feat of disconnecting the broadcast control unit after one had
entered onto a monitored highway. This resulted in the car's
vanishing from the ken of the monitor and passing back into the
control of its occupants. Jealous as a deity, a monitor will not
tolerate that which denies its programmed omniscience; it will
thunder and lightning in the Highway Control Station nearest
the point of last contact, sending winged seraphs in search of
that which has slipped from sight.
Often, however, this was too late in happening, for the roads
are many and well-paved. Escape from detection was, at first,
relatively easy to achieve.
Other vehicles, though, necessarily behave as if a rebel has
no actual existence. Its presence cannot be allowed for.
Boxed-in, on a heavily-traveled section of roadway, the
offender is subject to immediate annihilation in the event of any
overall speedup or shift in traffic pattern which involves
movement through his theoretically vacant position. This, in
the early days of monitor-controls, caused a rapid series of
collisions. Monitoring devices later became far more 'sophisti-
cated, and mechanized 'cutoffs reduced the collision incidence
subsequent to such an action. The quality of the pulpefactions
and contusions which did occur, however, remained unaltered.
The next reaction was based on a thing which had been
overlooked because it was obvious. The monitors took people
where they wanted to go only because people told them they
wanted to go there. A person pressing a random series of co-
ordinates, without reference to any map, would either be left
with a stalled automobile and a "RECHECK YOUR CO-
ORDINATES" light, or would suddenly be whisked away
in any direction. The latter possesses a certain romantic appeal
in that it offers speed, unexpected sights, and free hands. Also,
it is perfectly legal; and it is possible to navigate all over two
continents in this manner, if one is possessed of sufficient
wherewithal and gluteal stamina.
As is the case in all such matters, the practice diffused
upwards through the age brackets. Schoolteachers who only
drove on Sundays fell into disrepute as selling points for used
autos. Such is the way a world ends, said the entertainer.
End or no, the car designed to move on monitored highways
is a mobile efficiency unit, complete with latrine, cupboard,
refrigerator compartment, and gaming table. It also sleeps two
with ease and four with some crowding. On occasion, three can
be a real crowd.
Render drove out of the dome and into the marginal aisle. He
halted the car.
"Want to jab some coordinates?" he asked.
"You do it. My fingers know too many."
Render punched random buttons. The Spinner moved onto
the highway. Render asked speed of the vehicle then, and it
moved into the high-acceleration lane.
The Spinner's lights burnt holes in the darkness. The city
backed away fast; it was a smouldering bonfire on both sides of
the road, stirred by sudden gusts of wind, hidden by white
swirlings, obscured by the steady fall of gray ash. Render knew
his speed was only about sixty percent of what it would have
been on a clear, dry night.
He did not blank the windows, but leaned back and stared
out through them. Eileen "looked" ahead into what light there
was. Neither of them said anything for ten or fifteen minutes.
The city shrank to sub-city as they sped on. After a time,
short sections of open road began to appear.
"Tell me what it looks like outside," she said.
"Why didn't you ask me to describe your dinner, or the suit
of armor beside our table?"
"Because I tasted one and felt the other. This is different."
"There is snow falling outside. Take it away and what you
have left is black."
"What else?"
"There is slush on the road. When it starts to freeze, traffic
will drop to a crawl unless we outrun this storm.The slush looks
like an old, dark syrup, just starting to get sugary on top."
"Anything else?"
"That's it, lady."
"Is it snowing harder or less hard than when we left the
club?"
"Harder, I should say."
"Would you pour me a drink?" she asked him.
"Certainly."
They turned their seats inward and Render raised the table.
He fetched two glasses from the cupboard.
"Your health," said Render, after he had poured.
"Here's looking at you."
Render downed his drink. She sipped hers. He waited for
her next comment. He knew that two cannot play at the
Socratic game, and he expected more questions before she
said what she wanted to say.
She said: "What is the most beautiful thing you have ever
seen?"
Yes, he decided, he had guessed correctly.
He replied without hesitation: "The sinking of Atlantis."
"I was serious."
"So was 1."
"Would you care to elaborate?"
"I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally.
"It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It
was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies.
There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a
milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There
were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the
bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu,
as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying
with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the
dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek
tenor sax play at sunset.
"The Greek, of course, was a patient of mineparanoiac.
The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that's what
I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free rein for awhile,
and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full
fathom five. He's playing again and you've doubtless heard his
sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He's good. I still see him
periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the
greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He's just a fine, late twentieth-
century saxman.
"Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I
worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting
sense
of lost beautybecause, for
a single moment, his
abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that
his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world."
He refilled their glasses.
"That wasn't exactly what I meant," she said.
"I know."
"I meant something real."
"It was more real than real, I assure you."
"I don't doubt it, but . . ."
"But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your
argument. Okay, I apologize. I'll hand it back to you. Here's
something that could be real:
"We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand," he
said. "Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow
will melt, the waters will run down into the earth,
or be
evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand
will remain.
Nothing grows in the sand,
except
for
an
occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds,
insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In
the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where
there's an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block
out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the
elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements
are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy."
"There is no such place near here," she said.
"If I say it, then there is. Isn't there? I've seen it."
"Yes . . . You're right."
"And it doesn't matter if it's a painting by a woman named
O'Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If
I've seen it?"
"I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis," she said. "Do
you want to speak it for me?"
"No, go ahead."
He refilled the small glasses once more.
"The damage is in my eyes," she told him, "not my brain."
He lit her cigarette.
"I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains."
He lit his own cigarette.
"Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous
systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies . . ."
"Controlled fantasies."
"I could perform therapy and at the same time experience
genuine visual impressions."
"No," said Render.
"You don't know what it's like to be cut off from a whole area
of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience
something you can never knowand that he cannot appreciate
it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court
of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice
only fortuity, pure and simple."
"The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately,
man must reside in the universe."
"I'm not asking the universe to help meI'm asking you."
"I'm sorry," said Render.
"Why won't you help me?"
"At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason."