I pulled a flare from my belt, broke the seal. My aim was excellent. The flare landed in the center of the grave mound, went off the minute it hit the ground. The light was blinding. The whole northeast section of the cemetery became as bright as noonday, the interior of the 'copter leaped into dazzling detail. I could see the dungaree-clad ghouls standing on the edge of the open hatch. I could see the winch operator's face——
It was a striking face. It was a twentieth century landscape. The smear of grease on one of the pink cheeks had no effect whatsoever on the white cloud. The blue eyes, blinded by the unexpected light, flowed their blue and beautiful way along the green lip of the nonpareil meadow. The forested hills were more exquisite than ever—
But the solitary bird was gone, and the sky was empty.
And then, suddenly, I could not see anything at all. The ground erupted as the casket broke free, and a shower of dirt and broken clods engulfed me. I staggered to my feet, shielding my eyes with my arms, gasping for breath. By the time I regained my vision the 'copter was high above the lombardies, the exhumed car-casket swinging wildly beneath the still-opened hatch.
Don't shoot!my mind screamed to Kester.Don't shoot!But the words were locked in my throat and I could not utter them. I could only stand there helplessly, waiting for the disintegrating beam to lance out from the tower, waiting for the 'copter and the ghouls—and my conniving Julia—to become bright embers in the night sky.
But I needn't have worried. Kester missed by a mile.
I turned him in. What else could I do? I'd spent nine years languishing in lonely towers through long and lonely nights, faithfully guarding the buried art of the automakers. I couldn't throw those years away out of foolish loyalty to a man as obviously indifferent to the cause as Kester was.
But I didn't feel very proud of myself, standing there in the Cadillac Sexton's office the next morning, with Kester, his face cold and expressionless, standing beside me. I didn't feel proud at all. And the Sexton's praise of my last night's action only turned my stomach.
I was cheating and I knew it. I should have turned in Julia too. But I couldn't do that. Before I took any action, I had to see her, question her myself. There had to be a reasonable explanation for her complicity. Therehadto be!
After the Sexton dismissed me I waited outside for Kester. He didn't seem like a chastened man when he stepped into the morning sunlight. If anything, he seemed relieved—if not actually happy.
He would have walked right by me without a word, but I touched his shoulder and he paused. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't want to turn you in but I had no choice. But the Sexton let you go?"
He nodded.
"I'm sorry," I said again.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said: "Bartlett, you're a fool," and turned and walked away.
Julia wasn't in the apartment when I got home. But Taigue was.
He was sitting in one of the new chairs as though he owned the place. This time he hadn't come alone. The other chair was occupied by an MEP patrolman armed with a bludgeon gun.
"Come in," Taigue said. "We've been expecting you."
I don't know why I should have cared after the events of last night, but the thought of what he might have done to Julia crystallized my blood. "Where's Julia?" I said.
"Why, what a unique coincidence, Mr. Bartlett. Truly, our minds run in the same channel, to coin a cliché. I was about to voice the same plaintive question."
He was still fasting, and the increased gauntness of his face accentuated the fanatical intensity of his eyes. "If you've hurt her," I said, "I'll kill you!"
Taigue's ugly, dolichocephalic head swiveled on his thin neck till he faced his assistant. "Look who's going to kill someone, Officer Minch. Our esteemed candidate for the Letter himself!"
That one set me back on my heels. I felt the strength go out of my legs. "You're out of your mind, Captain. I'm legally married and you know it!"
"Indeed, Mr. Bartlett?" He reached into the inside pocket of his coat, withdrew a folded sheet of synthetic paper. He tossed it to me contemptuously. "Read all about your 'marriage,' Mr. Bartlett. Then tell me if I'm out of my mind."
I unfolded the gray document, knowing what it was and yet refusing to accept the knowledge. All warrants for arrest are unpleasant to the recipient, but an MEP warrant is triply unpleasant.
In addition to being a warrant, it is an indictment, and in addition to being an indictment, it is a sentence. A marital offender has automatically waived his right to a trial of any kind by the very nature of his offense. The logic of the first Puritanical legislators was muddied by their unnatural horror of illicit sex—an inevitable consequence of their eagerness to atone for the sexual enormities of their forebears.
I read the words, first with disbelief, then, as the realization of Julia's motivation dawned on me, with nausea:
CHARGE:Adultery, as per paragraph 34 of the Adultery Statute, which states in effect that all unofficial marital relationships, regardless of potential ameliorating factors, be construed as asocial and classified as adulterous acts.CORRESPONDENTS:Roger Bartlett, cit. no. 14479201-B: Julia Prentice, cit. no. 14489304-P.PARTICULARS:M. I. check, suggested and carried out by MEP Captain Lawrence Taigue, disclosed discrepancy in compatibility factors of aforementioned correspondents. Further check revealed deliberate altering of data cards before M. I. computation, rendering said computation invalid and resultant 'marriage' unofficial and therefore adulterous.SENTENCE:Public chastisement in the arena of the Municipal Coliseum.DATE OF CHASTISEMENT:June 20, 2151.AUTHORIZED ARRESTING OFFICERS:MEP Captain Lawrence Taigue; MEP Patrolman Ebenezer Minch.(signed)Myles FletcherMARRIAGE ADMINISTRATORJune 8, 2151
CHARGE:Adultery, as per paragraph 34 of the Adultery Statute, which states in effect that all unofficial marital relationships, regardless of potential ameliorating factors, be construed as asocial and classified as adulterous acts.
CORRESPONDENTS:Roger Bartlett, cit. no. 14479201-B: Julia Prentice, cit. no. 14489304-P.
PARTICULARS:M. I. check, suggested and carried out by MEP Captain Lawrence Taigue, disclosed discrepancy in compatibility factors of aforementioned correspondents. Further check revealed deliberate altering of data cards before M. I. computation, rendering said computation invalid and resultant 'marriage' unofficial and therefore adulterous.
SENTENCE:Public chastisement in the arena of the Municipal Coliseum.
DATE OF CHASTISEMENT:June 20, 2151.
AUTHORIZED ARRESTING OFFICERS:MEP Captain Lawrence Taigue; MEP Patrolman Ebenezer Minch.
(signed)Myles FletcherMARRIAGE ADMINISTRATORJune 8, 2151
"Well, Mr. Bartlett? Must you read the words off the page to get their import?"
My mind was reeling but it still rebelled against the reality of Julia's guilt. I grabbed at the first alternative I could think of. "Youchanged the cards, didn't you, Taigue?" I said.
"Don't be ridiculous. The mere thought of bringing an oafish clod like yourself into even transient intimacy with a sublime creature like Julia revolts my finer sensibilities. Julia altered the cards—as you perfectly well know. But she did not alter them of her own free will. You forced her to alter them."
I stared at him. "For God's sake, Captain, use your head! Why should I do such a thing? How—"
"Why?" Taigue had risen to his feet. His eyes were dilated. He breathed with difficulty. "I'll tell you why! Because you're a filthy animal, that's why. Because you looked at an ethereal woman and saw nothing but flesh. Because your carnal appetite was whetted and your lecherous desires had to be fed at any cost.
"But you're not going to get away with it!" He was shouting now and his trembling fingers were inches from my throat. "I myself will cast the first stone. But before I do, you'll confess. When the Hour is near, you'll realize the enormity of your lust, just as they all do, and you'll fall on your knees and ask forgiveness. And when you do, you'll automatically absolve Julia of all guilt.Allguilt, do you understand, Bartlett? Julia's purity must be restored. Julia's purityhasto be restored!"
I brought my right fist up into his stomach then. Hard. I had to. In another second those yearning fingers would have clamped around my throat.
But I forgot about Patrolman Minch and his bludgeon gun. Even before Taigue hit the floor, the first charge struck me in the shoulder, spun me around so that I faced the wall. The next one caught me squarely in the back of the neck, turned my whole body numb. I sagged like a cloth doll. The floor fascinated me. It was like a dark cloud, rising. A dark cloud, and then a swirling mist of blackness. And then—nothing.
Prison cells are ideal for objective thinking. There is a quality about their drab walls that brings you face to face with reality.
The Coliseum cell in which I was confined possessed the ultimate in drab walls. The reality with which I was faced was the ultimate in unpleasantness....
On our wedding night, Julia had told me that she had worked at Marriage Administration Headquarters for three years. But when I mentioned Taigue's concern over her, she was amazed. She said she hardly even knew him, that he had never spoken a word to her, had never—to her knowledge—even looked at her.
But he had looked at her without her knowledge. Of that I was sure. He had looked at her a hundred, a thousand, a million times. He had sat at his desk for three years, admiring her, adoring her, worshipping her.
Beyond her physical appearance, however, his Julia bore no relation to the real Julia. His Julia was far more than an ordinary woman. She was the exquisite vase into which he had thrust the flowers of his idealism.
The celibacy vows he had taken when he was ordained an MEP officer were only partly responsible for his attitude. The real key lay in his physical ugliness—an ugliness that had probably influenced his decision to become an MEP officer.
He had never spoken to Julia, or looked at her openly, because of a deep conviction that he would repel her; and he had rationalized his reticence by attributing it to his rigid interpretation of his duty as an MEP officer. The only way he could realize his love for her was by elevating that love to a higher plane. This had necessitated his elevating Julia also.
Taigue loathed sex. He could tolerate it only when it came as a result of a society-sanctioned marriage. With respect to Julia, he could not tolerate it at all, because the intrusion of sex upon his exquisite vase of flowers sullied both flowers and vase.
When he discovered that the Marriage Integrator had matched Julia with an ordinary mortal, he could not accept the validity of the computation; neither could he accept the fact that Julia had applied for a husband. He had to find a loophole somewhere, a means to rationalize the danger to his flowers. When he learned that Julia herself had contrived the computation, he immediately transferred the blame to me, thereby absolving Julia.
But his logic was shaky, and he knew it. He couldn't quite believe the lies he had told himself. His edifice was tottering and he needed my confession to shore it up. Therein lay my only hope.
For Taigue would buy that confession at any price. And I would sell it for only one price—
My life.
And so I sat there in my lonely cell, through the gray daytime hours and through the dark nights, waiting for Taigue.
I thought often of Julia. In spite of myself I thought of her, and in spite of myself I kept hoping that she would continue to elude the country-wide search which Marriage Enforcement Headquarters had instigated the morning of my arrest.
I thought of her not as Taigue's vase of flowers, but as the pale girl who had said "I do" with me at the mass-wedding ceremony; as the lovely girl who had lingered in the hive passageway, waiting for me to carry her across the threshold; as the unforgettable girl who had been my wife for a dozen precious hours.
But most of all, I thought of her as the deceitful woman who had intended to use me as an instrument in the ghouls' exploitation of the Cadillac Cemetery.
As she had used Betz and Kester before me.
I had her wholemodus operandifigured out. Her system was simple. When a cemetery sentry applied for a wife, she simply notified an available sister-ghoul, entered her application along with the sentry's, and then altered the resultant data cards so that they came out of the integrator in the right combination. It took a lot of know-how, but she hadn't worked at Marriage Administration Headquarters three years for nothing. She hadn't taken the job in the first place for nothing, either.
Being a senior sentry, I had rated her personal supervision. I had no idea as to what wiles she would have employed to make me voluntarily neglect my duty to Cadillac; but I had an uncomfortable suspicion that they would have worked.
Taigue didn't come until the last day—the last hour, in fact. I was sweating. The Coliseum seamstress had already sewn the big scarlet letter on the breast of my gray prison blouse and the Coliseum barber had just been in to cut my hair. I could hear the distant shuffling of feet on the stoning platform and the faraway murmur of many voices.
Taigue was still fasting. Ordinary MEP officers were usually content to fast their required day per week and to let it go at that. But Taigue was not an ordinary MEP officer. He stood before me like a Bunyanesque caricature. Caverns had appeared above the ridges of his cheek bones and his eyes had retreated into their depths where they burned like banked fires.
"Short hair becomes you, Mr. Bartlett," he said, but his irony lacked its usual edge. Moreover, the ghastly paleness of his face could not be wholly attributed to his physical condition.
"Did you come to receive my confession, Captain?"
"Whenever you're ready, Mr. Bartlett."
"I'm ready now."
He nodded solemnly. "I thought you might be. I discounted Julia's insistence that she acted of her own free will."
That shook me. "Julia? Is—is she here?"
He nodded again. "She gave herself up a week ago. She confessed to altering the data cards—insisted over and over that she alone was to blame. I tried to tell them, I tried to explain to the Marriage Administrator that she couldn't possibly be to blame, that she was an innocent tool in the hands of a hardened adulterer. But he wouldn't listen. No one would listen. They sewed the letter on her this morning. They—they cut her hair."
I tried to tell myself that she had it coming, but it wasn't any good. I felt sick. I kept seeing her crumpled body lying in the arena and the cruel stones scattered in the dirt and the blood on them. Julia's blood—
"Well, Mr. Bartlett? You said you were ready to confess."
"Yes," I said. "I presume you're ready to pay my price?"
"Price?" The emaciated face showed surprise. "Do you expect to be reimbursed for relieving your conscience, Mr. Bartlett?"
"You can put it that way if it makes it easier for you."
"And what do you think your confession is worth?"
"You know how much it's worth, Taigue. It's worth Julia's life—and mine."
"You try my patience, Mr. Bartlett."
"You try mine too."
"My wanting your confession is a purely personal matter. Both you and Julia will die in the arena regardless of your decision. Adultery charges are irrevocable."
"I'm not asking you to revoke any charges," I said. "All I'm asking you to do is to get Julia and me out of here alive. You can do it."
He stared at me. "Mr. Bartlett, your incarceration has affected your mind! Do you really think I'd free you, even if I could, and give you further opportunity to vitiate Julia?"
My thinking hadn't been nearly as objective as I'd imagined. I should have realized that Taigue would rather see his flowers dead than expose them to additional "defilement." I was desperate now, and my desperation got the better of my judgment. "Is my confession worth Julia's life then?" I asked.
He raised an arthritic hand to his forehead, wiped away a glistening film of sweat. Presently: "Mr. Bartlett, I'm afraid you don't understand the situation at all. Your perspective is so warped by wrong thinking that 2 and 2 fail to make 4 to you, either by multiplication or addition.
"Don't you see that Juliahasto die? Can't you understand that, even though she is innocent, her reputation is still hopelessly tainted by your illicit affections? Can't you realize that I wouldn't save her even if I could?"
I did realize finally, though his fanaticism stunned me. He was more than a mere zealot; he was a monster. But if Julia was his goddess, marriage enforcement was his god. He could not buy a guarantee of his goddess' purity if the price involved the desecration of his god. He needed my confession desperately, but he didn't have the authority to torture it out of me and he couldn't pay the price I had asked. My one hope of escape had turned out to be a pretty worthless item.
But it was still my only hope. If I could find another way to use it, it might still net me my freedom, and Julia's too.
There was one way. It was drastic and it might not work; but it was worth a try. "All right, Taigue," I said. "I understand your position. Bring Julia here and I'll confess."
"Bring her here? Why? All you have to do is admit you coerced her to alter the data cards. Her presence isn't necessary."
"It's necessary to me."
He looked at me for a moment, then turned abruptly and left the cell. He told the patrolman, whom he had posted by the door, to wait, then he disappeared down the corridor. The patrolman closed the cell door but didn't bother to lock it. He didn't need to. The bludgeon gun in the crook of his arm was a sufficient deterrent.
Presently I heard Taigue's returning footsteps. They were accompanied by other footsteps—light, quick footsteps. My heart broke the barrier I had erected around it, rose up, choking me.
When I saw her shorn hair I wanted to cry. Her face was more like a little girl's than ever, but the blue eyes gazing straight into mine were the eyes of a mature woman. There was regret in them, but no shame.
I turned away from her. "Dismiss your assistant," I told Taigue. "What I have to say is none of his business."
Taigue started to object, then changed his mind. With the reassurance he so desperately needed at his very fingertips, he wasn't in the mood to argue over trivialities. He took the patrolman's bludgeon gun, sent him on his way, re-entered the cell and closed the door. He leaned against the genuine steel panels, directed the muzzle of the gun at my chest.
"Well, Mr. Bartlett?"
"You asked for this, Taigue," I said. "You wouldn't have it any other way. Julia, come here."
She stepped to my side. Seizing the lapels of her Hester Prynne prison dress, I ripped it down the middle and tore it from her body.
Julia shrank back, trying to cover her nakedness with her arms. Taigue became a statue, a statue staring with horrified eyes at a shining goddess who had abruptly deteriorated into a mere woman. I tore the gun from his grasp before he could recover himself and bludgeoned him beneath the heart. But his eyes were glazed even before the charge struck him. I looked at him disgustedly as he sank gasping to the floor. The self-righteous idealism with which he had clothed Julia had been even thinner than the earthly clothes I had ripped away.
I turned to Julia. She had retrieved the prison dress, had slipped into it, and was improvising a catch to hold it together. Her face was white but her eyes were dry. I searched those eyes anxiously. I don't know why I should have been relieved to find understanding rather than anger in them, but I was relieved—more relieved than I would have cared to admit.
"Can you pilot a 'copter?" I asked.
She nodded. "I've been piloting them since I was twelve."
"There's a 'copter port on the roof. If we can reach it, we've got a chance. I don't know where we'll go, but we'll go somewhere—"
"We'll go to Mars, Roger. If you're willing." She had finished repairing her dress and stood calm and poised before me.
"This is no time for jokes," I said.
"And I'm not joking. There's a ramp not far from here that will take us to the roof. Come on, Roger!"
We peered up and down the corridor. It was empty. I followed Julia down the grim passage. In the distance, the arena entrance was bright with afternoon sunlight. At the first intersection, she turned right. The new passage was narrow, dimly lighted. At its far end a ponderous stone door opened reluctantly to the pressure of our shoulders and we found ourselves at the base of a sharply slanting ramp.
"You seem to know this place like a book," I said. "Were you ever in the cell block before?"
She nodded. "I visited my mother often before she was stoned."
"Your mother!Stoned?"
"Yes. Stoned. That's why I'm a ghoul. Hurry, Roger!"
We started up the ramp. After a dozen yards, it turned abruptly, became a steep spiral. Breathing was difficult, conversation impossible. Now and then, a slit of a window looked out into the crowded amphitheater.
The port boasted one derelict 'copter and one guard. The guard had his back to us when we crept cautiously onto the roof. He must have sensed our presence, for he turned. But I doubt if he ever saw us. The charge from my gun struck him in the side before he even completed his turn, and he crumpled to the sun-drenched concrete.
We were aboard the 'copter in an instant. Julia's experienced fingers made deft maneuvers on the control panel and then we were aloft, soaring over the amphitheater, the sky blue above us, the stoning platform a chiaroscuro of gray- and black-garbed men and women below us. The arena proper was a bleak expanse of packed dirt, unrelieved by a single blade of grass. I could hear the obscene murmur of the crowd above the whirring of the blades.
There was a telescreen above the control panel. I turned it on to see if our escape had been discovered. Apparently it had not been, for the scene coming over the single channel was the same I had just witnessed, viewed from a different angle. The telecamera had been set up opposite the arena entrance so that the upper echelon members of the hierarchy, who could afford such luxuries as TV sets, would have an excellent view of the expected chastisement.
The announcer was intoning the sixth commandment over and over in a deep resonant voice. I lowered the volume and turned to Julia. We were over the parsonage apartments now, headed in a northerly direction.
"Don't you think it's time you told me where we're going?" I said.
"I told you before but you wouldn't believe me. We're going to Mars, provided you're willing, of course. And I'm afraid you haven't much choice."
"Stop being ridiculous, Julia. This is a serious situation!"
"I know, darling. I know. And if the ship has already blasted, it will be a far more serious situation."
"What ship are you talking about?"
"The Cadillac-ship; the Ford-ship; the Plymouth-ship. Call it what you will. Cars are made of metal, so are spaceships. By applying the right temperatures, and the right techniques, dedicated people can transform Cadillacs and Fords and Plymouths into highways to the stars."
I was staring at her. "The ghouls—"
"Are people like myself—the new Pilgrims, if you like. Pilgrims sick of a society that evades population control by consigning its marriages to a computer deliberately designed to produce incompatible unions that will result in few, if any, children. Pilgrims who want no more of a civilization victimized by an outdated biblical exhortation, exploited by false prophets hiding behind misinterpretations of Freudian terminology."
The hives were flickering beneath us, gaunt precipices flanking narrow canyons. The verdure of the Cadillac Cemetery showed in the distance, and beyond it, eroded hills rolled away.
"I'm glad you did alter our data cards," I said after a while. "But I wish you'd done it for a different reason. I wish you could have loved me, Julia."
"I do love you," Julia said. "You see, darling, I couldn't accompany the colonists without a husband and I didn't want the kind of a husband the integrator would have given me. So I computed my own marriage. That was why I was so rude to you at the Cathedral. I—I was ashamed. Not that it was the first marriage I'd computed, but all the others—like Betz's and Kester's—involved people who were working on the ship, people who were already in love. There—there wasn't anyone in the group whom I cared for myself, so I had to look elsewhere. You and I are ideally suited, Roger. I didn't need the data cards to tell me that—all I needed was my eyes."
We were high above the Cadillac Cemetery and she was looking anxiously ahead at the rolling, dun-colored hills. "If only they haven't left yet," she said. "The last Cadillac we exhumed provided enough metal to finish the ship. But perhaps they waited for us."
A sudden crescendo in the murmur of the waiting crowd in the Coliseum brought the TV unit back to life. Slowly, the murmur rose into a great vindictive roar. Glancing at the screen, I saw the reason why.
The charcoal-uniformed figure that had just stepped through the arena entrance was unmistakable. The distance was considerable, and the eyes appeared only as dark shadows on the thin, haunted face. But I could visualize the terrible guilt burning in their depths; the consuming, the unbearable guilt—
I watched the first stone with horror. It missed, rolled to a stop in the dirt. The next one missed, too. But the one after it didn't, nor the one that followed. Taigue sank to his knees, and the stones became a murderous hail. And then, abruptly, it was all over, and Taigue lay dead and bleeding on the stone-littered ground, the scarlet letter he had pinned to his breast vivid in the merciless sunlight.
Thou shalt not look at a woman and lust—
Taigue had kept faith with himself to the end.
We were drifting over the hills. "There," Julia said suddenly. "There's the one, Roger!"
It looked like all the others to me—drab, scarred by innumerable gullies, lifeless. But when Julia opened the door of the cockpit and leaned out and waved, the gullies rivened, and the whole hill opened up like an enormous metallic flower.
I saw the ship then, the tall burnished ship poised on its concrete launching platform. I saw its name—theMayflower II.
We drifted down past the tapered prow, the gleaming flanks. The other Pilgrims were already aboard. Betz and Kester waved to us as we passed the open lock. We stepped out upon the launching platform. The ship towered above us. The lathes and presses and furnaces of the subterranean factory stood silent in the gloom around us.
I looked at Julia. Her eyes were iridescent with relieved tears, her smile tremulous with happiness. "Mars, Roger," she whispered. "The ship can make it. But perhaps the old colony has perished and we'll have to start a new one. It won't be easy, darling. But will you come?"
I felt the way Samuel Fuller and Christopher Martin must have felt five centuries ago, standing on a lonely wharf in Southampton. The way William White and John Alden must have felt—
No, not quite the way John Alden had felt. I already hadmyPriscilla Mullins. I bent and kissed her. Then, hand in hand, we ascended the spiral gang-plank of theMayflower IIto begin our journey to the New World.