Chapter 2

And all they wanted for me were such fine things as good health, long life, contentment. Contentment, sure. Continued irritation--a sour disposition resulting in excess flow of bile--did not provide just the sort of environment in which they cared to bring up the kiddies. Smoking? No. It wasn't healthy. Alcohol? Well, they were willing to declare a national holiday now and then. Within reason.

Which, as I already knew, meant two to four shots once or twice a week.

Sex? Themselves, they didn't have any. "But," they told me with an attitude of broad tolerance, "we want to be fair. We will not interfere with you in this matter--other than to assist you in the use of sound judgment in the selection of a partner."

_But_ I shouldn't feel that any of this was in any way real restrictive. It was merely practical common sense.

For observing it I would get their valuable advice and assistance in all phases of my life. I would enjoy--or have, anyway--perfect health. My life, if that's what it was, would be extended by better than 100 years. "You are fortunate," they pointed out, a little smugly I thought, "that we, unlike your race, are conservationists in the truest sense. Far from despoiling our homeland and laying waste its resources and natural scenic wonders, we will improve it."

I had to be careful because, as they explained it, even a small nick with a razor might wipe out an entire suburban family.

"But fellows! I want to live my own life."

"Come now. Please remember that you are not alone now."

"Aw, fellows. Look, I'll get a dog, lots of dogs--fine purebreds, not mongrels like me. The finest. I'll pamper them. They'll live like kings.... Wouldn't you consider moving?"

"Out of the question."

"An elephant then? Think of the space, the room for the kids to play----"

"Never."

"Damn it! Take me to--no, I mean let me talk to your leader."

That got me no place. It seemed I was already talking to their highest government councils. All of my suggestions were considered, debated, voted on--and rejected.

They were democratic, they said. They counted my vote in favor; but that was just one vote. Rather a small minority.

As I suppose I should have figured, my thoughts were coming through over a period that was, to them, equal to weeks. They recorded them, accelerated them, broadcast them all around, held elections and recorded replies to be played back to me at my own slow tempo by the time I had a new thought ready. No, they wouldn't take time to let me count the votes. And there is where you might say I lost my self control.

"Damn it!" I said. Or shouted. "I won't have it! I won't put up with it. I'll--uh--I'll get us all dead drunk. I'll take dope! I'll go out and get a shot of penicillin and--"

I didn't do a damned thing. I couldn't.

Their control of my actions was just as complete as they wanted to make it. While they didn't exercise it all the time, they made the rules. According to them, they could have controlled my thoughts too if they had wanted to. They didn't because they felt that wouldn't be democratic. Actually, I suppose they were pretty fair and reasonable--from their point of view. Certainly it could have been a lot worse.

III

I wasn't as bad off as old Faust and his deal with the devil. My soul was still my own. But my body was community property--and I couldn't, by God, so much as bite my own tongue without feeling like a bloody murderer--and being made to suffer for it, too.

Perhaps you don't think biting your tongue is any great privilege to have to give up. Maybe not. But, no matter how you figure, you've got to admit the situation was--well--confining.

And it lasted for over nine years.

Nine miserable years of semi-slavery? Well, no. I couldn't honestly say that it was that bad. There were all the restrictions and limitations, but also there was my perfect health; and what you might call a sort of a sense of inner well-being. Added to that, there was my sensationally successful career. And the money.

All at once, almost anything I undertook to do was sensationally successful. I wrote, in several different styles and fields and under a number of different names; I was terrific. My painting was the talk of the art world. "Superb," said the critics. "An astonishing other-worldly quality." How right they were--even if they didn't know why. I patented a few little inventions, just for fun; and I invested. The money poured in so fast I couldn't count it. I hired people to count it, and to help guide it through the tax loopholes--although there I was able to give them a few sneaky little ideas that even our sharpest tax lawyers hadn't worked out.

Of course the catch in all that was that, actually, I was not so much a rich, brilliant, successful man. I was a booming, prosperous nation.

The satisfaction I could take in all my success was limited by my knowledge that it was a group effort. How could I help being successful? I had a very fair part of the resources of a society substantially ahead of our own working for me. As for knowledge of our world, they didn't just know everything I did. They knew everything I ever had known--or seen, heard, read, dreamed or thought of. They could dig up anything, explore it, expand it and use it in ways I couldn't have worked out in a thousand years. Sure, I was successful. I did stay out of sports--too dangerous; entertainment--didn't lend itself too well to the group approach; and music--they had never developed or used sound, and we agreed not to go into it. As I figured it, music in the soul may be very beautiful; but a full-size symphony in a sinus I could do without.

So I had success. And there was another thing I had too. Company.

Privacy? No, I had less privacy than any man who ever lived, although I admit that my people, as long as I obeyed the rules, were never pushy or intrusive. They didn't come barging into my thoughts unless I invited them. But they were always ready. And if those nine years were less than perfect, at least I was never lonesome. Success, with me, was not a lonely thing.

And there were women.

Yes, there were women. And finally, at the end of it, there was a woman--and that was it.

As they had explained it, they were prepared to be tolerant about my--ah--relations with women as long as I was "reasonable" in my selection. Come to find out, they were prepared to be not just tolerant but insistent--and very selective.

First there was Helga.

Helga was Uncle John's secretary, a great big, healthy, rosy-cheeked, blonde Swedish girl, terrific if you liked the type. Me, I hadn't ever made a move in her direction, partly because she was so close to Uncle John, but mostly because my tastes always ran to the smaller types. But tastes can be changed.

Ten days after that first conversation with my people I'd already cleared something like $50,000 in a few speculations in the commodity market. I was feeling a little moody in spite of it, and I decided to quit my job. So I went up that afternoon to Uncle John's office to tell him.

Uncle John was out. Helga was in. There she was, five foot eleven of big, bouncy, blonde smorgasbord. Wow! Before, I'd seen Helga a hundred times, looked with mild admiration but not one real ripple inside. And now, all at once, wow! That was my people, of course, manipulating glands, thoughts, feelings. "Wow!" it was.

First things first. "Helga, Doll! Ah! Where's Uncle John?"

"Johnny! That's the first time you ever called me--hm-m--Mr. Barth has gone for the day ... Johnny."

She hadn't even looked at me before. My--uh--government was growing more powerful. It was establishing outside spheres of influence. Of course, at the time, I didn't take the trouble to analyze the situation; I just went to work on it.

As they say, it is nice work if you can get it.

I could get it.

It was a good thing Uncle John didn't come bustling back after something he'd forgotten that afternoon.

I didn't get around to quitting my job that afternoon. Later on that evening, I took her home. She wanted me to come in and meet her parents, yet! But I begged off that--and then she came up with a snapper. "But we will be married, Johnny darling. Won't we? Real soon!"

"Uh," I said, making a quick mental plane reservation for Rio, "sure, Doll. Sure we will." I broke away right quick after that. There was a problem I wanted to get a little advice on.

What I did get, actually, was a nasty shock.

Back in my apartment--my big, new, plush apartment--I sat down to go over the thing with the Department of the Interior. The enthusiastic response I got surprised me. "Magnificent," was the word. "Superb. Great!"

Well, I thought myself that I had turned in a pretty outstanding performance, but I hadn't expected such applause. "It is a first step, a splendid beginning! A fully equipped, well-armed expedition will have the place settled, under cultivation and reasonably civilized inside of a day or two, your time. It will be simple for them. So much more so than in your case--since we now know precisely what to expect."

I was truly shocked. I felt guilty. "No!" I said. "Oh, no! What a thing to do. You _can't_!"

"Now, now. Gently," they said. "What, after all, oh Fatherland, might be the perfectly natural consequences of your own act?"

"What? You mean under other--that is----"

"Exactly. You could very well have implanted a new life in her, which is all that we have done. Why should our doing so disturb you?"

Well, it did disturb me. But then, as they pointed out, they could have developed less pleasant methods of spreading colonies. They had merely decided that this approach would be the surest and simplest.

"Well, maybe," I told them, "but it still seems kind of sneaky to me. Besides, if you'd left it to me, I'd certainly never have picked a great big ox like Helga. And now she says she's going to marry me, too!"

"You do not wish this? We understand. Do not be concerned. We will--ah--send instructions to our people the next time. She will change her feelings about this."

She dropped the marriage bit completely.

We had what you might call an idyllic association, in spite of her being such a big, husky model--a fact which never bothered me when I was with her. "She is happy," I was assured, "very happy." She seemed pleased and contented enough, even if she developed, I thought, a sort of an inward look about her. She and I never discussed our--uh--people. We had a fast whirl for a couple of weeks. And then I'd quit my job with Uncle John, and we sort of drifted apart.

Next thing I heard of her, she married Uncle John.

Well. I have my doubts about how faithful a wife she was to him, but certainly she seemed to make him happy. And my government assured me Uncle John was not colonized. "Too late," they said. "He is too old to be worth the risk of settling." But they respected my scruples about my uncle's wife and direct communication with Helgaland was broken off.

But there were others.

IV

For the next nine years--things came easy for me. I suppose the restrictions, the lack of freedom should have made me a lot more dissatisfied than I was. I know, though they didn't say so, that my people did a little manipulating of my moods by jiggering the glands and hormones or something. It must have been that with the women.

I know that after Helga I felt guilty about the whole thing. I wouldn't do it again. But then one afternoon I was painting that big amazon of a model and--Wow!

I couldn't help it. So, actually, I don't feel I should be blamed too much if, after the first couple of times, I quit trying to desert, so to speak.

And time went by, although you wouldn't have guessed it to look at me. I didn't age. My health was perfect. Well, there were a couple of very light headaches and a touch of fever, but that was only politics.

There were a couple of pretty tight elections which, of course, I followed fairly closely. After all, I had my vote, along with everyone else and I didn't want to waste it--even though, really, the political parties were pretty much the same and the elections were more questions of personality than anything else.

Then one afternoon I went to my broker's office to shift around a few investments according to plans worked out the night before. I gave my instructions. Old man Henry Schnable checked over the notes he had made.

"Now that's a funny thing," he said.

"You think I'm making a mistake?"

"Oh, no. You never have yet, so I don't suppose you are now. The funny thing is that your moves here are almost exactly the same as those another very unusual customer of mine gave me over the phone not an hour ago."

"Oh?" There was nothing very interesting about that. But, oddly enough, I was very interested.

"Yes. Miss Julia Reede. Only a child really, 21, but a brilliant girl. Possibly a genius. She comes from some little town up in the mountains. She has been in town here for just the past six months and her investments--well! Now I come to think about it, I believe they have very closely paralleled yours all along the line. Fabulously successful. You advising her?"

"Never heard of the girl."

"Well, you really should meet her, Mr. Barth. You two have so much in common, and such lovely investments. Why don't you wait around? Miss Reede is coming in to sign some papers this afternoon. You two should know each other."

He was right. We _should_ know each other. I could feel it.

"Well, Henry," I said, "perhaps I will wait. I've got nothing else to do this afternoon."

That was a lie. I had plenty of things to do, including a date with the captain of a visiting women's track team from Finland. Strangely, my people and I were in full agreement on standing up the chesty Finn, let the javelins fall where they may.

Henry was surprised too. "You are going to wait for her? Uh. Well now, Mr. Barth, your reputation--ah--that is, she's only a child, you know, from the country."

The buzzer on his desk sounded. His secretary spoke up on the intercom. "Miss Reede is here."

Miss Reede came right on in the door without waiting for a further invitation.

We stood there gaping at each other. She was small, about 5'2" maybe, with short, black, curly hair, surface-cool green eyes with fire underneath, fresh, freckled nose, slim figure. Boyish? No. Not boyish.

I stared, taking in every little detail. Every little detail was perfect and--well, I can't begin to describe it. That was for me. I could feel it all through me, she was what I had been waiting for, dreaming of.

I made a quick call on the inside switchboard, determined to fight to override the veto I was sure was coming. I called.

No answer.

For the first time, I got no regular answer. Of course, by now I always had a kind of a sense or feeling of what was going on. This time there was a feeling of a celebration, rejoicing, everybody on a holiday. Which was exactly the way I felt as I looked at the girl. No objections? Then why ask questions?

"Julia," old Henry Schnable was saying, "this is Mr. John Barth. John, this is--John! John, remember----"

I had reached out and taken the girl's hand. I tucked her arm in mine and she looked up at me with the light, the fire in the green depths swimming toward the surface. I didn't know what she saw in me--neither of us knew then--but the light was there, glowing. We walked together out of Henry Schnable's office.

"John! Julia, your papers! You have to sign----"

Business? We had business elsewhere, she and I.

"Where?" I asked her in the elevator. It was the first word either of us had spoken.

"My apartment," she said in a voice like a husky torch song. "It's close. The girl who rooms with me is spending the week back home with her folks. The show she was in closed. We can be alone."

We could. Five minutes in a cab and we were.

I never experienced anything remotely like it in all my life. I never will again.

And then there was the time afterwards, and then we knew.

It was late afternoon, turning to dusk. She lifted up on one elbow and half turned away from me to switch on the bedside lamp. The light came on and I looked down at her, lovingly, admiringly. Idly, I started to ask her, "How did you get those little scars on your leg there and ... those little scars? Like buckshot! Julia! Once, along about ten years ago--you must have been a little girl then--in the mountains--sure. You were hit by a meteor, weren't you??"

She turned and stared at me. I pointed at my own little pockmark scars.

"A meteor--about ten years ago!"

"Oh!"

"I knew it. You were."

"'Some damn fool, crazy hunter,' was what Pop said. He thought it really was buckshot. So did I, at first. We all did. Of course about six months later I found out what it was but we--my little people and I--agreed there was no sense in my telling anyone. But you know."

It was the other ship. There were two in this sector, each controlled to colonize a person. My own group always hoped and believed the other ship might have landed safely. And now they knew.

We lay there, she and I, and we both checked internal communications. They were confused, not clear and precise as usual. It was a holiday in full swing. The glorious reunion! No one was working. No one was willing to put in a lot of time at the communications center talking to Julia and me. They were too busy talking to each other. I was right. The other ship.

Of course, since the other ship's landfall had been a little girl then, the early movements of the group had been restricted. Expansion was delayed. She grew up. She came to the city. Then--well, I didn't have to think about that.

We looked at each other, Julia and I. A doll she was in the first place and a doll she still was. And then on top of that was the feeling of community, of closeness coming from our people. There was a sympathy. The two of us were in the same fix. And it may be that there was a certain sense of jealousy and resentment too--like the feeling, say, between North and South America. How did we feel?

"I feel like a drink."

We said it together and laughed. Then we got up and got the drinks. I was glad to find that Julia's absent roommate, an actress, had a pretty fair bar stock.

We had a drink. We had another. And a third.

Maybe nobody at all was manning the inner duty stations. Or maybe they were visiting back and forth, both populations in a holiday mood. They figured this was a once in a millennium celebration and, for once, the limits were off. Even alcohol was welcome. That's a line of thought that kills plenty of people every day out on the highway.

We had a couple more in a reckless toast. I kissed Julia. She kissed me. Then we had some more drinks.

Naturally it hit us hard; we weren't used to it. But still we didn't stop drinking. The limits were off for the first time. Probably it would never happen again. This was our chance of a lifetime and there was a sort of desperation in it. We kept on drinking.

"Woosh," I said, finally, "wow. Let's have one more, wha' say? One more them--an' one more those."

She giggled. "Aroun' an aroun', whoop, whoop! Dizzy. Woozy. Oughta have cup coffee."

"Naw. Not coffee. Gonna have hangover. Take pill. Apsirin."

"Can-_not_! Can-_not_ take pill. Won' lemme. 'Gains talla rules."

"Can."

"Can-_not_."

"Can. No rules. Rule soff. Can. Apsirin. C'mon."

Clinging to each other, we stumbled to the bathroom. Pills? The roommate must have been a real hypochondriac. She had rows and batteries of pills. I knocked a bottle off the cabinet shelf. Aspirin? Sure, fancy aspirin. Blue, special. I took a couple.

"Apsirin. See? Easy."

Her mouth made a little, red, round "O" of wonder. She took a couple.

"Gosh! Firs' time I c'd ever take a pill."

"Good. Have 'nother?"

It was crazy, sure. The two of us were drunk. But it was more than that. We were like a couple of wild, irresponsible kids, out of control and running wild through the pill boxes. We reeled around the bathroom, sampling pills and laughing.

"Here's nice bottla red ones."

There was a nice bottle of red ones. I fumbled the top off the bottle and spilled the bright red pills bouncing across the white tile bathroom floor. We dropped to our knees after them, after the red pills, the red dots, the red, fiery moons, spinning suddenly, whirling, twirling, racing across the white floor. And then it got dark. Dark, and darker and even the red, red moons faded away.

Some eons later, light began to come back and the red moons, dim now and pallid, whirled languidly across a white ceiling.

Someone said, "He's coming out of it, I think."

"Oh," I said. "Ugh!"

I didn't feel good. I'd almost forgotten what it was like, but I was sick. Awful. I didn't particularly want to look around but I did, eyes moving rustily in their sockets. There was a nurse and a doctor. They were standing by my bed in what was certainly a hospital.

"Don't ask," said the doctor. I wasn't going to. I didn't even care where I was, but he told me anyway, "You are in the South Side Hospital, Mr. Barth. You will be all right--which is a wonder, considering. Remarkable stamina! Please tell me, Mr. Barth, what kind of lunatic suicide pact was that?"

"Suicide pact?"

"Yes, Mr. Barth. Why couldn't you have settled for just one simple poison, hm-m? The lab has been swearing at you all day."

"Uh?"

"Yes. At what we pumped from your stomach. And found in the girl's. Liquor, lots of that--but then, why aspirin? Barbiturates we expect. Roach pellets are not unusual. But aureomycin? Tranquilizers? Bufferin? Vitamin B complex, vitamin C--and, finally, half a dozen highly questionable contraceptive pills? Good Lord, man!"

"It was an accident. The girl--Julia----?"

"You are lucky. She wasn't."

"Dead?"

"Yes, Mr. Barth. She is dead."

"Doctor, listen to me! It was an accident, I swear. We didn't know what we were doing. We were, well, celebrating."

"In the medicine cabinet, Mr. Barth? Queer place to be celebrating! Well, Mr. Barth, you must rest now. You have been through a lot. It was a near thing. The police will be in to see you later."

With this kindly word the doctor and his silently disapproving nurse filed out of the room.

The police? Julia, poor Julia--dead.

Now what? What should I do? I turned, as always, inward for advice and instructions. "Folks! Why didn't you stop me? Why did you let me do it? And now--what shall I do? Answer me, I say. Answer!"

There was only an emptiness. It was a hollow, aching sensation. It seemed to me I could hear my questions echoing inside me with a lonely sound.

I was alone. For the first time in nearly ten years, I was truly alone, with no one to turn to.

They were gone! At last, after all these years, they were gone. I was free again, truly free. It was glorious to be free--wasn't it?

The sheer joy of the thing brought a tightness to my throat, and I sniffled. I sniffled again. My nose was stuffy. The tightness in my throat grew tighter and became a pain.

I sneezed.

Was this joy--or a cold coming on? I shifted uneasily on the hospital bed and scratched at an itch on my left hip. Ouch! It was a pimple. My head ached. My throat hurt. I itched. Julia was dead. The police were coming. I was alone. What should I do?

"Nurse!" I shouted at the top of my voice. "Nurse, come here. I want to send a wire. Rush. Urgent. To my aunt, Mrs. Helga Barth, the address is in my wallet. Say, 'Helga. Am desperately ill, repeat, ill. Please come at once. I must have help--from you.'"

She'll come. I know she will. They've _got_ to let her. It was an accident, I swear, and I'm not too old. I'm still in wonderful shape, beautifully kept up.

But I feel awful.

Well--how do you suppose New England would feel today, if suddenly all of its inhabitants died?

--WILLIAM W. STUART