as
just as likely to spend four hours going North on one highway, and then
take the next four coming back South on a parallel highway, and
sometimes I even came back to the original starting place. After a week
I had come no farther West than across that sliver of West Virginia into
Eastern Ohio. And in Eastern Ohio I saw some more of the now familiar
and suspicious road signs.

The emblem was right side up, and the signs looked as though they had
not been up long.

I followed that road for seventy-five miles, and as I went the signs
kept getting newer and newer until I finally came to a truck loaded with
pipe, hardware, and ornamental ironwork. Leading the truck was one of
those iron mole things.

I watched the automatic gear hoist one of the old pipe and white and
black enamel roadsigns up by its roots, and place it on a truck full of
discards. I watched the mole drive a corkscrew blade into the ground
with a roaring of engine and bucking of the truck. It paused, pulled
upward to bring out the screw and its load of dirt, stones and gravel.
The crew placed one of the new signs in the cradle and I watched the
machine set the sign upright, pour the concrete, tamp down the earth,
and then move along down the road.

There was little point in asking questions of the crew, so I just took
off and drove to Columbus as hard as I could make it.

* * * * *

Shined, cleaned, polished, and very conservatively dressed, I presented
myself to the State Commissioner of Roads and Highways. I toyed briefly
with the idea of representing myself as a minor official from some
distant state like Alaska or the Virgin Islands, inquiring about these
signs for official reasons. But then I knew that if I bumped into a hot
telepath I'd be in the soup. On the other hand, mere curiosity on the
part of a citizen, well oiled with compliments, would get me at the very
least a polite answer.

The Commissioner's fifth-under-secretary bucked me down the hall;
another office bucked me upstairs. A third buck-around brought me to the
Department of Highways Marking and Road Maps.

A sub-secretary finally admitted that he might be able to help me. His
name was Houghton. But whether he was telepath or esper did not matter
because the Commission building was constructed right in the middle of a
dead area.

I still played it straight. I told him I was a citizen of New York,
interested in the new road signs, Ohio was to be