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The literacy of Games applicants was notoriously low.
“Do you have any relatives who have been arrested on charges of crimes against the government or against the Network?” “No.” “Sign this loyalty oath and this Games Commission release form, Mr., uh, Richards.”
The door at the other end opened (there was always a door at the other end; they were like rats in a huge, upward-tending maze: an American maze, Richards reflected), and men trundled in large baskets on wheels, labeled S, M, L, and XL. Richards selected an XL for its length and expected it to hang baggily on his frame, but it fit quite well.
She made him keep his exam—legally he couldn’t give it to her until the hour was up—so Richards leaned back and wordlessly ogled her nearly naked body. The silence grew thick and oppressive, charged. He could see her wishing for an overcoat and it pleased him.
“But they’ll all be right,” he said, and smiled back at her. He leaned forward and swatted her lightly on the rump. “Take a shower, kid. You done good.” She blushed furiously. “I could have you disqualified.” “Bullshit. You could get yourself fired, that’s all.” “Get out. Get back in line.” She was snarling, suddenly near tears. He felt something almost like compassion and choked it back. “You have a nice night tonight,” he said. “You go out and have a nice six-course meal with whoever you’re sleeping with this week and think about my kid dying of flu in a shitty three-room Development
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Maybe only because it needed to be said once, to make it coalesce and take concrete shape, as things do when a man forces himself to translate unformed emotional reactions into spoken words.
programs will explain further exactly what is expected of you. But before that happens, I just want to repeat my congratulations and tell you that I find you to be a courageous, resourceful group, refusing to live on the public dole when you have means at your disposal to acquit yourselves as men, and, may I add personally, as true heroes of our time.”
One arm was withered, probably by polio, which had come back strong in 2005. It had done especially well in Co-Op.
And stay close to your own people.” He leveled a finger at Richards in emphasis. “Not these good middle-class folks out there; they hate your guts. You symbolize all the fears of this dark and broken time. It wasn’t all show and audience-packing out there, Richards. They hate your guts. Could you feel it?”
Everyone knew vice was bad for any real revolutionary climate.
And he knew in an animal way that went deeper than the rational that very soon he might be sleeping in an October-cold culvert or in a weed- and cinder-choked gully. The gun tomorrow night.
Someone had scrawled FUK THE NETWORK in foot-high letters above the urinal. It looked as though he might have been angry when he did it.
I’m being bracketed, he thought. The idea brought a helpless, rabbit terror. No, his mind corrected. You’ve already been bracketed.
his time sense had been utterly destroyed.
Ma said Cassie was going to heaven to be with Dicky and the other angels. The boy thought that was bullshit. Everybody went to hell when they died, and the devil jabbed them in the ass with a pitchfork.
Vermont’s no good. Not enough of our kind of people.
“I read it in a book. Man, they’re killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. It’s like a magician getting you to watch the cakes falling outta his helper’s blouse while he pulls rabbits out of his pants and puts ’em in his hat.” He paused and then said dreamily: “Sometimes I think that I could blow the whole thing outta the water with ten minutes talktime on the Free-Vee. Tell em. Show em. Everybody could have a nose filter if the Network wanted em to have em.”
You people in the cycle gangs. You people without jobs. You kids getting busted for dope you don’t have and crimes you didn’t commit because the Network wants to make sure you aren’t meeting together and talking together. I want to tell you about a monstrous conspiracy to deprive you of the very breath in y—”
“Behold the man,” Thompson said. “The man who would kill. The man who would mobilize an army of malcontents like himself to run riot through your streets, raping and burning and overturning. The man would lie, cheat, kill. He has done all these things.
“Strike him dead!” The audience over the chant: “Behold the man! He has been paid his blood money—but the man who lives by violence shall die by it. And let every man’s hand be raised against Benjamin Richards!”
Bradley’s eyes flashed dimly. “A bad day is comin, though. A bad day for the maggots with their guts full of roast beef. I see blood on the moon for them. Guns and torches. A mojo that walks and talks.”
There was no longer just himself, a lone man fighting for his family, bound to be cut down. Now there were all of them out there, strangling on their own respiration—his family included.
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride—if responsibility robs him of his manhood.
The Free-Vee killed the printed word very effectively.
It was then, after nine years of trying, that Sheila conceived. He was a wiper, the people in the building said. Can you believe he was a wiper for six years and knocked her up? It’ll be a monster, the people in the building said. It’ll have two heads and no eyes. Radiation, radiation, your children will be monsters— But instead, it was Cathy. Round, perfect, squalling. Delivered by a midwife from down the block who took fifty cents and four cans of beans.
His mind and his anger turned toward the Games Federation, with their huge and potent communications link to the whole world. Fat people with nose filters, spending their evenings with dollies in silk underpants. Let the guillotine fall. And fall. And fall. Yet there was no way to get them. They towered above all of them dimly, like the Games Building itself.
And upstairs, filtering both through the closed window and the open door downstairs, Mrs. Parrakis’s scream rose to a shriek which met and mixed and blended with the approaching sirens: “I DID IT FOR YOOOOOOOOOOO—”
It was twenty minutes of eight. He and Elton had left the Blue Door at ten minutes past seven. It seemed as if decades had passed.
There was something suspicious and alien in his features, yet familiar also. After a moment Richards placed it. It was innocence.
“You know what’s disgusting?” Richards asked, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you. It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you sterile. It’s disgusting to sit home and watch your wife earning the grocery money on her back. It’s disgusting to know the Network is killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw.”
“I told them and they tried to kill us,” she said wonderingly. “They tried to kill us.”
“These people,” Richards said, “only want to see someone bleed. The more the better. They would just as soon it was both of us. Can you believe that?” “No.” “Then I salute you.”
A hoarse voice in the crowd yelled “Let her through!”
“ALL CIVILIANS LEAVE THE AREA,” the bullhorn chanted. “THERE MAY BE SHOOTING. ALL CIVILIANS LEAVE THE AREA OR YOU MAY BE CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION AND UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY. THE PENALTY FOR OBSTRUCTION AND UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY IS TEN YEARS IN THE STATE PENITENTIARY OR A FINE OF TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS OR BOTH. CLEAR THE AREA. CLEAR THE AREA.” “Yeah, so no one’ll see you shoot the girl!” a hysterical voice yelled. “Screw all pigs!”
They had split themselves into two groups in unconscious segregation. On one side of the road were the middle- and upper-class citizens, the ladies who had their hair done at the beauty parlor, the men who wore Arrow shirts and loafers. Fellows wearing coveralls with company names on the back and their own names stitched in gold thread over the breast pockets. Women like Amelia Williams herself, dressed for the market and the shops. Their faces were different in all ways but similar in one: They looked oddly incomplete, like pictures with holes for eyes or a jigsaw puzzle with a minor piece
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On the other side, the left, were the poor people. Red noses with burst veins. Flattened, sagging breasts. Stringy hair. White socks. Cold sores. Pimples. The blank and hanging mouths of idiocy.
There were the gladiators in Rome who did the same thing. And there’s another game, too. Poker. In poker the highest hand is a royal straight-flush in spades. And the toughest kind of poker is five-card stud. Four cards up on the table and one in the hole. For nickels and dimes anyone can stay in the game. It costs you maybe half a buck to see the other guy’s hole card. But when you push the stakes up, the hole card starts to look bigger and bigger. After a dozen rounds of betting, with your life’s savings and car and house on the line, that hole card stands taller than Mount Everest. The
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The pretty, self-assured woman with the wraparound shades was all gone. Richards wondered if that woman would ever reappear. He did not think so. Not wholly.
“She is lying. It’s obvious. If you will pardon a touch of what your fellows like to call elitism, I will offer my observation that the middle class lies well only about sex.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got nothing to lose.” He didn’t answer her. She was so patently right. Nothing, anyway, that he hadn’t lost already.
They were queer-stompers. Queers, of course, had to be eradicated. Save our bathrooms for democracy.
“With you and five other innocent people on board? This honorable country?”
He realized with dawning, stumbling truth, the fact of his own actual ending, and cried out miserably through a mouthful of blood.
