I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into
them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping
pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to
feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.
I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing
time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the
following morning.
In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at
theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping
around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and
got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a
drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to
the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem
political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of
Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led
by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker
than water. Standard.
There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless
forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in
a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up
with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.
And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for
the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere
in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere
beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go
there....
Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a
verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had
unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The
poem went:
Wherever I go,
_I_ go too,
And spoil everything.
That was it. The story of mankind.
I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I
didn't sleep for a long, long time.
Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice
again. The low, seductive woman's voice--the startling, shocking voice
out of my unconscious.
"_You have taken the first step_," she said. "_You are on your way
to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of
conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only
answer...._"
* * * * *
I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I
_thought_ objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my
life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew
no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might
have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed,
stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within
me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not
even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....
"_The woman, Lara, attracts you_," said the voice.
I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the
voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with
it.
"_Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and
know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way._"
The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.