Pressure

by Lee Harding

The City was built up and down, Level upon Level. The sun, stars, sky and ocean were but legends in forbidden history—until Gordon found the Books, then the pressure really began to increase in his mind.

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.

Notes

Gordon stopped writing and looked up at the clock. It was a round, vulgar little anachronism standing on four spindly legs on a corner of the bookshelf. Its pious hands were indicating two minutes to ten and it was ticking noisily.

He compressed his lips into a narrow, almost invisible line and his right hand resumed the task of transmitting his muddled thoughts to paper.

Tonight, he wrote, I noticed that even the ticking of the clock has begun to annoy me…

And as he sat before his cramped little table and struggled to enter the substance of the day’s happenings into his diary, Doreen’s voice penetrated the walls of his bedroom.

“Ralph, darling…”

His hand gripped convulsively on the ball-pen and the plastic splintered between his fingers.

The door behind him opened. His wife stood framed in the doorway, regarding his unturned back petulantly. “The Barkers just phoned,” she informed. “They thought we might like to come over for a game of scrabble.”

Gordon stared hard at the bookcase. The torrent of words washed over him and forced the lines of his face towards intolerable agony as his wife’s voice droned on in that predictably nagging manner he had come to detest. And he couldn’t face her, for fear that her nasty, suspicious little mind might be surprised into burrowing for the truth.

Oh, curse the Barkers and their infantile preoccupation with party games!

But the noise of her voice. It was cutting his mind to shreds.

“Not tonight,” he said. “Some other time.”

“Oh, you and your silly work!” she snapped. “Who do you think you are, writing in little books all the time—an Historian or something?”

The word write was a dirty word in her mouth. To Doreen and uncountable millions like her any form of self-expression was simply incomprehensible.

Faced with his silence she stormed back into the livingroom, slamming the bedroom door behind her. The concussion exploded a cloud of red flashes inside his head and sent his senses reeling under the impact. He grabbed desperately at the edge of the table to keep from falling into the aching pit of unconsciousness that swept up to engulf him, and somehow succeeded.

His normal world gradually swam back into focus as his vision cleared and he looked down at the broken pieces of ball-pen in front of him. Somewhere a clock ticked even louder than before, innocent of the fact that it was causing its owner discomfort.

He was still sitting there a while later when Doreen’s voice again pounced hungrily through the closed door and fastened sharp little teeth on the tatters of his mind.

“I’m going over to Pat and Norm’s. You can stay in there all night if you want to—and get your own damn supper.” There was the sound of irate heels clicking angrily towards the front door of their unit and then the muffled sound of it closing behind her.

Thank God, he breathed. Thank God for the Barker’s and their childish preoccupations. At least they had given him a few hours respite. A weak sigh escaped his lips and he leant back in his chair and rubbed his aching forehead. His eyes sought and found the clock, his mind groping for and analysing the enigma of its ticking.

Was he losing after all?

The clock stared back. It was nothing more than a box full of whirring gears, and yet it was somehow conspiring to threaten what little peace of mind he now possessed. He considered switching it off, and then remembered that it was non-electric and that he’d have to dismantle its innards in some way.

The thought was dismissed almost as quickly as it came. To take such an action would signify a failure on his part. And one failure could lead to the complete destruction of his plans; he must follow everything through to the last decimal point of endurance.

So he compromised: he would endure the noise of the clock until it ran down. After that it need not annoy him for he wouldn’t wind it up again. The thing was completely unnecessary, anyway. The wall clock in the livingroom was silent and accurate, as were all the official clocks in the City for they came under direct guidance of Control. But this thing was forever losing time—when it wasn’t gaining it. It was useless, really, nothing more than an ornament, like the faded volumes in his bookshelf and the ancient paintings around the wall of the bedroom and the assortment of ornamental trivia dotting the furniture. Anachronisms all, bridges to a forgotten past.

With Doreen gone and the blare of the tri-di absent there was a chance that a resemblance of peace and quiet might return to his room, amidst which the bothersome ticking of the clock could easily fade to an inaudible background munner.

As he sat and explored the extent of his predicament, fatigue fell upon him unexpectedly and he welcomed it thankfully like a man who has exhausted himself almost beyond the powers of recuperation.

Which in effect he had.

He undressed and crawled into bed, wrapping the warm silence around him and letting his body stretch out luxuriously beneath the thermo sheet and anticipated the balm of sleep.

He lay there, unmoving, for some time. His ears probed the solitude distrustfully and then fastened upon a familiar intruder The clock ticked noisily, the sound rising steadily in volume until it threatened to swallow the universe.

He gritted his teeth and burrowed deeper into the bed. He had imagined he had successfully cast the offending clockwork out of his mind, and here it had returned and a hundred times more vicious than before.

Was there no end to the torture?

Grimly, he tried to sweat it out. He must win, otherwise he was as good as finished. Once the first chink appeared in his armour he feared that a rapid descent into despair would be inevitable.

A number of times he thought wildly of getting up and finding some way to stop it, but each time a small voice called up from the depths of his suffering. Hold on, it said, hold on…

And he held on. He was not even sure of sleep when it came. His mind was a jumble of images in which the real intermingled with the stuff of dreams and nightmares until it became impossible to distinguish one from the other. But sometime during the long night he did manage to salvage a few ragged hours of sleep before the new day dragged him back into the growing maelstrom of existence.

When he awoke in the morning the sense of failure hung like a dirty taste in his mouth. But the world was quiet.

He got up and dressed like a man awakening from a drugged sleep. His mind had been dulled and blunted by the night’s ordeal; it would be well into the day before he would be capable of thinking with his customary efficiency.

Still shrugging off the cobwebs of sleep, he walked over to the dressing table in search of his shoes. His bare feet trod on something small, sharp and broken. He winced and looked quickly down, and there on the carpet were the scattered innards of the clock. Its plastic face was crushed and broken, one hand pointing rudely to twelve and bits and pieces of its now silent mechanism lying beside it. There was a mark on the wall near the door where it could have been thrown with stunning force.

Then it hadn’t been a nightmare at all. He had broken; he had finally been able to stand the terrible noise no longer and he had got up and picked the clock up with trembling hands and dashed it angrily against the wall of the bedroom. He had thought the incident nothing more than another vague phantom of dream.

He felt sudden anger at the weakness in him that was responsible for such an irrational action. But the clock was silenced now. It could not annoy him again. He pushed the broken pieces under the synthetic carpet and put the battered clock away inside one of the built-in wall cupboards.

In the toilet he doused his face vigorously in cold water and towelled his face and arms roughly in the hope of dispelling some of the fog of headache that still clung to him. As he bent over the washbasin one hand rose automatically towards the medicine chest for a headache capsule, but just as quickly returned to the basin.

He stared at his drawn, haggard face in the mirror and thought: God, but I’m looking old! He was thirty-five, but the face of the man in the mirror looked closer to fifty. Was this to be the result of his meddling with the dictates of Control?

And he would not take any capsule—not even to relieve his headache. Total abstinence was the only way to prove his theories. He would see it out to the bitter end.

After he had removed the overnight stubble he reached inside the medicine chest and behind the brightly coloured capsule containers extracted the diminishing ball of flesh-coloured cotton wool. He pulled away two tiny tufts of the material and worked them carefully into the cavities of his ears, taking great care to make the tiny plugs of wool inconspicuous This done he felt ready to face the world for another gruelling day. But today, as he had done for the past week, he found himself wondering: today might be the last. He couldn’t get away with what he was doing indefinitely. Control wasn’t that big a fool.

Doreen was sitting disconsolately at the breakfast table when he walked into the dinette. He hadn’t heard her come in during the night and she had not disturbed him; they had been sleeping in separate rooms for some time now and the arrangement suited them both.

The clock in the livingroom had indicated nine-fifty. That left only five minutes for breakfast and the thought pleased him greatly, for he would have only a little time to endure the pressure of his wife’s company.

The thought brightened him considerably. There was even an uncommon tenderness in the goodbye kiss to his wife and a new lift to his steps as he made for the front door.

“Have you taken your pills?” she called after him.

He stiffened, one hand on the door knob. “Yes,” he lied. “See you this afternoon.” And closed the door behind him.

Before stepping on to the footstrip Gordon paused outside the door of their unit, like a dog testing the air. Sound was already buffeting at the raw wound inside his head. But his confidence had returned; the strain of the previous evening didn’t seem half so bad now as it had in the bleary first light of morning. Perhaps he had made some headway at last.

Overhead, the solid block of housing Units rose above him. There was a lot to be said for living at Ground Level. A man spent enough time as it was riding up and down the buildings in elevators. His eyes travelled up to where the towering grey blocks met the floor of the next Level that formed the roof of Gordon’s world. And while the City groped ever higher towards the sky, below him the great structure dropped away to an awesome chasm that sought blindly for the sub-Levels. But all this was hidden from Gordon’s eyes and those of his fellow workmen for the ground of his Level 23 in turn formed the roof over the levels below. And so it went.

Gordon’s Level had wide streets interlaced with sweeping overpasses and humming footstrips. Here and there the occasional twitter of a gyro or the distant murmer of machinery concealed within the stark simplicity of the buildings broke the immediate silence. But that was before the people appeared on the scene; the vast tide of commuters pouring forth from their housing Units and invading the footstrips that carried them off to their respective destinations, and turned the whole sterile world into a harsh, raucous bedlam with their loud, senseless talk.

This is my world, Gordon thought, bitterly. The whole goddamned awful world. Why had he come to loathe it so? Even before he had stopped taking the little scarlet capsules he had begun to detest it.

A succession of footstrips carried him to his destination. Computer Control Centre was a vast building little different from similar constructions around it. Indeed, the whole city seemed composed of the same featureless metal and plastic. Inside its walls was a complex, omnipotent machine which held the great equation of the City balanced within its electronic innards.

Gordon was whisked rapidly to his particular floor and he stepped out of the elevator and made his way along the long corridor to his compartment. Once enclosed within the small room he felt his body relax a little and he felt quite calm as he seated himself at his desk. His arms folded, he stared at the bank of instruments before him and solemnly waited.

The whole procedure of his working day was quite simple. In a little while the chute to his left would burp out a mountain of punched cards which he, in turn, would insert into the narrow mouthpiece leading to the portion of the computer’s brain responsible for Statistics and after a short wait the answer to the problem would be expelled through the smaller chute on his right. After decoding the punched card he would place the typewritten paper in a small container which would be sucked along a maze of tunnels until it finally reached its destination. Gordon had little idea where that destination would be, nor did he care. He did his part of the job, beyond that he never worried. Or at least he never had worried up until now…

It was all very simple and required the minimum of mental exertion. Sometimes the door behind him would open and a girl would come in with an urgent typewritten interrogation sheet which he would have to transpose on to a punched card and then insert into the machine. That took time and broke the monotony.

Perhaps that was what Control intended.

Nowadays Gordon’s working hours were plagued by a variety of elusive questioning thoughts. Today it was this: I wonder what people do with themselves? Oh, he knew that Norm worked in Maintainance and Charley had something to do with Air Conditioning, but what about the rest of those nameless strangers he saw on the footstrips?

And you couldn’t call Norm or Charleys’ work real work, no more than his. Work was something vital, exciting, interesting. At least, that was the way it appeared in the old books he had read. Not this monotonous existence. People only seemed to be filling in time. A number of times he had been unsettled by the thought that the City could quite easily dispense with their services entirely, so utterly pointless did their activities appear to him, as if the hours they worked were nothing more than a token offering, something to keep them occupied and out of mischief.

Another more horrifying thought occurred to him: was Control nothing more than a vast machine, something similar to the Computer he served, that had little need for human symbiosis?

As though in censure for these thoughts he noticed that the hum and throb of the workings of the vast brain had begun to penetrate into his mind by extremely devious means. It bypassed his auditory nerves completely and instead inveigled its annoying way through the very stuff of his body. His skeleton became the carrier of annoying, devastating vibrations which suggested they might ultimately shake his body apart.

By the time the mid-day lunch break arrived his resolve of the morning had crumbled beneath the onslaught of the insidious vibrations. There seemed no way to escape them. His position in the cubicle threatened to become unbearable.

He made his way quickly out of the building and on to a footstrip that carried him over to the main elevator shaft connecting the various Levels of the City. He rode the plastic ribbon apprehensively, the muted sounds of the city’s pulse struggling to pierce his numbed senses in a thousand different ways. Already he was fearing a recurrence of the previous day’s terrors, and the prospect appalled him. He must find solitude, if only for the two short hours ahead of him.

The guards at the Shaft scrutinised his pass and then let him through into the elevator. The door slid shut and the cube descended rapidly, pressing Gordon’s stomach against his ribs and bringing on the familiar nausea.

The lift fell deeper into the bowels of the City. Level after Level slid invisibly past and then the cube came to a gentle stop and the doors slid across to reveal the familiar streets of Level One. Two guards took his pass and examined it more carefully than their counterparts on Level 23. They finally let him through and he walked out into the quiet streets.

It was only recently that he had discovered the remarkably quiet atmosphere that existed on the lower Levels, and on One in particular. This was the guts of the City that laboured to keep the upper levels alive. Here, also; the pulse of life seemed to have slowed almost to a standstill and people moved like sleepwalkers through the dimly-lit streets.

He had first fled here a little more than a week ago, when the noise and discord around him had become too much to bear, and down the only direction in which he could flee. His Class 7 pass allowed him unrestricted travel between Levels 1 and 23. Further down, the sub-Levels pulsed with enigmatic life, forever hidden from his kind. Rumour had it that they were the life blood of the city which in turn fed the machines of Level One. Higher up, of course, rose the forbidden ramparts of the Upper Levels.

Gordon had never seen the sun. The moon and the stars were equally unattainable and seasons but a myth. There were stories that the Higher Ups could really crane their necks up and actually see open sky instead of the grey foundation of another Level.

He would have given a great deal to travel to the Upper Levels—but such requests could only be construed as insubordination and would be dealt with accordingly. A man must stick to his allotted Level. He could go down if he wished to discover and be awed by the workings of the City, but any attempt to climb higher in search of mental enlightenment was forbidden. What was it that Control was afraid of? Why were there restrictions?

Like the old days, he thought, when people had to go through a vast mountain of red-tape just to visit another country. Perhaps human nature hadn’t changed a great deal, merely accelerated some of the dogmatic ideas of the race.

There were none of the familiar footstrips to carry him along. Here a man used his limbs and walked, as he had done in the Old Days before the dreadful hive existence had begun.

That was what bothered Gordon more than anything. Why had it begun in the first place, and where would it all end? Mankind had faced the beginning of the twenty-first century with the stars in their grasp and somehow had lost them.

Or had they?

That was something Gordon was trying to find out.

The overhead lighting was dim and antiquated and the streets narrow and not too clean. More like passageways, really, for here vehicular traffic was unheard of. Behind the massive walls of the buildings lay the completely automated machinery responsible for handling the waste disposal of the City, as well as the beginnings of the vast network of air-recirculation pipes and water systems that stitched together the Levels. It was no wonder that, if the sub-Levels were referred to as the brains and heart of the City, then Level One was obviously the guts.

Where this particular Level differed from those higher up was in the manner in which time seemed to have flowed to a stop momentarily, casting up odd lumps of the past on to the backwaters of the present.

For here there were shops, row upon row of them offering anything from food to clothing to knick-knacks for sale. And shops were unheard of on Level 23. Here was the domain of the city’s proletariat and the people were surrounded with the symbology of their world.

As he walked along the crowded but quietly undulating streets he became aware of the vast weight of the City pressing down upon him, while around him it swelled to join the borders of other Cities and so conspired to girdle the globe with a single sheath of metal and plastic.

Is this all? his conscience kept demanding. Is there no more to life than this?

He finally found the little shop he was looking for and opened the door and walked in.

The little bell still jangled inanely above his head. He closed the door behind him and its cry was stilled. Inside it was as he had remembered it, as it had been on his last visit two days ago.

It was a small room, divided midway by a counter and around it on all sides were tables stacked high with an assortment of drama tapes and musical compositions. All this failed to interest him. It was the back of the room that drew his thirsty attention. One corner was devoted to a few rows of carefully stacked books.

Real books.

A door at the back of the little shop opened and the old man came in. Gordon didn’t know his name, if indeed he possessed one. Any identity the man might have once had now seemed submerged by the accumulated weight of years. His face was heavily lined, but friendly, and he welcomed Gordon with customary enthusiasm.

“Good day, Mister Gordon. So pleasant to see you again. Anything in particular you are looking for?” His voice filtered softly through Gordon’s ear plugs.

Gordon shook his head. “Just browsing,” he lied.

“But of course.” The old man made a vague gesture with one hand, giving Gordon his customary freedom of the shop, and then sat down behind the counter and busied himself sorting tapes.

Gordon looked impatiently through some of the tapes, purchasing a few for the sake of appearances, and then wandered over to the hand bound volumes in the corner. His pulse quickened noticeably as his eyes moved over the lettering on the spines. Some were faded and difficult to read. They must be old, he thought, and wondered how old. Already he had more than a dozen of the books back home in his own room. He had bought them one at a time when expenses permitted. His ambition was to ultimately own the lot, but that would take more spending money than he could expect in a lifetime.

For the present he had to content himself with procuring those items that particularly fascinated him. And then there was the uneasiness which made him wary to show too great an interest in the Old Books. There was no telling just how Control might construe such an interest. The puzzling thing was that they even allowed shops like this to exist…

“I see you like the old books,” the proprietor remarked from his place at the counter.

Gordon looked around. “They do interest me,” he replied. “I suppose it’s just different to putting a tape in a viewer, that’s all.”

The old man nodded. “There’s not many who are interested in printed books any more, you know. Only collectors. Are you a collector, Mister Gordon.”

“Yes, I suppose I am. But in a small way, you understand.” And, in a way he was. A collector of enigmas, of things that didn’t add up or make sense.

Most of the printed volumes he had accumulated were simply technical treaties devoted to the City and its workings, issued by Control to satisfy a demand for hand-printed work amongst the odd-balls of society. And then, only those few days ago had had stumbled upon this place and the fascinating contents. He had asked the old man if there were any other bookshops on the Level and he had replied, rather sadly, Gordon thought, that there were not. His was the last in the City. Perhaps, and this was an ominous thought, the last in all the World.

His attention returned to the books, Gordon was annoyed to see two particular volumes missing. After a fruitless search he turned to the proprietor and said: “Those two volumes on astronautics you had here the other day; I can’t seem to locate them.” He tried to make his voice sound as calm and detached as possible.

The old man got up and came over to him. A puzzled frown deepened the lines of his face. “Astronautics?” he said, dubiously. “Which ones were they?”

“I don’t remember the titles, but I do know the names of the writers. One was Clarke and the other was Ley, I think. They were here the day before yesterday…”

The other’s face brightened then. “Oh, those ancients.”

Was it imagination, Gordon wondered, or did he detect a faint flicker of amusement in the old man’s eyes?

“They went yesterday. Another young chap bought them. I think he was from Higher Up—maybe around your Level. He had a Class 6 pass, anyway.” He looked appropriately disappointed for Gordon’s sake. “But if there’s anything else I can…”

“No, no, that’s all right.” Gordon paid for his tapes and left the shop, his thoughts spinning wildly all the time. So he wasn’t the only one after all. There were others as curious as he was. But he was dismayed, none the less, that he had missed out on those two books. They may have helped to clear up a few of the unanswered questions gnawing away inside him.

He boarded the elevator and ascended to Level 23 and then back to his cubicle in Computer Control Centre. When he arrived, there was a heavy batch of work lying beneath the incoming chute. He fell to the task half-heartedly. After all, was it really necessary to go through this rigamarole day after day? Why couldn’t those in need of the information submit it directly to the computer themselves instead of channelling it through him and thousands like him? Was it really because the City was so vast and complex that it needed the efficient operation of countless individual cells?

But the more he studied the problem the stronger grew his conviction that the work he was engaged upon was nothing more than a token offering. Such being the case he saw little reason to really overwork himself, so he pushed the pile of cards to one side and rested his head on his crossed arms and tried to wangle a brief rest before the sharp sabres of discord resumed their merciless hacking away at his mind.

His thoughts wandered. Inevitably, he brought together their various skeins and traced the sum of his accomplishments.

Even now he could not easily define when the first spark of rebellion had burst into life. Sometime before even the discovery of the old Histories in the Central Library, perhaps. It had grown from the slow accumulation of curiosity which the passage of information through his cubicle in Statistics had fed. It was those intriguing facts which had first caused him to wonder about the system he lived under. What he did find difficult to accept was the fact that none of his friends or workmates exhibited a similar curiosity, and after a few abortive attempts to communicate his ideas he thought better of it, and kept his doubts to himself.

It was much later that he had discovered the faded yellow books buried deep within the thousands of tapes crammed into the Library. At first he had expected merely another of the endless treatises on the running of the City, but as he carefully turned the ancient pages he began to realise that he held within his hands something different to the average printed text-book.

Before his eyes a vast printed panorama of history opened before him. Chronicled within the seven volumes was a concise history of the World from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. This was an incredibly more detailed history book than any he had previously encountered. There was so much hidden within the dusty tomes that for a while he imagined that the whole thing was a gigantic work of fiction. Later, he began to believe all that he read was true and he lost count of the number of times he returned to the Library to devour the contents of the books.

Nowadays, he found time to wonder just what those particular books were doing there in the first place, for to a mind as curious as Gordon’s the contents therein were literal dynamite, and bound to spark off further curiosity. But then, perhaps the volumes had been forgotten with the passage of years, in much the same way as the bookshop on Level One.

In the weeks that followed his discovery of the Histories his whole world gradually turned upside down and he was forced from one enigma to another. There seemed no end to the unanswered questions nagging away at him.

After reading the lengthy volumes one fact emerged clearly in his head. The history ended with the closing years of the twentieth century. Earth had established bases on the moon and had already sent probes to the nearer planets.

And this was the twenty second century, the year two thousand one hundred and ninety-two—or so Control said. There was every reason to be doubtful of what Control said, he had discovered.

There was no mention of the Cities in the History. Oh, there were cities all right—London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Chicago and the like, but no Cities. The great hives of steel and plastic stretching up into the sky were non-existent at the close of the twentieth century. There wasn’t even the faintest hint of the future man would carve for himself in the rabbit warrens of his own miserable planet. And why should there be, for hadn’t man possessed the stars in his hands as the century came to a close?

Something had happened to the human race since then. Something had caused it to evolve into this stagnant, hive-like existence; something had caused real history to be suppressed and only a skeletal substitute taught in the Schools.

Most important of all there was no mention of the scarlet capsules.

Everybody took them—Control made it compulsory from the age of two years onwards. Two a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Vitamin Supplements, Control called them. But why have them at all? If the food they ate was vitamin deficient to a certain extent, why couldn’t the supplements be introduced into the food when it was synthetised?

There was something suspiciously unbalanced in that particular puzzle, but try as he would he couldn’t come up with a better explanation than Control’s.

It was but a short step from those first tentative suspicions to a complete lack of faith in everything concerned with Control Computer Centre and in fact everything about his life that he had once accepted without question.

In time he was unable to resist the temptation of the Computer. He began by cautiously submitting questions completely irrelevant to his problems, and then one day he took his first nervous plunge.

Why do we take the scarlet capsules? read the holes punched into the small card.

Very quickly, he thought, the brain had shot out a card into his hands. His eyes quickly translated the message.

Define the term ‘we.’

He swore and repunched the question and inserted it into the narrow orifice again.

Why do human beings take the scarlet capsules?

The answer was the familiar warning dictated by Control. He knew it by heart, had known it since he was two years old.

The Capsules are supplementary dietary combinations which the Law requires you to take as prescribed. To abstain from this will result in…

Gordon screwed the card up and cast it into the disposal chute. He hadn’t really expected anything more revealing. After all wasn’t the Computer the slave of Control?

It was at that moment he had decided to stop taking the capsules, not only from a desire to see what would happen to him but also as a snook in the nose at Control. He had no way of knowing that in performing such an action he was committing his first tangible act of revolt against the system which kept him.

The effect of his abstinence was not immediate. He began by cutting his intake of capsules down to one a day and kept this up for two weeks. When no discomfort was apparent he dispensed with the dosage entirely and awaited the results apprehensively. At the end of three weeks he detected the first signs of difference, and even then he was surprised to find that he felt in no way the worse off. If anything, he felt better than he had in a long time.

It was like ridding oneself of a burden, depositing a heavy load off the shoulder, feeling well after a long sickness, coming out of the dark and into the light, like growing up all of a sudden. It was all these things, and something more subtle than that.

He felt alive. More completely alive than he had ever imagined. He seemed to see things with astonishing clarity, hear things with a new perception. He was able to think more clearly than he had ever believed possible.

But he was unprepared for the disastrous effects of his liberation. It took but a few days for him to realise that everybody around him seemed appallingly wrong. The entire population of the city seemed to be wandering around in a drugged stupor. With Doreen it was most noticeable. She had never been one for gaiety and swift repartee but quite suddenly she had become as limp and soggy and as uninteresting as an old dishcloth.

He looked around him and couldn’t believe his eyes. Was the difference between them so marked? Probably not, he reasoned. It was only his astonishingly sharp mind that made the comparison so terribly obvious. But the fact remained that they were different, that none of them possessed his own new found alacrity.

Had he been like them, wandering around like a sleepwalker? Was this new dimension he experienced kept forever from mankind by the enigmatic capsules? If so, then Control was guilty of the most monstrous crime ever inflicted upon humanity.

But although he convinced himself that the human race were the victims of a treachery that staggered the imagination, he could still find no tangible proof. And if he did find it, what then?

He had tackled his task at Statistics with renewed vigour. No longer did his job seem senseless. He had an opportunity to find the facts he needed to corroborate the dreadful suspicions in his mind. And having found evidence he would find some way to display it. There must always be a way out, he kept telling himself, always…

During the days which passed, figures flashed across his mind and registered heavily on his strengthened memory cells. For instance, world population stood at an appalling seven billion, and was steady. It had been steady for three quarters of a century. That in itself pointed out that the limit had been reached in expansion across the globe. Why then were the stars untouched?

He had put another question to the Computer. His card asked: “Does the human race travel to the stars and the nearer planets?

The machine quickly returned its reply

Insufficient data. Gordon read.

He tried again. Had mankind ever sent rocket ships to other planets?

Insufficient data, the machine insisted. Refer to Control 3.

Gordon hastily destroyed the cards. Control 3 was his Staff Officer. If he ever found out that Gordon had been tampering with procedure… He had no desire to incur the wrath of his superiors this early in the game. Later, it would no doubt be inevitable. But there was so much he had yet to uncover.

His period of acute well-being was short lived. After a week or so his mental health began to deteriorate rapidly. At first he was unaware of this, but in the last week it had been forced home to him repeatedly.

It had begun with noise. The first offender had been the alarm buzzer signalling his lunch breaks; its imperative sound would sometimes jar alarmingly on his nerves. Other sounds began to annoy him. Doreen’s voice in particular achieved an horrendous nagging quality he had never imagined possible. Even the accustomed sounds of the busy Level encroached upon his peace of mind.

He usually started a headache just before breakfast and it continued all through the day and into the night. Only sleep brought release. Every little noise seemed to magnify itself a thousand times and hurl itself at his consciousness. The assault continued twenty-four hours a day.

So he had begun his diary. He thought vaguely that if anything happened to him then it might be discovered by others and perhaps they might get curious, like him and in that way the seeds of destruction might be grown in Control’s system. But he didn’t really have much faith in his fellow man, not after having observed them from his newly discovered plane.

The liberation of his senses to a more acute degree also accelerated and increased the mental suffering he underwent. But through it all he managed to retain the clarity that had come with his refusal to bow to Control’s will and keep taking the scarlet capsules. His newly-found wisdom, however, could find only one end to his quest if he continued along this pathway, and that was death. He had no concept of insanity—the very word was alien to his way of life. So he settled for death, and was even willing to face that rather than return to the lifeless existence of an automaton.

The desk beneath Gordon’s head began to hum noticeably as he rested and retraced his actions of the past few months.

He opened his eyes, eyes that were suddenly very much afraid. He had never before noticed the vibration of the Computer’s brain to such a degree. He looked down and could see that his arms were trembling as they braced themselves against the desk.

What new madness was this?

His whole body was shaking now as the insidious vibrations of the computer passed through the desk and into his body. Short waves of pain started to gnaw at the false solitude of his mind.

He got up from the desk and walked around in a quick circle. The feeling passed, and he was left standing in the centre of the tiny cubicle and glaring at the chutes in the wall with intense hatred.

Gradually, his anger cooled and he began to chide his own nervousness. He walked over and picked up a few cards from the stack and began to insert them into the narrow orifice. While he waited for the answers his mind rebelled restlessly at the irritating web of routine. A new unrest rose within him and mingled with the aural discord around him.

Boredom!

He picked up another card and then flung it against the wall in a fit of temper. Then he wiped the stacked cards off the desk with one sweep of his hand. They spilled on to the floor and the sight sent a warm glow of satisfaction through him.

He couldn’t go on like this. The dreadful monotony had become too much to bear. He would not work. Let them do something about that, he had little doubt they could manage quite well without him. Censure would be inevitable, of course, but why worry about that? One Level was as good as another in this rabbit warren.

Something was pressing on his head. A weight, an intolerable weight making his head ache unbearably. He pressed his hands against his temples and looked up at the low ceiling of the room.

Not pressing on his head, really, but on him, his whole body. He felt as though he were suffocating from the weight of it. And then he knew what it was.

The City. He could feel the unknown number of Levels pressing down upon him and the walls clamping him in his cell from all sides.

“It’s going to fall!” he yelled. “It’s going to crush me…”

He screamed then, and covered his face with his hands and backed towards the door. His hands fumbled with the catch and he stumbled through and fled down the corridor and out of the building.

But outside was no different. The City stretched above him, Level upon Level without end. And it was going to crush him.

He ran on to the footstrips, whimpering now like a frightened animal, the words bubbling from his mouth, the product of a mind in the last stages of disintegration. His face was ashen and his eyes wild and lost.

He couldn’t get away from the people. They were all around him, pressing in upon him like the walls of the City. And they were after him, they were all chasing him and trying to catch him.

He ran and ran, faster than the whirring plastic strips themselves, weaving his way through a barrage of noise, wading through the molten symphony of discord when the going got heavy. Sound had never assaulted him with such force. His mind was a raw, gaping wound reeling under the impact of the snarling, snapping noise the City had unleashed upon him. The cotton wool plugs lodged within his ears were a useless joke. The discord had succeeded in by-passing his auditory senses completely and had instead attacked through the very stuff of his body. Every skeletal bone, every nerve fibre was a carrier of intolerable agony leading to the ultimate destruction of his mind. And there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing at all.

Except run. Back to Home, back to his tiny cell in his Unit block. Blind instinct took him there and slammed the door loudly behind him. He staggered into the apartment and headed blindly for the toilet. He groped inside the medicine chest and emptied the contents of the phials on to the floor. A carpet of scarlet capsules spread out before him. He ground them into the floor with his feet, whimpering like a cornered animal.

He had lost his battle. Now they would come to claim him. He had no way of knowing that his end had been predictable from the very beginning; there was no other way for the battle to go. He could never have won.

He had no strength to scream. He let his body crumple on to the carpet and lay there, feeling the monstrous crashing of his heart beat and waited for the City to crush the last vestiges of life from out of his broken body.

They collected the scattered fragments of his reason and made it whole again. And then, when he was once again able to think and act with all the faculties they had feared might be lost, they took him to see a man named Jager.

The Control Psychologist was disarmingly friendly behind his wide desk. Gordon was questioned in a casual manner and answered readily enough. His three weeks in the psychiatric ward had taught him the uselessness of deception. A hard mask of hopelessness covered the hollow shell of his failure.

“We have read your diary, Mister Gordon,” Jager said. “We found it very interesting. However, there were a few things you neglected to explain. For instance, just why did you stop taking the capsules?”

“I was curious. I wanted to see what would happen.”

“And now that you have, what conclusions have you drawn?”

Gordon thought for a moment. “I think that the people of this City are being drugged for some reason, and the means of this sedation is in the capsules we are told to take.”

The psychologist regarded him thoughtfully. “Suppose I were to tell you that your hallucinations were the direct result of extreme vitamin deprivation, caused by your abstinence from taking the prescribed capsules?”

“Then I would call you a liar, sir. I’m not that much of a fool. And then there’s other things as well…”

“Other things? Such as, Mister Gordon?”

Gordon took a deep breath and said: “Why are we cooped up in the Cities when we should be colonising other planets? Why are we kept under all these lies, lies, lies?”

There was a glimmer that could have hinted at approval buried deep in Jager’s compelling eyes. “You were right, Marshall,” he said to the man standing immediately behind Gordon, “he is a damned determined fellow.”

The psychologist got up. “There’s something I’d like you to see, Mister Gordon.”

The three of them moved out of the room and down a short corridor to a waiting elevator. The door slid shut and they began to ascend.

They were going up, Gordon realized, and fought back a momentary panic. After all, he had no way of knowing if they were on Level 23 at all. He had no idea where the… hospital… was situated.

But the lift went up a long way. He had never been so long in an elevator in his life. Slowly, the panic began to return.

“Relax, Mister Gordon,” Jager said, smiling affably. “It won’t take very long.” Beside him, the aide named Marshall regarded Gordon with stony indifference.

“I think it adviseable to point out,” Jager went on, “at this stage of the proceedings, that your curiosity was, shall we say—tickled?—by Control very early in the piece. You exhibited a degree of intelligence above the ordinary. That was why you were put into Statistics in the first place. And then there were those Histories planted in the Library and Old Grainger’s bookshop on Level One…”

Gordon stared at him blankly.

Jager smiled. “Don’t try to assimilate it all at once, Mister Gordon. It will come to you, all in good time.”

The lift slowed to a gentle stop.

The psychologist thrust a pair of goggles into his hand. “Here, you’d better put these on. You’ll need them.”

Gordon pulled the glasses over his head and adjusted them over his eyes. They considerably darkened the interior of the lift.

“Better try and relax,” Jager advised, “and prepare yourself for something rather unique. We wouldn’t have brought you up here if you hadn’t already proved your mental stamina.”

Before Gordon had time to ponder the meaning of his words the door slid open and light flooded the interior of the lift.

Light such as he had never before seen.

They stepped out of the elevator. Jager first, followed by a stumbling Gordon and with Marshall following closely behind him.

Gordon let his eyes wander incredulously over the world around him. A great carpet of steel stretched away on all sides, the walls so far away he could not even see them. He squinted in the unaccustomed glare, thankful that the psychologist had thoughtfully provided the dark glasses. Otherwise, the glare would have been abominable.

The ground of this Level was unlike any other he had encountered. Smooth and flat, it boasted few protuberances and no buildings whatsoever. He let his eyes rise to meet the roof high overhead…

But there was no roof. Only a golden sky sifting the energy of the sun itself.

He was standing on the roof of the uppermost Level of the City. And the glaring light all around him was the unimagined fire of the Sun!

Momentarily, he staggered under the weight of discovery, and Marshall supported his shoulders with a vice-like grip.

Jager looked into his stunned eyes. “Well, Gordon, do you know where you are?”

He could only nod. And was that sparkling light in the far distance only sunlight bouncing from another myth-water? Was that the ocean out there? Beyond the hated steel and plastic of the City?

But wasn’t there something wrong? The sky—that was it.

Wasn’t it supposed to be blue, instead of this queer golden colour? And where were the fleecy puff-balls called clouds?

He turned his questioning eyes to Jager and the psychologist seemed to read his thoughts. “Yes, it’s not quite like you expected, is it Gordon?”

Gordon shook his head, wondering why the ageing psychologist sounded so bitter.

“You wanted to know why the human race is chained to these cities when it should have claimed its birthright amongst the stars? Well,” he said, gesturing up at the golden sky, “there’s your answer.”

Gordon said: “I don’t understand…”

Jager didn’t seem to hear him. “It was a little over two centuries ago,” he went on. “We had a base on the moon and had sent automated probes to Mars, Venus, the Saturnian and Jovian systems. And then the Slugs came. The first thing we knew about them was a desperate radio warning from the first expedition en route to Mars. They were the first to see their gigantic sausage-shaped ships swimming in from Out There. They immediately sent word to us but there was really nothing we could do. We were like ants to men in the face of their superiority.

“We could only watch while they busily divided up the solar system and reshaped the planets to suit their needs, and fearfully awaited our own destruction.

“But some sort of compassion seemed to prevail. When they could have slaughtered us as callously as we would have slaughtered them had the boot been on the other foot, they chose instead to shut us off from the rest of the system. For that matter, from the rest of reality as well. They spun this gigantic web around Earth, an incomprehensible warp of space and time that lets in the light of the sun but through which nothing from Earth can penetrate, and left us here to die, to kill ourselves, and so absolve them of the guilt.”

Gordon was beginning to understand. There had been a reason, after all.

“So you see,” Jager went on, “We had nowhere to go but our own planet. We spread and we built, always in the hope that someday, somehow man’s ingenuity would find some way through the Barrier.

“We were insane, stupid. Just because we had always found a way out in the past led us blindly to believe we would find a way out of this one. But we haven’t, not in a hundred and seventy years.

“The population increased and the cities expanded to keep up with the birth-rate until finally a halt had to be called. With the human race shut out forever from the rest of the universe we were becoming a race of claustrophobes. Something had to be done or the race would perish from the explosion of titanic psychological pressures. Perhaps that was what the Slugs intended.

“So the drugs were introduced. Tranquilisers, they were called. Over the years the dosages had to be increased to keep up with the mounting psychological pressures growing in the Cities. But there can only be one end to such a procedure.

“We are breeding a race of psychological weaklings, Gordon. You yourself are third generation; look what happened when you stopped taking the drugs. Your mind became susceptible to just about every phobia you can think of. You just couldn’t take it.

“The best of our brains are housed in the Upper Levels where the pressures are not so great, but even there its impossible to forget the implication of that golden sky overhead. They labour constantly to find some way of defeating the Barrier. In the meantime, our natural resources are being consumed at a dangerous rate. Only in the last quarter of a century have we harvested the ocean to any great extent. The only solution is gradually dropping the population to a level more appropriate to the living space. But even that can’t go on indefinitely.”

Gordon nodded his head, impatiently. That much he could understand, but why the mystery surrounding his own breakdown? Why had they let it happen?

“That’s easy to understand, Gordon. We could easily introduce the tranquilisers into the synthetic foods—a certain amount is, by the way. If you hadn’t gone off your food to such an extent you might never have deteriorated as much as you did.

“What we do not want to suppress is the natural desire for curiosity. Leaving the major intake of the drugs to the person by means of the capsules leaves room for the curious mind to ponder. You did that Gordon, but unlike a lot of others who merely lay off taking the capsules for an experiment and collapse into gibbering lunatics within a few days, you had the tenacity to pursue your theories to the limit. We had to see how far you could go. Otherwise, you would have been no use to us.

Gordon looked more puzzled than ever. “Use to you?”

“That’s right. We need every rebel we can get. That’s how we manage to weed out prospective Top Level workers from the millions of drugged, happy people we keep down there. The minor wayward types who only experiment but never really mean to go any further, well, we just patch them up and put them back into the rat race. But for those with your tenacity, Mister Gordon, there lies a rich reward.”

That wasn’t quite true, said the little voice of Jager’s conscience. Most of the rebels went mad, their minds collapsing under the impact of alien psychoses. Control patched them up as best as they could and sent them back to their respective units—heavily sedated, of course. It was a dreadful business, but thanks to the Slugs, all theycould do to combat the dreadful threat of race psychosis.

“There are a number of choices open to you,” he explained. Gordon listened dutifully. “You can work with the scientists on the Barrier after you’ve been given sufficient schooling—and I might add that that takes some time. Or you can move over to Ocean Maintenance, or Reforestation. But I’ll give you a complete picture when we go back inside.” He smiled and held out his hand, warmly. “Congratulations, Mister Gordon, on passing the most rigid test a man ever had.”

Gordon took the hand in his own and felt the warmth and friendliness pass between them. A great weight seemed to have lifted from his mind. It would be good to work with something like Ocean Maintenance. It was wonderful to be free, to be out in the open air with no cold grey roof above you…

Wasn’t it?

They walked towards the open doorway of the elevator.

“We’re not licked yet,” Marshall was saying in a high-pitched voice. “We’ve always managed to lick our problems before.”

Maybe he was right, Jager mused. The Barrier, would not, could not remain forever. Somehow man would find a way to rid himself of the cruel bondage imposed by the aliens. But for the moment…

For the moment he was tired.

The door closed and they descended into the City. Back to the Levels, back to the daily grind and the endless sifting of intelligence. Back to his patients, all three and a half million of them.

The End.

Notes and proofing history

Scanned with preliminary proofing by A\NN/A

January 10th, 2008—v1.0

from the original source: Science Fiction Adventures No. 24, January, 1962

Table of Contents

Notes