Race Against Time (3 page)

Assured, he moved on, running, walking, running, following Canute. The forest continued while his nervousness increased.
Had
he imagined it all, and was he now trekking through perfectly innocent, ordinary countryside, making a fool of himself?

After twenty minutes he saw a light. His heart pounded, and not just from the running. Now he would find out! He warned the dog to silence and approached, ducking behind trees and bushes. It was a house of sorts. Not like any in Newton. This one was half-round, like a soap bubble on water, and it shimmered: a glowing twenty-foot hemisphere with boxes stuck to it.

As he crept closer, he discerned more detail. The house was not bubble-shaped after all—it was octagonal. Its main diameter was about twelve feet, and the four cubes bracing it were about five feet on a side. The cubes were opaque, but the walls between them were transparent. He was sure it was a house because he could see people inside.

They were brown people. A brown girl slept on a cushion against one outer panel, her hand touching the glass. A brown man, probably her father, sat poring over something on a table. John didn't see any others, but they could be hidden in the cubicles.

Brown people. If all the artificial skin were peeled away from the people of Newton, they might be like this. Betsy's statement had been confirmed. Or had it? This was not like any zoo he had heard of!

More important: this house. It was futuristic. He could tell without further investigation that it beat anything of 1960 by a century of progress, at least. It hung in the air a yard above the ground, but nothing held it there. It had internal illumination, but there were no power wires leading to it. It was tiny, but the evident comfort of its visible occupants proved that it wasn't stuffy. John saw no kitchen or closets or sanitary facilities—and if those things all fit in the cubicles, they had to be mighty efficient. This wasn't any setup for his benefit. He had come in secret and struck it randomly, following Canute's nose. Most likely it was typical of the dwellings outside of Newton.

Brown people in a house of the future. What an item! It was exciting, and more than enough to think about. Time for him to get home. He would just about have time to straddle the fence—he realized belatedly he could prepare a pole to vault over—and lift Canute past, dismantle his unwieldy rampart, and get into bed before morning. He didn't want to get caught outside the zoo the way Betsy had been and have his freedom restricted more stringently.

And he'd better agree to her terms! Now he was sure he didn't want to stay in staid Newton, when the future lay outside. Literally.

The better part of a year passed. John graduated from high school and dutifully wrote his weekly letters to Betsy, making sure they were dull. He whistled as he performed household chores and did not ask awkward questions. He took up gymnastics, becoming quite proficient at running and jumping, and he trained Canute to do some remarkable tricks. Mom and Dad were very pleased.

Those dull letters exchanged with Betsy, however, were in increasingly sophisticated code, and some of Canute's tricks were meaningless within the Newton existence. And occasionally John applied brown makeup and hurdled the fence and explored the surrounding region. He raided an unoccupied floating house and learned by trial, error, and more error how to handle modern facilities, including the fantastic communicator. His grades in the Newton school were indifferent, but had he been graded on the total amount he learned in that year, he would have been the township champion.

The date outside was 2375, and the planet was "Standard." John was apparently the last healthy, sane, young, purebred Caucasian human male in existence, and Betsy was the last healthy, etc., female. They were to be mated so that this unique line could be continued. The rest of humanity was Standard: an evenly melted mixture of the assorted human stocks of the planet earth.

Neither John nor Betsy could ascertain why this time and place in history had been chosen for this oasis of the past. Was there some prejudice against the purebred Caucasian stock, and had these two white subjects been kept in seclusion and ignorance so that they would not be ravaged by the horrors of their ancestry? If so, what had happened to the world they thought they knew?

Yet if the Caucasian heritage was so evil, why had they been kept alive at all, let alone in such an elaborate setting? The zoos were a good deal more elegant than seemed necessary. But a zoo, whether as fancy as a palace or simple as a manacle on the ankle, was still a zoo. Two things John and Betsy agreed on: to thwart this mechanically calculated mating plan and to learn the truth about the vanished white race. They worked out their escape, refining the details week after week. Once they were free and safe, and once they knew the full story, they would go their separate ways.

Then, only two weeks before they were scheduled to meet, Betsy wrote in code: "There is a third zoo." That was all she knew. Her father had a wrist TV disguised as an old-time watch. He had forgotten it one night after removing it for a shower, and she had sneaked into his room and watched it for half an hour. The picture was three-dimensional, even though barely an inch across; she had had to put her eye up close to make out the detail, and it was like looking through a telescope. She saw routine news and a weather report, and they had flashed maps of the continent to mark the scheduled rain regions. Population densities and similar factors were overlaid in color, but she hadn't had time to analyze them. She spotted her own area, and it was blank. So was John's Newton. And one more.

They had no time to hash it out thoroughly. She might have misread the maps or misinterpreted the coding of the overlays. Even if she were correct, there could be a separate explanation for the third blank—a supply depot, perhaps. But they could not dismiss the possibility that they were not quite alone. They agreed to modify their program accordingly. They would somehow check out the third zoo before they split.

John spent his last night in Newton quietly. He wondered if his parents—actually two bleached-white Standards assigned to this task—suspected that he planned to leave the zoo forever tomorrow. Of course, Mom and Dad were good people, even if they lived a lie. They were dedicated. The other inhabitants of the Newton zoo could peel and scrub and resume their natural skin color and their normal existence each evening, but Mom and Dad had to maintain their roles constantly. They had done everything they were supposed to and never once let on that it was only a job. It was not their fault that he had seen through the masquerade that day when he had jokingly ordered Canute to climb the tree, and the dog had not been smart enough to reject the directive.

Did Mom and Dad approve of what they were doing? He doubted it. If there had been a certain coldness, it had not been directed at him. Things had always been harmonious but not that close; though he certainly bore them no enmity, he was not strongly attached. Would they be punished for letting him escape? The question struck him with greater misgiving than seemed warranted, and he was surprised to find his eyes moist. He was suddenly aware that Mom and Dad were more important to him than he had realized. They must love him a little, just as he loved Canute, and the feeling was reciprocal. It did not matter, on the personal level, that they were not his true parents and Canute not a true dog. The relationships were more binding than the facts.

He would have to leave a note to exonerate them. He went to the typewriter, then caught himself and passed by it to the closet, pretending to check his suit for the forthcoming occasion. The watchers could be watching. If he made a note, someone would see it too soon, and the whole thing would be ruined. Twenty-fourth-century technology could keep him under perpetual observation without any direct "bugs," he was quite certain now. His nocturnal excursions had escaped notice only because there had seemed to be no reason to watch him sleeping every night. He had kept them to a minimum, though, refusing to push his luck unnecessarily.

Mom and Dad would just have to take their chances. He regretted it, but there was no other way.

The telephone rang. Mom pounced on it immediately, though she had never been the nervous type. "Hello," she said and listened for a moment. "Where?" Another pause, then: "Thank you," gravely.

"She's come," Dad said, touching his little moustache, and Mom nodded. Oddly, they both seemed as much on edge as John himself.

"At the bus station," Mom said. "She—she's alone."

"I'll go pick her up," John volunteered, knowing that this was what they wanted. Some kind of mistake had been made in the delivery, and they were embarrassed and nonplussed.

Betsy was supposed to arrive on the train with a chaperon. That way the Standards would be sure she remained under control and that nothing was given away. But she had turned up on the bus and alone. Had she thumbed her nose at the system by giving her chaperon the slip? No wonder Mom and Dad were covertly shaking! What if she had escaped entirely? They wanted time to recover from the shock—and to bawl out someone on the phone.

John rode his bicycle, though he realized that this would not do to bring her back. Well, the two of them could walk—and anyway, he would not bring her to the house.

This confusion of arrival actually played into his hands. He would need no ruse to get out from under the supervision of the elders. He and Betsy could put their escape plan into effect at once. But he was upset, too. What fool stunt had Betsy pulled? Their plan required everything to be absolutely routine until it was time for the big break; it was important that the Standards have no hint of what was planned. Betsy's rash behavior could have alerted the watchers and destroyed any chance to flee!

He pedaled faster, knowing that he was overreacting. Once more he felt remorse at what this would do to his folks—and hers. They were imitation parents, but they were good, kind people. But it had to be done (if it could be done!) if he and Betsy were not to be lifelong zoo specimens.

The bus station was hardly more than a notch in the wall behind the five-and-dime store. There were only two buses a day—one on Sundays—and they seldom had more than one or two passengers. The driver sold the tickets; there was no proper office. It was just a partial shelter against rain or sun and an uncomfortable place to wait. Betsy would not be pleased.

He wheeled around the corner of Main and Third, making the one-block jog north to Birch, where the bus alley diverged. It was dark here, after the bright sunshine, but he followed Canute's white network confidently. In a moment the bus shelter loomed, and he saw a dark figure standing against the wall. Canute woofed.

John's eyes were adjusting to the shadow. At first he saw little more than a white robe. Then he made out tremendous yellow ear pendants, each like a quarter slice of honeydew melon. Then he lost control of the bicycle and crashed ignominiously to the pavement.

"Humé?" she called.

John fought back the pain of a skinned knee as he extricated himself from the wreckage. "Betsy?"

It could hardly be Betsy. This was a deeply brown-skinned girl—black, really—as far from Standard tan as he was. She wore a floor-length robe, scarf-tied hair, and huge earrings. She came to stand beside him solicitously, her dark hands clasping each other.

John straightened. "Is that—are those real gold?" he asked her, his eyes compelled by the yellow. Each pendant was a good six inches long.

"Yes," she said, as though that were obvious. "You are not Humé."

"I'm John. And you're not Betsy."

"I am Ala." She also had a delicate gold ring set in her nose, and a thin black braid of hair dropped across her forehead.

They looked at each other, a white boy and a black girl. "I think there has been a mistake," John said at last, "and not just a little one."

"You were to take a foreign bride? An Arab?"

"An
Arab?
No, an American."

"I was sent to Humé of Bornu." She made a face,
"Bornu!"

"Very bad," he agreed diplomatically, not knowing where Bornu was supposed to be. "Look—something is wrong, but we can't talk here. Someone might—overhear." Already he was certain that quick privacy was crucial. This opened up a whole new dimension to the zoo-escape problem!

She looked at him more thoroughly, and he was impressed by her bearing. She was just about his own age and very pretty. "You are not of Bornu or anywhere in the Sudan, yet—" Here she stopped abruptly.

"Yet not Standard?" he asked softly.

She seemed not to hear him. She looked down, her great golden earrings shifting forward. "You have a beautiful dog."

Canute's ears perked. He moved up to sniff her hand, tail half-wagging.

"Walk beside me," John said. "We'll try to bluff it through. Don't look at any other people."

They moved at a moderate pace out of the bus alley and northward along Third Street, ignoring the townspeople they passed, and the natives of Newton ignored them, though he knew there would be amazed discussion afterward. By acting boldly he hoped to carry it off, to make it seem as though he were
supposed
to be walking with a black girl.

Third terminated in a parklike dead end. They bypassed the barrier and advanced into open country. Once among the trees, they changed direction and began a wide arc westward.

"We can be seen here, but not heard, I think," John said at last. "I've checked out the region as well as I could."

"They cannot hear us from the city unless we shout," she said. "Please tell me now. Where is this remarkable place, and who are you? I have never been told of a city like this, and the people are all jinn-white."

"They aren't really white. They're Standards—brown people with white covering. Halfway between you and me."

"Tauregs?"

"Standards. People of the twenty-fourth century."

She turned her head with the glow of gold to stare at him in amazement. "What do you mean, John of the strange city?"

Suddenly he realized that she didn't know about the Standards. He had assumed from her reactions that she did, but now he saw that he had misinterpreted them. She thought all this was real!