Fifteen minutes later he was in a sleek air train, whizzing along at three hundred miles per hour through a deep tunnel. The bike was locked in a stall at the train terminal. He would pick it up on the way home.

The train was packed. Ron sat in a four-passenger compartment, but six people were jammed in there. All adults, all men his father’s age. They all looked grim. They were going to New York to have one last good time before the summer ended, even if it hurt.

Nobody talked. The only sound was the noise of air whistling past between the outside skin of the train and the tunnel wall. The compartment was painted a pleasant bright green, with clever little decorations spotted here and there along its paneled walls. There were no windows and nothing to see outside except the bare tunnel wall rocketing past. There was a blank TV screen on the partition wall in front of Ron, but he didn’t feel like watching TV. Besides, he got the feeling that his five cramped compartment-mates would object if he turned on one of the shows that he liked.

Ron saw his own face reflected in the dead screen. He was frowning. Thinking about what was going to happen when he returned home. It was Labor Day weekend. He had today, Sunday, and most of Monday to be in the City. Monday night he’d have to go back home—and face his father.

Okay, so I’ll go to business school. I can always make astronomy my hobby. But he hated it. He hated being forced into something he didn’t want to do. He hated having to give up what he wanted most. And he hated the feeling that there was nothing he could do about it.

Well, you’ve got this weekend, he told himself. Make the most of it.

It was only a little past noon when the train pulled into Grand Central Station. Stepping out of the train’s clean plastic shell and onto the station platform was like stepping from an art museum into a riot.

The noise hit Ron first. There were thousands of people bustling around the station platform, all of them talking, shouting, arguing at once. Policemen in black uniforms and white hard helmets were directing people into lines that surged up moving stairs. People were struggling with luggage. One old man—Ron’s father’s age—was screaming red-faced at a porter in a ragged uniform who had dropped a suitcase. It had popped open and all sorts of clothing were scattered across the filthy platform floor. People were trampling over the clothes, paying absolutely no attention to the man’s yowls.

Ron got into line behind a fat woman who was clutching a six-year-old girl by the wrist. The child was scared and whimpering.

“I don’t like it here, Mommy. I want to go home.”

The woman jerked the child’s arm hard enough to lift the kid off her feet. Bending down to push her puffy face into her daughter’s, she said: “Listen, you little brat. It cost plenty to get here and I didn’t have to bring you in the first place. Now you behave or I’ll sell you to the first meat grinder I see.”