"Please fasten your seatbelts," the stewardess said.
"Wait! I have to get off—" But the boarding tube had already separated, and the plane door was closed. He was trapped.
Well, it wasn't as if the plane were actually going anywhere. He had wandered into a most elaborate setting and ritual, but that was all. He sat down in the seat beside her and fastened the seat belt. He did not want to appear to be a complete spoilsport. The airplane began to taxi forward. Brother Paul lurched up—and got nowhere. The seat belt bound him securely. He grabbed the buckle convulsively, got it loose, stood up, looked about—and paused again.
If he jumped off now, as the mock-up trundled realistically around the concrete runway, the little girl would be left to endure her "flight" alone. Half the fun of it would be gone for her. He certainly would never desert a child on a real flight; why should he do it now? His cruelty would be much the same, figuratively.
He settled back into his seat and rebuckled. His other appointment would simply have to wait a little longer. No doubt the Watchers, discovering him absent, would check the edges of the Animation area and locate him here in due course. Since the child's real parents were not present, Brother Paul would have to keep an eye on her until they turned up. As Jesus Christ Himself had said about the least of children—"
The plane turned, orienting on the main runway, the one Brother Paul had originally spied. The machine accelerated. The vegetation outside shot by. This was no gentle push; the passengers were pressed back into their couches. It seemed like two hundred kilometers per hour. Fascinated, Carolyn peered out of the slanted window. Brother Paul squinted past her head, as interested as she, though for a different reason. This was really quite an effect!
The nose lifted, then the tail. The plane angled up, still driving relentlessly forward. This was becoming too realistic; how could it stop before the pavement gave out?
The passing foliage dropped below. Take off!
Take off? Brother Paul stared past the child through the few waving strands of her hair that had yanked themselves free of the braids. Already the landscape was twenty meters below and dropping rapidly, forced behind by the monstrous thrust of the jets.
Suddenly he caught on. Motion picture film projected on the window as the structure of the plane was angled. To make it seem, by means of tilt and vision, as though they were flying. Very clever illusion.
Soon the window image showed clouds, and the plane leveled out. Champagne was served; Brother Paul declined his glass. There had been a time when—but he would never touch any mind-affecting drug again!
The stewardess walked down the aisle, plunking packaged breakfasts on the little shelves that folded out from the seats in front. Scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, and fruit juice.
Breakfasts? Was this morning? Well, it could be, after all his time crawling through the labyrinth under the Sphinx. Subjective impressions of the passage of time were suspect once a person had been in Animation.
"Can I have milk?" Carolyn asked.
"May you have milk," Brother Paul said absently.
The stewardess smiled and produced a glass of milk. She was a buxom lass, and a chain of thought related the milk to—but he cut that off. Invalid, anyway; many people were not aware that cows did not freshen until bred.
Carolyn had a great time with this "picnic" meal, but Brother Paul was pensive. Why such an elaborate set with real food just like that of a past day on Earth (no wooden soup!), as though this really were a pre-mattermission airplane flight? It was really getting beyond the simple entertainment stage. Why squander the meager resources of Planet Tarot on such an exhibition of nostalgia?
Yet when he thought about it, it began to make more sense. He suffered from some nostalgia himself. It was nice to revisit the affluent, technological past, even briefly, even in mock-up. It had been so many years since he had been on a real airplane—and then it had not been as large or elegant as this one. So why not relax and enjoy the show?
They finished their meal—Carolyn left much of hers, he noted distastefully; he did not like waste—and the stewardess cleared away the trays.
Now they were far above the clouds—37,000 feet, the pilot's announcement said, causing Brother Paul to pause in his speculations a moment to translate that into kilometers: about eleven and a quarter—and he could have sworn his ears popped. The flight was level and dull. Some of the other passengers were reading, and others were sleeping, just as though they had made this trip many times before. Even as nostalgia, this was beginning to pall; enough was enough!
"Who was Will Hamlin?" Carolyn asked suddenly.
Startled, Brother Paul glanced at her. "What do you know about Will Hamlin?"
"Nothing," she replied brightly. "That's why I asked, Daddy."
Brother Paul oriented on the question, for the moment setting aside the other confusions of this odd journey. For there had indeed been a Will Hamlin...
Paul had first met Wilfrid G. Hamlin as a brand new freshman college student of eighteen. Paul was going around interviewing instructors, as was the system at this small, unusual institution. He was trying to make up his mind which courses best suited his nascent intellectual needs.
The oddness of this college was really the reason Paul had come. It had no irrelevant entrance requirements, no tests, no grades, and no set curriculum. The students talked with the instructors, each of whom gave a little sales pitch for his particular class, and then selected the courses that seemed most promising. If an insufficient number of students picked a given class, that class was discontinued before it started. Somehow, each semester, it all worked out, though it always seemed impossibly chaotic. The classes themselves were of the discussion variety with no lectures; the instructors merely tried to organize the expressed opinions and bring out the fine points as the classes proceeded. It was all very relaxed: education almost without pain.
Will Hamlin was a small man without distinguishing traits other than a slight stutter. He had a little cubbyhole of an office off the unfinished hallway leading to the Haybarn Theater.
Brother Paul shook his head, remembering. Three years later he had had an adventure of sorts in that hall—but that would hardly interest a child—
"Yes it would!" Carolyn insisted. "Tell me, Daddy!"
Um. Well—One of Paul's classmates, call him Dick, and another friend, call him Guy—though perhaps two other people had actually been involved in this minor escapade —well, the three of them and their three girlfriends, who shall be nameless (no, Carolyn, it is just a kind of convention: you don't say anything untoward about girls if you can help it. They are supposed to be unsullied)—the grandmother (or was it the grandfather? Call it the former) of one of these six had taken to making his own wine, and lo, a sample was on hand here at the college. Dandelion wine from homegrown weeds—it really was not very good. So in true collegiate tradition these bright young people—and they were pretty bright, their actions and scholastics to the contrary notwithstanding—had decided to improve upon this wine by distilling it. They rigged up a little still in the science lab at night (night was the chief period of action; day was reserved for sleeping and, on occasion, a college class or two), and after various mishaps in the dark succeeded in deriving the essence: perhaps a cup of 100 proof liqueur. But the bad taste of the original had been intensified by the distillation; now it was the very quintessence of awfulness. What to do with it? They carried it through the Haybarn Theater, on the way to the Community Center—but three drops spilled like guilty blood on the floor of the hall outside Will's office. (That's right—the college was so informal that all instructors and administrative personnel right up to the president were addressed by their first names.) Brother Paul had lost all memory of the final disposition of Distilled Old Grandma, but he clearly remembered passing through that hall the following morning—and catching a good whiff of Old Grandma. His stomach turned. That region had been impregnated with the stench, and of course no one would confess the cau
se. Poor Will, whose door opened directly onto it!
"No, I didn't think you'd understand," Brother Paul said. "In retrospect, it really isn't funny. Just an irrelevant reminiscence—" But Carolyn was stifling a girlish chuckle. Well, perhaps that had been the level of that episode! A stink in a hall...
Oh, the Haybarn Theater? Well, the whole college had been converted fourteen years before Paul's arrival—yes, he was actually older than the college!—from a New England farm, and the main building had been the big red gambrel-roofed barn.
Now the rough-hewn rafters showed high above the theater section; the hay had been removed, but a bird or two still nested in the upper regions. The office of the college president was in a silo. Will had not rated a silo. Which brings us back to that first encounter. Maybe being educated in a barn causes the mind to become littered with stray thoughts, running around and getting in the way like the stray dogs that roamed the campus. But now we have returned to what we were talking about. There was hardly room in Will's niche to turn around, but at least he had a window. On hot days that was a blessing.
"Dos Passos' U.S.A.", Will was saying. Brother Paul smiled with the force of another reminiscence. He had thought it was a place. Like Winesburg, Ohio, or God's Little Acre.
The problem was that each instructor described his course as though the student already knew what it was all about. Paul had no idea whether he wished to visit Dos Passos, U.S.A., or whether he preferred to contemplate the Individual and Society under the tutelage of another prospective instructor, or perhaps drama or art or music or any several of a number of other offerings. It was all very confusing.
In the end, Will's course was one of those which Paul elected to attend. In due course he learned that Dos Passos, U.S.A., was a monstrous place, three volumes long and as big as twentieth century America, and well worth the experience of struggling through its labyrinthine and fragmentary bypaths. It was, indeed, somewhat like life itself.
Paul learned a good deal more, and grew more, than could be accounted for in horizons of the classroom or dreampt of in the philosophies of the instructors. The college campus itself was a kind of Winesburg or Dos Passos, with devious interactions complimenting the open ones. The grapevine kept all interested parties posted on the on-going student, faculty, and student-faculty liaisons; some interactions were hilarious, some serious, and some pitiful. Some people thrived in this melting pot of intellectual and sexual personality; others were destroyed. A little freedom could be a devastating thing! Paul himself came through it—mainly by luck, he decided in retrospect—more or less whole. But he had learned a certain tolerance and became less inclined to judge a person by some particular aspect of his or her personality such as physical impairment or lesbianism or schizophrenia. During this overall educational experience, much of what Paul was later to become was shaped, though there had been scant evidence of it at the time.
In those years Will became Paul's faculty advisor. The advisor system at this college was closer than what was normal elsewhere; the advisor had quite specific involvement in the student's curriculum and concern with his overall welfare. Paul had by then become a student activist—this too was the normal course—and through him Will had another fairly shrewd insight into some of what was percolating through the deeper recesses of the tangled campus scheme.
The college tried to prepare its community for life in the great outside world by being a more or less faithful microcosm of that world. Students ran most of the campus routine, washing the dishes, cleaning the floors, tending the grounds, organizing the fire department, and serving on committees. Periodically, the faculty members were routed out to participate in these chores too, rather than being allowed to molder in their ivory towers (as it were: silos), but it was a thankless attempt. Most routed-out faculty soon drifted back to their normal ruts.
The whole was governed by the Community Meeting, consciously patterned after the Town Meetings of rural New England. Periodically, students, faculty, and administrators got together and thrashed through the agenda, utilizing formal Parliamentary procedure. The assorted committees that ran things in the interims reported to this meeting and were given new directives. Some of these committees tended to develop wills of their own, honoring the adage that power tends to corrupt, and this could lead to trouble. The most notorious was the Executive Committee, called Exec for short, composed of the heads of the other committees together with the president of the college, selected faculty members, and representatives from each student dormitory. At times Exec concealed what it was doing from the larger community in order to prevent its less popular decisions from being reversed by the Community Meeting. "We should be the head of the Community, not the tail," one Exec member put it. To which an irate community member responded: "Exec's acting like the asshole of the Community!"
For example: there was one student in his mid-twenties, a former small businessman called Deacon or "Deac" for short. He organized a Community cooperative store that sold cigarettes, cosmetics, stationery, and sundry other necessaries at reduced prices. The enterprise was doing well, and it served a Community need; therefore, the organizer was cordially disliked by the anti-free-enterprise elements of the Community. They tried to torpedo the co-op in various ways not excluding the rifling of several hundred dollars worth of supplies from the storeroom, but Deac was smarter than they, and the co-op survived. He had a candy machine installed; there was a great outcry against it as being counter to "Community spirit." But one evening the Community Communist, who had protested most vehemently against "commodity fetishism," was observed to sneak in and surreptitiously infiltrate a coin to obtain a box of raisins from the orifice of the evil machine. That was perhaps the coop's ultimate success.
Deac had a little dog. Dogs were not permitted on campus by Community law. But the college president's beautiful Irish Setter, called Pavlov because he tended to drool, wandered freely around and in the buildings. Pavlov once watered down a terrified student standing in the dining room. So the rule was not enforced. Deac's little canine was fed and housed off campus, but tended to follow the example set by other members of the community, going where the action was. (No one ever saw a dog attending a class, which showed how well the canines understood the situation.) Certain members of the Executive Committee saw their chance. The owner was responsible for the pet; the dog had broken the law; therefore, Deac was expelled from the Community. (No one suggested the college president should be served in the same fashion; there were, it seemed, limits.)
There was an immediate outcry. Deac had his enemies in Exec, but he also had his friends in the Community. The majority sentiment was clearly in Deac's favor, if only as a concern for fair play. So Exec maneuvered cleverly to prevent the issue from being placed on the agenda. With luck, Deac would be gone before the Community could formally discuss the matter: a fait accompli.
As it happened, Paul was then the Community Secretary, and his friend Dick, of Old Grandma repute, was Chairman of the Community Meeting. They conferred—they were after all roommates, as were their girlfriends, in a singularly cozy arrangement—and discovered that the prior agenda was advisory only; it could be set aside and anything discussed by the simple decision of the majority. So the notice of the Meeting was posted with the old agenda, so as not to alert the opposition, and plans were made and circulated.
The Meeting was called to order. The formalities were undertaken so that the first thing discussed was the Dog Law. A motion was made: abolish the law. Discussion? Three people spoke in defense of the law; no one spoke against it. With amazing suddenness the matter came to a vote—and the law was terminated by a massive, hitherto silent, majority. Deac was back on campus since he could not be expelled for his dog's violation of a nonexistent law. Too late, the anti-Deac forces that dominated Exec realized that they'd been had. They had been outmaneuvered and destroyed by the same machine tactics they had initiated. Paul wrote up the whole inside story for the Minutes of the Meeting, hardly concealing his
pride in his own participation.
Later in life, Brother Paul was to find that machine politics, far from being a local Community aberration or perversion of the system, were in fact typical of global politics. It gave him a very special comprehension of the forces at work in the historical McCarthyism and HUAC or House UnAmerican Activities Committee, itself one of the least American institutions. Power did tend to corrupt, in the macrocosm as in the microcosm, and at times desperate measures were required to right the determined wrongness of those supposedly representing the will of the majority. It was a phenomenon Paul never quite understood, the Good Guys acting just like the Bad Guys, but at least he learned to recognize it when he saw it. The college had, indeed, educated him for real life.
However effective this education was, the enrollment of the college was impecuniously small, and the administration decided to expand. They felt more students would come if Community standards were stricter. Certain faculty members felt that sexual morality was entirely too free among the students. (Certain students felt the same way about the faculty, but that was another matter.) So the faculty set curfews on the lounges: no males in female lounges or females in male lounges after ten p.m. each night.
Now this stirred resentment; students regarded the lounges as a Community resource and used them at any hour of the night. (A daytime curfew might not have been so troublesome.) In addition, the lounges were under Community authority; the faculty was a minority within the larger Community and could no more preempt control of the lounges unilaterally than Exec could kick out a dog-owning student on its own. So the new curfew was without legal foundation and was duly ignored.
Until Paul, with five other students, was spied sitting and talking in a female lounge at 10:40 p.m. by the night watchman. Now Paul had not endeared himself to certain elements of the faculty, and this was not merely a matter of helping to overturn the dog law. He had stood up for his student rights on other occasions and generally carried the day. From a shy freshman he had become a self-assured senior. Theoretically, this was the very kind of development the college favored: individualism was character. In practice, this was frowned upon when it manifested as opposition to new faculty curfews for lounges. Paul was summoned before the faculty Social Standards Committee, popularly known as the Vice Squad.