Fourteen
The long, blank-walled anteroom of the mating center was crowded to capacity with love-privileged men and women who had been granted short emergency leaves and were waiting to have their identification disks checked.
Teleman and Alicia stood very quietly in one corner of the large room, forcing themselves to remain calm and hardly glancing at the men and women about them.
They did not even allow their thoughts to dwell on the final stages of their almost miraculous escape—their unobserved ascent to a travel strip on the far side of the forest in the early hours of the morning, their journey on the strip in garments new to them, their self-consciousness when they glanced down at the insignia which proclaimed that their destination was a mating center and that they could walk openly in the sunlight as lovers, and pass a security guard or a Monitor without fearing that they would be stopped and questioned.
Had they wished they could have even paused and embraced openly on the strip, exchanging light, casual caresses, but that they had not done. Their love was neither light nor casual and the memory of the fulfillment which had come to them above a star-mirroring pool of still water was still too vivid and glorious to permit them to engage in the more superficial varieties of love-play.
Those varieties would occur later as a natural accompaniment of love, for even the deepest and most genuine love must have its lighter aspects, but for the moment they had been content to walk quietly on the strip hand in hand, their eyes shining with a memory-glow that had caused a few of the pedestrians to turn and stare at them in envy which they had not attempted to disguise.
They waited now with the glow still in their eyes, while the check-in security guard placed identity disks into a machine which quickly tested their genuineness and ejected them with a faint, whirring sound.
He sat at a desk in a far corner of the anteroom, a harassed and very busy man, with a look of boredom on his face and a restless impatience in his eyes.
“Too many leaves,” he muttered, so loudly that his voice carried to everyone in the room. “It makes quite unnecessary work for us. If I had my way I would permit no love-making outside of a mating center. But I am not a Monitor and I suppose I have no right to complain. I suppose that in exceptional cases some kind of safety-valve must be provided for the disgusting thing which you people are always talking about. Romance! It used to be a taboo word, but now you use it quite openly.”
He paused an instant, then went on complaining, the whirring of the machine making it difficult for Teleman and Alicia to catch all of his words.
“Of course, strictly speaking, no emergency leaves are granted on that basis. But I, for one, am not deceived. I know precisely why so many of you ask for emergency leaves. Illness, a death in your immediate family, the need to visit long-neglected relatives and friends. Faugh! If I were a Monitor I would accept no such excuses.”
He raised his eyes suddenly and called out two names. “Richa Malgroon. Taja Ramole. Your identification disks are in order. Come here and take them, and go quietly to your compartment in Section 9Y66. For all I care you can make love romantically all night long—right here in the mating center. That should content you, I should imagine. Why should you go to a vine-covered dwelling in the forest? It’s all down here. You have a dwelling in the forest where you spent your—revolting word out of the old books—honeymoon. This time you were granted five hours leave. You took a day and a night. But I have instructions not to censure you. It seems your original excuse was accepted and the Monitors can be very lenient. Too lenient, if you want my honest opinion.”
He coughed to clear his throat. “All right, come and get your disks. I have a feeling that you spent the night in that cottage, unlawfully. But I have no way of proving it, and the Monitors have given me instructions which I am duty-bound to accede to.”
Alicia nudged Teleman’s arm. “He’s talking to us,” she whispered. “Quick, darling. Go to the desk and take the disks, and try to act completely composed, as if we had been here many times before and are not in the least offended by his rough manner and outspokenness. I have never heard a security guard speak so frankly. It is very strange. I believe he is himself secretly rebellious and that his words have a double meaning.”
Teleman nodded, pressing her hand and stepping quickly to the desk. He accepted the disks in silence and returned to where Alicia was standing.
“We can go now,” he said. “Section 9Y66, compartment 66. We go through the door on our left. We’ll find someone who can direct us to the right section and compartment. It will be no problem. But we mustn’t act as if we didn’t know.”
They walked across the room and through the door and found themselves in a dimly-lighted corridor which was, for the moment, completely deserted.
They walked to the end of it, turned right and traversed another equally deserted corridor. As they walked along it Teleman found that he could no longer keep to himself thoughts which had badly shaken him and forced him, for Alicia’s sake, to pretend otherwise.
“I’m afraid that we have made a mistake in coming here,” he said. “We did not know that the couple whose identity we have assumed had such a completely documented past history. The Monitors know about the dwelling! They know that we took refuge in the dwelling. Don’t you realize what that means? We may have walked into the deadliest kind of trap. We thought the couple had escaped from the mating center by stealth, without having been granted any emergency leave at all. But apparently they had a five hour leave and simply took the risk of extending it. And the Monitors know about the cottage. They know we were there, so every guard here must have been alerted. The guard at the desk must know exactly who we are.”
“I did not want to alarm you,” Alicia said. “But the same thought occurred to me. Darling, what shall we do? If we are trapped—”
She moved into the circle of his arms, and he silenced her for a moment with a kiss. Alicia rubbed her body against him, and Teleman felt a strong urge to tear the garments from her body and take her there in the corridor, to press her down on the hard floor... but he pushed back the tide of desire and spoke quickly.
“I’m afraid we are. I’m afraid we’re in the deadliest kind of danger. Why they did not seize us immediately I do not know. Perhaps they intend to seize us in the privacy of our compartment, without causing any commotion, without letting the others here know what is going on. It is entirely possible that they planned it that way. That frustrated old woman we encountered on the strip; if she is the Monitor in charge such a capture might appeal to her in a cruelly whimsical way. To let us think ourselves safe and then to take us by surprise!”
“If you are right, darling, what shall we do?”
“We’d better not go to our compartment. I had no intention of doing so, but I spoke as I did in the anteroom because I didn’t want to frighten you. I wanted to get you out of there as quickly as possible.”
“You still haven’t answered me. What shall we do?”
“We’ve got to escape from this place in some way. But first we’ve got to find out more about it. How many deserted corridors are there, how many doors and windows, how many compartments where nothing but records are stored, or mating center furniture. How many compartments which are seldom visited, where we can hide....”
Had Teleman known, events were to take place in the next forty hours which were to shake the entire structure of the society of which he was a part, and make all of his desperately seized-upon plans for escaping from the mating center completely unnecessary. But he had no way of knowing, no way of even suspecting that he was to become an instrument of destiny and overthrow a tyranny unique in human history.
Had he known, he would not have believed that such an event could take place and that his own very human qualities and the courage of the woman at his side would elevate them both to greatness.
In the world of the Monitors, the human factor was very precariously balanced. Certain basic human instincts had been repressed or denied. But they could not be repressed forever and the most basic impulse of all could not be repressed without building up tensions volcanic in intensity.
The instinct which could not be repressed could not even be discussed in the world of the Monitors. Its denial and repudiation was basic to the survival of that world. All reference to it in the old books had been stippled out, and when men and women talked of love they did not know that they were treading on dangerous ground in respect to that impulse, which was a woman’s crowning glory.
Even Teleman, despite his historic role, did not know or suspect until he emerged from another corridor into a compartment so large that it must have filled two-thirds of the building’s interior. He did not know until he was standing in the entranceway, staring through a pale blue radiance at tiers upon tiers of cribs encased in sterile glass. He did not know until he saw the babies.
Tiers upon tiers of cribs and in each crib a sleeping human infant.
And in a few cribs a crying and a reaching out of tiny hands for arms that were not there, the arms of the mothers.
In each crib a man or woman of the future, still in swaddling clothes, but beginning to become aware of the world that he or she would someday inherit.
A thousand tiny faces stared up into the blue-lit immensity above the sterile cots, some rosy-cheeked and smiling, and fully awake, but most sleeping soundly. There were thin and peaked faces as well as rosy ones, contented faces and hungry-looking faces, and faces that looked completely innocent and faces that resembled the countenances of little old men, worn by years of toil, and faces that asked questions and faces that were content to express neither anger nor fear nor high intelligence but wore a look of untroubled innocence.
Teleman was too shaken to do more than stare silently and it was Alicia who put what they both felt into words, her eyes shining with a bright, newly-experienced kind of tenderness.
“I’ve heard about them but I’ve never seen them before. How beautiful they are, even the very thin ones and the angry ones! All of the future is here. But there is something lacking also. I feel it—I know it to be so. We are told that they will grow to manhood and to womanhood lacking nothing, but I cannot believe that the Monitors do not lie about that.
“There is something that should be here that is not here. They have a need, a need that is just as strong and complete in itself as the love which we have for each other.”
The sobbing was so far away and so low that they scarcely heard it at first. It came from the opposite side of the enormous room, and they could not see the woman with bent back and tearstained face who was kneeling beside one of the cribs, and tenderly caressing the cheeks of a sleeping infant.