Chapter 5

They were lying in bed together, neither of them asleep.

THX’s mind was telling him: You could lose everything. Everything.

“But I was unhappy before,” he muttered to himself, so low that he couldn’t hear it himself. “Everything was normal, but I was unhappy.”

Unhappy. Do you think you’re going to be happy now? If they find out, you’ll be destroyed. And her too. And it will be your fault.

He turned his head to look at her. She was watching him, her face troubled, aware.

“I thought you wanted a new roommate,” he said abruptly.

“What? Oh no. Who told you that?”

“SEN.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “He was lying. That’s not true… I need you so much!”

He slid his arm under her head and pulled her to him.

“I was so scared,” LUH said. “So alone. I needed to touch you so badly… to have you touch me. After I started cutting down on your sedatives I was frightened… of what kind of a person you’d turn out to be.”

“Turn out…?”

“Ohh… I’m sorry… I don’t know what I’ve done. I should have left you alone.”

Yes, his mind agreed. But he said, “No, don’t say that.”

The wake-up tone sounded.

THX started in surprise. “What time… what shift is it?”

“What… it’s three, I think.”

“Three! We’ll be late!”

He got up out of bed and headed for the sanitary. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

LUH called to him, “Don’t… don’t take anything.”

“What?” He was staring at his own face in the medicine cabinet mirror: puffy-eyed, tired- looking.

“Try not to take anything… please,” her voice came to him.

“I’ll try,” he answered softly. “I’ll try.” But his hands were already shaking.

The shift was a nightmare. He couldn’t concentrate. He kept thinking about LUH. Twice his supervisor had to warn him. THX knew that those warnings went into the permanent record for review by Control. Yet, despite the babble of voices in his earphones, despite the tension of the work, the exasperated looks of the supervisors, his own gut-turmoil and shaking hands, THX felt—not happy, certainly, but different. These things, these people around him, they didn’t touch him. And he realized that they never did. LUH was the one who counted. She was the only one that mattered to him.

He left the assembly center after his shift, walking tiredly through the homeward-bound workers.

“I’ve put in forty-three requests for a transfer,” he heard someone in the crowd say, “but I haven’t heard one word. DRG, my superior, agrees that I’m better suited to work in the fantasy bureau…”

“Please move briskly. Do not stop or block passageways.”

“Please do not linger in module dispersal areas. The carbon monoxide rate is plus eight hundred.” Abruptly, he saw LUH standing at the edge of the slideway, searching the crowd. For him. Then she saw him and pushed her way against the homebound pedestrians who were streaming up onto the slideway belt.

“What are you doing here?” he shouted at her, over the hubbub of the scurrying masses.

“I thought… THX, I’m afraid…”

He took her by the arm and guided her through the rushing pedestrian traffic. “You’re not cleared for this precinct. They’ll spot your badge. Let’s get across the slideway and out of here.”

They walked silently, swiftly, cutting across the main traffic flow and heading for the spiraling ramp that bridged the slideway. THX walked with his head down slightly, as if he didn’t want anyone to recognize him. Up the ramp they went, around twice, and out across the spidery bridge. The slideway was below them, jammed with workers. The outer belts of the ’way moved slowly, about the pace of a leisurely walk. But the center strip was almost a blur of speed, with people covering every square inch of it. Just a continuous blur of standing bodies, heads shaved, sexless and isolated from each other as they stood packed like meat animals riding to the slaughterhouse.

An elderly woman stumbled and fell on the outermost, slow beltway. People stepped over her as she struggled to get up. Finally a chrome police robot took her arm and helped her to her feet.

“Old fool!” a man’s voice grumbled up from the slideway. He kept on yammering but he was whisked away and his voice trailed off into the general din of the crowd.

THX and LUH didn’t slow their pace until they reached a new, half-unfinished commercial shopping plaza. Even here, though, the crowds were milling brainlessly and the overhead speakers were hard at work:

“If you buy more than five dendrites at a time you get the sixth one with only three percent more credits. Buy in volume and save.”

Slightly out of breath, LUH hung back on THX’s arm and forced him to slow down.

He turned to look at her. Her face was grave.

“You slipped on a circuit transfer just before lunch, didn’t you?” she asked. It wasn’t really a question.

“You were watching?”

She nodded.

Nearly angry with her, he said, “You shouldn’t be doing that! They’ll get suspicious. Control watches you observers.”

“But… I had to see you… I can’t just sit there all day and know that by touching a key I can see you… and then not do it.”

Shaking his head, “You’re going to get us both arrested if you’re not careful.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” he admitted. “Look… I can’t work this way. I need something. I’m too tense on the job… can’t concentrate. Got to shut out everything and concentrate.”

“You can do it by yourself. I know you can.”

“I can’t… a human being can’t do this kind of work unassisted. If I make a mistake, it’s all over. You see it every day. Do you want to see me taken away in pieces?”

“I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

He didn’t respond. They walked slowly, side by side. THX looked straight ahead, not at her, his face set in a bitter scowl.

LUH said, “If you… if you go back on sedation, you won’t feel the same about me. You’ll report me for drug evasion.”

He stopped in his tracks. “No! I couldn’t turn you in… not now. I… I know I couldn’t!”

“You don’t know. You don’t…”

Shaking his head miserably, THX muttered, “If I take something, you suffer. If I don’t, I suffer.”

“You can live without sedation,” she said firmly. “You can. I know you can.”

He felt excited and afraid at the same time. “I’ve got a slip movement to install on my next shift. I’ll never make it the way I am now. There’ve already been three explosions this…”

“You can do it without etracene,” she insisted.

People were drifting past them, staring at them as they just stood in the middle of the half- finished shopping plaza, not going anywhere, not buying anything, just standing there talking to each other. Relating. Not alone, not isolated. Together.

“Maybe I can do it without etracene,” THX said. “But then what? It can’t go on forever. You know it can’t. People can’t live without drugs.”

“Yes they can! I have! Others have!”

“Natural-borns,” he said, then seeing her face reacting to the way he said it, he wished his tongue had withered first.

Very slowly, deliberately calm and precise, LUH said, “There’s no difference between the physical makeup of a natural-born and a clinic-born. It’s merely a matter of conditioning. You can overcome the conditioning—if you want to.”

“I want—I want to be with you.”

“Then let’s leave,” she said suddenly. “We can leave here, live in the superstructure…”

“The superstructure?” He felt shocked. “But nobody lives up there except the shelldwellers. It’s all radioactive. The air’s poisonous.”

LUH shook her head, “No, I don’t believe that. It’s a lie.”

It’s too much, THX thought. Everything is upside down… so many new feelings, new ideas. I need time to think, to figure it all out.

LUH started walking toward the nearest vertitube entrance. “My series is over. You only have one more shift left, don’t you? We could be gone before our next series started.”

Following her, catching up beside her, he answered, “Gone? But they’d never let us leave. They’d stop us, catch us…”

They walked to the vertitube and went down to their quarters. When they were safely inside, LUH turned to THX and put her arms around his neck. Looking up into his eyes, she said simply: “Don’t let them separate us.”

He held her, he clung to her, and there was no question of it. I can’t lose her, I can’t, I can’t.

Much later, as they lay in bed together, half-drowsing, LUH murmured, “They know. They’ve been watching us. I can feel it.”

“No… they don’t know.”

“Control’s watching us now,” she said, her voice trembling.

“No one can see us here. We’re alone.” But he glanced around the room. There were a dozen places where a camera might be hidden.