STILL ON THE ROAD

by Geoffrey A. Landis

Geoffrey Landis has traveled back and forth across America, in the process visiting all of the states except Arkansas and one of the Dakotas (he’s forgotten which one). While not traveling, he is a physicist who works on designing and flying space missions, including missions to Mars, Venus, and the solar corona. Geoff is on a first-name basis with both of the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. He recently spent a year and a half as the Ronald McNair-NASA Visiting Professor of Astronautics at MIT, where he taught graduate students how to design spacecraft.

Turns out, you know, that old dharma bum never made it off the wheel of karma. He had too many attachments, to the road, to words; and if you love the things of the world of Mara too much you fall back into the world, like gravity pulling back a rocket that doesn’t reach escape velocity. Two, three thousand years later, he’s still on the road. Really, nothing’s changed. And Neal, that old prankster, Neal never really did want to transcend, he loved to see it all streaming past the window, a constant moving circus disappearing in the rear-view mirror, loved to talk, loved it all.

So there’s this guy needs to get to Arcturus, or really the second planet of that little star kinda behind Arcturus if you look—Arcturus itself is a red giant, no planets—place he wants to go is around a star has a number but no name, there’s a lot of them like that. Anyway there’s this guy and he’s got cash but no ride, and the busses don’t stop out that way, and Neal says he’ll drive if the guy can pay for fuel, and maybe a meal or two on the road, and cigarettes; he says he knows a girl out somewhere past Arcturus, but he really just wants an excuse to roll, and he and Jack and this other guy get in the vehicle—they’re not really cars anymore, got a little more capability, and even this little broken-down junker that Neal boosted somewhere can push on past c, get you from the Big Apple to LA in about a microsecond—they get in this rattletrap vehicle and head on out. And it’s a long haul, and for the first two days Neal and Jack just trade off driving—this guy doesn’t drive, he mostly sleeps in the back or stares out the window—and they’re just grooving on the emptiness, the pure pinpoints of stars and the subtle colors of nebulae, barely visible except from the corner of your eyes, and Neal is talking up a storm, but then in two days they’re barely halfway there, and they’ve really even stopped talking, just doggedly pushing c, Neal bleakly twirling the radio trying to scratch up something other than country and western chanting in some kind of Muphrid binary code, and they have to stop for fuel somewhere, and there’s this planet out that way that everybody says is worth seeing. So they stop and pay for a fill up, and then drive like fury out into the outskirts, until they’re past all the houses or what passes for houses, here in the armpit of Bootes.

The air’s got oxy here, yeah, but it’s also got 2 percent ammonia; nobody’s going to roll down a window and get a lungful of fresh air. This landscape’s just for watching. Long vistas of shimmery blue, like waterfalls coming down from the sky. But then Neal, that crazy fucker, he does roll a window down a crack, saying, hell, gentlemen, hell if it is poison, we’re here. He was always full of mad schemes, tremendously excited about everything he saw, every detail of every moment.... By God, I’ve got to see what will happen, he said, and we all were choking, and shouting Jesus, Cassady, you’re going to kill us all, but Neal, this only inflames him, and now he rolls the window all the way down, and you can’t really imagine the stink of it unless you had been there, the way you feel it more than smell it, the way it burns burns burns your eyes nose mouth armpits, and Neal’s laughing like a hyena and he says, this is living, boys, take a deep breath and choke on it, you can’t say this isn’t living!

And after a good long while—all of us choking—he rolled the window back up and Jack grabbed the wheel from him and pushed him away and boosted right out of there, and tears are running down everybody’s face even though Neal’s cranked the air-flow all the way up, and all the time Neal’s laughing and choking and saying that’s living boys, you can’t say this isn’t living, and Jack is saying you asshole, you asshole, and that guy in the back, he’s really wondering what the hell he got into, just who these jokers are.

Yeah, that was me, that guy in the back seat, and I was never so happy as when they dropped me off, and I watched them disappear into the ether, Neal with one arm out the window and talking a blue streak, Jack just cranking his seat back and taking it all in, even if they did end up hitting me up for all the scratch they could talk me out of before they lit the big candle and boosted out for who the hell knows.

And they’re still out there, I’ll bet, still bouncing around world to world to world, never staying anywhere three nights in a row, still boosting around somewhere.

And I have to say, yeah, I guess that really was living. At least, that’s what I tell people.

But if I’m ever stuck for a ride, and Neal and Jack drive past and open the door saying jump on in, next time I hope, I really hope, that I’ll pass.