THREE

Though he burned to be off with the word that had come to him, Skip finished the mural as promised. His categorical imperative was: 'Always leave a clean camp.' Urania and the boys kept dropping wistful hints about his staying longer, and they cried when he said good-bye. He didn't take it too hard, especially since his feet would soon have got itchy regardless. 'I'll try to come back,' he said. Maybe he would at that.

A man bound into town for supplies gave him a lift. 'Town' was a dozen houses, a couple of stores, a charging station, and a bar. Skip made a dive for the last of these.

They only used intoxicants for religious purposes in We. After he came up, snorting and blowing, he put questions to the proprietor. Over his second beer he did some travel arithmetic.

Normally he would have hitch-hiked. They still had elbow room in these parts, and thus less reason to be wary of their fellow men than most of Earth's poor rat-frenetic seven-plus billion. He'd have talked with them, asked about things, stopped at wherever looked interesting, often on impulse changed his whole destination. But now he was in a hurry. We's multiplex Lord knew when the Sigman would get tired and leave, and it'd take Skip a while to reach the President of the United States or the High Commissioner of the Peace Authority or whoever else turned out to be appropriate.

Let's count the jingle again. Urania hadn't paid much. There was hardly more personal money per capita in We than in the average sigaroon junction. He hadn't cared, then. Adding the sum to what was in his pockets on arrival— Damn, that C-coin's in old dollars; divide by a thousand and get a dime

—he reached a total of $233.50. And he must buy food and drink as well as tickets, and these two brews had already set him back four bucks----

Call Berkeley? Ask Dad to transfer a bit of credit? He'd be glad to oblige. Skip grimaced. No. He hated indebtedness, and the moral part he could never pay, since he had no intention of going george.

He decided to invest in a retrieval. The public phone was about the only modern item in the pleasant, cool and dim archaism of the tavern: so up-to-date that it didn't take coins. If Skip had put his credit card in the slot, the No Funds bulb would have kindled in its unnecessarily snotty fashion. He borrowed the proprietor's, after showing he had cash to cover charges. The phone screen lit with a recording, a pretty girl whose smile was probably just as automatic in the flesh. 'Data service. May we help you?'

He punched out essential words on the keyboard to avoid bringing in an expensive live operator.

Elsewhere on the continent, a computer routed the inquiry to the appropriate memory bank; electron beams scanned giant molecules and drew forth the information contained in their distortions; after a minute's wait—channels must be crowded today—the recording said, 'Your answer is ready. Do you wish a printout?'

'No, thanks,' Skip said, his natural memory being cheaper. He wondered why he thanked these gadgets.

Words unrolled on the screen, slowly until he turned the speed knob.

What Keeper caravans are where? Reply: Morgan's in Connecticut on an erosion contract; the Friends of Earth reforesting in Wisconsin; the Terrans on a rescue mission clear off in Egypt, along with several similar outfits from other countries, under aegis of the Environment Authority; Commonweal doing flood control in Alabama—

When the screen blanked, Skip paid the proprietor and returned to his beer and calculations. He'd worked for the Terrans last year, was well thought of among them, had hoped their chief would give him his first boost towards his goal. But he'd not make it to Egypt on,the wing in any reasonable time, and he'd have the problem of getting back. Besides, I don't want to go. News pictures are as much as I can take of what happens when the ecology of an overpeopled land collapses. The Tuatha de Danaan were nearest, at Lake Tahoe, but who was he to them? He'd have to enroll in their auxiliaries and spend six months proving himself before he could likely get a recommendation to someone really influential.

No, wait. He'd followed the Tahoe job with interest. It involved more than restoring purity of waters and the wilderness around them. It covered that whole part of the Sierra. Besides watershed, wildlife, timber, and recreation, agriculture was in the plans. Carefully located farms, crops and techniques lately developed for uplands, would not simply throw a little extra food into the world's ever hungrier gape.

They could make a positive contribution towards maintaining nature's balance, and the owners could double as wardens. Small, isolated, such a spread was made to order for a Freeman—and the government had promised homesteading rights to qualified persons who worked for the duration of the project—and the nearest Freemen to Tahoe were those in Mendocino County, who were Skip's friends—¦

'Hey, bartender, you know if anybody's driving north today?'

The bus was crowded. Most things were, around population centres. Mosiah hadn't lasted long as a shiny decent-sized New Town; the Salt Lake City-Pro vo octopus engulfed it. This ride being express, straight through to Reno, Skip had no great hope of shaking the bore who had settled next to him.

'—barbarism,' said the grey man. 'Not decadence, barbarism. You're an example, if you'll pardon me.

Not your fault. A factory turned you out, not a school, most certainly not a college. And why?' He tapped his seat-mate's knee. 'Because nobody cares. No respect for learning, scholarship, humanities; hardly any surviving awareness that such phenomena ever existed.'

Skip sighed and looked out of the window. The bus boomed over a land once again blessedly empty.

Through dust kicked up by the air-cushion drive, Skip saw alkali-white ground thinly strewn with sagebrush, distant bluish-brown mountains, a couple of buzzards wheeling far aloft. He wished the window could be opened or at least weren't self-darkening—hot pungent air, incandescent sunlight… A contrail crossed heaven, and another and another. He wished he could afford a first-class jet. Or a jumbo—no less a cattle car than this, but it would liberie him faster.

'You haven't been educated, you've been processed,' said the grey man.

Skip debated whether to show him the paperback of Robinson Jeffers in his tunic pocket. No, that might encourage him. Well, shall I slap him in the face with the truth? Something like:

—My parents, sir, explained the situation to me, I believe correctly. They are intelligent, open-minded people who give thought to what they experience. I differ from them but that does not diminish my respect for their brains.

—As children they witnessed the last fashionable radicalism and youthism. For years thereafter they heard ageing members of the Now Generation lament how the ungrateful young rejected the wisdom of their elders. My parents' own generation, however, was too busy surviving for capitalized Causes: too busy surviving intellectually, sometimes physically, in schools more packed, more explosively mixed, for each year that passed. Sir, how could the children of the poor at first, but presently the children of all except the very rich, be taught anything, unless a fresh look was taken at the problem, unless every philosopher of education from Plato to Skinner was called into scientific question, unless an engineering approach threw overboard that metaphor misnamed 'psychology' and applied the findings of rigorous research on man as a whole organism?

—The teaching machine was a mere beginning. Psychophysiological conditioning followed. Subliminal exposure was the aspect that roused most controversy, but simpler and subtler approaches went deeper.

For instance, after it was found what is the most effective kind of positive reinforcement—reward, if you choose—for a child's giving the right response, the rate of learning and retention skyrocketed.

—Yes, indeed, most education today, clear through college, is just another technology. And I am glad. It has saved me years of ennui, out of these too few that I was granted.

—Your problem, sir, is that you were born too late. You are a professor in an era when academe is no longer taken seriously. The researchers have been lured away by industry and government. The rare, genuine, born teacher necessarily restricts the number of his disciples. You have the title, you are equipped with a full battery of platitudes, but none except a pathetic handful like yourself pay attention. In the public mind, educators have been relegated to the skilled-technician class, along with repairmen, police officers, doctors, astronauts—

No. That would be too cruel. Skip contented himself with saying, 'Don't ask me. I'm only a vagabond.'

'You've given up the struggle, then.'

Skip shrugged. 'What's to struggle for?

The professor pinched his lips together. "The sense of drift, as Toynbee wrote. Why strive, when the current sweeps us helpless towards the brink?' He leaned close. The abrupt intensity of his stare and his tone astounded Skip. 'We might have coped with the machine,' he declared. 'We might have hoped for a renaissance after the dark age descending on us. But not when that devil's ship pollutes our sky.'

'Huh?'

'The alien. The Sigman. The thing from outside. Don't you see, however inhuman, a machine is nevertheless a product of humanity? But this being, this monster… obscenely hideous, its very body a jeer at man… the incalculable power, the arrogance of Satan—no, worse than that, for Satan is at least a human archetype—and we make a god of it, in some instances literally—we rack our best brains, we spend billions of dollars that could feed starving children—on Moloch, on trying to twist ourselves into so inhuman a way of thinking that we can converse with Moloch in his own language and semantics!'

The professor drew breath. He leaned back and said more levelly: 'Oh, I know the arguments about the Sig-man's peacefulness. I'm not convinced. Still they might be correct. Don't you see, though, it doesn't matter? The Sigman is the epitome of the final dehumanization. Whether we die or become slaves or flesh-and-blood robots or two-legged caricatures of Sigmans, makes no difference. Man will be gone from the universe.'

'What do you suggest?' Skip ventured. 'We should ignore that ship till the pilot quits and goes home?'

'We should destroy it,' said the professor, and now he spoke quite calmly. 'I would be proud, no, joyful to smuggle an atomic bomb aboard and detonate it'

Frustration breeds fanatics, Skip decided.

It came to him that he'd heard more paranoia about the ship than you might expect, especially from low-rank members of the Ortho like this fellow. The remarks had made no special impression on him, since he generally avoided extended conversations with persons he found dreary. And what was drearier than the class which his seatmate typified?

They didn't have the talent to become high-paid managers, engineers, scientists, politicians, any of the professionals who, with spit and baling wire, kept civilization somehow creaking along. Nor could they become the equally expensive entertainers who lubricated the machine. They were routineers, who rarely had much to offer that a computer-effector hook-up couldn't supply better.

No doubt morality as well as timidity kept them from dropping down to the Underworld. But lack of originality as well as lack of nerve restrained them from joining any Byworld sub-culture, let alone starting a new one. In a pathetic and, to Skip, fairly horrible manner, these shopkeepers, clerks, office flunkies, holders of titles that the real Ortho hadn't got around to abolishing, continued to ape their masters and tell themselves that they too were essential.

The wonder was that hatreds did not ferment in more of their brains. Public opinion polls said a large majority of Americans were pro-Sigman.

Hm. How reliable are the polls, in a country as kaleidoscopic as this'n's become? And what about foreign countries? And how many minds have changed, after three years of negative? And what demagogue might find here. the exact issue he needs?

Yes, I'd better hustle.

Currently the Tuatha de Danaan were on the south shore of Lake Tahoe, which most urgently needed them. The hordes who had defeated every earlier attempt at rehabilitation were gone. The resorts and clip joints which drew them had been razed, after the inmates had been redistributed in various New Towns. Condemnation proceedings never have been much of a political hurdle since California's Central Valley turned into malodorous desert. Nor was new topsoil hard to come by, what with container dumps bio-degrading everywhere you went. But the soil must be distributed, fertilized, watered, planted to the right species. When that first, quick-growing lot of trees and bushes had made a forest of sorts, the first kinds of wildlife must be introduced. Meanwhile you worked your way around the banks. And processing the entire lake, to get rid of contaminants and algae, would take years.

The camp didn't welcome tourists, but applications for employment were solicited. Skip told a guard jokes for an hour and won a pass to 'look around and see if I might fit in'. Two more hours of sauntering, gabbing, and inquiring led him to Roger Neal, whom he'd known in Mendocino.

The younger-son Freeman was working for an eventual hearth and home-acre of his own. His assignment was to a less pastoral scene than close to the fence, where trees remained and a few entomological technicians were stock-, ing bugs that attacked plant pests. Here, on a steep red slope, bulldozers rumbled, dirtspreaders upchucked, graders whuffled, a hundred men swarmed and shouted above the noise. Most of that racket came from the water, where it roared down the tubes of barge-mounted processors and spouted back, white under a brilliant sun. Yet locally the lake was glittering again, jewel blue; and kilometres away, scars hidden by distance, peaks held forth a promise of what might someday come back.

Might, Skip had thought. I dunno. India, Egypt, half China … oh, huge chunks of this planet— Who says North America hasn't already gone too far down that same road? If some of us, a few of us, could start fresh on a new world—

Roger, muscular, sunburned, his work clothes muddied, shook hands vigorously. 'Great to see you!

Gonna sign on? 'Fraid we can't have another Night of the Barn—no girls here—but a weekend in Hangtown, these days, is something to remember. What you been doing, horn? Bet you got a million yarns to spin. Bet four of 'em are true.'

Skip grinned. He had first met Rog when, at fifteen, his chronic restlessness led him to a summer job on that farm. He had found the Freemen pretty straitlaced. They were, in fact, still another Utopian movement, attempting to restore the independent, patriarchal yeoman on a basis of modern agronomics, cheap and sophisticated equipment, abundant power, easy electronic communication with the outside world. The Night of the Barn had called on Skip's full resources of generalship and deviousness to arrange. None of the adults having ever learned about it, he remained welcome among the Mendocino colonists, and could always pick up a little jingle odd-jobbing for them.

'Five,' "he said. 'You forgot the normal kind. What do you mean, no girls? Wild, glamorous Keeper'

women— where's your initiative?'

'Too big a ration of auxiliaries to cadre, this project. Too much competition. Hangtown's easier. I will say, though, on fiesta nights, watching those alices dance amongst the fires—yeah, I'll stay in camp for that.'

Skip nodded, recalling his time among the Terrans. Keepers, full-time conservers and restorers, might live in mobile houses of necessity; a man on a task of months or years would want his family around, and kids could get their formal education via multiple-hook-up two-way screens. The nomad communities might thus become close-knit; they might come to view what they did romantically, almost religiously, as the most important work on Earth; they would develop their special folkways; yes, all quite natural. But Skip suspected that the gipsylike overtones, the holidays where ceremony and conviviality flowed together, the plangent songs, the colourful garb… had their growth not been forced a wee bit? An extra inducement for outside help?

No matter. He'd enjoyed himself.

'I'm not after a billet, Rog,' he said. 'I'd like to talk with you when you get off.'

'Sure. Spend the night. The food's okay. I'll sign a chit for you. You can spread your sack on my bunkhouse floor, or on the ground if you prefer. My mates'll be delighted.'

Skip made himself unobtrusive till the 5.30 whistle blew. The Keepers' help had no objections to a forty-hour week. Overtime pay was welcome when there wasn't much to do in camp but earn it.

He explained his errand. Rog didn't have immediate access to Chief Keough, but his foreman did. Skip spent the evening winning over the foreman, which wasn't hard. The fellow was fresh from Alaska, where you rarely met a sigaroon, so to him the song-jape-story routine was enchanting. He gladly made an appointment on Skip's behalf 'to talk about an idea that might be useful'.

Daniel Keough, next noon, was a different case. He'd seen hundreds like his visitor. His courtesy was gruff. 'Sit yourself, Mr Wayburn. I'm afraid I can't spare you a lot of time.'

Skip eased into a folding chair, like the one which held Keough's huge frame. Working or no, the chief wore fringed pants, embroidered tunic, red sash and beret, silver on neck and wrists. His wife and daughters, flitting in and out of the dirigible dwelling, were still more gaudy. The latter cast glances at Skip which made him wish he could stay. Around, pines climbed green into blue heaven. A butterfly cruised through sun-speckled sweet-smelling shadows, a bird whistled, a squirrel ran fiery up a bole. Distantly came the noise of the machines that sought to bring this back everywhere.

'Reckon I'll have to convince you fast, sir.'

Keough puffed his pipe and waited.

'I want to see President Braverman,' Skip said. 'Or Commissioner Uchida or somebody like that, somebody at the top of the office.'

Keough's brows lifted in the seamed, bronzed face. 'How can I help you?'

'By passing me on to the right person, sir. You see, I doubt if anybody in this country is more than, oh, ten steps away from the top. Usually fewer. Like, I know my father, who knows a state committeeman of the Popular Party, who must be buddy-buddy with our senators, who've got the ear of the President.

Like that.'

Keough stroked his beard. "Then why not ask your father?'

'I may. But only for back-up, an extra smidgin of influence. Politicians will tend to dismiss me as a crank, and they've learned how to slough off cranks—Darwinian necessity.' Keough chuckled, which encouraged Skip to continue. Nonetheless he felt nervous enough that, hardly thinking about it, he took pad and pencil from his tunic and started sketching while he spoke. 'They will listen to a reputable scientist or engineer. And that kind is likelier to listen to me, And you, sir, must know any number of such. Please help. It's urgent. Not for me. I don't care who delivers my message, if he delivers it straight.

This is for the human race.'

Keough's eyes veiled.

'I know,' Skip said. 'A beardless boy intends to save the world. Aren't cranks generally older? All I want to do is give the authorities an idea that doesn't seem to have hit them. If I wrote to Washington, you know I'd get a form letter thanking me for my interest in democracy. But if you tell somebody respected, who respects you, that you think I may be on to something, he'll listen. And so it'll

'What's that you're doodling?' Keough asked sharply.

'Huh? Oh… nothing. I guess what you're doing here suggested it.' Skip passed the cartoon over. A few lines showed a steppe, in the background a burning town, in the foreground several mounted Mongols of Genghis Khan's time. They were looking in some dismay at a leader who, pointing furiously to a lone blade of grass, exclaimed, 'Who's responsible for this?'

Skip didn't think the little jest rated such volcanic laughter. 'Okay,' Keough said. 'You've earned yourself five minutes.'

At the end of them, he said, 'Go on.'

After an hour, he sprang to his feet. 'You could be flat wrong,' he roared, 'but what's to lose? And a galaxy to grab! Sure, I'll buck you on, lad. I'll arrange your transportation, too. If you are wrong, if you never do another deed in your life worth a belch, remember, you did give old Dan Keough an hour's hope for his grandchildren!'