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Ebook has 1420 lines and 70730 words, and 29 pages

THE SENTINEL STARS

A NOVEL OF THE FUTURE BY LOUIS CHARBONNEAU

With love to Helen and Bruce

TRH-247

That meant he was the two-hundred-and-forty-seventh citizen with the name Thomas Robert Hendley. His name, of course, was never used. The Organization found numbers more efficient than names.

Only, TRH-247 wasn't any other citizen. He was himself, different from anyone else, and he had to do something about it.

So he quit work; smuggled himself into the forbidden pleasures of a Freeman Camp; found boredom and nonidentity there, too; committed the ultimate rebellion, using a false number; and got the ultimate punishment--banishment.

He took the girl with him, for her crime was equal to his. The only problem he had to face now was--survival!

A PROPHETIC NOVEL OF AN EASILY FORECAST FUTURE WHEN A CITIZEN HAD TO FIT THE MACHINE--OR PERISH....

The morning after. In the underground streets and the wide arcades lined with shops, curling colored streamers rustle under the feet of night workers hurrying home to their rooms. Automatic street cleaners snuffle at plastic cups and empty bottles strewn outside of vending bars and recreation halls--snuffle like some curious animal, suck, devour and move on, their fat wheels whispering on the pavement. Marquees overhead still wink with last night's slogans:

ONE FOR ALL--ALL FOR ONE! WORLD HAILS MERGER!

The Merger is complete. East is West, and black is white. Now the talk can cease. Now the viewscreens, the discussion forums, the recreation hours, the coffee debates, the public opinion polls, the conversations of lovers can turn to other things.

The Organization is One. Freedom is all.

Rebellion can be a bomb or a cry of pain, a shout of defiance or a mute, sullen face.

Or a man lying in bed, motionless.

The building in which TRH-247 lay was a circle of apartments bounding the Architectural Center, where he worked, like the ring around Saturn. Its outer fa?ade was windowless, a curving face of concrete thirty stories high. The windowed inner circle looked across a broad courtyard toward the concentration of offices in the Center. Moving walks joined the residential ring to its activity core like spokes in a wheel. Because of the blind outer wall, common to all buildings in the Organization, the sun was visible to those living and working in the Center for only a brief period at midday.

The sunrise belonged to the Free.

Yet, through the unease of his hangover, TRH-247 was aware of the coming of day. Without opening his eyes he had been conscious of the gradual dilution of the room's darkness into gray, of the pink glow creeping from the corners of the room to spread up the walls, and at last of the splendid aurora of brightness climbing the east wall. Had he been asleep, he would have been gently conditioned to wakefulness by the artificial dawn.

Feeling the weight of light and warmth harsh upon his lids, he waited for the bird call which came every morning at precisely six o'clock. In spite of the fact that he was anticipating it, the tuneful whistle made him start. His eyes flew open. He felt a slow draining away of tension.

The psychology of it was wrong, he thought. Anything as naturally unpleasant as an alarm to wake you should be simply and directly jarring. The bird song, monotonously cheerful every morning, was actually a depressant.

He wondered if a real bird singing would have the same effect.

The question was idle, and he wasn't sure why it had occurred to him. But a great many such speculations, equally idle, had been disturbing him lately. All, he supposed, because of the Merger.

The Merger. His mind rejected the word like an assembly machine spitting out a defective part. In a deliberate effort to detour that line of thought he nudged the button which turned on the viewscreen set into the south wall. It brought into focus a picture of a parklike setting in the early morning, a green glade drenched in sunlight. The camera's eye moved close to a cluster of flowers and focused sharply on a single red rose glistening with dew. Beyond the trembling rose, blurred but distinguishable, two naked figures appeared, running. A man and a woman. His hands caught her from behind and the pair tumbled together onto the wet grass. A shrill peal of woman's laughter rang. The background music soared to a joyous crescendo, and the camera turned discreetly away to embrace the sky, vaulting in a breathless leap from horizon to horizon.

The final chord of music crashed. The picture faded out abruptly. An announcer appeared, smiling cheerfully. "Good morning, you late and early viewers! You have just seen 'Tender Shoots,' a Freedom Play written by...."

TRH-247 clicked off the sound. He turned impatiently from the screen to stare at the blankness of the ceiling. Always the same fadeout, he thought. The same idyllic setting, the same sensuous appeal, the same bronzed hero and heroine finding joy unconfined and forever after in a Freeman Camp. Why not? It was society's dream. It had always been his own. What was wrong with it now? Or with him?

He shook his head angrily, as if the gesture would help him shrug off his restlessness. "Thomas Robert Hendley," he said aloud, "you should get up."

The habit was recent--not talking to himself, a practice so old he found it perfectly natural, but the indulgence of thinking of himself in the old-fashioned names instead of his official designation. For some reason he found it strangely pleasing to think of himself as Thomas Robert Hendley. It didn't matter that there had been, in the history of the Organization, two hundred and forty-six other Thomas Robert Hendleys. None of them had his particular set of brown eyes, his hard-to-comb black hair, his six feet of angular frame, his aches, his memories, his four inches of childhood scar on his right forearm, his restless dreams, his hopes, his mind.

Frowning, Hendley continued to stare at the ceiling. He knew that he barely had time to bathe, wipe off his beard, dress, eat, and still get to work on time, even though his office was less than five minutes away and he was not due until seven. He moved slowly in the mornings. He couldn't gulp down his breakfast, and he liked to linger over his coffee and his first cigarette. Still he did not move.

Unwanted, a trickle of memories sifted into his mind. Fragments of the previous day's celebration. People shouting, drinking, dancing. The whole city a bobbing, swirling sea of color, noise, confusion. Joy, joy--and one unsmiling mouth, one pair of sober eyes, one arm unraised in salute. His.

Well, he had taken care of the sober eyes. He had got drunk with the rest of them. And he had still felt alone, apart.

All along he had felt out of it--through all the weeks of endless news coverage on the home and public viewscreens, the interminable debates at work, the hotly argued discussion forums. No one had talked of anything else. And there had been a strange intensity in the endless great debate, which often erupted into angry words and shaking fists and red faces, as if everyone sensed a significance in this last Merger, a special importance that was neither voiced nor even consciously realized.

Once it had been voiced: Hendley remembered one discussion forum for his group a week before. He had been sitting between RED-498, his Assigned, the woman he was soon to contract with, and a short, fat man in the yellow coverall of a 2-Dayman. The round man had constantly been rising to demand the floor, grabbing his seat mike and shouting so loudly that his words over the loudspeaker were distorted and often incomprehensible. His round, full face had a squinty look, the triangle of eyes and nose being squeezed close together like a cluster of dots in the center of a circle. Even his eyebrows added to the effect--blond tufts of hair thick next to the bridge of his nose but disappearing as they fanned out. Below this concentration, a small red mouth pursed angrily.

"They just don't remember," he complained to Hendley. "They don't remember!"

The fat man sat down, breathing hard as if he had been running. He nodded with emphatic triumph at Hendley and RED-498. "This Merger is the greatest thing that could happen," he declared. "You'll see if it isn't!"

Others spoke. A tall, broad-shouldered man in the respected beige coverall of a 1-Dayman, adorned with the stitched emblem of an athlete, rose to deliver a speech which was quickly diverted from the Merger to the virtues of competitive sports as one of the Organization's finest forms of recreation. A plaintive voice wondered if maybe the Organization wasn't just getting so big that it oughtn't to get bigger. A woman with the calm, crisp voice of an intellectual pointed out that the Eastern and Western Organizations had for many years been moving steadily toward the Merger--had actually been merged in innumerable ways, not the least of which was the Executive Exchange Program, of which she could speak personally as one who had been proud to work for a year in the Eastern society. And there was one voice from the back of the hall, from someone who remained seated so that Hendley could not see him, whose words made Hendley stiffen and listen attentively.

"What we're trying to do," the unknown man said, "is to pretend that history never was. We're saying it doesn't mean anything to be born a Westerner. Maybe it's right that we should forget that our ancestors fought against the East, and a lot of them died to make sure we wouldn't all be swallowed up. But that doesn't mean we should let ourselves get swallowed up now...."

The fat man beside Hendley had growled with anger. Even RED-498 had been indignant, her ordinarily placid face flushed. "That's silly!" she had cried. "Tell him, TR! Tell him!"

Hendley had left that meeting deeply disturbed. When RED-498 somewhat surprisingly took the initiative in suggesting that they visit a nearby Public Intercourse Booth for the weekly hour allowed to Assigned, he had pleaded fatigue. Back in his room alone, unaccountably tired, he had drifted into and out of the fringes of uneasy sleep. He could recall thinking that they were taking away the last symbol of personal identity. Everything was to be reduced to One, like those ancient religions in which man strove to lose himself completely in his God and be One with Him. But the new god was one vast, all-encompassing, impersonal Organization.

At last sleep had come. And with it, from some deep recess of his mind, emerged a scene from the old world before the Organization, a world preserved on flickering films in the Historical Museum, a world where men once walked freely on the shores of a great sea. In the mysterious logic of the dream, it seemed quite natural for TRH-247 to be there, walking on a wide sandy beach, white under a brilliant sun by a blue sea. In the distance there was another distinct beach, and beyond that another--individual crescents of sand succeeding one another. But there were no people. He was alone. He ran in the wet sand close to the water, feeling its coolness and firmness. He ran so fast that his feet hardly seemed to touch, and his heart pounded with exhilaration. Coming to the end of the curving beach, he stopped. And as he stood there watching, the sand moved, lapping outward like the waves of the sea, reaching toward the next beach. And that golden crescent in turn expanded. Hendley felt a nameless terror. He turned and raced back along the shoreline. But at the opposite end the beaches were already meeting, hungry fingers of sand interlacing like lovers' hands. Staring into the distance, Hendley saw that everywhere the sands were flowing into each other, pushing back inland, filling every crevice, covering every footprint, burying every stone, until at last he could see no marking, no line of difference, no beginning or end. And he knew that all of the beaches of the world had merged into one. His heart filled his chest with a painful drumming. Looking wildly all around him, he saw with terrifying clarity that the area where he stood was no longer like a beach at all. There was no beach, nothing anywhere but a great empty desert bordering the sea....

It was past 6:40 in the morning. TRH-247 lay in bed staring at the ceiling. If he got up now, he thought, if he did without a shower, without breakfast or coffee, he could still be at his drafting board on time.

And something would have ended.

How did you rebel? How did you protest against a system that knew you only as a number? How could you defy a vast network of computers that knew what you were going to do before you did it--knew, and saw your defiance merely as an equation to be speedily solved. How did you change directions on a one-way street?

In his own work, architecture, when perfection left a residue of discontent you introduced a flaw. You broke one of the rules. And maybe what you ended up with would be better than the perfect thing, in its flaw as flawless as an artist's distortion of the world to his own image of it. Hendley had done it himself, taking pure harmony and proportion of form and trying to make it individual. He had....

"No," he muttered aloud. "You only pushed a button."

For if one line could be altered, the master computer in the basement of the Architectural Center had already worked out the six hundred and sixty-eight ways in which that single change could be made without weakening the resulting structure. The Organization encouraged that kind of individuality. It wasn't originality at all.

Yet the principle was valid. You had to break one of the rules. You had to get out of step.

And there was a way. Work was the foundation of the Organization--the work day, the work hour, the work minute. This was the basic commodity, the medium of exchange, the measure of social status. Work to pay off your tax debt. Work to climb the rungs on the ladder that led to freedom.

Simply lying there, without lifting a hand, he could create a flaw.

About ten o'clock that morning TRH-247 stood on an underground pedestrian ramp watching the crowds flow past him--shoppers, tourists, workers, going and coming, stepping with the ease of long habit from the slow to the fast strips of the moving sidewalks. All the faces were different, Hendley thought. He was less than a five-minute rise from the Architectural Center, but it was quite probable that he had never once seen any of these faces before. These people might live in the same building, eat from the same venders, visit the same Rec halls, even work at the Center. But under the carefully staggered schedules in the structure of the Organization's work pattern, schedules which enabled 32,000,000 people in this particular City No. 9 to live in a circumscribed area without trampling one another underfoot, the chances were good that none of these people had ever crossed Hendley's path before. Simply because he had never been in this spot at this hour on this day of the week.

Hendley was a 3-Dayman. His identifying coverall was blue. He worked on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays except during his assigned vacation month, when he customarily used his travel pass to visit one of the tourist recreation centers in another of the major cities. It was unthinkable that his vacation time would find him this close to home, and it was equally unlikely that he would be there on any of his four free days of the week, for even these days were quite taken up with the designated periods of recreation, education, physical therapy and discussion. In fact, Hendley was experiencing the rare sense of freedom which came from having nothing to do.

This was what it must be like in the Freeman Camps, he reflected--seven days a week to enjoy the luxury of complete choice, of having each day stretch before you like a blank sheet of paper onto which you could dictate absolutely anything you wanted.

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