Forrester puzzled over the message drearily. “It doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said.
“Of course it does! Clear as the crawlers on the Farside coconut, don’t you see? He thinks you ought to hide out with the Forgotten Men!”
Eleven
It was only ten minutes walking from the children’s home to the great underbuilding plazas and warrens where the Forgotten Men lived. But Forrester had no guide this time, nor was there a joymaker to display green arrows to guide him, and it took him an hour. He dodged across an avenue of grass between roaring hovercraft, his life in his hands, and emerged under a hundred-story tower where a man came humbly toward him. He looked vaguely familiar.
“Stranger,” the man said, softly pleading, “Ah’ve had a turrible lahf. It all started when the mahns closed and my wahf Murry got sick—”
“Buddy,” said Forrester, “have you got a wrong number.”
The man stepped back a pace and looked him up and down. He was tall, lean, and dark, his face patient and intelligent. “Aren’t you the fellah Ah panhandled with those two little kids?” he said accusingly. “Gave me fifty bucks, Ah think.”
“You remember good. But that was when I had money; now I’m broke.” Forrester looked around at the tall buildings and the greensward. They did not seem hospitable. “I’d be obliged to you,” he added, “if you’d tell me where I can sleep tonight.”
The man glanced warily around, as if suspicious of some kind of a trick, then grinned and stuck his hand out. “Welcome to the club,” he said. “Name’s Whitlow. Jurry Whitlow. What happened?”
“I got fired,” said Forrester simply, introducing himself.
Jerry Whitlow commiserated. “Could happen to anybody, Ah guess. You know, Ah noticed you didn’t have a joymaker, but Ah didn’t think much about it. Figured, sweat, he’s just a damn greenhorn, prob’ly forgot to take it with him. But you got to get yourself one raht away.”
“Why?”
“Whah? Sweat, man! Don’t you know you’re fur game for anybody on the hunt? They come down here, take one look around, and they see you’re busted—hell, man, you wouldn’t last out the day.” He unclipped his own joymaker—or what Forrester had taken to be a joymaker—and proudly handed it over. “Fake, see? But it looks lahk the real thing. Fool anybody. Fooled you, Ah bet.”
It had, as a matter of fact. But actually, Forrester saw with surprise, it wouldn’t fool anyone at all, not at close range. It was far too light to be a joymaker, apparently whittled out of some organic plastic and painted in the pale patterns of a joymaker. “Of course, it don’t work,” Whitlow grinned. “But on the other hand Ah don’t have to pay rent on it. Keeps ‘em off pretty good. Didn’t have that, one of these preverts that get they kicks from total death’d come down here and tag me first thing.”
Gently he pulled it out of Forrester’s hand and looked at him calculatingly. “Now, you got to get one just lahk it and, damn, you hit lucky first tahm. Theah’s a fellow two houses over makes them to sell. Friend o’ mahn. Ah bet he’ll give you one for—hell! Maybe little as a hundred dollars!” Forrester started to open his mouth. “Maybe even eighty! . . . Seventy-fahv?”
“Whit,” said Forrester simply, “I haven’t got a dime.”
“Sweat!” Whitlow was awed. Then he shrugged. “Well, hell, Ah guess we can’t let you get killed for a lousy fifteen bucks. Ah’ll get you fixed up on spec.”
“Fifteen?”
Whitlow grinned. “That’s without mah commission. Come on with me, boy. You got some ropes to learn!”
The Forgotten Men lived on the castoffs of the great world overhead, but it did not seem to Forrester that they lived badly. Jerry Whitlow was not fat, but he was obviously not starving, either. His clothes were clean and in good repair, his attitude relaxed. Why, thought Forrester, it might even turn out that I’ll like it here, once I learn my way around. . . .
Whitlow was a first-rate teacher, even though he never stopped talking. He conducted Forrester through underbuilding mazes and footbridges Forrester had not even seen, his mouth going all the while. Mostly it was the story of his life.
“. . . Laid off at the mahns when Ah was sixteen. Out of work, Chuck, and me with a family to support. Well, we made out, kahnd of, until mah wahf Murry got sick and we had to go on the relief. So a gov’ment man came around and put me on the Aydult Retraining and gave me tests and, Chrahst, Chuck, you know Ah scored so hah Ah just about broke the scales. So then Ah went back to school and—”
He stopped and glanced apprehensively overhead. They were between buildings, under a tiny square of open sky. He grabbed Forrester and dragged him swiftly back into the cellar where the joymaker-maker had kept his shop.
“Watch out!” he whispered fiercely. “They’s a reporter up there!”
The word meant nothing to Forrester, but the tone carries the message. He ran one way, Whitlow the other. The joymaker-maker’s shop had been in a sort of vermiform appendix to the plumbing of an apartment complex, in an area where some installation had been designed into the plans, then was outmoded and removed, and the space left vacant. The little man who sold the joymakers occupied a sort of triplex apartment—three rooms on three levels—and out of it and around it ran, for some reason, a net of empty, four-foot-wide tunnels. Down one of them Whitlow fled. Down another ran Forrester.
It was dark. The footing was uneven. But Forrester hurried down it, stooped over to avoid banging his head, until the blackness was total and he fell to the rough floor, gasping.
He still did not know what he had been running from, but Whitlow’s fear was contagious. And it reawakened a hundred old pains; until this moment he had almost forgotten the beating he had taken the first day out of the freezer, but the exertion made every dwindling ache start up again. His sides pounded, his head throbbed.
He had now been a Forgotten Man for exactly two hours.
Time passed, and the silence was as total as the darkness. Whatever it was that Whitlow had feared it did not seem to be pursuing here. It would take a human stoat to pursue a human rabbit in this warren, he thought; and in the darkness maybe even the rabbit would develop claws. It had been bad enough when all he had to fear was the crazy Martian. Now. . . .
He sighed, and turned over on the rough, cast-stone floor.
He wondered wistfully what had become of all the furnishings and gadgets he had bought so recklessly for the apartment he no longer owned. Shouldn’t there be some sort of trade-in allowance?
But if there was, he did not have the skill to claim it. Nor did he own a working joymaker to help him with instructions. He wondered if Hara would help him out at this last juncture and resolved to go looking for the doctor. After all, it was in a way Hara’s responsibility that he was in this predicament. . . .
“No,” said Forrester in the darkness, aloud and very clearly.
It wasn’t Hara’s responsibility at all. It was his own.
If there was one thing that he had learned in his two hours as a Forgotten Man, it was that there were no responsibilities any more that were not his own. This was not a world where a protective state provided for its people. It was a world of the individual; he was the captain of his fate, the master of his soul—
And the prisoner of his failings.
By the time he heard Whitlow cautiously calling his name, Forrester had come to terms with the fact that he was all alone in a cold and uncaring world.
Cautiously they tiptoed out of the pipes, across a hoverway, and under a huge building that was supported on a thousand elliptical pillars, set in beds of grass. What light kept the grass growing came from concealed fixtures in the ten acres of roof over their heads.
Whitlow, regaining the appearance of confidence, led the way to one particular pillar that held a door, marked in glittering red letters EMERGENCY EXIT. He pushed it open, shoved Forrester inside, and closed it behind them.