I stood by the yawning mouth of the newly exhumed grave and swore.
I had only been on duty two hours, but I had lost a Cadillac-corpse
already.
I shifted the beam of my pocket torch from the deep impressions made
by the 'copter feet to the tumbled earth around the huge grave mouth,
then into the empty grave itself. The gun metal casket had left a
neat rectangle in the blue clay when the cargo winch had yanked it
loose. Staring down at the smooth, mute subsoil, I felt like Christian
wallowing in the Slough of Despond.
I had lied to Julia. Things were _not_ under control at Cadillac. This
was the fourth car-corpse I had lost during the past month, and I
shuddered when I thought of what the Cadillac Sexton would probably say
to me in the morning.
The fact that I'd lost no time in notifying the Air Police was small
consolation. The half dozen decrepit 'copters they had at their
disposal were no match for the streamlined jobs of the ghouls. The
ghouls would get away just as they always did and one more car-corpse
would be dismembered and sold on the black market--or contribute its
vital steel, copper and aluminum to the clandestine manufacture of
newer and swifter 'copters.
I kicked a lump of loose dirt. I felt sick. Around me, tall lombardies
formed a palisade so dense that the light of the gibbous moon couldn't
penetrate it. Above me, Mars shone like an inflamed red eye. For a
moment I wished I were up there, a member of the abandoned colony in
_Deucalionis Regio_.
But only for a moment. The ordinary rigors of colonial life were
as nothing compared to the rigors that must have faced the Martian
colonists when the metal crisis terminated the building of spaceships
and brought about the colony's isolation. Perhaps those rigors had
eased by now, and then again, perhaps _Deucalionis Regio_ had turned
into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I turned and began walking back to the ganglion tower whence Betz's
alarm had summoned me. Betz hailed me when I approached tower 6, and
I paused. I could see his round youthful face in the moonlight. The
silvery albedo made it seem like a small moon itself as he peered down
at me from his eyrie. I had never thought much of him--probably because
he had applied for a wife nine years before he needed to and was
already a married man. I thought even less of him now.
"I can't understand how they got down without my seeing them," he said.
"I can't understand either," I said.
"It's these damn trees," Betz said. "Some of them are higher than the
towers. I don't see how the Sexton expects us to do a good job of
guarding when we can't see what we're trying to guard."
"It helps if you keep your eyes open," I said, and walked away.
But whether I liked it or not, his objection was valid. While the
Cadillac Cemetery had none of the sprawling vastness of Ford Acres, its
decorative landscaping made the deployment of a limited guard detail a
difficult proposition. The ancient automakers anticipated neither the
future value of their enshrined products nor the sacrilegious exhumings
that were to begin a century later, and when they laid out their car
cemeteries, they stressed beauty rather than practicality. I could not
feel any kindness toward a long dead manufacturer with a penchant for
lombardy poplars, weeping willows, and arborvitae; who, seemingly, had
done everything in his power to make it easy for twenty-second century
ghouls to dig up car-corpses right under sentries' noses and whisk them
away in swift cargo 'copters.
As I made my way toward the ganglion tower, I thought of what I
would say to the Cadillac Sexton in the morning. I prepared my words
carefully, then memorized them so that I could deliver them without
faltering: _The time has come for the authorities to decide which is
the more important--the scenic beauty of the ground itself, or the
security of the sacred corpses beneath the ground. No sentry, however
alert he may be, can be expected to see through trees, and now that
the rains are over and the new foliage has reached maximum growth, the
situation is crucial and will remain so until fall_--
I went all out. The more responsibility I could foist on the time of
the year, the less I would have to assume myself. The Ford Acres Sexton
had given me a glowing recommendation when I'd applied for the post at
Cadillac several years back, and I hated to lose face in the Cadillac
Sexton's eyes. The money was good, much better than at Ford, and with a
wife on the way I couldn't afford the cut in salary that relegation to
an inferior cemetery would entail. Anyway, the time of the year _was_
to blame. What other reason could there possibly be for my losing so
many car-corpses?
* * * * *
But the Cadillac Sexton took a dim view of my suggestion when he
showed up the next morning. He glowered at me from behind his desk
in the caretaker's office and I could tell from the deepening of the
creases in his bulbous forehead that I was in for a lecture.
"Trees are rare enough on Earth as it is without wantonly destroying
them," he said, when I had finished talking. "And these particular
trees are the rarest of the rare."
He shook his head deploringly. "I'm afraid you don't quite understand
the finer points of our mission, Bartlett. The scenic beauty which you
would have me devastate is an essential part of the mechanistic beauty,
the memory of which we are trying to perpetuate. There is a higher
purpose behind the automobile trust funds than the mere preservation
of twentieth century vehicles. In setting those funds aside, the
ancient automakers were endeavoring to return, symbolically and in a
different form, the elements they had taken from the Earth. It was a
noble gesture, Bartlett, a very noble gesture, and the fact that we
today disapprove of the Age of Wanton Waste does not obviate the fact
that the Age of Wanton Waste could--and did--produce art. The symbolic
immortality of that art is our responsibility, our mission.
"No, Bartlett, we can never resort to the sacrilegious leveling of
trees and shrubbery in an attempt to solve our problem. Its solution
lies in greater vigilance on the part of sentries, particularly senior
sentries. Our mission is a noble one, one not lightly to be regarded.
It behooves us--"
He went on and on in the same vein. After a while, when it became
evident that he wasn't going to relegate me to Chevrolet Meadows or
Buick Lawn, I relaxed. His idealism was high-flown, but I could endure
it as long as the money kept coming in.
When he finally dismissed me, I started back to the hives. I couldn't
help thinking, as I walked along the crumbling ancient highway, that
if the manufacturers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries had been a little less zealous in their production of art,
the Mesabi iron range might be something more than a poignant memory
and there might have been enough ore available to have made mass
'copter production something more than an interrupted dream. There was
an element of irony in using a super-highway for a footpath.
I hailed a rickshaw at the out-skirts of the city and rode in style
to my apartment. There was a letter in my mail receptacle. The return
address said: MARRIAGE ADMINISTRATION HEADQUARTERS. I waited till I
got to my roomettes before I opened it. I wouldn't have opened it then
if I'd dared not to.
The message was brief:
_Report 1500, City Cathedral, Chapel 14, for marital union with one
Julia Prentice, cit. no. 14489304-P, as per M. I. directive no.
38572048954-PR._
I read it again. And again. It still said Julia Prentice.
I knew my heart was beating a lot faster than it normally did and I
knew my hands were trembling. I also knew that I was reacting like a
fool. There were probably a hundred Julia Prentices in the hive sector
alone and probably a hundred more in the other residential districts.
So the chance that this Julia Prentice was the one I wanted her to be
was one in two hundred.
But my heart kept up its rapid pace and my hands went right on
trembling, and I kept seeing that beautiful flowing river with the
green sweep of meadow just beyond, the lovely forested hills and the
white cloud; the dark and forlorn speck of the soaring bird....
* * * * *
She was there waiting for me, standing in the Cathedral corridor before
the little door of Chapel 14, and she was _the_ Julia Prentice. I
asked myself no questions as to why and wherefore. The reality of her
sufficed for the moment.
She looked at me as I came up, then quickly dropped her eyes. The blue
polka dots of her new sunbonnet matched her new Priscilla Mullins dress.
"I never thought it would be you," I said. "I still can't believe it."
"And why not me?" She would not raise her eyes but kept them focused on
the lapel of my John Alden coat. "Why not me as well as someone else?
I had a right to apply for a husband. I'm of age. I had nothing to do
with the Marriage Integrator's decision."
"I didn't say you did."
"You implied it. I think you are conceited. Furthermore, I think you're
being quixotic about a perfectly prosaic occurrence. There's nothing in
the least romantic about two pasteboard cards meeting in the digestive
system of the Marriage Integrator and finding themselves compatible."
I stared at her. I'd been under the impression, during the brief
interval I'd talked with her the preceding day, that she liked me.
But perhaps liking a total stranger whom you never expected to see
again was different from liking a near total stranger who was very
shortly going to be your husband. For the second time during the past
twenty-four hours I found myself wallowing in the Slough of Despond.
"I didn't have anything to do with the Marriage Integrator's decision
either," I said flatly. I turned away from her and faced the chapel
door.
It was a real wooden door, with a stained glass window. The design on
the window depicted a stoning in the Coliseum. There were two people
standing forlornly in the arena--a man and a woman. They stood with
their heads bowed, the scarlet letters on their breasts gleaming
vividly. The first stone had just struck the ground at their feet; the
second stone hovered in the air some distance away. The encompassing
stoning platform was crowded with angry people fighting for access to
the regularly spaced stone piles, and high above the scene the Coliseum
flag fluttered proudly in the breeze, its big red letter proclaiming
that a chastisement was in progress.
There were a dozen other couples waiting in the corridor now, shyly
conversing or staring silently at the stained glass windows before
them. I wondered if they felt the way I felt, if they had the same
misgivings.
The minutes inched by. The silence between Julia and myself became
intolerable. I pondered the meaning of the word "compatibility," and
wondered why unconscious rapport should manifest itself in conscious
hatred.
I remembered my own lonely childhood--the long evenings spent in my
parents' hive apartment, the endless dissension between my mother
and my father, my father's relegation to the parlorette couch and
my mother's key in the bedroomette door, their suicidal leap twenty
stories to the street when I was nineteen years old.
I thought of how crowded the hive school had been when I attended
it and I wondered suddenly if it was crowded now. I thought of the
increasing number of empty apartments in the hive sector, and the cold
breath of a long dormant suspicion blew icily through my mind. The
world quivered, began to fall apart--
And then Julia said: "I was very rude to you. I didn't mean to be. I'm
sorry, Mr. Bartlett."
The world steadied, came back into proper focus. "My name is Roger," I
said.
"I'm sorry, Roger."
The marriage chimes began to sound, appending a tinkling ellipsis to
her words. I opened the door with trembling fingers and we stepped into
the chapel together. The door closed silently behind us.
Before us stood a life-size TV screen. At our elbows, electric candles
combined their radiance with the feeble sunlight eking through the
narrow stained glass window above the screen and made a half-hearted
attempt to chase away the gloom. A basket of synthetic flowers bloomed
tiredly at our feet.
Julia's face was pale, but no paler, probably, than mine was. Suddenly
sonorous music throbbed out from a concealed speaker and the TV screen
came to life. The Marriage Administrator materialized before us, tall,
black-garbed, austere of countenance.
He did not speak till the marriage music ended. Then he said: "When
I raise my left hand the first time, you will pronounce your own
names clearly and distinctly so that they can be recorded in the
tape-contract. When I raise my left hand the second time, you will
pronounce, with equal clarity and distinctness, the words 'I do.'
"Do you--" He paused and raised his left hand.
"Julia Prentice."
"Roger Bartlett."
"Take this man-woman to be your lawful wedded husband-wife?" He raised
his left hand again.
"I do." We spoke the words together.
"Then by the power invested in me by the marriage amendment, I
pronounce you man and wife and sentence you to matrimony for the rest
of your natural lives."