Dave Dryfoos

“ If he wasn't senile and didn't want a home with barred windows and a barbed wire fence, he had to lie low and keep his mouth shut.
Anyone could charge an overage person with incompetence. The charge was not a crime and so had no defence.
All of which was old stuff to Ollie Hollveg. He'd been dodging the geriatricians for sixteen years. He considered himself used to the setup.
Yet something about the rancher, Rost—maybe his excessive weight, in contrast with the pickers' under-fed gauntness, or maybe his cardboard cowboy boots and imitation sombrero—made Ollie boil in spite of himself. ”

“ People without a fixed place in society, and not too much to leave behind. A husky old itinerant like you is just what we want."
"For what?" Ollie insisted.
"To travel—as a sort of working passenger, since piloting will of course be mechanical—in the first manned spaceships to leave Earth for the stars."
"Spaceships?"
"Sure. Solo spaceships. Super-fast, which means the trip will seem relatively short while you're on it, and will give you extra earth-years of life in the end.
"The job is much easier and less hazardous than the train ride that brought you here. You're a natural for it. ”

“ In a central California tomato field a dusty-faced man opened the autodriver of a nuclear-powered truck and inserted a cannery's address card so the truck would know where to deliver its load.
Six old men—the tomato pickers—waited for their pay in the truck's lengthening shadow. Most of them smoked or dozed, too tired for talk.
Ollie Hollveg, tallest and oldest of the pickers, eyed the heavy-set rancher who sat at the tally table figuring the payroll. For this day's work Ollie expected even less pay than usual ”

“ If I had the money I'd hire somebody to knock me off right now."
"Don't be stupid!" the deputy snarled. "You wouldn't be losing your freedom if you'd had sense enough to stay out of a fight. And when you talk about suicide salesmen, you sure prove you can't take care of yourself!"
But the deputy was kinder than he sounded. Rather than allege incompetence, he charged Ollie with an assault against Rost. So instead of being remanded to the geriatricians, Ollie was kept overnight in jail and ordered held, next morning, for want of fifty dollars bail. ”

“ Ollie protested.
"He might at that. All he's got is those measily four rented acres of tomatoes. The cannery pays him the same as if he had four hundred acres and could pick by machine.
"About all the profit he can make is what he chisels out of his pickers. You'll be better off in a Home, Pop, than trying to work cheaper than a machine."
"Those Homes are prisons!"
The deputy sighed. "I know how you feel. My old grandfather cried when we put him in. But we couldn't support him and he had no way of making a living.
"The world changes faster than the people in it, Pop. ”

“ He'd intended climbing under the caboose to its rear truck, but the bulls and his own lack of agility made this impossible so now he must ride where he was, exposed to battering wind and searching cold as the train crossed the High Sierras, and also exposed to the whims of the trainmen if any should come out on the platform and look down.
He'd seen men shot off trains. But he didn't worry about it. Instead, like the old hand he was, he tried to sleep while clinging there.
At Sparks the train stopped for a maintenance check. The guards formed a perimeter but Ollie was inside it. ”

“ Transcontinental freight was carried in long trains of rubber-tired cars towed on elevated beamways by remotely-controlled, nuclear-fueled steam tractors. Here at the San Francisco yards the trains were broken up and the individual cars hauled by turbo-tractor on city streets and suburban roads for delivery at the addressees' doors. ”