by Walter Tevis
“We can go get her now,” he said.
And I found myself leaving my cell easily. As we went out the unlocked door I turned to Belasco and said, “I feel better.”
He slapped me lightly on the back. “What are friends for?” he said.
I stood there a moment, not knowing what to say. And then, almost without thinking of the gesture, I reached out and put my hand on his forearm. And I thought of something. “There’s a building I want to get in. Do you think it might be unlocked?”
He grinned at me. “That’s more like it,” he said. And then, “Let’s go see.”
We left the building. It was simple and there were no guards in sight.
We got into the deserted building with no trouble, but inside it was too dark to see, and we stumbled over boxes in the hallways. Then I heard Belasco say, “Sometimes these old places have a switch on the wall,” and I heard him fumbling, heard him trip and curse, and then there was a click and a big overhead light came on in the hallway. For a moment I was frightened that the guards might see the light, but then I remembered the boarded-up windows and was relieved.
But when I found the library door it was still locked! I was tense enough already, and I could have screamed.
Belasco looked at me. “Is that where you want to go?”
I said, “Yes.” Without even asking me what I wanted to get in the room for, he began to examine the lock. It was of a kind I had never seen before, and didn’t even appear to be electronic.
Belasco whistled quietly. “Wow!” he said. “This bastard is old.” He began feeling in his pockets until he found his prison-issued lighter. Then he put it on the floor and stamped on it two or three times with his heel, until it was broken. He reached down, picked up the mess of wires and glass and plastic, and, after studying it a moment, pulled out a piece of stiff wire about as long as my thumb. I watched him silently, having no idea what he was doing this for.
He bent to the lock on the door carefully, placed the end of his wire into a slot in it, and began probing around. Every now and then a little clicking sound came from inside the lock somewhere. He cursed a couple of times, quietly, and continued. And then, just as I was about to ask him what he was trying to do, there was a softer sound inside the lock and Belasco grinned, took the doorknob in his hand, and opened the door!
It was dark inside, but Belasco found a switch on the wall again and two somewhat dim overhead lights came on.
I looked around me eagerly, hoping to find the walls lined with books. But they were empty. I stared for a long time, feeling almost sick. There were ancient wooden tables and chairs, and a few small boxes along one wall, but there were no shelves and the pockmarked walls were empty even of pictures.
“What’s the problem?” Belasco said.
I looked at him. “I was hoping to find . . . books.”
“Books?” He apparently didn’t know the word. But he said, “What’s in those boxes over there?”
I nodded, without much hope, and went over to look at the boxes by the wall. The first two I opened were filled with rusty spoons—so badly rusted that they were all frozen together in a reddish mass. But the third box was filled with books! I began taking them out eagerly. There were twelve of them. And at the bottom of the box was a pile of sheets of blank paper that was hardly yellow at all.
Excitedly I began to read the titles. The biggest was called North Carolina Revised Statutes: 1992. Another was called Woodworking for Fun and Profit and a third, also very thick, was called Gone With the Wind. It felt wonderful just to hold them and think of all the writing inside.
Belasco had been watching me with mild curiosity. Finally he spoke. “Are those things books?” he said.
“Yes.”
He picked one up from the box and ran his finger through the dust on the cover. “Never heard of such a thing,” he said.
I looked at him. “Let’s get the cat and get these back to my cell.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
We got Biff and carried the books back without any trouble at all.
It is very late now and Belasco has gone back to his cell. I will stop writing now and look through my books. I have them hidden between my water bed and the wall, near where Biff is sleeping.
DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE
I am very tired because I read almost all night last night and had to work all day today. But what excitement I have found! My tired mind was busy all day, with all of the new things I had to think about.
I think I will make a list of my new books:
North Carolina Revised Statutes: 1992
Woodworking for Fun and Profit
Gone With the Wind
Holy Bible
Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide
A Dictionary of the English Language
The Causes of Population Decline
Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries
A Backpacker’s Guide to the Carolina Coast
A Short History of the United States
Cooking Shore Dinners: Let’s Have a Party!
The Art of the Dance
I have been reading the history books, going from one to the other and to the dictionary to find the meaning of new words. The dictionary is a pleasure to use, now that I know the alphabet.
There is much in the history books that I do not understand, and it is hard for me to accept the idea that there have been so many people in the world. In the history that is about Europe there are pictures of Paris and Berlin and London, and the size of the buildings and the number of people are staggering.
Sometimes Biff jumps up into my lap while I am reading and goes to sleep there. I like that.
DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE
For ten days now I have spent every moment that I can in reading. No one has bothered me; the guards either do not care or, more likely, their programming does not take into account the phenomenon. I even take a book to social time with me and no one seems to notice that I am reading it during the films.
My blue prison jacket—already a bit faded—has large pockets and I always carry one of my smaller books in it. A Short History of the United States and The Causes of Population Decline are both small, and they fit very comfortably. I read during my five-minute breaks at the shoe factory.
The first sentence of The Causes of Population Decline says: “In the first thirty years of the twenty-first century the population of the earth declined by one-half, and it is still declining.” To read things like this, that consider the nature of all of human life, and at far-off times, fascinates me for reasons that I do not understand.
I do not know how long ago the twenty-first century was, although I understand that it is more recent than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that my history book is about. But I was never taught about “centuries” in the dormitory; I only know the meaning of the word from the dictionary: it divides up human history into groups of one hundred years—of two hundred yellows.
The twenty-first century must have been a long time ago. For one thing, there are no mentions of robots in the book.
Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide has the date 2135 on it, and I know from reading history that the date is from the twenty-second century.
Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.
The robots in the Audel’s book are shown in pictures and diagrams. They are all of a very simple kind made for elementary chores like fieldwork and record keeping.
Gone With the Wind resembles some of the films I know. It is, I think, a made-up story. It is about some silly people in big houses, and about a war. I don’t think I will ever finish it, since it is very long.
Many of the other books make no sense at all to me. Still, t
hey seem to fit into some larger, only dimly clear, pattern.
What I like most is the strange sensation I get in the little hairs at the back of my neck when I read certain sentences. And, oddly enough, there are sentences that are often quite unclear to me, or that make me sad. I still remember this one from my days in New York:
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
I will stop writing now, and go back to reading. My life is very strange.
DAY ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE
I read continuously, and take no sopors and smoke no marijuana. I read until I can stay awake no longer and fall in bed and lie there with my mind whirling and with faces and people and ideas from the past crowding and confusing me until, exhausted, I fall asleep.
And I am learning new words. Thirty or forty a day.
Long before robots and Privacy, mankind had a violent and astonishing history. I hardly know how to think or feel about some of the dead people I have read of, and of the great events. There is the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and the Great Flood of Fire and World War III and the Denver Incident. I was taught as a child that all things before the Second Age were violent and destructive because of a failure to respect individual rights; but it was never more specific than that. We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged tothink about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”
I am amazed to think of the number of people who must have screamed and died on battlefields in order to fulfill the ambitions of presidents and emperors. Or of the aggregation into the hands of some large groups of people, like the United States of America, great reserves of wealth and power, denied to most others.
And yet, despite all this, there seemed to have been good and kind men and women. And many of them happy.
DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-TWO
The back part of Holy Bible is about Jesus Christ. Some sentences in it have been underlined by a former reader.
Jesus Christ died violently when he was still young, but before he died he said and did a great many striking things. He cured many sick people and talked strangely to many others. Some of the underlined sayings resemble what I was taught in my Piety classes. “The kingdom of God is within you,” for example, sounds much like our being taught to seek fulfillment only inwardly, through drugs and Privacy. But others of his sayings are quite different. “Ye must love one another” is one of these. Another one that is very strong is: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” And another: “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
If someone should come to me and say, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” I would want with all my strength to believe him. I want those things: a way, the truth, and life.
As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With the Wind, or a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.
Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.
I think my writing is improving. I know more words, and the making of sentences comes more easily.
DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-SEVEN
I have read all of my books, except for Gone With the Wind and The Art of the Dance, and I want more. Five nights ago the doors were unlocked again and Belasco and I went back to the abandoned building and searched it thoroughly, but we found no more books.
I must have more to read! When I think of all those books in the basement of the library in New York I hunger to be back there.
In New York I saw some films that showed prison escapes. And in those prisons the guards were human and vigilant, while here ours are only moron robots.
But there are these metal bracelets that cannot be deactivated for more than a half day at a time. And how would I get to New York if I escaped?
In the Backpacking book there is a map of what is called the Eastern Seaboard; North and South Carolina are on this map, and so is New York. If I walked along the beach, keeping the ocean on my right, I would come to New York. But I have no idea how far it is.
Cooking Shore Dinners tells about finding clams and other things to eat on beaches. I could feed myself that way, if I escaped.
And I could copy this journal, in smaller writing, on the thin paper I found with the box of books and carry it with me in my pocket. But I could not carry all the books.
And there is no way to remove the bracelets. Unless there is something that would cut them.
DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT
In the shoe factory there is a very large machine that cuts the sheets of plastic that the shoes are made from. It has a shining blade of adamant steel that cuts through about twenty sheets of tough plastic at a single stroke. There is a robot guard by the machine, and no human worker is supposed to go near it. But I have noticed that at times the guard seems dormant; he may be a nearly senile robot that has been assigned to the simple task of standing by a machine.
If, when I saw him looking dormant, I went to the machine and held my hands in exactly the right spot, the knife might be able to cut my bracelets.
If I made a mistake it would cut my hands off. Or it might not be able to cut through the metal and the blade would catch on it and twist my arms out of their sockets.
It is too frightening. I will stop thinking about it.
DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY
The Causes of Population Decline says this interesting thing about the number of people in the world:
The reduction of the planet’s inhabitants has been accounted for in a diverse and conflicting number of ways by contemporary demography. The most persuasive of these accounts usually suggest one or more of the following factors:
1. fears of overpopulation
2. the perfection of sterilization techniques
3. the disappearance of the family
4. the widespread concern with “inner” experiences
5. a loss of interest in children
6. a widespread desire to avoid responsibilities
The book then analyzes each of these things.
But nowhere does it speak of a possibility that there might be no children at all. And that, I think, is the way the world has come to be. I do not think there are any more children.
After we all die, there may be no others.
I do not know whether that is bad or good.
Yet I think it would be in many ways a good thing to be the father of a child, and to have Mary Lou be the mother. And I would like to live with her, and for us to be a family—despite the great risks to my Individuality.
What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?
DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR
Today the Protein 4 plants were harvested. When we went out in the field to work there were two huge yellow machines already there, noisily moving down the rows like giant thought buses, throwing up clouds of dust and scooping up the ripened plants twenty or thirty at a time and feeding them into hoppers, where I supposed they would be pulverized, to be made into soybars and synthetic protein flakes.
We kept our distance from the field because of the smell, which was far worse even than usual, and watched the machines in silence for a while.
Finally someone spoke. It was Belasco, and he said grimly, “There goes another season’s work, boys.”
Nobody said anything else. Another season’s work. I looked around and behind me, looking at things closely fo
r the first time in weeks. The trees on the hills beyond the prison buildings had all lost their leaves. The air was cold on my skin. I felt a tingling, thinking of the feeling of my skin, looking up at the pale blueness of the sky. At the edge of the hills a great crowd of birds were flying, wheeling, and turning in unison.
And I decided then that I must escape from this prison.
Spofforth
Her face was not pretty, but it held his frightened gaze as it always did. She stood on the wet mud at the edge of the pond, as tall as he, her white feet not even sinking into it, her face puzzled and her arms tense, shaking slightly beneath her long robe as she held the thing out to him. What it was he could never tell, no matter how hard he tried to see it across the four or five feet that separated them. He stared and stared at what she was holding out to him and then, sadly, defeated, looked down. The mud was over his own white ankles, and he could not move. Nor, he felt, could she. He looked up again at her, still holding out the thing that would not focus for his eyes, and he tried to speak to her, to ask her what she wanted to give him, but he could not speak. He became more frightened. And he awoke.
Deep, deep he had known it was a dream. He always seemed to know. And afterward, sitting on the edge of his narrow bed in the apartment, he thought of the woman in the dream, as he always did afterward, and then he thought of the girl with the black hair and the red coat. He had never, in his long, long life, dreamt of her; it was always the woman in the robe—his secondhand dream, taken by accident from a life he had not lived and knew almost nothing of.
He had seen a few real women who looked something like her. Mary Borne was one of these, with her bright, strong eyes and her solid way of standing, although she was much stronger-looking, much more poised than the woman in the dream.