It was late afternoon by the time I got out of the Marriage
Administration Building. The sun, red and swollen from the spring
dust storms, was just disappearing behind the distant elevators of
the plankton conversion plant, and the sky was beginning to lose its
coppery haze. I hailed a rickshaw, leaned back in the plastic chair and
let the June wind cool my face.
The street murmured with the whir of rickshaw wheels and the rhythmic
pounding of runners' feet. The Marriage Administration Building faded
into the lengthening shadows. The Cathedral drifted grayly by, the
tiny windows of its serried chapels glinting red in the final rays of
the sun. Then the massive pile of the Coliseum, silent and somber and
brooding. In the distance, the hives towered darkly into the sky.
The Coliseum gave way to the parsonage apartments. Prim façades
frowned down on me with narrow-windowed righteousness. I shifted
uneasily in my rickshaw seat. If my surreptitious reading of the
forbidden books had given me a new perspective on the Age of
Repentance, it had also given me a troubled conscience.
Just the same, I knew that as soon as the next book "collection" got
under way, I would offer my services to the Literature Police just as
I'd done a dozen times before. And if my luck held, and I was assigned
to sentry duty in the book dump, I would read just as many forbidden
volumes as I could every time I got the chance. Moreover, this time I
would risk Purgatory and try to save a few of them from the flames.
The parsonage apartments petered out and the noisome market area
took their place. Rickshaw traffic densened, competed with hurrying
pedestrians. Plastic heels clacked and ankle-length skirts swished in
the gloom. The hives occulted the sky now, and the stench of cramped
humanity rode the night wind.
I dropped a steelpiece into the runner's hand when he pulled up before
my hive. I tipped him a plastic quarter when he handed me my change. I
could feel the loneliness already, the crushing loneliness that comes
to all men who live in faceless crowds.
But I didn't regret having come to the hives to live. They were no
lonelier than the YMCA had been. And three rooms, no matter how small,
were certainly preferable to the cramped little cubicle I had occupied
during the years immediately following my parents' suicide.
A long time ago--a century perhaps, maybe more--the hives bore the
more euphemistic name of "apartment houses." But they had corridors
then instead of yard-wide passageways, elevators instead of narrow
stairways, rooms instead of roomettes. Those were the years before the
metal crisis, before the population upsurge; the years that constituted
the Age of Wanton Waste.
Deploring the appetites of one's ancestors is a frustrating pastime. I
did not indulge in it now. Climbing the four flights of stairs to my
apartment, I thought instead of my imminent marriage, hoping to take
the edge off my loneliness.
I concentrated on my wife-to-be. A wife, according to the pamphlet
that had accompanied my marriage summons, guaranteed to be my ideal
mate, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. A wife who would
personify my unconscious conception of a goddess, who would fulfill
my unconscious standards of feminine beauty, who would administer
faithfully to my unconscious emotional needs. In short, just exactly
the kind of woman I had unconsciously wanted all my miserable lonely
life.
I tried to picture her. I threw everything out of my mind and left my
mental retina blank. It did not remain blank for long. Gradually, the
twentieth century landscape came into focus--the river flowing in the
foreground, bluer than before, the green sea of the meadow spreading
out to the exquisite forested hills, the impeccable cumulus mountain,
and finally, the solitary bird soaring in the vast sky....
* * * * *
I prepared and ate a frugal meal in the kitchenette, then I shaved,
went into the bedroomette and changed into my sentry suit. I was
combing my shoulder-length hair when the knock on the door sounded.
I waited, listening for the knock to sound again. I knew practically no
one in the city, save the members of my own guard detail, and it was
unlikely that any of them would visit me. They saw enough of me on the
graveyard shift.
Who, then?
The knock sounded again, rising unmistakably above the background
noises of the hive--the dull clatter of plastic pots and pans and
dishes, the nagging voices of wives, the strident ones of husbands,
and the whining of children. I laid down my comb, left the bedroomette,
stepped across the parlorette, opened the door--and stepped back
involuntarily.
The MEP captain had been seated when I had seen him at Marriage
Administration Headquarters, and I hadn't been particularly impressed
by his size. Standing, he was an arresting sight. The top of his high,
wide-brimmed hat touched the ceiling of the passageway; the charcoal
coat that hung so loosely on his shoulders could not conceal their
striking width; large bony wrists with huge arthritic hands protruded
from their cuffs. He looked like a giant who had never had enough to
eat.
As I stood staring, he removed his hat and, reaching into an inside
pocket of his coat, produced a stained plastic badge. He waved it
briefly before my eyes, then replaced it. "Captain Taigue," he said in
a voice as thin and unpleasant as his face. "I have a few questions to
ask you, Mr. Bartlett."
The shock of finding him on my doorstep had left me numb. But I
remembered my rights. "You've no right to ask me questions," I said.
"I'm a single man."
"I was invested with the right today when you applied for a wife.
A husband-to-be is as securely bound to the laws of matrimony as an
actual husband is."
He began to move through the doorway. I either had to get out of the
way or be pushed aside. I got out of the way. Taigue shut the door
behind him and sat down in the parlorette chair. He fixed me with his
brooding eyes.
"Tell me, Mr. Bartlett, do you accept the basic tenets embraced by the
marriage amendment?"
I still wasn't sure whether he had jurisdiction over me or not, but I
decided to cooperate. I was curious to know the reason for his visit.
"Naturally I accept them," I said.
"Then you devoutly believe that enforced monogamy is the final answer
to the deplorable serialized polygamy that characterized the sexual
relationships of the twentieth century and brought on the conjugal
chaos of the twenty-first; that strict adherence to the monogamous
ideal is mandatory if it is to be perpetuated; that the marital
unions computed by the Marriage Integrator can never be questioned
because they are the ultimate in emotional, physical, and intellectual
rapport--"
"I said I accepted the tenets," I said. "What more do you want?"
"That adultery," Taigue went on implacably, "is the most despicable
crime a citizen can commit against his society; that adultery has many
subtle phases, among the subtlest being the proclivity on the part of
some husbands and husbands-to-be to look at women other than their
wives or wives-to-be--and lust! You _do_ devoutly believe these things,
do you not, Mr. Bartlett?"
"Look, Captain," I said. "I spent the whole afternoon being
cross-examined by a reverend psychiatrist. He knows more about my
sexual nature now than I do myself. If you doubt my marital fitness,
why don't you read his report?"
"Psychiatrists are fools," Taigue said. "I investigate applicants in my
own way. Now, for the last time, Mr. Bartlett, do you devoutly believe
the tenets I have just enumerated?"
"Yes!" I shouted.
"Then why did you look at the girl who took your application this
morning--and lust?"
The question staggered me. It betrayed a fantastic overzealousness in
his pursuit of his duty--an overzealousness so consuming that it had
warped his perspective, had made him see sin where no sin existed.
Julia Prentice was one woman whom you could _not_ look at and lust. It
was that particular quality, I realized now, that had attracted me to
her in the first place.
I knew my face was burning; and I knew that Taigue was just the kind
of a man who would deliberately interpret a manifestation of anger as
a manifestation of guilt if it suited his predilections. The knowledge
infuriated me all the more. In his eyes I was guilty, and nothing I
could do would prove I wasn't.
I waited until I was sure I could control my voice. Then I said: "I
think you've been fasting too long, Captain. Your hallucinations are
getting the best of you."
He took no offense. In fact, he smiled as he got slowly to his feet.
But his eyes burned with a sort of crazed satisfaction that was either
the essence of dedication or the flickering of incipient insanity.
"I did not expect you to answer my question, Mr. Bartlett," he said. "I
merely wished to apprise you of the alertness of the MEP, and to warn
you that any further attention you may bestow on Julia Prentice will
not go unobserved--or unpunished."
"You can leave any time," I said, opening the door.
"I can also return any time. Remember that, Mr. Bartlett. And remember
the new commandment--_Thou shalt not look at a woman and lust!_"
* * * * *
His tall starved body swayed slightly as he moved through the doorway.
It was all I could do to keep my fists at my sides, all I could do to
hold back the violent words and phrases that swirled in my mind. When
the door swung shut, eclipsing the charcoal shoulders, I collapsed
against it.
I had heard tales of the zealots who guarded the matrimonial sanctity
of society; I had even visited the Coliseum when a stoning was taking
place and seen the battered bloody bodies of the victims lying in the
dirt of the arena. But somehow neither the tales nor the bodies had
driven home the truth that overwhelmed me now.
When the inevitable metal crisis followed the production-consumption
orgy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the
material world began to fall apart, the people turned to religion for
succor. The subsequent merging of the two main churches was a milestone
in religious progress. But then the trend went so far that the people
elected church officials to represent them and began to stress outward
manifestations of virtue by regressing to Puritanical dress and by
voluntarily limiting their literary fare to the Bible, _Paradise
Lost_, _The Pilgrims' Progress_, _The Scarlet Letter_, and _The Divine
Comedy_.
The first clergy-congress was as zealous as the first ordained
president in the drafting and the passing of the marriage amendment.
And the frugal way of life already adopted by the people was ideal
for a world down to its last inch of topsoil. The Marriage Integrator
fitted into the new scheme of things nicely, for it justified the stern
enforcement of the new marriage laws. And so marriage became a duty
rather than a privilege.
I'd been profoundly distrustful of machine-made marriages ever since
my parents' suicide, and the surreptitious reading I'd done on the
various occasions when I had access to the book dump had increased that
distrust. Marriage, according to all the old literature I'd read on it,
was a pretty complex undertaking, so replete with subtleties that it
was difficult to imagine a computing machine, no matter how intricate
it might be, capable of dealing with them.
There was another aspect about Big Cupid that didn't quite add up.
Logically, compatible marriages should result in many children. But
most of the married couples in the apartments around me had only
one child, and many of them were childless. The condition held true
throughout the rest of the city, probably throughout the entire
country.
A possible explanation lay in the popular conviction that sex was sin.
But it was far from being a satisfactory explanation. The original
Puritans identified sex with sin too, but they still raised large
families.
No, there was something about Big Cupid that didn't make sense.
Moreover, there was something about the Age of Repentance itself that
didn't make sense either--when you used books other than the sacred
Five for criteria.
The sex orgies which climaxed the Age of Wanton Waste and were
influential in bringing about the mass regression to Puritanism, were
unquestionably a blot on the scarred escutcheon of civilization.
However, they only represented one extreme: the monogamous fanaticism
of the Age of Repentance represented the other, which was just as
remote from normalcy. Both were wrong.
The society in which I lived and moved was an inconsistent and a rigid
society; I had known this for years. But, until now, the knowledge had
never bothered me, for I had created the illusion of being a free man
by avoiding personal relationships, especially marriage. Now that I
could no longer do that, I realized my true status.
I was a prisoner--and Taigue was my keeper.