Daniel Hatch: Last Stop on the Green Line

Illustration by Ron Chironna

The snow in Harvard Yard was a foot deep, and Harry Simpson was up to his knees in it.

And up to his hips, his shoulders, and his neck. He realized without shock or surprise that he was lying on his back in the middle of the icy confection.

He opened his eyes and looked up at a sharp blue sky framed by the wall of Memorial Church and a row of low shrubberies.

A moment passed before he remembered the party. It was one of those on-line dorm affairs where everyone talked to each other through their think-man, so no one paid much attention to a twenty-six-year-old public service student like Harry Simpson, allowing him to drink far more than he should have.

And on the way home, the yard in front of the church had seemed as inviting as his own bed and much, much closer.

The shrubs had shielded him from view of passing students and the campus police, and his rik-suit had saved him from freezing to death. The Rik-technology garment that had been the fashion rage a year ago was now hopelessly out of style, but it still served its purpose.

A cold wind nipped at Harry’s face as the bell in the spire began to ring, and the wind rasped across his cheeks, reminding him that it was still February.

He counted the pealing of the church bell, hoping to determine the time without actually looking on-line. He stopped when his count reached thirteen. That was close enough, he decided.

Then he noticed the quiet.

Not quiet outside, where the church bell echoed off the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library and Emerson Hall and the rest of Harvard Yard, but quiet inside. Inside his head.

His think-man was off-line, he realized with a start. For the first time in days as far as he could recall—with the exception of his cybernetics and philosophy class with Professor Epstein. The faint menu shimmering in the air was gone. So was the gentle pressure of the virtual mouse in his hand. And there was no soft whisper filling his ears with information at the moment of command.

“Instant access to unlimited information is not the wonder it would first seem to be,” Professor Epstein had said often enough, her eyes glaring with mystic intensity. “If you don’t know what to do with that information, then it is a waste of technology and a waste of a potentially useful mind. One of the reasons you have mortgaged your futures to attend this university is to become accustomed to doing more than drowning yourselves in a flood of data. And that is why you cannot enter this classroom without unplugging.”

For most of his classmates, that had been a difficult exercise. They found themselves stammering as they tried to form sentences without cybernetic assistance, answer questions that called for judgments instead of the quick recitation of facts and figures provided by a computer somewhere across the river, and generally pretend to be more human than they had learned to be in their short lives.

With the exception of the Rik students, of course. Their race had grown up with the technology and knew how to handle it.

And, on occasion, with the exception of Harry Simpson, who had spent six years in public service, planting forests in the Pacific Northwest and earning enough credits to get to Harvard in the first place and learning to think for himself long before the price of the think-man had dropped to a level even he could afford. Or so he liked to think.

He remembered now that he had switched off-line shortly after falling backwards into the snow. The think-man had been too noisy, lecturing him about the life expectancy of an exposed human being lying on the ground in the middle of February in the middle of the night in the middle of Harvard Yard.

The church bell stopped ringing, and Harry became aware of the sudden rise in the level of noise around him. Voices, footsteps, and the commotion of changing classes.

He turned his head to glimpse the parti-colored parade through the bushes. His head punished him for his escapade of the previous night by throbbing and spinning.

There was no choice now but to follow through—or lie here and risk suffering the fate of pathetic rock musicians of the last century.

He rose to his feet in one swift motion, trying to outwit his protesting sense of balance. It worked, after a fashion, and he pushed through the shrubs to the sidewalk where students thronged and the occasional professor tried to keep a steady course against the current.

Cambridge was a company town where the major industry was sophistication, so everyone tried to look sophisticated. Sometimes they were just faking it, but sometimes they weren’t. Harry remembered the night he had wandered into a seminar on foreign policy and extraterrestrial trade. The lecturer had been Elsie Hays, the government’s Extraterrestrial Trade Representative with the Riks.

He opened his rik-suit, exposing himself to the bitter winter chill for a moment, and switched on his think-man. The reassuring murmur of faraway voices returned to his ears, the menu flickered to life at the edge of his vision, and he could feel the virtual mouse in his hand once more.

Though he wouldn’t admit it to his classmates, this was his way of belonging to something larger than himself. He just didn’t feel comfortable joining their team. He had learned too young how to be a loner. But he didn’t feel comfortable without belonging to something, and this was it.

“Thank you for using MRI On-Line Systems,” the voice in his ear said. “You have seven messages in voice-mail.”

“Victoria!” he cried out loudly, smacking himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. He squeezed the mouse and the main menu appeared before him—complete with a digital clock that told him he was more than an hour late for his date with Victoria Anne Dickinson.

The voice-mail was from her. All of it.

“I’m waiting, Harry dear.”

“I’m still waiting, Harry.”

“Harry, it’s been half an hour.”

“Mr. Simpson, I do not appreciate being embarrassed like this.”

“Where are you, Harry?”

“If you’re not here in five minutes, Harry, you can forget about it.”

“I’m in the Science Center and you have exactly five minutes—until 11:05 A.M.—to get your trash over here.”

With about ninety seconds left before her deadline, he dashed down the lane, ducking across the path of a Campus Police security cart and nearly clipping the rearview mirror. He narrowly avoided plowing into a pack of Riks—who resembled meter-tall gerbils with insect-like compound eyes—as they passed through the gate into the Yard. And he stopped short only a few inches from Professor Epstein as she stepped out from behind a concrete planter.

“Mr. Simpson!” the professor said without a gasp, her gray eyebrows arching towards the wool cap she had pulled tightly over her head. “One of the drawbacks of that infernal machine in your brain is that it interferes with your concentration and turns you into a menace to pedestrians.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,” he said quickly, turning around and walking backwards away from her. “I’m late. I’m late—for a very important date.”

The professor cocked a dubious eyebrow at him, shook her head, and continued on her way.

Harry dashed through the doors of the Science Center, past a bulletin board plastered with flyers and notices, and up the concrete ramp towards the fern-filled restaurant with its vegetarian treats and hungry students.

And there was Victoria, standing at the top of the ramp, waiting, wearing knee-high black boots, a long red coat that reached nearly to her ankles—with black buttonhooks undone from about mid-calf—and a fierce expression that she wielded like a weapon powerful enough to melt holes through lead—a weapon aimed directly at him.