The driver grinned. “Ain’t the universe a wacky place?”
The beautiful woman waved at them, smiling.
The engine howled and the truck swung out onto the smooth pavement. It roared off down the road.
They watched it become a silver dot again, then vanish.
“Charming fellow, wasn’t he?” Dalton said.
“As truck drivers go, I suppose.”
“I bet someone could write a great novel about the sort of life he leads.”
“Oh, I rather doubt it.”
Nineteen
City
They assigned him to a hospital to work as an orderly.
The place was different from the “hospital” where he’d been incarcerated. The atmosphere was decidedly low-tech. The floor he was assigned to was a cardiac unit, but there were no continuous monitoring instruments in use. Nurses wheeled bulky EKG machines around from patient to patient to get periodic readings. Doctors (if that’s what they could be called, though they were probably more on the order of highly trained paramedics) relied on tried-and-true devices and methods: stethoscopes, pulse taking, and so forth.
The place was dingy, plaster cracking on ill-painted walls. It was clean, though, because he cleaned it, pushing brooms and slapping mops around. The patients wore pasted smiles but were generally miserable, as the medical care was terrible and the food was worse than in the cafeterias.
He kept trying to come up with a plan, to find a way of exploiting the glitches, the defects in the system. InnerVoice’s control was marginally less than total. The system was essentially a technological approach to totalitarianism. While political methods of repression could approach complete efficiency, no technology could. The anguished note on the bulletin board proved that things could go awry. Either the control system could not penetrate to the forebrain and control thoughts, or the tiny controlling computers could malfunction. He did not know which was the case; either way it was a ray of hope.
He could still think, but there was no telling for how long. The people around him seemed to be under more complete control than he was, but this could have been an illusion. He had quickly learned to curb his tongue, to act the part. Speech was behavior, and here behavior was controlled by a quickly responding mechanism of “reinforcements,” to use Behaviorist jargon, most of which were “negative.” But some were positive in the sense that compliance with accepted modes of behavior was just as quickly rewarded with surcease from psychic and physical pain.
Perhaps his thoughts would continue to be his own, but thoughts wouldn’t help his body, which was dangling like a marionette on biochemical strings.
The contrastingly backward technology of the hospital led him to think. He watched nurses take oral temperatures with old-fashioned liquid-lead thermometers, the standby of home medicine chests for ages. Even with the dumb technology, minimum sanitary measures were followed. Those thermometers were sterilized, and for a thermometer the only way to do that was immersion in alcohol; for oral purposes that meant ethyl alcohol, ethanol. Methanol, wood alcohol, was poisonous.
If his unconscious bodily mechanisms were being monitored internally, was there something he could ingest that would suppress those mechanisms? Drugs, maybe. Drugs were here, and he could get to them, but what sort of drugs would suppress autonomic responses? Tranquilizers? Maybe, but he doubted that any in use here would be effective enough. Narcotics? Possibly. But he was naturally wary of those. After all, overdosing was as easy as falling off a ghetto stoop.
Narcotics were easily available, in the sense that there were no physical barriers. The drug cabinets had no lock. In this society locks were unneeded. And for that reason he couldn’t touch them. He couldn’t approach the cabinets with the intention of stealing drugs without risking intervention by InnerVoice.
But the thermometers made him think. He had seen no taverns, no liquor stores. As far as he knew, this society was teetotal. Why? Perhaps because the effects of booze could thwart InnerVoice.
There was probably a bottle of ethanol in the drug cabinet, and if not there, in the supply lockers. But the question was, could he steal the alcohol?
No. The same constraints applied, or would be applied. He couldn’t even risk thinking about it too much.
Back to square one. He ruefully half entertained thoughts of sidling up to the bottle, eyes averted, whistling innocently, then grabbing it and chugging as much as he could before InnerVoice grabbed his gut and squeezed. But the ploy was absurd. He couldn’t very well plan to do something without knowing he was going to do it. There was no one to fool but himself.
Was there no way out besides hoping for his internal police force to go on the fritz?
He might have to face up to the possibility that there was no way out of this. The thought of it was numbing. An eternity here?
What about the castle? They surely had missed him by now. Surely they’d send out a search party.
The thought of castle folk in doublets and tights wandering around in this universe was incongruous. But Linda was smart enough to know that a strange universe would call for caution.
Maybe that was the reason for the delay in finding him. Just how would they go about it, anyway? This was a big world, a complex society, and a very dangerous one. He couldn’t know for sure that the rescuers had not also been abducted and injected with InnerVoice.
If so, there was no hope. The portal could close, if it hadn’t already, and he’d be stuck here forever.
He went home after his first day, made himself boiled potatoes, ate, and sat down to log screen time. While he watched, he thought. At length he resolved on a course of action. Absurd idea though it was, tomorrow he would try stealing the bottle and downing as much alcohol as he could, neat, before the shakes got to him. He wouldn’t try to fool himself or InnerVoice, he would just do it. He simply could not think of anything else to try.
The resolution enabled him to sit through the evening’s “entertainment” without too much distress. Afterward, he was restless. He decided to go out for a walk. As far as he knew, it was allowed. Anything that was allowed, he could do.
Maybe he would keep walking. He’d had about enough of this place.
Then he considered what might happen if he tried to escape. He had refrained from daring another attempt out of simple fear. He did not want to experience again the excruciating psychic pain, the unbearable sense of impending doom, the unremitting terror that he had felt under InnerVoice’s lash. The very thought of it made his stomach spasm.
No, he wasn’t quite ready to face it again, and the bottle-grabbing notion now struck him as stupid and rash. In time, maybe. For now about all he could risk was taking a walk.
He was on the stairway between the second and third floors when she came through the door opening on the landing. He almost bumped into her. It was the woman he’d seen last night.
She seemed startled at first, then burst into the forced smile she’d given him before. “Hello, citizen!”
“Hi,” he said. Then he blurted, “I’m going out for a stroll. Want to walk with me?”
The smile disappeared, and she gave him a penetrating stare.
He stood there, letting her gauge him, taking his measure. She seemed to be weighing the risk, trying to figure whether this was a test or a trap. Could she trust him? Should she dare? All this she spoke with her eyes, and he was vastly relieved to hear it. It was the first evidence he’d had of humanity, of conscious volition, behind the universal facade of robotlike obedience.
“Yes,” she said finally.
They walked out of the building together.
The night was cool and the city was quiet. Too quiet. It was not yet Lights Out, but along the stark faces of the high rises there were more dark windows than lighted ones. A musky, watery smell came on a breeze from the river. There was little traffic on the boulevard. No one else was about. It was late.
“When did it stop?” she asked after they had walked in silence for a st
retch.
“When did what stop?”
“InnerVoice.”
“It hasn’t.”
She halted and looked at him. “You just haven’t realized it yet. It’s gone.”
He shrugged. “I haven’t tried to do anything unsocial yet.”
“You’re doing it now.”
“I didn’t know evening walks were forbidden.”
“They’re not. There’s no need to forbid it. No one does anything that’s not on his daily schedule. It’s too risky. Don’t you know that?”
“No,” he said. “I’m new here.”
“Were you an Outperson?”
“Yeah. If that means a foreigner.”
“An Outperson is someone without InnerVoice. The whole world doesn’t have InnerVoice yet.”
He had wondered about the outside world, and about how much of the planet InnerVoice had under its control. There was no news at all on the screen, nothing except endless propaganda about heroic production efforts and quota overfulfillments.
“What do you know about Outpersons?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “We haven’t been able to get any accurate news for years.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
She started walking again. “People who’ve lost InnerVoice.”
“So, not everyone’s controlled.”
“No, not everyone.” She gave him a glum look. “But it might as well be everyone. There are so few. You’re one, even if you don’t know it yet.”
“How do you know that you don’t have InnerVoice anymore?”
“Because I can do anything I want. Like go for walks in the evening, take an extra portion of food, not watch the screen when I don’t want to. I almost never do anymore.”
“No wonder. It’s awful stuff.”
She smiled. “See? You wouldn’t be able to say that if you hadn’t lost it.”
He shook his head. “I wish you were right. But they just shot me up with the gunk the other day. Can it fail that quickly?”
“We don’t know. Most maladapts lose InnerVoice in their late teens. That’s when I lost mine. I’m twenty-six now. And they haven’t caught on yet.”
“Is there danger that you’ll be found out?”
“Oh, of course. There’s always that danger. But you get used to it. The thing is, even though InnerVoice is silent, habits are hard to break. I don’t do anything really unsocial. Just little things.”
They turned a corner and walked toward the river.
He asked, “Why does InnerVoice sometimes fail?”
“We don’t know that, either. We think that the body’s defense system overcomes it, like it was an infection. Maybe maladapts have better defense systems than most people.”
“Just like some people have spontaneous remissions from cancer, maybe.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
They walked on until they came to a small park by the river’s edge. There was a bench, and they sat. Lights on the other shore reflected as long wavering lines on the water. There were no boats on the river, no barges. In another universe this was an industrial town, but here it was a dull administrative center.
“I usually come here at nights when the weather’s nice,” she said. “I like to watch the river go by. It comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, away from here. I like to think about taking a little boat and going out on the water, and letting the river carry me away. I’d never leave the boat. I’d just fish, lie in the sun, do nothing all day.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I sit and type on a keyboard. I key in data, and then I ask the computer to report on the data, and it spews out all kinds of stuff at me. Fun.”
“Yeah, sounds like it. Tell me this. How many other maladapts are there?”
“I only know two, but there are more. Don’t ask me their cognomen-omnicodes, because I don’t trust you well enough yet. You might be InnerVoice.”
“You mean I might be a police agent?”
“There are no police. But I’ve heard of people being arrested by the Committee for Constant Struggle.”
“The army.”
“Yes. They sometimes use agents to trick people. Or so I’ve heard. It may be all lies, though. You never know. You can never know what’s truth and what isn’t.”
“Let me ask you something very basic and crucial. Who’s in charge of the government? Who runs this whole nightmare?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been trying to figure it out for years. All we know is that there’s InnerVoice.”
“But someone invented InnerVoice. Someone used it to control people. Who was it?”
She shrugged.
He asked, “How long has InnerVoice been in control?”
“No one knows that, either. Years and years.”
“Isn’t there any history?”
“What’s history?”
He looked out across the river. Darkness and silence and slow-moving water.
Her hand sought his.
“Let’s go back,” she said. “My place.”
“Are you sure?”
She giggled. “I’ve had an order to get pregnant for months now. I’ve been ignoring it. Couldn’t find anyone I wanted to get pregnant with.”
Now he knew how it was done. An order was issued, an order was obeyed.
Light came through the lone window and made a trapezoid on the bare floor beside the bed. Lying on his side, he studied it. He liked its lambent geometry, its two-dimensional clarity.
“Are you awake?” she asked.
“Yes.” He rolled over to face her.
She asked him, “What are you thinking?”
“Of how to get out of this place.”
“This place? You mean the living complex?”
“I mean this world.”
“How can you get out of the world? That’s silly.”
“No, it isn’t. I know a way to get to a different world.”
“A different world,” she said dreamily. “Do you think there are worlds other than this one?”
“Yes, there are any number of them. And I can get you to a pretty nice one. It’s just a matter of getting outside the city a little ways.”
“How would you do that?”
“I don’t know. Walk, take a bus. Steal a vehicle. It doesn’t matter. The main question in my mind is, can I do it without InnerVoice interfering?”
“You should be able to. You wouldn’t be able to sleep with me if you still had InnerVoice.”
“How could you get pregnant if no one was able to sleep with you?”
“If they had an order, they could.”
“You need an order?”
“Sure. You didn’t find the order to impregnate someone on your schedule, did you?”
“No.”
“Well, then. You wouldn’t be able to sleep with me unless InnerVoice was dead inside you.”
“Then that means there’s nothing preventing me from leaving.”
“Not if you actually have someplace to go. You say you do, but I don’t understand how. InnerVoice is in control outside the city, too.”
“I can get to a place where no one ever heard of InnerVoice.”
“Is there such a place? There are stories, rumors.”
“Rumors of what?”
“That there are Outpersons who wage war against InnerVoice.”
“Where?”
“No one knows. It’s rarely talked about. Just sometimes on the Information Specials they’ll mention something about ‘socially irresponsible outside elements.’ That’s how they phrase it, usually.”
“Rebels? An opposing military force of some kind?”
“Don’t know.”
It suddenly struck him that he didn’t even know this woman’s name. Wait; she didn’t have a name, only a nonsensical and dehumanizing jumble of letters and numbers. He really didn’t want to know what her cognomen was, much less her omnicode.
“Alice.”
She said, “What di
d you say?”
“I just gave you a name. Alice. You look like one.”
“‘Alice.’ That’s pretty.”
“So are you.”
“That’s unsocial. No one is better looking than anyone else.”
“That’s a lie. Alice, listen. I’m going to leave here and I want to take you with me. Do you want to come?”
“Go with you?”
“Yes.”
“To this other place, this other world you talked about?”
“Yes. Do you want to come with me?”
She was silent for a long time.
Then she said: “You know, I was thinking about doing it tonight. Jumping into the river.”
“You wanted to kill yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. But I think about it a lot. Just jumping in and letting the water carry me away.”
“Drowning.”
“Of course. Killing yourself is the most unsocial thing you can do, and I wanted to do it tonight. And then … I met you. And now you want to take me away.”
“Come with me, Alice. We’ll live in a big castle.”
“What’s a castle?”
“A big house.”
“A big house.” She inhaled deeply and sighed. “Yes, I’ll go with you.”
“Let’s leave now.”
She kissed him. “Tomorrow. Let’s try to get me pregnant again.”
“All right, Alice. By the way, my name is Gene.”
“Gene.” She laughed. “Gene. It sounds funny.”
“Laugh all you want. It sounds wonderful.”
Twenty
Laboratory
Jeremy sat huddled over the terminal keyboard, typing away. His eyes were fixed on the screen, his fingers graceful dancers performing a complex choreography. Isis stood behind him, watching, one slender white hand on his shoulder. Osmirik sat at another section of the workstation, paging through an ancient leather-bound tome.
Jeremy’s fingers did a finale. Then he sat back and sighed.
“That’s the coding,” he said. Reaching, he jabbed at a few more keys. “Now we compile it, debug it, and see if it runs.”
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