had pictures. He saw ancient pictures of the country before the revolution. He saw men working in open fields, families eating on rustic tables in scenes of outdoor splendor. One section of the book showed before and after scenes. A bright mountain stream would be shown cascading over rocks. Then the same stream was shown,
in color, foamed, dirty, dead fish floating. A typical family dwelling of the late twentieth century was shown. It was a beautiful building with large windows and rock on the front. Inside there were, unbelievably three bedrooms, a large area called an entrance hall—this was the most incredible waste of living space Luke had ever seen—a vast living room with a fireplace for burning wood. There was an entirely separate room reserved only for eating! A tremendous kitchen with gleaming appliances. A thing they called a family room with comfortable chairs and a bookcase and rugs on all the floors. But the books which disturbed Luke most had no pictures. They had names like Of Mice and Men, War and Peace, Gone With the Wind, Catch 22. They were things that Dr. Wundt had mentioned. Novels. Stories. Thumbing through the one called Catch 22 he saw, and he cringed as he saw it, the word «whore.» Blushing, feeling soiled and degraded, he read a few sentences. Men and women were naked in a room. He could read no more. He was sure that he was in league with anti-Christ devils. He was frightened. After that he left the novels alone, avoiding them as if they were poison, as if they were, indeed, the devil's work. Alone in his luxurious room he prayed for forgiveness for reading the vile material. He prayed for release. He prayed to be allowed to go back to
his life. At least, in Old Town, he'd helped slightly to do God's work. There he'd preached and he had healed. What was he doing in this hidden, underground place. Was it God's will? Had he been sent to do something about the godless conditions here? Was he to preach to these strange doctor people? He felt helpless. Food was delivered to him. Caster came and took his pulse and temperature and gave him capsules. And, as usual, she talked cheerfully about many things. She would ask him how he felt and what he was doing to entertain himself. She asked if there were anything in particular he'd like to hear in the way of music. She would ask if she could get him something special in the way of food and if he'd seen a particular program on the screen and if he'd read any of the books. He blushed at the mention of the books, wondering if she read the obscene novels. He didn't think she did. She seemed wholesome. But she knew books. She went to the shelf and handed him a book and suggested he might enjoy it. After she was gone he opened the book suspiciously It was called A Brief History of the
United States. It, at least, was not dirty. It told about people in an ancient time who rebelled against a country called England, probably one of those countries which had been destroyed in the great Godless Communist nuclear war. Those people had fought because of something called taxes. It was all strange to Luke, but, having nothing else to do, he struggled through the text. And was fascinated by the overwhelming fact that once the country had been a wilderness. Once the population had been concentrated along the eastern coast in the area which was now covered by East and South Cities. West of that were mountains and forest—trees, hundreds of miles of trees and open land where Middle City now sprawled. And animals. Huge herds of things called buffalo and people killing them for meat and for their hides and— «Do you believe this stuff?» he asked Caster. «Don't you?» «I don't know.» He frowned. «Why didn't they have ground cars? It says here it took months to go from the East to a place called California by a thing called a wagon train pulled by animals. Why didn't they go by ground car?» «They didn't have roads,» Caster said, smiling. «Oh,» Luke said. That was reasonable. He lost himself in the book. He read how the country fought over slavery, and the concept was shocking to him. People owning other people. Why had God allowed it? And why did those ancient people think people with black skin were bad? According to the book, people thought people with black skins were worse than—than—well, worse than Fares, probably. He read about more wars and he talked with Caster about it when she came to check his pulse. She was nice, after all. She was a cheerful woman who said she was forty-two years old. She had nice brown hair cut short and a good smile and she was just a little bit shorter than him, but built solidly in contrast to Luke's thinness. They talked. Then she suggested that it was time for him to start exercising. She took him to a place they called a gym. The crisp young men were there riding things with pedals and lifting things and wearing baggy, thick suits. Luke tried the pedals things and saw no future in sitting on a sharp seat pushing pedals with his feet and going nowhere. Besides, he became tired easily. His exercise in the past had consisted of walking around the sidewalks of Old Town and climbing the stairs to his room. They walked. Caster showed him places called laboratories with fantastic arrays of glass and smoking, steaming things. Men worked and smiled and waved and talked and Luke wondered who they all were. «Doctors, scientists,» Caster said. «Buy why are they here? If the Brothers need Doctors so badly, how can they all stay here?» «They're all dead,» Caster said. Luke looked at her blankly. «You're dead,» she said. «Oh. You mean like that.» «Like that,» she said. «I don't understand,» Luke said. «Why—» «Some of them were brought here because they were being given shakeshock by the Brothers for some offense.» «Healing?» Luke asked, since he knew that healing, for some reason, was frowned on by the Brothers. «Well, practicing medicine, maybe. Or for questioning things. Some of them choose to come here.» «They must be crazy.» Luke said. «I don't know why they'd choose to live here. Never seeing the sun. Never being out in the fresh air—» «Fresh air?» Caster laughed. «Don't talk to me about fresh air. I'm from West City. When I was brought here I was terminal with the lung sickness.» Since she had opened the subject, Luke felt free to ask, «Why are you here, Caster?» She shrugged. «I smuggled medicine out of a Brother house I was working as a maid. I knew I had the lung sickness and I heard the Brother talking with his doctor and when I heard that there was something that could be done, I took medicine. I didn't know what medicine I was taking.
I just took medicine. It happened to be a mild opiate. That's a sort of drug. I got high—» «High?» «Know how you felt when you were having all the tests? All woozy and kinda floating and not caring about anything?» «Yes.» «I got higher than that. You've had Soul Lifter?» Luke smiled in agreement. «I was high, like you get high on Soul Lifter. I went in to work and they spotted it. They put me on the rack and I talked my head off. I told them about stealing the medicine. They sentenced me to therapeutic shock until my memory was cleansed of the knowledge of medicine. You know what that means.» Luke shuddered. «You walk around blank.» Yes, he'd seen those who had been cleansed of evil by shakeshock. «A doctor 'killed' me. With the drug. I woke up here.» «But you know medicine now,» Luke said. «Hah! I'm a nurse. I know how to talk to a sick man and how to take his
pulse and temperature. I'm still under training. I'll learn more. But I don't know medicine. Not like the doctors.» «You mean they teach you that stuff?» «If you want to learn,» she said. «Do you want to learn, Luke?» «I don't know.» «This is a good place, Luke. They're good people. They want to help. They want to help everyone, not just the Brothers.» «But they don't believe in God,» Luke said, remembering the cynical remarks he'd heard from Wundt and some of the others. «They don't tell you not to believe in God, do they?» «No.» «They believe in freedom,» she said. «I don't think I know exactly what freedom is,» Luke said. Then there was another book. She brought it in from outside. «Dr. Wundt thinks you're ready for this,» she said. It was called The Revolution, Its Causes and Effects. And it was written by Dr. Zachary Wundt. «To understand the revolution,» the book began, «one must understand the condition of the country in the late decades of the twentieth century.» And then, the man who said he believed in freedom, wrote that, perhaps, there was too much freedom in that ancient time. He wrote about the country being in a war and how some people thought it was wrong. He said that most of those people were «liberals» and were «victims» of the victory of Communist propaganda. He said the liberals were free to talk against the government because of a thing called the guarantee of freedom of speech and that they abused this freedom by giving aid and comfort to an enemy who wanted to control the world by violent means. He wrote about the freedom to take drugs and a gradual breakdown in law and order. He said that the culture of the entire country was influenced by a subculture who worshiped a drug called LSD, how the users of this drug created an entirely new music form and now, because it was fashionable to be «young,» the entire country accepted this so- called music. He said that the drug-using minority also influenced the country in many other ways, in dress, for example. And there were pictures of dirty-looking young people in rags, with long hair and beads and strange decorations. He said that the drug users also contributed to a breakdown in morality. And (Luke blushed and started to put the book away, but didn't) how sex became one of the new freedoms, how girls and boys lived together and did sex indiscriminately. He wrote about how nudity became acceptable, how Broadway shows were performed with the cast naked, how the screen was filled with nude bodies, how books were allowed to be
sold openly describing sexual acts, natural and perverted, in minute detail. Sexual freedom, Wundt said, contributed to a slow breakdown in the family unit, long a standard of Western civilization, one of the adhesive factors. Wundt wrote: Freedom, without the education necessary to use freedom intelligently, can be destructive. To inject a personal note, the freedom to enjoy sex with a partner of one's choice is a necessary part of being civilized, of being human. Yet this freedom was handed to a nation with Puritan upbringing, a nation that had been weaned on the teaching that all sex is dirty, or even criminal. The nation eagerly seized this freedom, without
the understanding of it, and, while enjoying it, lacerated itself with guilt. In the orgy of freedom in the late
