The Later Journeys - 9. Seeking
Previous chapter So, the next day after the midday meal, we granted Ben’s request to go out and see the countryside, but during breakfast we reminded him that he was bound to be in for some surprises. “The world has gotten much louder,” I began. I remembered a Twilight Zone episode from the 1960s, in which a scientist had manipulated time (with a machine, inevitably) to cause a Western outlaw to appear in midtown Manhattan, just ahead of the hangman. All I really remembered about that was how the visitor instantly pressed his hands to his head in agony and begged the scientist to do something about all that noise. We were lucky, as I’ve said, to be in a tiny, sheltered enclave, mostly surrounded by farms and the New Jersey Pine Barrens, but it really was tiny and one step in the wrong direction, at the wrong time, would destroy the most carefully constructed illusion that we were still at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And so we sensibly decided to prepare Dr. Fran...