By her battened hatch I leaned and caught
Sounds from the noisome hold--
Cursing and sighing of souls distraught
And cries too sad to be told.
_Gloucester Moors_, William Vaughn Moody.
Thorn teetered on the dark edge. His footgear made sudden grating
noises against it as he fought for balance. He was vaguely conscious of
shouts and of a needle of green light swinging down at him.
Unavailingly he wrenched the muscles of his calves, flailed the air
with his arms.
Yet as he lurched over, as the edge receded upward--so slowly at
first!--he became glad that he had fallen, for the down-chopping green
needle made a red-hot splash of the place where he had been standing.
He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of flying togs he was
not wearing.
There was time for a futile, spasmodic effort to get clear in his mind
how, plunging through the forest, he should find himself on that dark
edge.
Indistinct funnel-mouths shot past, so close he almost brushed them.
Then he was into something tangly that impeded his fall--slowly at
first, then swiftly, as pressures ahead were built up. His motion was
sickeningly reversed. He was flung upward and to one side, and came
down with a bone-shaking jolt.
He was knee-deep in the stuff that had broken his fall. It made a
rustling, faintly skirring noise as he ploughed his way out of it.
He stumbled around what must have been a corner of the dark building
from whose roof he had fallen. The shouts from above were shut off.
He dazedly headed for one of the bluish glows. It faintly outlined
scrawny trees and rubbish-littered ground between him and it.
He was conscious of something strange about his body. Through the
twinges and numbness caused by his fall, it obtruded itself--a feeling
of pervasive ill-health and at the same time a sense of light, lean
toughness of muscular fiber--both disturbingly unfamiliar.
He picked his way through the last of the rubbish and came out at the
top of a terrace. The bluish glow was very strong now. It came from the
nearest of a line of illuminators set on poles along a broad avenue
at the foot of the terrace. A crowd of people were moving along the
avenue, but a straggly hedge obscured his view.
He started down, then hesitated. The tangly stuff was still clinging
to him. He automatically started to brush it off, and noted that it
consisted of thin, springy spirals of plastic and metal--identical with
the shavings from an old-style, presubtronic hyperlathe. Presumably
a huge heap of the stuff had been vented from the funnel-mouths he
had passed in his fall. Though it bewildered him to think how many
hyperlathes must be in the dark building he was skirting, to produce
so much scrap. Hyperlathes were obsolete, almost a curiosity. And to
gather so many engines of any sort into one building was unthought of.
* * * * *
His mind was jarred off this problem by sight of his hands and
clothing. They seemed strange--the former pallid, thin, heavy-jointed,
almost clawlike.
Sharp but far away, as if viewed through a reducing glass, came
memories of the evening's events. Clawly, the symchromy, the old man in
black, the conference in the Sky Room, his plunge through the forest.
There was something clenched in his left hand--so tightly that the
fingers opened with difficulty. It was the small gray sphere he had
stolen at the Yggdrasil. He looked at it disturbedly. Surely, if he
still had that thing with him, it meant that he couldn't have changed.
And yet--
His mind filled with a formless but mounting foreboding.
Under the compulsion of that foreboding, he thrust the sphere into
his pocket--a pocket that wasn't quite where it should be and that
contained a metallic cylinder of unfamiliar feel. Then he ran down
the terrace, pushed through the straggly hedge, and joined the crowd
surging along the blue-litten avenue.
The foreboding became a tightening ball of fear, exploded into
realization.
That other Thorn had changed places with him. He was wearing that other
Thorn's clothing--drab, servile, workaday. He was inhabiting that other
Thorn's body--his own but strangely altered and ill-cared-for, aquiver
with unfamiliar tensions and emotions.
He was in the world of his nightmares.
He stood stock-still, staring, the crowd flowing around him, jostling
him wearily.
His first reaction, after a giant buffet of amazement and awe that left
him intoxicatedly weak, was one of deep-seated moral satisfaction. The
balance had at last been righted. Now that other Thorn could enjoy
the good fortunes of utopia, while he endured that other Thorn's lot.
There was no longer the stifling sense of being dominated by another
personality, to whom misfortune and suffering had given the whiphand.
He was filled with an almost demoniac exhilaration--a desire to explore
and familiarize himself with this world which he had long studied
through the slits of nightmare, to drag from the drifting crowd around
him an explanation as to its whys and wherefores.
But that would not be so easy.
An atmosphere of weary secrecy and suspicion pervaded the avenue. The
voices of the people who jostled him dropped to mumbles as they went
by. Heads were bowed or averted--but eyes glanced sharply.
He let himself move forward with the crowd, meanwhile studying it
closely.
The misery and boredom and thwarted yearning for escape bluely shadowed
in almost all the faces, was so much like that he remembered from his
nightmares that he could easily pretend that he was dreaming--but only
pretend.
There was a distorted familiarity about some of the faces that provided
undiminishing twinges of horror. Those must be individuals whose
duplicates in his own world he vaguely knew, or had glimpsed under
different circumstances.
It was as if the people of his own world were engaged in acting out
some strange pageant--perhaps a symbolic presentation dedicated to all
the drab, monotonous, futile lives swallowed up in the muck of history.
They were dressed, both men and women, in tunic and trousers of some
pale color that the blue light made it impossible to determine. There
was no individuality--their clothes were all alike, although some
seemed more like work clothes, others more like military uniforms.
Some seemed to be keeping watch on the others. These were treated with
a mingled deference and hostility--way was made for them, but they
were not spoken to. And they were spied on in turn--indeed, Thorn got
the impression of an almost intolerably complex web of spying and
counterspying.
Even more deference was shown to occasional individuals in dark
clothing, but for a time Thorn did not get a close glimpse of any of
these.
Everyone seemed on guard, wearily apprehensive.
Everywhere was the suggestion of an elaborate hierarchy of authority.
There was a steady drone of whispered or mumbled conversation.
One thing became fairly certain to Thorn before long. These people
were going nowhere. All their uneasy drifting had no purpose except to
fill up an empty period between work and sleep--a period in which some
unseen, higher authority allowed them freedom, but forbid them from
doing anything with it.
* * * * *
As he drifted along Thorn became more a part of the current, took on
its coloring, ceased to arouse special suspicion. He began to overhear
words, phrases, then whole fragments of dialogue. All of these had one
thing in common: some mention of, or allusion to, the activities of a
certain "they." Whatever the subject-matter, this pronoun kept cropping
up. It was given a score of different inflections, none of them free
from haunting anxiety and veiled resentment. There grew in Thorn's
mind the image of an authority that was at once tyrannical, fatherly,
arbitrary, austere, possessed of overpowering prestige, yet so familiar
that it was never referred to in any more definite way.
"They've put our department on a twelve-hour shift."
The speaker was evidently a machinist. Anyway, a few hyperlathe
shavings stuck to his creased garments.
His companion nodded. "I wonder what the new parts that are coming
through are for."
"Something big."
"Must be. I wonder what they're planning."
"Something big."
"I guess so. But I wish we at least knew the name of what we're
building."
No answer, except a tired, mirthless chuckle.
The crowd changed formation. Thorn found himself trailing behind
another group, this time mostly elderly women.
"Our work-group has turned out over seven hundred thousand identical
parts since the speed-up started. I've kept count."
"That won't tell you anything."
"No, but they must be getting ready for something. Look at how
many are being drafted. All the forty-one-year-olds, and the
thirty-seven-year-old women."
"They came through twice tonight, looking for Recalcitrants. They took
Jon."
"Have you had the new kind of inspection? They line you up and ask you
a lot of questions about who you are and what you're doing. Very simple
questions--but if you don't answer them right, they take you away."
"That wouldn't help them catch Recalcitrants. I wonder who they're
trying to catch now."
"Let's go back to the dormitory."
"Not for a while yet."
Another meaningless shift put Thorn next to a group containing a girl.