Chapter III

Rick almost ran from her, bumping into two figures standing at a corner of the house, smoking. It was Len and Sam from his own farm.

“It’s not fair,” Len complained jokingly, “to spend all your time with Barie. After all, you _are_ going to be paired with a Mech in a couple more days!”

“I’m not!” he cried in exultation. “I’m going with Barie. I need your help.” In a tumble of words he told them what he planned. “Get a half dozen more guys from inside the house, Sam. Len, you come and help me get started. We’ll pump the tanks full and figure out a way to feed them from spare barrels inside the plane. There ought to be enough barrels around the farm.”

But neither of the men had moved. “Come on!” he said.

“You can’t,” said Sam. “You know better, Rick. It isn’t right. The Machine’s told you what’s best. We like you too much to help with a fool thing like this. You and Barie--we like you both too much.”

He saw it then, he thought. Sam had always liked Barie. Maybe he figured with Rick out of the way the Machine might give her to him.

“It takes something like this to find out who your friends are,” Rick cried. “There are plenty of guys who _will_ help me!”

“We’re your friends,” said Len quietly. But he was gone from hearing.

One by one, or in groups of two or three, they were approached by him in the hall or out in the yard. They were appalled by the stupidity of the thing he asked them to do. He was stunned by their repeated refusal.

In panic, he looked about him. There was still dancing in the hall, but it was muted now, and the jumping, frantic rhythm had reduced to a low beat that was more felt than heard. Their eyes were upon him, averting as he stared back in defiant bewilderment.

He had not asked them all, but word had gone around from mouth to ear, until all knew his frantic decision.

He held them in his stare when he had asked his last man, and knew it was futile to ask any longer. He whirled from the room and raced out to the hangars alone.

The night was half gone and he had only until daylight to work, but he had to try. He unreeled the fuel hose and fed it to the partially empty tanks of the plane. While it throbbed with the pump’s pulsations, he ransacked the tool and supply sheds for drums to fill the cabin.

He gathered some, but there didn’t seem to be nearly enough. What he had he wrestled up the landing stairs and through the doorway. He lashed them down and went searching for more, then came back to change the hose connection on the tanks.

The dancing had ceased inside the house. All the guests, those who were his friends and had known him all his life, came out and stood in silent knots watching his frantic movements silhouetted against the night sky as he tried to prepare the plane alone.

But it was too much of a task. Dawn came, and he hadn’t found enough barrels. He hadn’t filled those he had, and he hadn’t devised the way to feed their contents to the main tanks from inside the plane.

He was licked, but he was still trying when they saw the plane of the Watch Police against the brightening sky, coming to take him to the re-orientation center.

He climbed down in defeat and looked slowly about the ring of sober faces of his friends who had watched and refused to help. “I could have done it,” he cried, “if you’d given me a hand. I leave behind no friends at Lonestar--only enemies!”

And then it came to him for the first time, apparently, that Barie could have helped, but she hadn’t. He turned to her, in the forefront of the group, and seemed to read in her eyes the thing he had always known was there but didn’t dare to admit.

She had known it would be this way. She had never intended going with him.

“You can’t keep childhood forever, Rick. I had to show you that,” she said. “It was the last good thing I could do for you!”

Six days ago he’d had nothing in his heart but love for the land--and for Barie. He’d expected he’d have the right to pair with her. If you were an Agro, you could afford such hopes. The Machine didn’t bother Agros too much. It let them pair often with the ones they had chosen themselves.

Only a few were denied it. And fewer still were taken away from the Region altogether, to pair and spend the rest of their lives elsewhere. Rick remembered those who had gone. Stan More, Daly Croden--not more than a couple of dozen since he’d been aware of the kind of world he lived in, and the things that sometimes happened to people.

Now, he was one of them, borne through the sky to an alien land that he had never seen, never wanted to see. It had happened to him.

He watched the unfamiliar landscape through the windows of the plane. A couple of Watch Police were his companions, but they were busy over a game and paid no attention to him. His thoughts remained with the world he was leaving behind.

There was something wrong with it. He had never been able to put his finger on it, but he had always been the odd one, the strange one who didn’t fit. He wanted things of his own--in a world where each man could say that all the Earth was his, if he remembered his neighbor could say it too. He didn’t believe that the great Machine, which they told him did the thinking for mankind, could think out his own problems as well as he could.

Somehow this wrongness in the world had destroyed Barie. That was the sign by which he knew it was the world and not he who was in error. It could make her stand and say it was right for someone else to take her place in his arms.

Barie--Barie--

It had taken from him every reason for living.

He had no idea what was ahead of him, but in his mind there burned a single decision that would cover anything that came up. He would do everything in his power to obstruct the goals and purposes to which the Machine assigned him. He would break, and destroy, and disobey until they either crushed him or let him go back. And he had never heard of any who went back.

With this decision clearly made, his mind was free to speculate on what he might find. He knew the traditional stories that circulated among the Agros regarding the Mech cities and their vast production centers. He’d heard tales of the monstrous, unthinkable mechanical brain that had finally brought order out of the chaos of human civilization.

The thinking machine, as the Agros called it, had direct control over the life of every human being on the face of the Earth. At birth, a tape of data based on brain and chromosome mapping was filed with the central library which fed the machine. Here it was instantly available for optimum meshing with similar data from all other men and women currently alive.

In as much detail as the machine considered necessary then, the subsequent lives of the people were planned. Their station, occupation, matings, permission to reproduce--all of these activities and thousands more, at the machine’s option, were precisely dictated and controlled.

Rick was vaguely aware of the history of the changeover from chaos and war to order and peace. It had come about as a natural byproduct of the Second Industrial Revolution. Men had been searching for the answer for all the ages of history, and then suddenly they had it without even looking for it.

Automation. Robots took the place of clerks and mechanics in the factories. Machines could remember ten thousand times as many facts as the most efficient human and apply those facts without error. There was dislocation and unrest, but eventually the economy settled down just as it had in the First Industrial Revolution.

And then the Great Idea that was so obvious and yet so long delayed. Automation in government. Millions of accurate data on tape to determine the need for a new law or change in the old one. No Senator or Representative could hope to match knowledge with such a device. But the one impregnable argument held for many years: This was mere machine calculation. You couldn’t depend for lawmaking on an operation in which no judgment was involved. Human beings had to be governed by human beings. There was no other way.

But finally this limitation, too, was overcome. Marcroft’s invention of the judgment circuit made it possible to construct a machine capable of duplicating human thought. The chain was complete.

The changeover was almost painless. Automation, conscription, emergency regulation had been with the world so long that it had become the normal way of life. Here at last was a device that could, without error, direct a man’s life in the most useful channels, and do it for _all_ men on the globe, without favoritism or bias. Here at last was the millennium for which all the prophets and seers had searched.

Only a few, like Rick Theron, felt, burning within them, aching remnants of something that was not satisfied or taken into account by the Machine.