by Stephen King
The cop looked at him truculently.
“Got a family? It could be you next week.”
“Move on!” the cop shouted furiously.
With a smile, Richards moved on.
There was a line of perhaps twenty applicants waiting at the elevators. Richards showed one of the cops on duty his card and the cop looked at him closely. “You a hardass, sonny?”
“Just about as smart as you talk without that gun on your leg and your pants down around your ankles,” Richards said, still smiling. “Want to try it?”
For a moment he thought the cop was going to swing at him. “They’ll fix you,” the cop said. “You’ll do some walking on your knees before you’re done.”
The cop swaggered over to three new arrivals and demanded to see their cards.
The man ahead of Richards turned around. He had a nervous, unhappy face and curly hair that came down in a widow’s peak. “Say, you don’t want to antagonize them, fella. They’ve got a grapevine.”
“Is that so?” Richards asked, looking at him mildly.
The man turned away.
Abruptly the elevator doors snapped open. A black cop with a huge gut stood protecting the bank of push buttons. Another cop sat on a small stool reading a 3-D Pervert Mag in a small bulletproof cubicle the size of a telephone booth at the rear of the large car. A sawed-off shotgun rested between his knees. Shells were lined up beside him within easy reach.
“Step to the rear!” the fat cop cried with bored importance. “Step to the rear! Step to the rear!”
They crowded in to a depth where a deep breath was impossible. Sad flesh walled Richards on every side. They went up to the second floor. The doors snapped open. Richards, who stood a head taller than anyone else in the car, saw a huge waiting room with many chairs dominated by a huge Free-Vee. A cigarette dispenser stood in one corner.
“Step out! Step out! Show I.D. cards to your left!”
They stepped out, holding out their I.D. cards to the impersonal lens of a camera. Three cops stood close by. For some reason, a buzzer went off at the sight of some dozen cards, and the holders were jerked out of line and hustled away.
Richards showed his card and was waved on. He went to the cigarette machine, got a package of Blams and sat down as far from the Free-Vee as possible. He lit up a smoke and exhaled, coughing. He hadn’t had a cigarette in almost six months.
…Minus 096 and COUNTING…
They called the A’s for the physical almost immediately, and about two dozen men got up and filed through a door beyond the Free-Vee. A large sign tacked over the door read THIS WAY. There was an arrow below the legend, pointing at the door. The literacy of Games applicants was notoriously low.
They were taking a new letter every fifteen minutes or so. Ben Richards had sat down at about five, and so he estimated it would be quarter of nine before they got to him. He wished he had brought a book, but he supposed things were just as well as they were. Books were regarded with suspicion at best, especially when carried by someone from south of the Canal. Pervert Mags were safer.
He watched the six o’clock newsie restlessly (the fighting in Ecuador was worse, new cannibal riots had broken out in India, the Detroit Tigers had taken the Harding Catamounts by a score of 6–2 in an afternoon game), and when the first of the evening’s big-money games came on at six-thirty, he went restlessly to the window and looked out. Now that his mind was made up, the Games bored him again. Most of the others, however, were watching Fun Guns with a dreadful fascination. Next week it might be them.
Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk. The els were slamming at high speed through the power rings above the second-floor window, their powerful headlights searching the gray air. On the sidewalks below, crowds of men and women (most of them, of course, technicos or Network bureaucrats) were beginning their evening’s prowl in search of entertainment. A Certified Pusher was hawking his wares on the corner across the street. A man with a sabled dolly on each arm passed below him; the trio was laughing about something.
He had a sudden awful wave of homesickness for Sheila and Cathy, and wished he could call them. He didn’t think it was allowed. He could still walk out, of course; several men already had. They walked across the room, grinning obscurely at nothing, to use the door marked TO STREET. Back to the flat with his daughter glowing fever-bright in the other room? No. Couldn’t. Couldn’t.
He stood at the window a little while longer, then went back and sat down. The new game, Dig Your Grave, was beginning.
The fellow sitting next to Richards twitched his arm anxiously. “Is it true that they wash out over thirty percent just on the physicals?”
“I don’t know,” Richards said.
“Jesus,” the fellow said. “I got bronchitis. Maybe Treadmill to Bucks…”
Richards could think of nothing to say. The pal’s respiration sounded like a faraway truck trying to climb a steep hill.
“I got a fambly,” the man said with soft desperation.
Richards looked at the Free-Vee as if it interested him.
The fellow was quiet for a long time. When the program changed again at seven-thirty, Richards heard him asking the man on his other side about the physical.
It was full dark outside now. Richards wondered if it was still raining. It seemed like a very long evening.
…Minus 095 and COUNTING…
When the R’s went through the door under the red arrow and into the examination room it was just a few minutes after nine-thirty. A lot of the initial excitement had worn off, and people were either watching the Free-Vee avidly, with none of their prior dread, or dozing. The man with the noisy chest had a name that began with L and had been called over an hour before. Richards wondered idly if he had been cut.
The examination room was long and tiled, lit with fluorescent tubes. It looked like an assembly line, with bored doctors standing at various stations along the way.
Would any of you like to check my little girl? Richards thought bitterly.
The applicants showed their cards to another camera eye embedded in the wall and were ordered to stop by a row of clotheshooks. A doctor in a long white lab coat walked over to them, clipboard tucked under one arm.
“Strip,” he said. “Hang your clothes on the hooks. Remember the number over your hook and give the number to the orderly at the far end. Don’t worry about your valuables. Nobody here wants them.”
Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had had replaced at the local cobbler’s six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.
He was wearing tattered skivvies because Sheila was too stubborn to let him go without, but many of the men were buck under their pants. Soon they all stood stripped and anonymous, penises dangling between their legs like forgotten war-clubs. Everyone held his card in one hand. Some shuffled their feet as if the floor were cold, although it was not. The faint, impersonally nostalgic odor of alcohol drifted through.
“Stay in line,” the doctor with the clipboard was instructing. “Always show your card. Follow instructions.”
The line moved forward. Richards saw there was a cop with each doctor along the way. He dropped his eyes and waited passively.
“Card.”
He gave his card over. The first doctor noted the number, then said: “Open your mouth.”
Richards opened it. His tongue was depressed.
The next doctor peered into his pupils with a tiny bright light, and then stared in his ears.
The next placed the cold circle of a stethoscope on his chest. “Cough.”
Richards coughed. Down the line a man was being hauled away. He needed the money, they couldn’t do it, he’d get his lawyer on them.
The doctor moved his stethoscope. “Cough.”<
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Richards coughed. The doctor turned him around and put the stethoscope on his back.
“Take a deep breath and hold it.” The stethoscope moved.
“Exhale.”
Richards exhaled.
“Move along.”
His blood pressure was taken by a grinning doctor with an eyepatch. He was given a short-arm inspection by a bald medico who had several large brown freckles, like liverspots, on his pate. The doctor placed a cool hand between the sac of his scrotum and his upper thigh.
“Cough.”
Richards coughed.
“Move along.”
His temperature was taken. He was asked to spit in a cup. Halfway, now. Halfway down the hall. Two or three men had already finished up, and an orderly with a pasty face and rabbit teeth was bringing them their clothes in wire baskets. Half a dozen more had been pulled out of the line and shown the stairs.
“Bend over and spread your cheeks.”
Richards bent and spread. A finger coated with plastic invaded his rectal channel, explored, retreated.
“Move along.”
He stepped into a booth with curtains on three sides, like the old voting booths—voting booths had been done away with by computer election eleven years ago—and urinated in a blue beaker. The doctor took it and put it in a wire rack.
At the next stop he looked at an eye-chart. “Read,” the doctor said.
“E—A, L—D, M, F—S, P, M, Z—K, L, A, C, D—U, S, G, A—”
“That’s enough. Move along.”
He entered another pseudo voting booth and put earphones over his head. He was told to push the white button when he heard something and the red button when he didn’t hear it anymore. The sound was very high and faint—like a dog whistle that had been pitch-lowered into just audible human range. Richards pushed buttons until he was told to stop.
He was weighed. His arches were examined. He stood in front of a fluoroscope and put on a lead apron. A doctor, chewing gum and singing something tunelessly under his breath, took several pictures and noted his card number.
Richards had come in with a group of about thirty. Twelve had made it to the far end of the room. Some were dressed and waiting for the elevator. About a dozen more had been hauled out of line. One of them tried to attack the doctor that had cut him and was felled by a policeman wielding a move-along at full charge. The pal fell as if poleaxed.
Richards stood at a low table and was asked if he had had some fifty different diseases. Most of them were respiratory in nature. The doctor looked up sharply when Richards said there was a case of influenza in the family.
“Wife?”
“No. My daughter.”
“Age?”
“A year and a half.”
“Have you been immunized? Don’t try to lie!” the doctor shouted suddenly, as if Richards had already tried to lie. “We’ll check your health stats.”
“Immunized July 2023. Booster September 2023. Block health clinic.”
“Move along.”
Richards had a sudden urge to reach over the table and pop the maggot’s neck. Instead, he moved along.
At the last stop, a severe-looking woman doctor with close-cropped hair and an Electric Juicer plugged into one ear asked him if he was a homosexual.
“No.”
“Have you ever been arrested on a felony charge?”
“No.”
“Do you have any severe phobias? By that I mean—”
“No.”
“You better listen to the definition,” she said with a faint touch of condescension. “I mean—”
“Do I have any unusual and compulsive fears, such as acrophobia or claustrophobia. I don’t.”
Her lips pressed tightly together, and for a moment she seemed on the verge of sharp comment.
“Do you use or have you used any hallucinogenic or addictive drugs?”
“No.”
“Do you have any relatives who have been arrested on charges of crimes against the government or against the government or against the Network?”
“No.”
“Sign this loyalty oath and this Games Commission release form, Mr., uh, Richards.”
He scratched his signature.
“Show the orderly your card and tell him the number—”
He left her in midsentence and gestured at the buck-toothed orderly with his thumb. “Number twenty-six, Bugs.” The orderly brought his things. Richards dressed slowly and went over by the elevator. His anus felt hot and embarrassed, violated, a little slippery with the lubricant the doctor had used.
When they were all bunched together, the elevator door opened. The bulletproof Judas hole was empty this time. The cop was a skinny man with a large wen beside his nose. “Step to the rear,” he chanted. “Please step to the rear.”
As the door closed, Richards could see the S’s coming in at the far end of the hall. The doctor with the clipboard was approaching them. Then the doors clicked together, cutting off the view.
They rode up to the third floor, and the doors opened on a huge, semilit dormitory. Rows and rows of narrow iron-and-canvas cots seemed to stretch out to infinity.
Two cops began to check them out of the elevator, giving them bed numbers. Richards’s was 940. The cot had one brown blanket and a very flat pillow. Richards lay down on the cot and let his shoes drop to the floor. His feet dangled over the end; there was nothing to be done about it.
He crossed his arms under his head and stared at the ceiling.
…Minus 094 and COUNTING…
He was awakened promptly at six the following morning by a very loud buzzer. For a moment he was foggy, disoriented, wondering if Sheila had bought an alarm clock or what. Then it came to him and he sat up.
They were led by groups of fifty into a large industrial bathroom where they showed their cards to a camera guarded by a policeman. Richards went to a blue-tiled booth that contained a mirror, a basin, a shower, a toilet. On the shelf above the basin was a row of toothbrushes wrapped in cellophane, an electric razor, a bar of soap, and a half-used tube of toothpaste. A sign tucked into the corner of the mirror read: RESPECT THIS PROPERTY! Beneath it, someone had scrawled: I ONLY RESPECT MY ASS!
Richards showered, dried with a towel that topped a pile on the toilet tank, shaved, and brushed.
They were let into a cafeteria where they showed their I.D. cards again. Richards took a tray and pushed it down a stainless steel ledge. He was given a box of cornflakes, a greasy dish of home fries, a scoop of scrambled eggs, a piece of toast as cold and hard as a marble gravestone, a halfpint of milk, a cup of muddy coffee (no cream), an envelope of sugar, an envelope of salt, and a pat of fake butter on a tiny square of oily paper.
He wolfed the meal; they all did. For Richards it was the first real food, other than greasy pizza wedges and government pill-commodities, that he had eaten in God knew how long. Yet it was oddly bland, as if some vampire chef in the kitchen had sucked all the taste out of it and left only brute nutrients.
What were they eating this morning? Help pills. Fake milk for the baby. A sudden feeling of desperation swelled over him. Christ when would they start seeing money? Today? Tomorrow? Next week?
Or maybe that was just a gimmick too, a flashy come-on. Maybe there wasn’t even any rainbow, let alone a pot of gold.
He sat staring at his empty plate until the seven o’clock buzzer went and they were moved on to the elevators.
…Minus 093 and COUNTING…
On the fourth floor Richards’s group of fifty was herded first into a large, furnitureless room ringed with what looked like letter slots. They showed their cards again, and the elevator doors whooshed closed behind them.
A gaunt man with receding hair with the Games emblem (the silhouette of a human head superimposed over a torch) on his lab coat came into the room.
“Please undress and remove all valuables from your clothes,” he said. “Then drop your clothes into one of the incinerator slots. You’ll be i
ssued Games coveralls.” He smiled magnanimously. “You may keep the overalls no matter what your personal Games resolution may be.”
There was some grumbling, but everyone complied.
“Hurry, please,” the gaunt man said. He clapped his hands together twice, like a first-grade teacher signaling the end of playtime. “We have lots ahead of us.”
“Are you going to be a contestant, too?” Richards asked.
The gaunt man favored him with a puzzled expression. Somebody in the back snickered.
“Never mind,” Richards said, and stepped out of his trousers.
He removed his unvaluable valuables and dumped his shirt, pants, and skivvies into a letter slot. There was a brief, hungry flash of flame from somewhere far below.
The door at the other end opened (there was always a door at the other end; they were like rats in a huge, upward-tending maze: an American maze, Richards reflected), and men trundled in large baskets on wheels, labeled S, M, L, and XL. Richards selected an XL for its length and expected it to hang baggily on his frame, but it fit quite well. The material was soft, clingy, almost like silk, but tougher than silk. A single nylon zipper ran up the front. They were all dark blue, and they all had the Games emblem on the right breast pocket. When the entire group was wearing them, Ben Richards felt as if he had lost his face.
“This way, please,” the gaunt man said, and ushered them into another waiting room. The inevitable Free-Vee blared and cackled. “You’ll be called in groups of ten.”
The door beyond the Free-Vee was topped by another sign reading THIS WAY, complete with arrow.
They sat down. After a while, Richards got up and went to the window and looked out. They were higher up, but it was still raining. The streets were slick and black and wet. He wondered what Sheila was doing.
…Minus 092 and COUNTING…
He went through the door, one of a group of ten now, at quarter past ten. They went through single file. Their cards were scanned. There were ten three-sided booths, but these were more substantial. The sides were constructed of drilled soundproof cork paneling. The overhead lighting was soft and indirect. Muzak was emanating from hidden speakers. There was a plush carpet on the floor; Richards’s feet felt startled by something that wasn’t cement.