Part 2

He alighted at the next off-ramp. On the preceding incline almost a hundred yards away, a steady stream of people flowed out to the street and spilled into the torrent of pedestrians there. It was impossible to pick out the girl. Her bright coverall was now a disguise rather than a beacon. Red, the designation of the 5-Dayman, was the most common color. It suddenly seemed as if the whole street was splotched with red.

He hurried back, astonished at the sharpness of his disappointment. There had been something about the girl--something more than the beauty of her face or the curving suppleness of her body--that had made him want to know her. Or had he imagined a reflection in her eyes of his own discontent, his own yearning?

The street was lined with the Organization's bewildering variety of shops, service outlets, offices, vending cafes, entertainment centers. Crowded arcades tunneled under one of the great cylindrical work centers. Nearby a series of escalators trundled down to the tube station on the next level. Hendley heard the rumble of a departing train.

She could have gone anywhere. Even if she had entered one of the nearby shops or office buildings, even if he had known which one, he would have had little chance of finding her. He could recall no emblem on her coverall that would suggest where she worked or what she did.

He stopped at the foot of the ramp where the girl had disappeared. It was hopeless. An accidental collision of two specks in an interminable dust storm of people, almost instantly blown apart. What were the odds against another....

She was standing in the arched entry of a building, staring at him. As he pushed his way toward her she started to turn, averting her gaze, taking one step as if about to leave. The motion was arrested, and she seemed to be suspended there, poised on the verge of flight. She didn't move until he spoke.

"I was afraid I'd lost you."

"Were you?"

"Why did you try to get away?"

"I don't know what you mean. I work here."

Hendley glanced at the sign over the doors: AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH CENTER. Above them, above the barren crust of the earth, another eyeless concrete cylinder thrust upward toward the sky like a raised fist.

"You're working today?" he asked.

She was studying him now. "Yes."

It was strange, he thought, how much was already understood between them, how much had no need to be said.

"When can we meet?"

"I--that wouldn't be wise."

"When?" he demanded. "This afternoon? Tonight?"

"No, no." She licked her lips nervously. "I'm late. I have to go. Please--we're not of the same status. There's no use--we'd be seen."

His hand went out quickly to grip her arm, and she flinched sharply. His fingers held her, tight on the soft flesh under the coarse red fabric. "Don't you want to see me again?"

She glanced anxiously toward the doors of the building, as if afraid that an Inspector might be watching them. "That doesn't have anything to do with it. It--it's impossible." Then she seemed to wilt, her weight sagging against his supporting hand. "Yes," she said helplessly, "I do want to see you."

"What time? When are you free?"

She hesitated. "Four o'clock this afternoon. But--"

He had already been casting about for a place. "The Historical Museum," he said quickly. "Main floor. As soon as you can make it after four. Do you know where that is?"

She nodded. There was wonder in her face, crowding out the tension of worry. "What's your name?" she asked.

Automatically he started to give his official identity. "TRH--" He broke off. "Hendley," he said abruptly. "Call me Hendley."

His hand slid down her arm to examine the identity disc on her bracelet. Her number was ABC-331. He smiled, for the combination of letters was rare. "What does the 'A' stand for?"

Startled, she stared at him for a moment before answering. "Ann," she murmured. "But nobody ever--"

"I know. That's why I want to call you Ann."

Their eyes held for several seconds. He could feel the pulse beating in her wrist. Her red lips were parted in an expression of surprise. Suddenly she pulled her hand free.

"I have to go," she said. Whirling, she ran toward the doors of the Research Center.

"Four o'clock," he called after her.

But she didn't look back.

* * * * *

For several minutes after the girl had disappeared, TRH-247 lingered near the entry to the building, reluctant to leave. Excitement made his skin prickle and tighten sensitively. Ann, he thought. Her voice was soft, light, musical, her wrist so slim his fingers had overlapped when he'd held it. Shadows enlarged her eyes, and fear, too. She was afraid, but she would meet him. She wanted to.

Across the way from the Research Center there was a sidewalk vender with a cluster of tables. He charged a cup of coffee, showing his identity disc to the machine to be photographed, and sat at one of the small tables.

Why had he been attracted to her so quickly? Why this keen anticipation? Was it just because she was pretty? He didn't think so. And it was not the simple need of sex. Organization knows, RED-498 was willing enough, and the once-a-week hour they were allotted in one of the PIB's had always seemed satisfactory.

But only that, he corrected himself. A habit, a routine like the discussion forums and the sports and the therapy hours. Satisfactory, but never exciting.

Perhaps it was the fact that he had found the girl in red himself. RED-498 had been selected for him almost a year before by the Marital Contract Computer. His complete dossier had been fed into the computer. The process of choosing an appropriate partner for the contract from all the women available in City No. 9 of the proper age, size, intelligence, and personality traits, weighing also such factors of compatibility as the size of the tax debt carried by the woman and the man, had taken the computer exactly thirty-two seconds.

It surprised Hendley a little to realize that he felt no guilt, no sense of betrayal of RED-498. The reason was simple. There was no emotional involvement between them--only a comfortable arrangement. She was passive by nature, casually accepting their impending contract. The computer had selected them for each other, and it would never have occurred to her to question or approve its judgment. With a feeling of chagrin, Hendley realized that, were he to disappear, his Assigned would experience no more than a brief period of concern, which would end as soon as the computer selected a more dependable partner for her.

There ought to be more between a man and a woman, he thought--something more than the body's casual hunger, more than good will, more than the careful balance of factors weighed by a computer.

And maybe he had found it.

He finished his coffee. He had been sitting at the table by the vender for no more than ten minutes. When he glanced across the way at the Research Center, idly wondering what ABC-331 did there, he saw her. She was standing at the fringe of the entryway, peering up and down the street with an air unmistakably furtive. Hendley jumped to his feet and started toward her. She had not seen him. Before he could fight his way through the mass of pedestrians between them, the girl slipped into the crowd, walking rapidly.

Hendley reached the entry where she had stood a moment before. She was nowhere in sight.

* * * * *

For an hour Hendley wandered the area where the girl in red had vanished. A dozen times he thought that he glimpsed her face in a crowd inside a shop or across a street or on one of the overhead walks. Each time he was mistaken.

He tried to tell himself that her actions didn't mean that she had lied. Perhaps she'd been sent on an errand. For all he knew her job with the Research Center might be as a messenger, who would enter and leave the building a dozen times during the day. But he couldn't shake the impression that she had been looking for _him_ when she emerged--looking anxiously, afraid that he might still be there.

His pleasure in the day's defiant freedom was gone. It seemed pointless to wander the streets. The time that had stretched before him like a blank sheet of paper now seemed merely empty, the sense of freedom a futile gesture. What had he hoped to gain? Surely he had known from the beginning of the day that, sooner or later, he would have to return to his room, to the only life he knew, to the inevitable reckoning that waited for him.

A flashing marquee caught his eye. SEE THE INTERIOR OF A FREEMAN CAMP! the sign shrilled. REVEALING! EXCITING! AUTHENTIC!

Hendley hesitated. It was a come-on, he knew. Very little that was revealing or exciting would be shown. But the possibility teased his mind. Even a brief glimpse was better than nothing. And he was tired of walking.

He presented his identity disc to the ticket machine. The show was expensive, costing 30D, or thirty minutes debit against his work time, but he felt reckless. He recognized the symptom as dangerous. Sometimes workers went completely berserk under the same impulse, going off on wild sprees that could run up many years debit, nullifying an equal period of work and prudent self-denial. Hendley had known one man in his own department at the Architectural Center who had fallen back from 3-Day to 4-Day status as the cost of a free-spending one-month vacation. Recognizing the danger, Hendley deliberately shrugged it off.

He had arrived at a bad time. A newsreel was being shown, devoted almost entirely to coverage of the great Merger. After the news he had to sit through a poorly produced, badly written and ineptly acted Freedom Play, no better than those he could see without cost on his own room viewscreen. But at last the feature attraction began. Hendley sat erect in his seat, watching intently.

The pictures were authentic enough. They had been taken through the telescopic lens of a long-range camera. The first views showed only a long, unbroken wall about fifteen feet high, above which trees could be seen. Real trees, Hendley thought. Then, from a higher vantage, the camera peeked over the wall.

The section of the pictures showing the interior of the Freeman Camp had been greatly enlarged at the cost of sharpness of detail. Nevertheless Hendley was able to define beyond the high wall a cleared area perhaps a hundred feet across, ending at a grove of trees and thickly growing bushes, broken here and there by foot paths. For several minutes little more could be seen. Hendley's heartbeat slowed to normal. He began to feel an edge of disappointment. He'd seen this much before. Everyone knew about the closely guarded wall and the security clearing beyond it, a protection against anyone trying to sneak into the camp unlawfully. At the very least he had expected something new....

His throat went dry. A cluster of white-clad figures materialized from the green mass of the woods, moving into the cleared area. One of the figures ran ahead of the others, who set off in pursuit. These were Freemen, evidently playing some kind of a game. A ripple of excitement ran through the theater. The pursuing men in white caught up with the leading figure, and they all converged in a writhing, tumbling mass, arms and legs flying. The spectacle was so violent it resembled a battle. One of the men broke free--the same one? Hendley wondered. Perhaps he was "it" in the game. His white coverall was torn, flapping as he ran. One of the other men dove after him, catching him by the ankles and tripping him up. The pursuers closed in....

The screen blurred, out of focus. An audible groan filled the theater. Hendley's heart was thumping. When the picture cleared, one of the Freemen was lying casually on the grass alone, apparently staring up at the sky. It was the one with the torn coverall. The others were racing off into the distance. They disappeared under the cover of the trees.

That was all. For a little while after the Freemen vanished, the camera continued to probe the line of trees hopefully. Hendley kept wishing it would return to the man lying in the clearing, but it did not.

Another sequence began in the film, but it merely showed some of the camp facilities. No Freemen were visible. Hendley's thoughts kept going back to the men he had seen. What carefree game had they been playing? What must it be like to engage in such openly abandoned sport? To lie endlessly on cool grass, watching the sun? To follow any impulse at will, with no thought of the cost?

Perhaps all the years of work and waiting were worth while, if in the end you could be truly free, your tax debt paid off and limitless recreation yours to enjoy. Was he willing to throw that away--to exchange it for a brief affair with a girl he didn't know, whose brown-green eyes probably held only what he wanted to read into them?

The remainder of the picture was short and unrevealing. When the screen went dark Hendley felt a sudden surge of anger. They teased you with freedom, he thought, just as the theater's marquee promised untold delights and offered instead a spoonful of stolen pleasure. And in the meanwhile they housed you in a blind room in a blind building, kept you busy pushing buttons in work that made you no more than a mechanical extension of a much more clever machine, and regimented your days and hours so that you wouldn't have time to think that there might be more to life than this--more even than the dream of ultimate ease and endless games.

No, he thought. It was more than the lure of hope in a girl's eyes that attracted him. To seek her out, to meet her again, was simply to give specific direction to the day's gesture of defiance. What he hoped to accomplish by it, he didn't know. Where it would all end didn't matter. It was something he had to do.

But she might not come.

He checked the time. It was after three o'clock. With a sense of urgency he rose and left the theater.

3

There was something unusual about the Historical Museum, oddly unsettling, and it was awhile before Hendley realized what it was. The place was almost empty. Here and there a few individuals or small groups of people shuffled slowly before the exhibits. A guide was pompously discoursing before a model of one of the old, exposed cities wiped out more than a hundred years before in the short war that scoured and blackened half the earth. His voice seemed loud only because the museum itself was so strangely silent in contrast with the hubbub and confusion outside in the streets.

Hendley had made a quick survey of the main floor of the museum, his eyes alert for the red coverall ABC-331 had worn. She was not there. It was well past four. He stared blankly at an exhibit of old weapons, trying to dull his mind against his bitter disillusionment.

The weapons were from another world beyond understanding--a world of great weapons of destruction, and of small, frightening individual weapons, from knives to clubs to firearms. That had been a time of personal achievement and personal crime. Now the only real crime was against the Organization and its rules--rules which demanded obedience to the Organization, its directives and its officers; forbade sexual relations between partners not Assigned or otherwise designated by the Organization; made unlawful the theft of Organization property for personal use, or the taking of the life of any person indebted to the Organization. Few would break these or the many refinements of the Organization's rules of order (including, Hendley thought, reporting for scheduled work days). Crime carried within itself its own punishment: it cut one off from ultimate freedom and the joys of pure recreation. Detection in an all-seeing, all-controlling, almost completely automated Organization was too certain, the penalty too great.

Hendley smiled wryly. He had joined a select group in his act of rebellion. And if the girl named Ann had come, he had been prepared to....

"Hello."

Hendley spun around. He gaped in astonishment into the warm, green-flecked eyes of ABC-331, and then at the blue coverall she wore, matching his own.

"I didn't think you'd come," she said.

"And I didn't think you would."

Suddenly they were smiling at each other. Hendley turned abruptly toward the weapons exhibit, staring without seeing. The girl moved close to his side. His mind was full of questions, but he didn't ask them. There would be time for that later. "Stay close to me," he murmured, not looking at her. "Just follow what I do."

Without consciously working it out, he found that he had already planned where they would go. The knowledge had been at the back of his mind when he first suggested the Historical Museum as a meeting place. He had been involved with the building's design in his work at the Architectural Center. He knew its floor plan above and below ground--its provisions for utilities, its security precautions, its entrances and exits.

Casually he began to walk among the exhibits, pausing to study some of them, then moving on, the girl following silently. They reached a stairway leading to a lower floor. Hendley nodded at ABC-331. Downstairs there were other exhibits, but he quickly located a corridor leading to some storage rooms and, beyond these, to another stairway.

Moments later they were moving quietly through the low-ceilinged room which housed the building's heating and air-conditioning plant. A steel door led to a narrow passage, which opened onto an underground tunnel carrying a maze of pipes.

"There's a service exit," he said. "It leads outside."

"Outside?" Her eyes showed alarm.

Hendley nodded. The safest place was in the sun.

He found the winding metal staircase he was looking for. He led the way up the stairs. Another steel door at the top was secured, but it opened from the inside. Hendley swung the door open. Sunlight blazed down on them. The girl gasped. Her hand came up to shield her eyes. Hendley quickly climbed through the opening and pulled her up after him. He stripped the belt from his coverall and used it as a wedge to keep the steel door from closing completely behind them. Then he stood in the naked sunlight and looked down at her.

"They'll never look for us here," he said.

The girl did not reply, but her slim, small hand slipped into his and squeezed gently. She was squinting against the harsh glare. The sun was a white, hot eye rolling in the sky. Its light reflected in a massive blaze of white from the unbroken curve of concrete towering for some thirty stories above them. In the distance other great concrete cylinders glared in the sunlight. A flat table of bare, baked earth, pale and shimmering, stretched between the featureless buildings like the floor of an enormous oven. Far above, sealed, windowless helicopters droned over the city in a steady stream, their blades beating like wings.

She was trembling.

"It's quite safe," Hendley said. "They've been letting people come out for years now, even here. And the Freeman Camps are all exposed like this."

"I know," she said. "It isn't that."

Her smile was apologetic. Her face was still squinting, eyes almost closed, lips drawn back in a bow, and the expression was youthfully innocent and appealing. A strange complex of emotions--compassion, tenderness, delight--engulfed him. Where her mouth was bowed, as if she were about to fling an arrow of words against the white target in the sky, he kissed her. Her lips were soft and dry. A tremor communicated itself from her spine to his hand.

Suddenly she tore her lips away and fell against him, her face turned down, pressing against his chest. "Oh, Hendley!" she cried. "How I've wanted you to do that!"

He held her tightly, a little dazed by the passion behind her words, so unlike the unemotional, almost indifferent acceptance of his Assigned....

He broke off the thought. He didn't want reality, past or future, to intrude on them. It was as if, emerging from the tunnel into the open sunlight, they had removed themselves from the real world, shutting it behind them with an act as simple as closing a door. The Organization existed behind the thick concrete walls, in the network of underground streets and moving walks--but only there. Not outside. Not in the sun.

Except for the Freemen, he thought unexpectedly.

He put one hand to the girl's hair, feeling its softness bristle at the nape of her neck where it was cut short, then turn soft as water when his fingers passed through the longer curls.

His hand stopped. "Your head is hot," he said. "We'd better get out of the sun."

"I'm all right."

"No. Neither of us is used to this much sun. It'll be shady on the other side."

He led her by the hand, keeping within arm's reach of the curving wall. Here and there they passed steel doors set flush with the smooth concrete, and once a slab of steel in the ground about ten feet from the wall, similar to the one from which they had emerged. He thanked the luck which had made him remember these exits and how to find them.

They reached shade, sharp and definite as black ink on white paper, painting the shape of the building long and flat across the bleak landscape. Coolness struck his face and hands as crisply as a slap. He drew the girl close to the building. Together they sank to the ground.

"Are you sure no one will find us?"

He put his arm around her shoulders. "No one will be looking."

She stared past him at the wasteland extending in every direction between the tall buildings and beyond. "It's so--so empty," she said nervously. "I've never been out before."

"Not many workers have."

"It frightens me."

"Don't look at it."

She looked up at him, and something in her eyes seemed to melt. She quivered spasmodically as he folded her into his arms. Her eyes were wide as his face loomed near, but when he brought his lips to hers, the fringed lids closed over her eyes like shades drawn against the light. And suddenly her hands were strong and hard on his back, urgent and demanding....

* * * * *

The sun, invisible to them now behind the building, touched the horizon. The bleached earth turned brown, and its surface, apparently flat before, shaped itself into small, shadowed rises and ridges. The air was cooler.

"I saw you leave the Research Center this morning," Hendley said. "Where were you going?"

For an instant something like dismay was naked in her eyes. "You must have seen somebody else," she said quickly.

"Do you think I'd mistake anyone else for you?"

Her face was pink, and now she didn't meet his eyes. "Oh, I--I don't really work there." The words spilled out in a rush. "I was--afraid of you--and I didn't know what to think. So I said I worked there. I really work up the street--I'm a clerk in a dress shop." She looked up at him beseechingly. "I shouldn't have lied."

He was so relieved that he found it easy to forgive her. "You didn't have to be afraid."

"I know that now."

Smiling, he caressed the round curve of her shoulder. The fabric of her coverall, which was still open at the front, was smooth to his touch. Her red garment had been rougher, cheaper....

"Why did you wear blue?" he asked suddenly.

"Because you do. Then if we were seen together, we wouldn't be noticed especially. It's illegal for a 3-Dayman to go out with a girl in red. You know that."

"It's illegal to wear the wrong color, too. Where did you get it--this coverall?"

"From a--a friend."

"She's bigger than you are--here. I like your waist."

"She's not bigger here."

"No." He smiled. "I like that too." He regarded her objectively. "You're very beautiful."

"Don't say that."

"Why not? It's true."

"It's what I'm supposed to be." Her mouth had a sad, reflective curve.

"What does that mean?"

"Just tell me--do you like me?"

"Very much. Don't you know, Ann?"

"Tell me that."