Triton

And he’d looked at, now ... what?

Four out of five? Those four were not very good choices for a reasonable and happy man. And who for the fifth?

Six kaleidoscopically painted ego-booster booths (“Know Your Place in Society,” repeated six lintels) sided the transport kiosk.

Me? he thought. That’s it. Me.

Something amusing was called for.

He started toward the booths, got bumped in the shoulder; then forty people came out of the kiosk and all decided to walk between him and the booth nearest I will not be deterred, he thought. I’m not changing my mind: and shouldered someone hard as someone had shouldered him.

Finally, inelegantly, he grabbed a booth’s edge. The canvas curtain (silver, purple, and yellow) swung. He pushed inside.

Twelve years ago some public cha

Eleven years ago another public cha

Ten years ago a statute was passed that any citizen had the right to demand a review of all government information on him or her. Some other public cha

Eight years ago, someone whose name never got mentioned came up with the idea of ego-booster booths, to offer minor credit (and, hopefully, slightly more major psychological) support to the Government Information Retention Program:

Put a two-franq token into the slot (it used to be half a franq, but the tokens had been devalued again a year back), feed your government identity card into the slip and see, on the thirty-by-forty centimeter screen, three minutes’ videotape of you, accompanied by three minutes of your recorded speech, selected at random from the government’s own information files. Beside the screen (in this booth, someone had, bizarre-ly, spilled red syrup down it, some of which had been thumb-smudged away, some scraped off with a fingernail), the explanatory plaque explained: “The chances are ninety nine point nine nine and several nines percent more that no one but you has ever seen before what you are about to see. Or,” as the plaque continued cheerily, “to put it another way, there is a greater chance that you will have a surprise heart attack as you step from this booth today than that this confidential material has ever been viewed by other human eyes than yours. Do not forget to retrieve your card and your token. Thank you.”

He had, for several weeks, worked at the public cha

He had been amused.

And, oddly, reassured.

(“Actually,” he’d said to Lawrence, “as a matter of fact I have been in them, a number of times. I rather pride myself on occasionally doing things contrary to what everyone else does.” To which Lawrence—who was seventy-four, homosexual, and unregenerate—had muttered at the vlet board, “That’s a type too.”)

He took his card from the pouch on his loose, rope belt, found his two-franq token, and, with his thumb, pushed it into the slot, then fed the card into the slip.

Across the top of the screen appeared his name:

Bron Helstrom and below that his twenty-two digit government identity number.

The screen flickered—which it was not supposed to. A blur, filling the right half, rushed upward, froze a moment on the image of a doorway that someone (him?) was starting to open—then the blur rushed again, sliding (the heavy black border; the single bright line up the middle) across the screen; which meant the multitrack videotape had somehow lost sync. (When it happened on one of the public cha

Snap! from the speaker (which he assumed—though he had no reason to be sure—was a length of five-hundred micro-track videotape, somewhere in an Information Retention storage bank, breaking) turned the screen into colored confetti. The speaker grill hummed and chuckled, simultaneously and inanely.

Broken?

He looked at the card slip: How do I get my card out? he thought, a little panicky. Pry it out with my five-franq token? He couldn’t get it with a fingernail. Was the fault possibly here in the booth and not in the storage bank ... ?

Indecision storming, he leaned against the booth’s back wall and watched storming dots. Once he bent and put his eye to the slip. A centimeter beyond the aluminum lips, the card edge, to some whirring timer, quivered like a nervous tongue.

He leaned back again.

After three minutes, the screen went gray; the speaker’s burr ceased.

From the metal slip the card thrust (like a printed-over tongue, yes; with a picture of him in one corner). As he took it, thick wrists heavy with bracelets, that on a thi

His face (syrup spilled his shoulder), under pale, curly hair, was distraught. One eyebrow (since age twenty-five it had grown constantly, so that he actually had to cut it) was rumpled: his other he’d had replaced, when he was seventeen, by a gold arc set in the skin. He could have had it removed, but he still enjoyed the tribute to a wilder adolescence (than he would care to admit) in the Goebels of Mars’s Bellona. That gold arc? It had been a small if violent fad even then. Nobody today on Triton knew nor cared what it meant. Frankly, today, neither would most civilized Martians.