And so, time is swift and to detail the various modes of life sampled by Blake Daniels would be tedious. Enough to say he survived them, sometimes quite respectably, more often less so, learning the slums of the land, and the wilderness areas—he discovered that he could live off the land in the summer more comfortably than he could manage in the cities, and he could avoid the endless bloody riots and the ever present possibility of being picked up for questioning. He learned the museums and the libraries. Especially the libraries. He read everything and remembered everything he read. He discovered drama, and he wondered if French drama lost much in translation, so he learned French. He learned Russian and Spanish and Italian, and when he came across Haiku in the original, he started in on Asian languages. When he was fifteen he could pass for eighteen and his identification problems were solved for him. He bought a forged draft card and ID cards, credit cards, and so felt safe unless a thorough investigation should be made. He listed Chillicothe, Ohio, as his hometown because he thought it was a funny name. By sixteen he no longer feared being forced to stay with Obie, but he didn’t want to go through the court battles that he knew Obie could arrange. He planned to return to Matt and Lisa when he was eighteen.
Chapter Ten
HERE are some of the things Lisa Daniels never told Matt:
1. She had to do all the shopping in downtown Cincinnati. The village grocery refused to trade with short hairs.
2. There were seven new Listener’s Booths between the market and the bus stop.
3. A long-haired bitch pushed her off the sidewalk and into the gutter.
4. She had to walk four miles and shop six stores to find the things she needed for Derek’s birthday party.
5. Someone in a cab (a long-short hairs were never picked up now) had thrown an apple core and hit her right between the shoulders.
6. Every time she left the house during the day someone scrawled obscenities all over the first-floor windows.
Matt was still straight and stiffly erect, graying slightly, and she thought, much better-looking than he had been when younger. They talked occasionally of moving far away, of going to one of the spots where the long hairs were either non-existent, or in a very small minority, but they didn’t go. And wouldn’t, unless forced out. There were too few doctors who would treat patients from the ranks of the short hairs for anyone of them to give up and leave now. Eventually, Matt said forcefully, the maniacs would come to their senses and everything would get back to normal. Meanwhile they’d just have to be careful.
Lisa made dinner while Matt showered and she hummed thinking about the birthday party for Derek, and about Lorna’s first visit home since leaving for college almost a year ago. In the middle of dinner the view phone chimed and it was the chief surgeon at Matt’s hospital. He was bald and perspiring heavily. He was wearing his surgeon’s paper gown, paper mask dangling about his neck.
“Another of those nights, Matt. Can you come back?”
“Good God!” Matt said, but in resignation.
The two words shook the surgeon, who glanced about quickly. “You’d better come in your copter. I wouldn’t want to drive anywhere in town tonight.”
“Right,” Matt said. “National Guards out?”
“Not yet, but any minute.”
Lisa unclenched her hands before Matt turned to her. She smiled briefly. “Be careful, darling.” She would not start an argument. It was too hot. They would both get upset, she’d end up with a headache, and the weekend was too important to spoil that way.
As soon as he was gone she turned on the news, but as usual they were not giving any riot facts while the riot was taking place. She turned the sound down and washed the few dishes, slamming them about until she broke a glass. Then she relaxed a little. The water pressure was too low to run the dishwasher. She read for a while, conscious of the flickering three dimensional figures across the room from her, apparently enacting in pantomime a tragic love affair. At eleven the Savers clustered at the gate to the Daniels’ yard and sang: The Lord is My Strength; the Lord is My Power and Find a Refuge in the House of the Lord. The tambourine was terrible, the bass fiddle had a loose string, the trumpeter must have been yanked from some junior high school Band 1 class, and the ensemble as a whole caricatured an old Salvation Army group. Lisa recited a list of curses, then stifled a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob, and checked her doors and windows. All locked. They never tried to get in, as far as she knew, but they might. They had an electronic hookup that brought the voice of the young Messenger inside the house, putting it at her elbow. He said: “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”
Some people were so terrified at the sound of the voice so close, so intimate that it seemed almost to originate within them, that they opened their doors and invited the Savers inside and were converted on the spot, or they joined the roving band with fanatical zeal and henceforth became Savers also. Lisa held her hands over her ears until silence returned.
She was left alone then until Matt returned. The riot had started, he told her, when one long hair pulled a handful of hair from another long hair in the mistaken belief that it was a wig. The rumor had started that the meeting at which this happened was crawling with ringers, women wearing wigs pretending to be believers. A hair-pulling fray ensued that erupted into the street and enmeshed twelve city blocks before the Guards arrived with antimob foam bombs and dispersed the rioters. Lisa sighed. It didn’t matter how it started, it always ended the same, with Matt being called to the hospital to treat short hairs who got the worst of it, and they always did.
Derek arrived at noon the next day. He had become a six-footer, with broad shoulders, dark like his father, and as straight, but not giving the same impression of rigidity. He was doing his doctorate work in astrophysics that year, and his proudest possession, which he pulled from his pocket as soon as the kisses had been finished with, was his pass to gain him admittance to the spaceship whenever he chose that summer.
Lisa hung back as Derek and Matt talked. She brushed tears away angrily as she stared at her tall son, and again and again she tore her gaze from him and tried to banish the smile she knew must be foolish-looking. Matt grinned at her sympathetically and didn’t comment.
Lisa was thinking: my son will be in the convertible air car, skimming along the street flanked by honor guards, preceded by a mounted guard, with confetti and ticker tape and bands, five, ten bands, foreign dignitaries, the king of England, the Russian premier, our president. We’ll be on the review stand, next to the president, and the photographers will tell him please to move aside just a little, don’t obstruct the clear view of the doctor and his wife, if you don’t mind. The Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Einstein Medal, the U. N. Distinguished Gold Cup….