Besides, it hadn’t been a bad day, all things considered. Five hours to cover the forty miles out to the beach, then of course a couple of hours waiting in line at the beach for their turn in the water. The trip home was taking a little longer: it always did. The Tunnel, too, was unpredictable. Say ten o’clock, for getting home. Pretty good time. As good a way as any of killing a leisureday, he guessed. Sometimes there seemed to be an awful lot of leisuretime to kill.
Jeannie, in the seat beside him, was staring through the windshield. Her hair, almost as fair as the kids’, was pulled back into pigtails, and although she was pregnant again she didn’t look very much older than she had ten years before. But she had stopped knitting, and her mind was on the Tunnel. He could always tell.
“Ouch!” Something slammed into the back of Tom’s neck and he ducked forward, banging his forehead on the windshield.
“Hey!” He half-turned and clutched at the spade that four-year-old Pattie was waving.
“I swimmed,” she announced, blue eyes round. “I swimmed good and I din’t hit nobody.”
“Anybody,” Tom corrected. He confiscated the spade, thinking tiredly that “swim” these days meant “tread water,” all there was room to do in the crowded bathing-area.
Jeannie had turned too, and was glowering at her daughter, but Tom shook his head.
“Over and out,” he said briefly. He knew a car ride was an extra strain on kids, and lord knew he saw them seldom enough, what with their school-shifts and play-shifts and his own job-shift But his brood was going to be properly brought up. See a sign of extroversion, squelch it at the beginning, that was his theory. Save them a lot of pain later on.
Jeannie leaned forward and pressed a dashboard button. The tranquillizer drawer slid open; Jeannie selected a pink one, but by the time she had turned around Pattie had subsided with her hands folded patiently in her lap and her eyes fixed on the rear seat TV screen. Jeannie sighed and slipped the pill into Pattie’s half-open mouth anyway.
The other three hadn’t spoken for hours which, of course, was as it should be. Jeannie had fed them a purposely heavy lunch in the car, steakopop and a hot, steaming bowl of rehydrated algaesoup from the thermos, and they had each had an extra dose of tranquillizers for the trip. Six-year-old David, who has having a particularly hard time learning to introvert was watching the TV screen and breathing hard. David, his first-born son, born in the supermarket delivery booth in the year twenty-one hundred on the third of April at 8:32 in the morning. The year the population of the United States hit the billion mark. And the fifth child to arrive in that booth that morning. But his own son. The two-headed twins, Susan and Pattie, sat upright and watched the screen with expressions of great seriousness on their faces, and the baby, two-year-old Betsy, had her fat legs stuck straight out in front of her and was obviously going to be asleep in minutes.
The car crawled forward at its allotted ten mph, just one in a ribbon of identical bright bubble cars, like candy buttons, that stretched along the New Pulaski Skyway under a setting sun. The distance between them, strictly rationed by Autodrive, never changed.
Tom felt the dull ache of tension settled behind his eyes. All of his muscles were protesting now with individual stabs of cramp. He glanced apologetically at Jeannie, who disliked sports, and switched on the dashboard TV. Third game in the World Series, and the game had already begun. Malenkovsky on red. Malenkovsky moved a checker and sat back. The cameras moved to Saito, on black. It was going to be a good game. Faster than most.
They were less than a mile from the Tunnel when the line of cars came to a halt. Tom said nothing for a minute. It might just be an accident, or even somebody, driving illegally on Manual, out of line. Another minute passed. Jeannie’s hands were tense on the yellow blanket she was knitting.
It was a definite halt. Jeannie regarded the motionless lines of cars, frowning a little.
“I’m glad it’s happening now. That gives us a better chance of getting through, doesn’t it?”
Her question was rhetorical, and Tom felt his usual stir of irritation. Jeannie was an intelligent girl; he couldn’t have loved her so much otherwise. But explaining the laws of chance to her was hopeless. The Tunnel averaged ten closings a week. All ten could happen within seconds of each other, or on the hour, or not at all on a given day. That was how things were. The closing now affected their own chance of getting through not one iota.
Jeannie said thoughtfully, “We’ll be caught some time, Tom.”
He shrugged without answering. Whatever might happen in the future, they were obviously going to be held up for a good half hour now.
David was wriggling a little, his face apologetic.
“Can I get out, Daddy, if the Tunnel’s closed? I ache.”
Tom bit his lip. He could sympathize as well as anyone, remembering the cramped misery of the years when his own body was growing and all he wanted to do was run fast, just run headlong, any place. Kids. Extras, all of them. Maybe you could get away with that kind of wildness back in the twentieth century, when there were no crowds and plenty of space, but not these days. David was just going to have to learn to sit still like everybody else.
David had begun to flex his muscles rhythmically. Passive exercise, it was called, one of the new pseudo-sports that took up no room, and it was very scientifically taught in the playshifts. Tom eyed his son enviously. Great to be in condition like that. No need to wait in line to get your ration of gym time when you could depend on yourself like that.
“Dad, no kidding, now I gotta go.” David wriggled in his seat again. Well, that sounded valid. Tom looked through the windshield. The thousands of cars in sight were still motionless, so he swung the door open. Luckily there was a chemjohn a few yards away, and only a short line in front of it. David slid quickly out of the car. Tom watched him start to stretch his arms over his head, released from the low roof, then sheepishly remember decent behavior and tighten into the approved intro-walk. “He’s getting tall,” Tom thought, with a sudden accession of hopelessness. He had been praying that David would inherit Jeannie’s height instead of his own six feet. The more area you took up the harder everything was, and it was getting worse: Tom had noticed that, already, people would sometimes stare resentfully at him in the street.
There was an Italian family in the bright blue Topolino behind his own; they too had a car full of children. Two of the boys, seeing David in front of the chemjohn, burst out and dashed into the line behind him The father was grinning; Tom caught his eye and looked away. He remembered seeing them pass a large bottle of expensive re-claimed-water around the car, the whole family guzzling it as though water grew on trees. Extros, that whole family. Almost criminal, the way people like that were allowed to run loose and increase the discomfort of everyone else. Now the father had left the car too. He had curly black hair; he was very plump. When he saw Tom watching him he grinned broadly, waved toward the Tunnel and lifted his shoulders with a kind of humorous resignation.
Tom drummed on the wheel. The extras were lucky. You’d never catch them worrying unduly about the Tunnel. They had to get the kids out of the city, once in a while, like everybody else; the Tunnel was the only way in and out, so they shrugged and took it. Besides, there were, so many rules and regulations now that it was hard to question them any more. You can’t fight City Hall. The extras would neither dread the trip, the way Jeannie did, nor… Tom’s fingers were rigid on the wheel. He clamped down, hard, on the thought in his mind. He had been about to say, needed it, the way he did.