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thanked her, she had recovered enough to laugh, her way: I may still get you on a fertile
vacation!
There were workmen in his apartment. Three men in plain and suddenly familiar
garb: denim overalls with many pockets, blue, with blue shirts. The head man spoke after
Glenn used his key and swung the door open, Be through in five minutes, Mr. Howard. I m
the foreman, here. Jim Peters.
They shook hands. Glenn s enquiring eye brought immediate explanation: Just
making some electrical-electronic shifts. The . . . the people upstairs thought you d appreciate
it. He beckoned Glenn into the bedroom and indicated a newly installed switch beside the
big, luxurious bed. They want to observe you as much as you ll allow. But if you flip this
switch, every observational device will cut out and you ll have privacy. He stared at Glenn
with interest and, perhaps, veiled amusement. They hope you won t. But you can. And it s
straight.
Glenn felt embarrassed because of his embarrassment at being watched. Evidently
nobody else shared that sensation.
The other man shrugged. Miss Smith, Mayor s Secretary, just phoned. You re to call
back.
He got Leandra, voice and picture in natural color, on the visaphone. Hi? she was
smiling. But not quite the radiant way she usually had smiled at him.
Hi! he answered.
Her next words depressed him. You like red-headed damsels?
I like girls. A girl, here, especially.
That somehow brought her to an unexpected halt. He watched her recover her self-
control and when she spoke, she was very businesslike. Have your lunch the panel shows
you what to push for your order. At two, a Miss Elma Bareen is calling. The hospital, since
you gave up the school.
Miss Bareen was all any redhead could be: green eyes, the same creamy skin that
Donna possessed, a witchy way and a restlessness he noticed at once. A trained nurse.
The hospital was interesting. So was the lady.
He saw part of a transplant operation eyes. He watched an injured man receiving a
new left leg and a new kidney. He understood these things the rejection factor had been
resolved. All sorts of elaborate nerve-connections could be made even for eyes! Colds were
halted by a single shot in the arm. Disease, however, was rare in L.A. But his final view was
of a Still Room and that altered his rising marvel at medical advances.
An elderly man, accompanied by a weeping wife, kissed her at the glass door of the
Still Room and entered. He lay down. A white-clad nurse entered and gave him an injection.
He looked toward his sobbing wife, a grey-haired woman, toil-worn, nervous, kindly, and
somehow lost. He waved and blew a kiss but his effort at repeating that failed. His arm
dropped. His eyes closed. Glenn and his redheaded guide watched silently, Glenn not yet
aware of what they watched: not aware that the elderly woman, the man s wife, was quietly
given a small glass of medicine which she drank after a wordless protest His guide took him
away but the woman remained and, Glenn thought, began to recover from her grief.
What was that therapy?
Therapy? Miss Bareen was astonished. He was erased.
Killed?
Of course! He had one of the relatively few cancers we cannot cure. It had reached
the painful stage. He no longer could work he was some sort of a checker. So
Jesus! Glenn was stricken. And his wife a nice, sweet, kindly, hard-working
woman !
They gave her Monemnmon.
What?
A drug. She won t remember the misery you saw her feeling. Only that her husband
didn t have to suffer for ages. She won t with repeated doses, if needed ever recall her
grief. Just the happy times they had. And her present will be largely what she will be aware
of, anyhow.
Glenn said to himself, Monstrous!
What? It was quick, fiery and hostile.
I said, marvellous. Euthanasia and no mourning afterward! Just a rub-out!
I thought you said something else?
You re wrong. By then Glenn had begun to know that any sign of outrage at the
current system was not acceptable.
Miss Elma Bareen let it go, changed the subject to the usual one. They d have
dinner there was a special restaurant for Class A s. She was B, but had an exception permit.
Then some movies at her place.
He gathered, on the way to the restaurant, that the movies would be designed to
make him so ardent together, doubtless, with Aphron in the roast beef, or what not that
Miss Bareen would get herself loved.
She nearly was, without erotic movies. But not quite. Through an interesting meal, a
meal with several dishes he couldn t identify but found delicious, with an invisible source of
music that seemed not recorded, but was, and that seemed to arouse the rather shinily clad
beautiful people types his description of the diners to an elated and also amorous mass-
condition. It did not affect Glenn, however. His mind was wrestling with the memory of that
Still Room. For such chambers were not devoted wholly to ending lives that couldn t be
saved and would be agonizing.
Criminals were erased there. Miss Bareen had filled him in, since he feigned a
positive interest, and he had hidden his sense of horror. Crimes were rare, but they occurred.
Thieving, a few sexual attacks of a sadistic sort, or, at least, of unwanted kinds. And people
who d been injured in ways that could not be well enough healed to permit them to return to
their special job or profession, these, too, were erased. Flawed infants, also rare owing to
medical advance and genetic screening, didn t get to the Still Rooms; they were simply
erased in the crib wards. All anti-corporate attitudes brought erasure. Some fumbling at work,
if repeated often enough and if the fumbler wasn t useful in some lower job, meant death. It
seemed to Glenn that they could hardly count on the very small population growth their city
extension and production increased allowed. But he knew these things would be
computerized and if there happened to be a period of excess youth-to-middle age erasures,
there would be a matching increment of breeding on those fertility vacations.
It made Glenn a less than attentive dinner companion. And when he told Miss Bareen
that, thank you very truly, he was too tired for her apartment and the movies, she tried to
force him, it seemed, to go with her, anyhow.
He would get some drugs, she said, to cut out his weariness. She would bet anything
that he wouldn t be able to look at her private show of motion tapes for half an hour and not
demand sex with her. Or with somebody.
They are of me, making love. With some very lovely men. And some girls.
Girls?
Dorothea and Frances and Delma and I do it all the time. You ll be literally wild
when you see me with one of them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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