Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  —and Malachi caught my eye, and winked, and began to scat around the drone—

  I laughed right in the middle of my chant, for sheer joy; it gave the sound a transient vibrato. And then I jumped in after him.

  What we all built together then was—briefly, too briefly—something very like my mental picture of The Mind.

  Remarkably so, when you consider that at that point in time, probably not more than twenty or thirty people in the room were actually members of Rachel’s conspiracy…

  Does that seem like a lot? All I can say is, why not? Membership doesn’t require a special, extraordinary, highly educated mind. A mind as simple and unsophisticated as Mona Bent’s can encompass our conspiracy and accept telepathy. The mind need not be brilliant or well stocked with information to be one of us, to respond to our call: it need only not be suffused with self-hatred. And our membership committee is a telepath.

  I know: hippies can’t keep secrets, especially juicy ones.

  Well, suppose each of us had spilled the beans to some one close friend, and in the end, half the hippies at the Solstice Party had learned the secret? Suppose further they even believed it. What would be the effect?

  They would all begin to live their lives as though conscience meant something, as though kharma was real, as though there is a god. Well, most of them were trying to learn to do that anyway, even though they knew better. Now they would know better than to know better, is all. They’d tend to leave the woods, over time, scatter over the planet and live as righteously as possible, find or invent all kinds of right livelihood. They’d stop banding together in self-defense, and spread out and go where they were needed, disappear into the mix.

  Do you understand now why I’m telling this story to you, and why I don’t care much one way or the other whether you believe it? If you choose to do so, all that you can do about it is to stop being so afraid of death, personal and planetary, and to start living as though you are one day going to have to account for your actions to everyone you’ve ever loved. How can that hurt?

  It’s now the Nineteen-Eighties, and pessimism and despair are in fashion. There are almost no hippies left on the Mountain. Fundamentalists rage through the world like hungry beasts. Belief in apocalypse is everywhere, and a numb dumb fatalistic yearning to get it over with. Wonderful excuses to abandon responsibility. Every day our news media bring us a billion cries of pain, and there is nothing we can do about any of them—as individuals. Small wonder we feel the growing urge to put ourselves out of our misery.

  Hang on. Just for a couple of decades, that’s all I ask. The cavalry is coming. It is a pitcher of cream you’re drowning in: keep churning. If you don’t, you’re going to feel really stupid one day soon. Keep living as though it mattered—because it does.

  If you’ve ever really wondered where all the Hippies went, and not merely used the question as a way of denying that they ever existed—well, I will tell you where some of them went: they diffused throughout the planet like invading viruses. They went underground in plain sight, simply by changing their appearance, and they put their attention on lowering their race’s psychic immune system, dismantling its defenses of intolerance of anything new or different, and thus making it ready for the ultimate transplant, the ultimate invasion.

  And they all lived happily ever after.

  EPILOGUE

  I guarantee that every word of this story is the truth.

  About the Author

  Since he began writing professionally in 1972, Spider Robinson has won three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the E.E. (“Doc”) Smith Memorial Award (Skylark), the Pat Terry Memorial Award for Humorous Science Fiction, and Locus Awards for Best Novella and Best Critic. A member of World SF, he has recently been reprinted in Журнал Изобретатель и Рационализатор (USSR) and in Fantastyka (Poland). TIME PRESSURE is his eleventh book.

  He has been married for twelve years to Jeanne Robinson, founder, Artistic Director and resident choreographer of Nova Dance Theatre, a five-year-old professional modern dance company. The Robinsons collaborated on the Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus-winning classic STARDANCE (Dial Press, 1977), which involves zero-gravity dance.

  The Robinsons met and married on the North Mountain of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley; presently they live in Vancouver, British Columbia, with their twelve-year-old daughter, Luanna.