CHAPTER I
"I'd like to apply for a wife," I said.
The Marriage Administration girl inserted an application blank into the talk-typer on her desk. Her eyes were light blue and her hair was dark brown and she was wearing a Mayflower dress with a starched white collar.
"Name and number?"
"Roger Bartlett. 14479201-B."
"Date of birth?"
"January 17, 2122."
"What is your occupation, Mr. Bartlett?"
"Senior Sentry at the Cadillac Cemetery."
She raised her eyes. Her hair was combed tightly back into a chignon and her face looked round and full like a little girl's.
"Oh. Have there been any exhumings recently, Mr. Bartlett?"
"Not at Cadillac," I said.
"I'm glad. I think it's a shame the way the ghouls carry on, don't you? Imagine anyone having the effrontery to rob a sacred car-grave!"
Her voice sounded sincere enough but I got the impression she was ridiculing me—why, I couldn't imagine. She could not know I was lying.
"Some day they'll rob one grave too many," I said flatly, "and earn the privilege of digging their own."
She lowered her eyes—rather abruptly, I thought. "Last place of employment?"
"Ford Acres."
The longer I looked at her, the more she affected me. The little-girl aspect of her face was misleading. There was nothing little-girlish about her lithe body, and her stern, high-bosomed dress could not conceal the burgeoning of full breasts or the breathless sweep of waist and shoulders.
Illogically, she reminded me of a landscape I had seen recently at a clandestine art exhibit. I had wandered into the dim and dismal place more out of boredom than curiosity, and I had hardly gone two steps beyond the cellar door when the painting caught my eye. It was called "Twentieth Century Landscape."
In the foreground, a blue river flowed, and beyond the river a flower-flecked meadow spread out to a series of small, forested hills. Beyond the hills a great cumulus formation towered into the sky like an impossibly tall and immaculate mountain. There was only one other object in the scene—the lofty, lonely speck of a soaring bird.
An impossible landscape by twenty-second century standards; an impossible analogy by any standards. And yet that's what I thought of, standing there in Marriage Administration Headquarters, the stone supporting pillars encircling me like the petrified trunks of a decapitated forest and the unwalled departments buzzing with activity.
"Can you give us some idea of the kind of wife you want, Mr. Bartlett?"
I wanted to say that I didn't want any kind of a wife, that the only reason I was applying for one was because I was on the wrong side of twenty-nine and had received my marriage summons in yesterday's mail. But I didn't say anything of the sort. It wasn't wise to question Marriage Administration procedure.
But I didn't take it lying down. Not quite. I said: "The wife I want is a pretty remote item from the one I'll probably get."
"What we want consciously is invariably different from what we want unconsciously, Mr. Bartlett. The Marriage Integrator's true benefit to humanity arises from the fact that it matches marriageable men and women in accordance with their unconscious rather than with their conscious desires. However, any information you may care to impart will be entered on your data card and might influence the final decision."
"I don't know," I said.
And I didn't. The celibacy I had endured rather than apply for a wife before reaching the maximum age of twenty-nine had resulted in the total sublimation of my sexual desires. Women had lost reality for me—at least, until this morning.
I looked around the huge chamber in search of inspiration. The various departments were cramped with desks and marriage officials, enlivened here and there by gray- or black-garbed secretaries. The department next to the one in which I stood constituted the headquarters for the Marriage Enforcement Police and less than ten feet away from me a gaunt MEP captain brooded behind an austere marble desk.
Apparently he had been fasting, for his charcoal gray coat hung loosely on his wide shoulders. His cheeks were cadaverous, his thin lips pale. His thin nose jutted sharply from his narrow face, giving him a bleak, hungry look, and his deep, somber eyes intensified the impression.
Those eyes, I realized suddenly, were gazing directly into mine.
So far as I knew, there was nothing about my appearance to pique the interest of an MEP official. My Roger Williams suit was conventional enough; I had doffed my black, wide-brimmed hat upon entering the building and now held it at my waist in the prescribed manner; I was above average in height, but not noticeably so, and if my yellow hair and gray eyes failed to match the dour decorum of my clothing, I could hardly be held responsible for the defection. Nevertheless, there was something about me that the MEP captain found disagreeable. The disapproval in his eyes was unmistakable.
"Do you have any ideas at all, Mr. Bartlett?"
The girl's cool blue eyes were a relief after the somber brown ones. It was like returning from Milton's Paradise Lost to the carefree L'Allegro of his youth. Abruptly, the inspiration I'd been searching for materialized—almost at my fingertips.
"Blue eyes," I said. "I'd definitely want her to have blue eyes—and dark brown hair to go with them. And then I'd want her to have a round, full face, and shoulders that look good even in a Mayflower dress."
I saw the telltale pinkness come into her cheeks and I caught the tiny fluttering of a pulse in her white temple. But all she said was: "What else, Mr. Bartlett? I presume she would have intellectual as well as physical qualities."
"Naturally." I knew I was being presumptuous, that I was probably violating some of the law-enforced mores of the Age of Repentance. But for once in my life I felt reckless.
I concentrated on the piquant face before me. "I'd want her to be a little on the sophisticated side," I said softly (the MEP captain had big ears). "Well-versed in the Five Books of course—and perhaps acquainted with one or two of the forbidden ones. And then I'd want her to like children and maybe be willing to have three—or even four—instead of one or none. But most of all I'd want her to be able to freeze any wrong thoughts a man might have about her, not by recourse to the law, or by saying or doing anything; but just by looking the way she does, by being the way she is—if you know what I mean."
The pinkness of her cheeks had darkened to deep rose. "Is that all, Mr. Bartlett?"
I sighed. My recklessness had netted me nothing. "Yes," I said.
She withdrew the application from the talk-typer and initialed it. She raised her eyes. "I censored your reference to the forbidden books," she said. "It would have rated you at least two years in Purgatory if the Marriage Administrator had seen it. You really should be more careful about what you say, Mr. Bartlett."
I'd forgotten all about the meticulous little machine tap-tapping silently away on the desk. I felt like a fool. "Thanks," I said.
"One of the reverend psychiatrists will interview you on the top floor. You'll find a waiting room at the head of the staircase."
I started to turn, then paused. I didn't know why I paused; I only knew that I couldn't let it end like that.
"I wonder," I said.
"Yes?"
"You obtained a lot of information from me but I don't know a single thing about you. Not even your name."
The blue eyes had become arctic lakes. Then, suddenly, they filled with the sparkling warmth of spring. A smile dawned on her lips and her face became a sunrise.
"Julia," she said. "Julia Prentice."
"I'm glad to have known you," I said.
"And I, you, Mr. Bartlett. And now if you'll please excuse me, there are other applicants waiting."
There were—a whole benchful of them. I walked past them glumly, hating them, hating myself, hating a society that would not permit me to choose my own mate; but most of all hating Big Cupid, the mechanized matchmaker that would choose for me.
I paused at the foot of the stone staircase, turned for a final look at Julia. She was interviewing the next applicant. She had forgotten me already.
But someone else in the departmented chamber hadn't. The gaunt MEP captain was more absorbed in me than ever. And, judging from his expression, he no longer merely disapproved of me—he despised me.
Why? Had he overheard my conversation with Julia? I did not think so. With the confused murmur of hundreds of other voices all around him, he could scarcely have singled out mine, especially in view of the fact that I had spoken softly.
But perhaps not softly enough. In any event, he was looking at me as though I were a hopeless habitué of Vanity Fair desperately in need of an Evangelist. I felt like walking over to his desk and asking him the way to the Coelestial City. But I didn't. You don't make flippant remarks to MEP officers, particularly when those remarks involve one of the Five Books. You don't, if you want to stay out of Purgatory.
Instead, I turned and started up the stairs to the eyrie of the reverend psychiatrists.