A hardly perceptible purple glow pervaded the air in the room of the health-rays. Perhaps two score men lay about, naked, under the ray tubes. Chuls stripped himself and selected the space under a vacant tube. Rikud, for his part, wanted to get back to the viewport and watch the one new bright star. He had the distinct notion it was growing larger every moment. He turned to go, but the door clicked shut and a metallic voice said. "Fifteen minutes under the tubes, please."
Rikud muttered to himself and undressed. The world had begun to annoy him. Now why shouldn't a man be permitted to do what he wanted, when he wanted to do it? There was a strange thought, and Rikud's brain whirled once more down the tortuous course of half-formed questions and unsatisfactory answers.
He had even wondered what it was like to get hurt. No one ever got hurt. Once, here in this same ray room, he had had the impulse to hurl himself head-first against the wall, just to see what would happen. But something soft had cushioned the impact—something which had come into being just for the moment and then abruptly passed into non-being again, something which was as impalpable as air.
Rikud had been stopped in this action, although there was no real authority to stop him. This puzzled him, because somehow he felt that there should have been authority. A long time ago the reading machine in the library had told him of the elders—a meaningless term—who had governed the world. They told you to do something and you did it, but that was silly, because now no one told you to do anything. You only listened to the buzzer.
And Rikud could remember the rest of what the reading machine had said. There had been a revolt—again a term without any real meaning, a term that could have no reality outside of the reading machine—and the elders were overthrown. Here Rikud had been lost utterly. The people had decided that they did not know where they were going, or why, and that it was unfair that the elders alone had this authority. They were born and they lived and they died as the elders directed, like little cogs in a great machine. Much of this Rikud could not understand, but he knew enough to realize that the reading machine had sided with the people against the elders, and it said the people had won.
Now in the health room, Rikud felt a warmth in the rays. Grudgingly, he had to admit to himself that it was not unpleasant. He could see the look of easy contentment on Chuls' face as the rays fanned down upon him, bathing his old body in a forgotten magic which, many generations before Rikud's time, had negated the necessity for a knowledge of medicine. But when, in another ten years, Chuls would perish of old age, the rays would no longer suffice. Nothing would, for Chuls. Rikud often thought of his own death, still seventy-five years in the future, not without a sense of alarm. Yet old Chuls seemed heedless, with only a decade to go.
Under the tube at Rikud's left lay Crifer. The man was short and heavy through the shoulders and chest, and he had a lame foot. Every time Rikud looked at that foot, it was with a sense of satisfaction. True, this was the only case of its kind, the exception to the rule, but it proved the world was not perfect. Rikud was guiltily glad when he saw Crifer limp.
But, if anyone else saw it, he never said a word. Not even Crifer.
Now Crifer said, "I've been reading again, Rikud."