The following day, Rama invited me and Alexander to ride in his group. It was at a rest area in southwestern Utah that Rama approached me and said, "You had better stop vibing Laura. I am fucking her." A UCSD recruit in her early twenties, Laura had large, dark eyes and ample social self-esteem. She spoke so fast that she often slurred her words. She was currently riding with Rama. "Sorry, Rama," I said, startled by his raw honesty. We pushed on to Denver and then to Boulder, where we stayed in a motel near the university. We assessed the city in terms of jobs, housing, computer courses, and mystical power spots. Two or three days later, Rama asked us to *see* if we should stay or move on to Boston. He seemed pleased that we voted to stay. Boulder, after all, was commuting distance to computer jobs in Denver; it had a respectable university; it was beautiful in the winter and cute the year round; it felt at least a mile high until several days later, when Rama accused us of destroying it with our powerful Negative Energy Field. "Pack your things," he ordered, and we cut a path south toward Albuquerque along the Rockies' edge. There was something about the open road and the blue Colorado sky that absolved us of our guilt from having decimated a city, because Alexander and I were anything but upset. The Beatles' White Album was playing Sexy Sadie, a song satirizing an Indian guru. I asked him if I could turn up the volume. "Sure." Soon he asked me the same. Before long, the music was blasting, and we were singing Helter Skelter at the top of our lungs: "WHEN I GET TO THE BOTTOM I GO BACK TO THE TOP OF THE SLIDE, AND I STOP AND I TURN AND I GO FOR A..." Several nights later, near Tucson, Arizona, the disciples looked out from a hill at the lights of the city below. "This is a real moment of power," said Rama. "It is essential that each of you speak with power and with respect for the spirit of the land." I typically spoke very briefly at such a gathering unless I knew in advance what Rama wanted to hear. But now I went on and on about how in Tucson there was a healthy balance between people and nature, and about how if we moved here, we would heal. When I was done, Rama took me aside and said, "Kid--you're going to be all right." But Tucson was not the right city, he later announced, so we continued the drive west.