their own stupidity, he would not have written De Rerum Natura, whose goal was to make its readers more rational. 

Rodolfo, as the new Lucretius, had intended to follow his predecessor’s example with regard to the structure of his proposed epic. That is, he had intended to begin, à la Lucretius, by invoking Venus, source of all attraction and hence goddess of physics. He would end, as Lucretius had ended, with the dire consequences of human unreason.  And in between would be the physics, and the history of physics.

(In fairness, we ought to mention that a great many people consider De Rerum Natura unfinished.  Rodolfo had no opinion on this matter, but had decided to copy Lucretius’s epic in the form in which fate had handed it down. This meant ending on a very bleak note indeed, but such an ending seemed appropriate to Rodolfo.)

Unfortunately, Rodolfo did not yet know enough physics to write the first book of his epic. For the invocation to Venus, you have to know all sorts of physics. The poem should begin, more or less, like this:

Goddess of physics and passionate love, You make everything happen.

And then he would go briefly into the details: how Venus makes masses attract each other via the law of gravitation, with love so powerful that space curves around it; how the electric charges both attract and repel each other as if pierced by Cupid’s arrows of gold and lead, and how this interplay of love and hate gives birth to electromagnetic radiation and hence light; then on to the strong and the weak forces, about which Rodolfo so far knew nothing.  He would say something about heat transfer and something about the passionate plasma state, the state of fire, the state of most matter in the universe. He would describe how Venus moves fluids, producing those gorgeous effects in water that Leonardo da Vinci drew so well. He would describe what goes on inside crystals. He would discuss subatomic particles. But he didn’t know enough yet to do this. He couldn’t start Book One yet, so he had been thinking of starting with the end of Book Six, with the tragic results of human unreason. In particular, he had been thinking of writing about cars.

For the continued reliance of the industrial world upon cars was a glaring and distressing example of human unreason. The cars were polluting the air and the water.  More and more city space each year was paved over for them, but still there was not enough room for them.  People drove fifty miles a day at high speeds merely for the sake of getting to work and back. Each year in the United States alone, 40,000 people were killed and a couple of million injured in car crashes. Yet even such cities as New York and Tokyo, cities with heavily polluted air and good public transportation systems, never even considered or discussed getting rid of the cars. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that the fossil fuel would run out in fifty years. And apparently everyone wanted to keep on driving for those fifty years, making things worse and worse while pretending that there was no problem. It seemed to be a case of an impulse to mass suicide, or at the very least, mass self-torture.

And now, through some mysterious agency, humanity had been saved from at least one aspect of its worser self.  The cars had stopped running. No one knew why. The President of the United States of America (Rodolfo’s native country and the mise en scène of our story) had urged all scientists to find the explanation of this threat to “our American way of life.” The scientists, of course, would have worked on it anyway, because it was such an interesting problem.

How could all the cars stop, with certain exemptions that seemed tied to the purpose of the car’s journey?  Surely this was scientifically impossible? Since it had happened, it was clearly not scientifically impossible.  Actuality implies possibility. The test of scientific theory is experiment.

There was panic in Detroit, of course, at the beginning. But our story does not concern Detroit, nor does it concern panic. Our tale is set in Tinny Waters, Texas, home of Rodolfo Salinas, the new Lucretius. With regard to time, it begins one day in April some time around the turn of the twenty‑first century, about two years after the cars stopped running. 

Rodolfo, as a humanitarian and a rationalist, could not but be pleased that, as if by magic, the human species had been spared some of the consequences of its own irrational behavior. (Not that there was not enough irrational behavior left over to destroy the species, but never mind.) For Rodolfo personally, however, this partial deliverance of humanity produced two difficulties. In the first place, his idea for the tragic ending of his epic was ruined. And in the second, and much more serious, place, Rodolfo’s bicycle had disappeared.

The bicycle had vanished from the front room of the house that Rodolfo shared with Fred Kuhlmann, the love of his life. Fred taught mathematics at the local university, the huge University of the Southwest at Tinny Waters.  Rodolfo, who had finished his Ph.D. in Latin literature two years before, worked thirty hours per week in the University physics library shelving books, answering questions, and showing people how to use the computer. This allowed him to attend undergraduate classes in physics, so that he could learn enough to write the new De Rerum Natura. Fred knew enough physics to write Rodolfo’s epic, but he was incapable even of explaining what he knew to Rodolfo. Writing an epic poem about anything was completely beyond Fred’s powers and outside his interests. Fred was not much of a communicator, and Rodolfo thought that he must be a rather poor teacher of mathematics. But Fred’s professional life was none of Rodolfo’s business. Fred continued to hold his job, and there were no complaints, or no more than usual, about his performance. He did get occasional death threats from unbalanced students. Perhaps he got more than his share of them. But this is not the focus of our story.

It was Fred who had converted Rodolfo to bicycling.  At the time when he met Fred, Rodolfo, in common with many denizens of Tinny Waters, had been hauling his carcass from place to place by means of an old car that kept breaking down. After meeting Fred, Rodolfo had sold his dilapidated car and bought a new mountain bike with which nothing ever went wrong, aside from the occasional flat tire. 

Rodolfo had equipped his bicycle with four saddlebags, two in front and two in back, and a front basket, the better to transport his dictionaries, physics books, library books, and groceries. He had fitted it out with two ten‑watt headlights and three flashing amber taillights, and covered the frame with reflective tape. He had decorated the saddlebags with reflectors and scraps of glittery metallic fabric. The results were magnificent.

Rodolfo was extremely attached to this bicycle.  Sometimes he thought that it talked to him, offering ideas for his epic. Certainly his best ideas often came to him as he cycled.

And now his bicycle was gone. It had just walked out of the house, apparently, while Rodolfo and Fred slept.  Perhaps they hadn’t locked the front door. They often forgot. Why would someone take Rodolfo’s bicycle and not Fred’s? Perhaps the thief was only one person, and only required one bicycle.

Rodolfo grieved for his bicycle. He had called the police to report it stolen. Rodolfo had a friend in the Tinny Waters Police Department, Homicide Detective Gwendolyn Nighthawk. Bicycle theft was not her specialty, but she said she’d see what she could do. She warned Rodolfo that she could probably do nothing.

In the old days (that is, before the cars stopped) nobody ever would have stolen Rodolfo’s bicycle. It was far too distinctive to be easily fenced. Rodolfo’s four saddlebags were of four different types. He had removed them years ago from some of the derelict bicycles that stood abandoned on the racks in front of the library, the physics building, and other University buildings. There had been many such derelicts in the Automobile Age. A student would bring a shiny new bicycle to the University, ride it until it got its first flat tire, and then abandon it in favor of the more fashionable car. If the bike was anything less than top of the line, it would be passed over by bicycle thieves and sit for months rusting in a bike rack. Now, of course, all the derelicts were fixed up and back in motion. It was a great time for the derelict bicycles (or the formerly derelict bicycles, as we speak of the former Soviet Union), which had been leading dull lives.

But bicycles (as the discerning reader may object) do not lead lives at all. Is this going to be a tale in which inanimate objects have lives? We will answer this question to the best of our ability.

Attributing souls to inanimate objects is probably something that people have always done. In the so-called twentieth century A.D., when there were so many machine-made objects available for soul ascription, the perniciousness of this habit became evident. In the prosperous United States of America, the most common object of the pathetic fallacy (the amusing name given by grammarians to the practice of investing inanimate objects with souls) was the automobile. People named their cars and talked to their cars. If you read (as Rodolfo had done during the Age of Motorcars) the personal ads in the Weekly Cascade, you would find many in which a person seeking a sweetheart was described as a car seeking a car sweetheart. (Example: Midsize luxury sedan with child safety seat and low mileage seeks foreign compact...)

The naive reader (in favor of whom much may be said; naiveté, or willingness to consider the obviously impossible, sometimes gets results where sophistication fails) may object at this point that perhaps these ads were not put in the paper by people describing themselves as cars, but by actual cars with souls. These ads were placed and answered by telephone. Some cars were equipped with phones. Perhaps the car culture had engendered a car subculture consisting of the cars themselves, without people, leading independent lives, making dates with each other and going to drive‑ins.

The twentieth century has made us the richer by many stories of animated cars. We will not make a list of them here. This tale will not contain any animated cars. For we think that the idea that cars have souls is a very bad and anti-productive idea, and one that helped prolong the Motorcar Age beyond all reasonable limits.

So much for cars with human souls. What is our position vis-à-vis anthropomorphic bicycles? While we are far more drawn to this idea than to the other one, basically we think it is best to regard animals as animals, plants as plants, people as people, and machines as machines.  Besides, this notion has already been explored with great thoroughness and mastery by Flann O’Brien in his excellent nonsense novel The Third Policeman. In this book Mr. O’Brien presents the thesis that, due to the modern and maleficent Atomic Theory, people who ride bicycles a great deal get their own molecules, and hence their own personalities, mixed up with the molecules, and hence the personalities, of the bicycles they ride. The bicycles become more like people and the people more like bicycles. (Of course, this would also apply to motorcars, but there aren’t any motorcars to speak of in The Third Policeman.)

We confess that we (the author of this history, who is sometimes singular and sometimes plural) find the anthropomorphic bicycle a very appealing idea, and are tempted to use it in our own book. Flann O’Brien certainly gets plenty of laughs out of it. But we feel that (1) we should not steal from Mr. O’Brien quite so openly; and (2) we don’t want to deal with all the wandering motorcar souls that Mr. O’Brien’s idea would generate.  So probably we will forgo this device, although we do not promise.

Thus Rodolfo’s bicycle, as far as we know, had no soul. But Rodolfo, like the motorcar drivers who gave their cars names, felt sometimes as if his bicycle were a person. He didn’t usually talk to it, as one would talk to a dog, for example. Sometimes he did ask his bicycle to behave itself, as when it slid about mischievously as he tried to load cargo into its saddlebags or chain it to a street sign. But Rodolfo knew that the bicycle slid about as the result of his own machinations and the force of gravity. He was a rationalist; he was, in fact, the new Lucretius. If Rodolfo was sometimes tempted to ascribe a soul to his bicycle, this was because (a) he had read The Third Policeman and liked the part about the Atomic Theory; and (b) he admired the bicycle as a machine. For the bicycle is such an excellent machine that (compared with the other machines of the Automobile Age) it hardly seems like a machine at all.

Certainly the bicycle is unlike most machines of the Age of the Motorcar. It is quiet. It is not motorized. It is easy to maintain. It increases a pedestrian’s speed by anywhere from fourfold to fifteenfold. It does not pollute. It does not take up much space. It has excellent cargo‑carrying capacity (which, however, was not much exploited in industrialized countries during the Age of the Motorcar). It is so easy to pedal on flat ground that it almost gives something for nothing. It is like a perpetual motion machine or a magic carpet, except when it has a flat tire.

And now, two years into the millennium (not the Twenty-first Century but the Age of the Bicycle), Rodolfo’s bicycle had vanished. He would have to buy another bicycle, for he supposed that there was no hope of replacing the stolen one. This buying of a new bicycle might not be easy. The bicycle business was booming. At bike shops these days, you often had to put your name on a waiting list to buy a bicycle.

Rodolfo opened the front door of the house he shared with Fred, and stepped toward the street. It was 8:15 a.m., and rush hour traffic was going past on bicycles. This was the new world, and he was not part of it. Here was humanity behaving rationally, while the new Lucretius stood as remote and apart from it as the old Lucretius had stood from various horrors, including the plague at Athens and its concomitant panic. Aloof out of habit? Not at all. Apart due to bicycle theft. And now it was time to go to work. He would walk to his job and his physics class, while the reasonable world went by on bicycles. 

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