He had already been casting about for a place. "The Historical Museum,"
he said quickly. "Main floor. As soon as you can make it after four. Do
you know where that is?"
She nodded. There was wonder in her face, crowding out the tension of
worry. "What's your name?" she asked.
Automatically he started to give his official identity. "TRH--" He
broke off. "Hendley," he said abruptly. "Call me Hendley."
His hand slid down her arm to examine the identity disc on her
bracelet. Her number was ABC-331. He smiled, for the combination of
letters was rare. "What does the 'A' stand for?"
Startled, she stared at him for a moment before answering. "Ann," she
murmured. "But nobody ever--"
"I know. That's why I want to call you Ann."
Their eyes held for several seconds. He could feel the pulse beating
in her wrist. Her red lips were parted in an expression of surprise.
Suddenly she pulled her hand free.
"I have to go," she said. Whirling, she ran toward the doors of the
Research Center.
"Four o'clock," he called after her.
But she didn't look back.
* * * * *
For several minutes after the girl had disappeared, TRH-247 lingered
near the entry to the building, reluctant to leave. Excitement made his
skin prickle and tighten sensitively. Ann, he thought. Her voice was
soft, light, musical, her wrist so slim his fingers had overlapped when
he'd held it. Shadows enlarged her eyes, and fear, too. She was afraid,
but she would meet him. She wanted to.
Across the way from the Research Center there was a sidewalk vender
with a cluster of tables. He charged a cup of coffee, showing his
identity disc to the machine to be photographed, and sat at one of the
small tables.
Why had he been attracted to her so quickly? Why this keen
anticipation? Was it just because she was pretty? He didn't think so.
And it was not the simple need of sex. Organization knows, RED-498 was
willing enough, and the once-a-week hour they were allotted in one of
the PIB's had always seemed satisfactory.
But only that, he corrected himself. A habit, a routine like the
discussion forums and the sports and the therapy hours. Satisfactory,
but never exciting.
Perhaps it was the fact that he had found the girl in red himself.
RED-498 had been selected for him almost a year before by the Marital
Contract Computer. His complete dossier had been fed into the computer.
The process of choosing an appropriate partner for the contract
from all the women available in City No. 9 of the proper age, size,
intelligence, and personality traits, weighing also such factors of
compatibility as the size of the tax debt carried by the woman and the
man, had taken the computer exactly thirty-two seconds.
It surprised Hendley a little to realize that he felt no guilt, no
sense of betrayal of RED-498. The reason was simple. There was no
emotional involvement between them--only a comfortable arrangement. She
was passive by nature, casually accepting their impending contract.
The computer had selected them for each other, and it would never have
occurred to her to question or approve its judgment. With a feeling
of chagrin, Hendley realized that, were he to disappear, his Assigned
would experience no more than a brief period of concern, which would
end as soon as the computer selected a more dependable partner for her.
There ought to be more between a man and a woman, he thought--something
more than the body's casual hunger, more than good will, more than the
careful balance of factors weighed by a computer.
And maybe he had found it.
He finished his coffee. He had been sitting at the table by the vender
for no more than ten minutes. When he glanced across the way at the
Research Center, idly wondering what ABC-331 did there, he saw her. She
was standing at the fringe of the entryway, peering up and down the
street with an air unmistakably furtive. Hendley jumped to his feet and
started toward her. She had not seen him. Before he could fight his way
through the mass of pedestrians between them, the girl slipped into the
crowd, walking rapidly.
Hendley reached the entry where she had stood a moment before. She was
nowhere in sight.
* * * * *
For an hour Hendley wandered the area where the girl in red had
vanished. A dozen times he thought that he glimpsed her face in a crowd
inside a shop or across a street or on one of the overhead walks. Each
time he was mistaken.
He tried to tell himself that her actions didn't mean that she had
lied. Perhaps she'd been sent on an errand. For all he knew her job
with the Research Center might be as a messenger, who would enter
and leave the building a dozen times during the day. But he couldn't
shake the impression that she had been looking for _him_ when she
emerged--looking anxiously, afraid that he might still be there.
His pleasure in the day's defiant freedom was gone. It seemed pointless
to wander the streets. The time that had stretched before him like a
blank sheet of paper now seemed merely empty, the sense of freedom a
futile gesture. What had he hoped to gain? Surely he had known from the
beginning of the day that, sooner or later, he would have to return to
his room, to the only life he knew, to the inevitable reckoning that
waited for him.
A flashing marquee caught his eye. SEE THE INTERIOR OF A FREEMAN CAMP!
the sign shrilled. REVEALING! EXCITING! AUTHENTIC!
Hendley hesitated. It was a come-on, he knew. Very little that was
revealing or exciting would be shown. But the possibility teased his
mind. Even a brief glimpse was better than nothing. And he was tired of
walking.
He presented his identity disc to the ticket machine. The show was
expensive, costing 30D, or thirty minutes debit against his work time,
but he felt reckless. He recognized the symptom as dangerous. Sometimes
workers went completely berserk under the same impulse, going off on
wild sprees that could run up many years debit, nullifying an equal
period of work and prudent self-denial. Hendley had known one man in
his own department at the Architectural Center who had fallen back
from 3-Day to 4-Day status as the cost of a free-spending one-month
vacation. Recognizing the danger, Hendley deliberately shrugged it off.
He had arrived at a bad time. A newsreel was being shown, devoted
almost entirely to coverage of the great Merger. After the news he
had to sit through a poorly produced, badly written and ineptly acted
Freedom Play, no better than those he could see without cost on his own
room viewscreen. But at last the feature attraction began. Hendley sat
erect in his seat, watching intently.
The pictures were authentic enough. They had been taken through the
telescopic lens of a long-range camera. The first views showed only a
long, unbroken wall about fifteen feet high, above which trees could
be seen. Real trees, Hendley thought. Then, from a higher vantage, the
camera peeked over the wall.
The section of the pictures showing the interior of the Freeman
Camp had been greatly enlarged at the cost of sharpness of detail.
Nevertheless Hendley was able to define beyond the high wall a cleared
area perhaps a hundred feet across, ending at a grove of trees and
thickly growing bushes, broken here and there by foot paths. For
several minutes little more could be seen. Hendley's heartbeat slowed
to normal. He began to feel an edge of disappointment. He'd seen
this much before. Everyone knew about the closely guarded wall and
the security clearing beyond it, a protection against anyone trying
to sneak into the camp unlawfully. At the very least he had expected
something new....
His throat went dry. A cluster of white-clad figures materialized from
the green mass of the woods, moving into the cleared area. One of the
figures ran ahead of the others, who set off in pursuit. These were
Freemen, evidently playing some kind of a game. A ripple of excitement
ran through the theater. The pursuing men in white caught up with the
leading figure, and they all converged in a writhing, tumbling mass,
arms and legs flying. The spectacle was so violent it resembled a
battle. One of the men broke free--the same one? Hendley wondered.
Perhaps he was "it" in the game. His white coverall was torn, flapping
as he ran. One of the other men dove after him, catching him by the
ankles and tripping him up. The pursuers closed in....
The screen blurred, out of focus. An audible groan filled the theater.
Hendley's heart was thumping. When the picture cleared, one of the
Freemen was lying casually on the grass alone, apparently staring up at
the sky. It was the one with the torn coverall. The others were racing
off into the distance. They disappeared under the cover of the trees.
That was all. For a little while after the Freemen vanished, the camera
continued to probe the line of trees hopefully. Hendley kept wishing it
would return to the man lying in the clearing, but it did not.
Another sequence began in the film, but it merely showed some of the
camp facilities. No Freemen were visible. Hendley's thoughts kept going
back to the men he had seen. What carefree game had they been playing?
What must it be like to engage in such openly abandoned sport? To lie
endlessly on cool grass, watching the sun? To follow any impulse at
will, with no thought of the cost?
Perhaps all the years of work and waiting were worth while, if in the
end you could be truly free, your tax debt paid off and limitless
recreation yours to enjoy. Was he willing to throw that away--to
exchange it for a brief affair with a girl he didn't know, whose
brown-green eyes probably held only what he wanted to read into them?
The remainder of the picture was short and unrevealing. When the screen
went dark Hendley felt a sudden surge of anger. They teased you with
freedom, he thought, just as the theater's marquee promised untold
delights and offered instead a spoonful of stolen pleasure. And in the
meanwhile they housed you in a blind room in a blind building, kept you
busy pushing buttons in work that made you no more than a mechanical
extension of a much more clever machine, and regimented your days and
hours so that you wouldn't have time to think that there might be
more to life than this--more even than the dream of ultimate ease and
endless games.
No, he thought. It was more than the lure of hope in a girl's eyes that
attracted him. To seek her out, to meet her again, was simply to give
specific direction to the day's gesture of defiance. What he hoped to
accomplish by it, he didn't know. Where it would all end didn't matter.
It was something he had to do.
But she might not come.
He checked the time. It was after three o'clock. With a sense of
urgency he rose and left the theater.
3
There was something unusual about the Historical Museum, oddly
unsettling, and it was awhile before Hendley realized what it was.
The place was almost empty. Here and there a few individuals or
small groups of people shuffled slowly before the exhibits. A guide
was pompously discoursing before a model of one of the old, exposed
cities wiped out more than a hundred years before in the short war
that scoured and blackened half the earth. His voice seemed loud only
because the museum itself was so strangely silent in contrast with the
hubbub and confusion outside in the streets.
Hendley had made a quick survey of the main floor of the museum, his
eyes alert for the red coverall ABC-331 had worn. She was not there.
It was well past four. He stared blankly at an exhibit of old weapons,
trying to dull his mind against his bitter disillusionment.
The weapons were from another world beyond understanding--a world of
great weapons of destruction, and of small, frightening individual
weapons, from knives to clubs to firearms. That had been a time of
personal achievement and personal crime. Now the only real crime was
against the Organization and its rules--rules which demanded obedience
to the Organization, its directives and its officers; forbade sexual
relations between partners not Assigned or otherwise designated by
the Organization; made unlawful the theft of Organization property
for personal use, or the taking of the life of any person indebted
to the Organization. Few would break these or the many refinements
of the Organization's rules of order (including, Hendley thought,
reporting for scheduled work days). Crime carried within itself its
own punishment: it cut one off from ultimate freedom and the joys of
pure recreation. Detection in an all-seeing, all-controlling, almost
completely automated Organization was too certain, the penalty too
great.
Hendley smiled wryly. He had joined a select group in his act of
rebellion. And if the girl named Ann had come, he had been prepared
to....
"Hello."
Hendley spun around. He gaped in astonishment into the warm,
green-flecked eyes of ABC-331, and then at the blue coverall she wore,
matching his own.
"I didn't think you'd come," she said.
"And I didn't think you would."
Suddenly they were smiling at each other. Hendley turned abruptly
toward the weapons exhibit, staring without seeing. The girl moved
close to his side. His mind was full of questions, but he didn't ask
them. There would be time for that later. "Stay close to me," he
murmured, not looking at her. "Just follow what I do."
Without consciously working it out, he found that he had already
planned where they would go. The knowledge had been at the back of
his mind when he first suggested the Historical Museum as a meeting
place. He had been involved with the building's design in his work
at the Architectural Center. He knew its floor plan above and below
ground--its provisions for utilities, its security precautions, its
entrances and exits.
Casually he began to walk among the exhibits, pausing to study some
of them, then moving on, the girl following silently. They reached
a stairway leading to a lower floor. Hendley nodded at ABC-331.
Downstairs there were other exhibits, but he quickly located a corridor
leading to some storage rooms and, beyond these, to another stairway.
Moments later they were moving quietly through the low-ceilinged room
which housed the building's heating and air-conditioning plant. A steel
door led to a narrow passage, which opened onto an underground tunnel
carrying a maze of pipes.
"There's a service exit," he said. "It leads outside."
"Outside?" Her eyes showed alarm.
Hendley nodded. The safest place was in the sun.
He found the winding metal staircase he was looking for. He led the way
up the stairs. Another steel door at the top was secured, but it opened
from the inside. Hendley swung the door open. Sunlight blazed down on
them. The girl gasped. Her hand came up to shield her eyes. Hendley
quickly climbed through the opening and pulled her up after him. He
stripped the belt from his coverall and used it as a wedge to keep the
steel door from closing completely behind them. Then he stood in the
naked sunlight and looked down at her.
"They'll never look for us here," he said.
The girl did not reply, but her slim, small hand slipped into his and
squeezed gently. She was squinting against the harsh glare. The sun
was a white, hot eye rolling in the sky. Its light reflected in a
massive blaze of white from the unbroken curve of concrete towering for
some thirty stories above them. In the distance other great concrete
cylinders glared in the sunlight. A flat table of bare, baked earth,
pale and shimmering, stretched between the featureless buildings
like the floor of an enormous oven. Far above, sealed, windowless
helicopters droned over the city in a steady stream, their blades
beating like wings.
She was trembling.
"It's quite safe," Hendley said. "They've been letting people come out
for years now, even here. And the Freeman Camps are all exposed like
this."
"I know," she said. "It isn't that."
Her smile was apologetic. Her face was still squinting, eyes almost
closed, lips drawn back in a bow, and the expression was youthfully
innocent and appealing. A strange complex of emotions--compassion,
tenderness, delight--engulfed him. Where her mouth was bowed, as if she
were about to fling an arrow of words against the white target in the
sky, he kissed her. Her lips were soft and dry. A tremor communicated
itself from her spine to his hand.
Suddenly she tore her lips away and fell against him, her face turned
down, pressing against his chest. "Oh, Hendley!" she cried. "How I've
wanted you to do that!"
He held her tightly, a little dazed by the passion behind her words,
so unlike the unemotional, almost indifferent acceptance of his
Assigned....
He broke off the thought. He didn't want reality, past or future, to
intrude on them. It was as if, emerging from the tunnel into the open
sunlight, they had removed themselves from the real world, shutting it
behind them with an act as simple as closing a door. The Organization
existed behind the thick concrete walls, in the network of underground
streets and moving walks--but only there. Not outside. Not in the sun.
Except for the Freemen, he thought unexpectedly.
He put one hand to the girl's hair, feeling its softness bristle at the
nape of her neck where it was cut short, then turn soft as water when
his fingers passed through the longer curls.
His hand stopped. "Your head is hot," he said. "We'd better get out of
the sun."
"I'm all right."
"No. Neither of us is used to this much sun. It'll be shady on the
other side."
He led her by the hand, keeping within arm's reach of the curving
wall. Here and there they passed steel doors set flush with the smooth
concrete, and once a slab of steel in the ground about ten feet from
the wall, similar to the one from which they had emerged. He thanked
the luck which had made him remember these exits and how to find them.
They reached shade, sharp and definite as black ink on white paper,
painting the shape of the building long and flat across the bleak
landscape. Coolness struck his face and hands as crisply as a slap. He
drew the girl close to the building. Together they sank to the ground.
"Are you sure no one will find us?"