Chapter Two
Leaving the dorm, Cory hopped onto the sidewalk and rode across the parklike greenscape, giving no thought to the incongruity of riding rather than walking to an exercise ritual. He was lucky enough to find a place. Coming back would not be so easy with everyone jamming the walks, the well-muscled exercisers shouldering the food faddists out of the way if necessary. No one walked late if he could help it. Everyone was too damned exhausted from comsesh, Cory thought.
Catching the drift of his musings, habitual lately, Cory thought: It’s a phase. Something you’re going through. You’ll come out of it and go on building muscles until the day you disappear, like all the others.
He shivered, suddenly cold under the pale luminescence of the night sky. Sometimes it was not good to look too far ahead. It was like a painting he had seen once which had caught the illusion or sighting along an empty walkway toward a bleak horizon, with nothing visible anywhere, no sign of life. Even the art panels flanking the walk were blank expanses of gray. He had felt a chill, looking at that painting, the same cold foreboding he felt now.
It had happened gradually, his weariness, the feeling of stultification, of slowly, with an infinite patience of repetition, being smothered to death in the monotony of-overdeveloped muscles or the tastelessness of some new health food program. His awareness of it, on the other hand, had been recent and abrupt, like waking one morning to find that you were an adult, twenty-five years old and with more than half your life behind you, without knowing how you had got there from childhood.
At the intersection on the northwest corner of the greenscape Cory skipped off the moving walk onto a ramp. There he had to wait for a workgang of grayshirted intellectuals to trudge wearily by at the end of their long day. They were heading for their camp at the northern perimeter of the cityzone.
“Look at them,” a white-clad exerciser standing beside Cory said, contempt in his tone.
“Look?” another asked. “You can smell ‘em.”
You could. Technician Cory could not deny an automatic and irrational feeling of revulsion. There were ready explanations for the reaction, of course, such as his deeply conditioned respect for personal cleanliness, an attitude shared by the rival food faddists as determinedly as by any exerciser. The unmistakable grayshirt smell was simply offensive. Weekly, it was said, they were forced to disrobe and climb into public pools, where they were hosed down. But that was the nearest they came to bathing, and obviously it was not enough. Their notorious indifference to cleanliness and their carelessness about dress was almost defiantly displayed in matted beards, food-stained gray tunics, and worn and dirty boots.
His restlessness sharpened, Cory was glad when the last of the grayshirts had stumbled past him—this one a thin, sharp-boned old man with hollow cheeks and slumped shoulders. Like the others the old man did not even glance at the watching crowd on the ramp as he passed. With a shrug Cory stepped onto the southbound walk, almost glad to be going to a clean, bright, healthy gym session to join his regular group of radiantly healthy and muscular technicians and citizens.
Almost. Not even the lingering smell of a sweaty grayshirt could hold off his newly discovered boredom for long.
Riding, his thoughts turned idly to Technician Owen and wished him well in the fitness test—surely there was no need to worry! But the image of the slump-shouldered old grayshirt kept intruding. He would not be around long, Cory thought. It was his appearance of age that was unusual, catching attention. He must be close to his time, and he had made no effort to conceal the fact. He must be ready to go.
Where?
This unnatural question, hardly new, taunted Cory as it had for the past year. Where did the old people go? It was a mystery which did not bear much thinking about, for then he would remember his mother too keenly, and the sad resignation in her face (the eyes brimming over, the gentle mouth quivering in a smile that threatened to lose its shape) when she left the dormitory on what turned out to be her last visit.
She had been forty-eight years old, Clock-measure, and there was finally no way to get around that, even though a lot of people tried, like that exerciser on the ramp who had spoken so disgustedly, a man with a visible cake of makeup trying to hide the pouches under his eyes and the folds of his neck. But Cory’s mother had not looked or felt or acted old …
He scowled. It did no good to remember, no good to ask questions the Authority Figures would not answer. That was what Owen always said.
And as far as Owen’s test was concerned, there was nothing to worry about. Owen would be waiting for him when he got back to their sleeproom, grinning from ear to ear, full of how well he had scored and insisting on a celebration.
“There it is!” someone said eagerly.
Technician Cory jerked erect. Staring ahead, he glimpsed the tall figure of the Statue looming over the edge of the greenbelt, overlooking the moving walk, and in that instant the old man and Owen and Cory’s own restlessness were forgotten.
His heartbeat quickened. Watching the figure grow larger, Cory felt the familiar excitement that never seemed to diminish and heard the normal murmur of talk and motion along the walkway gradually fade until, as Cory and those near him approached the great Statue, there was silence.
There were six of the Statues in the world. In his lifetime Cory had seen five of them, and he hoped one day to see the other one. There were identical, as if created from the same model, yet each was strikingly different, arrested in a different, astonishingly lifelike pose. Made in the image of man, flawlessly accurate in detail, they had been known to exist since the beginning of Clocktime, their origins lost in that mist of history in which the Clockmaker himself had conceived and executed his master work. The Statues were so curiously lifelike that each seemed to have paused in motion, as if he had heard his name called.
The one which Cory passed now had his left arm raised as if reaching for something, the fingers spread and extended. His right arm was relaxed, his body leaning forward slightly. Larger than life, he stood nine feet, six inches tall, and was perfectly proportioned, slender and graceful, clad in the loose one-piece coverall which was the everyday garment for all citizens except grayshirts—but in the white (with blue piping) of an exerciser, rather than the pale blue of a faddist. Cory could remember the eye-stinging pride he had felt in his youth over this identification with the Statue, a pride in what he was that he had somehow lost, even though his awe of the Statue was undiminished. They were like men, he thought, but more than men, as if their creator, the artistic genius who had conceived and wrought them with such exquisite care in the dawn of the world, had meant them to be gods.
The walk cruised past the Statue. For a long moment Cory stared back over his shoulder, reluctant to lose that deeply stirring vision, another man’s dream of what he might become.
With a sigh he turned away. The natural murmur along the walk had resumed the busy rhythm of life. Ahead was the curving dome of the gym, and reality.