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Show It's the Fourth of July. Somewhere through heat lying low over an unseen night lake, there is a dull boom. A skyrocket! Starting low, its hissing tail slithering away into darkness, it climbs up and up, a candle, a moving star, arches over and explodes, raining a thousand lights onto the sky. Red, white, blue, they stream down toward the earth in burning patterns that stretch, stretch, stretch until pulled apart. Glowing coals fall on arid fields, setting them ablaze. OVER SEVEN BILLION people will shortly inhabit the Earth. Seven Billion. 7,000,000,000. An impossible number, a figure that, like the starshell, goes up and up until one believes it gone forever. Then it explodes. And all the land is a tinder box. Already one sees and feels the pressures of burgeoning population: Expansion, expansion, more room, make way for larger facilities, inadequate service, increased consumption, more wastes, more vehicles, high-rise and low-budget. Streams of automatons in uniform business suits driving in floods of automobiles to work at pre-programmed occupations until automated out of existence. Seas of houses, suburban bays and bywaters, inundated by wave upon wave of populace. Showers of droplet-identical rebels. An individual drowns in the waters of population, is swept away into its faceless ocean. Tides and waves of men, all identical, all running in channels, save when a tsunami, a tidal wave, crests above the surrounding sea and raises some few lucky souls a petty distance above their fellows. Only to re-merge without lasting effect. Some few men find water too confining; find swimming in schools training for being sardines; swim against, rather than with the current and eventually come to the bounds of the ocean. Like those lung-fish who set man on the way to being by chinning themselves on the shore, these men dig fingers into unknown beaches and pull themselves out of the water, gasping at the sharpness of the air, blinded by the sun. Once able to breathe, once able to really see, they find themselves at the edges, the rims of existence, able to perceive what they could not before but unable to return, the water gone from their lungs. |
