Passing Through the Flame (65 page)

“This is all so unreal,” he said quietly. “A few months ago I was a fuck film cameraman on a dead-end street to nowhere, and now here I am directing eight camera units on a project like this. And the most unreal part is that I don’t feel particularly intimidated. It just feels like my natural job.”

“It was probably your natural job all along,” Sandra said, feeling the size of him, feeling how much he had grown. “That’s why you’ve grown into it so easily.”

“You really think so?” he said, turning to her, looking wild and powerful and bashful and boyish, all at once. “I don’t feel any different.”

“Just think of what you’ve come through.”

His face grew somber; he seemed to be contemplating some inner landscape of conflict. Lines of weariness appeared around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. He seemed suddenly older, more guarded.

“Thinking about what you’ve come through?”

“About what I’m going to go through,” he said ruefully.

“You’re doing fine. You’ll do fine.”

They stared silently out into the darkness together. Together, yet apart. Does he know? Does he know how Jango has made Horst his creature? Does he know how much this is costing EPI? Does he know that nothing about this project makes sense?

What can I say to him? That this thing smells bad, that I know Jango, that I can sense there are things going on under the surface of this project that are bigger than what seems to be on top? What would it sound like but sheer paranoia? What good could it do him?

She put her hand on Paul’s. He acknowledged it with a weak smile, but she could sense that he wasn’t with her, that his mind was off in some private thought, a thought that compelled his attention through dread.

Does he know something
I
don’t? Sandra wondered. Is there something he thinks it’s better for
me
not to know?

Physically together, yet drifting farther and farther apart, they stood under the hot Southern California night sky, looking at the abstract and shrouded blacknesses and shadows of the People’s World’s Fair, as if trying to read what tomorrow’s dawn would reveal in these looming enigmas, what strange flowers would bloom in the midday sun.

EIGHT o’clock in the morning, and the sun was a cool smoky ball just above the eastern horizon, burning away the morning fog and casting a golden patina over the Santa Monica Mountains. Orange highlights flashed off the rear window of the old Chevy directly in front of Barry Stein’s Karmann Ghia, harbinger of what would be a blazing Southern California summer’s day.

To the right of Stein’s car was a Volkswagen bus painted with rainbows, planets, and sunrises, in front, the old blue Chevy, and behind an ancient black Cadillac convertible, KHJ blaring from its radio, stuffed to the gunwales with long-haired teen-age surfers smoking joints and drinking cans of beer. For as far as Stein could see, the road was a double line of cars, crawling along at an average speed of about ten miles an hour. It was bumper to bumper all the way from the Ventura Freeway ten miles and an hour’s drive behind down in the San Fernando Valley to the festival site up here in the hills. The strange thing was not how slowly the cars were moving, but how steadily—it was saturation traffic, but it wasn’t frozen into a jam.

“This is really something,” Ivan Blue said, leaning forward from the little rear seat and sticking his face into the front of the car between Stein and Ruby Berger like some overeager cooped-up puppy. “I wonder what this thing is going to draw.”

“Beck’s announced that the grounds will accommodate a quarter of a million,” Stein said. “He claims he’ll turn back everyone after that.”

“Which probably means we can expect at least three hundred thousand,” Ruby said. “Especially if this weather holds.”

“Incredible!” Ivan said. “Like they say, far fucking out!”

“The biggest ego trip you’ll ever take,” Ruby grunted.

“Like they say, right on!”

Stein said nothing, not feeling in a very talkative mood, inching the Ghia along in first gear, as he had for nearly an hour. His reality was contracted into the in-out-in of his left foot on the clutch, the jab-jab-jab of his right foot on the accelerator, the gutteral yowlings, coughings, and splutterings of hundreds of car engines of every description propelling their vehicles along at a walk with varying degrees of protest. The lightheaded aroma of gasoline fumes was offensive to the nostrils but strangely intoxicating to the back reaches of the brain.

By noon it would probably be around ninety, any closed car would be an oven, and the gas fumes cooking in the hot sun would create an atmosphere approximating that of Venus. Engines would overheat and blow, blocking traffic, and this road would become a colossal nightmare. But now, in the misty morning coolness, there was something pleasantly hypnotic about the mindless task of inching the car along toward the festival site.

The Ghia became an insulated little universe, just the three of them, adrift in time and space like astronauts in their space capsule. Tens of thousands of these pocket universes—VW’s, Chevies, Fords, Cadillacs, Datsuns, Porches, Toyotas—stretched out like an endless strand of beads in both directions. Each containing its own crew of lovers, friends, chance acquaintances, perhaps even enemies. Tens of thousands of independent realities converging on the festival grounds.

The enormity of Sunset City was beginning to get through to Barry Stein, and with it, the enormity of what they were going to attempt. Porsches, Mercedes, chopped low-rider wagons, dune buggies, funky VW buses, motorcycles, luxury vans, converted hearses, old trucks, American sedans, battered moving wrecks. The variety of vehicles was endless, and each of them was a subtle expression of the life-style, economic status, and consciousness of its passengers. These are the People we talk about so abstractly in our meetings; these are the tribes of the invisible nation we’re going to try to lead, to turn into a revolutionary instrument with a unified will.

And how unified are we even in this one car? Ruby thinks Ivan is a male chauvinist pig, he has no real respect for her, and I’m not sure how I feel about her or how she feels about me. That’s just three of us at the very top of the leadership pyramid. Multiply that by a hundred thousand and what do you get?

Yet the three of us
are
united, at least in purpose. We have a plan and the means to carry it out, and we
are
working together, no matter what our personal trips are. Because we have the same enemies, and we share some common consciousness, and we have the same vision of a world in which our different trips can bloom together side by side in a community of mutual understanding and love.

Ahead, the road climbed a gently sloping hill, and Stem could see the endless double line of cars crawling up the slope like a giant metal caterpillar, the yellowish rays of the rising sun flashing off a crazy-quilt rainbow of colors. It was a huge communal organism of people and machinery, a multitude of conflicting styles, but a unity of motion and purpose. Love filled Stein’s heart, and hope warmed his mind like the growing warmth of the sunrise.

“Yes, we can,” he mumbled to himself. “Yes, we can.”

“Yes, we can what, Barry?” Ruby said, looking at him somewhat peculiarly, making him aware that his mind had drifted from the mundane reality of the car to the point where he had started talking to himself.

“Yes, I think we can pull this thing off,” he said. “If we fail, we deserve to fail. If we can’t get ourselves together here, there’s no one else to blame.”

“Yeah,” Ruby said moodily. “If we get our shit together, it’s the start of a new world, but if we don’t, we’ll be left holding the bloody coat hanger at the abortion of the Age of Aquarius.”

“Jesus, will you cut that shit out!” Ivan said. “It’s a beautiful day, and a quarter of a million of our brothers and sisters are coming together, and we’re going to have a beautiful trip.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans, drew out a rumpled joint, lit it, and passed it to Ruby. “Get into the spirit of things,” he said.

Up ahead, the blue Chevy crested the brow of the hill, and then, off to the right in the distance, Stein got his first vague view of Sunset City: spires, domes, and jumbled geometric shapes peeping up over the next ridgeline, tinted a uniform gold by the slanting rays of the rising sun, a vision of the New Jerusalem seen from afar. He puffed gently on the joint that Ruby handed him, basking in the golden vibes of the sun, the day, and the vision.

“If I believed in omens, I’d believe in that,” Ruby said.

“I don’t believe in omens either, but I believe what I see,” Ivan said.

Stein turned on the radio. It came on playing “Gimme Shelter.”

“Christ, what a mess this is,” Aaron Baum said, slipping the clutch again as the old Jaguar sedan in front of the van slowed down once more. The Porsche engine spluttered and complained just like Baum, and Chris Sargent found himself wondering whether dropping the hot engines in these VW’s might not turn out to be a pain in the ass. All we have to do is blow a couple of engines from overheating in this traffic, and we’ve got a mess. And if we blow the engine in
this
van before we get there, we’re
really
screwed.

“Try to take it easy on the engine,” Sargent said. “Just remember that this thing has got to get our asses out of here
muy pronto on
Sunday.”

Which was why it was worth dropping the Porsche engines in all the vans—if something goes wrong with the command van, we can bail out in any of the other nine. Any of the vans could make the rendezvous with the hydrofoil on the coast before anything could catch them. Better to risk not getting in than to risk not getting out.

The clogged traffic sped up again to a riproaring ten miles an hour as they came down the slope of a long hill and the road approached a huge parking area, still mostly empty at this early hour. The engine hesitated as Baum dropped the clutch in again.

“Make sure you tune that engine up again before Saturday night,” Sargent said. “How’s the oil temperature?”

“Pretty hot, but we’re almost there. It won’t blow.”

He and Baum were alone in the command van, which carried just about all the ordnance the strike force was taking into Sunset City: the spare M-16’s, the bazooka, the live grenades, all the ammo, even the cheap pistols that would be handed out on Sunday. The troop carriers were strung out at fifty-yard intervals in the crawling traffic behind the command van, but there was nothing in them but camping equipment, emergency rations, practice grenades, radios, and the M-16’s the Boys were carrying. If the command van didn’t make it, the mission would have to be aborted. The next three days were going to be a permanent potential mutiny, and it would be bad news to store weaponry in the troop carriers, where half a dozen spaced-out freaks might just decide to rip it off and go into business for themselves. Better to risk blowing the mission than to risk getting your ass fragged.

Down at the bottom of the hill, highway patrolmen were standing along the right side of the road at ten-yard intervals, directing traffic. A hundred cars or more at a time were being directed to wheel right by the police, so that they advanced north across the churned-up earth of the parking lot like a series of frontal tank assaults.

It was a neat piece of traffic management, since it kept the entrance to the parking area from becoming a bottleneck, but it also made choosing your parking space that much more difficult. And it was absolutely vital that the command van be stationed with immediate access to the ranch drive that cut through the center of the parking area, so that it could get the hell out on Sunday. Anything not right up against the road would be jammed tight in the middle of maybe a hundred thousand parked cars. From the map that Jango had given him, Sargent also knew that the security compound was located just north of the western wing of the parking area, and he certainly didn’t want the command van parked smack up against that!

“Make for the northwest corner of the eastern parking area,” he told Baum, “and park this thing beside the road if you’ve got to crush a few of these crappy Volkswagens to do it.”

Then there was a cop alongside the van pointing to the right and semaphoring with his right arm. Still in first gear, Baum obeyed and swung the van off the road and onto the rutted brown earth, even as the Jag in front and the Ford behind made the turn at its flanks.

Looking ahead, Sargent saw that they were roughly in the center of a long line of vehicles rumbling and jouncing across the pitted earth toward the masses of cars already parked along the northern edge of the parking area. The ranch drive was maybe two hundred yards to their left. The previous line of vehicles was about a hundred yards ahead of them. They had to make two hundred lateral yards in the one-hundred-yard interval between the two ranks of cars which were moving forward at maybe fifteen miles an hour.

“Floor it!” Sargent shouted. This was going to be hairy!

Baum slammed down the accelerator. The Porsche engine screamed toward redline even as Baum speed-shifted through second into third. The command van shot out ahead of the cars to either side of it, and Baum swung sharply to the left as soon as he had a dozen yards of daylight, bouncing and lurching across the rough terrain at about fifty miles an hour, cutting almost directly across the advance of the line of cars. Over the howling of the engine, Sargent could barely hear the squeal of sudden braking, and he could see cars fishtailing, throwing dirt in the air, as they came to panic stops. He braced himself against the instrument panel as Baum hung onto the wheel, which bucked in his hands like an M-60 machine gun.

They made fifty, seventy-five, a hundred lateral yards, and then some asshole in an old Austin-Healy accelerated out of the pack in front of them, cutting them off.

“Motherfucker!” Baum grunted, swerving around the Healy, then having to swerve again to avoid creaming out against a chopped metallic blue Dodge full of low riders who had decided to play the same game. Sargent reached reflexively for his M-16, stopped himself.