The truck drivers sat over their cups of coffee in a sort of contained delirium, men who had done a thousand times what had to be done, understanding it too well. We got going again. Clevenger, at the wheel, pointed to a group of ten or twelve small dwellings located in a shallow valley about three hundred yards off the road. They appeared to be huts of wood and clay. He slowed the car and pulled over.

"That's where they are," he said. "A year ago they were maybe three or four. Now I hear it's up to twenty."

"Who are they?"

"Bunch of kids. Younger than you. Living down there with the Indians. Hell, I don't know what they're up to. I hear they claim some kind of agrarian squatter's rights. That's government land they're on, so it's only a matter of time."

"I think I'd like to take a look. Do you mind?"

"It's a free country, boy."

"Maybe I should take my stuff. I've been enough trouble."

"Tell you what," he said. "You go on down and have your look. I'll run into Phoenix and pick you up soon as I can. Have two Jewboys to out-hustle. Take me no more than a couple of hours. Then we'll be on our way."

"I've been enough trouble, Mr. Clevenger."

"Get your ass on down there, son. And get used to calling me cap'n. That's what the boys at the track call me."

I slid down the embankment and walked across a field of flat stones and sagebrush. The huts were arranged in no discernible pattern and there did not seem to be any village square or center. A few people sat on the ground-two young men, a white girl holding an Indian baby. I sat next to one of the men. He wore no shoes or shirt and his pants were tan chinos cut off above the knees.

"Dave Bell," I said. "Just having a look around."

"I'm Cliff. This is Hogue. That's Verna and the baby's name is Tommy. Or is that Jeff?"

"That's Jeff," the other man said.

"So you're living with the Indians. What's it like?"

"It's the total thing," Cliff said. "It outruns all the other scenes by miles. We all live like persons. There's a lot of love here, although it gets monotonous at times."

"Are these Navahos or what?"

"These are Apache. Exiles from an Apache tribe about a hundred miles east of here. Misfits more or less. They refused to become ranchers like the rest of their people. There's only eleven of them here but we expect more to come. There's eighteen of us. We'd like to have more of them than us. It's an emotional factor."

"I don't want to sound like a critic at the very outset because you've probably had plenty of those coming around but I don't think I understand what you expect to accomplish."

"We don't expect to accomplish anything. We just don't want to be part of the festival of death out there."

"Here comes Jill," Hogue said.

She was very thin and seemed to be coming at us sideways in small skips and bounces. She couldn't have been more than seventeen years old. Her hair was reddish brown and there were several dozen muted freckles swarming about her nose. After introductions and further commentary, she offered to give me a tour of the village. I liked the way her gums showed when she smiled.

"I'm from Trenton, New Jersey," she said.

"I'm from New York."

"Neighbors!"

She wore a man's white shirt, tails tied around her middle, and blue jeans cut off above the knees. We went into one of the huts. It had a dirt floor with a carpet on it. There were several straw mats, a sleeping bag, some rolled-up blankets, a Matisse print propped against a wall, and that was it. A man with blue hair was asleep on one of the mats. It was hot and dark. We sat on the ground.

"Are you happy?" I said.

"We're all happy. This is the happiest place in the world. I mean that really seriously."

"Are the Indians happy?"

"It's hard to tell. They don't say much. But they must be happier than they used to be or else they'd go back to ranching."

"You're pretty young to be living like this, not that I'm criticizing. Did you run away from home?"

"My dad and I both ran away. Mom was driving us batty. It was psychorama twenty-four hours a day. I guess I love her and all but it got pretty bad. All she did was drink and smoke and yell things over the telephone to my father at his office. So then he stopped coming home from work. So then after that he came and got me at school and we sneaked my things out of the house when she was shopping and we got into the car and ran away. My dad's in Tempe now trying to start a dry-cleaning place. He comes out here on weekends to see me."

"Don't you get bored?"

"Anything's better than working for the death machine. We all try to dress the same way here. Simple and beautiful. But it's not like uniforms. It's just part of the single consciousness of the community. It's like everybody is you and you are everybody. Sex is mostly auto. You can watch someone doing something with himself or herself and then they can watch you do it. It's better that way because it's really purer and it's all one thing and you can do it with different people without anybody running for their shotgun like in the death factory out there. Sometimes it's not auto but mostly it is and it's two people mostly because two is still the most beautiful. I don't know what the Indians do."

"Look, Jill, I'm not a reporter or anything, so you don't have to tell me things that are private or sensitive."

"It's okay," she said. "I would tell you anything because you remind me of my brother. He was killed by the police."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's okay. I loved him very much but I wasn't sad. You have to get beyond that."

"Who's that guy over there?"

"That's Incredible Shrinking Man. He sleeps every day at this time. At night he goes into the desert. He's the one that started this whole thing. He has so much love in him. It won't be long before they kill him too. He believes in the truth of science fiction. The cosmos is love. Something is out there and once we learn to welcome it instead of fear it, we'll find out that its mission is love. His name is the name of an old sci-fi movie. At night he goes into the desert to watch for UFOs. He's seen lots of them. We've all seen them. This is a good place for sightings. That's one of the reasons he started the community out here. The visibility is terrific. So then they'll kill him because he preaches love."

"I believe in the saucers."

"Almost everybody does," she said. "But people are afraid to admit things to themselves. If we can learn to welcome instead of fear, the whole universe will heave with love. But the festival of death is going on all the time. That makes it hard for some people."

"I knew a boy at college who did what you did. He left school just like that and went to live with the Havasupai Indians. He lost forty or fifty pounds."

"They're north of here. I think they're farmers and planters."

"I wonder if he's still with them. Leonard Zajac. A very brilliant boy."

"This is the only community that's sci-fi oriented."

"I know another guy who's walking to California," I said.

Incredible Shrinking Man rose to his elbow. He was wearing plaid bermudas. He was well-tanned and very muscular, dispelling the vague sense of undernourishment in the area. His hair reached down almost to his shoulders. We stood to shake hands and I realized he was about six feet eight inches tall, broad across his bare chest, lean at the waist. His grip was gentle. I found myself exerting pressure. Then we sat down again.

"This is an interesting thing you've got here."

"The locals fear us," he said. "What they don't realize is that we're much more conservative than they are. This is a very conservative settlement. We want to cleave to the old things. The land. The customs. The words. The ideas. Unfortunately wilderness will soon be nothing but a memory. Then the saucers will land and our children will be forced to embrace the new technology. If they're not prepared, if we don't prepare them, there'll be an awful lot of confusion. We have to learn to accept the facts of technology without the emotion it engenders, the death impulse. But soon big government will take this land from us and install silos and missiles and lasers to keep out the UFOs. Big government beeps out everything in the end. Screaming meemies wield all the guns. Pimps and brainwashers are gaining power footholds. The answer is indistinguishability. Become indistinguishable from your neighbor and his neighbor and his neighbor. The death circus is coming to town and benign totalitarianism is the only feasible response."