We headed straight out of town until we hit the outer ring road, the GRA. Soon we were stationary, one in a long line of cars, whose roofs and windscreens gleamed in the sun like the carapaces of metaled insects. Even at the best of times this road is a linear parking lot, and now it was the end of the working day, the rush hour. We inched forward, Peter thrusting the car into the smallest gaps with the best of them, blaring his horn and edging through the crowds. I’d have been scared for my safety if not for the fact that our speed was so slow.

The car was a battered old Punto. With a head still full of the Crypt, I felt utterly disoriented. I said, “This car belongs to the Pakistani ambassador.”

He looked at me oddly. “Oh. Michael Caine. I saw that movie, too . . .”

“You’re making some kind of point, aren’t you?”

“Damn right,” he said. “You won’t understand, not at first. And when you do understand you probably won’t believe me.” His knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel, and he was sweating. “So I’ll have to make you see. This might be more important than you can imagine.”

I smiled. “Important. This from a man who thinks that alien ships are making three-point turns in the core of the Earth. What could be important compared to that?”

“More than you know,” he said. “George, what causes traffic jams?”

I shrugged. “Well, you need a crowded road. Roadworks. Breakdowns.”

“What roadworks?”

There were no works ahead, no obvious breakdowns or crash sites. And yet we were stationary.

Peter said, “George, to make a traffic jam all you need is traffic. The jams just occur. Look around. All that makes up the traffic is individual drivers—right? And each of us makes individual decisions, based, minute to minute, on what our neighbors are doing. There’s not a one of us who intends to cause a jam, that’s for sure. And there’s not one of us who has a global view of the traffic, like you’d get from a police chopper, say. There are only the drivers.

“And yet, from our individual decisions made in ignorance, the traffic jam emerges, a giant organized structure involving maybe thousands of cars. So where does the jam come from?”

We were moving forward by now, in fits and starts, but, scarily, he took his eyes off the road to look at me, testing my understanding.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.