Why don’t I live in one, then? Why build a house by the
sea, set in its own isolation of pine trees? Well, there are
lots of reasons.
For instance:
Crime, it seems to me, is nothing more than a necessary
evil, an offshoot of freedom and liberty. When you give a
man a list of rights, things that he should expect to be able
to do according to his standing as a member in the human
community, you are providing the unscrupulous man with
a list to stretch to his own ends. You are giving the clever
man something to look over in search of loopholes. And, in
the end, you have criminals making the free-enterprise
system work for them, their way, as they understand it. So
you arrest them and you punish them, but you learn to
live with them. Unless you would prefer restricting those
liberties everyone enjoys. You could shorten the list of
rights or do away with it altogether, thus giving the
unscrupulous ones less to stretch, less things to find
loopholes in. Everyone suffers, of course, when the list is
destroyed. And the cleverest and most intelligent of the
unscrupulous manage to end up at the top of the pile
anyway—or maybe they were the ones who eliminated the
list of rights to begin with, in order to cut down on
competition from amateurish punks. They call themselves
“city government” and steal legally. And with their sur-
veillance of the corridors, their bugging of elevators and
escalators and pedways and stairs, their files on every resi-
dent, which grow thicker with data each year, the apart-
ment complexes do not foster liberty, but slowly absorb it
from their residents.
Pollution? Well, maybe I’ll die of lung cancer sooner
than a complex dweller. But I can breathe the smell of the
sea, the smell of wet earth after a rain, the ozone pro-
duced by lightning. My air has not been so filtered and
cleaned as to become flat and unexciting.
Inflation? Perhaps things are cheaper in the complexes,
and perhaps that’s because the companies really want to
give their residents a fair shake in every way possible. But
there is something frightening, to me at least, about depend-
ing on one conglomerate entity for your food, your drink,
your entertainment, your clothing, your necessities, and
your luxuries. I stopped being dependent on Harry, my
father image, by the time I was halfway through adoles-
cence. I don’t yearn to be fathered or mothered to death by
some team of accountants and cost-projecting computers.
A community sense of togetherness, they say, makes life
much more fun in the giant apartment structures. But I
don’t want to have to be friends with anyone merely
because I happen to live near them. I don’t enjoy the high
school rah-rah, go-team unison of small minds or the
brittle-fingered canasta desperation of old people seeking
companionship in their last days. Besides, last night, I saw
an example of that community togetherness which banded
the “innocent” citizens of that complex .across the street
into a spying, ruthless creature which could report neigh-
bors to the police to have them slaughtered. Community
togetherness can lead to a consensus outlook that seeks and
destroys any dissident element, no matter how small and
really harmless.
Thanks but no thanks.
I’ll take my sea.
And my pine trees.
And even my damned polluted air.
Her apartment was as it had been. It did not look as if
it had even been searched—a strange fact if they truly
had thought her involved with revolutionary elements. I
got some food in a plaza supermarket and returned to her
place, fixed myself a solid meal, and ate until my shriveled
stomach was somewhat back to normal size.
After that, I turned on the television and was instantly
glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had
driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had
brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been
so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a
television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wide-
angle tube.
On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking