“Your name,” he said. “I’d like to know your name.”
“My name is Donald Parker.”
“An honest name,” said Alden Street. “A good, clean, honest name.”
“Now go to sleep,” said Parker. “You have talked too long.”
“What time is it?”
“It will soon be morning.”
The place was dark as ever. There was no light at all. There was no seeing and there was no sound and there was the smell of evil dankness. It was a pit, thought Alden—a pit for that small portion of humanity which rebelled against or ignored or didn’t, for one reason or another, go along with the evangelistic fervor of universal health. You were born into it and educated in it and you grew up and continued with it until the day you died. And it was wonderful, of course, but, God, how tired you got of it, how sick you got of it. Not of the program or the law, but of the unceasing vigilance, of the spirit of crusading against the tiny germ, of the everlasting tilting against the virus and the filth, of the almost religious ardor with which the medic corps kept its constant watch.
Until in pure resentment you longed to wallow in some filth; until it became a mark of bravado not to wash your hands.
For the statutes were quite clear—illness was a criminal offense and it was a misdemeanor to fail to carry out even the most minor precaution aimed at keeping healthy.
It started with the cradle and it extended to the grave and there was a joke, never spoken loudly (a most pathetic joke), that the only thing now left to kill a person was a compelling sense of boredom. In school the children had stars put against their names for the brushing of the teeth, for the washing of the hands, for regular toilet habits, for many other tasks. On the playground there was no longer anything so purposeless and foolish (and even criminal) as haphazard play, but instead meticulously worked out programs of calisthenics aimed at the building of the body. There were sports programs on every level, on the elementary and secondary school levels, on the college level, neighborhood and community levels, young folks, young marrieds, middle-aged and old folks levels—every kind of sports, for every taste and season. They were not spectator sports. If one knew what was good for him, he would not for a moment become anything so useless and so suspect as a sports spectator.
Tobacco was forbidden, as were all intoxicants (tobacco and intoxicants now being little more than names enacted in the laws), and only wholesome foods were allowed upon the market. There were no such things now as candy or soda pop or chewing gum. These, along with liquor and tobacco, finally were no more than words out of a distant past, something told about in bated breath by a garrulous oldster who had heard about them when he was very young, who might have experienced or heard about the last feeble struggle of defiance by the small fry mobs which had marked their final stamping out.
No longer were there candy-runners or pop bootleggers or the furtive sale in some dark alley of a pack of chewing gum.
Today the people were healthy and there was no disease—or almost no disease. Today a man at seventy was entering middle age and could look forward with some confidence to another forty years of full activity in his business or profession. Today you did not die at eighty, but barring accident, could expect to reach a century and a half.
And this was all to the good, of course, but the price you paid was high.
“Donald Parker,” said Alden.
“Yes,” said the voice from the darkness.
“I was wondering if you were still here.”
“I was about to leave. I thought you were asleep.”
“You got in,” said Alden. “All by yourself, I mean. The medics didn’t bring you.”
“All by myself,” said Parker.
“Then you know the way. Another man could follow.”
“You mean someone else could come in.”
“No. I mean someone could get out. They could backtrack you.”
“No one here,” said Parker. “I was in the peak of physical condition and I made it only by the smallest margin. Another five miles to go and I’d never made it.”
“But if one man…”
“One man in good health. There is no one here could make it. Not even myself.”
“If you could tell me the way.”
“It would be insane,” said Parker. “Shut up and go to sleep.”
Alden listened to the other moving, heading for the unseen door.
“I’ll make it,” Alden said, not talking to Parker, nor even to himself, but talking to the dark and the world the dark enveloped.
For he had to make it. He must get back to Willow Bend. There was something waiting for him there and he must get back.
Parker was gone and there was no one else.
The world was quiet and dark and dank. The quietness was so deep that the silence sang inside one’s head.
Alden pulled his arms up along his sides and raised himself slowly on his elbows. The blanket fell off his chest and he sat there on the bed and felt the chill that went with the darkness and the dankness reach out and take hold of him.
He shivered, sitting there.
He lifted one hand, cautiously, and reached for the blanket, intending to pull it up around himself. But with his fingers clutching its harsh fabric, he did not pull it up. For this, he told himself, was not the way to do it. He could not cower in bed, hiding underneath a blanket.
Instead of pulling it up, he thrust the blanket from him and his hand went down to feel his legs. They were encased in cloth—his trousers still were on him, and his shirt as well, but his feet were bare. Maybe his shoes were beside the bed, with the socks tucked inside of them. He reached out a hand and felt, groping in the dark—and he was not in bed. He was on a pallet of some sort, laid upon the floor, and the floor was earth. He could feel the coldness and the dampness of its packed surface as he brushed it with his palm.
There were no shoes. He groped for them in a wide semi-circle, leaning far out to reach and sweep the ground.
Someone had put them someplace else, he thought. Or, perhaps, someone had stolen them. In Limbo, more than likely, a pair of shoes would be quite a treasure. Or perhaps he’d never had them. You might not be allowed to take your shoes with you into Limbo—that might be part of Limbo.
No shoes, no toothbrushes, no mouth washes, no proper food, no medicines or medics. But there was a doctor here—a human doctor who had broken in, a man who had committed himself to Limbo of his own free will.
What kind of man would you have to be, he wondered, to do a thing like that? What motive would you have to have to drive you? What kind of idealism, or what sort of bitterness, to sustain you along the way? What sort of love or hate, to stay?
He sat back on the pallet, giving up his hunt for shoes, shaking his head in silent wonderment at the things a man could do. The human race, he thought, was a funny thing. It paid lip service to reason and to logic, and yet more often it was emotion and illogic that served to shape its ends.
And that, he thought, might be the reason that all the medics now were robots. For medicine was a science that only could be served by reason and by logic and there was in the robots nothing that could correspond to the human weakness of emotion.
Carefully he swung his feet off the pallet and put them on the floor, then slowly stood erect. He stood in dark loneliness and the dampness of the floor soaked into his soles.
Symbolic, he thought—unintentional, perhaps, but a perfect symbolic introduction to the emptiness of this place called Limbo.
He reached out his hands, groping for some point of reference as he slowly shuffled forward.
He found a wall, made of upright boards, rough sawn with the tough texture of the saw blade unremoved by any planing, and with uneven cracks where they had been joined together.