crawling across his lips shortly after he first began to doze. He slapped the disgusting insect away and then he could hear Caster breathing evenly. She was asleep. It was bad. He'd never been in the same room with a female. Even though he was fully clothed and she was sleeping in her clothing, too, he knew it was wrong. He prayed for forgiveness. He prayed that the intent of the mission would make up for the sin of sleeping in the same room with a female. Finally, long after the factory horns blew midnight, he dozed. He awoke with a headache. His limbs were stiff. His hipbone felt as if he'd been sleeping on rocks. Caster, awake before him, had a meal ready. Fish meal and coffee. After the decent food of the underground, it was terrible. In the streets, they were assailed by the ever-present noise, harsh, ear-achingly persistent. Their lungs felt the burning, acrid fumes which closed the city from the sky. Around them people moved in streams. The streets crawled with ground cars belching more smoke into the already overladen air. They walked, caught up in the hopelessness of the city, a feeling Luke had never experienced. Before the Brothers had taken him to the Hall of Justice, he'd known no life but the city, if one discounted his brief stay at the University. He had accepted it. There was the knowledge
that he'd lived half or more of his life, true. There was the knowledge that the lung sickness or his heart would kill him, but, before he went underground and learned that there were alternatives, he had been only one of a billion people who faced the same fate and he had not asked why. He had accepted it as God's will. Now he found himself asking why and suffering guilt for having asked it. For one does not question God. «You forget,» Caster said, after they'd walked for blocks in silence. He knew she meant the city, the teeming, hopeless life, the ear- hurting
noise, the lung-searing air, the jostling and fighting for a place to stand. «Somewhere west there's a place where they work on nothing but space
travel,» Caster said. «They think that would be the answer, to ship millions of people to other planets, give those who are left a chance to breathe and move.» «Watch what you say,» Luke said. «You're not underground.» «Sorry.» Two ground cars collided. Thin metal crumpled. Heavy engines broke loose, crushing the people in one car, one engine bouncing along the street into a crosswalk, mangling pedestrians. They halted. Luke accepted it as a matter of everyday course. Caster was appalled. Wrecking machines came. Cars were lifted, crushed, moved toward the big barges which would carry them down the river to the dumping grounds in the gulf. Bodies were tossed into other vehicles. The wounded, if unable to walk, were taken to—Luke paused in his thoughts. Taken where? He'd never thought about that before. What became of seriously injured accident victims? Once he'd seen an aid station in Old Town. Those with nonfatal injuries were given Newasper. Broken arms were set roughly by aid attendants and wrapped in slings. But what happened to the more seriously injured victims? There was a neighbor who had been hit by a ground car in the street in front of Luke's building in Old Town. He'd been taken away. Luke never saw him again. Were such people given the benefit of medicine? Near them, as they watched the bodies and the wounded being taken away, stood a woman with a horribly scarred face. One eye was raw and protruding with deep, livid scars running away from it. Her mouth was twisted and scarred. Her cheeks were pocked and rutted. And, looking around, Luke saw others. He felt like crying. He could imagine the agony those people went through, healing from such injuries with only Newasper to help. «I've just decided that I hate them,» he said. «Yes,» Caster said. «I mean the Brothers.» «Yes.» That night they found a small park. Caster stood in the shadows while Luke, armed with a permit from the local Brotherfuzz, preached. He was shy, at first. Then, standing on a rock, he began to see that Middle City was no different. It was like Old Town, without the tall, crumbling skyscrapers. The people were the same. They spoke the same. Regional accents had long since been replaced with a speech patterned after the countrywide viewscreen network, the great leveler. People in Middle City were the same, Fares, Techs, Lays. He preached. He talked quietly about the Lord and his promise of everlasting life. A Tech, high on Soul Lifter, razzed him, grew bored, moved on. Two old Fares nodded and said, «Amen.» The Tireds moved in close, some with the bloodfleeks of the lung sickness on their lips, others looking up at him with glazed eyes, drinking in the promises. «Amen, brother.» «You tell it so sweetly, brother.» «Praise the Lord!» And Luke crying inside thinking of them going through each day not even knowing that there was another way. And then crying openly and
they, his little audience, thinking he was in a religious ecstasy and saying «Amen» and «Praise the Lord» and Caster standing in the shadows looking on sadly. And Luke talking about faith and how it could move mountains. But man could and had moved mountains to build the sprawling, acid infections called cities and no one wanted to move mountains but faith could do more. It could heal man of his ever-present miseries and, come forward, brothers and sisters, come and give me your faith and be healed and then laying on his hands and not feeling it and looking up and praying through his tears for help and not getting it. Back in the room, tired, lying on the floor with Caster breathing evenly from the bed. «Oh, God, look down on me and send me a sign.» And, bitterly: «In your mercy, help us. Help us overcome them and help us be human again.» And only the sounds of the city outside seeping through the thin walls. And the people next door high on Soul Lifter yelling and singing and banging things against the wall. Uneasy sleep. Caster and the morning meal. She was dressed in a Fare one-piece, her hair wrapped in a faded cloth. She looked as young as a girl. They ate in silence. It was raining outside. The meal finished. Caster washed the two plates at the
sink and put them on the rack to dry. Luke was sitting silently in the chair. «It makes me feel guilty,» Caster said, wiping her hands on her one-piece not looking at Luke. «Huh?» «I mean, I see them and I know what they are and how they live and
then I think that for twenty-five years I've been living, I mean really living, not just getting past one day after the other the way they do. I've been eating good food and I've had proper medical care and filtered air to breathe and they breathe this stinking air every day, not just one time in twenty-five years the way I'm doing.» «It's not your fault,» Luke said. Inside, he cringed. Whose fault was it, then? God's? He would not allow it to form, that terrible thought. «Oh, I know that,» Caster said. «I've told myself that I wasn't even alive
when it all started. I've told myself that it was the people, themselves, who threw it all away. God knows they were warned. I've read and seen how the thinking men warned us. They warned about the dirtying of the waters and the air and about overpopulation and about excesses in the name of freedom. No one listened, because it was all so good then, when it all
started. I guess when a person lived in a whole house all to himself and his immediate family in the good, green countryside he couldn't get too excited because people were being crowded into the ghettos of the cities and because chemical plants went into the good, green countryside and built and poured wastes into clear rivers. And knowing that people in West City couldn't breathe sometimes was terrible, but it didn't touch those who didn't live in West City and who didn't know that gradually the city was creeping outward like some kind of all-devouring monster to take
up the good, green countryside and to spread its poisoned air over the hills and then the very desert and all. They were warned, God knows, but they didn't listen and it isn't my fault except that I am a member of the race and I can do some little something, maybe, to help make it better.» «Oh, sure,» Luke said. «Everyone does what he can.» But he spoke without conviction. «But you can get into trouble caring about people,» Caster went on. «It's
all so complicated. I read where, back in the First Republic, they paid sort of Fare checks to people who couldn't find work or who wouldn't work. I find it hard to believe, but there were women who had children—uh— without being married.» She swallowed. Luke looked away in silent embarrassment. «And the government paid them so much for
each child. They were trying to help, you see, because the women, after all, were human and they couldn't help it, they said, because they, uh, had children and—well, anyhow, you see what I mean. They were encouraging the growth of population when that was one of the main problems, so while trying to help they were really bringing us to this.» She spread her hands to the ten by ten cubicle. «And back in those days families might have as many as five or six or even more children and—» Luke was cringing. She'd promised not to talk dirty. «Oh, stop it,» Caster said. «You've got to grow up sometime, Luke.» «I don't like that kind of talk,» he said, almost angrily. «Don't you ever have the feeling that you're missing something?» she asked. «No.» «I'm not talking dirty I'm talking about life. I'm wondering how it came to be this way. There was a time, Luke, when a woman married and had a home and had children and the old books talk about this as if it were something wonderful. I read one which said giving birth is one of the natural functions of a woman and I've always wondered if that isn't so.» «You're talking in circles,» Luke said. «First you talk about overpopulation and then you talk about having—children—being the natural order of things. You're not making sense.» «Does any of it make sense? This world used to be a good place to live. That made sense. And why did God make us different? Why in all that's holy did he make men and women?» «The Fares have children.» «Yes. And they die at birth and when they're babies and they get killed on the streets and they die
