by Isaac Asimov
“Who said anything about wrong? Useless is what I would say. Why did you keep it to yourself?”
“I—I thought they’d laugh at me.” (He thought abruptly of a recent exchange with Trevelyan. George had very cautiously broached the thought, as of something merely circulating distantly in the very outermost reaches of his mind, concerning the possibility of learning something by ladling it into the mind by hand, so to speak, in bits and pieces. Trevelyan had hooted, “George, you’ll be tanning your own shoes next and weaving your own shirts.” He had been thankful then for his policy of secrecy.)
Dr. Antonelli shoved the bits of film he had first looked at from position to position in morose thought. Then he said, “Let’s get you analyzed. This is getting me nowhere.”
The wires went to George’s temples. There was the buzzing. Again there came a sharp memory of ten years ago.
George’s hands were clammy; his heart pounded. He should never have told the doctor about his secret reading.
It was his damned vanity, he told himself. He had wanted to show how enterprising he was, how full of initiative. Instead, he had showed himself superstitious and ignorant and aroused the hostility of the doctor. (He could tell the doctor hated him for a wise guy on the make.)
And now he had brought himself to such a state of nervousness, he was sure the analyzer would show nothing that made sense.
He wasn’t aware of the moment when the wires were removed from his temples. The sight of the doctor, staring at him thoughtfully, blinked into his consciousness and that was that; the wires were gone. George dragged himself together with a tearing effort. He had quite given up his ambition to be a Programmer. In the space of ten minutes, it had all gone.
He said dismally, “I suppose no?”
“No what?”
“No Programmer?”
The doctor rubbed his nose and said, “You get your clothes and whatever belongs to you and go to room 15-C. Your files will be waiting for you there. So will my report.”
George said in complete surprise, “Have I been Educated already? I thought this was just to—”
Dr. Antonelli stared down at his desk. “It will all be explained to you. You do as I say.”
George felt something like panic. What was it they couldn’t tell him? He wasn’t fit for anything but Registered Laborer. They were going to prepare him for that; adjust him to it.
He was suddenly certain of it and he had to keep from screaming by main force.
He stumbled back to his place of waiting. Trevelyan was not there, a fact for which he would have been thankful if he had had enough self-possession to be meaningfully aware of his surroundings. Hardly anyone was left, in fact, and the few who were looked as though they might ask him questions were it not that they were too worn out by their tail-of-the-alphabet waiting to buck the fierce, hot look of anger and hate he cast at them.
What right had they to be technicians and he, himself, a Laborer? Laborer! He was certain!
He was led by a red-uniformed guide along the busy corridors lined with separate rooms each containing its groups, here two, there five: the Motor Mechanics, the Construction Engineers, the Agronomists—There were hundreds of specialized Professions and most of them would be represented in this small town by one or two anyway.
He hated them all just then: the Statisticians, the Accountants, the lesser breeds and the higher. He hated them because they owned their smug knowledge now, knew their fate, while he himself, empty still, had to face some kind of further red tape.
He reached 15-C, was ushered in and left in an empty room. For one moment, his spirits bounded. Surely, if this were the Labor classification room, there would be dozens of youngsters present.
A door sucked into its recess on the other side of a waist-high partition and an elderly, white-haired man stepped out. He smiled and showed even teeth that were obviously false, but his face was still ruddy and unlined and his voice had vigor.
He said, “Good evening, George. Our own sector has only one of you this time, I see.”
“Only one?” said George blankly.
“Thousands over the Earth, of course. Thousands. You’re not alone.”
George felt exasperated. He said, “I don’t understand, sir. What’s my classification? What’s happening?”
“Easy, son. You’re all right. It could happen to anyone.” He held out his hand and George took it mechanically. It was warm and it pressed George’s hand firmly. “Sit down, son. I’m Sam Ellenford.”
George nodded impatiently. “I want to know what’s going on, sir.”
“Of course. To begin with, you can’t be a Computer Programmer, George. You’ve guessed that, I think.”
“Yes, I have,” said George bitterly. “What will I be, then?”
“That’s the hard part to explain, George.” He paused, then said with careful distinctness, “Nothing.”
“What!”
“Nothing!”
“But what does that mean? Why can’t you assign me a profession?”
“We have no choice in the matter, George. It’s the structure of your mind that decides that.”
George went a sallow yellow. His eyes bulged. “There’s something wrong with my mind?”
“There’s something about it. As far as professional classification is concerned, I suppose you can call it wrong.”
“But why?”
Ellenford shrugged. “I’m sure you know how Earth runs its Educational program, George. Practically any human being can absorb practically any body of knowledge, but each individual brain pattern is better suited to receiving some types of knowledge than others. We try to match mind to knowledge as well as we can within the limits of the quota requirements for each profession.”
George nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“Every once in a while, George, we come up against a young man whose mind is not suited to receiving a superimposed knowledge of any sort.”
“You mean I can’t be Educated?”
“That is what I mean.”
“But that’s crazy. I’m intelligent. I can understand—”
He looked helplessly about as though trying to find some way of proving that he had a functioning brain.
“Don’t misunderstand me, please,” said Ellenford gravely. “You’re intelligent. There’s no question about that. You’re even above average in intelligence. Unfortunately that has nothing to do with whether the mind ought to be allowed to accept superimposed knowledge or not. In fact, it is almost always the intelligent person who comes here.”
“You mean I can’t even be a Registered Laborer?” babbled George. Suddenly even that was better than the blank that faced him. “What’s there to know to be a Laborer?”
“Don’t underestimate the Laborer, young man. There are dozens of subclassifications and each variety has its own corpus of fairly detailed knowledge. Do you think there’s no skill in knowing the proper manner of lifting a weight? Besides, for the Laborer, we must select not only minds suited to it, but bodies as well. You’re not the type, George, to last long as a Laborer.”
George was conscious of his slight build. He said, “But I’ve never heard of anyone without a profession.”
“There aren’t many,” conceded Ellenford. “And we protect them.”
“Protect them?” George felt confusion and fright grow higher inside him.
“You’re a ward of the planet, George. From the time you walked through that door, we’ve been in charge of you.” And he smiled.
It was a fond smile. To George it seemed the smile of ownership; the smile of a grown man for a helpless child.
He said, “You mean, I’m going to be in prison?”
“Of course not. You will simply be with others of your kind.”
Your kind.The words made a kind of thunder in George’s ear.
Ellenford said, “You need special treatment. We’ll take care of you.”
To George’s own horror, he burst into tears. Ellenford walk
ed to the other end of the room and faced away as though in thought.
George fought to reduce the agonized weeping to sobs and then to strangle those. He thought of his father and mother, of his friends, of Trevelyan, of his own shame—
He said rebelliously, “I learned to read.”
“Everyone with a whole mind can do that. We’ve never found exceptions. It is at this stage that we discover—exceptions. And when you learned to read, George, we were concerned about your mind pattern. Certain peculiarities were reported even then by the doctor in charge.”
“Can’t you try Educating me? You haven’t even tried. I’m willing to take the risk.”
“The law forbids us to do that, George. But look, it will not be bad. We will explain matters to your family so they will not be hurt. At the place to which you’ll be taken, you’ll be allowed privileges. We’ll get you books and you can learn what you will.”
“Dab knowledge in by hand,” said George bitterly. “Shred by shred. Then, when I die I’ll know enough to be a Registered Junior Office Boy, Paper-Clip Division.”
“Yet I understand you’ve already been studying books.”
George froze. He was struck devastatingly by sudden understanding. “That’s it…”
“What is?”
“That fellow Antonelli. He’s knifing me.”
“No, George. You’re quite wrong.”
“Don’t tell me that.” George was in an ecstasy of fury. “That lousy bastard is selling me out because he thought I was a little too wise for him. I read books and tried to get a head start toward programming. Well, what do you want to square things? Money? You won’t get it. I’m getting out of here and when I finish broadcasting this—”
He was screaming.
Ellenford shook his head and touched a contact.
Two men entered on catfeet and got on either side of George. They pinned his arms to his sides. One of them used an air-spray hypodermic in the hollow of his right elbow and the hypnotic entered his vein and had an almost immediate effect.
His screams cut off and his head fell forward. His knees buckled and only the men on either side kept him erect as he slept.
They took care of George as they said they would; they were good to him and unfailingly kind—about the way, George thought, he himself would be to a sick kitten he had taken pity on.
They told him that he should sit up and take some interest in life; and then told him that most people who came there had the same attitude of despair at the beginning and that he would snap out of it.
He didn’t even hear them.
Dr. Ellenford himself visited him to tell him that his parents had been informed that he was away on special assignment.
George muttered, “Do they know—”
Ellenford assured him at once, “We gave no details.”
At first George had refused to eat. They fed him intravenously. They hid sharp objects and kept him under guard. Hali Omani came to be his roommate and his stolidity had a calming effect.
One day, out of sheer desperate boredom, George asked for a book. Omani, who himself read books constantly, looked up, smiling broadly. George almost withdrew the request then, rather than give any of them satisfaction, then thought: What do I care?
He didn’t specify the book and Omani brought one on chemistry. It was in big print, with small words and many illustrations. It was for teen-agers. He threw the book violently against the wall.
That’s what he would be always. A teen-ager all his life. A pre-Educate forever and special books would have to be written for him. He lay smoldering in bed, staring at the ceiling, and after an hour had passed, he got up sulkily, picked up the book, and began reading.
It took him a week to finish it and then he asked for another.
“Do you want me to take the first one back?” asked Omani.
George frowned. There were things in the book he had not understood, yet he was not so lost to shame as to say so.
But Omani said, “Come to think of it, you’d better keep it. Books are meant to be read and reread.”
It was that same day that he finally yielded to Omani’s invitation that he tour the place. He dogged at the Nigerian’s feet and took in his surroundings with quick hostile glances.
The place was no prison certainly. There were no walls, no locked doors, no guards. But it was a prison in that the inmates had no place to go outside.
It was somehow good to see others like himself by the dozen. It was so easy to believe himself to be the only one in the world so—maimed.
He mumbled, “How many people here anyway?”
“Two hundred and five, George, and this isn’t the only place of the sort in the world. There are thousands.”
Men looked up as he passed, wherever he went; in the gymnasium, along the tennis courts; through the library (he had never in his life imagined books could exist in such numbers; they were stacked, actually stacked, along long shelves). They stared at him curiously and he returned the looks savagely. At least they were no better than he; no call for them to look at him as though he were some sort of curiosity.
Most of them were in their twenties. George said suddenly, “What happens to the older ones?”
Omani said, “This place specializes in the younger ones.” Then, as though he suddenly recognized an implication in George’s question that he had missed earlier, he shook his head gravely and said, “They’re not put out of the way, if that’s what you mean. There are other Houses for older ones.”
“Who cares?” mumbled George, who felt he was sounding too interested and in danger of slipping into surrender.
“You might. As you grow older, you will find yourself in a House with occupants of both sexes.”
That surprised George somehow. “Women, too?”
“Of course. Do you suppose women are immune to this sort of thing?”
George thought of that with more interest and excitement than he had felt for anything since before that day when—He forced his thought away from that.
Omani stopped at the doorway of a room that contained a small closed-circuit television set and a desk computer. Five or six men sat about the television. Omani said, “This is a classroom.”
George said, “What’s that?”
“The young men in there are being educated. Not,” he added, quickly, “in the usual way.”
“You mean they’re cramming it in bit by bit.”
“That’s right. This is the way everyone did it in ancient times.”
This was what they kept telling him since he had come to the House but what of it? Suppose there had been a day when mankind had not known the diatherm-oven. Did that mean he should be satisfied to eat meat raw in a world where others ate it cooked?
He said, “Why do they want to go through that bit-by-bit stuff?”
“To pass the time, George, and because they’re curious.”
“What good does it do them?”
“It makes them happier.”
George carried that thought to bed with him.
The next day he said to Omani ungraciously, “Can you get me into a classroom where I can find out something about programming?”
Omani replied heartily, “Sure.”
It was slow and he resented it. Why should someone have to explain something and explain it again? Why should he have to read and reread a passage, then stare at a mathematical relationship and not understand it at once? That wasn’t how other people had to be.
Over and over again, he gave up. Once he refused to attend classes for a week.
But always he returned. The official in charge, who assigned reading, conducted the television demonstrations, and even explained difficult passages and concepts, never commented on the matter.
George was finally given a regular task in the gardens and took his turn in the various kitchen and cleaning details. This was represented to him as being an advance, but he wasn’t fooled. The place might have been far more mechanized than it was, b
ut they deliberately made work for the young men in order to give them the illusion of worth-while occupation, of usefulness. George wasn’t fooled.
They were even paid small sums of money out of which they could buy certain specified luxuries or which they could put aside for a problematical use in a problemical old age. George kept his money in an open jar, which he kept on a closet shelf. He had no idea how much he had accumulated. Nor did he care.
He made no real friends though he reached the stage where a civil good day was in order. He even stopped brooding (or almost stopped) on the miscarriage of justice that had placed him there. He would go weeks without dreaming of Antonelli, of his gross nose and wattled neck, of the leer with which he would push George into a boiling quicksand and hold him under, till he woke screaming with Omani bending over him in concern.
Omani said to him on a snowy day in February, “It’s amazing how you’re adjusting.”
But that was February, the thirteenth to be exact, his nineteenth birthday. March came, then April, and with the approach of May he realized he hadn’t adjusted at all.
The previous May had passed unregarded while George was still in his bed, drooping and ambitionless. This May was different.
All over Earth, George knew, Olympics would be taking place and young men would be competing, matching their skills against one another in the fight for a place on a new world. There would be the holiday atmosphere, the excitement, the news reports, the self-contained recruiting agents from the worlds beyond space, the glory of victory or the consolations of defeat.
How much of fiction dealt with these motifs; how much of his own boyhood excitement lay in following the events of Olympics from year to year; how many of his own plans—
George Platen could not conceal the longing in his voice. It was too much to suppress. He said, “Tomorrow’s the first of May. Olympics!”
And that led to his first quarrel with Omani and to Omani’s bitter enunciation of the exact name of the institution in which George found himself.
Omani gazed fixedly at George and said distinctly, “A House for the Feeble-minded.”
George Platen flushed. Feeble-minded!
He rejected it desperately. He said in a monotone, “I’m leaving.” He said it on impulse. His conscious mind learned it first from the statement as he uttered it.
