by Dave Dryfoos
Anyone could charge an overage person with incompetence. The charge was not a crime and so had no defense.
All of which was old stuff to Ollie Hollveg. He’d been dodging the geriatricians for sixteen years. He considered himself used to the setup.
Yet something about the rancher, Rost—maybe his excessive weight, in contrast with the pickers’ underfed gauntness, or maybe his cardboard cowboy boots and imitation sombrero—made Ollie boil in spite of himself.
He tried not to show his feelings. But when he was called to the tally table the rancher scowled up at him defensively and said, “Don’t glare at me, Hollveg! If you moved as fast picking tomatoes as you do collecting your pay, you’d have earned more than this.”
He pushed out a little pile of coins that came to four dollars eighty-seven cents.
“Odd pennies?” Ollie’s voice broke as he fought to keep it under control. “Odd pennies, when picking’s at the rate of two bits a lug? That can’t be right. Just because we’re old you’re stealing from us!”
Rost’s fat face turned livid “Call me a thief?” he sputtered. “Get off my land!”
Rost jumped clumsily to his feet, upsetting the tally table. Ollie bent to retrieve the coins scattered in the dust.
“Don’t try to steal from me!” Rost shouted. He pulled out a small gas gun and discharged it under Ollie’s nose. Ollie pitched forward onto his face, twitched, moaned, and lay still.
The deputy sheriff held an ampoule under his nose and brought him to after setting the squad car on the beamway, proceeding under remote control toward the county seat.
The first thing Ollie thought of was his day’s pay. He’d never received it. Worse—his bedroll was left behind. And there was no stopping nor turning on the beamway. He complained bitterly.
“You won’t need that stuff,” the sharp young deputy said. “Not when you’re going.”
“I suppose Rost needs it!” Ollie protested.
“He might at that. All he’s got is those measly four rented acres of tomatoes. The cannery pays him the same as if he had four hundred acres and could pick by machine.
“About all the profit he can make is what he chisels out of his pickers. You’ll be better off in a Home, Pop, than trying to work cheaper than a machine.”
“Those Homes are prisons!”
The deputy sighed. “I know how you feel. My old grandfather cried when we put him in. But we couldn’t support him and he had no way of making a living.
“The world changes faster than the people in it, Pop. Science all the time lets us live longer, but faster and faster it keeps changing the way we do things. An old guy falls so far behind the times, the only place for him is a Home.”
“But if a man wants to stay out,” said Ollie, “I don’t see why he can’t.”
“Old guys are dangerous to the rest of us. I saw three people killed, not long ago, trying to dodge an old-timer who walked too slow to get across a wide street before the lights changed against him.”
“They could have slowed the signal,” Ollie said. “But no! Always it’s the man who has to adapt to the machine, not the machine to the man. The only way to get by in this world is to find some machine you just naturally fit.”
“You sound kind of bitter.”
“Why not? I used to be a stock control clerk, keeping track of spare parts supply for a nationally distributed line of machine tools. I had twenty girls working for me. Then one day they put in a big computer.”
He sighed. “No wonder these suicide salesmen do so well. If I had the money I’d hire somebody to knock me off right now.”
“Don’t be stupid!” the deputy snarled “You wouldn’t be losing your freedom if you’d had sense enough to stay out of a fight. And when you talk about suicide salesmen, you sure prove you can’t take care of yourself!”
But the deputy was kinder than he sounded. Rather than allege incompetence, he charged Ollie with an assault against Rost. So instead of being remanded to the geriatricians, Ollie was kept overnight in jail and ordered held, next morning for want of fifty dollars bail.
An hour after bail had been set, a dapper thin faced bail bond broker came to see him.
“Want out?”
“Sure.”
“If I put up bail you’ll be out.”
“No Home?”
“You’re classified as a criminal, ineligible for a Home till either you’re found not guilty or serve your lime.”
“Well, but I’m broke. I can’t buy a bail bond.”
“You can work it off. I’m going to spring you right now. As soon as they let you out, meet me in the southwest corner of the park, just across from the post office.”
Ollie did. He thought his bail had been arranged by the deputy.
The broker kept him waiting in the park for half an hour, but was brisk when he appeared.
“My name is Lansing,” he said. “Come on. We’re taking a little trip.”
He steered Ollie to the copter tower at the park’s center and with him boarded its endless-belt manlift. They were carried ten stories to the roof, and as they stepped off the manlift an empty copter hovered at hand. It bore on sides and bottom an address, a phone number, and the words Bail Bonds, all in big letters.
The copter rose under the tower’s control as soon as they’d entered it, and continued to rise till Lansing selected a pre-punched destination card and slipped it into the autopilot. Then a knowing red light winked on, the copter leveled off and headed southwest, and Lansing took one of a pair of chintz-padded wicker seats, motioning Ollie into the other.
“How do you like the idea of going to a Home?” he asked abruptly.
“I’d rather be dead.”
“I know someone who agrees with you. A fellow with bad health who wants to die but doesn’t have the guts to do the necessary. Feel like helping him out?”
Ollie sighed, smiled grimly, and shook his head. “No, thanks!”
“You might die yourself, Hollveg.” Lansing’s voice was heavy with menace.
“I might,” Ollie agreed hotly. “I might get murdered. And maybe the same thing will happen to this supposedly sick man you want me to help out. He may not want to die any more than I do. I’ve heard you suicide salesmen do a lot of murder-for-hire.”
“You’ve heard too much, Hollveg.”
Lansing took a plush-lined metal case from an inside pocket and removed from it a filled syringe, complete with needle.
“This won’t hurt,” he said in a sneering imitation of a doctor. “But it’ll end your independence like a barbed wire fence.”
Ollie began to sweat. “I’ve heard of those zombie-shots too,” he said. He looked wildly around, then controlled himself and gestured almost calmly toward the sky, land, and water visible through the cabin’s plastic walls.
“Maybe you can put the needle away for a while,” he suggested. “I’m not going to walk out on you right now.”
Lansing smiled and complied. “You may keep your health a long time yet,” he said urbanely. “If you’re sensible we might even find steady work for you.”
Ollie suppressed a shudder. Laming tuned in a Western on the physeo. Soon the odor of sage and horse-sweat filled the cabin.
Ollie watched avidly. He hadn’t seen enough physeo to be bored with it.
There was a mouth watering camp supper scene, with pleasant odors of broiling beef and burning wood; and a stirring moonlit love scene with a wholesome girl who smelled of soap and starch, and only faintly of cosmetics.
But then came the climactic chase, a combined stampede, stagecoach race, and Indian fight. So much alkali dust poured from the physeo that Ollie got a fit of coughing.
He couldn’t stop. After several excruciating minutes he lay down on the floor and gasped to Laming for a drink of water.
“There isn’t an
y,” Lansing told him sharply. “And brother, you’d better get up from there, because you’ll have to move fast when we get to Frisco.”
Without knowing what would result, Ollie made sure he neither got up nor stopped coughing till they reached San Francisco which was fifteen minutes later.
The pretense involved intense effort for so old a man. His voice went. He was clammy with sweat from head to foot. His face was pale and his hands cold.
By the time the copter readied the roof of San Francisco’s Union Square tower, Ollie was actually unable to jump out of the cabin in the thirty seconds allotted by the remote traffic-control system. Lansing tried to carry him out, but the result was merely a delay that damned the stream of traffic.
A winged inspector buzzed them, took remote control of their copter, and led it to the emergency tower at Civic center.
Ollie was taken off on a stretcher. Lansing, his urbanity washed away in a flood of red faced rage, was still in the copter when it rose. And the hypo was still in his pocket; with Ollie due to get medical attention, he hadn’t been able to use it.
Ollie didn’t dare stay long in the hospital. As soon as his stretcher was set down on the receiving ward floor, he rolled out of it and with the help of a fat steward struggled to his feet.
“Thanks,” he whispered hoarsely. “I have to go now.”
“You can’t!” said the steward. “You haven’t even been examined yet.”
“It’s against my religion to have to do with medicine,” Ollie improvised. “Besides, I’m perfectly well.”
“Yeah? What about your voice—or lack of one?”
“A coughing spell. I’m over it now. And my voice is coming back.” It was.
The steward unbuttoned his coat and scratched his belly meditatively. “If you don’t want treatment you don’t have to have it,” he said finally. “The joint’s overcrowded now.”
Ollie didn’t congratulate himself when he got out. He was now a fugitive from both the geriatricians and the underworld. Soon the police would want him for bail-jumping, and meanwhile they’d grab him for vagrancy if they caught him off skid row.
He headed that way at once, walking over to Mission and down it toward Third. A clock on a storefront said five twenty. He felt overdue for supper and bed.
He counted his change—three dollars and forty-two cents. He had no bedroll; no overcoat, either. Even in this nice summer weather it might be a little tough for a fellow to get by on the road with so little plunder. Eighty-six was a trifle old for the rugged life.
What he needed, of course, was a white-collar job. Not only needed, but deserved—he was a good clerk. Therefore he should go to the Hearst Building at Third and Market and scan the want ads posted there. As he’d been doing when in San Francisco for forty years.
He thought of some of the many times he’d stared at that bulletin board. He’d gone there often during the years he’d worked as a construction timekeeper, before that skill became obsolete. Then there’d been an interval when he’d sold rebuilt window washers—for a firm which still owed him money. And he’d haunted the board during the months he’d had that job in the automatic grocery, replenishing the dispensing machines’ merchandise.
None of his jobs had come from a want ad. But he had to go look. It was a ritual.
The years had made the ritual a hard one for him. He could read the fine-printed columns only with head cocked an arm’s length away from a cheap reading glass held up to them. He took a lot of room; forced a white-capped young mechanic to peer awkwardly around him.
Embarrassed Ollie moved out of the way. He’d begun to walk off when the young fellow stopped him.
“I don’t think you saw this one, Dad,” he said, pointing.
OLDER MEN (the ad read) without dependents needed for dangerous scientific experiment. If able to pass intensive physical and mental tests report for interview to Civilian Personnel Office, Short Air Force Base, Short, Utah.
“I don’t know where the place is at all,” Ollie complained wearily.
“Just this side of Salt Lake, on the main line,” the young man said. “I served there, so I’m curious. If you’re not—well—” He shrugged and edged away.
‘Thanks, son,” Ollie called after him. “I’m going to follow that up.” The young man walked on without looking back.
Ollie felt committed, not only by his offhand declaration, but by his ritual. He’d come to look for a job; he’d found one for which he was eligible; he must go after it.
He headed down Third Street toward the freight yards but stopped at a skid row restaurant for a bowl of stew and a cup of coffee. Passing an old-fashioned catchpenny grocery he went in and bought a half-dozen rolls to take with him. The proprietor, squat, unshaven, and swarthy, picked out a large red apple and slipped it in with the rolls.
“Good for you,” he said, smiling. Ollie shook his head.
The grocer frowned, then replaced the apple with an orange. “Easier on teeth,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Ollie, smiling. “You make me feel lucky. I’m answering a want ad—maybe I’ll get the job.”
The grocer smiled vaguely. “I hope.” Then his face livened. “What job? In paper?”
“Yes.” There could be no other, for a man his age.
“It says ‘dangerous,’” said the grocer. “I think maybe they cut you up, find out how you live so long. Or make you sick to try new cure. You find better job—or Home. That one bad.” There was a slight pause.
“Look. I close soon. You sweep store. I give you dollar.”
“You’re a good guy,” said Ollie. “But I’ve got three dollars now.” He showed them proudly. “You save yours for somebody who doesn’t have a job to try for.”
He tucked the rolls and orange inside his shirt, marched valiantly out of the dark little store, and continued on to the yards.
The heavy traffic there confused him briefly. Transcontinental freight was carried in long trains of rubber-tired cars towed on elevated beamways by remotely-controlled, nuclear-fueled steam tractors. Here at the San Francisco yards the trains were broken up and the individual cars hauled by turbotractor on city streets and suburban roads for delivery at the addressees’ doors.
The cars were huge, the noise and bustle awe-inspiring. Ollie stood outside the main exit watching the little tractor and big cars emerge, till a beamway bull came over, flashed a badge, and told him to move on.
He did. He was a fugitive from so many things; he couldn’t afford resentments.
He went on around the yards. They were vast. He felt sure that somewhere there must be an unguarded entry, and set out to find it, moving cautiously from shadow to shadow along the high plasti-board fence.
Twice he blundered into watchmen. Once he nearly got himself run over. But after a couple of hours he saw a bindlestiff slip through an unguarded gate, and in half a minute he was right behind the man.
Ollie moved away from him. There was safety in solitude. Besides, he had to find a Salt Lake train.
The sealed cars were addressed like so many packages. But he had to have light to read by, and he risked discovery every time he moved into the light and took his stance behind the reading glass.
There were other hazards; television beams for the yard clerks to read numbers by, invisible beams for the bulls to catch him with, headlights that suddenly flashed on blindingly, humped cars rolling unattended on silent, murderous tires.
Ollie felt like an ant on a busy sidewalk, liable to be crushed under foot at any moment.
But an added hazard helped him find his train. The bulls had read that want ad too. They were out in force around a string of cars. He slipped between two sleepy-looking men, checked an address, and then slipped out again, certain every car would be inspected before departure.
A good way down the yard he hid at the base of the fence, dozing a
nd shivering for several hours as he lay stretched out on the dew-chilled concrete. He checked each outbound train as it went by, and again knew his by the bulls on it.
They were on the cowcatcher and in the cab, on the car roof, and in the caboose with the train-crew of three trouble-shooting mechanics. Highlights gleamed on their weapons. Their job was to keep or get all transients off that train—and they would if they could.
Ollie let most of the train go past. The caboose came by at about fifteen miles an hour with a sharp-eyed guard head-and-shoulders out of the cupola. Ollie let him get past, too—and hoped he went on looking toward the front.
He began to hobble parallel to the train, dismayed at the stiffness that had set in while he lay out on the damp concrete.
As the rear of the caboose drew even with him he emerged from the shadows and dived for the coupling at the car’s rear. He caught it clumsily, tore the nail off his left ring finger, but hung on.
He tried to trot but the train dragged him. He gave a leapfrog player’s jump and landed on top of his own hands, his thighs around the coupling, his nose against the rear platform-wall of the caboose.
The engine jerked slack out of the long train and nearly dislodged him. One at a time he moved his hands from the coupling to the base of the wall. He edged in a little closer. The train gathered speed.
He wasn’t really on but he couldn’t safely get off. He’d intended climbing under the caboose to its rear truck, but the bulls and his own lack of agility made this impossible so now he must ride where he was, exposed to battering wind and searching cold as the train crossed the High Sierras, and also exposed to the whims of the trainmen if any should come out on the platform and look down.
He’d seen men shot off trains. But he didn’t worry about it. Instead, like the old hand he was, he tried to sleep while clinging there.
At Sparks the train stopped for a maintenance check. The guards formed a perimeter but Ollie was inside it. Too stiff to move far, he stayed in a shadow while the mechanics inspected, then he climbed under the caboose and stretched out on a girder separating two tires of the rearmost, six-tired truck.