Fifteen minutes later he was in a sleek air train, whizzing along at three hundred miles per hour through a deep tunnel. The bike was locked in a stall at the train terminal. He would pick it up on the way home.

The train was packed. Ron sat in a four-passenger compartment, but six people were jammed in there. All adults, all men his father’s age. They all looked grim. They were going to New York to have one last good time before the summer ended, even if it hurt.

Nobody talked. The only sound was the noise of air whistling past between the outside skin of the train and the tunnel wall. The compartment was painted a pleasant bright green, with clever little decorations spotted here and there along its paneled walls. There were no windows and nothing to see outside except the bare tunnel wall rocketing past. There was a blank TV screen on the partition wall in front of Ron, but he didn’t feel like watching TV. Besides, he got the feeling that his five cramped compartment-mates would object if he turned on one of the shows that he liked.

Ron saw his own face reflected in the dead screen. He was frowning. Thinking about what was going to happen when he returned home. It was Labor Day weekend. He had today, Sunday, and most of Monday to be in the City. Monday night he’d have to go back home—and face his father.

Okay, so I’ll go to business school. I can always make astronomy my hobby. But he hated it. He hated being forced into something he didn’t want to do. He hated having to give up what he wanted most. And he hated the feeling that there was nothing he could do about it.

Well, you’ve got this weekend, he told himself. Make the most of it.

It was only a little past noon when the train pulled into Grand Central Station. Stepping out of the train’s clean plastic shell and onto the station platform was like stepping from an art museum into a riot.

The noise hit Ron first. There were thousands of people bustling around the station platform, all of them talking, shouting, arguing at once. Policemen in black uniforms and white hard helmets were directing people into lines that surged up moving stairs. People were struggling with luggage. One old man—Ron’s father’s age—was screaming red-faced at a porter in a ragged uniform who had dropped a suitcase. It had popped open and all sorts of clothing were scattered across the filthy platform floor. People were trampling over the clothes, paying absolutely no attention to the man’s yowls.

Ron got into line behind a fat woman who was clutching a six-year-old girl by the wrist. The child was scared and whimpering.

“I don’t like it here, Mommy. I want to go home.”

The woman jerked the child’s arm hard enough to lift the kid off her feet. Bending down to push her puffy face into her daughter’s, she said: “Listen, you little brat. It cost plenty to get here and I didn’t have to bring you in the first place. Now you behave or I’ll sell you to the first meat grinder I see.”

The child’s eyes went wide with terror. For a moment she tried hard not to cry, but it was too much for her. She burst into a wild, high-pitched scream. Tears poured down her cheeks and past her open mouth.

“Shut up!” her mother hissed at her, glancing around at the crowd. Ron saw that everybody on the moving stairway was looking the other way, trying hard to ignore them.

Ron wanted to bend down and tell the little girl that she didn’t have to be afraid. But he didn’t know if he should or not. So he just stood there while the child cried and the mother glared and threatened. He felt confused and sad, and a little guilty about not doing anything to help the child.

At the top of the long moving stairway the crowd was broken into smaller groups by still more policemen and set up into dozens of lines. The woman and her child disappeared somewhere in the confused, chaotic mass of people. Ron found that the line he was shunted into wasn’t terribly long, only about twenty people ahead of him. But it moved very slowly.

It was hot and Ron felt sweaty. The noise that pounded in from everywhere in this huge cavern of a room made it feel even hotter. Echoes bounced off the vast ceiling, high overhead. It felt as if all the people in the world were in there, shouting at each other and heating up the station to the boiling point.

Ron leaned out to see around the people in front of him. The line ended at an entrance booth. He remembered the entrance booths from the time before.

People jostled and grumbled and looked at their watches and wiped their brows and complained. But the line moved slowly, slowly. Finally Ron was standing at the booth. He slid his credit card and ID card across the counter to a tired-looking man with narrow, bloodshot eyes and tight, thin lips.

“Fullamnt?” the man mumbled.

“What?” Ron asked.

Looking disgusted, the man said more slowly, “Full amount? Ya want the full amounta cash dat the credit card covers? Dat’s two towsan dollahs.”

“Oh.” Ron finally understood. “Yes, two thousand dollars, please.”

The man touched a button and a neatly, wrapped package of bills popped up from a little trapdoor in the counter.

“Y’ alone?” the man asked.

“Yessir.”

“How old are ya?”

Ron suddenly noticed the sign on the back wall of the man’s booth: CHILDREN UNDER EIGHTEEN NOT ADMITTED UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY PARENT OR GUARDIAN.

“Uh . . . I’m eighteen.”

The man’s sour face turned even more sour. “Fifty bucks,” he said.

“What?”

“Fifty,” he pronounced carefully. “Gimme—give me fifty dollahs.”

Ron tried to remember if his father had paid anything at the entrance booth. “But why?”

“Look kid, you ain’t eighteen. Ya want me to believe you’re eighteen, gimme fifty. Otherwise, go home. Now c’mon, you’re holdin’ up the line.”

Ron blinked at him. “But that’s illegal! You can’t—”

“Ya wanna get in or ya wanna go home? C’mon, there’s lotsa people waitin’.”

Ron looked around. The people in line were glaring at him, angry, hot, and impatient. There was a policeman nearby, tall and official-looking in his uniform and helmet. But he was carefully looking in the other direction.

Ron tore the plastic wrapping off his package of bills and pulled out a fifty. He slid it across the counter.

“Welcome t’ Fun City,” said the man in the booth in a flat, totally automatic way.

The little gate at the far end of the booth clicked open and Ron stepped through. He was now officially in New York City.

“Watch it!”

A porter in an electric wagon piled high with luggage zipped past him. Ron had to jump back to get out of the way.

Ron pushed through the crowd and made it outside to the street. The throngs here were even thicker and noisier, pushing and shouldering along the sidewalk. Everyone was going someplace. Someplace important, too, from the busy looks on their faces. At the curb was a line of cabs, and people poured into them. Cars were charging down the street. They pulled up short when the traffic light turned red, then roared for the next light as soon as it flashed green again. Bumpers banged but nobody seemed to care or even notice.

These cars weren’t the safe, quiet electrics that were used in the Tracts. These smoked and went vrooom! when they started up. Unsanitary, Ron told himself. They make a terrible amount of pollution. Still, he yearned to drive one.

Down the street he rushed. He couldn’t walk slowly because the crowd pushed him along, move, move, move. Doesn’t matter where you’re going or why. Just keep moving or they’ll trample over you.

A little old lady with a sweet smile and an umbrella passed him, heading the other way. She was holding a leash that was attached to the collar of the biggest dog Ron had ever seen. Walking a dog, on a public street! In the daytime! Back home, you couldn’t take a dog out on the street at all. You could only walk him in the park, or on your own property, and then only at night.

It wasn’t until after the lady with the dog had passed that Ron thought about her umbrella. It took him a minute to figure out what the odd-looking thing was. Back home, with the Weather Control Force in charge of everything, you always knew well in advance when it was going to rain. And here, under Manhattan Dome, why would anyone need an umbrella at all?

He glanced upward. Yes, the Dome was still up there. He could see its gray steel framework, like a giant spiderweb, far, far above. It was almost lost in the haze of smog that hung above the street.

Two blocks down the street Ron found a clothing store. The windows looked great. Real live models walking up and down inside the windows, talking to one another, tossing a ball around, laughing and waving to the crowd. A bunch of people had gathered in front of the window to watch them. Ron fought his way past the stream of people walking down the street and got to the edge of the crowd at the window. He was tall enough to see over the heads of most of them.

The girls were fantastic! Shorts and little sleeveless tops that barely covered their figures. Not at all like the girls back at the Tracts, with their shapeless prefaded sloppy clothes and their constant challenging in the classroom and the athletic field. Ron grinned at these girls and they smiled right back. Every few minutes a new model would come into the window and one of the others would leave. To change into a new outfit, Ron guessed.

The window must have been soundproofed, because Ron could see the models moving their lips, talking, but he couldn’t hear them at all. The people in the crowd were yelling things to them, but they paid no attention. Some of the things that the grown men said to those girls . . . Ron was surprised at first, then he got sore. Dirty old cruds, he said to himself.