Read Online The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online Page A

was off somewhere and it obviously wasn’t somewhere good.
    “Hey, what’s the matter? Take it easy—”
    She seemed to come back from wherever she had been, but there was an awful look in her eyes, look of someone who has looked somewhere they shouldn’t and now they know it.
    “Dig it man,” she said, “we’re like ants. Dirty little ants crawling around their pantry. Nobody. Nothing. Dirty little ants. Oooh, shit!”
    “Hey, take it easy, baby. Groove on the street. Dig it. Look at the golden garbage cans; isn’t that a gas? Golden garbage cans!”
    “Fucking gold garbage cans!” she shouted—and heads turned to sneer at the freaking hippie. I stroked her shoulder in a cool-it gesture. Softer, she hissed bitterly: “Yeah, those filthy cocksuckers with their gold garbage cans! What do they care? What do they know?”
    Oh Christ, I thought, she’s on some kind of paranoid trip!
    “They just sit there in their office buildings ruling the world and all we are to them is dirty little ants in their cookie jars…”
    Oh wow, a hippie Proletariat workers of the world unite bummer!
    “It’s not like that,” I said. “You’ve got to understand—it’s the Big Game, is all.”
    “Game?”
    “Yeah, it’s all a big groovy game. It’s their trip. They groove behind it, see?”
    “We’re only pawns in their game...”
    “Oh shit! You’re getting paranoid. Nobody’s out to get us.” Why couldn’t she understand?
    “They’re monsters! Playing games with our lives!”
    Jesus, where did she pick up all this pseudo-Marxist shit? The Wolves of Wall Street, the Fagins of Fifth Avenue!
    “Oh man, you don’t understand, they control us all with wires in our heads and all they have to do is press a button and we jump and twitch and squirm—”
    Goddamn, there was no way to talk her out of it! She was freaking out and I had to do something, had to put her head in another place... yeah... Yeah!
    I pulled her to the curb, waved my hand for a minute or so, finally got a cab (no real sweat on Fifth Avenue!), said “Magic carpet time, baby,” and stuffed her into the back seat ahead of me.
    The cab ride downtown started bringing me down like a slow dissolve. The more Robin gibbered about Them and how They controlled the world and how we were Dirty Little Ants, the more aware I became of the fact that she was having an acid bummer, which reminded me of the fact that she was on acid which reminded me that I was on acid which reminded me that the big light show that was going on outside the cab was an acid distortion which kind of put me in the position of still being high but now seeing myself as high and so I could see myself beginning to slowly and majestically sink back into the sea of reality. Whatever that was.
    By the time the cab had dropped us off on Avenue D, outside the housing project near where the trip had started, Robin was quieting down, and I felt that I was half in one reality and half in another, and not quite knowing which one was really real, or even if there was such a thing as real.
    “Hey man, where are we going?” Robin said in a pathetic scared little voice as I started to lead her through the admittedly-ominous giant red-brick buildings of the darkening, glowering project towards the pedestrian bridge over the East River Drive that led to the strip of park along the river. “Those big buildings with metal spiders in them... we’re like ants... dirty little ants...”
    Some esthetic, some strange sense of symmetry, had given me the idea of taking her back to the same place we had gone up in. It had been peaceful and groovy there, and it seemed like the logical antidote to her bummer.
    “Somewhere groovy,” I told her as we puffed up the metal stairs of the pedestrian bridge. As we reached the arching span of the bridge over the snarling traffic of the East River Drive, I glanced down, winced as I imagined what it would do to her head now to see the cars shooting below us like crazed