The long, blank-walled anteroom of the mating center was crowded to
capacity with love-privileged men and women who had been granted short
emergency leaves and were waiting to have their identification disks
checked.
Teleman and Alicia stood very quietly in one corner of the large room,
forcing themselves to remain calm and hardly glancing at the men and
women about them.
They did not even allow their thoughts to dwell on the final stages
of their almost miraculous escape--their unobserved ascent to a
travel strip on the far side of the forest in the early hours of the
morning, their journey on the strip in garments new to them, their
self-consciousness when they glanced down at the insignia which
proclaimed that their destination was a mating center and that they
could walk openly in the sunlight as lovers, and pass a security guard
or a Monitor without fearing that they would be stopped and questioned.
Had they wished they could have even paused and embraced openly on
the strip, exchanging light, casual caresses, but that they had not
done. Their love was neither light nor casual and the memory of the
fulfillment which had come to them above a star-mirroring pool of still
water was still too vivid and glorious to permit them to engage in the
more superficial varieties of love-play.
Those varieties would occur later as a natural accompaniment of love,
for even the deepest and most genuine love must have its lighter
aspects, but for the moment they had been content to walk quietly on
the strip hand in hand, their eyes shining with a memory-glow that had
caused a few of the pedestrians to turn and stare at them in envy which
they had not attempted to disguise.
They waited now with the glow still in their eyes, while the check-in
security guard placed identity disks into a machine which quickly
tested their genuineness and ejected them with a faint, whirring sound.
He sat at a desk in a far corner of the anteroom, a harassed and very
busy man, with a look of boredom on his face and a restless impatience
in his eyes.
"Too many leaves," he muttered, so loudly that his voice carried to
everyone in the room. "It makes quite unnecessary work for us. If I had
my way I would permit no love-making outside of a mating center. But I
am not a Monitor and I suppose I have no right to complain. I suppose
that in exceptional cases some kind of safety-valve must be provided
for the disgusting thing which you people are always talking about.
Romance! It used to be a taboo word, but now you use it quite openly."
He paused an instant, then went on complaining, the whirring of the
machine making it difficult for Teleman and Alicia to catch all of his
words.
"Of course, strictly speaking, no emergency leaves are granted on that
basis. But I, for one, am not deceived. I know precisely why so many
of you ask for emergency leaves. Illness, a death in your immediate
family, the need to visit long-neglected relatives and friends. Faugh!
If I were a Monitor I would accept no such excuses."
He raised his eyes suddenly and called out two names. "Richa Malgroon.
Taja Ramole. Your identification disks are in order. Come here and
take them, and go quietly to your compartment in Section 9Y66. For
all I care you can make love romantically all night long--right here
in the mating center. That should content you, I should imagine. Why
should you go to a vine-covered dwelling in the forest? It's all down
here. You have a dwelling in the forest where you spent your--revolting
word out of the old books--honeymoon. This time you were granted five
hours leave. You took a day and a night. But I have instructions not
to censure you. It seems your original excuse was accepted and the
Monitors can be very lenient. Too lenient, if you want my honest
opinion."
He coughed to clear his throat. "All right, come and get your disks. I
have a feeling that you spent the night in that cottage, unlawfully.
But I have no way of proving it, and the Monitors have given me
instructions which I am duty-bound to accede to."
Alicia nudged Teleman's arm. "He's talking to us," she whispered.
"Quick, darling. Go to the desk and take the disks, and try to act
completely composed, as if we had been here many times before and are
not in the least offended by his rough manner and outspokenness. I have
never heard a security guard speak so frankly. It is very strange. I
believe he is himself secretly rebellious and that his words have a
double meaning."
Teleman nodded, pressing her hand and stepping quickly to the desk. He
accepted the disks in silence and returned to where Alicia was standing.
"We can go now," he said. "Section 9Y66, compartment 66. We go through
the door on our left. We'll find someone who can direct us to the
right section and compartment. It will be no problem. But we mustn't
act as if we didn't know."
They walked across the room and through the door and found themselves
in a dimly-lighted corridor which was, for the moment, completely
deserted.
They walked to the end of it, turned right and traversed another
equally deserted corridor. As they walked along it Teleman found that
he could no longer keep to himself thoughts which had badly shaken him
and forced him, for Alicia's sake, to pretend otherwise.
"I'm afraid that we have made a mistake in coming here," he said. "We
did not know that the couple whose identity we have assumed had such
a completely documented past history. _The Monitors know about the
dwelling!_ They know that we took refuge in the dwelling. Don't you
realize what that means? We may have walked into the deadliest kind
of trap. We thought the couple had escaped from the mating center by
stealth, without having been granted any emergency leave at all. But
apparently they had a five hour leave and simply took the risk of
extending it. _And the Monitors know about the cottage_. They know we
were there, so every guard here must have been alerted. The guard at
the desk must know exactly who we are."
"I did not want to alarm you," Alicia said. "But the same thought
occurred to me. Darling, what shall we do? If we _are_ trapped--"
She moved into the circle of his arms, and he silenced her for a moment
with a kiss. Alicia rubbed her body against him, and Teleman felt a
strong urge to tear the garments from her body and take her there in
the corridor, to press her down on the hard floor ... but he pushed
back the tide of desire and spoke quickly.
"I'm afraid we are. I'm afraid we're in the deadliest kind of danger.
Why they did not seize us immediately I do not know. Perhaps they
intend to seize us in the privacy of our compartment, without causing
any commotion, without letting the others here know what is going on.
It is entirely possible that they planned it that way. That frustrated
old woman we encountered on the strip; if she is the Monitor in charge
such a capture might appeal to her in a cruelly whimsical way. To let
us think ourselves safe and then to take us by surprise!"
"If you are right, darling, what shall we do?"
"We'd better not go to our compartment. I had no intention of doing so,
but I spoke as I did in the anteroom because I didn't want to frighten
you. I wanted to get you out of there as quickly as possible."
"You still haven't answered me. What shall we do?"
"We've got to escape from this place in some way. But first we've got
to find out more about it. How many deserted corridors are there, how
many doors and windows, how many compartments where nothing but records
are stored, or mating center furniture. How many compartments which are
seldom visited, where we can hide...."
Had Teleman known, events were to take place in the next forty hours
which were to shake the entire structure of the society of which he was
a part, and make all of his desperately seized-upon plans for escaping
from the mating center completely unnecessary. But he had no way of
knowing, no way of even suspecting that he was to become an instrument
of destiny and overthrow a tyranny unique in human history.
Had he known, he would not have believed that such an event could take
place and that his own very human qualities and the courage of the
woman at his side would elevate them both to greatness.
In the world of the Monitors, the human factor was very precariously
balanced. Certain basic human instincts had been repressed or denied.
But they could not be repressed forever and the most basic impulse of
all could not be repressed without building up tensions volcanic in
intensity.
The instinct which could not be repressed could not even be discussed
in the world of the Monitors. Its denial and repudiation was basic to
the survival of that world. All reference to it in the old books had
been stippled out, and when men and women talked of love they did not
know that they were treading on dangerous ground in respect to that
impulse, which was a woman's crowning glory.
Even Teleman, despite his historic role, did not know or suspect until
he emerged from another corridor into a compartment so large that it
must have filled two-thirds of the building's interior. He did not know
until he was standing in the entranceway, staring through a pale blue
radiance at tiers upon tiers of cribs encased in sterile glass. He did
not know until he saw the babies.
Tiers upon tiers of cribs and in each crib a sleeping human infant.
And in a few cribs a crying and a reaching out of tiny hands for arms
that were not there, the arms of the mothers.
In each crib a man or woman of the future, still in swaddling clothes,
but beginning to become aware of the world that he or she would someday
inherit.
A thousand tiny faces stared up into the blue-lit immensity above the
sterile cots, some rosy-cheeked and smiling, and fully awake, but most
sleeping soundly. There were thin and peaked faces as well as rosy
ones, contented faces and hungry-looking faces, and faces that looked
completely innocent and faces that resembled the countenances of little
old men, worn by years of toil, and faces that asked questions and
faces that were content to express neither anger nor fear nor high
intelligence but wore a look of untroubled innocence.
Teleman was too shaken to do more than stare silently and it was Alicia
who put what they both felt into words, her eyes shining with a bright,
newly-experienced kind of tenderness.
"I've heard about them but I've never seen them before. How beautiful
they are, even the very thin ones and the angry ones! All of the future
is here. But there is something lacking also. I feel it--I know it to
be so. We are told that they will grow to manhood and to womanhood
lacking nothing, but I cannot believe that the Monitors do not lie
about that.
"There is something that should be here that is not here. They have a
need, a need that is just as strong and complete in itself as the love
which we have for each other."
The sobbing was so far away and so low that they scarcely heard it at
first. It came from the opposite side of the enormous room, and they
could not see the woman with bent back and tearstained face who was
kneeling beside one of the cribs, and tenderly caressing the cheeks of
a sleeping infant.