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Finally the voice resumed: “May I take your order?”

“One small French fries please.”

“Anything else?”

“No thank you.”

“Pull ahead.”

At the window a young man who appeared well fed on fries said, “Uh, we’re learning to use a new cash register, so it’ll be about a ten- to fifteen-minute wait.”

“Ten to fifteen minutes for one order of French fries?”

There was a pause as the young man took in my friend’s bewilderment.

“Uh, I see what you mean. But I don’t know how to do it. Why don’t you pull ahead to the next window.”

At the next window, a slightly older female, who might have been the manager, again fielded the request. At first she gave a blank stare. Then a light went off in her head. Taking out pencil and paper, she did some arithmetic and, without any further ado, handed over the fries.

My friend drove away puzzled. Now fully revived, she began to unravel what had happened. It appeared to her that the workers were involved in a chain of command with a machine at the top. It told them what the prices were, it added them together, it cued them to their duties. They took their orders from a cash register. Only when pressured by a customer did the manager at last realize that she had the power to act of her own accord and, in a flash of recognition, overrode the mechanical spell.

Section I

Planting

One

Seeds of Discontent

I used to be as optimistic as anyone about technology. Once asked in grade school to draw a picture of what my home would look like when I grew up, I sketched, in crayon, a transparent hemisphere resting on a single pole and a little flying saucer containing me, my wife, and our many kids about to dock at it. There were exactly eight little heads (besides mine and my wife’s) peeking over the rim of the craft, all identical and propagated with the help of a fertility drug.

When I reached my early teens, I never failed to watch an episode of Star Trek, and I read almost every piece of science fiction Isaac Asimov wrote. On our family’s first cross-country trip, I became ecstatic when we got caught in a traffic jam on the Oakland Bay Bridge. To a midwestern boy, traffic jams were exotic events in which only special people living in modernistic cities took part.

There was always an undertow to my technological infatuation, however, which at first I was loath to acknowledge. On that trip out west, I spent most of the time carsick. A few years later, after returning to the lazy metropolis of Topeka, Kansas, I began to notice anomalies in the mechanical utopia of our modernized household. After we got an automatic dishwasher, the size of the pile of dirty plates on the countertop didn’t decrease at all. If anything, it increased. My dad bought one of the first word processors ever made in the hopes of easing the time and effort of writing. He spent so much time with that machine, I almost never saw him again.

In my grade-school years, the neighborhood seemed alive with children out in the street playing stickball and hide-and-seek. But the older I grew, the more deserted the street became—except for the cars, of course, which had multiplied over time and made playing out-of-doors more perilous. After supper even the cars went into hibernation; the only signs of life were the faint glows cast by cathode ray tubes on living-room blinds.

I had always been on the bashful side, so I went more or less the way of the trend, retreating as determinedly as everyone else to the altar of TV. But lest I surrender utterly to The Void, I applied myself diligently at the piano, practicing several hours a day. To survive socially in a place dominated by the automobile, of course, you had to drive; so I also made an attempt to earn money to buy a car by working at McDonald’s. But soon I saw the futility and the irony: in a town whose borders motor vehicles had pushed to the horizons (with a population of 120,000, Topeka covered 50 square miles), the only sensible way to get to my job was by automobile. Until I could afford one, I had to bike the six-mile round trip on busy roads with no shoulders