“Cassie!” cried Mom.
“Tris, I’ll handle this,” Dad said, and Mom snatched the milk from the table and went elsewhere. While his father talked, Martin watched his mother slam things around the kitchen. He couldn’t believe Cassie had been dumb enough to talk badly about the President. These smart Wonder kids sure could act stupid sometimes. No wonder people called them freaks.
“You see,” Dad said slowly, “the President would never tell a lie. He wouldn’t do that because he’s our leader. We don’t talk about that kind of thing. Not ever. We don’t even think about that kind of thing.”
“Yes, sir,” whispered Cassie.
“We don’t talk disrespectfully about voting,” he went on. “It’s the most important thing we do. People who don’t vote can’t be trusted. When the time comes for job assignments to come over the computer, those people don’t get jobs, and then they can’t get married. They don’t fit in anywhere, and no one wants to be around them. Sooner or later, they leave the suburb, and they don’t come back.”
I wonder where they go, thought Martin. Off and on, he’d become aware of certain people not in their houses anymore, of kids at school shrugging over someone on their block who had gone missing. But the suburb held several thousand residents, and the adults never mentioned the ones who had left.
“We’re very lucky people,” Dad continued, on familiar ground now. “Before, things were terrible: everybody getting sick, not enough food, not enough jobs. So they built the suburbs, and our families were the lucky ones who got to live here.”
Martin was barely listening. Every lecture ended this way, like a little commercial. We live in the suburbs, we’re the lucky ones, we have everything we want. Slurping cereal, Martin tried to imagine the alternative: sitting around outside the steel dome in the blowing waste of sand and poison gas that people said was out there.
“We have everything we want,” Dad concluded. “We have an easy life. All the President wants in return is a little help, a little appreciation. That’s not much to ask, now is it?”
Cassie shook her head, staring at her cereal as its colors slowly faded to gray. Martin gave her a little kick under the table. How many times had he warned her? If you want to find out about something, don’t ask. It was much better to listen at doorways. And that reminded him.
“Hey, Dad, I want to come to work with you today.”
Dad’s eyelids flickered slightly. “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “Stuck in the loading bay when all your buddies are out having a good time . . .” He trailed off and looked appealingly at Martin.
Martin looked innocently back. “Come on, Dad, you always want me to go; you know, quality time and all. And now when I want to, you’re backing off. What’s the big problem?”
Dad swirled the lukewarm dregs of his coffee, stalling for time. If he raises an excuse, thought Martin, I’ll just ask more questions. Pretty soon, it’ll be obvious he’s hiding something, and I know he doesn’t want that.
His father must have come to the same conclusion. “All right,” he said. “But I want you to promise you’ll stay out of the way this morning. Big loads are coming in.” He glanced at the clock. “Fifteen minutes till we leave.”
Fifteen minutes was plenty of time to pull on the jeans that lay crumpled by Martin’s bed and trade his pajama top for the T-shirt he’d worn to school the day before. So what if its logo had faded? It was the softest T-shirt he owned. But Mom would have a fit if she saw it two days in a row, so he prudently covered it up with a sweatshirt.
Martin shut the annoying little dog in his room, but before he got to the garage, it caught up with him again, giving shrill barks of joy at their reunion. That was strange. He walked back to Cassie’s room. She was curled up on her bed with her big plush bunny and a coterie of sympathetic fashion dolls.
“Did you let the dog out?” he asked.
Eyes dull, Cassie shook her head, and Martin felt bad for her. “Do me a favor, stay out of Mom’s way while I’m gone,” he said, tugging a curl to watch it spring back into place. “Mom and Dad are freaked out about something, and I don’t want to sit through any more boring lectures.”
His tone was kinder than his words. Cassie gave him a grateful look. “Nobody let your dog out,” she said. “I saw the door open by itself when I came down the hall.”
Martin turned to the beagle, surprised and a little impressed. “Did you let yourself out? I didn’t know toys could do that. I think that’s kind of cool. Okay, computer dog, you can come with me.”
Today was Sport Day, the first day of the weekend, and the streets reverberated with noisy life. Driving the scooter cautiously, Dad wove in and out of impromptu soccer matches, past a pickup basketball game going on around a streetside net, and through the middle of a freeze-tag tournament. Martin glanced back at the little dog trotting after them and began to see the fun of owning something that showed him such devotion. All the way across the suburb, its little paws pumped like pistons; but then, until its batteries ran down, that computer-chip creature never would get tired.
Dad turned down an alley behind the last row of buildings, where the steel dome, braced with its reinforcing network of girders, rose from its concrete bed. Here, it was not the tidy structure that appeared to float above them, but a heavy tangle of crossing I beams, ugly plates, and gigantic rivets, streaked with rust and bubbled with layers of thick powder blue paint. The nearest skylights—great flat butter-colored panels—were hazy with many thousands of lines and scratches. Martin squinted at them out of habit, looking for clues about the world outside.
Sometimes they glowed brightly, and sometimes they didn’t, but he had never seen so much as a shadow move across their translucent surfaces.
“Get the elevator,” Dad said. Martin jumped off the scooter, jogged to the tan door set in the back of the grocery store building, and typed his father’s password onto the keypad. Martin had been getting the elevator for his father since he was old enough to punch buttons. Coming or going, Dad always seemed to have a vehicle to maneuver or an armful of stuff.
They rode the elevator down, which was the only direction it could go. At the bottom, they were in Dad’s world.
Every day, as the suburbanites watched their television sets to alleviate their boredom with a sky that never changed, catchy ads alerted them to new products that they couldn’t wait to buy. Shipments of goods arrived at the suburb constantly, and a steady stream of discarded items left. These were loaded into boxes, which were packed into larger boxes, which were put inside enormous boxes on flashing steel wheels, the packets that came and went on the rail lines. There was a packet for every need, from the refrigerated ones that held their food and the double-hulled ones that held the power plant fuel to the plain black packet that came when a local inhabitant died, the one that took a person to meet his maker.
Martin and Dad stepped out of the elevator into the loading bay, a large utilitarian space lit by banks of fluorescent tubes. Iron rails crossed and recrossed the polished concrete floor, and packets of all descriptions waited on those rails, in the process of being loaded via mechanical carts or overhead cranes. Yellow paint striped the floor, warning people where not to walk, but it didn’t matter anymore. Only one human was on the payroll in the loading bay, and he didn’t go near the rails. Tool bots did all the hard work these days.
Dad was the packet chief, in charge of making sure that the right loads were hooked up and waiting to leave on the rail lines. He sat at the computer console, reporting on arrivals and departures, as his freight bots assembled the packets, lined them up on the outbound rails, dragged in the arriving packets, and broke their contents down for distribution. Dad held the highest-paying job in the suburb: it required a reasonable amount of brains and attention to detail for a minimum of six days a week. Some people pitied Martin’s father because he had to work for a living, but he said he enjoyed having something to do.
Dad tapped a key to bring up the computer screen, ch
ecking for the daily schedule. He typed:
SUBURB HM1 ONLINE GOOD MORNING FRED HOPE YOUR WEEKEND IS STARTING WELL
The bright green letters glowed at the output line for a few seconds, and then they moved up, replaced:
SUBURB BNBRX ONLINE GOOD MORNING WALTER THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND WISHES BUT I PREFER NOT TO DISCUSS PERSONAL MATTERS
Dad sighed. “Fourteen years, and he hasn’t unbent an inch. So much for the daily attempt at good manners.”
The heavy-duty freight bots were clustering around now, ready for their orders, folded as small as they could be so that their many long telescoping arms would pose no danger to their boss. Dad began reading out the contents to be placed inside the first packet.
Martin scouted around the busy loading bay, looking for the mysterious “thems” that had come off the packet car from Central. A nudge at his knee interrupted him. The little hound was looking up at him, wagging its white-tipped tail. It, too, looked as if it were waiting for orders.
“No, I don’t know what I’m after,” he said irritably. “I’ll know when I see it, though.”
He skirted the large well-lit space, watching as the booms swung loaded crates into yawning containers. Several packets rolled by, screeching and thumping into one another as they slowed to a stop. A quick scan of them turned up nothing unusual.
The dog bumped Martin’s knee again, its expression eager. Obviously, it counted on him to come up with some sort of plan. “I know what I’m doing,” he told it. But he didn’t. He stopped to think. “Okay, we’ll see when the Central packet arrives today. Maybe more inspection things will be on it.”
He sidled up to his father’s console, trying to appear nonchalant. Dad’s computer screen informed him that Central’s shipment would come in at 8:57 a.m. Martin stepped back just in time to keep the beagle from nudging him again. “Look, computer chip, get your own life!” he snapped.
The dog’s soulful brown eyes gazed up at him in unblinking adoration. You are my life, they seemed to say.
“Whatever,” he muttered. “I guess we could kill time finding rats.” His toy barked joyfully in agreement.
“Rats?” Dad said, overhearing them. “Son, we don’t have rats in HM1.” But Martin and the dog were already walking away.
Where had Jimmy found his rat? Martin remembered him saying something about the warehouse. They followed a mechanical cart as it rolled down a short hallway and into a large high room filled with cardboard boxes resting on open shelves. The cart sprouted long stilts to deposit its load on a shelf above their heads, and they edged gingerly past it.
The beagle bounded ahead now, sniffing the cement floor. It led Martin into the produce room. Long flat boxes of fresh fruits and vegetables were stacked into chest-high towers by the door, and nectarines filled the shallow plastic bins of a rolling trolley nearby. Down the center of the room, specialized bots with many long rubber fingers were washing bunches of radishes at a white porcelain trough, and industrial refrigerators lined three walls, humming in a maddening whine.
The dog wove its way through the cardboard stacks, around the bases of the busy bots, and straight into a large mound of vegetable rubbish heaped against the unoccupied wall. By the time Martin reached the pile, it was digging furiously. Bruised lettuce leaves and dried-up orange rinds went flying through the air.
“Stop! Stop!” called Martin. “Get out of that junk!”
His dog emerged, tail wagging cheerfully. Moist brown apple peels clung to its nose and wound around its neck in a festive chain.
“You look gross,” Martin told it severely. “Playing in the trash! Stop fooling around and get to work finding rats.”
Shedding the peelings with a mysterious swiftness, the beagle sat down and yelped in protest, but Martin made it follow him back into the warehouse.
“Rats . . . ,” he mused, looking down the aisles of cardboard boxes. At a loss, he studied the labels, as if one of the containers might be stamped RATS—SIX GROSS—STORE THIS SIDE UP—DO NOT OPEN WITH CUTTING TOOL.
The dog barked again, shrill and annoying. “Shut up!” Martin said. He glanced at his watch: 8:55. The packet was almost due.
Martin waited for the packet’s arrival behind a load of new laundry-sorting machines, with a good view of the incoming rails but hidden from his father. Warning bells clanged as the large metal gates swung open, and the incoming packet rolled in dripping from the humid darkness of the washing room. No human had ever set foot in that room beyond the steel gates. Special machines there decontaminated the packets, so that the poisons couldn’t come in from outside.
Just one car from Central today, its corrugated sides rust red. Martin scanned it, feeling disappointed. He didn’t see anything strange. No, hold on. The little black box stuck on the under-carriage, right next to a big steel wheel. Had he seen one of those before?
As Martin walked forward to get a better look at the box, a panel on its side slid open, and water came pouring out. No, that wasn’t right; it couldn’t be water because it wasn’t dripping. What liquid moved like that?
The silver substance clung to the bottom of the packet car, flowing along it with gluey sluggishness. A small wave formed, streaming down the big wheel, and puddled around Martin’s shoes.
“Cripes!” he yelped, jumping back.
Hundreds of small oval forms were hurrying along, climbing over one another in their haste. They were fat and gelatinous, about an inch long, fringed by many short, rippling legs. As they surged across the wide space, they lost their silver color and mimicked the shiny gray of the cement floor. Within seconds, they disappeared, flawlessly camouflaged, their movement nothing more than a vague impression.
“Don’t look at them,” said a tense voice. Dad was behind him. “Act like you don’t see them. We’re not supposed to know about them, not really. Or be too nosy.”
The mass of busy creatures made Martin shiver. He had the horrible feeling that one had glided up his sock. “What are they?” he asked, hopping on one foot to shake out his jeans leg.
Dad caught his elbow and dragged him away. “It’s government business,” he answered. “Don’t ask about them. And don’t tell. Remember, the walls have ears.” He glanced uneasily at the invisible swarm. “Eyes, too,” he muttered.
Martin followed his father to the computer console, still feeling as if those things were all over him. While Dad reported the arrival of the Central packet W/OUT INCIDENT, Martin rubbed the back of his neck to stop the tickles going up and down his spine. After a few minutes, the prickly feeling went away. “Come on, computer chip,” he called to his dog.
“Where are you going?” Dad asked anxiously.
“Back to the warehouse,” Martin lied. “We were hunting for rats.”
Once they were out of sight behind the laundry machines again, he ducked down and studied the floor. Nothing moved there. The little horde was gone.
“Okay, computer dog, time to earn your batteries,” he whispered. “Find me those crawly things.” The beagle tilted its head and cocked one floppy ear in surprise. “Yeah, I know what I said to Dad. Just do what I tell you.”
The dog obediently sniffed the floor, moving in the direction the shapes had gone. It trotted behind a stack of metal panels and followed a yellow-marked rail line out of the loading bay. A door slid open to let them through, and lights flickered on.
They were in a low room, octagonal and very wide, large enough to hold everyone in the suburb standing in a big crowd. The rail line bisected the space, but the warning stripes were gone; here, the floor was covered with dark gray vinyl embossed to look like stone. The brown paneling had an imitation wood grain pattern, and brassy fixtures held up flame-shaped electric bulbs with lights inside that wobbled back and forth.
This was the room where the black packet waited when one of the suburb’s members died. Here, the people gathered, spoke about the deceased, and loaded up the body. Then, as they stood and watched, the packet car rolled off down the rails.
Martin could still remember the day when Granny had taken that trip. He had run after the packet, crying; in his memory, the rails were long bright smears. He had run all the way across the loading bay, following that big, scary box. Then the security horn had sounded its earsplitting blast, and a net of steel mesh had dropped down to catch him. The big gates had swung shut before he could struggle free. Granny had gotten away.
High-pitched yelping interrupted his reverie. The beagle was running in circles. It paused, whimpering, and looked around. Then it trotted toward a custodial bot that was vacuuming the floor nearby.
Bots came in all shapes and sizes. This one looked like a small upturned trash can, ringed at the bottom by a circle of optical sensors. Its vacuum engine hummed away as it rolled repeatedly over a pale spot on the floor. Blocking its path, the beagle emitted a high, vibrating tone from somewhere inside its chest. The custodial bot switched off its vacuum and gave an answering whine, more tinny and even more annoying.
“Whoa! Computer dog, you speak bot!” Martin said, considerably impressed. “I’ve never seen a pet do that. Do the vacuum guy a favor then, and tell him that spot’s gum.”
Moving purposefully once more, the beagle trotted across the room and down a poorly lit hallway covered with old red carpeting that had raveled at the edges. Martin caught sight of a shimmer on the wall by his head. The trail of plump, glistening things was there, moving along steadily, blending in with the beige waffle-weave wallpaper. The creatures reached a door marked AUTHORIZED ENTRANCE ONLY and poured through a crack at the top of the doorframe. In a few seconds, they were gone.
Martin tried the handle. Locked. He fingered the keypad without hope. “Well, that figures,” he said bitterly. “This place is all about locked doors, and no one ever does anything about it.”
His dog studied the keypad, its brow wrinkled in thought. Then, slowly and carefully, it walked right up the door, its feet making plopping noises. It placed a paw over the keypad, and green numbers flickered across the screen. After a few seconds, Martin heard a click. He turned the knob, and the door swung inward, the beagle clinging to it like a stuntman. On the other side was vast darkness and the drone of machinery. “Unreal!” he whispered.