In a future where the city belongs to the wheels or the feet, never both, a society has carved itself into two irreconcilable tribes. The motorists rule the gleaming highways and suburbs in their chrome machines, while the pedestrians claw out existence in the grim Ring, their world measured in shoe leather and survival. When a trivial accident a little old lady shoved beneath a fender ignites into headline news, the fragile pretense of peace shatters. Retaliation begets retaliation. Fistfights become firefights. The city spirals toward civil war between those who walk and those who drive, each convinced of their own righteousness. Only when the streets run hot with blood do representatives from both sides meet to negotiate and produce the comically grotesque Wheel-Foot Articles of Agreement a bureaucrat's dream of order imposed on chaos. Leiber's satirical eye is merciless, turning a premise that sounds absurd into something uncomfortably recognizable: a portrait of how quickly decent people become partisans, how technology becomes tribe, how the walls we build to feel safe become the prisons that drive us mad.
