By the summer of 1966, 3 things had come together that made me decide against Australia.

The first was that the relationship with Alice was behind me. She had gone back to her boyfriend, and with that went any pull toward Australia, where she had also been planning to emigrate.

The second was that it had become clear Kudibal would not be coming. I later found out he had gone on a trip to Yugoslavia and visited the Australian Embassy there, but was most likely told exactly what the Czech speaking lady in Vienna had predicted — that his having gone back voluntarily after his first escape would count against him — and he decided to stay in Czechoslovakia. That ended the whole plan we had made together, of me working for his real estate agency in Melbourne and attending university part time.

The third was my good friend Pepa, who was studying at MIT in the USA — his father was a professor there and a US citizen — and who had been writing to me for months encouraging me to come to the USA instead.

Those 3 things together — Alice, Kudibal, and Pepa — made Australia feel like the wrong place. I canceled the Australia emigration and applied for the USA instead. Pepa found me a job promise from an Austrian restaurant on Harvard Square in Cambridge, and one of his MIT classmates, a US citizen, agreed to sponsor me. AFCR arranged the charter flight to New York, the cost of which — I think it was around $170 — I was required to pay back within one year of arriving. On October 24, 1966 — four days short of exactly one year since I had arrived in Vienna — I left for the United States.