by Ben Bova
“THX 1138, you are under arrest for drug evasion and resisting arrest. Further resistance is useless.”
Then from the same robot came OOM’s voice: “I am here to help you. Relax. You have nothing to fear. I am here.”
THX’s shoulders slumped. There was no other place to run to.
From one of the robots he heard a faint human voice announcing:
“THX 1138 has been taken into custody at a minimal monetary expenditure. Total operation cost 3000 units under budget. Congratulations. Be efficient. Be happy.”
The other chrome robot took a step forward and touched THX with his rod. Gently.
A searing bolt of electricity blazed through every nerve in his body. He collapsed into blackness.
Chapter 9
He was sitting up. It took a long time for his eyes to focus, and then he realized it was because there was nothing for them to focus on.
He was clean, freshly dressed, sitting alone in an endless, featureless expanse of white. Clinical white, soundless, odorless, no shadows, no horizon. Nothing but himself and a perfect endless limbo of pure white.
Suddenly he was shivering uncontrollably. He pulled himself together into a fetal ball, trying to protect himself against the nothingness that surrounded him. Gradually he grew tired. His eyes closed. He slept.
Voices awakened him. He couldn’t tell where they were coming from. There was still absolutely nothing to be seen. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the chatter was like the continuous babble of instructions and commands that filled the working and living areas of the city. Somehow THX felt reassured. This at least was familiar.
He slept again.
This time he was awakened by footsteps. THX got to his feet and looked around to see where they were coming from. Nothing. But the steps were getting louder. Firm, heavy, even strides. He turned and there was a police robot with an electric rod in one hand.
THX backed away. But another police robot appeared, and another. He tried to move away from them, out of reach of those rods. He had felt what they could do.
They circled him, three police robots, identical and identically armed. THX ran, ran in circles while they stood around him, shuffling sideways slightly to make certain he couldn’t break between them. He ran like a caged animal looking for a way out of an endless treadmill; ran until his legs were fluttering with exhaustion, his eyes blurred and stinging, his lungs raw.
As he collapsed to the blank white floor the police robots disappeared with a bluish flash.
Chest heaving, drenched with sweat, THX stared around himself. He was alone again, alone in this white void. Which is worse? he wondered.
Then the voices came back, and he could hear them this time.
“Increase.”
“No… here… hold this down.”
“Audio.”
“Audio’s already on.”
“I can’t hear him.”
They’re talking about me!
“… cortex bonding, probably temporary. Before you report a possible equipment malfunction, don’t you check the subject?”
“Stress category.”
“Correct… Origin?”
“Birth born? Sexact? Not on his record.”
“Violation?”
“Drug evasion with…”
“Triple three, triple three! Hey, easy there!”
THX sat on the bare floor, hearing them, involuntarily looking for someone or something. But there was nothing except the voices.
“A sinex drop reading of less than 2000 with an accompanying loss of greater than 350 since admission may indicate…?”
“Permanent cortex bond.”
“Correct.”
“This really isn’t a very good subject… limited. All this over here is wasted on him. Hey… watch!”
“H’mmm… What do you think?”
“Can’t tell. Let’s get him into organalysis.”
“Shifting.”
The voices faded off. Blinking, THX sat there totally alone. Then there was another sound, a tone, a soft rich single note that thrummed just barely at the threshold of audibility. THX listened to it, cocked his head to hear it better. His eyelids, for some reason, were getting very heavy. He could hardly keep his eyes open. It was… was… He was asleep.
He awoke and tried to scream. But he couldn’t open his mouth. Couldn’t move. Not even his eyes. He was totally paralyzed, laid out straight on something hard with a huge glaring white light staring down at him like a pitiless eye.
He could see, he could feel, he could hear his own pulse throbbing in his ears. But he couldn’t voluntarily move a single muscle. Not twitch or blink or even make his tongue work.
His mouth was completely dry. He lay there for an age, straining to hear something besides his own heartbeat And then he did. A tiny, annoying electrical hum.
Into his line of vision came a shining mechanical arm tipped with a cotton pad. He felt something soft and cold rub on his biceps. The first mechanical arm retracted and another—or maybe the same one—came at him, with a hypodermic syringe at its business end. THX felt the needle slip into him. Then more needles along both arms.
The whirring sounds of electrical motors were all he could hear, busy mechanical insects that flitted around him without pause. A tube was inserted into one nostril, a soft, surgical-green plastic clamp sealed his mouth shut. He watched as a pink fluid gurgled through the tube and into him.
The fluid stopped and a little clamp sealed off THX’s other nostril. Air pumped through the tube now, distending THX’s chest, bigger, bigger, more, more. Panic raced through him and then the pump stopped, the mouth clamp flipped back, and THX expelled breath with an explosive painful sigh. Then it all started over again.
It went on for hours. Wires into his chest. Pinpricks in strange patterns across his abdomen. Pain, lights, injections, blood sucked out of him by mechanical vampires, nerves triggered by electrical impulses. Querying photocells on the ends of fiberoptic stalks staring into his eyes from a few millimeters away. They made his heart race, slowed it down, contracted his leg muscles in painful spasms, sampled his urine, masturbated him and sampled that.
Somewhere in the vast underground city a computer typed:
1138, THX
Diagnosis: COMPATIBLE, TYPE A-5
Rate: EXCELLENT
Exceptions: LEFT KIDNEY (See detailed index 24-921)
He awoke in the featureless white limbo again. Awoke with the sound of footsteps, jumped to his feet. But these weren’t the hard steady beats of a chrome robot. They were soft, hesitant pads of slippered feet.
Against the blank unmarked background it was impossible to judge distances. A figure was out there, hard to make out because it was wearing standard white pajamas. THX watched the figure approaching. It looked like LUH!
It can’t be, he told himself. Don’t…
But he wanted it to be her. Then he realized that if it was, she would be a prisoner too, and they must have done the same things to her that they did to him. So he raged within himself: wanting her and hoping it wasn’t her.
“LUH?” he heard his own voice calling, pleading.
She rushed toward him and into his arms.
“Are you real… is it really you?”
They kissed and clung to each other.
“Are you all right?” she asked, gazing up at him worriedly.
He asked, “What did they do to you?”
For a long moment she didn’t answer, then she said, “I’m going to have a baby.”
He felt as if they’d electric-shocked him again. “No, no, no…”
“Hold me,” LUH begged. “Hold me.”
His arms wrapped protectively about her while his mind went spuming into wild, guilt- ridden gulfs. “It’s the end… what have I done?”
“I’m not afraid,” she said firmly. “I’m not afraid.”
“But it’s wrong. So wrong. What we’ve done…”
His strength seemed to ebb
away. He let go of her and sank to the floor, sobbing. “I didn’t want this. How did it happen? I love you, and now I’ve done this to you…”
She knelt beside him, embraced him. “You have to be strong… You’re going to have a son.”
Control steepled his fingertips as he watched THX and LUH embracing, shedding their clothes, making love. His huge viewscreen showed them larger than life, and his safe, quiet, comfortable office was filled with the sounds of their murmurings, their breathing, their passion.
When at last they lay still, side by side, wet and spent, Control took two orange pills and touched a switch on his communicator panel. Instantly, his viewscreen showed an observer’s cell, with THX and LUH on the observer’s main screens.
“You see?” Control asked academically. “Even in prison, where they know they’re under observation, they grapple like animals. Disgusting, isn’t it?”
The observer nodded, his throat too dry to trust his voice just yet.
“They’ve had their chance. It’s obviously a hopeless case. Organ banks for him. Destruction for her. If the courts concur, I hope someone is intelligent enough to mark his glands as nonconsumables.”
THX awoke again to the sound of footsteps. But this time they were the heavy, measured treads of robots. He leaped up to his feet. LUH stirred and sat up. They were still naked, both of them.
Two robot policemen and a man dressed in yellow pajamas were coming toward him. LUH got to her feet and THX circled an arm around her protectively.
The police and the man stopped a few meters in front of them. The police robots both had electric rods.
The man recited tonelessly, “No person held to service in one section under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service may be due.”
One of the robots reached out and took LUH by the arm. He pulled her from THX’s grasp.
“No… please…” She screamed and reached for THX, eyes wide with terror.
THX jumped at the robot but its partner stepped in the way, clubbed him to his knees and then touched him on the neck with the stunner. The world exploded into flaming pain and THX blacked out.
Chapter 10
To THX the courtroom looked like chaos multiplied. He sat in a glassed-in cubicle, limp, exhausted, with a pair of earphones jabbering endless babble into his head.
He had no idea of how long it had been since they’d taken LUH away. Nor where she was. He knew they had been sedating him; most of the time in his sensory-less prison limbo he had slept. Without dreaming. Without really resting.
Now he sat in a high-backed chair with two robot policemen gleaming on either side of him. His own defense counsel, a stubby little man who had identified himself to THX for the first time a few minutes earlier, was standing in front of him, listening intently to the gibberish of the court, hand pressed to one earphone, eyes fixed on the proctor who stood in front of the judge’s bench.
There seemed to be a dozen cases being tried at once. The proctor was reading off computer cards as fast as he could, and THX’s earphones shrilled a cacophony of prosecutors and defense counsels shouting phrases that were mostly meaningless to him. But they shouted them with great vehemence, as if they really believed in what they were doing.
The judge (was he the one they kept referring to as Pontifex? THX wondered) sat high above everyone else at a sort of control booth, with a computer console flashing its lights behind him. He also had earphones clapped on his head, but his eyes seemed sleepy, bored—except that every once in a while, he snapped awake to say something. It always sounded like something harsh to THX, although he couldn’t understand most of the terms that the judge used.
Then he heard the proctor’s voice rattling off his own name: “Charge: 1138 prefix THX charged with violation ” index 3278.927, appendix 445-60-613. Drug evasion, malicious sexual perversions, unconditional response and transgression. Justice proceed. Pontifex 606 presiding.”
A waspish little evil-faced man got to his feet and bowed to the judge. “Mercicontrol prosecutor 727, if it please the court. Mercicontrol respectfully places its evidence before you…” The computer began flashing madly and the judge seemed to be looking down into a view-screen that was set into his booth. Or was he merely dozing?
“Tapes 9198, 5116, and 1477,” the prosecutor said. “These negative documents are certified by AN-OTO and registered at files, tomb 34.”
THX’s defense counsel raised a stubby finger. “Non-drug, nondrug total excuse. Defendant in unstable condition, not responsible. Nondrug asylum… precedent…”
But the prosecutor continued without pause, “Mercicontrol respectfully submits a 5254, immediate destruction, on the basis of an ECO TR-X 314; totally incurable chemical imbalance with socially deteriorating consequences.”
The defense counsel wagged his head. “Reject, reject. Inefficient unwarranted destruction. Must be saved… mass is one… can be productive. Name of economics; cure this soul… malignant cure. There is a heritage of good and economic efficiency… net gain.”
“Insane,” said the prosecutor.
“Granted,” said the judge, nodding.
The prosecutor went on, “Immediate destruction is the only efficiency. The crimes are of secondary importance. The issue is one of genetic inferiority. This man is of the womb…”
“Reject, reject!” shouted the defense counsel.
“He is the product of an illegal sexual perversion,” the prosecutor said to the judge, still ignoring the defense counsel, “and should have been destroyed at the moment of conception. What is in question here is a concept of economic efficiency and procedure that has allowed these erotics to exist and dilute this great society.”
“Reject, reject,” squawked the defense counsel. “The defendant is known to be of clinical origin, not of the womb… his records…”
“The services performed by these erotics must be automated. If sexual perversion is to be stamped out, the products of these perversions must…”
“Insane… insane… What’s the prosecutor trying to do here? All records pertaining to the defendant affirm his clinical origin.” The defense counsel reached down for a stack of computer cards and shuffled through them, reading, “The Office of Opportunity, the Festival of the Rings, employment and living selection, depositions made and submitted by the arresting officers… there is absolutely no precedent for the allegations made by the prosecution regarding the defendant’s origin.”
The prosecutor grimaced. “The defendant has committed crimes of perversion and corruption that are incompatible with clinical origin… There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he is an erotic type. Records that are even remotely subject to error or possible alteration must not stand in the way if society is to defend itself from these perversions.”
“This is not a race issue!” The defense counsel shifted tack. “Not here… remember sanctity of the individual regardless of race or origin. Econ equilibrium status 542 through 691 apply to this case… The defendant was a roommate of an erotic type… crime of persuasion and influence… Loss of innocence… but, examined and proven physically compatible. Crimes not relevant. Defendant used, not destroyed. Case rest.”
The defense counsel slammed his computer cards back on the little table from which he’d taken them, then turned to THX and smiled.
But the prosecutor summarized: “The perversions committed by this obsolete race have a definite corrosive effect on our society. If he is not destroyed, his deviate characteristics will be transmitted to others. We must not continue to consume these erotics. We must exterminate the source of sin. Economics must not dictate situations which are obviously religious.”
The judge sighed and stirred in his high seat. “Conclude,” he murmured.
“If 1138 is consumed and not destroyed, this perversion will spread. He must be destroyed. It is the only logical,
efficient, and righteous verdict that can be reached.”
The proctor looked up from his desk. “Concluded?”
Both the prosecutor and defense counsel nodded.
The judge said, “Next case.”
The proctor began reading another charge. The prosecutor returned to his desk and began leafing through cards. In THX’s cubicle, the defense counsel stacked his own cards neatly and took off his earphones.
“You’re going?” THX asked, yanking his own earphones from his head.
“Of course. Your case is finished now. I’ve got hundreds of others waiting.”
“But what?…”
“The computer is analyzing your case. The proctor will inform you of its outcome.”
“But… wait…”
With a final smile, the defense counsel hurried out of the cubicle. THX started to get up from his chair, but one of the chrome police robots laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, forcing him back down.
The other robot picked THX’s earphones off the floor and wordlessly handed it to him. He noticed that the proctor was looking his way and slipped the earphones on.
The proctor was reading from a computer tape: “… 1138 prefix THX is deemed clinic- born of certified origin. Stands convicted of index 3278.927 appendix 445 through 613: drug evasion 321, 399, and malicious sexual perversion. Deemed organically invaluable. Subject shall be consumed as economics dictate.”
THX sat there, dazed. Consumed? Does that mean not destroyed? The police robots took his arms and guided him out of the chair, past a new defendant entering the cubicle, and out into the busy hallway.
The courtroom continued to buzz with dozens of simultaneous cases being argued at once. THX never saw LUH enter a defendant’s cubicle, far on the other side of the noise-filled courtroom. Strictly by coincidence, her defense counsel was the same as his.
Chapter 11
The chrome police robot was carrying a long pole as he led THX through the endless white emptiness of prison. The pole was electrified; THX knew it instinctively. He walked grudgingly, sullenly, without hope—but strangely also without fear.
