New Atlantis Read Free Page A

death, and
time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.
    I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a
half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”
    He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just the drugs.
They save it mostly for the VIPs. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be
important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my
‘foreign contacts.’” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I
suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next
time, and not a Federal Hospital.”
    “Simon, were they . . . are they cruel, or just righteous?”
    He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He
knew what I was asking. He knew by what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our
heads.
    “Some of them . . .” he said at last, mumbling.
    Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their
work. You cannot blame everything on society.
    “Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.
    You cannot blame everything on the enemy.
    “Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand
— “some of them, there were men like gold there — ”
    The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.
    “What have you been playing?” he asked.
    “Forrest, Schubert.”
    “With the quartet?”
    “Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”
    “Ah, poor Max.”
    “It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”
    I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked
until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment
Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory.
I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the
defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a
day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical
and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the
welfare counselors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed,
and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I
ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot
to the touch when I kissed him good-bye. I went instead and got a black-market
doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever
wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant
drugs the fed-meds make you take when they give you an abortion. She was a
jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was
convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in
pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of
course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.
    The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on
the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it
was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love
illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make
laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is
wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman,
like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her
into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side.
But there was more to it than that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too;
and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical
schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil,
under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the
universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and
Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff.
She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon