Profession

The place was no prison certainly. There were no walls, no locked doors, no guards. But it was a prison in that the inmates had no place to go outside.

It was somehow good to see others like himself by the dozen. It was so easy to believe himself to be the only one in the world so—maimed.

He mumbled, “How many people here anyway?”

“Two hundred and five, George, and this isn’t the only place of the sort in the world. There are thousands.”

Men looked up as he passed, wherever he went; in the gymnasium, along the te

Most of them were in their twenties. George said suddenly, “What happens to the older ones?”

Omani said, “This place specializes in the younger ones.” Then, as though he suddenly recognized an implication in George’s question that he had missed earlier, he shook his head gravely and said, “They’re not put out of the way, if that’s what you mean. There are other Houses for older ones.”

“Who cares?” mumbled George, who felt he was sounding too interested and in danger of slipping into surrender.

“You might. As you grow older, you will find yourself in a House with occupants of both sexes.”

That surprised George somehow. “Women, too?”

“Of course. Do you suppose women are immune to this sort of thing?”

George thought of that with more interest and excitement than he had felt for anything since before that day when—He forced his thought away from that.

Omani stopped at the doorway of a room that contained a small closed-circuit television set and a desk computer. Five or six men sat about the television. Omani said, “This is a classroom.”

George said, “What’s that?”

“The young men in there are being educated. Not,” he added, quickly, “in the usual way.”

“You mean they’re cramming it in bit by bit.”

“That’s right. This is the way everyone did it in ancient times.”

This was what they kept telling him since he had come to the House but what of it? Suppose there had been a day when mankind had not known the diatherm-oven. Did that mean he should be satisfied to eat meat raw in a world where others ate it cooked?

He said, “Why do they want to go through that bit-by-bit stuff?”

“To pass the time, George, and because they’re curious.”

“What good does it do them?”

“It makes them happier.”

George carried that thought to bed with him.

The next day he said to Omani ungraciously, “Can you get me into a classroom where I can find out something about programming?”

Omani replied heartily, “Sure.”

It was slow and he resented it. Why should someone have to explain something and explain it again? Why should he have to read and reread a passage, then stare at a mathematical relationship and not understand it at once? That wasn’t how other people had to be.

Over and over again, he gave up. Once he refused to attend classes for a week.

But always he returned. The official in charge, who assigned reading, conducted the television demonstrations, and even explained difficult passages and concepts, never commented on the matter.

George was finally given a regular task in the gardens and took his turn in the various kitchen and cleaning details. This was represented to him as being an advance, but he wasn’t fooled. The place might have been far more mechanized than it was, but they deliberately made work for the young men in order to give them the illusion of worth-while occupation, of usefulness. George wasn’t fooled.

They were even paid small sums of money out of which they could buy certain specified luxuries or which they could put aside for a problematical use in a problemical old age. George kept his money in an open jar, which he kept on a closet shelf. He had no idea how much he had accumulated. Nor did he care.

He made no real friends though he reached the stage where a civil good day was in order. He even stopped brooding (or almost stopped) on the miscarriage of justice that had placed him there. He would go weeks without dreaming of Antonelli, of his gross nose and wattled neck, of the leer with which he would push George into a boiling quicksand and hold him under, till he woke screaming with Omani bending over him in concern.

Omani said to him on a snowy day in February, “It’s amazing how you’re adjusting.”

But that was February, the thirteenth to be exact, his nineteenth birthday. March came, then April, and with the approach of May he realized he hadn’t adjusted at all.

The previous May had passed unregarded while George was still in his bed, drooping and ambitionless. This May was different.

All over Earth, George knew, Olympics would be taking place and young men would be competing, matching their skills against one another in the fight for a place on a new world. There would be the holiday atmosphere, the excitement, the news reports, the self-contained recruiting agents from the worlds beyond space, the glory of victory or the consolations of defeat.

How much of fiction dealt with these motifs; how much of his own boyhood excitement lay in following the events of Olympics from year to year; how many of his own plans—

George Platen could not conceal the longing in his voice. It was too much to suppress. He said, “Tomorrow’s the first of May. Olympics!”

And that led to his first quarrel with Omani and to Omani’s bitter enunciation of the exact name of the institution in which George found himself.

Omani gazed fixedly at George and said distinctly, “A House for the Feeble-minded.”

George Platen flushed. Feeble-minded!

He rejected it desperately. He said in a monotone, “I’m leaving.” He said it on impulse. His conscious mind learned it first from the statement as he uttered it.

Omani, who had returned to his book, looked up. “What?”

George knew what he was saying now. He said it fiercely, “I’m leaving.”

“That’s ridiculous. Sit down, George, calm yourself.”

“Oh, no. I’m here on a frame-up, I tell you. This doctor, Antonelli, took a dislike to me. It’s the sense of power these petty bureaucrats have. Cross them and they wipe out your life with a stylus mark on some card file.”

“Are you back to that?”

“And staying there till it’s all straightened out. I’m going to get to Antonelli somehow, break him, force the truth out of him.” George was breathing heavily and he felt feverish. Olympics month was here and he couldn’t let it pass. If he did, it would be the final surrender and he would be lost for all time.

Omani threw his legs over the side of his bed and stood up. He was nearly six feet tall and the expression on his face gave him the look of a concerned Saint Bernard. He put his arm about George’s shoulder, “If I hurt your feelings—”

George shrugged him off. “You just said what you thought was the truth, and I’m going to prove it isn’t the truth, that’s all. Why not? The door’s open. There aren’t any locks. No one ever said I couldn’t leave. I’ll just walk out.”

“All right, but where will you go?”

“To the nearest air terminal, then to the nearest Olympics center. I’ve got money.” He seized the open jar that held the wages he had put away. Some of the coins jangled to the floor.

“That will last you a week maybe. Then what?”

“By then I’ll have things settled.”

“By then you’ll come crawling back here,” said Omani earnestly, “with all the progress you’ve made to do over again. You’re mad, George.”

“Feeble-minded is the word you used before.”

“Well, I’m sorry I did. Stay here, will you?”