"You'd pick something else now?"
"You bet. I'd go in an aut'm'bile, real slow. Then I'd see everything there was."
Mrs. Hanshaw seemed troubled, uncertain. "You don't think it's abnormal, then, Doctor?"
"Unusual, perhaps, but not abnormal. He likes the outside."
"But how can he? It's so dirty, so unpleasant."
"That's a matter of individual taste. A hundred years ago our ancestors were all outside most of the time. Even today, I dare say there are a million Africans who have never seen a Door."
"But Richard's always been taught to behave himself the way a decent person in District A-3 is supposed to behave," said Mrs. Hanshaw, fiercely. "Not like an African or-or an ancestor."
"That may be part of the trouble, Mrs. Hanshaw. He feels this urge to go outside and yet he feels it to be wrong. He's ashamed to talk about it to you or to his teacher. It forces him into sullen retreat and it could eventually be dangerous."
"Then how can we persuade him to stop?"
Dr. Sloane said, "Don't try. Channel the activity instead. The day your Door broke down, he was forced outside, found he liked it, and that set a pattern. He used the trip to school and back as an excuse to repeat that first exciting experience. Now suppose you agree to let him out of the house for two hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Suppose he gets it through his head that after all he can go outside without necessarily having to go anywhere in the process. Don't you think he'll be willing to use the Door to go to school and back thereafter? And don't you think that will stop the trouble he's now having with his teacher and probably with his fellow-pupils?"
"But then will matters remain so? Must they? Won't he ever be normal again?"
Dr. Sloane rose to his feet. "Mrs. Hanshaw, he's as normal as need be right now. Right now, he's tasting the joys of the forbidden. If you cooperate with him, show that you don't disapprove, it will lose some of its attraction right there. Then, as he grows older, he will become more aware of the expectations and demands of society. He will learn to conform. After all, there is a little of the rebel in all of us, but it generally dies down as we grow old and tired. Unless, that is, it is unreasonably suppressed and allowed to build up pressure. Don't do that. Richard will be all right."
He walked to the Door.
Mrs. Hanshaw said, "And you don't think a probe will be necessary, Doctor?"
He turned and said vehemently, "No, definitely not! There is nothing about the boy that requires it. Understand? Nothing."
His fingers hesitated an inch from the combination board and the expression on his face grew lowering.
"What's the matter, Dr. Sloane?" asked Mrs. Hanshaw.
But he didn't hear her because he was thinking of the Door and the psychic probe and all the rising, choking tide of machinery. There is a little of the rebel in all of us, he thought.
So he said in a soft voice, as his hand fell away from the board and his feet turned away from the Door, "You know, it's such a beautiful day that I think I'll walk."
Surprises work both ways, I explained in my introduction to "Nightfall" that its success had been completely unexpected. Well, in the case of "Strikebreaker," I thought I had a blockbuster. It seemed to me to be fresh and original; I felt it contained a stirring sociological theme, with lots of meaning, and with considerable pathos. Yet, as nearly as I can make out, it dropped silently into the sea of audience reaction without as much as marking out a single circular ripple on its surface.
But I can be stubborn about such things. If I like a story, I like it, and I include it here to give the audience a second chance.
This is one of those stories where I can remember the exact occasion that put it into my mind. It involved one of my periodic trips to New York which have, more and more, become a kind of highlight to my life. They are the only occasions on which I can stop writing for as much as three or four days at a time without feeling either guilty or restless.
Naturally, anything that would tend to interfere with one of my trips would ruffle my otherwise imperturbable sang-froid. Actually, I would throw a fit. It was bad enough when something enormous would get in my way-a hurricane or a blizzard, for instance. But a subway strike? And not of all the subway employees, but only a few key men, say thirty-five. They would stall the entire subway system and, with that, the entire city. And if the strike came to pass, I could scarcely venture into a stalled city.
"Where will this all end?" I apostrophized the heavens in my best tragical manner, one fist raised high and the other clenched in my hair. " A mere handful of men can paralyze an entire megalopolis. Where will it end?"
My gesture remained frozen as, in thought, I carried the situation to its logical extreme. I carefully unhooked the gesture, went upstairs, and wrote "Strikebreaker."
The happy ending is that the threatened strike did not come to pass, and I went to New York.
One more point about this story. It represents my personal record for stupid title changes. The editor of the magazine in which this story first appeared was Robert W. Lowndes, as sweet and as erudite a man as I have ever known. He had nothing to do with it. Some idiot in the higher echelons decided to call the story "Male Strikebreaker."
Why "Male"? What possible addition to the sense of the title can be made by that adjective? What illumination? What improvement? Heavens, I can understand (though not approve) a ridiculous title change which the publisher felt would imply something salacious and thus increase sales, but the modified title doesn't even do that.
Oh, well-I'll just change it back.
First appearance-The Original Science Fiction Stories, January 1957, under the title "Male Strikebreaker." Copyright, 1956, by Columbia Publications, Inc.
Strikebreaker
Elvis Blei rubbed his plump hands and said, "Self-containment is the word." He smiled uneasily as he helped Steven Lamorak of Earth to a light. There was uneasiness all over his smooth face with its small wide-set eyes.
Lamorak puffed smoke appreciatively and crossed his lanky legs.
His hair was powdered with gray and he had a large and powerful jawbone. "Home grown?" he asked, staring critically at the cigarette. He tried to hide his own disturbance at the other's tension.
"Quite," said Blei.
"I wonder," said Lamorak, "that you have room on your small world for such luxuries."
(Lamorak thought of his first view of Elsevere from the spaceship visiplate. It was a jagged, airless planetoid, some hundred miles in diameter -just a dust-gray rough-hewn rock, glimmering dully in the light of its sun, 200,000,000 miles distant. It was the only object more than a mile in diameter that circled that sun, and now men had burrowed into that miniature world and constructed a society in it. And he himself, as a sociologist, had come to study the world and see how humanity had made itself fit into that queerly specialized niche.)
Blei's polite fixed smile expanded a hair. He said, "We are not a small world, Dr. Lamorak; you judge us by two-dimensional standards. The surface area of Elsevere is only three quarters that of the State of New York, but that's irrelevant. Remember, we can occupy, if we wish, the entire interior of Elsevere. A sphere of 50 miles radius has a volume of well over half a million cubic miles. If all of Elsevere were occupied by levels 50 feet apart, the total surface area within the planetoid would be 56,000,000 square miles, and that is equal to the total land area of Earth. And none of these square miles, Doctor, would be unproductive."