THE SENTINEL STARS

A NOVEL OF THE FUTURE BY
LOUIS CHARBONNEAU

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

With love to
Helen and Bruce

TRH-247

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.

She was studying him now. "Yes."

It was strange, he thought, how much was already understood between them, how much had no need to be said.

"When can we meet?"

"I—that wouldn't be wise."

"When?" he demanded. "This afternoon? Tonight?"

"No, no." She licked her lips nervously. "I'm late. I have to go. Please—we're not of the same status. There's no use—we'd be seen."

His hand went out quickly to grip her arm, and she flinched sharply. His fingers held her, tight on the soft flesh under the coarse red fabric. "Don't you want to see me again?"

She glanced anxiously toward the doors of the building, as if afraid that an Inspector might be watching them. "That doesn't have anything to do with it. It—it's impossible." Then she seemed to wilt, her weight sagging against his supporting hand. "Yes," she said helplessly, "I do want to see you."

"What time? When are you free?"

She hesitated. "Four o'clock this afternoon. But—"

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?"

He put his arm around her shoulders. "No one will be looking."

She stared past him at the wasteland extending in every direction between the tall buildings and beyond. "It's so—so empty," she said nervously. "I've never been out before."

"Not many workers have."

"It frightens me."

"Don't look at it."

She looked up at him, and something in her eyes seemed to melt. She quivered spasmodically as he folded her into his arms. Her eyes were wide as his face loomed near, but when he brought his lips to hers, the fringed lids closed over her eyes like shades drawn against the light. And suddenly her hands were strong and hard on his back, urgent and demanding....

The sun, invisible to them now behind the building, touched the horizon. The bleached earth turned brown, and its surface, apparently flat before, shaped itself into small, shadowed rises and ridges. The air was cooler.

"I saw you leave the Research Center this morning," Hendley said. "Where were you going?"

For an instant something like dismay was naked in her eyes. "You must have seen somebody else," she said quickly.

"Do you think I'd mistake anyone else for you?"

Her face was pink, and now she didn't meet his eyes. "Oh, I—I don't really work there." The words spilled out in a rush. "I was—afraid of you—and I didn't know what to think. So I said I worked there. I really work up the street—I'm a clerk in a dress shop." She looked up at him beseechingly. "I shouldn't have lied."

He was so relieved that he found it easy to forgive her. "You didn't have to be afraid."

"I know that now."

Smiling, he caressed the round curve of her shoulder. The fabric of her coverall, which was still open at the front, was smooth to his touch. Her red garment had been rougher, cheaper....

"Why did you wear blue?" he asked suddenly.

"Because you do. Then if we were seen together, we wouldn't be noticed especially. It's illegal for a 3-Dayman to go out with a girl in red. You know that."

"It's illegal to wear the wrong color, too. Where did you get it—this coverall?"

"From a—a friend."

"She's bigger than you are—here. I like your waist."

"She's not bigger here."

"No." He smiled. "I like that too." He regarded her objectively. "You're very beautiful."

"Don't say that."

"Why not? It's true."

"It's what I'm supposed to be." Her mouth had a sad, reflective curve.

"What does that mean?"

"Just tell me—do you like me?"

"Very much. Don't you know, Ann?"

"Tell me that."

He told her. And the sun went down completely beyond the unseen horizon, leaving behind a gray world. The concrete cylinders loomed larger in the dusk, more forbidding. A wind whined across the unprotected land.

"It's been wonderful out here," she said. "I'll never forget it. At first it scared me, but—not now."

"You'll come out again."

She smiled, staring off into the distance. "Yes, of course."

He felt her shiver. "You're getting cold. We'll have to go in."

"I'm not really cold." She gazed at him seriously. "I'm glad we were both free this afternoon."

He weighed his answer, wondering how she would react. "I wasn't," he said. "Today was a work day for me. I didn't report."

She frowned, staring at him without comprehension.

"It's true," he said. "This wasn't a free day. But I'm glad I didn't work. I'd never have met you."

She was instantly concerned. "You'll be penalized!"

"I suppose so." He smiled at her shocked expression. "What do you think would happen if we were caught together out here? Or if you were found wearing blue?"

"That's different! They'd have to catch us—but they'll know you didn't work!" The full implications of his action had reached her, and her eyes were round with dismay—and wonder. "Why? What made you do it?"

"I can't really explain it. Maybe it has something to do with—" For a moment he was withdrawn, searching his own mind. Then he asked, "What do you think about the Merger?"

"I don't think about it much," she said slowly.

"It doesn't mean anything to you?"

She shook her head. "Why should it?"

"It's what started me off. But that was just the"—he thought of the firearms in the Historical Museum exhibit—"the trigger. I was trying to be ... me."

She regarded him apprehensively. "What will they do to you?"

He shrugged. "I suppose there's a whole team of computers and technicians somewhere in the Organization that handles these things. I don't imagine I'm the first one."

"Don't do anything like that again," she said urgently. "Promise me you won't."

He said it to please her, not knowing what he meant to do. The world beneath the surface and inside the cylinders was still unreal. "I promise," he said.

Darkness was closing in when they once again circled the wall, looking for the steel door he had wedged open. When they came to it he felt the first real tug of fear. The door seemed tight. He knelt quickly. The heavy weight of the steel had crushed the fabric belt flat—but there was still a narrow opening. The inside latch had not caught.

Hiding his relief, he rose and once more took Ann into his arms. "Don't give back that blue outfit," he said.

"No," she whispered. "No, Hendley."

He kissed her. When he opened the door and took her hand to help her step down, she said, "We should go separately."

Surprised, he pondered the suggestion a moment. "I don't think we were noticed. And the museum is open all night. We can just go back—"

"It would be safer," she insisted. "I—I'll meet you in front of the museum in five minutes. I can find my way out."

He caught the appeal in her voice. And she might be right after all. If they were to use this meeting place again, it was just being sensible to come and go separately.

"All right," he said. "You go first."

Her hand gave his a convulsive squeeze. She dropped down into the tunnel, her steps ringing faintly on the metal staircase. He waited until the sounds had faded off. The sky was a deep blue now, and a single bright star was visible above the horizon. What must it be like to see the whole span of the sky lit up with stars? Now that he knew the way, he could come out and see. There was nothing to prevent him. There had never been anything but the habit of obedience.

When five minutes had passed he stepped onto the stairway, pulling the steel door shut behind him and locking it. He had taken only a couple of steps down the winding stairs when he heard a distinct, flat sound. He went rigid. Motionless, his muscles taut, he waited, listening intently. The narrow aisle along the floor of the tunnel was dimly lighted. High on the stairway he was almost lost in shadows. The sound had been that of a door closing gently under its own power—or slowly eased shut. No more than the click of a latch, magnified along the tunnel. Now there was only silence.

He didn't want to be caught here. No explanation would be accepted without an investigation—and there would be signs on the surface revealing that two people had been out together, a man and a woman.

Slowly, setting each foot cautiously onto the metal steps, he began to descend. When he was low enough he leaned down and away from the staircase to peer along the tunnel. The service tunnel fed into a larger passage. There was a door at this opening, and another between the passage and the air conditioning-heating room. The door at the end of the tunnel was open.

Perhaps Ann had left the farther door slightly ajar, and a slight current of air had caused it to click shut. Still....

Hendley reached the bottom of the stairs. Keeping close to the maze of pipes along one side, he edged forward. A shadow moved across the face of the tunnel. Hendley squeezed close to the pipes. One of them carried hot water, and he had to suppress a gasp as his hand touched the hot metal.

After a long moment he moved his head out a few inches—just far enough to catch a glimpse of the opening at the end of the tunnel. A shoulder came into view, bearing the emblem of a security guard on a green sleeve. Hendley eased back against the pipes, setting his teeth against the heat from the one pipe that seared a bar of pain across his back. If the guard took one or two steps into the tunnel—or even leaned through the door to get a better angle of view—Hendley would be visible to him.

Hendley breathed very slowly and silently. His legs were beginning to quiver from the strain. Either the guard didn't suspect his presence, or he was unwilling to enter the tunnel alone, making himself a vulnerable target. What had drawn the man there? Had Ann been seen leaving? Surely not—the guard's investigation would be more thorough. Had he heard a suspicious noise then, the noise Hendley had made closing and locking the outside door? Or was this simply a routine inspection?

The tunnel darkened suddenly. The steel door clanked shut, sealing the tunnel off from the adjoining passage. In the dim light remaining from the tunnel's own illumination panel, Hendley stepped away from the pipes into the center of the aisle. He let out a deep breath.

He was safe enough for the moment. But obviously he couldn't risk leaving the building the way he had entered. The guard might be going on his rounds—or the closing of the door might be a ruse. Frowning, Hendley tried to sort out in his memory the various functions of this utility tunnel. If he remembered correctly, it led to a large water pump station, and there were branches along the way feeding into smaller underground facilities. It should be no trick to find another way out.

He could hear the water pump when he was still a good distance away from the station. It would probably be routinely guarded. He chose at random one of the branching tunnels. A few minutes later he stepped into the heating room of what he guessed was an arcade. The heating and air-conditioning unit was of a size and type designed to serve a series of small shops and offices.

No one saw him when he emerged from the room into a walkway behind a row of shops. He strode casually along the walk and stepped out into a crowded street.

Orienting himself, Hendley found that he was only a quarter of a mile from the museum. He began hurrying through the noisy evening crowd. Theater and sports arena marquees were winking. Throngs filled the busy arcades, the sidewalk venders, the discussion halls, the public gyms. A news announcer's voice blared from a street corner viewscreen. Still talking about the Merger.

Hendley saw the steps of the museum ahead. He didn't know exactly how long his roundabout escape had taken. He had given Ann a five-minute start. Add about fifteen minutes to that, he guessed. She would be anxious now, worrying.

A few people were entering the museum. A guard stood by the entry, watching the crowd on the street below with apparently casual interest. A young woman emerged from the museum. She wore a yellow coverall and her hair was dark.

Baffled, Hendley walked slowly past the museum steps. ABC-331 was not there.

The guard at the Historical Museum's entry was watching him now. Hendley merged with the flow of pedestrians, allowing himself to be carried along. He had been wandering back and forth in front of the building for twenty minutes. Long enough to draw attention to himself. Longer than necessary to know that Ann was gone.

He couldn't understand her actions. The chilling fear kept recurring that somehow she had been detected leaving the tunnel. But reason argued that in that event the museum guards would have made a careful search for her male companion.

Then why had she vanished? Looking back, trying to recall everything that had happened between them, every word that had been spoken, Hendley recognized evasiveness in some of her replies, duplicity in some of her actions. She had been trying to avoid him when she left the Research Center early that day. Moreover, she had suggested that they leave separately. She had planned to disappear.

Yet she had come to meet him—she had given herself to him joyously.

Tired and discouraged, Hendley stopped at a sidewalk vending unit. He hadn't eaten since breakfast. He selected a hot meal, pressed the appropriate buttons, and presented his identity disc. A red panel of light flashed on.

Startled, Hendley stared at the machine. He tried again. Once more his charge was rejected.

Someone was watching him curiously. Hendley quickly left the vender. Safely in the crowded street again, he found that he was trembling. Now it begins, he thought.

He tried to enter a theater. The ticket machine rejected his identity disc. He went down the escalator to a subway station. There was a line of people before the gate. By the time Hendley reached it, a number of other people had lined up behind him. His hand shook as he held his identity disc out to the ticket machine. Again a red light flashed.

The people behind him grew restless. "Come on, hurry up!" a man said. "What's the trouble?" another asked. "Look!" a woman cried. "Something's wrong! That red light is on!"

Hendley slipped out of the line, his face hot and his heart bumping wildly against his ribs. He heard a shout behind him as he reached the escalators. He plunged up the moving steps.

Back on the street, he was afraid to enter another crowded place to use his disc again. He waited until he found a small, old-fashioned coffee machine tucked away in a quiet corner of an arcade. No one was watching him.

The antique vending machine whirred, vibrated, and began to buzz loudly. Hendley ran.

As long as he kept to the crowded streets, he was safe from detection—providing he didn't attempt to use his identity disc. That way they could track him. But if his disc was useless, he couldn't eat, he couldn't enter a recreation hall, he couldn't take the subway, or sleep in a rented room. He couldn't find rest or refuge in a theater. He could only keep moving.

In the middle of this well-fed city, he could be starved. Free to move about at will, he was trapped.

The day of rebellion had come full circle. He could wait it out until the need of food or sleep dragged him down. He could make them find him. If Ann had been with him, if the machines had rejected her too, he might have kept going as long as possible.

Alone, he knew that he didn't want to. He had known all along this would happen. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of making him run until he was exhausted, until he was forced to crawl to them, hungry and frightened.

Hendley went up the nearest ramp to the moving sidewalks, grateful that these at least were a free service. He would not have relished walking all the way back to the Architectural Center.

When he reached the Center he stood outside the entry for several minutes. It was almost midnight, but you couldn't determine that from street level. At surface level, from the courtyard between the office core and the sleeping unit, you would be able to see the night sky overhead. Elsewhere the day was all one. Activity was the same at any hour, involving different work shifts, different people, but essentially the same.

Hendley felt an inner chill as he entered the residential wing and made his way up to his room. No one stopped him. His room had no lock on the door. The room was undisturbed, silent, empty.

On the small plastic desk to the left of the entrance was a slip of white paper. The note, which had been delivered through the mail chute opening in the wall just above the desk, directed him to report to the infirmary. It was stamped with the time of delivery: 9:35 A.M.

In sudden anger Hendley tore the note into shreds and threw the white strips of paper into the waste chute. As they disappeared, fluttering madly in the suction, he had the odd impression that they were like the tiny figures of the Freemen he had seen in the film, vanishing into the trees.

There was a knock on the door.

The tall, silver-haired man in the beige coverall had a genial face, dominated by sympathetic gray eyes. He was big-boned and heavy, but he carried himself easily. His voice had an impressive rumble.

"Good evening, TRH-247," he said. "You've had quite a day, haven't you?"

The emblem on his sleeve, brown with a white background, showed a design of staff-and-serpent. Lettered in brown stitching were the words Morale Investigator.

"You will come with me," the Investigator said. With a faintly indulgent smile he added, "I trust you are not going to give us any trouble?"

Hendley shook his head. He had stopped running. As he stepped from his room into the bright corridor, he felt an odd tug of regret for the close security he was leaving. The room was too small, blind-walled, impersonal, uninviting. But it was a place familiar and known. It held no surprises.

4

Naked, TRH-247 sat on a cool white plastic bench and repressed a shiver. The room was not cold, but gooseflesh stood out on his arms. Though he was now alone in one of a series of examination rooms to which he had been taken, he felt ill at ease in his nakedness—an effect no doubt carefully calculated, he reflected, to increase the insecurity anyone must feel in the Morale Investigation Center.

Everything in the Center was designed to create the impression that here nothing was—nothing could be—concealed. The walls, the ceilings, the floors, the spare furnishings, the instruments—all were a gleaming, immaculate white plastic, bathed in clear white light. Even the attendants and nurses, as well as the gray-haired Investigators, donned white robes over their uniforms when they entered the Center.

Hendley had not seen the first Investigator since they parted at the beginning of his processing. But in the course of his tests—psychological, intelligence and reaction tests, a humiliatingly thorough physical examination, along with other tests unfamiliar to him—he had met two other men identified as Investigators. Each might have been cast from a single mold. In the small interrogation rooms they seemed to grow, looming larger to the eye like figures on a viewscreen expanding as the camera moved in for a closeup. They were all big men, all distinguished, all gray-haired, all easy of manner—big, handsome, confident men, like idealized father-images.

Suddenly, sitting on the cold white bench, hugging his body with his arms against the unreasonable chill that shook him, Hendley remembered an incident long forgotten, a fragment from that strangely blank period of pre-work—he thought of it that way; not as childhood, but as pre-work. It had been a negative time, like a period of non-existence in preparation for existence. If it had seemed then a time of freedom, that illusion prevailed only because the concept of freedom was not understood. In fact those days had been strictly regimented, filled with classes, recreation hours, group games, prescribed activities from waking to sleeping.

But on one occasion, at least, there had been a kind of escape into life. Hendley hadn't been alone in the daring escapade, although he could not recall the numbers of the other two boys, or even their faces. One had been fat and very blond, with an intense dislike of exercise not of his own choosing. The other had been a small, slender, lively, black-haired boy whose memorable characteristic in Hendley's mind was a flashing smile and a high-pitched, squealing laugh.

The idea had been the blond boy's in the beginning, Hendley was sure, but there had been no sense of being led. For all three boys the action had been spontaneous, unpremeditated, without malice or special meaning. One moment they were walking toward their classroom along an underground street—it was morning, but there was no awareness of time then, in a pre-work day beneath the surface—and the next moment they were opposite a pedestrian ramp leading to the sidewalk strips and the fat blond boy was yelling, "Let's go for a ride!" And in the instant they were racing exuberantly up the ramp, dodging among the uniformed men and women, excitedly jumping onto the moving walk, pausing only when they were safely together on the walk to stare at each other in flushed, panting triumph. A glitter of challenge had danced in the fat boy's eyes—Why could he remember that exact expression, Hendley wondered, but not the face which shaped it?—and he had made a reckless, clumsy leap to the fast strip. Hendley and the slender boy had hurtled after him, the latter's shrill peal of laughter trailing behind them. In that moment when he was airborne between the strips, his heart bumping with fear, Hendley experienced a surge of happy exhilaration such as he'd never felt before. Suddenly the thoughtless flight acquired a sharp spirit of adventure. Soon it was he who took the lead, challenging his companions to new and more intricate maneuvers on the walks, bolder excursions into the bustling center of the city.

They stayed out all day, wandering through the crowded, noisy arcades, exploring the colorful stores, filing in wonder through the great stone plaza in the middle of the business district past the giant statues and sculptured stone trees and strange marble animals. When the sightseeing began to pall, they boarded the walks again, riding them to remote parts of the city. It was only at the end of the day when, tired and hungry, they tried to retrace their way and found themselves lost, that the realization came to them slowly that they had done something unheard of, something very wrong, for which they were sure to be punished.

They had strayed far from the sidewalk strips, and in their search for the walks they came upon a clearing which ended in a high, blank wall. Curiosity gaining the better of their increasing nervousness about the day's adventure, they followed the line of the wall, speculating about it.

"I know what it is," the fat boy said confidently.

"I'll bet you don't!" the smallest of the trio said.

"What is it?" Hendley demanded.

"He doesn't know," the slender boy jeered.

"I do too! It's where people go when they're old!"