The Children of Hamelin (46 page)

BOOK: The Children of Hamelin

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It was cold solace.

But as I stood there feeling sorry for myself, I saw myself feeling sorry for myself, and it pissed me off. Asshole that you are to think you get something like freedom without paying dues!

Yeah, maybe I had something after all: I was free. Free to take the real trip, the real leap, without a parachute, the leap from the prison of the past into the unknown future—the real way, maybe the only way to break on through to the other side. You gotta die to be born again...?

Well, maybe the old Tom Hollander
had
died and the new Tom Hollander still waited in the womb of time to be born.

And quite suddenly, but with no surprise at the revelation, I knew what I had to do.

All I had to do was make the Big Leap. And now there was no rationalization to hold me back.

Nothing at all...

Walking down the futuristic white-walled corridor—crowded with pink-scrubbed cats in suits, expensive chicks in expensive clothes, college students from Harvard and Vassar, Army officers, who knows, rock stars, politicians, star surgeons, nuclear physicists, novelists, minor movie stars, spies, diplomats—I felt myself melting into the airport scene and really grooving behind it.

I felt almost stoned—Kennedy Airport was like another reality, or maybe a kind of anteroom between realities, a place where all the world-lines converged and then spread out again.

I had never flown before, but now, as I entered the huge, high-ceilinged embarkation room and saw the 707 waiting outside the glass wall of the terminal to whisk me off to LA, dug the people waiting to board the plane—Alabama hicks, Hollywood directors, senators, sausage salesmen, whores, Californians on the way home, emigrants, con-men, important dope-pushers—I understood why all airports have futuristic architecture.

Because for me (and for how may of the others?) Kennedy was the nexus-point between the known present and the unknown future, was therefore part of the future already. The unknown future... Unknown?

Yeah, unknown. I mean, I knew I was on my way to Los Angeles to take the slush-pile job at
Slick,
but that was just a reason to get on a plane in New York and get off in Los Angeles instead of San Francisco or Timbuktu. As a matter of fact, for all the reality LA had for me, it might as well be Timbuktu. And Timbuktu might as well be LA. They were both nothing more than cities of the mind and I knew dead-certain that LA would be a reality as different from New York and everything I had ever known as Timbuktu or the dark side of the moon. On the way to the airport, I had picked up the
Times
and seen that yesterday’s high temperature in New York had been 30°. Yesterday’s
low
in LA had been 52°. High had been 73°. 73° in December! Palm trees! Hollywood! Sunset Strip! Movie stars!

I checked in at the ticket desk, got a seat number written on my ticket, went and looked out the huge window at my 707. From this close, it seemed much smaller than I had imagined it, and the aluminum skin was dull and gray and grainy, as ordinary as a subway car. Somehow only now, looking at the weathered old plane, did the whole thing become really real.

But tell me it wasn’t all a magic carpet ride! Within five hours, I’d be somewhere where the sun was shining and the temperature was forty degrees warmer, palm trees, movie studios, and yours truly met at the airport by a flunky (no doubt a very low-level flunky) from
Slick,
and off to play a new game which could end up with me as editor of a crotch-mag, and after that, who knows, there are lots of other airports around...

Yeah, airports
had
to have futuristic architecture. The future passes through them every minute of every day.

The tourist-class section of the plane was jammed. Three seats to each side of the aisle and a lot smaller inside than those TV commercials would have you believe. Not much different from being on a bus. I had lucked into a window seat. Beside me was some old bat who looked like an Iowa farmwife and beside her a cat who looked like an aging brassiere salesman. I had no urge to say one word to either of them. Yeah, a lot like a bus, or the subway.

Even the endless hurry-up-and-wait. Ticket desk. Wait. Board the plane. Wait. Plastic blond stewardess does her seat-belts and oxygen number. Wait. Ramp pulls back into the terminal like a hard-on wilting. Wait. Feeling of excitement as the plane as last starts to move. Building and building as the plane taxis further and further. Then stops. And I look out the little scratchy window and see that there are five other jets ahead of us, like a line waiting to take off. So we wait. Whoosh! The lead jet suddenly roars down the runway from a dead stop and I get a thrill and a chill as it belches gray smoke and bolts into the air. We move up a slot. And wait. Another plane takes off. Another short taxi. Wait...

I feel almost as if I’m watching a stripper do her thing. As each plane ahead of us takes off and we move one step closer to the Big Moment, the tension building in me is almost sexual, almost like waiting for acid to hit, like holding a spike above your vein, like sticking it in and feeling that little pain, and your finger on the plunger anticipating the Surge...

And then finally, FINALLY, we’re on the line. The engines rev up to a tremendous roar and the whole plane is vibrating and I feel as if I’m inside some huge beast chomping at the bit, as if the power of the universe is being held back by a halter...

Then suddenly, the plane is moving, moving, faster and faster, a huge metal beast charging down the runway, faster and faster, the world flashing by, faster and faster and faster—

And then—the Big Surge! Something groovy seems to kick me in the base of the spine, like smack suddenly hitting, like an orgasm, like breaking on through to the other side, and like a great bird the plane leaps into the air like a thing alive, and there’s nothing to see but the wild blue yonder, the pure blue blankness of the sky unfolding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Norman Spinrad is the author of over twenty novels, including the acclaimed

BUG JACK BARRON.

He is a multiple nominee for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction achievement, an American Book Award Nominee writer, and winner of the Prix Apollo. He has written scripts for Star Trek and produced two feature films. He has also published over 60 short stories collected in half a dozen volumes, and his novels and stories have been published in over a dozen languages.

He has been President of Science Fiction Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) three times.

He is a tireless campaigner for authors’ rights and is the creator of the “model contract” now in use by several writers’ organizations. He’s been a literary agent, President of World SF, briefly a radio phone show host, has appeared as a vocal artist on three albums, and occassionally performs live. He is a long time literary critic, sometime film critic, perpetual political analyst, and sometime songwriter.

He grew up in New York, has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and travelled widely in Europe and rather less so in Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.