The bailiff reached them. Shoving Hendley aside, he grabbed Ann's arms. Hendley spun the bailiff around, breaking his hold. The courtroom guards converged on the scene. In the brief struggle one of the guards clipped Hendley a glancing blow with a club. Ann was pushed into her chair.
As suddenly as it had begun the scuffle was over. With an effort Hendley brought his anger under control. The bailiff glared at him threateningly, but Hendley ignored him as he resumed his seat and looked anxiously at Ann. Her hand reached out to him in mute appeal. Her cheeks were damp with tears.
He looked up bitterly as the judge began to speak. The eyes that met his showed neither compassion nor understanding. These would be out of place, Hendley thought angrily, in such a court, just as they could not really exist in a world governed by machines.
"It is the judgment of this court," the judge said harshly, "that the names TRH-247 and ABC-331 be erased from all the records of the Organization, that their identity discs be destroyed, and that the accused formerly known by said numbered designations be taken from the city and banished forever into the outer light...."
14
At night, in the second week, they slept wrapped in each other's arms for warmth. The last matches were gone, and a battery had burned out in the electric fire starter. Try as he might, hampered by the stiffness remaining in his left hand as well as by inexperience, Hendley could not create enough spark with stones or dry sticks to fan a flame into life. By then they were both hungry, a deep continuous hunger which seemed to add to the cold's penetration, as if the blanket of flesh covering their bones, already worn thinner, could no longer keep out the chill which spread over the land after the sun went down.
Each day he had tried to put more miles between them and the city. The copter had left them some distance away, but still in sight of the tall, faceless cylinders of the major centers. Viewed across the barren plain, the towers appeared more like dead, naked trees than buildings swarming with human life. Moving always west, away from the hated towers, Hendley kept expecting to see them sink below the horizon, but they remained persistently in view, seeming no further away.
He slept fitfully. Waking in the cold darkness before dawn, he could see the beams of light shooting up from the circular cores of the great cylindrical towers, as if they were giant torches held up to illuminate the sky. Ann shivered in her sleep and tried to hug him more tightly, seeking to warm her body with his. Pity washed through him. Holding her, he felt a growing, spreading ache that was like the cold but deeper, that would not yield to warm rays of the morning sun.
He had brought her to this, and he was failing her.
Once, in the first week, he had trapped a small animal, one of the few species that seemed to be alive on the plain. He had had matches then, had built a fire, and it seemed they had never tasted anything more delicious than the fresh meat they shared in that festive meal. "I think," Ann had said, "Hendley, I think now we are really free. For the first time."