Before Ron could think of anything for an answer, his father went on, but in a gentler voice, “Listen, son, I really know a lot more about the world than you do. The business career is best, believe me. Once you—”
Ron stared at the carpet and shook his head.
His father pounded a fist on the desk so hard that the desk lamp tumbled over. Ron jerked back and looked up at the old man—he was red-faced and snarling.
“You’re going to Getty whether you like it or not!” he shouted.
No I’m not, Ron said to himself. I’m going to run away. I’ll go to New York!
It was easy.
So easy that Ron could hardly believe it. It took him all week to work up the nerve. Then, on Saturday morning, while his father was out with his usual golfing foursome, he told his mother that he was going to spend the weekend with some of his friends who lived in the next housing Tract, a few miles away.
“Don’t go on the freeway with your bike, Ronnie dear. Stay on the secondary roads—they’re safer.”
That’s all she said.
Ron went up to his room and put on a clean one-piece zipsuit. I can get throwaway clothes in New York, he thought. Don’t have to carry anything else with me. He took his credit card and all the cash he had in the house, about thirty dollars. He walked his power bike out of the garage, started its tiny electric motor, and hummed down the driveway and into the street.
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?”
