That meant he was the two-hundred-and-forty-seventh citizen with the
name Thomas Robert Hendley. His name, of course, was never used. The
Organization found numbers more efficient than names.
Only, TRH-247 wasn't any other citizen. He was himself, different from
anyone else, and he had to do something about it.
So he quit work; smuggled himself into the forbidden pleasures of a
Freeman Camp; found boredom and nonidentity there, too; committed
the ultimate rebellion, using a false number; and got the ultimate
punishment--banishment.
He took the girl with him, for her crime was equal to his. The only
problem he had to face now was--survival!
A PROPHETIC NOVEL OF AN EASILY FORECAST FUTURE WHEN A CITIZEN HAD TO
FIT THE MACHINE--OR PERISH....
* * * * *
THE SENTINEL STARS
_A Bantam Book / published November 1963_
_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-19052_
_© Copyright, 1963, by Louis Charbonneau._
_Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada._
_Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade-mark,
consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a
bantam, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in other
countries. Marca Registrada. Patented in the United States of America.
Bantam Books, Inc., 271 Madison Ave., New York 16, N. Y._
* * * * *
1
The morning after. In the underground streets and the wide arcades
lined with shops, curling colored streamers rustle under the feet of
night workers hurrying home to their rooms. Automatic street cleaners
snuffle at plastic cups and empty bottles strewn outside of vending
bars and recreation halls--snuffle like some curious animal, suck,
devour and move on, their fat wheels whispering on the pavement.
Marquees overhead still wink with last night's slogans:
ONE FOR ALL--ALL FOR ONE!
WORLD HAILS MERGER!
The Merger is complete. East is West, and black is white. Now the talk
can cease. Now the viewscreens, the discussion forums, the recreation
hours, the coffee debates, the public opinion polls, the conversations
of lovers can turn to other things.
The Organization is One. Freedom is all.
* * * * *
Rebellion can be a bomb or a cry of pain, a shout of defiance or a
mute, sullen face.
Or a man lying in bed, motionless.
The building in which TRH-247 lay was a circle of apartments bounding
the Architectural Center, where he worked, like the ring around
Saturn. Its outer façade was windowless, a curving face of concrete
thirty stories high. The windowed inner circle looked across a broad
courtyard toward the concentration of offices in the Center. Moving
walks joined the residential ring to its activity core like spokes in a
wheel. Because of the blind outer wall, common to all buildings in the
Organization, the sun was visible to those living and working in the
Center for only a brief period at midday.
The sunrise belonged to the Free.
Yet, through the unease of his hangover, TRH-247 was aware of the
coming of day. Without opening his eyes he had been conscious of the
gradual dilution of the room's darkness into gray, of the pink glow
creeping from the corners of the room to spread up the walls, and at
last of the splendid aurora of brightness climbing the east wall. Had
he been asleep, he would have been gently conditioned to wakefulness by
the artificial dawn.
Feeling the weight of light and warmth harsh upon his lids, he waited
for the bird call which came every morning at precisely six o'clock. In
spite of the fact that he was anticipating it, the tuneful whistle made
him start. His eyes flew open. He felt a slow draining away of tension.
The psychology of it was wrong, he thought. Anything as naturally
unpleasant as an alarm to wake you should be simply and directly
jarring. The bird song, monotonously cheerful every morning, was
actually a depressant.
He wondered if a real bird singing would have the same effect.
The question was idle, and he wasn't sure why it had occurred to him.
But a great many such speculations, equally idle, had been disturbing
him lately. All, he supposed, because of the Merger.
The Merger. His mind rejected the word like an assembly machine
spitting out a defective part. In a deliberate effort to detour that
line of thought he nudged the button which turned on the viewscreen
set into the south wall. It brought into focus a picture of a parklike
setting in the early morning, a green glade drenched in sunlight. The
camera's eye moved close to a cluster of flowers and focused sharply
on a single red rose glistening with dew. Beyond the trembling rose,
blurred but distinguishable, two naked figures appeared, running. A
man and a woman. His hands caught her from behind and the pair tumbled
together onto the wet grass. A shrill peal of woman's laughter rang.
The background music soared to a joyous crescendo, and the camera
turned discreetly away to embrace the sky, vaulting in a breathless
leap from horizon to horizon.
The final chord of music crashed. The picture faded out abruptly. An
announcer appeared, smiling cheerfully. "Good morning, you late and
early viewers! You have just seen 'Tender Shoots,' a Freedom Play
written by...."
TRH-247 clicked off the sound. He turned impatiently from the screen
to stare at the blankness of the ceiling. Always the same fadeout, he
thought. The same idyllic setting, the same sensuous appeal, the same
bronzed hero and heroine finding joy unconfined and forever after in a
Freeman Camp. Why not? It was society's dream. It had always been his
own. What was wrong with it now? Or with him?
He shook his head angrily, as if the gesture would help him shrug off
his restlessness. "Thomas Robert Hendley," he said aloud, "you should
get up."
The habit was recent--not talking to himself, a practice so old he
found it perfectly natural, but the indulgence of thinking of himself
in the old-fashioned names instead of his official designation. For
some reason he found it strangely pleasing to think of himself as
Thomas Robert Hendley. It didn't matter that there had been, in the
history of the Organization, two hundred and forty-six other Thomas
Robert Hendleys. None of them had his particular set of brown eyes, his
hard-to-comb black hair, his six feet of angular frame, his aches, his
memories, his four inches of childhood scar on his right forearm, his
restless dreams, his hopes, his mind.
They weren't _him_.
Frowning, Hendley continued to stare at the ceiling. He knew that he
barely had time to bathe, wipe off his beard, dress, eat, and still
get to work on time, even though his office was less than five minutes
away and he was not due until seven. He moved slowly in the mornings.
He couldn't gulp down his breakfast, and he liked to linger over his
coffee and his first cigarette. Still he did not move.
Unwanted, a trickle of memories sifted into his mind. Fragments of the
previous day's celebration. People shouting, drinking, dancing. The
whole city a bobbing, swirling sea of color, noise, confusion. Joy,
joy--and one unsmiling mouth, one pair of sober eyes, one arm unraised
in salute. His.
Well, he had taken care of the sober eyes. He had got drunk with the
rest of them. And he had still felt alone, apart.
All along he had felt out of it--through all the weeks of endless
news coverage on the home and public viewscreens, the interminable
debates at work, the hotly argued discussion forums. No one had
talked of anything else. And there had been a strange intensity in
the endless great debate, which often erupted into angry words and
shaking fists and red faces, as if everyone sensed a significance in
this last Merger, a special importance that was neither voiced nor even
consciously realized.
Once it had been voiced: Hendley remembered one discussion forum for
his group a week before. He had been sitting between RED-498, his
Assigned, the woman he was soon to contract with, and a short, fat man
in the yellow coverall of a 2-Dayman. The round man had constantly
been rising to demand the floor, grabbing his seat mike and shouting
so loudly that his words over the loudspeaker were distorted and often
incomprehensible. His round, full face had a squinty look, the triangle
of eyes and nose being squeezed close together like a cluster of dots
in the center of a circle. Even his eyebrows added to the effect--blond
tufts of hair thick next to the bridge of his nose but disappearing as
they fanned out. Below this concentration, a small red mouth pursed
angrily.
"They just don't remember," he complained to Hendley. "They don't
remember!"
He jumped up as another speaker finished. "Now listen!" he cried.
"Think a minute. Just think! What is it that has made this Organization
great? It's growth, that's what it is. Being big enough to do more
things for more people, and do them better! What did we have before?
I'll tell you what we had! A lot of little organizations, all
squabbling among themselves, and the worker caught in the middle. There
weren't any Freeman Camps then. There wasn't any chance for a man to
get his tax debt paid off, not a chance in the world. Now we all have
that chance, every one of us. _That's_ what's important!"
The fat man sat down, breathing hard as if he had been running. He
nodded with emphatic triumph at Hendley and RED-498. "This Merger is
the greatest thing that could happen," he declared. "You'll see if it
isn't!"
Others spoke. A tall, broad-shouldered man in the respected beige
coverall of a 1-Dayman, adorned with the stitched emblem of an athlete,
rose to deliver a speech which was quickly diverted from the Merger
to the virtues of competitive sports as one of the Organization's
finest forms of recreation. A plaintive voice wondered if maybe the
Organization wasn't just getting so big that it oughtn't to get bigger.
A woman with the calm, crisp voice of an intellectual pointed out that
the Eastern and Western Organizations had for many years been moving
steadily toward the Merger--had actually been merged in innumerable
ways, not the least of which was the Executive Exchange Program, of
which she could speak personally as one who had been proud to work for
a year in the Eastern society. And there was one voice from the back of
the hall, from someone who remained seated so that Hendley could not
see him, whose words made Hendley stiffen and listen attentively.
"What we're trying to do," the unknown man said, "is to pretend that
history never was. We're saying it doesn't mean anything to be born a
Westerner. Maybe it's right that we should forget that our ancestors
fought against the East, and a lot of them died to make sure we
wouldn't all be swallowed up. But that doesn't mean we should let
ourselves get swallowed up now...."
The fat man beside Hendley had growled with anger. Even RED-498 had
been indignant, her ordinarily placid face flushed. "That's silly!" she
had cried. "Tell him, TR! Tell him!"
But Hendley had remained silent. The unseen speaker's words had touched
a sensitive nerve. We shouldn't let ourselves get swallowed up. By
what? What difference did it make to the bottom of the mountain when
the banks of snow shifted on a peak perpetually shrouded by clouds? In
its immediate effects that's all the Merger really meant--a reshuffling
of men at the top. Down at the bottom you wouldn't feel it. You would
go on eating the same food, catching the same copter or sidewalk,
pushing the same buttons, paying off the same tax debt. Nothing would
change.
Hendley had left that meeting deeply disturbed. When RED-498 somewhat
surprisingly took the initiative in suggesting that they visit a nearby
Public Intercourse Booth for the weekly hour allowed to Assigned, he
had pleaded fatigue. Back in his room alone, unaccountably tired, he
had drifted into and out of the fringes of uneasy sleep. He could
recall thinking that they were taking away the last symbol of personal
identity. Everything was to be reduced to One, like those ancient
religions in which man strove to lose himself completely in his God
and be One with Him. But the new god was one vast, all-encompassing,
impersonal Organization.
At last sleep had come. And with it, from some deep recess of his mind,
emerged a scene from the old world before the Organization, a world
preserved on flickering films in the Historical Museum, a world where
men once walked freely on the shores of a great sea. In the mysterious
logic of the dream, it seemed quite natural for TRH-247 to be there,
walking on a wide sandy beach, white under a brilliant sun by a blue
sea. In the distance there was another distinct beach, and beyond that
another--individual crescents of sand succeeding one another. But
there were no people. He was alone. He ran in the wet sand close to
the water, feeling its coolness and firmness. He ran so fast that his
feet hardly seemed to touch, and his heart pounded with exhilaration.
Coming to the end of the curving beach, he stopped. And as he stood
there watching, the sand moved, lapping outward like the waves of the
sea, reaching toward the next beach. And that golden crescent in turn
expanded. Hendley felt a nameless terror. He turned and raced back
along the shoreline. But at the opposite end the beaches were already
meeting, hungry fingers of sand interlacing like lovers' hands. Staring
into the distance, Hendley saw that everywhere the sands were flowing
into each other, pushing back inland, filling every crevice, covering
every footprint, burying every stone, until at last he could see no
marking, no line of difference, no beginning or end. And he knew that
all of the beaches of the world had merged into one. His heart filled
his chest with a painful drumming. Looking wildly all around him, he
saw with terrifying clarity that the area where he stood was no longer
like a beach at all. There was no beach, nothing anywhere but a great
empty desert bordering the sea....
* * * * *
It was past 6:40 in the morning. TRH-247 lay in bed staring at the
ceiling. If he got up now, he thought, if he did without a shower,
without breakfast or coffee, he could still be at his drafting board on
time.
And something would have ended.
How did you rebel? How did you protest against a system that knew you
only as a number? How could you defy a vast network of computers that
knew what you were going to do before you did it--knew, and saw your
defiance merely as an equation to be speedily solved. How did you
change directions on a one-way street?
In his own work, architecture, when perfection left a residue of
discontent you introduced a flaw. You broke one of the rules. And
maybe what you ended up with would be better than the perfect thing,
in its flaw as flawless as an artist's distortion of the world to his
own image of it. Hendley had done it himself, taking pure harmony and
proportion of form and trying to make it individual. He had....
"No," he muttered aloud. "You only pushed a button."
For if one line could be altered, the master computer in the basement
of the Architectural Center had already worked out the six hundred and
sixty-eight ways in which that single change could be made without
weakening the resulting structure. The Organization encouraged that
kind of individuality. It wasn't originality at all.
Yet the principle was valid. You had to break one of the rules. You had
to get out of step.
And there was a way. Work was the foundation of the Organization--the
work day, the work hour, the work minute. This was the basic commodity,
the medium of exchange, the measure of social status. Work to pay
off your tax debt. Work to climb the rungs on the ladder that led to
freedom.
Simply lying there, without lifting a hand, he could create a flaw.
2
About ten o'clock that morning TRH-247 stood on an underground
pedestrian ramp watching the crowds flow past him--shoppers, tourists,
workers, going and coming, stepping with the ease of long habit from
the slow to the fast strips of the moving sidewalks. All the faces were
different, Hendley thought. He was less than a five-minute rise from
the Architectural Center, but it was quite probable that he had never
once seen any of these faces before. These people might live in the
same building, eat from the same venders, visit the same Rec halls,
even work at the Center. But under the carefully staggered schedules
in the structure of the Organization's work pattern, schedules which
enabled 32,000,000 people in this particular City No. 9 to live in a
circumscribed area without trampling one another underfoot, the chances
were good that none of these people had ever crossed Hendley's path
before. Simply because he had never been in this spot at this hour on
this day of the week.
Hendley was a 3-Dayman. His identifying coverall was blue. He worked on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays except during his assigned vacation
month, when he customarily used his travel pass to visit one of the
tourist recreation centers in another of the major cities. It was
unthinkable that his vacation time would find him this close to home,
and it was equally unlikely that he would be there on any of his four
free days of the week, for even these days were quite taken up with
the designated periods of recreation, education, physical therapy and
discussion. In fact, Hendley was experiencing the rare sense of freedom
which came from having nothing to do.
This was what it must be like in the Freeman Camps, he reflected--seven
days a week to enjoy the luxury of complete choice, of having each day
stretch before you like a blank sheet of paper onto which you could
dictate absolutely anything you wanted.
Exhilarated by the freshness of the moment, he stared in fascination at
the passing faces. It was like trying to study the waves of the sea.
They dissolved even as you glanced at them and were instantly replaced
by others. He began to feel a little dizzy from the effort of isolating
the moving figures. You could only know a wave, he thought, know its
form and strength and motion, by riding it.
He stepped onto the slow strip of the sidewalk.
Instantly the faces which had been streaming past him were arrested.
He studied the man standing closest to him. He had Eastern blood, to
judge by the Oriental caste of his features, the thick shock of black
hair, the full upper eyelids. Hendley suspected that he caught the
reflection of perma-lenses coating the dark eyes. The stranger wore a
green coverall over a small, wiry body. A commissary worker, Hendley
guessed, on an eleven to seven day schedule, going to work. Or a finish
carpenter, skilled in manipulating the buttons which caused graceful
designs to be carved in plastic and metal, on his way home from a two
until ten morning shift. Middle-aged, with an unusual Eastern name that
would have a low number after the initials. Devoted to his Assigned,
the father of a brood of black-haired children, perhaps a boy to
inherit his craft.
This latter fancy evaporated. The stranger wore green. A finish
carpenter would be further advanced than a 4-Dayman, would be closer to
paying off his tax debt.
That was one of the troubles with the color designation of the
universal coverall, Hendley thought. It instantly established status.
It explained the way the Easterner's black eyes kept flicking forward
with an expression of mingled respect and envy toward the beige
coverall of a man several steps ahead--a tall, confident-looking man
with carefully combed gray hair that matched the gray sleeve emblem
identifying him as being in Administration.
Beige. A 1-Dayman. One step away from Freeman status. Son of a
successful father, undoubtedly also an Organization official, who had
passed on only a small tax debt to his fortunate son. Within a few
years his debt to the Organization would be paid off. He would be free
to enjoy the lifetime privileges of a Freeman Camp.
Hendley felt a twinge of--was it merely envy?
A flash of red caught his eye, speeding past him on the rapid sidewalk
strip. On impulse he stepped to the side of the slow lane and made the
short jump to the faster strip, using the standard technique of a few
quick running steps before leaping. The blur of red he had glimpsed was
a good distance ahead of him by the time he had completed the maneuver.
But the red figure was standing motionless on the speeding walk. By
threading his way forward through the crowd, Hendley was able to narrow
the gap.
He stopped when he was ten feet behind the girl.
His first fleeting impression was confirmed. The red coverall shaped
itself to her body under the gentle pressure of the air currents
as she rode. Hendley couldn't help contrasting the figure of his
Assigned--tending already toward plumpness, sturdy of calf and thigh,
heavy of neck--with the slender grace of the girl in red. Her hips
were round, but they flowed inward to a narrow waist. Below, her legs
were long and straight; above, her back was a supple curve, her neck a
beautifully feminine column of white. Her hair was gold, cropped close
to the nape of her neck.
Hendley moved two steps closer. He wanted to see her face. Would it
match the sensitivity of her body? Would it be fine of feature, vivid
and alive? Or would her body's promise be blunted by coarseness in her
face?
It seemed more important than it should have been. It was as if
the girl was part of this morning's freshness, its sense of escape
from--something. He didn't want her eyes to be vacant or stupid or
self-satisfied. He wanted her mouth to be neither prim nor slack,
neither sullen nor fixed in an empty smile.
Another step brought him to her side. For a moment he didn't turn his
head. He stared forward, the rushing air cool against his eyes, his
neck growing stiff with the effort of remaining still. Then he looked
at her.
Her eyes were a warm brown with flecks of green. They were full on
him, as if she too had been staring. They were neither appraising nor
aloof--but they weren't empty. They seemed to be waiting, as he had
been waiting. He felt his heart begin to labor. You are searching too,
he thought. You are hoping for something different.
In the long moment while their eyes held, it seemed to him that the
soft, wide curve of her lips began to bend upward at one corner in a
tentative smile. He wanted to speak but hesitated.
Then she was gone. Frantically he looked back over his shoulder. He was
in time to see her nimbly adjusting her forward movement to the pace of
the slow lane. Before Hendley had time to move she was stepping onto an
off-ramp, already well behind him.
Damn! He jumped recklessly from the fast strip. He had been so absorbed
that her quick action had caught him by surprise. In his haste he
failed to take the few running steps that would have countered the
sudden braking when his feet hit the skidproof surface of the slow
lane. His shoes caught and he plunged headlong.
He skidded face down on the sidewalk. Someone was laughing. A hand
gripped him under the armpit to haul him to his feet. A black-browed
face grinned into his.
"When did you learn to ride the walks?" the man jibed. "You'll never
live to be a Freeman that way!"
Hendley grunted in shamefaced appreciation for the help. He felt
embarrassed and angry with himself. The laughter did not annoy him.
You had to expect that if you took a spill. Knowing how to gauge the
sidewalks was as basic as walking. You couldn't expect sympathy when
you forgot. What angered him most of all was the possibility that the
girl in red had seen him fall.
He alighted at the next off-ramp. On the preceding incline almost a
hundred yards away, a steady stream of people flowed out to the street
and spilled into the torrent of pedestrians there. It was impossible to
pick out the girl. Her bright coverall was now a disguise rather than
a beacon. Red, the designation of the 5-Dayman, was the most common
color. It suddenly seemed as if the whole street was splotched with red.
He hurried back, astonished at the sharpness of his disappointment.
There had been something about the girl--something more than the beauty
of her face or the curving suppleness of her body--that had made him
want to know her. Or had he imagined a reflection in her eyes of his
own discontent, his own yearning?
The street was lined with the Organization's bewildering variety
of shops, service outlets, offices, vending cafes, entertainment
centers. Crowded arcades tunneled under one of the great cylindrical
work centers. Nearby a series of escalators trundled down to the tube
station on the next level. Hendley heard the rumble of a departing
train.
She could have gone anywhere. Even if she had entered one of the nearby
shops or office buildings, even if he had known which one, he would
have had little chance of finding her. He could recall no emblem on her
coverall that would suggest where she worked or what she did.
He stopped at the foot of the ramp where the girl had disappeared. It
was hopeless. An accidental collision of two specks in an interminable
dust storm of people, almost instantly blown apart. What were the odds
against another....
She was standing in the arched entry of a building, staring at him. As
he pushed his way toward her she started to turn, averting her gaze,
taking one step as if about to leave. The motion was arrested, and she
seemed to be suspended there, poised on the verge of flight. She didn't
move until he spoke.
"I was afraid I'd lost you."
"Were you?"
"Why did you try to get away?"
"I don't know what you mean. I work here."
Hendley glanced at the sign over the doors: AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH
CENTER. Above them, above the barren crust of the earth, another
eyeless concrete cylinder thrust upward toward the sky like a raised
fist.
"You're working today?" he asked.