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. Handley 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 l-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 disappointaient. 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.