“Amen,” said Forte, closing the door quietly behind him.
The Forte Ocean Engineering Piper tiltprop, with Forte in the left seat, let down gradually from 3,000 feet as he studied the airways chart and calculated that his landing point lay just eight miles ahead. A minute later he saw the neat rows of tents in the vast flat emptiness of West Texas and depressed the tilt control. The aircraft shuddered as it lost speed, and just short of stall the twin engines swung to the vertical on their axes, and the plane settled to the earth as softly as a falling leaf.
A Texas Ranger jeep came rolling up in a cloud of dust, and a heavy man bundled up in a sheepskin coat against the cold wind that whipped across the prairie pulled on the hand brake and climbed out.
“Mr. Forte?” he said, sticking out his hand, “I’m Captain Gordon Catlin, of the Texas Rangers. Hate to drag you out on a day like this, but damned glad you could come.”
“I hope I can help,” Forte replied, shaking the other’s hand. “Everything under control?”
“A little tense, but I think good sense will prevail. These people seem determined, all right, but they aren’t crazies who start shooting at the glint of a badge.”
“Care to fill me in?”
“No, sir, that I wouldn’t. You’d better hear their story from their own lips. It’s all too mixed up with philosophy and other big words for a simple lawman like me. They’ll explain it all, and if you buy their bill of goods, I’m on my way back to town and my warm office. If you don’t, I’ll run ’em off, just like it says in the book. It’s up to you.”
Forte climbed into the jeep, and they drove to the little tent camp in silence. Captain Catlin stopped before a tent that stood a little apart from the others.
A tall, thin, handsome man of forty-odd in jeans and a sheepskin coat pulled back the tentflap and stepped out. He smiled and shook hands with Forte as he got out of the jeep. “I’m Hallelujah Brown, Mr. Forte, and I owe you an explanation.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” said Forte. Except for his name, Brown seemed quite normal, not at all the wild-eyed fanatic he had expected to find.
“Then please come inside. Will you join us, Captain Catlin?”
“No, thanks. I’ll just wait outside. Never could stand canvas coming between me and the Lord’s fresh air.”
“As you wish.” Brown preceded Forte into the tent, which was furnished with a long trestle table and benches on each side, and a lamp hanging from the ridgepole. In the corner was a camp kitchen at which a handsome middle-aged woman in tight-fitting wool shirt and jeans was filling thick mugs with coffee. “May I present Mr. Ripley Forte, our reluctant landlord, my dear?” As she smiled and nodded, he turned to Forte. “This is my wife, Mrs. Letitia Brown, or I should say, Dr. Brown, our resident physician, lately Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Rice University.”
Ripley Forte said it was a pleasure, and wondered what the hell was going on.
“Please take a mug of coffee and a generous slice of your excellent hot apple pie to Captain Catlin, Letty. I’ll look after our guest.”
“Of course.” She put mugs, a pot of steaming coffee, and an uncut pie and china plates on the table, and silently left the tent with a covered tray for the Texas Ranger.
“Now, then, Mr. Forte,” said Brown, rubbing his hands together briskly. “Sit down, help yourself to the best-perhaps the only-apple pie and coffee for a hundred miles around, while I tell you the story of the Brownian Movement.”
“Brownian Movement?”
“A harmless conceit, although in fact our community got its start from my observation of the Brownian movement in my researches-until recently I was Professor of Physics at the University of Texas, you know-in the kinetic theory of molecules. As you know, when microscopic particles are suspended in a fluid, under magnification they are shown to move randomly. Also, the greater the heat, the more vigorous the random movement. Old stuff, and not a fashionable subject of research these days, I’m afraid. But the phenomenon has always fascinated me, and never so much as when it suddenly dawned on me a couple of years ago that not only did Brownian movement apply to liquids and gases, but to communities as well-insect, animal, human.
“I was on my daily commute from Austin to Houston when it suddenly hit me. Now that the high-speed expressway is in, the hundred-seventy-odd miles is only an hour-and-twenty-minute run, but the density of traffic makes for a nerve-racking twice-a-day ride. Passing the mangled cars one sees every day on the shoulders, I got to thinking, what a difference it would be if I were all alone on the highway: the worry and stress would disappear, and it would become a relaxed instead of a nightmarish commute.
“It was but a short mental leap to a consideration of daily life in Houston. I don’t have to recite to you the incidence of robbery, rape, theft, mental illness, venereal disease, child abuse, dope trafficking, wife beating, and other social ills that afflicted our state when Governor Traynor became President Traynor and took Texas out of the Union. Despite a wrenching depression from the drying up of our oil reserves and the desiccation of our range and wheat land, by imposing draconian penalties for these social ills he’s done a magnificent job of drastically cutting down their incidence. But note, Mr. Forte, those ills have not disappeared.”
“Of course not. Social ills never do.”
“Nor can they, in cities like Houston, because of the Brownian movement of their populations. This was my flash of insight: people, like molecules, come into collision-read ‘conflict’ or ‘sociopathy’-in direct proportion to their numbers and density. Physical space, Mr. Forte, and limitation of numbers are the keys to social health.
“Take the South Bronx in New York, that textbook sociological horror: more than two million individuals compressed in a single small borough, each competing in the urban jungle for life’s necessities, jostling, pushing, shoving, elbowing everybody else intent on the same objectives. In cities every man is a stranger, and every stranger a potential enemy. And in cities few people can claim to be happy and fulfilled.
“Contrast that with the situation prevailing in a simpler society, such as that of the Hottentots of the Kalahari Desert. They have almost no personal possessions, are perpetually on the brink of starvation, have no system of laws, and yet, living in groups of around thirty, they are among the happiest people on earth. Why? Because, I think, they respect each other’s strengths and condone each other’s weaknesses. They must, for to live they must cooperate. In short, it is not man’s nature that breeds ill so much as his numbers: when they are too many-conflict; when few-cooperation.”
Ripley Forte shook his head. “You make it sound simple, Professor Brown. But hell, even families have their troubles. It only takes two to divorce.”
Hallelujah Brown smiled. “You’re absolutely right. And we’ve read too much history to believe in Utopias. Conflict is not only inevitable but desirable in any society, however small. The. difference is that, in what we Brownians consider the optimum-size community, where every single individual personally knows every other, a person cannot escape the consequences of his actions. He must accommodate to the prevailing values of his fellow townsman or face loss of a job, ridicule, or ostracism. That’s why villages can and often do function perfectly well without courts or policemen. Consensus rules.”
Forte topped off his coffee cup and cut himself another slice of pie. A lot of what Brown said made sense, but it still didn’t explain what he was doing on Forte’s land. He cleared his throat.
“Ah, yes,” Hallelujah Brown said, grinning, “you want to know what all this has to do with you.”
“Something like that.”
“It’s very simple. We deliberately picked you because of your reputation for immense riches allied, most improbably, with an open mind.”
“It’s my mind that’s open, not my range.”
“I’ll get to that, in a moment. First, let me ask you: are you happy with the civic health of our common hometown, Houston?”
“Hell, no.”
“What would you give to see slums eliminated, jobs substituted for welfare payments, the rebirth of the family, a society where the individual bears the consequences of his actions?”
Forte laughed and shook his head. And Brown said he didn’t believe in Utopias!
“Well, Mr. Forte, what I describe is what we here intend to build. The thirty-one families here are the nucleus of a town called Brown-until we decide on a better name. Every family brings, in addition to enough money to subsist on a Spartan level for at least three years, professional or mechanical skills. Our first concern will be to establish schools, where each child will learn the value of manual labor through the study and practice of farming, animal husbandry, carpentry, masonry, or other useful work. Their curriculum will prepare them for university studies elsewhere, should they desire to pursue a professional career.