by James Gunn
As if to confirm his diagnosis, the monorail out of the city was almost empty.
Gavin took his place along the north lane of the superhighway. The sun was warm, but he didn't mind: he was heading for Berkeley and the Coast. For a while he just stood there, waiting for someone to notice his need and stop to pick him up. No one stopped. He began to use his thumb and finally waved his whole hand at the advancing cars to indicate the urgency of his desire to get out of this unpleasant place. Still no one stopped, and the cars began to pass him less frequently, as if the very traffic patterns were beginning to conspire against him.
Finally he sat down on a boulder near the road and considered the desperation of his hunger. He couldn't go home. That would make him look like a little boy who returned from running away from home because he was forbidden to cross the street. Perhaps the best choice, he thought, would be to walk along the highway and leave at the next exit, if he didn't get picked up before then, find the first likely freak who might part with a little food and give him a place to flop. Then he could get an early start in the morning.
The more he considered the matter, the better he thought the idea was, even though it suggested a certain lack of faith in his fellow travelers. He began walking west.
He had walked about a quarter of a mile and was adding thirst and fatigue to his hunger when he heard a car's horn beside him. He looked up hopefully. It was a yellow electric, a small convertible with a narrow second seat behind the two bucket seats in front. The girl named Elaine was sitting in the front seat, her blond hair lifting in the light breeze, her blue eyes turned to him, her lips smiling.
“Well,” she asked, “do you want a ride or not?”
“What are you doing here?” Gavin asked irritably.
“I'm offering you a ride.”
“If you think I'm going to return to my parents’ house with you...” he began.
She raised her left hand from the steering wheel. “Of course not.”
Gavin walked along the road, his head turned to the left. The girl kept the car beside him, glancing at the rear-vision mirror occasionally to make certain that no car was coming from behind.
“Then what are you doing here?” Gavin asked.
“Do I have to say it again?”
“Where are you going?”
“Wherever you're going. The West Coast, I guess.”
“You must be crazy!” Gavin exclaimed. This girl irritated him with everything she did. “You live in a room in my home. You eat at my table. You work back there.”
“Not any more,” Elaine said.
“You left?” Gavin asked. “Just like that?”
“Just like that. Get in.”
“Not on your life,” Gavin said firmly. “I really think you're crazy. Why would you do something like that?”
“I told you,” Elaine said. “I feel responsible. Anyway, I've never done anything crazy before, and a person ought to do something crazy once in their life. Isn't that right? I'd get in, if I were you. Most of these cars are going short distances. Long-distance travelers take airplanes or trains or buses. You'd be weeks on the road, even if you got picked up. And nobody picks up hitchers anymore, not unless they've got a reason. Besides ... I've got some sandwiches.”
Gavin stopped. The car jerked to a stop beside him. “All right,” he said. “It's your problem.”
He got into the car. As he was settling back into the seat, the car began accelerating down the highway. The wind poured around the windshield, fresh and cool, blowing his hair, blowing Elaine's blond hair back from her head as she looked down the road. She had a good profile.
He wasn't sure he believed any of it—the succession of strange events that had evicted him from the campus, which had driven him from his home, which now had him traveling down a highway toward the West Coast with a girl he hadn't met until this morning, a girl he disliked, a girl who had tossed over her plans, her life, and impulsively, for no reason, was driving him toward the Coast and Jenny...
Jenny, he thought, and looked at the highway unrolling in front of him. At the end of that long, unbroken ribbon was Jenny, and if things went smoothly, he might be seeing her again in as little as four days.
He bit into one of the sandwiches he found at his feet. It was peanut butter. He never had liked peanut butter, which was a great handicap to a revolutionary.
6. The Start of a Journey
To what more glorious or more natural existence do we look back? Did the neolithic farmers envy the more natural lives of their paleolithic forefathers, and did those savage hunters, in turn, recall nostalgically the carefree careers of their arboreal ancestors? Or did such romantic nonsense begin only with the postindustrial-revolution factory worker? Among all the varieties of lives that man has tried, which is the most natural? To which shall we return? Or can we say that man, as the adaptable animal, finds natural that which conditions make most rewarding? The countryside is no more natural than the city, though a long tradition of pastoral writing has given us certain unnatural yearnings for sheep and meadows and shepherds. Actually, the most natural condition for man, if we define “natural” as that which has been most prevalent, is hunger, privation, poverty, sickness, and an early death. Perhaps it is the scarcity of these natural conditions which forces our reformers to protest.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
The evening sun hung in a notch between the Flint Hills as they advanced toward it at a sedate sixty miles per hour, looping gently over the hills and into the valleys. Fluffy clouds hung in the western sky, and already their lower edges were kindled with the bright promise of sunset.
The car swooped like a hawk along the black ribbon of highway, the only sounds the friction of the tires against the asphalt and the wind of their passing; it came in the side windows or over the windshield to run suggestive fingers through Gavin's hair and whisper strange thoughts in his ears. Gavin sat relaxed beside the girl who had picked him off this highway some eighty miles behind, and he felt as if he were floating through space, far from the ugly city and the busy town filled with people and noise and the stink of machines.
The land was hilly here; only a thin layer of soil covered its stony shape. On either side the layered white-and-gray limestone deposited when the area had been an inland sea had been replaced by reddish quartz. It emerged from the soil like the earth's bones: in boulders or rounded outcroppings in the green hills; or, occasionally, when the highway cut through a hill, painted in strips along either side of the exposed rock. In spite of the scanty soil, the grass grew thick and tall. Red cattle with white faces stood knee-deep, or grazed mournfully on the sides of hills as if they had been bred for these pastures with downhill legs longer than the other pair, or cooled themselves, broad chests deep, in still ponds, or lay ruminatingly in their green beds, jaws grinding their day's meal into more easily digested form.
On a distant hilltop, silhouetted against the evening sky, a lonely figure slouched in the saddle of a horse like a statue raised to a vanishing way of life. Nowhere could Gavin see signs of man's habitation, and for the first time he felt as if he had plenty of room, as if he could never run out of green. He recalled how he had once flown over Illinois and Iowa and Missouri, and how cities had appeared here and here like amoebas growing wherever two roads met, but mostly what he had seen from the air was green geometry, squares of living things, with here and here the brown rectangle of a plowed field and the regular blue oval of ponds, thousands of ponds, reflecting the limitless sky.
Gavin wanted to run through the pastures among the cattle until his heart pounded and his lungs gasped, and then throw himself into the grass to look up into the sky and smell the air thick with growing things and listen to the sounds of the living earth.
Gavin did not know how long he remained in his pastoral reverie, but his peace was broken by the clamor of an old Greyhound steam-turbine bus which swung past them. The bus was painted from front to back and from top to bottom with fanciful designs in ps
ychedelic colors like Day-Glo orange and purple and red and yellow and green, and in the midst of the designs, hidden like color-blindness tests, cabalistic messages like “The Kesey Express” and “You're on the bus or you're off the bus.”
Inside the bus, bodies moved in rhythm to a hardrock tape that assaulted Gavin's eardrums. It was like a gigantic coffin floating on waves of sound, with windows in the side through which could be seen surging masses of flesh and colored cloth like decorated protoplasm. As the vehicle passed, someone tossed a handful of pills in their direction, and over the noise of the tape a voice shouted, “Live! Grow! Experience the infinite!” Most of the pills missed, but a few landed in Gavin's lap—sugar-coated red pills, yellow capsules, blue capsules, yellow-and-green capsules, red-and-white capsules...
In the middle of the bus, a girl waved her bare bottom at them through a window, peering over her shoulder to see their reaction, and a couple standing up in the rear seat were locked in the ecstasies of orgasm.
And then the bus was gone in a wail of Dopplered sound and a spurt of steam from the exhaust.
“Flaming youth,” Elaine said disgustedly. “Precollege pranksters.” She picked a capsule from her skirt and tossed it out of the car.
“We used to save that sort of thing for college,” Gavn said. “What do they have left?”
“Remorse and reform,” Elaine said.
The pastoral mood was broken, and Gavin looked once more to the road pulling the sun toward them. On the side of the road ahead he saw a stick figure against the horizon; it turned into a person trudging along the highway.
“There,” he said to Elaine, pointing. “Let's pick him up.”
The person turned a pale, unhappy face toward the car as it passed. He was a young fellow dressed in a ragged workman's shirt and peasant trousers; on his back he carried a pack complete with bedroll and guitar.
Gavin slapped the padded dashboard in disgust. “I don't know why you don't pick up people like that.”
Elaine shrugged. “I feel no obligation,” she said. “They've made their choice, and they might turn out to be murderers, thieves, rapists, carriers of a hundred contagious diseases...”
Gavin sat up a bit straighter. “That could be true of anybody anywhere.”
“I don't pick them up, either.”
“But these are brothers,” Gavin went on.
“Not my brothers.”
“They're like monks,” Gavin said. “Like they've taken a vow of poverty. If they were thieves, they wouldn't be walking along the road in rags. They'd be driving, like you.”
“I didn't steal this car,” Elaine said. “I worked to buy it. If they want to ride, let them work, too.”
Gavin shook his head sorrowfully. “You're just like my father. Don't you see? They don't want to surrender to the Protestant work ethic like their fathers did, and find themselves trapped day by day in a routine of hypocrisy and pollution and the kind of life that is built upon lack of concern for real values.”
“Then I wouldn't think of seducing them into a collaboration with that society by picking them up,” Elaine said. “That would be a surrender to the Protestant ride ethic, and it seems to me that their virtue depends on their walking.”
“But your virtue depends on picking them up.”
“I suspect that it's the other way around,” Elaine murmured.
“You can redeem some of your own hypocrisy by sharing what you have with people who are less fortunate, like giving alms to beggars,” Gavin went on, unheeding. “You might almost say that they are put on this earth to test you.”
“Then I've just flunked the test,” Elaine said cheerfully, “because they don't seem less fortunate to me. They chose their situation. They chose to be on the road without transportation. Fortune had nothing to do with it. If they are satisfied with their educational allowance or their guaranteed annual income, why should they be allowed to enjoy the material goods that other people have been willing to work for? And why should I encourage them in their folly by ameliorating the consequences of their decisions? How are they ever going to learn?”
“Everybody is exploited by society,” Gavin said, “the rich man as well as the poor man. Those who work and those who don't. Over the years man—man, not individuals—has built up, with hard work and ingenuity, a substantial amount of capital, a production system that runs virtually without human intervention, that provides the affluence that some enjoy and others must do without but is sufficient for all, irrespective of work. It is our built-up capital which produces wealth today, not labor, which today is a sort of hobby with a peculiar social reward system.
“So we can't claim the rights of personal property and withhold its benefits from others. In the only meaningful sense, nobody owns anything, and we all own everything. The real nobility in our society are those who don't claim their birthright, who refuse to join the society of overconsumption, who save resources for others, including the poor, deprived masses in the underdeveloped nations of the world whose resources we are consuming at an ever-increasing rate....”
Gavin could hear the Professor's ironic voice saying, “Who's giving the lectures here?”
“As a matter of fact,” Elaine said, “the power output of our fusion and solar satellites has been made available to anyone who wishes to put up a receiving station.”
“That's only elementary justice,” Gavin said. “There still are irreplaceable natural resources and food and—”
“Nobody uses oil and gas and coal for fuel anymore,” Elaine said, “and with recycling and seawater extraction and mining the ocean beds, the usable amounts of metals and other valuable minerals are increasing rather than diminishing. We do ship agricultural products overseas, of course, in compensation for those minerals we don't have on this continent, but we can't feed the whole world and its constantly increasing population. That's a matter for birth-control policies in those countries.”
“You mean,” Gavin said, “it's all right for us to have all the babies we want, but not black and brown and yellow peoples.”
“Look,” Elaine said, frowning, “Id like to have lots of babies, but I won't; at most, I'll have two because I feel a sense of responsibility. The rest of our people do, too. Our national birth rate has been below the replacement level for more than thirty years. We've taken care of our problem, and we can't take care of theirs. In fact, everything we do to help them avoid the necessity of facing their problems now—gifts of food and money—only builds greater problems for them later, when the food runs out and they have many more people to feed. Or to see starve.”
“That's an easy way to avoid self-sacrifice,” Gavin said.
“No,” Elaine said firmly, “giving is an easy way to buy absolution. You wouldn't let your father do it to you, so why should you want us to do it to the underprivileged?”
Gavin sank back in his seat, remembering the Professor saying one day, “The Radiclib wants to do for others what he would find unforgivable if it were done to him.” What was challenging coming from the Professor, however, was pure reactionism coming from a pretty girl driving along the highway in a yellow convertible. It was too bad—he had begun to think favorably of the girl; she was quiet, pleasant, not bad to look at, and she was taking him in the direction he wanted to go. “Did you have something going with my father?” he asked. He studied her face. It was turned straight to the road again. He thought he saw color rise in her cheeks, but it might have been only the setting sun.
“That's none of your business,” she said.
He shrugged. “Of course not.”
“But,” she continued, “there was nothing between us except the affection a daughter and a father might share.”
“I see,” Gavin said, “incest.”
“Don't be ridiculous!” she said. “You seem to think the only thing a man and a woman can share is a bed.” Her face really was red now.
“It's always there,” Gavin said. “Not ‘will she or won't she?’ but ‘with
me or not with me?'” He had her on the defensive now. He suspected that she was a prude, perhaps even a virgin, and it all made him more pleasantly disposed toward her than reality justified.
“Your father was—is—an attractive man,” Elaine said, fumbling for words, “but ... he didn't appeal to me in that way. Besides, I was interested in someone else.”
“Who?”
“That is none of your business,” she said firmly.
“Look!” Gavin said suddenly, sitting up. “There's some more hitchers. Now's your chance to redeem yourself.”
Two bedraggled caricatures sat on the concrete railing of a bridge ahead like scarecrows who had wandered in from a nearby cornfield. Worn packs and rolled sleeping bags rested on the railing beside them. They waved frantically at the car as it approached. Close-up, Gavin could tell that they were male and female. “For God's sake,” he said, “aren't you going to stop?”
He held out his hand, widespread, in a gesture of helplessness and apology as the car sailed over the bridge and past the two disconsolate hitchers.
“Why are they always so miserable?” Elaine said.
“They have a chance to see human nature at its most inhumane,” Gavin said. “You don't know what it does to me to reject my brothers and sisters like that.”
“You can go to work and buy a car and devote the rest of your life to missionary work on the highways, picking up strays, transporting them from one spot to another,” Elaine said.
“They'd give you anything they had,” Gavin said.
“I suspect that all she'd have to give you is the clap,” Elaine said. “Isn't it strange that people who have nothing are always willing to share it, and other people's plenty, too.”
“I don't think it's strange at all,” Gavin said. “It's just another example of the corruption of affluence.” But he remembered the Professor saying, “A poor man's generosity comes to the same end as a rich man's parsimony. The poor man believes in equality; the well-to-do man, in freedom. Beware of the man who wants to trade his penury for your freedom.”