“What do you mean?”
“Why do you think they have the rituals?”
“Because they have nothing better to do. They need something to occupy their minds, and they haven’t got the guts to come out here in the web and struggle for themselves.”
Ralf laughed now. “If they all migrated out here, Leela, there would be no struggle. We’d all die. In our own way we live off you people in the official quarter of the City. We struggle, do perhaps a little unofficial stealing from the surplus farm stores, bargaining with your people when there’s some specialized knowledge we have that you don’t. All we are, Lee, is the people rituals couldn’t work for, the ones who’d go a little crazy if we didn’t reconstruct the City’s radar sector in miniature — for a hobby; make improvements on a model hydroponics garden — not for food but for fun; or put colors and shapes on canvas simply as an organization of forms. Maybe it’s just different rituals.”
Just then Timme stood up. “Isn’t it about time for Hodge to come over?”
“That’s right,” Merril said. “He’ll make it to the edge of the track. Just go out to bring him over to the Ring.”
Timme bounced out the door.
“Hodge?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.” Merril nodded.
“Does he come to visit you too?”
“He gets lonely,” she said. “Probably lonelier than you do.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “Sometimes I’ve seen him walk in the concourse. Nobody talks to him, everyone backs away. But he walks around looking at things, at people…I don’t think anyone talks to him. But if that’s true in the official quarter, I’m surprised anyone even allows him in here.”
“Why?” Merril asked, with the slight smile again.
I shrugged. “Well…because he’s been responsible for so many of your people’s…I mean, whenever the legal department takes it into its head to start enforcing the Norm — ” I stopped.
“Responsible?” questioned Merril.
I shrugged. “I see what you mean. He’s only carrying out orders.”
“Hodge is a very lonely man,” Ralf said. “Most of us are lonely out here in the web. Yes, maybe there should be that sort of fear, but we’re also a pretty suicidal bunch as well.”
“Hodge comes out here twice a week,” Merril said. “He spends the evening with us, eats here, plays chess with Ralf.”
“Twice a week?” I said. “I’m surprised when he comes to the official sector twice a year.”
“You know, sometimes I’ve thought that you and Hodge have a lot in common.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you are the only two people who aren’t allowed to choose mates and go to the Market and raise children.”
“With the exception,” I reminded him, “that I can resign and play mother any time I want, where Hodge is stuck with his job for life.”
Ralf nodded. “Then, also, you both are, in your ways, responsible for the entire ship, not just your sector. Even Judge Cartrite doesn’t have any real control over the One-Eyes, except when he catches us. But we’re bound to obey you as much as anyone else in the City.”
“I know,” I said. Then I said, “The responsibility: Ralf, Merril, that’s what I really wanted to talk to you about. Somehow I feel that even by letting the rituals go on, I’m betraying that responsibility. Oh, a couple of times when we’ve argued, you’ve told me that we all have our rituals, from my duties as Captain to some poor creature who pushes a small steel ball up a metal ramp with his nose in honor of the Journey to the Stars, to your studies in Ancient Earth political sciences. But there has to be some way to distinguish between them. I look at the kids walking around the official sectors, and then I look at Timme. One-Arm and all, Timme is alive, alert; you can see it in his face. There’s a kid Parks is training in Market Research, a bright boy, but every response comes out in slow motion. Parks tells me the boy’s appalled at the lack of interest we show in the rituals — thinks we’re all oafish brutes with no interest in the higher things.”
Ralf waited for me to go on as I turned in my seat.
“What it all comes down to is that someday — and this seems to be the thing they’ve all forgotten — someday there won’t be any more Cities. There will be a bright new world hanging in the night before us, with natural forces to fight and food to be searched for, tracked, and hunted, not handed to us on a conveyor belt from the hydroponics garden. All right, you and I will never see it, but it’s not five or six hundred years from now anymore; it’s only a hundred and fifty, two hundred years away. And one and the other considered, I’d rather turn Timme out on a new world to struggle for his own than Parks’s little bright-eyed boy. If I let the City become a bunch of blank-faced ritual followers, then I’m not fulfilling my responsibility.”
There was silence for seconds as Ralf thought. I wondered what answer he might make. Merril did not seem to have one.
Just then Timme called in, “Here’s Hodge.”
I turned as Hodge reached the door. He was tall, with high cheekbones and deep eyes. The black hood was pushed back from his face, and as he stopped on the threshold, the emblem of rope he carried over his shoulder swung around against his chest. His black uniform made me conscious of all the other colors in the room; even the paintings, which I had thought somber, now seemed very bright.
We talked a little more, and when dinnertime came, I excused myself, and Timme took me through the hectic journey back to the mouth of the web. This time I kept my eyes open. I saw many of the One-Eyes making the fantastic leap onto the Ring, as though they were stepping off a curb.
Timme, as he towed me along, guessed my thought. “You know Hodge can get around the web almost as well as a One-Eye,” he said. “But he still needs help over the jump. Just takes practice, though.”
He cut me loose and gave me a shove into the corridor. Gravity returned, and I staggered forward. Then I turned, waved good-bye to Timme, and started back to my office.
Chapter Eight
Second entry:
Parks woke me up at three thirty this morning to give me the first report. He was on Night Watch in the Market, so of course he noticed it first. I got out of my bed, went over and jammed the receive button on the emergency intercom. “What the hell’s the matter?” I said. “Has the sand count gone up again — ”
“Captain, this is Parks down in the Market.”
“What in the world do you want at this hour of the morning?”
“I just checked the sand count, Captain. It’s been steady. But there’s something else, even worse — ”
“Huh?”
“The hard radiation all over the City has just tripled. It’s not enough to bother anyone where you are, but I’m worried about its effect on the fetuses down here. I’ve tried to shield the stalls off, but I don’t know how much good it’s doing.”
“What’s gone wrong? Have you found out which one of the reactors is haywire?”
“That’s just it. None of them. It’s coming from outside the City.”
“Are you sure? Have you contacted any of the other Cities to see if they’ve registered the same thing?”
“I wanted to call you first, Captain, and see what you said.”
“Then I’ll call up Epsilon-6 and see what’s going on.”
“Right, Captain. Can I listen in?”
I got the Nine and waited for about five minutes for Riche to answer. Finally his voice came over: “Leela, well how’s my girl today?”
“She’s puzzled,” I said. “We’ve got radiation flooding our City. As of yet it’s not very high, but it’s coming from outside, so they tell me.”