Chapter 6

FROM birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann’s age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before.

And then you were Of Age.

Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry—after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority, which carried with it all offices and all power.

It meant freedom.

As a bare beginning, it meant the freedom to command any number of juniors or scholars. On Ross’s last punitive day in the dye vats, a happy ancient commandeered the entire staff to help set shrubs in his front lawn—a good dozen acres of careful landscaping it was, and the prettiest sight Ross had seen on this ugly planet.

When they got back to the dye vats, the yellow and blue had boiled over, and broken strands of yarn had fouled all the bobbins. Dobermann raged—at the juniors.

But then Dobermann’s raging came to an end forever. It was the night before Holiday, and there was a pretty ceremony as he packed his kit and got ready to turn Junior Unit Twenty-three over to his successor. Everyone was scrubbed, and though a certain amount of license in regard to neatness was allowed between dinner and lights out, each bunk was made and carefully smoothed free of wrinkles. After half an hour of fidgety waiting, Dobermann called—needlessly—for attention, and the minister came in with his ancient retinue.

The rich mechanical voice boomed out from his breastplate: “Junior Dobermann, today you are a man!”

Dobermann stood with his head bowed, silent and content. Junior Unit Twenty-Three chanted antiphonally: “Good-by, Junior Dobermann!”

The retinue took three steps forward, and the minister boomed, “Beauty comes with age. Age is beauty!”

And the chorus: “Old heads are wisest!” Ross, standing as straight as any of them, faked the words with his lips and tongue, and wondered how many repetitions had drilled those sentiments into Junior Unit Twenty-Three.

There were five more chants, and five responses, and then the minister and his court of four were standing next to Dobermann. Breathing heavily from his exertions, the minister reached behind him and took a book from the hands of the nearest of his retinue. He said, panting, “Scholar Dobermann, in the Book lies the words of the Fathers. Read them and learn.”

The chorus cried thrice, “The Word of the Fathers Is Law.” And then the minister touched Dobermann’s hand, and in solemn silence, left.

As soon as the elders had gone, the juniors flocked around Dobermann to wish him well. There was excited laughter in the congratulations, and a touch of apprehension too: Dobermann, with all his faults, was a known quantity, and the members of Junior Unit Twenty-Three were beginning to look a little fearfully at the short, redheaded youth who, from the next day on, would be Dobermann’s successor.

Ross promised himself: He can be good or bad, a blessing or a problem. But he won’t be my problem. I’m getting out of here tomorrow!

Holiday.

“Oh, it’s fun,” Helena told him enthusiastically. “First you get up early to get the voting out of the way——”

“Voting?”

“Sure. Don’t they vote where you come from? I thought everybody voted. That’s democracy, like we have it here.”

He sardonically quoted one of the omnipresent wall signs: “THE HAPPINESS OF THE MAJORITY MEANS THE HAPPINESS OF THE MINORITY.” He had often wondered what, if anything, it meant. But Helena solemnly nodded.

They were whispering from their adjoining cots by dim, false dawn filtering through the windows on Holiday morning. They were not the only whisperers. Things were relaxing already.

“Ross,” Helena said.

“Yes?”

“I thought maybe you might not know. On Holiday if you, ah, want to do that again you don’t have to wait until I faint. Ah, of course you don’t do it right out in the open.” Overcome by her own daring she buried her head under the coarse blanket.

Fine, thought Ross wearily. Once a year—or did Holiday come once a year?—the kids were allowed to play “Spin The Bottle.” No doubt their elders thought it was too cute for words: mere tots of thirty and thirty-five childishly and innocently experimenting with sex. Of course it would be discreetly supervised so that nobody would Get In Trouble.

He was quite sure Helena’s last two faints had been unconvincing phonies.

The wake-up whistle blew at last. The chattering members of Junior Unit Twenty-Three dawdled while they dressed, and the new foreman indulgently passed out shabby, smutted ribbons which the girls tied in their hair. They had sugar on their mush for breakfast, and Ross’s stomach came near turning as he heard burbles of gratitude at the feast.

With pushing and a certain amount of inexpert horseplay they formed a column of fours and hiked from the hall—from the whole factory complex, indeed, along a rubberized highway.

Once you got out of the factory area things became pleasanter by the mile. Hortatory roadside signs thinned out and vanished. Stinking middens of industrial waste were left behind. And then the landscape was rolling, sodded acres with the road pleasantly springy underfoot, the air clean and crisp.

They oohed and aahed at houses glimpsed occasionally in the distance—always rambling, one-story affairs that looked spanking-new.

Once a car overhauled them on the highway and slowed to a crawl. It was a huge thing, richly upholstered within. A pair of grimlooking youths were respectively chauffeur and footman; the passenger waved at the troop from Junior Twenty-Three and grinned out of a fantastic landscape of wrinkles. Ross gaped. Had he thought the visiting minister was old? This creature, male or female, was old.

After the car sped on, to the cheers of the marchers, there was happy twittering speculation. Junior Twenty-Three didn’t recognize the Citizen who had graciously waved to them, but they thought he—or she?—was wonderful. So dignified, so distinguished, so learned, so gracious, so democratic!

“Wasn’t it sweet of him?” Helena burbled. “And I’m sure he must be somebody important connected with the voting, otherwise he’d just vote from home.”

Ross’s feet were beginning to hurt when they reached the suburban center. To the best of his recollection, they were no more than eight or ten kilos from the field and his starship. Backtrack on the road to the suburban center about three kilos, take the fork to the right, and that would be that.

Junior Twenty-Three reached a pitch of near-ecstasy marveling at the low, spacious buildings of the center. Through sweeping, transparent windows they saw acres of food and clothing in the shopping center; the Drive-In Theater was an architectural miracle. The Civic Center almost finished them off, with its statue of Equal Justice Under the Law (a dignified beldame whose chin and nose almost met, leaning on a gem-crusted crutch) and Civic Virtue (in a motorized wheelchair equipped with an emergency oxygen tent, Lindbergh-Carrel auxiliary blood pump and an artificial kidney).

Merry oldsters were everywhere in their cars and wheelchairs, gaily waving at the kids. Only one untoward incident marred their prevoting tour of inspection. A thick-headed young man mistakenly called out a cheerful: “Life and wisdom, ma’am!” to a beaming oldster.

“Ma’am, is it?” the oldster roared through his throat mike and amplifier in an unmistakable baritone. “I’ll ma’am you, you wise punk!” He spun his wheelchair on a decishield, threw it into high and roared down on the offender, running him over. The boy covered himself as well as he could while the raging old man backed over him again and ran over him again. His ordeal ended when the oldster collapsed forward in the chair, hanging from his safety belt.

The boy got up with tire marks on him and groaned: “Oh, lord! I’ve hurt him.” He appealed hysterically: “What’ll I do? Is he dead?”

Another Senior Citizen buzzed up and snapped: “Cut in his L-C heart, you booby!”

The boy turned on the Lindbergh-Carrel pump, trembling. The white-faced juniors of Twenty-Three watched as the tubes to the oldster’s left arm throbbed and pulsed. A massive sigh went up when the old man’s eyes opened and he sat up groggily. “What happened?”

“You died again, Sherrington,” said the other elder. “Third time this week—good thing there was a responsible person around. Now get over to the medical center this minute and have a complete checkup. Hear me?”

“Yes, Dad,” Sherrington said weakly. He rolled off in low gear.

His father turned to the youngster who stood vacantly rubbing the tire marks on his face. “Since it’s Holiday,” he grated, “I’ll let this pass. On any other day I would have seen to it that you were set back fifteen years for your disgraceful negligence.”

Ross knew by then what that meant, and shuddered with the rest. It amounted to a death sentence, did fifteen additional years of the grinding toil and marginal diet of a junior.

Somewhat dampened they proceeded to the Hall of Democracy, a glittering place replete with slogans, statues, and heroic portraits of the heroic aged. Twenty-Three huddled together as it joined with a stream of juniors from the area’s other factory units. Most of them were larger than the cable works; many of them, apparently, involved more wearing and hazardous occupations. Some groups coughed incessantly and were red-eyed from the irritation of some chemical. Others must have been heavy-manual-labor specialists. They were divided into the hale, whose muscles bulged amazingly, and the dying—men and women who obviously could not take the work but who were doing it anyway.

They seated themselves at long benches, with push buttons at each station. Helena, next to him, explained the system to Ross. Voting was universal and simultaneous, in all the Halls of Democracy around the planet and from all the homes of the Senior Citizens who did not choose to vote from a Hall. Simultaneously the votes were counted at a central station and the results were flashed to screens in the Centers and homes. She said a number of enthusiastic things about Democracy while Ross studied a sheet on which the candidates and propositions were listed.

The names meant nothing to him. He noted only that each of three candidates for Chief of State was one hundred thirty years old, that each of three candidates for First Assistant Chief was one hundred and twenty-seven years old, and so on. Obviously the nominating conventions by agreement named candidates of the same age for each office to keep it a contest.

Proposition One read: “To dismantle seven pediatric centers and apply the salvage value to the construction of, and the funds no longer required for their maintenance to the maintenance of, a new wing of the Gerontological Center, said wing to be devoted to basic research in the extension of human life.”