Chapter III: Part ONE (2)

He met Derban at the turn in the corridor, perhaps fifty feet before the Alberts' door. That wasn't strictly according to the rules, and Albin knew it: he had learned the code as early as anyone else. But the rules were for emergencies--and emergencies didn't happen any more. The Alberts weren't about to revolt.

He was carrying his Belbis beam, of course. The little metal tube didn't look like much, but it was guaranteed to stop anything short of a spaceship in its tracks, and by the very simple method of making holes. The Belbis beam would make holes in nearly anything: Alberts, people or most materials. It projected a quarter-inch beam of force in as near a straight line as Einsteinian physics would allow, and it was extremely efficient. Albin had been practicing with it for three years, twice a week.

Everybody did. Not that there's ever been a chance to use it.

And there wasn't going to be a chance, Albin decided. He exchanged a word or two absently with Derban and they went to the door together. Albin reached for the door but Derban's big brown hand was already on it. He grinned and swung the door open.

Air conditioning had done something to minimize the reek inside, but not much. Albin devoted most of his attention to keeping his face a complete mask. The last thing he wanted was to retch--not in front of the Alberts, who didn't really exist for him, but in front of Derban. And the party (which he wasn't going to think about) hadn't left his stomach in perfect shape.

The Alberts, seeing these masters enter stirred and rose. Albin barked at them in a voice that was only very slightly choked: "Form a line. Form a line."

The Alberts milled around, quite obviously uncertain what a line was. Albin gripped his beam tighter, not because it was a weapon but just because he needed something handy to take out his anger on.

"Damn it," he said tightly, "a line. Form a straight line."

"It's only their second day," Derban said in a low voice. "Give them time." Albin could barely hear him over the confused babble of the Alberts. He shook his head and felt a new stab of anger.

"One behind the other," he told the milling crowd. "A line, a straight line."

After a little more confusion, Albin was satisfied. He sighed heavily and beckoned with his beam: the Alberts started forward, through the door and out into the corridor.

Albin went before, Derban behind, falling naturally into step. They came to the great elevator and Albin pushed a stud. The door slid open.

The Alberts, though, didn't want to go in. They huddled, looking at the elevator with big round eyes, muttering to themselves and to each other. Derban spoke up calmly: "This is the same room you were in yesterday. It won't hurt you. Just go through the door. It's all right." But the words had very little effect. A few of the Alberts moved closer and then, discovering that they were alone, hurriedly moved back again. The elevator door remained open, waiting.

Albin, ready to shriek with rage by now, felt a touch at his arm. One of the Alberts was standing near him, looking up. Its eye blinked: it spoke. "Why does the room move?" The voice was not actually unpleasant, but its single eye stared at Albin, making him uncomfortable. He told himself not to blow up. Calm. _Calm._

"The room moves because it moves," he said, a little too quickly. "Because the masters tell it to move. What do you want to know for?"

"I want to learn," the Albert said calmly.

"Well, don't ask questions," Albin said. He kept one eye on the shifting mob. "If there's anything good for you to know, you'll be told. Meanwhile, just don't ask any questions."

The Albert looked downcast. "Can I learn without questions?"

Albin's control snapped. "Damn it, you'll learn what you have to!" he yelled. "You don't have to ask questions--you're a slave. A slave! Get that through your green head and shut up!"

The tone had two effects. First, it made the Albert near him move back, staring at him still with that single bright eye. Second, the others started for the elevator, apparently pushed more by the tone than the words. A master was angry. That, they judged, meant trouble. Acceding to his wishes was the safest thing to do.

And so, in little, frightened bunches, they went in. When they were all clear of the door, Albin and Derban stepped in, too, and the doors slid shut. Derban took a second to mutter secretly: "You don't have to lose your temper. You're on a hell of a thin edge this morning."

Albin flicked his eyes over the brown face, the stocky, stolid figure. "So I'm on a thin edge," he said. "Aren't you?"

"Training is training," Derban said. "Got to put up with it, because what can you do about it?"

Albin grinned wryly. "I told somebody else that, last night," he said. "Man named Dodd--hell, you know Johnny Dodd. Told him he needed some fun. Holy jumping beavers--fun."

"Maybe you need some," Derban said.

"Not like last night, I don't," Albin said, and the elevator door opened.

Now others took over, guiding the Alberts to their individual places on the training floor. Each had a small room to himself, and each room had a spy-TV high up in a corner as a safeguard.

But the spy-eyes were just as much good as the beams, Albin thought. They were useless precautions: rebellion wasn't about to happen. It made more sense, if you thought about it, to worry the way Johnny Dodd worried, about the Confederation--against which spy-eyes and Belbis beams weren't going to do any good anyhow. (And nothing was going to happen. Nothing, he told himself firmly, was going to happen. Nothing.)

The Alberts were shunted off without trouble. Albin, heaving a small sigh, fixed the details of his next job in his mind: quality control in a smelting process. It took him a few seconds to calm down and get ready, and then he headed for room six, where one Albert waited for him, trying to think only of the job ahead, and not at all of the party, of Dr. Haenlingen, of Johnny Dodd, of rebellion and war.

He nearly succeeded.

* * * * *

When he opened the door the Albert inside turned, took a single look at him, and said: "I do not mean to make masters troubled."

Albin said: "What?"

"I do not ask questions now." Albin blinked, and then grinned.

"Oh," he said. "You're the one. Damn right you don't ask questions. You just listen to what I tell you--got that?"

"I listen," the Albert said.

Albin shut the door and leaned against it. "Okay," he said. "Now the first thing, you come over here and watch me." He went to the far side of the room, flicked on the remote set, and waited for it to warm up. In a few seconds it held a strong, steady picture: a single smelter, a ladle, an expanse of flooring.

"I see this when you teach me before," the Albert said in almost a disappointed tone.

"I know," Albin told it. Routine was taking over and he felt almost cheerful again. There was a woman working in the food labs in Building Two. He'd noticed her a few times in the past weeks. Now he thought of her again, happily. Maybe tonight "This time I'm going to show you what to do," he told the Albert, and swept a hand over a row of buttons. In the smelter, metal began to heat.

The job was simple enough: the metal, once heated, had to be poured out into the ladle, which acted as a carrier to take the stuff on to its next station. The only critical point was the color of the heated liquid, and the eyes of Alberts and humans saw the same spectrum, with perhaps a little more discrimination in the eyes of the Alberts. This Albert had to be taught to let the process go unless the color was wrong, when a series of buttons would stop everything and send a quality alarm into men's quarters.

A machine could have done the job very easily, but machines were expensive. An Albert could be taught in a week.

And this one seemed to learn more quickly than most. It grasped the idea of button-pushing before the end of the day, and Albin made a mental note to see if he could speed matters up, maybe by letting the Albert have a crack at actually doing the job on its own by day four or five instead of day six.

"You learn fast," he said, when work was finally over. He felt both tired and tense, but the thought of relaxation ahead kept him nearly genial.

"I want to learn," the Albert said.

"Good boy," Albin said absently. "What's your name?"

"Cadnan."

7

But Cadnan, he knew, was only a small name: it was not a great name. He knew now that he had a great name, and it made him proud because he was no longer only small Cadnan: he was a slave.

It was good, he knew, to be a slave. A slave worked and got food and shelter from the masters, and the masters told him what he could know without even the need of asking a question. The elders were only elders, but the masters were masters, and Cadnan was a slave. It made him feel great and wise when he thought of it.

That night he could hardly wait to tell his news to Marvor--but Marvor acted as if he knew it already and was even made angry by the idea. "What is a slave?" he asked, in a flat, bad tone.

Cadnan told him of the work, the food, the shelter....

"And what is a master?" Marvor asked.

"A master is a master," Cadnan said. "A master is the one who knows."

"A master tells you what to do," Marvor said. "I am training and there is more training to come and then work. This is because of the masters."

"It is good," Cadnan said. "It is important."

Marvor shook his head, looking very much like a master himself. "What is important?" he said.

Cadnan thought for a minute. "Important is what a master needs for life," he said at last. "The masters need a slave for life, because a slave must push the buttons. Without this work the masters do not live."

"Then why do the masters not push the buttons?" Marvor said.

"It is good they do not," Cadnan said stubbornly. "A slave is a big thing, and Cadnan is only a little thing. It is better to be big than little."

"It is better to be master than slave," Marvor said sullenly.

"But we are not masters," Cadnan said, with the air of a person trying to bring reason back to the discussion. "We do not look like masters, and we do not know what they know."

"You want to learn," Marvor said. "Then learn what they know."

"They teach me," Cadnan said. "But I am still a slave, because they teach me. I do not teach them."

Marvor hissed and at the same time shook his head like a master. The effect was not so much frightening as puzzling: he was a creature, suddenly, who belonged to both worlds, and to neither. "A master is one who does what he wants," he said. "If I do what I want, am I a master?"

"That is silliness," Cadnan said. Marvor seemed about to reply, but both were surprised instead by the opening of the door.

A master stood in the lighted entrance, holding to the sides with both hands.

Anyone with a thorough knowledge of men could have told that he was drunk. Any being with a sense of smell could have detected the odors of that drunkenness. But the Alberts knew only that a master had come to them during the time for eating and sleeping. They stirred, murmuring restlessly.

"It's all right," the master said, slurring his words only very slightly. "I wanted to come and talk. I wanted to talk to one of you."

Before anyone else could move, Cadnan was upright. "I will talk," he said in a loud voice. The others stared at him, including Marvor. Even Cadnan himself was a little surprised at his own speed and audacity.

"Come on over," the master said from the doorway. "Come on over." He made a beckoning motion.

Cadnan picked his way across the room over wakeful Alberts.

When he had reached the master, the master said: "Sit down." He looked strange, Cadnan realized, though he could not tell exactly how.

Cadnan sat and the master, closing the door, sat with his back against it. There was a second of silence, which the master broke abruptly.

"My name's Dodd," he said.

* * * * *

"I am called Cadnan," Cadnan said. He couldn't resist bringing out his latest bit of knowledge for display. "I am a slave."

"Sure," Dodd said dully. "I know. The rest of them say I shouldn't, but I think about you a lot. About all of you."

Cadnan, not knowing if this were good or bad, said nothing at all, but waited. Dodd sighed, shook his head and closed his eyes. After a second he went on.

"They tell me, let the slaves have their own life," he said. "But I don't see it that way. Do you see it that way? After all, you're people, aren't you? Just like us."

Cadnan tried to untangle the questions, and finally settled for a simple answer. "We are slaves," he said. "You are masters."

"Sure," Dodd said. "But I mean people. And you want the same things we do. You want a little comfort out of life, a little security--some food, say, and enough food for tomorrow. Right?"

"It is good to have," Cadnan said. He was determined to keep his end of the odd conversation up, even if it seemed to be leading nowhere.

"It isn't as if we've been here forever," Dodd said. "Only--well, a hundred or so of your years. Three generations, counting me. And here we are lording it over you, just because of an accident. We happen to be farther advanced than you, that's all."

"You are masters," Cadnan said. "You know everything."

"Not quite," Dodd said. "For instance, we don't know about you. You have--well, you have got mates, haven't you? Hell, of course you do. Male or female. Same as us. More or less."

"We have mates, when we are ready for mates," Cadnan said.

Dodd nodded precariously. "Uh-huh," he said. "Mates. They tell me I need mates, but I tried it and I got into trouble. Mates aren't the answer, kid. Cadnan. They simply aren't the answer."

Cadnan thought, suddenly, of Dara. He had not spoken to her again, but he was able to think of her. When the time of mating came, it was possible that she would be his mate....

But that was forbidden, he told himself. They came from the same tree in the same time. The rule forbade such matings.

"What we ought to do," Dodd said abruptly, "is we ought to do a thorough anthropological--anthropological study on you people. A really big job. But that's uneconomic, see? Because we know what we have to know. Where to find you, what to feed you, how to get you to work. They don't care about the rest."

"The masters are good," Cadnan said stolidly into the silence. "They let me work."

"Sure," Dodd said, and shrugged, nearly losing his balance. He recovered, and went on as if nothing at all had happened. "They let you work for them," he said. "And what do you get out of it? Food and shelter and security, I guess. But how would you like to work for yourself instead?"

Cadnan stared. "I do not understand," he said slowly.

Dodd shook his head. "No," he said. "How would you like it if there were no masters? Only people, just you and your people, living your own lives and making your own decisions? How about that, kid?"

"We would be alone," Cadnan said simply. "No master would feed us. We would die."

"No," Dodd said again. "What did you do before we came?"

"It was different," Cadnan said. "It was not good. This is better." He tried to imagine a world without masters, but the picture would not come. Obviously, then, the world he lived in was better: it was better than nothing.

"Slaves," Dodd said to himself. "With a slave mentality." And then: "Tell me, Cadnan, do they all think like you?"

Cadnan didn't think of Marvor. By now he was so confused by this strange conversation that his answer was automatic. "We do not talk about it."

Dodd looked at him mistily. "I'm disturbing you for nothing," he said. "Nothing I can do but get killed trying to start up a slave revolt. Which might be okay, but I don't know. If you get me--I don't know about that, kid. Right?" He stood up, a little shakily, still leaning against the door. "And frankly," he said, "I don't want to get killed over a lot of alligators."

"No one wishes to die," Cadnan said.

"You'd be surprised," Dodd told him. He moved and opened the door. For a second he stood in the entrance. "People can wish for almost anything," he said. "You'd be surprised." The door banged shut and he was gone.

* * * * *

Cadnan sat staring at the door for a second, his mind a tangle of ideas and of new words for which he had no referents whatever. When he turned away at last his eye fell on Dara, curled in a far corner. She was looking at him but when he saw her he looked away. That disturbed him, too: the rules were very clear on matings.

Cadnan wanted to tell someone what he felt. He wanted information, and he wanted someone to follow. But the masters were masters: he could not be like them. And in the room where he slept there were no elders. The thought of speaking with an elder, in any case, gave him no satisfaction. He did not want an elder: he could not join the masters and ask questions.

Somewhere, he told himself, there would be someone....

Somewhere....

Of course, there was Marvor. Later in the night, while Cadnan still lay awake trying to put thoughts and words together in his mind, Marvor moved closer to him.

"I want you with me," he said.

But Marvor, Cadnan had decided, was bad. "I sleep here," Cadnan said, a trifle severely. "I do not move my place."

In the dimness Marvor shook his head _no_, like a master. "I want you with me in the plan I have," he said. "I want you to help me."

That was different. The rules of the elders covered such a request. "Does a brother refuse help to a brother?" Cadnan asked. "We are from the same tree and the same time. Tell me what I must do."

Marvor opened his mouth wide, wider, until Cadnan saw the flash of his many teeth, and a second passed in silence. Then Marvor snapped his jaws shut, hissing, and spoke. "The masters tell us what to do. They make our life for us."

"This is true," Cadnan muttered.

"It is evil," Marvor said. "It is bad. We must make our own lives. Every thing makes its own life."

"We are slaves," Cadnan said. "This is our life. It is our place."

Marvor sat up suddenly. Around them the others muttered and stirred. "Does the plant grow when a master tells it?" he asked. "Does the tree bud when a master tells it? So we must also grow in our own way."

"We are not plants or trees," Cadnan said.

"We are alive," Marvor said in a fierce, sudden whisper. "The masters, too, are alive. We are the same as they. Why do they tell us what to do?"

Cadnan was very patient. "Because they know, and we do not," he said. "Because they tell us, that is all. It is the way things are."

"I will change the way things are," Marvor said. He spoke now more softly still. "Do you want to be a master?"

"I am no master," Cadnan said wearily. "I am a slave."

"That is a bad thing." Cadnan tried to speak, but Marvor went on without stopping. "Dara is with me," he said, "and some of the others. There are not many. Most of the brothers and sisters are cowards."

Then he had to define "coward" for Cadnan--and from "coward" he progressed to another new word, "freedom." That was a big word but Cadnan approached it without fear, and without any preconception.

"It is not good to be free," he said at last, in a reasonable, weary tone. "In the cold there is a bad thing. In the rain there is a bad thing. To be free is to go to these bad things."

"To be free is to do what you want," Marvor said. "To be free is to be your own master."

After some thought Cadnan asked: "Who can be his own master? It is like being your own mate."

Marvor seemed to lose patience all at once. "Very well," he said. "But you will not tell the masters what I say?"

"Does a brother harm a brother?" Cadnan asked. That, too, was in the rules: even Marvor, he thought sleepily, had to accept the rules.

"It is good," Marvor said equably. "Soon, very soon, I will make you free."

"I do not want to be free."

"You will want it," Marvor said. "I tell you something you do not know. Far away from here there are free ones. Ones without masters. I hear of them in the Birth Huts: they are elders who bring up their own in hiding from the masters. They want to be free."

Cadnan felt a surge of hope. Marvor might leave, take away the disturbance he always carried with him. "You will go and join them?"

"No," Marvor said. "I will go to them and bring them back and kill all the masters. I will make the masters dead."

"You cannot do it," Cadnan said instantly, shocked.

"I can," Marvor said without raising his voice. "Wait and you will see. Soon we will be free. Very soon now."

8

This is the end.

Dodd woke with the words in his mind, flashing on and off like a lighted sign. Back in the Confederation (he had seen pictures) there were moving stair-belts, and at the exits, at turnoffs, there were flashing signs. The words in his mind were like that: if he ignored them he would be carried on past his destination, into darkness and strangeness.

But his destination was strange, too. His head pounded, his tongue was thick and cottony in a dry mouth: drinking had provided nothing of an escape and the price he had to pay was much too high.

_This is the end._

There was no escape, he told himself dimly! The party had resulted only in that sudden appearance, the grim-mouthed old woman. Drinking had resulted in no more than this new sickness, and a cloudy memory of having talked to an Albert, some Albert, somewhere.... He opened his eyes, felt pain and closed them again. There was no escape: the party Albin had taken him to had led to trouble, his own drunkenness had led to trouble. He saw the days stretching out ahead of him and making years.

It was nearly time now to begin work. To begin the job of training, with the Alberts, the job he was going to do through all those days and years lying ahead.

_This is the end._

He found himself rising, dressing, shaving off the stubble of beard. His head hurt, his eyes ached, his mouth was hardly improved by a gargle, but all that was far away, as distant as his own body and his own motions.

His head turned and looked at the clock set into his wall. The eyes noted a position of the hands and passed the information to the brain: 8:47. The brain decided that it was time to go on to work. The body moved itself in accustomed patterns, opening the door, passing through the opening, shutting the door again, walking down the hallway.

All that was very distant. Dodd, himself, was--somewhere else.

He met his partner standing before a group of the Alberts. Dodd's eyes noted the expression on his partner's face. The brain registered the information, interpreted it and predicted. Dodd knew he would hear, and did hear, sounds: "What's wrong with _you_ this morning?"

The correct response was on file. "Drinking a little too much last night, I guess." It was all automatic: everything was automatic. The Alberts went into their elevator, and Dodd and his partner followed. Dodd's body did not stumble. But Dodd was somewhere else.

The elevator stopped, the Alberts went off to their sections, Dodd's partner went to his first assignment, Dodd found his body walking away down the hall, opening a door, going through the opening, shutting the door. The Albert inside looked up.

"Today we are going to do the work together." Dodd heard his own voice: it was all perfectly automatic, there were no mistakes. "Do you understand?"

"Understand," the Albert said.

_This is the end._

* * * * *

At the end of the day he was back from wherever he had been, from the darkness that had wrapped his mind like cotton and removed him. There was no surprise now. There was no emotion at all: his work was over and he could be himself again. In the back of his mind the single phrase still flashed, but he had long since stopped paying attention to that.

He finished supper and went into the Commons Room, walking aimlessly.

She was sitting in a chair, with her back to the great window. As Dodd came in she looked up at him. "Hello, there."

Dodd waved a hand and, going over, found a chair and brought it to hers. "I'm sorry about the other night--"

"Think nothing of it," the girl said. "Anyhow, we're not in any trouble, and we would have been by now, if you see what I mean."

"I'm glad." He was no more than polite. There was no more in him, no emotion at all. He had reached a blank wall: there was no escape for him or for the Alberts. He could see nothing but pain ahead.

And so he had turned off the pain, and, with it, everything else.

"Do you come here often?" the girl was saying. He had been introduced to her once, but he couldn't remember her name. It was there, filed away....

"Greta Forzane," he said involuntarily.

She smiled at him, leaning a little forward. "That's right," she said. "And you're Johnny Dodd. And do you come here often?"

"... Sometimes." He waited. Soon she would stop, and he could leave, and....

And?

"Anyhow, it was just as much my fault as yours," Greta was saying. "And there's no reason why we can't be friends. All right?"

"Of course."

There was a brief silence, but he hardly noticed that.

"I'm sorry if I'm bothering you," she said.

"Not at all." His eyes were looking at her, but that made no difference. There was nothing left, nothing.

He could feel himself tighten, as if he were truly waiting for something. But there was nothing to wait for.

Was there?

"Is there something wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm fine."

"You look--"

She never finished the sentence. The storm broke instead.

Dodd found himself weeping, twisting himself in the chair; reaching out with his hands, violently racked in spasms of grief: it seemed as if the room shook and he grasped nothing until she put her hands on his shoulders. His eyes were blind with water, his body in a continual series of spasms. He heard his own voice, making sounds that had never been words, crying for--for what? Help, peace, understanding?

Somewhere his mind continued to think, but the thoughts were powerless and very small. He felt the girl's hands on his shoulders, trying to hold him, and masked by the sounds of his own weeping he heard her voice, too:

"It's all right ... calm down now ... you'll be all right...."

"... I ... can't...." He managed to get two words out before the whirlpool sucked him down again, the reasonless, causeless whirlpool of grief and terror, his body shaking, his mouth wide open and calling in broken sounds, the tears as hot as metal marking his face as his eyes squeezed shut.

"It's all right," the voice went on saying. "It's all right."

At last he was possessed by the idea that someone else might come and see them. He drew in a breath and choked on it, and the weeping began again, but after a time he was able to take one breath and then another. He was able to stop. He reached into his pocket and found a handkerchief, wiped his eyes and looked into her face.

Nothing was there but shock, and a great caution. "What happened?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

He took a long time answering, and the answer, because it was true, surprised him. He was capable of surprise, he was capable of truth. "I don't know," he said.