"Fetches you up, now, don't it?" Greene demanded proudly. I shook my head, couldn't answer. He identified Tower Hall, its belfry floodlit in the distance, and pointed out the brilliant string of lights that followed the Power Line eastwards from that building to the Boundary and behind us to Founder's Hill — the string whose other end I'd glimpsed from the Powerhouse. WESCAC was there — the storied Belly, the awful EATer; and there too, somewhere beneath that high-spired dome, was the fabled Central Library and a certain particular booklift where my journey had begun. The ambiguous thrill brought tears to my eyes; I leaned down and touched Max's shoulder for comfort, and he briefly put his brooding by to share my feeling.
"Twenty years since I went over this hill," he said.
"Lots of things have changed since then," Greene said cheerfully. "They're all the time tearing down old ones and putting up new."
Max pointed out the Lykeionian-revival porch of the Chancellor's Mansion, the Remusian pilasters of the Old Armory, the flying buttresses of Enoch Hall. I inquired about what appeared to be, after the Stadium, the largest building of all, a floodlit multistoried cube of enormous dimension with a featureless limestone facade.
"Military Science," Max said grimly. "And out past Tower Hall, the last big building to the south — see those four turrets with the searchlights? That's Main Detention, where I spent my last night before they sent me away."
"Ain't it grand?" said Peter Greene. "We got the biggest detention-hall in the University!" What was more, he added, the clock-tower of Tower Hall was the tallest structure on the campus; and there were so many kilometers of hallway in the Military Science Cube that the professor-generals pedaled bicycles from office to office; and nine out of every ten NTC staff-members (and eleven out of every twelve students) owned his own motorbike-a ratio triple that of Nikolay College and well ahead of any of our West-Campus colleagues. The total power expended in a single day by all these engines equaled the energy of a hundred EAT-waves of the latest type…
"And make the most important poison in the atmosphere," Max added, "except for the drop-outs from EAT-wave testing."
"Say what you want," Greene chuckled. "If it weren't for all them drivers there wouldn't be no drive-ins."
We came down then from the overlook into the stunning traffic of a main highway ("Hit 'em right at the evening rush," Greene remarked — and hit them he very nearly did on a number of occasions, by driving through traffic lights at intersections or misjudging the distance of approaching headlamps. In addition to his color-blindness, it seemed, he was unable to perceive depth with his single eye; I was to learn later that he was subject to certain photisms, or optical hallucinations, as well, but fortunately was spared that extra cause for alarm during this first experience of vehicular traffic). The noise took my heart out; I was terrified by the rush and by the confusion of lights and signals. Arrows flashed this way and that; signs commanded one on every hand to stop, to go, to turn. I spurred tireless Croaker to his utmost gallop; even so the slowest of the vehicles sped past as if we stood still. Not the least of my astonishments was that we drew so little attention: horns would blow and insults be shouted if we strayed off the shoulder onto the pavement or trespassed inadvertently against the right-of-way; otherwise, however, young and old roared past without a curious glance — as if a fleeced goat-boy, astride a black giant and accompanied by a bearded old Moishian, were to be seen at every interchange!
Not until we turned from the highway onto the apron of the promised eating-place did anyone really notice us: the evening was warm, and a throng of young couples had drawn their machines up to the Pedal Inn, as the place was called. They laughed and slouched in their sidecars or at outdoor tables, in every kind of dress; some danced upon the asphalt to music that seemed to bleat from half a dozen floodlight poles; others smoked tobacco, furtively pawed one another's bodies, or chewed upon victuals (meat, I fear) run out to them by white-frocked attendants. They greeted our approach with cries and whistles and claps of the hand; I distinguished Croaker's name several times, and was pleased to see them give way. A number of the girls were not unattractive, by human standards, and it relieved me to see that Croaker was after all too fatigued by his final sprint to need restraining. It seemed to me a colorful and animated host; I took their merriment as an expression of goodwill and waved my hand cordially. They formed a large ring around us as Peter Greene parked, and those inside the glass-walled eating-place stared out. The jaws of most worked vigorously, as if upon a cud; some pared their nails with knives while they hooed and hollered; others combed and combed their hair.
"Wonderful kids, aren't they?" Greene exclaimed.
Max muttered something unpleasant about a lynch-mob and asked whether Greene was sure the place would serve Frumentians, Moishians, and goat-boys.
"They'll durn well serve any friends of mine," Greene laughed, and confessed to being part-owner of the establishment. The name Pedal Inn had occurred to him one day at lunch, and he'd built a chain of drive-in restaurants to bear it.
2
"That was two-three years ago," he said; "before things went kerflooey."
We sat inside, in a stall with benches, and dined on cheeseburgers and fried potatoes. I could not of course stomach the meat and so made do with the buns and onions and a sheaf of paper napkins, which I found piquant with tomato catsup. Croaker on the other hand squatted on the floor and ate his raw; Max declared he had no appetite, though he'd eaten little all day, and remarked besides that Moishian custom forbade meat and dairy produce at the same board — a rule I'd never heard him invoke before. He contented himself with occasional sips of sarsaparilla. After the original stir of our entrance, though they came to the window now and then to stare, most of the young people returned to their former pursuits, and I was able to listen undistracted except by the overwhelming novelty of the surroundings.
"Kerflooey?" I said.
Greene tisked and nodded. "Used to be, I was sitting pretty. I liked people; people liked me. Business doing fine. Married to the prettiest gal in the neck of the woods: sweet as apple cider; pure as pure. Then all of a sudden, kerflooey, the whole durn thing. I swear to Pete."
The kerflooiness of things, it developed, had a bearing upon Mr. Greene's return to Great Mall, and consisted of reverses both professional and domestic. He had in fact put home and business behind, and had now to choose whether to return or make the breach final. Yet things had not after all gone kerflooey in an instant of time: rather they had slipped into that condition by degrees, over a period of many semesters.
"I wonder sometimes if I ain't one of them drop-outs from the EAT-wave tests, you know? Things ain't been the same at all since I come home from the Riot and set up in the plastic and promotion way."
I inquired whether Mrs. Greene was also a Graduate.
"I should hope to kiss a pig!" Greene cried, and though the phrase itself conveyed to me no certain answer, its tone and context suggested affirmation. "I guess she was the smartest little gal I ever did run across, was Sally Ann — till things went kerflooey. When she'd call on a fellow to recite his lesson, he'd better know it right by heart, don't she'd fetch out that ruler of hers and crack him a daisy! Fellows twice her own size, that could break a redskin in two or lick their weight in wildcats!"
From this I inferred that in her youth Mrs. Greene had been some sort of pedagogue in the wilder reaches of the NTC Forestry Preserve, and that it was the idiom of that place and tune into which her mate now slipped as he recalled it.