The passengers were told to fasten their seat belts. The precaution hardly seemed necessary, for the copter’s motion was almost imperceptible in the windowless cabin. An illuminateci board flashed the message that the ship was hovering in the landing pattern over City No. 9, waiting its turn to descend. Hendley had a mental image of the great city below, huge concrete cylinders rising from the brown, barren land. From above a circular eye in the center of each tower would be visible, peering at the sky.
Wondering what time it was, Hendley was startled to realize how readily he had come to measure time by the sun. He looked around for the copter’s clock panel, found it at the back of the cabin. It was not yet two o’clock.
There would be time to reach the Historical Museum before four.
Would she be there? Three weeks had passed since he’d suggested the museum as a meeting place. Even if she had clung to the hope that he was alive and safe, she would believe that he was in the Freeman Camp under Nik’s identity. Would she still have come, day after day, to look for him? How long would such blind hope have lasted before discouragement came, and then despair?
He looked down at his left hand, held stiff by plastic braces and wrapped in a fresh bandage. The little doctor had again attended to his hand without question and without recompense. Only once had he sought to dissuade Hendley, saying, “If this man was a criminal, you shouldn’t leave the camp in his place. He must have had good reason for smuggling himself in here. That took some doing.”
But Hendley had replied: “It may be my only chance to get out. I have to take it. Even if I could live with this kind of freedom, which I can’t, I’d have to go back. To find her.”
A slight bump alerted him. The copter had landed. Hendley let some of the other passengers file out ahead of him. The exit led directly along an enclosed ramp into a reception area. Hendley walked slowly behind the others. He had no idea what to expect. But for some reason he felt no fear.
A bank of windows in the outer wall of the receiving area faced the great circle of the landing field. A six-foot partition of plastic formed the opposite wall. Set into it was an open gateway. Attendants stationed on either side of the gate watched the passengers with routine curiosity, conveying no impression of special alertness. But Hendley knew that it was not these he had to be concerned about. It was the master computer stationed by the gate, its unblinking eye waiting to record the identities of all those who passed through.
The more impatient passengers were already filing through the gate. As Hendley loitered at the very end of the line, one of the attendants inspected him idly, looked away, then let his gaze wander back. Hendley began searching his uniform pockets. When he dared another glimpse, the attendant had lost interest and was no longer watching.
Everything was all right. The computer might reject his identity number, but the gateway was open. It appeared that the computer did not have to control the gate to allow each passenger through. Hendley guessed that such a process caused too much congestion. When the moment came, a sudden rush would carry him through the opening. Before the guards could act, he would be merging into the stream of travelers thronging the main lobby. With luck he would escape.
It was too much to hope that the computer at the city’s central landing field would not possess information about the visitor whose identity disc Hendley wore. And the big man had said enough to make it clear that he was a hunted criminal.
The passenger directly in front of Hendley reached the gate and flashed his identity disc. The computer emitted a low click. The passenger walked on. Hendley stepped into his place. He waved his wrist toward the computer’s eye casually. He was too conditioned to computer efficiency to feel any surprise when the machine buzzed in protest. A red warning light flickered.
Hendley did not wait any longer. He charged for the open gateway.
A split-second later he was reeling back, his face and body bruised and battered, his brain numbed by shock. Something had risen to smash him away from the opening. Awareness seeped into his stunned mind. An invisible electronic field triggered by the computer’s warning. Impregnable. The way was blocked.
There were voices now. Shouts beyond the barrier, faces swimming toward him. Green uniforms—guards advancing. He stumbled back, looking around frantically. There was no other gate. In seconds the attendants would be on him. Only one path lay open, and that seemed a dead end. He took it anyway, running blindly down the tubelike ramp which led back into the copter. A stewardess blocked his way. He brushed by her into the cabin. A man was coming along the aisle, dressed in beige, wearing a stitched emblem with wings—the ship’s mechanic. Hendley did not slow his rush. He drove into the man at full tilt, his one good fist smashing out ahead of him, striking the mechanic’s jaw so hard the impact sent an electric shock along strings of nerves all the way up Hendley’s arm into his shoulder. The man fell backward. Hendley trampled over him.
Then he was in the control center at the front of the copter. A service door stood open, a ladder suspended from the doorway. Hendley went down three steps and jumped to the paved surface of the landing field.
There was a momentary illusion of escape. The landing field was broad and open, dotted here and there with copters in the process of loading or unloading. There was no one immediately behind him. Hendley started across the field, running, putting distance between himself and the alerted guards. He ran into a wide, bright swatch of sunlight.
A siren began to yip—an ascending series of pulsating cries. Hendley stopped, looking back. Still there was no one in close pursuit. The door of the copter from which he had escaped was still open—no! The ladder withdrew even as he watched. The door swung shut! He whirled. All around the field the routine of activity had ceased. Ladders were withdrawing, ramps pulling back, doors closing. Two men at the far side of the field, mechanics, ran toward an opening and jumped through it just before a panel sealed the doorway.
Hendley was alone in the center of the deserted landing field, standing in the glare of the sun as in a spotlight, exposed and defenseless.
The siren’s wail died as if it were running down. Silence shut down upon the great expanse of the landing field like a lid. Hendley took a couple of aimless steps. The thud of his footsteps echoed across the pavement. He saw movement behind the high windows all around the field, faces pressing close to the glass, mouths gaping.
From somewhere high above came the slow, deep grinding of a giant machine rousing itself, groaning, heaving into motion. Hendley looked up. The massive interlocking panels of the airfield’s domelike roof, ordinarily closed only against the weather, were moving. Two vast crescents crept toward each other, straightening out, sluggishly diminishing the opening through which sunlight and warmth poured down. Hendley could not tear his eyes away. Alone, isolated in the stunned silence of the airfield, he watched the roof close over him with a sensation of physical pain. The two closing crescents were like two huge presses grinding together, beating the sky into an ever-thinner, brighter sliver, crushing it at last as the roof panels clashed shut.
Sickened, Hendley tore his gaze away. He saw that doors had opened now at intervals spanning the wide circle of the landing field. Green-uniformed guards advanced toward him from each doorway, carrying weapons he could not identify at the distance. He stood rooted, unable to run any more. The tight green cordon of guards pulled closer around, the circle shrinking. He threw an agonized glance overhead at the blank, sealed grayness of the roof dome, where mo-ments before there had been a dazzling brightness. A deep chill made him shiver. He looked once more at the noose of guards tightening around him, and slowly he sank to his knees.
His rebellion had ended.
The trial was brief.
For three days Hendley was kept in a bare, windowless room in the Judicial Center. There was a single, one-piece pad of plastifoam on which to he. The foam was designed so that, intact, it was both resilient and comfortable. It was almost impossible to tear, but even if that could have been managed, the damaged web of foam would then have disintegrated. There was no way it could be used as a weapon, either against others or oneself. Because it breathed, it would not even smother if held over the face. The cell was otherwise empty.
He was taken from the room for periodic questionings, some of them under drugs. Before the trial began he knew that the contents of his brain had been thoroughly scooped out and examined. All would be presented in evidence.
His uniform was taken from him, along with the identity disc which had belonged to the visitor. He wondered if he would be led naked into the courtroom.
On the fourth day he was given a nondescript uniform of a kind he had never seen before, a pale gray in color. He was transferred to another room. Here there was one window. It was covered with unbreakable plastic, but he could look out and, through a speaker imbedded in the plastic, listen to the sounds outside. The room was well above street level, looking out upon the vast underground city.
At first, listening and watching with fascination as the familiar activity of the city swarmed through the streets, he felt a peculiar sense of rightness, a feeling of being back in his own element, his senses lulled by sights and sounds he had always known—the soft artificial sky of the illuminated roof, the rumble of walk and tube and hurrying feet, the babble of talk, the faintly discernible odor of chemically cleansed air—most of all the knowledge of being enclosed, contained within the city’s gigantic womb.
But in a short time Hendley began to feel unnerved by the jostling, hurrying crowds, even though he was not physically among them. The noise and confusion made his head ache. The city seemed oppressively close and warm. There was nowhere a patch of cool shade on which the eye could rest. He felt a barrenness in the unending surfaces of stone and glass and plastic and metal, unrelieved by any grass or living plant. He missed the irregularities of landscape, the sense of openness, the unexpected breezes which he had so quickly come to take for granted in the Freeman Camp. He began to feel himself a tiny creature caught in the intricately meshing gears of a huge, impersonal machine buried far underground.
He turned off the speaker, welcoming the silence of his cell, and in the end he did not even look out the window.
The trial began on the fifth day. Wearing his gray uniform, Hendley was led into an antiseptically clean, white amphitheater. As he was taken to his seat in the center of the courtroom, spectators, seated behind glass on the balcony level, ogled him. He was surprised to see a second empty chair beside his own. The surprise turned to shocked dismay when a second gray-clad figure was escorted into the court. He rose, dumfounded, as ABC-331 was seated in the chair next to his.
“What are you doing here?” he exclaimed. “How did they find—” He broke off. They had scoured out his mind. They knew everything. Everything from that first forbidden escapade outside the museum.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ann said, trying to soothe him. “It’s all right. This is the way I want it.”
“But they can’t—you’ve done nothing!”
She smiled a little. “Did you think you broke the rule all by yourself that first day?”
“But they wouldn’t try you with me for that alone!”
“There’s more. You’ve made a misfit out of me, too.” She spoke without regret, with even a suggestion of pride. “I was withdrawn from my—my work. There were complaints that I was—uncooperative. Do you understand, Hendley?”
As the meaning of her words sank in, he felt a rush of emotion, full and swelling in his chest. “So that’s why you haven’t been in the show!”
“Yes, that’s why. Then when I learned about your arrest—it’s been on all the news, they’re making an issue out of it—I beat them to it before they could come for me. I gave myself up as an accomplice.” Hendley started to protest but Ann went on quickly, giving him no chance. “You wouldn’t have been caught in the camp by that—that awful man if you hadn’t tried to see me. It’s because of me you’re here at all. Don’t you know how important that is yet? I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but with you.”
Hendley sank into the chair beside her. He reached out impulsively to grip her hand.
A stern voice intruded. Hendley looked up at the bench facing the two chairs of the accused. “The accused will be silent,” a grim-visaged judge said, staring down at them. “This court will now come to order.”
As the procedural ritual to open the trial began, Hendley thought of Ann’s reference to Nik. His safe refuge under Hendley’s identity would have exploded around him. He would certainly have been taken into custody, perhaps returned to the Freeman Camp. Hendley smiled grimly.
Two beige-clad men came forward at the judge’s order. One was designated as a pleader for the defense, the other for the prosecution. There was also a bailiff, several guards, and, ranged along one wall, a bank of twelve computers, six in each of two rows. Each was of a different design and manufacture. These, Hendley knew, were the jurors. Such trials were unusual in the Organization, but not unknown, and the system was familiar to him. He guessed that the rarity might account for the crowded spectator gallery.
“They’re here because of all the news coverage,” Ann whispered, as if she had divined his thoughts. “Not just over you, but over that man whose disc you were wearing. There’s been a lot of furor over BAM. They’re said to be guilty of sabotage—it’s caused all kinds of excitement.” She paused. Then, nodding at the jury, she asked, “Why are there twelve of them?”
“It’s an old tradition.”
“Wouldn’t one of them do?”
“Yes. A more sophisticated computer could even make twelve separate sets of calculations, for that matter. But it’s traditional—it’s always been done that way.”
The two pleaders began to present their cases. Each spoke rapidly, without emotion—the emotional factor could not be considered by the computers who would render the verdict, and was, in fact, regarded as inconsistent with absolute justice. The presentation by the prosecution took most of the morning. Its weight of evidence was exhaustive. At noon the court recessed. Hendley was taken back to his cell, where he was given a spare meal. When the trial resumed, it seemed to him that Ann was paler, more drawn than before.
The defense made no attempt to refute the evidence, pointing instead to the instability of morale shared by the two accused, and to the series of events beyond their control which had driven them into infractions of the Organization’s rules of order. The defense was palpably weak. A sense of the hopelessness of their case began to weigh upon Hendley.
The defense rested. Two legal computers were brought into the courtroom and hooked up to the jury. Each in turn fed into the twelve jurors all recorded legal precedents which bore upon the case for or against the accused. During this time Hendley could not help staring at the flickering screens of the twelve jurors. He had the strange sensation that they were watching him, examining and judging what they saw.
Ann sat with her head down, her hands clasped in an attitude of resignation. But her face, when she glanced up at him, was calm.
“It’s all right,” she whispered reassuringly. But he knew that she did not mean they would be acquitted.
At last, after a brief address to the jury by the judge, the twelve computers went into action. A bailiff pushed a button to start them off. Hendley could see excited activity among the spectators in the balcony as they craned their necks to see and talked animatedly among themselves. In the soundproofed courtroom only the calculations of the jury were audible, each computer racing to its decision—clicking, humming, whirring, finally coughing up, each in turn, a strip of white tape. The bailiff ceremoniously collected each strip and handed all twelve to the judge. As he examined them his stern face did not change expression.
“The accused will rise,” he intoned. Staring down gravely at Hendley and Ann, he said: “You have been accused of rebellion and sedition against the rules of order of the Organization. The verdict is unanimous—guilty!”
Hendley was surprised to find that he felt no reaction. Too much had happened to him in recent weeks. Or perhaps it was just that he had already accepted the inevitability of the decision.
“It is within the prerogative of this court,” the judge said slowly, “to determine the severity of sentence. In the light of the male accused’s persistent and determined efforts to defy the Organization’s accepted mode of conduct and way of life, the court does not see that leniency would serve any just purpose. As for the female accused, known as ABC-331, it would appear that her emotional relationship with her fellow accused accounts in great part for her actions. Rehabilitation in the Morale Center—”
“No!” Ann cried, leaping to her feet. “We’re both guilty!”
The judge frowned severely. “The accused will refrain—”
“But I must! You can’t separate us!” She whirled toward Hendley, seizing his arm with desperate fingers. “Don’t let them! Hendley, please, I have to be with you!”
“Bailiff!” the judge stormed. There was turmoil in the gallery as the judge pounded his bench with a gavel.
“Stop it!” Hendley spoke to Ann sharply. “They’ll make your punishment easy!”
“I don’t care about punishment!” she cried. “I don’t care about the Organization! I care about us! What kind of life would I have without you now?”
The bailiff reached them. Shoving Hendley aside, he grabbed Ann’s arms. Hendley spun the bailiff around, breaking his hold. The courtroom guards converged on the scene. In the brief struggle one of the guards clipped Hendley a glancing blow with a club. Ann was pushed into her chair.
As suddenly as it had begun the scuffle was over. With an effort Hendley brought his anger under control. The bailiff glared at him threateningly, but Hendley ignored him as he resumed his seat and looked anxiously at Ann. Her hand reached out to him in mute appeal. Her cheeks were damp with tears.
He looked up bitterly as the judge began to speak. The eyes that met his showed neither compassion nor understanding. These would be out of place, Hendley thought angrily, in such a court, just as they could not really exist in a world governed by machines.
“It is the judgment of this court,” the judge said harshly, “that the names TRH-247 and ABC-331 be erased from all the records of the Organization, that their identity discs be destroyed, and that the accused formerly known by said numbered designations be taken from the city and banished forever into the outer light….”