‘All right, Hathaway, what is it this time?’ he snapped. ‘I’m sick of you hanging around here all day.’
Hathaway lurched to a halt in front of him, uncut black hair like an awning over his eyes. He brushed it back with a claw-like hand and turned on a wild smile, obviously glad to see Franklin and oblivious of the latter’s hostility.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you at night, Doctor, but your wife always puts the phone down on me,’ he explained without a hint of rancour, as if well-used to this kind of snub. ‘And I didn’t want to look for you inside the Clinic.’ They were standing by a privet hedge that shielded them from the lower windows of the main administrative block, but Franklin’s regular rendezvous with Hathaway and his strange messianic cries had already become the subject of amused comment.
Franklin began to say: ‘I appreciate that — ‘ but Hathaway brushed this aside. ‘Forget it, Doctor, there are more important things now. They’ve started to build the first big signs! Over a hundred feet high, on the traffic islands outside town. They’ll soon have all the approach roads covered. When they do we might as well stop thinking.’
‘Your trouble is that you’re thinking too much,’ Franklin told him. ‘You’ve been rambling about these signs for weeks now. Tell me, have you actually seen one signalling?’
Hathaway tore a handful of leaves from the hedge, exasperated by this irrelevancy. ‘Of course I haven’t, that’s the whole point, Doctor.’ He dropped his voice as a group of nurses walked past, watching his raffish figure out of the corners of their eyes. ‘The construction gangs were out again last night, laying huge power cables. You’ll see them on the way home. Everything’s nearly ready now.’
‘They’re traffic signs,’ Franklin explained patiently. ‘The flyover has just been completed. Hathaway, for God’s sake, relax. Try to think of Dora and the child.’
‘I am thinking of them!’ Hathaway’s voice rose to a controlled scream. ‘Those cables were 40,000-volt lines, Doctor, with terrific switch-gear. The trucks were loaded with enormous metal scaffolds. Tomorrow they’ll start lifting them up all over the city, they’ll block off half the sky! What do you think Dora will be like after six months of that? We’ve got to stop them, Doctor, they’re trying to transistorize our brains!’
Embarrassed by Hathaway’s high-pitched shouting, Franklin had momentarily lost his sense of direction. Helplessly he searched the sea of cars for his own. ‘Hathaway, I can’t waste any more time talking to you. Believe me, you need skilled help, these obsessions are beginning to master you.’
Hathaway started to protest, and Franklin raised his right hand firmly. ‘Listen. For the last time, if you can show me one of these signs, and prove it’s transmitting subliminal commands, I’ll go to the police with you. But you haven’t got a shred of evidence, and you know it. Subliminal advertising was banned thirty years ago, and the laws have never been repealed. Anyway, the technique was unsatisfactory, any success it had was marginal. Your idea of a huge conspiracy with all these thousands of giant signs everywhere is preposterous.’
‘All right, Doctor.’ Hathaway leaned against the bonnet of one of the cars. His mood seemed to switch abruptly from one level to the next. He watched Franklin amiably. ‘What’s the matter — lost your car?’
‘All your damned shouting has confused me.’ Franklin pulled out his ignition key and read the number off the tag: ‘NYN 299-566-367-21 can you see it?’
Hathaway leaned around lazily, one sandal up on the bonnet, surveying the square of a thousand or so cars facing them. ‘Difficult, isn’t it, when they’re all identical, even the same colour? Thirty years ago there were about ten different makes, each in a dozen colours.’
Franklin spotted his car and began to walk towards it. ‘Sixty years ago there were a hundred makes. What of it? The economies of standardization are obviously bought at a price.’
Hathaway drummed his palm on the roofs. ‘But these cars aren’t all that cheap, Doctor. In fact, comparing them on an average income basis with those of thirty years ago they’re about forty per cent more expensive. With only one make being produced you’d expect a substantial reduction in price, not an increase.’
‘Maybe,’ Franklin said, opening his door. ‘But mechanically the cars of today are far more sophisticated. They’re lighter, more durable, safer to drive.’
Hathaway shook his head sceptically. ‘They bore me. The same model, same styling, same colour, year after year. It’s a sort of communism.’ He rubbed a greasy finger over the windshield. ‘This is a new one again, isn’t it, Doctor? Where’s the old one — you only had it for three months?’
‘I traded it in,’ Franklin told him, starting the engine. ‘If you ever had any money you’d realize that it’s the most economical way of owning a car. You don’t keep driving the same one until it falls apart. It’s the same with everything else — television sets, washing machines, refrigerators. But you aren’t faced with the problem.’
Hathaway ignored the gibe, and leaned his elbow on Franklin’s window. ‘Not a bad idea, either, Doctor. It gives me time to think. I’m not working a twelve-hour day to pay for a lot of things I’m too busy to use before they’re obsolete.’
He waved as Franklin reversed the car out of its line, then shouted into the wake of exhaust: ‘Drive with your eyes closed, Doctor!’
On the way home Franklin kept carefully to the slowest of the four-speed lanes. As usual after his discussions with Hathaway, he felt vaguely depressed. He realized that unconsciously he envied Hathaway his footloose existence. Despite the grimy cold-water apartment in the shadow and roar of the flyover, despite his nagging wife and their sick child, and the endless altercations with the landlord and the supermarket credit manager, Hathaway still retained his freedom intact. Spared any responsibilities, he could resist the smallest encroachment upon him by the rest of society, if only by generating obsessive fantasies such as his latest one about subliminal advertising.
The ability to react to stimuli, even irrationally, was a valid criterion of freedom. By contrast, what freedom Franklin possessed was peripheral, sharply demarked by the manifold responsibilities in the centre of his life — the three mortgages on his home, the mandatory rounds of cocktail parties, the private consultancy occupying most of Saturday which paid the instalments on the multitude of household gadgets, clothes and past holidays. About the only time he had to himself was driving to and from work.
But at least the roads were magnificent. Whatever other criticisms might be levelled at the present society, it certainly knew how to build roads. Eight-, ten- and twelve-lane expressways interlaced across the country, plunging from overhead causeways into the giant car parks in the centre of the cities, or dividing into the great suburban arteries with their multiacre parking aprons around the marketing centres. Together the roadways and car parks covered more than a third of the country’s entire area, and in the neighbourhood of the cities the proportion was higher. The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
The ten-mile journey to his home in fact covered over twenty-five miles and took him twice as long as it had done before the construction of the expressway, the additional miles contained within the three giant clover-leaves. New cities were springing from the motels, cafs and car marts around the highways. At the slightest hint of an intersection a shanty town of shacks and filling stations sprawled away among the forest of electric signs and route indicators.
All around him cars bulleted along, streaming towards the suburbs. Relaxed by the smooth motion of the car, Franklin edged outwards into the next speed-lane. As he accelerated from 40 to 50 m.p.h. a strident ear-jarring noise drummed out from his tyres, shaking the chassis of the car. Ostensibly an aid to lane discipline, the surface of the road was covered with a mesh of small rubber studs, spaced progressively farther apart in each of the lanes so that the tyre hum resonated exactly on 40, 50, 60 and 70 m.p.h. Driving at an intermediate speed for more than a few seconds became nervously exhausting, and soon resulted in damage to the car and tyres.