“Increase.”
“No… here… hold this down.”
“Audio.”
“Audio’s already on.”
“I can’t hear him.”
They’re talking about me!
“… cortex bonding, probably temporary. Before you report a possible equipment malfunction, don’t you check the subject?”
“Stress category.”
“Correct… Origin?”
“Birth born? Sexact? Not on his record.”
“Violation?”
“Drug evasion with…”
“Triple three, triple three! Hey, easy there!”
THX sat on the bare floor, hearing them, involuntarily looking for someone or something. But there was nothing except the voices.
“A sinex drop reading of less than 2000 with an accompanying loss of greater than 350 since admission may indicate…?”
“Permanent cortex bond.”
“Correct.”
“This really isn’t a very good subject… limited. All this over here is wasted on him. Hey… watch!”
“H’mmm… What do you think?”
“Can’t tell. Let’s get him into organalysis.”
“Shifting.”
The voices faded off. Blinking, THX sat there totally alone. Then there was another sound, a tone, a soft rich single note that thrummed just barely at the threshold of audibility. THX listened to it, cocked his head to hear it better. His eyelids, for some reason, were getting very heavy. He could hardly keep his eyes open. It was… was… He was asleep.
He awoke and tried to scream. But he couldn’t open his mouth. Couldn’t move. Not even his eyes. He was totally paralyzed, laid out straight on something hard with a huge glaring white light staring down at him like a pitiless eye.
He could see, he could feel, he could hear his own pulse throbbing in his ears. But he couldn’t voluntarily move a single muscle. Not twitch or blink or even make his tongue work.
His mouth was completely dry. He lay there for an age, straining to hear something besides his own heartbeat And then he did. A tiny, annoying electrical hum.
Into his line of vision came a shining mechanical arm tipped with a cotton pad. He felt something soft and cold rub on his biceps. The first mechanical arm retracted and another—or maybe the same one—came at him, with a hypodermic syringe at its business end. THX felt the needle slip into him. Then more needles along both arms.
The whirring sounds of electrical motors were all he could hear, busy mechanical insects that flitted around him without pause. A tube was inserted into one nostril, a soft, surgical-green plastic clamp sealed his mouth shut. He watched as a pink fluid gurgled through the tube and into him.
The fluid stopped and a little clamp sealed off THX’s other nostril. Air pumped through the tube now, distending THX’s chest, bigger, bigger, more, more. Panic raced through him and then the pump stopped, the mouth clamp flipped back, and THX expelled breath with an explosive painful sigh. Then it all started over again.
It went on for hours. Wires into his chest. Pinpricks in strange patterns across his abdomen. Pain, lights, injections, blood sucked out of him by mechanical vampires, nerves triggered by electrical impulses. Querying photocells on the ends of fiberoptic stalks staring into his eyes from a few millimeters away. They made his heart race, slowed it down, contracted his leg muscles in painful spasms, sampled his urine, masturbated him and sampled that.
Somewhere in the vast underground city a computer typed:
1138, THX
Diagnosis: COMPATIBLE, TYPE A-5
Rate: EXCELLENT
Exceptions: LEFT KIDNEY (See detailed index 24-921)
He awoke in the featureless white limbo again. Awoke with the sound of footsteps, jumped to his feet. But these weren’t the hard steady beats of a chrome robot. They were soft, hesitant pads of slippered feet.
Against the blank unmarked background it was impossible to judge distances. A figure was out there, hard to make out because it was wearing standard white pajamas. THX watched the figure approaching. It looked like LUH!
It can’t be, he told himself. Don’t…
But he wanted it to be her. Then he realized that if it was, she would be a prisoner too, and they must have done the same things to her that they did to him. So he raged within himself: wanting her and hoping it wasn’t her.
“LUH?” he heard his own voice calling, pleading.
She rushed toward him and into his arms.
“Are you real… is it really you?”
They kissed and clung to each other.
“Are you all right?” she asked, gazing up at him worriedly.
He asked, “What did they do to you?”
For a long moment she didn’t answer, then she said, “I’m going to have a baby.”
He felt as if they’d electric-shocked him again. “No, no, no…”
“Hold me,” LUH begged. “Hold me.”
His arms wrapped protectively about her while his mind went spuming into wild, guilt- ridden gulfs. “It’s the end… what have I done?”
“I’m not afraid,” she said firmly. “I’m not afraid.”
“But it’s wrong. So wrong. What we’ve done…”
His strength seemed to ebb away. He let go of her and sank to the floor, sobbing. “I didn’t want this. How did it happen? I love you, and now I’ve done this to you…”
She knelt beside him, embraced him. “You have to be strong… You’re going to have a son.”
Control steepled his fingertips as he watched THX and LUH embracing, shedding their clothes, making love. His huge viewscreen showed them larger than life, and his safe, quiet, comfortable office was filled with the sounds of their murmurings, their breathing, their passion.
When at last they lay still, side by side, wet and spent, Control took two orange pills and touched a switch on his communicator panel. Instantly, his viewscreen showed an observer’s cell, with THX and LUH on the observer’s main screens.
“You see?” Control asked academically. “Even in prison, where they know they’re under observation, they grapple like animals. Disgusting, isn’t it?”
The observer nodded, his throat too dry to trust his voice just yet.
“They’ve had their chance. It’s obviously a hopeless case. Organ banks for him. Destruction for her. If the courts concur, I hope someone is intelligent enough to mark his glands as nonconsumables.”
THX awoke again to the sound of footsteps. But this time they were the heavy, measured treads of robots. He leaped up to his feet. LUH stirred and sat up. They were still naked, both of them.
Two robot policemen and a man dressed in yellow pajamas were coming toward him. LUH got to her feet and THX circled an arm around her protectively.
The police and the man stopped a few meters in front of them. The police robots both had electric rods.
The man recited tonelessly, “No person held to service in one section under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service may be due.”
One of the robots reached out and took LUH by the arm. He pulled her from THX’s grasp.
“No… please…” She screamed and reached for THX, eyes wide with terror.
THX jumped at the robot but its partner stepped in the way, clubbed him to his knees and then touched him on the neck with the stunner. The world exploded into flaming pain and THX blacked out.
Chapter 10
To THX the courtroom looked like chaos multiplied. He sat in a glassed-in cubicle, limp, exhausted, with a pair of earphones jabbering endless babble into his head.