Paul felt it. Even if he had known of no reason to be afraid, the others’ fear would have communicated itself to him. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before. Surely nothing pleasant was in store.
What were they going to do? There would be an announcement probably, stating that two people had been killed. And what then? Would they ask the guilty party to identify himself? Or ask if anyone could volunteer any information?
Then quite strangely, he felt calm. If they had brought everybody out here, that meant they didn’t know who was responsible, didn’t it? That was encouraging. Of course it appeared now that there would be an investigation of some sort. Questions asked. Whereabouts checked. He would have to be careful. But the main thing to remember was that the authorities did not yet know who the murderer was. And if he could keep his wits about him, they need never know.
But there was no announcement from the loudspeakers. The long ranks of silent men were left to contemplate the unknown, to nurse their fears. Perhaps the authorities had planned it this way, to let those fears wreak their psychological mischief for a little while before the questions began.
Half an hour went by, and still the dawn did not appear. Yet no one broke ranks. No one coughed or shuffled his feet. The only sound was the moan of the night wind over the high walls.
What bothered Paul the most was the floodlights. They seemed to be shining directly into his eyes. He could blink against the glare, but he discovered that if he tried to close his eyes for a few seconds, his body had a tendency to sway. He didn’t dare call attention to himself by falling down or even by swaying too much. So he tried to endure the glare, tried to think of the pleasant things that would happen when this ordeal was over.
And it had to be over some time. The whole machinery of Complex 55 with its hundred thousand members could not be halted and disrupted indefinitely because two of those members had been murdered. People were taken off to die every day, and their places were filled with recruits from the Youth Farms. There would be some excitement and tension for awhile, but sooner or later things would have to return to normal.
Normal... a mating cubicle with Carol... somebody to talk to... talk to privately... an end to the deadly aloneness... even with the microphones and the television screens, he knew that mated couples could manage a certain degree of privacy.
“Company Number One! Right face! Forward march!”
A sound of tramping feet, and a hundred men left the courtyard.
By listening to the shouted commands that followed, Paul could estimate where they had gone. To the Recreation Hall adjoining the Dormitory. Whatever was happening to them, whatever processing they were going through, was being done in the Rec. That didn’t sound too ominous. If they had marched out the gate, he might have felt rather more uneasy.
A few more minutes passed. Possibly a quarter of an hour. The lights were becoming unbearable, and there was still no sign of dawn. But Paul was in the second company. Perhaps he could manage. But there were pains shooting up and down his legs. A slight dizziness attacked him momentarily. The floodlights danced before him. He closed his eyes tightly, but they could not be shut out. The dance became weird.
“Company Number Two!”
He marched, fawningly grateful for the exquisite feeling of being able to move again. Yes, they were going into the Rec. Two guards held the doors ajar, and the entire company tramped into the big place.
More lights, but no longer painful. A buzz of human voices pitched low. The company was taken to the far end, then formed into a single file. They were held at attention no longer, but still the men could not relax. Their fears had been worked on too long. They were silent, refusing to speculate among themselves.
Finally, the single file became a queue, and began moving through a small door. Paul was perhaps the twentieth man in line. It seemed to him that the men ahead of him moved through the door at a rate of one every thirty seconds or so. He awaited his turn, still calm, confident that the huge scale of this maneuver indicated desperation and helplessness on the part of the authorities.
Then he saw around the shoulders of the man ahead of him, saw through the door into the room beyond. There was no one and nothing there, but a nurse with a tableful of hypodermic needles beside her.
He could have either laughed or cried with relief. They were only giving shots. Oh, of course, it perhaps meant a plague scare. Or a test of some new serum. Or even a possibility of bacteriological warfare — and they were being given a precautionary antidote. It had nothing at all to do with his two insignificant little murders.
When his turn came for the needle, he endured the small sting with supercilious disdain. After the long ordeal in the courtyard and his occasional uneasy imaginings, this was a small enough price to purchase reassurance.
Yet the effect of the shot was rather strange. There was scarcely any pain in his arm, but there was an odd lightness in his head. Surely, he thought, he wasn’t going to faint in this moment of triumph.
But then he lost all awareness of himself as self. He did as a guard told him. He walked into the next room. There a man in a white coat and a very penetrating stare confronted him.
“Did you stab two people to death yesterday?” the man asked.
Somehow there didn’t seem to be any choice, but to answer with the truth. Perhaps it had been the shot.
“Yes,” he said.
There was a big trial. He was dazed throughout most of it. But it wasn’t for his benefit anyway. It was rather for the edification of all the members of Complex 55.
Then afterward they put him in a glass cage at one end of the courtyard. He was strapped there in an upright position. More than a hundred wires were inserted into various portions of his body, and ran down through the floor and thence out into a control box where there was a button for each wire. His torturers were the members of Complex 55 themselves, who were expected to display their devotion to civilization by pausing in front of the cage whenever they had a moment and pushing a few of the buttons. The result was exquisite pain, which made him scream and writhe inside his bonds, but which was never fatal.
Once a day, of course, the loudspeaker reminded him and all the others why he was there. “Paul 2473,” it would intone, “in wantonly and wilfully destroying two pieces of valuable state property, Richard 3833 and Laura 6356, committed sabotage, and is a traitor to the state.”
But his miscalculations had not ended there. One of the most frequent visitors to the cage, and one of the most enthusiastic button-pushers, was Carol 7427.
Summer Evil
by Nora H. Caplan
There is nothing more charming than two little girls in crisp pinafores, pulling at one another’s hair as they scream in perfect unison. This is play. This is pretending to be grown-up ladies.
The drive, almost obscured by flanking bridal wreath, lilacs and forsythia, followed one boundary line of the property to a stone building that was once a barn. Between that and the house was a boxwood hedge pruned to a height of six feet.
The house was built in the early 1830’s. It was a small, two-story cottage of red brick with a slate roof and huge central chimney. Weathered green shutters framed the windows and recessed front door. Beyond the swell of pin oaks and pines sheltering the site lay Sugar Loaf Mountain. And beyond that, a hazy suggestion of the Catoctin range.