Summary ...

From the introduction:

Piers Anthony postulates a fascinating technological ... er, breakthrough in a story well worth reading, if only for the title.

Story Excerpt ...

Williams Zether slowed to 40, alarmed by the condition the highway. He had driven a long way on the superhighways, and this was a come down. He had sought to surface was aging asphalt, but now decided on oiled gravel. Low-grade gravel, water oil. Great long cracks classed both lanes, their patterns resembling lightning frozen in mid-jagged and iron flat.

He slowed again to negotiate a chasm the width of his tie are. It Peter doubt near the edge of the opposite lanes, becoming a delta of tributary crevices. By skidding his lefts into the dusty ditch he was able to span the narrowest offshoot with his rights. He continued at twenty.

Exactly how far into the wilderness was the sweet or village of violet? The roadmap intimated 10 miles, but he was sure he had gone 15 since filling his tank at the last cluster of houses signifying a township. The motley Schist Mountains had approached ever closer in the interim, the terrain had degenerated into waves of desert heat, and the road...

He crunch the brakes. The wheels skewed, dust ascended, the vehicle rocked and heaved sickly, and he came to a tumultuous hold in the midst of a car-sized sand trap he had sought to avoid.

As a choking swirl subsided, he attempted to nudge forward; but as he had feared, the wheels merely churned themselves into functional oblivion. He should have allowed the car to bull through on inertia.

Zether turned off the motor and pondered his situation. He would have to dig his way out by hand, and naturally he had no shovel and was wearing his best suit.

The car's air-conditioning had cut off with the motor, and already he could feel the perspiration gathering. He pushed open the door, on tangled seat belt and shoulder harness, and climbed out—and was struck by the blast furnace that passed for a July noon hereabouts. His thirty-five-dollar shoes sank out of sight in the desiccated quick sand that engulfed that the vehicle up to the hubs.

"I," he remarked to the burning welkin, "have had it. In spades. And I wish I had a spade, or at least a derrick."

But Williams Zether was not a man to rail at circumstance. Perceiving that the wheels were hopelessly mired, and mindful of the fifteen miles behind, he slung his jacket over his back, wedged the felt brim of his hat over his sweltering forehead, and waded onward in the transitory comfort of his shirt sleeves. Somewhere ahead there had to be civilization.

The landscape was dehydrated, and he felt thirsty already. He sloughed out of the sand. His footwear had sustained a thirty-dollar depreciation, and he preferred not to assess the remainder of his apparel. The trail before him resembled the baked bed of the sun-crazed mud shallow attacked by amateurs with dull jackhammers.