Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo

8

Tibsnorg Pieckymoosy began work in the Central Archive of Biological Materials. At the same time, he continued his education. The salary he made was good, but after a pro rata deduction to pay for the care he had received until now, not much remained. Expenditure for food and the rent for a dark little room consumed the rest of his money, so that his paycheck was only symbolic. The food, synthetic, was eaten in a cafeteria. It was an improvement over the IV. In the cafeteria he kept seeing the same people, which was boring, but by his calculations he couldn’t afford a better eating place, one where he would be able to come at different hours. He ex. He exchanged few words with the people he met in the cafeteria. They were all older than he. Some came in wheelchairs, but most could walk. He looked at them carefully: not one was completely normal. Each had deformities.

Tibsnorg was lucky: had he scored lower than 120 on his test, he wouldn’t have been allowed to continue his education. But he also kept working, because he feared the memories that came with free time. He would pay for all his operations himself, but he didn’t forget who had first helped him stand on his legs and conquer his nerveless body. Also, as a person, he had the right to know the truth, to know—despite the pictures on the viewscreen showing pretty landscapes, people formed correctly, and animals that had once lived-what the world really looked like now. Every five days, after work, he was allowed to go up to the surface and from an observation tower view his surroundings.

It was a grayish brown waste. Massive gray trucks continually moved across it, carrying loads from different mines. The trucks, he knew, were operated by people who could not have children, because the radiation background on the plain was too high. One of these drivers ate at Tibsnorg’s cafeteria. He looked completely normal and made three times more money than anyone else there, and yet Tibsnorg would not have traded places with him.

The tests Tibsnorg had done on himself, with his first saved money, showed that he was fertile, though probably only passively, that is, through the collection and storing of his sperm. In a short time he mastered his computer job and was promoted. His new position was administering the decisions made by the division of Central that chose material to harvest from among the living specimens. Central’s decisions were clear, logical, and in general didn’t need correction. A bonus was given for discovering mistakes in them, and Tibsnorg paid close attention to his work. The material was harvested both for the general public hospital and for individuals who at their own cost wanted to reduce their defectiveness. There was plenty of work: several dozen requests came in every day, and with them the decisions, which all had to be read, considered, processed. Soon Tibsnorg established a procedure and began to have free time, which he used to familiarize himself with the computer and learn various facts.

He remembered Piecky’s words, that because information was a privilege, one had to make the utmost use of it. He learned that the decision whether someone would be a person or not was usually based on a simple sum of scores on tests. There was therefore a fairly large margin of error. He also learned that he had become a person thanks only to Bablyoyannis’s intervention. Bablyoyannis had changed Central’s decision to give Piecky personhood. The number of points Piecky had earned for mental ability had in fact exceeded what Snorg accumulated for physical function, correctness of form, and intelligence. When Tibsnorg read on the viewscreen that Tib had received exactly a zero, he uttered an obscenity.

He had always been intrigued by the light of day that fell into the Room. Now he learned that it was only a lamp in the visible and the ultraviolet spectrum, a lamp that was turned on and off periodically. The Room was located far beneath the earth. On the surface, he saw the sun only once-a bright-gray disk shining through a thick mist. The sun was better now than it had been; in the time when the earth was covered constantly with snow, the sun never pierced the clouds.