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Blindman's Buff. Man has always held the night in terror—from Homer's day, when the warriors in the Iliad besought Zeus to "deliver from darkness the sons of the Achaeans," through Biblical times, when God's direst threat was to "set darkness upon thy land," right down to the present, on those rare occasions when he encounters it.
Even so, New Yorkers assailed by chill night—and, for a frozen instant, silence—reacted almost sportively, as if it were all a gigantic game of blindman's buff. In soaring office buildings and fetid subway tunnels, beleaguered commuter trains and jampacked terminals, they joked and chattered, waiting from minute to minute for the reviving whine of dynamos, the first stutter of returning light. And, incredulously, they began to realize at last that they had been transported to Caliban's world, a vast, trackless cave without warmth or wheels, without hot food or the lights of home.
As 630 subway trains gasped to a halt, 800,000 passengers were trapped in them. In hundreds of stalled elevators, office workers hung tremulously between earth and sky. Traffic lights failed; main arteries snarled. Hundreds of drivers ran out of gas—only to discover that service-station pumps cannot work without electricity. Apartment buzzers summoned nobody. Most vending machines became inoperable. Fire alarms were mute. At the United Nations, earphones and tape recorders went dead, leaving bewildered delegates —for the first time in memory—with the refreshing experience of having nothing to say and no one to listen to.
Betrayed. Seldom had Americans been more aware of their dependence on machines. When power failed in the $37,500 Queens home of Mechanical Engineer Edwin Robbins, the result was pure farce. Nothing worked, not the multitone door chimes or the intercom system, not the Danish dining-room chandelier or the bedroom clocks, not the hair dryer or the electric blankets, not the can opener or the carving knife, not the toothbrush or the razor. Not even the electric-eye garage door. For dinner, the Robbinses had charcoal-broiled steaks grilled over a primitive backyard barbecue.
To Americans served and shielded by machines at every turn, each silent switch and powerless push button was a taunt. Two of modern technology's paramount deities—the dynamo and the digital computer—had defected simultaneously. Yet Northeasterners wasted little time lamenting their betrayal by the machine. Instead, with a high sense of shared adventure, they set about the unfamiliar task of using legs and arms to help themselves and their fellow men. If in the process the 20th century American learned belatedly to mistrust the complex mechanics by which he lives, he also acquired new faith in his humanity.
Deprived of power for their milking machines, resourceful farmers hooked the machines to tractor motors to keep their bellowing herds