The resolution enabled him to sit through the evening’s “entertainment” without too much distress. Afterward, he was restless. He decided to go out for a walk. As far as he knew, it was allowed. Anything that was allowed, he could do.
Maybe he would keep walking. He’d had about enough of this place.
Then he considered what might happen if he tried to escape. He had refrained from daring another attempt out of simple fear. He did not want to experience again the excruciating psychic pain, the unbearable sense of impending doom, the unremitting terror that he had felt under InnerVoice’s lash. The very thought of it made his stomach spasm.
No, he wasn’t quite ready to face it again, and the bottle-grabbing notion now struck him as stupid and rash. In time, maybe. For now about all he could risk was taking a walk.
He was on the stairway between the second and third floors when she came through the door opening on the landing. He almost bumped into her. It was the woman he’d seen last night.
She seemed startled at first, then burst into the forced smile she’d given him before. “Hello, citizen!”
“Hi,” he said. Then he blurted, “I’m going out for a stroll. Want to walk with me?”
The smile disappeared, and she gave him a penetrating stare.
He stood there, letting her gauge him, taking his measure. She seemed to be weighing the risk, trying to figure whether this was a test or a trap. Could she trust him? Should she dare? All this she spoke with her eyes, and he was vastly relieved to hear it. It was the first evidence he’d had of humanity, of conscious volition, behind the universal facade of robotlike obedience.
“Yes,” she said finally.
They walked out of the building together.
The night was cool and the city was quiet. Too quiet. It was not yet Lights Out, but along the stark faces of the high rises there were more dark windows than lighted ones. A musky, watery smell came on a breeze from the river. There was little traffic on the boulevard. No one else was about. It was late.
“When did it stop?” she asked after they had walked in silence for a stretch.
“When did what stop?”
“InnerVoice.”
“It hasn’t.”
She halted and looked at him. “You just haven’t realized it yet. It’s gone.”
He shrugged. “I haven’t tried to do anything unsocial yet.”
“You’re doing it now.”
“I didn’t know evening walks were forbidden.”
“They’re not. There’s no need to forbid it. No one does anything that’s not on his daily schedule. It’s too risky. Don’t you know that?”
“No,” he said. “I’m new here.”
“Were you an Outperson?”
“Yeah. If that means a foreigner.”
“An Outperson is someone without InnerVoice. The whole world doesn’t have InnerVoice yet.”
He had wondered about the outside world, and about how much of the planet InnerVoice had under its control. There was no news at all on the screen, nothing except endless propaganda about heroic production efforts and quota overfulfillments.
“What do you know about Outpersons?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “We haven’t been able to get any accurate news for years.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
She started walking again. “People who’ve lost InnerVoice.”
“So, not everyone’s controlled.”
“No, not everyone.” She gave him a glum look. “But it might as well be everyone. There are so few. You’re one, even if you don’t know it yet.”
“How do you know that you don’t have InnerVoice anymore?”
“Because I can do anything I want. Like go for walks in the evening, take an extra portion of food, not watch the screen when I don’t want to. I almost never do anymore.”
“No wonder. It’s awful stuff.”
She smiled. “See? You wouldn’t be able to say that if you hadn’t lost it.”
He shook his head. “I wish you were right. But they just shot me up with the gunk the other day. Can it fail that quickly?”
“We don’t know. Most maladapts lose InnerVoice in their late teens. That’s when I lost mine. I’m twenty-six now. And they haven’t caught on yet.”
“Is there danger that you’ll be found out?”
“Oh, of course. There’s always that danger. But you get used to it. The thing is, even though InnerVoice is silent, habits are hard to break. I don’t do anything really unsocial. Just little things.”
They turned a corner and walked toward the river.
He asked, “Why does InnerVoice sometimes fail?”
“We don’t know that, either. We think that the body’s defense system overcomes it, like it was an infection. Maybe maladapts have better defense systems than most people.”
“Just like some people have spontaneous remissions from cancer, maybe.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
They walked on until they came to a small park by the river’s edge. There was a bench, and they sat. Lights on the other shore reflected as long wavering lines on the water. There were no boats on the river, no barges. In another universe this was an industrial town, but here it was a dull administrative center.
“I usually come here at nights when the weather’s nice,” she said. “I like to watch the river go by. It comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, away from here. I like to think about taking a little boat and going out on the water, and letting the river carry me away. I’d never leave the boat. I’d just fish, lie in the sun, do nothing all day.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I sit and type on a keyboard. I key in data, and then I ask the computer to report on the data, and it spews out all kinds of stuff at me. Fun.”
“Yeah, sounds like it. Tell me this. How many other maladapts are there?”
“I only know two, but there are more. Don’t ask me their cognomen-omnicodes, because I don’t trust you well enough yet. You might be InnerVoice.”
“You mean I might be a police agent?”
“There are no police. But I’ve heard of people being arrested by the Committee for Constant Struggle.”
“The army.”
“Yes. They sometimes use agents to trick people. Or so I’ve heard. It may be all lies, though. You never know. You can never know what’s truth and what isn’t.”
“Let me ask you something very basic and crucial. Who’s in charge of the government? Who runs this whole nightmare?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been trying to figure it out for years. All we know is that there’s InnerVoice.”
“But someone invented InnerVoice. Someone used it to control people. Who was it?”
She shrugged.
He asked, “How long has InnerVoice been in control?”
“No one knows that, either. Years and years.”
“Isn’t there any history?”
“What’s history?”
He looked out across the river. Darkness and silence and slow-moving water.
Her hand sought his.
“Let’s go back,” she said. “My place.”
“Are you sure?”
She giggled. “I’ve had an order to get pregnant for months now. I’ve been ignoring it. Couldn’t find anyone I wanted to get pregnant with.”
Now he knew how it was done. An order was issued, an order was obeyed.
Light came through the lone window and made a trapezoid on the bare floor beside the bed. Lying on his side, he studied it. He liked its lambent geometry, its two-dimensional clarity.
“Are you awake?” she asked.