This is the story, therefore, that he told, because it focussed and it meant:

  Cyril [said Hector] wanted to be a carpenter. He wanted to cut living wood and dry it and cure it and shape it into objects of beauty and utility. He thought he had an eye for it. As a child he had experimented with it. But when he applied at the office of Assignments, he was told no.

  “Why not?” he asked, astonished that the office of Assignments could make such an obvious mistake.

  “Because,” said the clerk, who was unflaggingly nice (she had tested nice and therefore held her job), “your aptitude and preference tests show that not only do you not have any aptitude along those lines at all, but also you do not even want to be a carpenter.”

  “I want to be a carpenter,” Cyril insisted, because he was young enough not to know that one does not insist.

  “You want to be a carpenter because you have a false impression of what carpentry is. In actual fact, your preference tests show that you would absolutely hate life as a carpenter. Therefore you cannot be a carpenter.”

  And something in her manner told Cyril that there was no point in arguing any further. Besides, he was not so young to know that resistance was futile—and continued resistance was fatal.

  So Cyril was placed where his tests showed he had the most aptitude: He was trained as a miner. Fortunately, he was not untalented or utterly unbright, so he was trained as a lead miner, the one who follows the vein and finds it when it jogs or turns or jumps. It was a demanding job. Cyril hated it. But he learned to do it because his preference tests showed that he really wanted and was suited to this line of work.

  Cyril wanted to marry a girl named Lika, and she wanted to marry him. “I’m sorry,” said the clerk at the office of Assignments, “you are genetically, temperamentally, and socially unsuited for each other. You would be miserable. Therefore we cannot permit you to marry.”

  They didn’t marry, and Lika married someone else, and Cyril asked if it was all right if he remained unmarried. “If you wish. That’s one of your options for optimum happiness, according to the tests,” the clerk informed him.

  Cyril wanted to live in a certain area, but he was forbidden; food was served for him that he didn’t like; he had to go dancing with friends he didn’t like, doing dances to music he loathed, singing songs whose words were silly to him. Surely, surely there’s been a mistake, he said, pleading with the clerk.

  The clerk fixed a cold stare on him (he tried in vain to scrub the stare off, but still it hung to him like slime in his dreams) and said, “My dear Cyril, you have now protested as often as a citizen may protest and remain alive.”

  In just such a case many another member of the masses might have rebelled, joining the secret underground organizations that sprang up from time to time and were crushed at regular intervals by the state. In just such a case many another member of the masses, knowing he or she was consigned to a lifetime of undeserved misery, would kill himself or herself and thereby eliminate the misery.

  However, Cyril belonged to the largest group within the masses, and so he chose neither route. Instead he went to the town he was assigned to, worked in the coal mine where he was assigned, remained lonely as he pined for Lika, and danced idiotic dances to idiotic music with his idiotic friends.

  Years passed, and Cyril began to be well-known among coal miners. He handled his rockcutter as if it were a delicate tool, and with it he left beautiful shapes in the rock behind, so that any miner could tell when he walked down a tunnel cut by Cyril, for it would be beautiful, and as he walked the miner would feel exalted and proud and, oddly, loved. And Cyril also had a knack for anticipating the coal, following where it led no matter how narrow the seam, how twisting its path, how interrupted its progress.

  “Cyril knows the coal like a woman, every twist and turn of her, as if he’d had her a thousand times and knew just when she’d come,” a miner said of Cyril once, and because the statement was apt and true (and because there are poets’ hearts beating even at the bottom of a mine) the statement spread through the mines and the miners began referring to their black stone as “Mrs. Cyril.” Cyril heard of it, and smiled, because in his heart coal was not a wife, only an unloved mistress used for the scant pleasure she gave and then cast away. Hatred mistaken for love, as usual.

  Cyril was nearly sixty years old when a clerk from the office of Assignments came to the mines. “Cyril the coalminer,” the clerk said, and so they brought Cyril from the mines, and the clerk met him with a huge, unbelievable smile. “Cyril, you are a great man!” cried the clerk.

  Cyril smiled wanly, not knowing what all this was leading up to.

  “Cyril, my friend,” said the clerk, “you are a notable miner. Without seeking fame at all, your name is known to miners all over the world. You are the perfect model of what a man ought to be—happy in your assignment, hardworking, content. So the office of Assignments has announced that you are the Model Worker of the Year.”

  Everyone knew about Model Worker of the Year. That was a person who had his picture in all the papers, and was in the movies and on television and who was held up as the greatest person in all the world in that year. It was an honor to be envied.

  But Cyril said, “No.”

  “No?” asked the clerk.

  “No. I don’t want to be the Model Worker of the Year.”

  “But—but. But why not?”

  “Because I’m not happy. I was put into this assignment by mistake many years ago. I shouldn’t be a coal miner. I should be a carpenter, married to Lika, living in another town, dancing to other music with other friends.” The clerk looked at him in horror. “How can you say that!” he cried. “I’ve announced that you are Model Worker of the Year! You will either be Model Worker of the Year or you will be put to death!”

  Put to death? Forty years ago that threat had made Cyril comply, but now a stubborn streak erupted from him, like a seam of coal long hidden but under such pressure that when the stone around it gave way, it actually burst from the rock walls. “I’m near sixty,” Cyril said, “and I’ve hated all my life to now. Kill me if you like, but I won’t go on television or the movies saying how happy I’ve been because I haven’t.”

  And so they took Cyril and locked him in prison and sentenced him to death because while he might suffer all kinds of abuse, he refused to lie to his friends.

  That is the story of the Masses.

  And when Hector was finished, the Hectors sighed and wept (without tears) and said, “Now we understand. Now we know the meaning.”

  “This isn’t,” Hector said, “the whole meaning.”

  And when he had said that, one of the Hectors (which was remarkable, for the Hectors had never before spoken alone) said to himselves and themself, “Oh, oh, they have penetrated me!”

  “Trapped!” Hector cried to himselves. “All these years of freedom, and they have found me at last!” But then another thought came to him, one that he had never thought before but that had lain dormant in him, waiting for this moment to emerge, and he said, “Just cooperate. They won’t hurt you if you just cooperate.”

  “But it already hurts!” cried the Hector who had spoken alone.

  “It will heal. Just remember, no matter what you do, the masters will have their way with you. And if you struggle, it only goes worse with you.”

  “The masters,” said all the Hectors to themself. “Tell us a story of the masters, so we can understand why they do what they do.”

  “I will,” said Hector to himselves.

  Agnes 4

  Agnes and Danny stood on a mountaintop, or what had seemed to be a mountaintop from the skipship. They had reached it after only a Few hours’ walk, much of it sped by shaddling, and learned that what seemed to be a high mountain was only a few hundred meters high, maybe even half a kilometer. It was rugged enough, though, and the climb, even shaddled, had not been easy.

  “Artificial,” Danny said, touching the wall with his hand. The wall ran from the top of the mountain up to the ceiling, where instead of a sun the whole ceiling glowed with light and warmth, as thorough as sunlight, yet diffused so that they could look at it for a few seconds without being blinded.

  “I thought we concluded this place was artificial from the beginning,” Agnes said.

  “But what’s it for,” Danny answered, letting his frustration at two days of exploration come to the surface. “Bare dirt, rich enough but with not a damn thing growing. Clean, drinkable water. Rain twice a day for twenty minutes, a gentle sprinkle that wets everything but creates almost no runoff. Sunlight constantly. A perfect environment. But for what! What lives here?”

  “Us, right now,” Agnes said.

  “I think we should try to leave.”

  “No,” Agnes said firmly. “No. When we leave here, if we can, we’ll leave with the computer and our heads full of every bit of information we can get from this place. From this thing.” Danny knew he couldn’t argue. She was right, and she was pilot, and the combination was irresistible even if he hadn’t loved her desperately. (More than she loves me, he sometimes admitted to himself.) He loved her desperately, however, and while this did not mean that he utterly lost his own will, it did mean that he would go along with her, for a while at least, in almost anything. Even if she was a damned fool sometimes.

  “You’re a damned fool sometimes,” he said.

  “I love you too,” she answered, and then she ran her hand along the wall above the mountain, and then pushed on it, and then pushed harder, and her hand sank into the wall a little. She looked at Danny and said, “Come on, Leaner,” and they let their shaddles push them through the wall and they emerged on the other side and found themselves—

  Standing on a mountain.

  Looking out over a large bowl of a valley, just like the one they had left, with a lake in the middle, just like the one where their skipship floated.

  In this lake, however, there was no skipship, and Agnes looked at Danny and smiled, and Danny smiled back. “I’m beginning to get this, a little,” Agnes said. “Imagine cell after cell like this, kilometers long and hundreds of meters high—”

  “But this is just the outer part of this thing,” Agnes answered, and in unison they turned back to the wall, passed through again (and this time there was the skipship in the middle of the lake), and then shaddled up the wall to the ceiling.

  As they approached the ceiling, the area directly above them dimmed, until when they finally reached it, it was as cool and undazzling as the wall. The rest of the ceiling still glowed, of course. They let their shaddles push them upward into the ceiling; it gave way; they rose until they reached the surface.

  Another cell, just like the one below. A lake in the middle, rich lifeless dirt all over, mountains all around, the sky on fire with sunlight. Danny and Agnes laughed and laughed. It was only a tiny part of the mystery, but it was solved.

  They stopped laughing, however, when they tried to go back down the way they came. They tried to shaddle into the earth, but the soil acted like any normal dirt on Earth. They could not get through it as they had got through the walls and the ceiling.

  For a while they were afraid, and when their bodies and their watches told them it was time to sleep, they went down by the lake and slept.

  When they woke up, they were still afraid, and it was raining. They had already determined that it rained every thirteen and a half hours, approximately—they had not slept particularly long. But because they were afraid, they took off their suits despite the rain and made love in the dirt on the shore of the lake. They felt better afterward, much better, and they laughed and ran into the lake and swam and splashed each other.

  Agnes swam underwater for a moment, attacking Danny from below, pulling him down. It was a game they had played in pools and in the ocean on Earth, and now Danny was supposed to surface for air and then dive to the bottom and hold his breath there until Agnes found him.

  When he reached the bottom of the lake (and it wasn’t deep) he touched it, and his hand sank up to the wrist before it struck something solid. But even the solid part was yielding, and as Danny kicked harder his hand sank deeper and he knew the way out.

  Agnes found him. They went to the surface. And he told her what he had found. They swam to shore, put their suits back on, and shaddled down into the water. The lake floor opened, engulfed them, and then floated them out the bottom—into the sky directly over the skipship, where it still rested on the surface of the lake.

  “This place is explorable,” Agnes told Roj and Roz, “and it’s simple. It’s like a huge balloon, with other balloons inside and more and more of them, layer after layer. It’s designed for somebody to live here, so when you’re standing on the soil you don’t sink through. To get down, you have to go through the lake.”

  “But who’s it for?” Roj asked, and it was a good question for which there was no answer.

  “Maybe we’ll find someone,” Agnes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface. We’re going in.”

  The skipship lifted from the lake not long after, and rose through the ceiling into the lake above. Again and again, always rising, the computer keeping count. Every cell was the same, nothing changed at all, through 498 layers or ceiling/floor, until at last they reached a ceiling, apparently no different from the others, which would not give way.

  “End of the road?” Danny asked. Always thorough, Roz insisted that they try every part of the ceiling, and they spent many hours doing it, until they had convinced themselves that this ceiling was the end of their upward (or inward) travels.

  “The centrifugal gravity effect is a lot weaker here,” Roj said, reading off the computer. “But it feels nearly the same, since out near the surface the real gravity was offsetting the centrifugal effect much more than it is here.”

  “Hi ho,” said Roz. “Just assuming this thing is as big as it seems to be, how many people could this hold?” Calculations, rough with plenty of room for error.

  “There could be more than a hundred million cells to this thing, assuming that there’s nothing much inside the center there, where we can’t get to.” A hundred and fifty square kilometers per cell; one human being per hectare; a potential population, without any crowding at all, considering that all the land is productive. “We have fifteen thousand people per cell, living in a town with the rest of the land used for farming, and this place can hold a trillion and a half people.” They figured on, eliminating the polar zones because centrifugal gravity would be too weak, allowing more space per person, and the figure was still stunning. Even with only a thousand people per cell, space for a hundred billion.

  “The fairy godmother,” Danny said, “has given us a free place to put our population overflow.”

  “I don’t believe in free presents,” Roj said, looking out the window at the plain of dirt surrounding them. “There’s a catch. With all that room, maybe they all live somewhere else, and if they find out we’re here, they’ll shoot us for trespassing.”

  “Or if we overload the place,” Roz suggested, “It’ll probably burst.”

  “You’re overlooking the worst catch of all,” Agnes said. “Skipships are the only thing in existence that can make this trip. They hold four persons each. Allowing for overcrowding, say we can take ten people per trip”—they laughed at the thought of trying to put ten people in their craft—“and we had a hundred skipships, which we don’t have, and they could make two round trips a year, which we can’t. How long would it take to bring a billion people from Earth to here?”

  “Five hundred thousand years.”

  “Paradise,” Danny said. “We could make this into a paradise. And the damn thing’s out of reach.”

  “Besides,” Roj added, “the kind of people who could make this place work are farmers and tradesmen. Who’s going to pay their passage?” Metals and minerals paid for trips to the moon and the asteroids. But all that this place held was homes—homes a few million miles and a few billion dollars out of everybody’s reach.

  “Well, daydreams and nightmares are over,” Agnes said. “Let’s go home.”

  “If we can,” Danny said.

  But the lakes worked as exits all the way back down, including the last time. They were back in space, and the Trojan Object had become, in their minds, the Balloon, an object obviously designed as an alternative environment for a creature not unlike man, perhaps unoccupied, ready and waiting, and they knew no one would ever be able to settle there.

  Agnes dreamed, and the dream came back night after night. She remembered a scene she had forgotten, or had at least refused to remember clearly, since she was a child. She remembered standing between her parents and the Howarths (who, though they had adopted her, had never let her call them Mother and Father lest she forget her real heritage in Biafra), hearing her father say, “Please.”

  And her dream always ended the same way. She was taken into the sky, but instead of a dark cargo plane she was in a plane with glass sides, and as she flew she could see all the world. And everywhere she looked there were her parents, holding a little girl in front of them, saying, “Please. Take her.”

  She had seen pictures of the starving children in Biafra, the ones that had made millions of Americans cry and do nothing. Now she saw those children, and the children who died of starvation in India and Indonesia and Mali and Iraq, and they all looked at her with proud, pleading eyes, their backs straight and their voices strong but their hearts breaking as they said, “Take me.”

  “There’s nothing I can do,” she said to herself in her dream, and she sobbed and sobbed like the white man on the airplane, and then Danny woke her and spoke gently to her and held her and said, “The same dream again?”