Douglas R. Mason
Eight Against Utopia
(From Carthage Then I Came)
One
There was some warmth in the pale sun, although it was well after midday. Not much. In fact, when the oblong panels ground slowly open and the tiny observation cupola had direct access to the outside world there was a ten-degree fall on the temperature recorder. But where the sun rays shone on the back of his neck, he could feel a positive heat.
The watcher set the small capsule to rotate left and made a “direct vision” scan, with powerful lenses, as he turned slowly towards the sun. Even the sea appeared less gray. It was just possible to believe the ancient records which described it as the “blue” Mediterranean. But it strained credence to the utmost to imagine that the dark blur of the opposite mainland coast, five hundred miles to the North, could ever have been called the Cote d’Azur.
Gaul T. Kalmar, alone in the observatory on the roof of the Environment Stabilization Building, was also in a minority of one in the extent of his speculation. A hundred and fifty thousand citizens lived in this most northerly center of human settlement. When they passed on their daily business, through the great squares and avenues of their city, it was doubtful if anyone looked anymore at the vast, pale blue, translucent dome which insulated them from all contact with the flux of the natural world outside. They might see the four tall pillars rising with mathematical exactitude from the center of each quadrant and supporting their sky. But no one would have any reason to suppose that the column, soaring from the roof of the principal building in the Esmun quarter, actually penetrated their ceiling and ended in a window on the world.
Carthage had maintained itself for seven thousand years as a bastion of life against the threatening ice. Now, although few knew it, the vigil could end. The automatic, meteorological records showed no icebergs in the landlocked sea for the last hundred years. Glaciers on the land mass of Europe were far in retreat again. Old lands were stirring with new life.
Gaul Kalmar shivered as he came round into the glare of the sun. He killed the ancient linear motor and stopped the movement. It was springtime in the changing seasons of the outside. The air had a fresh, damp smell which, coupled with the sun, was a remarkable experience for an organism used to a stable and unvarying temperature and humidity level.
The curve of the dome blacked out the immediate bare rock plateau on which the city stood. Metaphorically “blacked,” since the outer dome was of some shiny reflecting material on its outside surface and silvered within. An insulation space of two meters separated it from the inner, translucent, blue semisphere and contained the miles of continuous light tubes which simulated the daylight sky. Farther out, as far as could be seen, the rock gave place to endless forest land. It was difficult to accept that this had once been arid desert.
A warning ping reminded him that he had been five minutes with the roof open and he set the reluctant motors to work to close it. Heat loss for so small a place would not be significant against the huge energy consumption of the whole city, but he knew the delicacy of the control systems. Some bright engineer would spot the loss and a full-scale investigation would be on. Where the heat output of every human being was calculated to the last watt and balanced in the heat exchange bill, it was necessary to pinpoint unusual heat consumption and he did not want the finger to be pointed at him.
When it was closed, he made a quick check of everything he had touched, wiping each shining surface with wads of tissue. Then he dug out the close-fitting manhole cover and dropped down into the compartment below. This time it was more difficult to obscure all possible traces of his visit, but there was no urgency. It was a legitimate place to be. The small compartment gave access to the space between the domes and as an Environment Engineer 1st Class he was charged with making regular visual inspection of the equipment mounted there. Even then, perhaps, the record would show too great an attention to this part of his work and some busybody in social control would want to know why.
Satisfied that he had left the roof in bland innocence of concealing anything above, he went out onto the inner dome. Any curious idler on the cypress-lined, central square could have seen his smudgy shadow in the sky two thousand feet overhead. He was still outside the pickup range of the monitors and gave himself the full, permitted time before he returned to the elevator cage and dropped swiftly down to the main floor of the E.S.B.
He could feel when the monitor picked him up again. Gaul Kalmar was more sensitive than most, because he had more often broken the link. Every man, woman, and child had his distinctive frequency, based on the tiny currents flowing in his mental circuits, and the computers in the Administrative Center of the Byrsa quarter did a twenty-four-hour monitoring check on his activities. It was the ultimate in social control.
Where two or three gathered together, a cluster drew attention to the fact and a security official was the unseen guest. Any great change in bodily tension could trip a relay and have an operator checking back on medical records. So that cases had been known of ambulance tenders picking up a man who reached a hospital berth before he had his stroke. This was the element that gave the system a kind of respectability. This and the fact that the statistical unlikelihood of being monitored directly at any particular minute was good enough to confer a modified sense of privacy.
For the most part, conditioning brought acceptance. To be followed into bed by a distant computer was a fact of life. L’homme moyen sensuel lived with it, only slightly modifying his natural behavior. And the minority, whose neurosis was increased, was balanced by a minority whose neurosis was lessened by the omnipresent, supporting, watchful, anonymous confessor. That was the public image.
Deviants never reported on the sinister side.
It was the less well-documented aspect that concerned Gaul Kalmar, however. His immunity, so far, from interference was based on a combination of accidental attributes, partly physical and partly psychological. He was at the extreme of the permitted range in a number of directions and these qualities had made a sum which his profile card, filed away in sociometrics, did not fully reveal.
Height range for adult males was 1.9 to 2.1 meters with a slight tolerance where all other factors were favorable. He was 2.13 and passed only because of high ratings elsewhere. Mental grade on the narrow five-point range was on the top line of the top bracket. Suggestibility was low. Attitude scales gave a reading which showed high stability. The crucial ability, which did not show up on the charts, was a kind of cold intellectualism, which allowed him to think of stirring and emotive ideas without betraying physiological changes to flag down his guardian angel. This, coupled with a sense of being an individual, a self-consciously different man, was enough to make him feel that he was outside the system. And from the outside the system looked rotten.
It was the end of the tour of duty. He went to his desk and flipped a series of keys that signaled his intentions to all whom it concerned. He dictated a short report to the fluted ear of the robot log and went out from his sound-proof cubicle office to the great circular arena, where the rank and file of the Environmental Engineering staff had their open stations.
Any monitoring official should have remarked that he made the trip through a gauntlet of high-power charm without registering any affective tone. Probably the only reason why no query had yet been raised on this unusually Spartan performance was that, with all its refinements, the telltale remained a purely mental probe. It carried no picture, except by implication, of the visual stimuli from which conceptual thought was born. This was possibly a built-in safeguard, because the visual stimuli in the general office of E.S.B. would have gone a long way towards producing emotional bias even in a computer.
The
tonal color for E.S.B. was blue and this appeared in its full hue on identification tags and major vertical surfaces. Complex color harmonies, based on an analogy with frequency ranges in the musical scale, made chords and subtle tonal statements on all other planes. Girls in red and orange-yellow leotards stood gracefully at the consoles which carried the control of environmental factors in the four quarters of the city. Esmun—the Professional Quarter, where the E.S.B. department stood—with every other kind of medical and scientific research establishment, schools, hospitals and laboratories. Byrsa, the Administrative Center, public buildings, civil guards, President of the city and his council. Celesta, mainly free recreation space, sports stadium, theater, shops, Arts’ Center. Megara, the dormitory area, living quarters for all citizens except the police and the council, whose superior accommodation clustered round the Presidential Lodge in Byrsa.
Gaul Kalmar allowed a half-formed thought to pass that any revolution might well start here. The strings of power came to this room. It was, in its way, surprising that the setup allowed for such a decentralization, when every other item of control was centered in Byrsa. He pushed the thought out of his mind—it would not be healthy to go on along that tack; but some subconscious impulse, which he could not control and which used too little mental wattage to be registered on the distant monitor, moved him to stop at the Byrsa control points. Five consoles and a section leader’s desk.
Jane Welland, in blue, with shoulder flashes of orange-yellow to show rank, was hoping he would stop and thought momentarily that it was to speak to her that he had. The flicker of basic, biological interest, which was involuntary on her part, was enough to bring her to the attention of the watchers. It was not a rewarding conversation for them.
“Power requirements for your quarter are being met?”
It was an obvious remark; so unnecessary that she merely looked at him and waited for the next thing. He had the privilege of the uncomplicated gaze of warm eyes in a full oval face, red-gold hair in a deep bell, which swung elastically as she turned and made its own special contribution to the color orchestration of the section, straight nose, serious mouth, short upper lip. It was a satisfying face to look at. He found that his mathematical, engineer’s brain was analyzing it in a detached kind of way. In the few seconds he met her direct look, before the silence forced him to say something else, he had established that the width of the head was just equal to the distance from eyebrows to chin. The relation of the portion above the brows to that below was recognizable as a familiar standard, .383 to .617.
He went on, “I know you would have reported any difficulties. I suppose I mean—are you still using the lion’s share of the grid?”
Even that was a dubious question; but he got back, “Byrsa has a great deal of equipment; but we see that they don’t waste anything.”
He was outside in the square before he realized that she might well be an ally.
It was sixteen-fifteen on the time disk on the I.T.E. building opposite. Initial Teaching Establishments closed early and there was no yelling throng of youngsters on the walkway. It was moving at a sedate pace and by walking along he had a ground speed of ten kilometers per hour which took him to the Medical Center in under three minutes. He was early again. Tania Clermont would not appear until the dot of 1630 hours. He left the walkways at the reduction step and took a rising escalator up the face of the building until he stood on the wide piazza above the laboratories. From there he could look down the main, tree-lined avenue into the central square of the city.
Not many people were about at this time. The right-hand walkway, which went through to the square, had stopped, sensitive to the reduced demand. There was some basis for the argument that man had reached the ultimate in every kind of progress. The city was perfect by the most exacting esthetic. Every proportion in the long vista was exactly calculated. Changeless, unfading color, built into the fabric of the buildings, was planned to the last balanced grille of bronze in its mock marble setting. Fountains washed the carefully regulated air. Temperature stabilized at 19.4° Centigrade. The elaborate medical services were hardly ever called on for the ancient illnesses of mankind. An environment of great beauty, a bed of Procrustes, with homo sapiens lopped and tailored and forced to be worthy of it.
Gaul Kalmar leaned on the rose-madder balustrade and thought coldly about the situation he was in. He could remember the wet tang of the cold spring air from outside. In some moods he felt that he was chasing an illusion; in others he felt, like Abraham, that he had to go out into a wilderness to find room to meet himself in.
Quick, decisive steps brought the girl to join him. For quasi outdoor wear she had put on a short tabard of stiff yellow gauze over the basic blue-violet leotard of the Mental Therapy Service. She was vividly dark with a narrow oval face. Tall, slim, moving like a dancer.
She said, “You look as though you tend to vault into the street.”
“With you standing here, I should be climbing up.”
“That’s an atavistic tendency.”
“Thank you very much. That’s what you get for trying to natter a mind-bender.”
She was not to be drawn along that tack at all. “Where to, then?”
“Food and then back to my flat. Lee gets in about six and he’s bringing Wanda. A small party. We can walk round the city.”
“How very restless.”
She knew, however, what he had in mind. Alone, in all the many departments of the city, the Mental Health section had a small screened therapy room. It had been found that the stress cases became agonizingly sensitive to the endless listening watch and could even tell, immediately, when a distant monitor was listening directly to them. The psychologists had demanded, and finally gamed, a small concession in the shape of a treatment room, where the patient’s transmitting brain was surrounded by a nonconductor, so complete that he was incommunicado. The effect was immediately soothing. Patients who were deeply unapproachable, relaxed and talked freely to their therapist. It was the only place inside the dome where there was privacy.
It was the time for many duties to end and the avenue below was becoming thronged again with an extravaganza of color. Color and movement. Although he had lived twenty-eight years in the city, and knew nothing else, Gaul felt that there was something missing. There was hardly any noise from the great mass of people. He remembered the noise of the wind moving the damp, fresh air outside. That was possibly the missing element. They were a subdued, self-conscious lot. Necessarily so. Frank self-expression could lead to a course of reorientation sessions, which would leave a man or woman or child dazed and inert for many months.
He filed it away as a piece of information to be produced later on and they were quiet themselves as the fast lane of the walkway whirled them along to the distant square, the very heart of Carthage.
Four great arteries, like processional ways, with six lanes of walkways, went out from the centers of each side of the square into the four quarters. By nice management of reduction bays, Gaul steered her across the homeward-moving tide into a lane which took them out into Celesta. It was quieter there and when they reached the towering, blank, white wall of the Coliseum they were alone again.
It was early. Most people would go first to their homes in Megara and come out to the restaurant area by one of the concentric, subway rings. Broad, shallow steps took them down to a circular hall, which could have been the floor of a silent sea. Brilliant, tropical fish moved in shoals behind its glass walls, and across its ceiling. A display of piranhas swiveled easily to a light touch and they were in the ring corridor which lay behind. Fish motifs followed them through into a polygonal dining room, arranged so that only a dedicated diner-out would ever exhaust its infinite variety of angles and vistas.
The Management of The Staring Fish made the presentation of the basic four food materials an intellectual as well as a gastronomic challenge. Each table had a “do-it-yourself” numbered dial working in combination with a four-letter code which woul
d give some millions of edible combinations of the molecular content of the food staples. A simple man’s guide to some past successes lay bulkily on the shelf below. Busy or trusting types could signal “Defer Choice” and get the plat-du-jour. In The Staring Fish this was also the most sensible move to make since its staff reacted to it as a vote of confidence and set out to deserve the trust.
Only a handful of people were already there. When they sat down, no one else was visible, and the room appeared as a trapezoid with large abstract murals based on fruit shapes.
Small attentions, insofar as they were necessary in an almost fully automated system, were given by a young man who could be identified from shoulder recognition tags as in the last year of his public service stint. Filling in two years from the end of the first stage of higher education, it meant that from twenty-one to twenty-three everyone was at the direction of the social control office. Frank Shultz looked as though he would be glad to be done with it. Tow-haired, solidly square with a faintly freckled skin, he was more taciturn then even two years of compulsory dogooding could justify.
Gaul Kalmar showed his identification tag, neatly incorporated into the lid of his time disk, so that his theoretical account could be debited with the equally theoretical costs of the meal. Where money was no longer used even as a counter, it was all highly unreal. Shultz keyed the letter and number reference on a miniature tabulator face which pulled out from the table leg.
“Can I organize anything else for you?” He sounded like a Borgia, denied the chance to break a phial in the cup.
Gaul said, “Living with fish is not for you. Where do you go from here?”
“Byrsa.”
That should have stopped Gaul. Anyone earmarked for Byrsa would already have done some orientation training. Tania looked discouragement, she knew more about it from the sociometrics angle. The youngster would be police potential. Ordinary citizens keep clear.
Eight Against Utopia Page 1
