The Complete Ecotopia by Callenbach Ernest

Author:Callenbach, Ernest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heyday
Published: 2021-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

One day in April Lou got a note from a young man, Bert Luckman, who had been a couple of years ahead of her in high school. He had heard about her cell work from Ellen and David. He had some ideas about it, and wondered if he could come over some time.

Lou arranged to meet him at Jan’s one day after school. She realized she did remember him; he was a lanky, distracted type, and she had seen him once through a doorway at school, in what looked like a meeting of the chess club. And he had written literary pieces in the school paper.

“Come on in,” said Lou. “This is my mother’s place. I live here part of the time. My lab’s in Bolinas, though.”

Bert ambled in and looked around. “I like it,” he announced. Then, seeing the kitchen alcove, “You got anything to eat?”

Lou laughed. “Sure,” she said. “Cheese and crackers? Fruit?” “Wonderful!” said Bert. As they munched on the snacks, he told Lou that since he got out of school he had been writing for local papers and magazines, but lately had gotten more involved in the Survivalist Party. “You know about that?” he asked.

Lou did, in a general way. Roger and Carol and Dimmy had gone to a few meetings and come back intrigued; they planned to join soon. And Lou had heard the name Vera Allwen. The party sounded like a good thing, but up till now rather abstract and distant. “You’re the first live Survivalist I’ve met,” she confessed.

Bert wiggled his ears at her. “We can all do that,” he said. “It terrifies the polluters—they think we’re from outer space. No, seriously, I’ll tell you all about that another time.” Bert licked his fingers and bit into an apple. “What I want to know about now is this cell of yours. It sounds like it might be, uh, let’s say the first great technological breakthrough of the Survivalist era.”

He asked Lou some basic questions about the cell and nodded more and more enthusiastically at her answers. Then he launched into a long, fanciful diatribe which convinced Lou that he was either quite crazy or some kind of genius. When he talked his eyes shot around this way and that, as if looking for the ideal listener. He saw Lou’s cell as a new paradigm for techno-social innovation; he saw it giving the people confidence in their own powers again; he saw it unifying the country’s rooftop architecture as red tile had once done for Mediterranean cities; he saw it spawning small, decentralized supplier industries; he saw a corps of young people sailing from country to country teaching cell-production workshops from Lapland to Patagonia; he saw the cell taking its place in powering videophone electronic communication webs that would make it less necessary to move bodies from place to place for work and business purposes, thus loosening the throttlehold of the automobile on the economy and liberating entire new patterns of social and psychological energy.

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