FREEWAY
BY BRYCE WALTON
The Morrisons didn't lose their freedom.
They were merely sentenced to the highways
for life, never stopping anywhere, going no
place, just driving, driving, driving....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, June 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Some people had disagreed with him. They were influential people. He was put on the road.
Stan wanted to scream at the big sixteen-cylinder Special to go faster. But Salt Lake City, where they would allow him to stop over for the maximum eight hours, was a long way off. And anyway, he couldn't go over a hundred. The Special had an automatic cut-off.
He stared down the super ten-lane Freeway, down the glassy river, plunging straight across the early desert morning—into nowhere. That was Anna's trouble. His wife couldn't just keep travelling, knowing there was no place to go. No one could do that. I can't do it much longer either, Stan thought. The two of us with no place to go but back and forth, across and over, retracing the same throughways, highways, freeways, a thousand times round and round like mobile bugs caught in a gigantic concrete net.