A Generation Removed

CHAPTER 1

The Euth Center’s vehicle port hissed upward and open, punching a bright rectangle of light through the evening darkness.

Outside waited a returning Euth Wagon, the Center’s harsh interior glare turning the front half of the vehicle’s midnight black chassis to twilight.

The Wagon’s driver jockeyed forward and back, lining up for entry, a difficult task since the port, a remnant of earlier days and smaller Wagons, afforded him bare inches of clearance on either side.

Slowly, cautiously the Wagon pulled in, adding yet another gouged tally mark to the many others already scouring the vehicle’s side in mute visual testimony to the ample frequency of multiple comings and goings.

The crew emerged, the two-man Euth unit from out of the forward control section, the doctor from the rear examination and disposal portion. The doctor stripped off his disposable gray uniform smock and stuffed the garment into a flash can.

Yawning and stretching, clad only in porous weave shorts and T-shirt, he disappeared through an exit door into the Center proper.

The two Euths, a typical contingent, both in their late teens, both tall and husky, assumed positions, one on either side of the Wagon.

In their black vinyl uniforms, they shone like icicles, like daggers of frozen oil. In unison, each yanked down on an L-shaped handle. With a steady, shuddering groan, a compartment opened in the Wagon’s belly. There, stacked in neat rows, lay ten canvas sacks. An average night’s haul.

Laughing at a private joke, the two unloaded the sacks one by one. They chucked the sacks into a red chute where a vacuum sucked them in with a soft pop.

Somewhere deep in the Center’s bowels, the remains inside the sacks would be sifted, sorted, and processed, elements and chemicals extracted, gold fillings wrenched loose, anything remaining ground into fertilizer. The body in each sack yielded about six pounds of reusable material, not much on an individual basis, but a Center didn’t deal in individuals. Centers dealt in volume.

As the two finished their task, their replacements and another doctor entered the bay. They exchanged genial greetings around.

While the first two Euths buttoned up the Wagon’s undercarriage, the fresh crew climbed aboard.

Groaning under the force necessary to propel a vehicle of such size into motion, the Wagon lumbered backward, out the portal door—gaining one more scratch in the process—and away.

In all, the Wagon had been off the streets for less than ten minutes.

With silent efficiency, the port glided shut.

That’s all of them, said one of the four observers hidden in an alleyway across the street. He displayed a scrap of paper. A series of vertical slashes indicated the twelve Wagons in this Center’s complement had come and gone. They wouldn’t return again for two hours. The Euths manning the Center was now as low as that number was likely to get.

The men’s leader drew out from the wall to face them. Ready? he asked. The lastex mask drawn around his head stretched taut across his chin and jaw to underscore the word.

The other three men nodded, their own masks cutting flesh-colored arcs through the air.

Even the relatively little the masks revealed of their faces, nothing but eyes and mouths, was enough to lend the group a distinct and inherent commonality. All had deep lines under the eyes, thrust up from time-worn cheeks. Cracked, flaking mouths punctuated at each end by the wrinkled parentheses of a life’s worth of laughter and frowns. Teeth yellowed and pitted from malnutrition and dental neglect. Eyebrows gray or gray-flecked.

To a man, they all had eyes hardened with well-aged determination. All but one carried folded white sacks. All of them carried pistols.

Remember, cautioned the Leader, no improvisations. We do this exactly the way we planned. Ten minutes. After that, the place will be crawling with Euths. We grab as much as we can, but when I say leave, we leave. The stuff does nobody any good unless we get everything out. Clear?

Once again, the masks bobbed forward and back.

Let’s go, said the Leader forcibly.

The four of them moved out.

They stayed crouched inside the safety of the alleyway’s shadows for as long as they could.

Then they darted into the overhead lights, across the street, and up the stairs into the Center.

Only one person occupied the lobby, a teen-ager sitting in a large glassed-in office immediately to the right of the front entrance. A sign above his door identified him as Chief Administrator. He had a gun at his head before he could swing his feet off the top of his walnut desk.

While none of the raiders saw or heard any form of alarm, they assumed that somehow one had been sounded. Euth Centers operated much too efficiently to suppose anything else.

One of the raiders, the one without a sack, bound and gagged the youngster, then positioned himself to have a clear view of the lobby entrance.

The rest headed up a nearby flight of stairs. They wound down a series of narrow hallways to an unmarked door.

The Leader tried the handle. Locked. No time for finesse. He rammed his gun against the lock and pulled the trigger. The door slammed open. Move, commanded the Leader over the cacophony of echoes thumping through the halls.

They entered.

Shelves stacked floor to ceiling with medicine lined three sides of the room. Pills, spansules, salves, liquids, a pharmacological gold mine. On the fourth side, larger shelves held a variety of analytical instruments, some marked as to kind and function, some, the more common ones such as the blood and amino acid analyzers, simply numbered for staff checkout.

O.K., Doc, said the Leader. Show us what to take.

The raider called Doc circled the room, pointing out various medicines as he went. The other two grabbed what he indicated and stuffed the medicines into their sacks. They still had quite a bit of the room to cover when the Leader called time to go. All three immediately headed for the door.

On his way out, Doc noticed something: an Autosampler set into a small cupboard. Impulsively, he went over and wrestled the rather large instrument toward the front of the shelf, moving first one side, then the other.

Leave that, the Leader commanded him. We haven’t got time.

Doc didn’t slacken off. You have no idea how valuable this will be to me, he wheezed, his strenuous efforts sending his breath into convulsive gasps. I can do wonderful things with this, save countless lives.

Glancing warily down the corridor, the Leader motioned him along. Doc, there’s no time. Leave that and come with us.

The Leader and the other raider, assuming Doc’s compliance, hustled into the hall.

Doc heard them descending the stairs.

Stubbornly, he continued to work. At last, with one final tug, he hauled the Autosampler free. Holding the device under one arm, his bag of drugs under the other, he hobbled to the staircase.

An armed Euth now guarded the staircase, effectively cutting off Doc’s route of escape.

Doc reversed direction, threading his way down a series of hallways to a fire exit several corridors over.

Sagging wearily from the weight of his treasure, he eased the door open with his rear end and backed out.

Straight into the waiting arms of two Euths.

Each of them seized an elbow. Together, they shoved him roughly back into the corridor, where he banged into the opposite wall.

Stunned, he lost his grip on the Autosampler. The precious instrument crashed to the floor.

One of the Euths stooped over to collect the parts of the shattered instrument. The other Euth stopped him. Don’t bother, he said. Euths, in the course of their work, grew accustomed to waste. We got hundreds of those gadgets. One more or less ain’t going to matter.

With that, the Euth braced Doc against the wall and disarmed him.

The two Euths moved in, so close Doc could smell their breaths, a cloying mixture of chocolate bars and cola.

One of the Euths pulled off Doc’s mask. Doc was old—fifty-five, at least, possibly sixty. Fingers of white hair hung about his head in sweaty strands dangling almost to his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved nor, judging from his body odor, bathed for days.

You lousy Gerrys, snapped the bigger of the two Euths. You never give up, do you?

He hit Doc an efficient, spiraling blow to the groin. The old man crumpled. The Euth kicked him once in the small of the back, then again in the kidneys.

Caught up in the spirit, the other Euth joined in.

CHAPTER 2

Another GED.

Wagons had a busy night.

By rote, Herschel pushed the two keys, G, E and D. Instantaneously, those letters joined a medium-long sequence of others in the file displayed on his screen. Touching his optical inscription pen to the screen’s surface, he affixed the date and his signature, Herschel Lichter, to the file, thereby certifying the data’s transcription.

With a practiced flick of his index finger, he joggled the wipe key, automatically returning the file to proper position in Data Bank Central. In all likelihood, the file would never be called for again.

GE indicated the offender was geriatric, a Gerry, someone over the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five, whose crime was harboring a euthable disease. D meant subject deceased.

Wasting neither time nor motion, Herschel moved his hand smoothly across the control panel to thumb the input switch. On the left half of his screen appeared a file number followed in parentheses by the data to be inserted. Hectic night on the streets indeed. Another GED.

Herschel punched the access key and the file number, and visually verified the file that appeared microseconds later on the blank half of his screen. As with the previous file, he added G, E and D, certified the insertion, wiped the screen, advanced to the next input, and followed the exact same procedures once more.

Herschel worked as a data file clerk in the Chicago Police Department’s file room. He operated one of the one hundred access terminals arranged in a circle about the department’s main data retrieval bin.

Even though completely miniaturized, the data system and associated hardware filled almost the entire room.

The system’s drab paint job, beige and black, provided the room’s only swatch of color. The file room walls were a drab gray, as if to match the nature of the work they enclosed.

Rows of husky amber lights overhead filled the room with an eternal and empty promise of forthcoming dawn. The lighting provided just enough brightness to make terminal keys clearly visible, but not too much to overshadow the brownish, weak-tea images flashed on the screens. The file clerks’ functional gray metal-and-cord chairs had been specially engineered to provoke spinal stress on the lower back, a ramification of some teen-aged administrator’s belief that a constant physical prod of some sort was necessary and advisable to prevent clerks from being lulled into carelessness by the stupefyingly repetitive nature of their duties. Conical absorbers studded the ceilings and walls at regular intervals, sucking up every driblet of sound. In sum, an atmosphere of sterility interlaced with insignificance.

When he was first assigned here, Herschel struggled to avoid the robotic submissiveness such monotonous work unfailingly breeds. As he grew older, as his daily routine coated him with ever greater degrees of obscurity, stripped him of importance, involvements, anything with the potential, however remote, of thrusting him into a position of responsibility, eventually he simply gave up his resistance. Now, at age fifty-one, only four years away from mandatory retirement, he reluctantly accepted the inevitability of frittering away the rest of his productive life in irrevocable inconsequence, doing a job where the only requisites were to be accurate more often than you were not, and to finish your daily quota more often than you didn’t.

Absently, Herschel shoved his glasses higher up his nose with the tip of his index finger. They fell immediately back down. Absorbed in resolving the tiny notations on his screen, he didn’t notice.

At last, the data deciphered, he punched in the information. This nearly caught him up with his day’s filing. He keyed out a time hack. Perfect. At the rate he was going, he would finish his daily quota easily and thus avoid being kept after work.

He had his thumb poised above the input switch when a two-line message winked onto his screen. He read the words, blinked incredulously, polished his glasses on his shirtfront, then read the message again. According to this, he was to report at once to the Captain upstairs.

So conditioned had Herschel become to rule by negative sanction that he immediately braced himself for a reprimand, and a stern one at that if delivered from the top man on the force.

He shut down his terminal, pushed back his chair, and shambled upstairs into the administrative levels, traveling with the adverse resolve of a soldier forced by duty into a confrontation he knew he was destined to lose.

The Captain’s secretary, a beautiful creature of perhaps fifteen, chattered into her personal rectangular plastic phone. While she talked, she twiddled her free fingers through the red, white, and blue scarf, the kind reserved for wear exclusively by those under twenty, knotted loosely about her neck. From her conversation, she was engaged in nothing more than idle gossip, not even work related, yet when Herschel arrived she completely ignored him.

He cleared his throat and rocked back and forth on his heels several times in front of her desk but failed to gain her attention.

Lady, he addressed her, using the standard venerational mode prescribed when speaking to someone her age, pardon my intrusion, but my name is Herschel Lichter.

Her lips wrinkled angrily together, her eyes two narrow, darkened gashes beneath the pastel green of her lid toner. She removed her phone earlet and tossed the cord across her shoulder. She leaned forward on her desk, supporting herself on her elbows, her hands pressed together into fists. Suddenly, one of those fists, the right one, came alive, the index finger unfolding. She pointed that finger directly at him.

I am talking on the phone. She broke distinctly after each word to emphasize the force of her rebuke. When I am ready for you, I will let you know. Until then, you will sit down and keep quiet.

She pointed to one of the chairs.

Herschel sat down. The chair nearly swallowed him up. No spinal stress in the Captain’s office.

The secretary resumed her personal conversation, dragging her end out longer and longer solely, Herschel suspected, as a means to further chastise him by prolonging his wait.

Finally, after several minutes of what amounted to a monologue, she signed off and removed her earlet. All right, you, she said, crooking her finger at Herschel, beckoning him to her. What do you want?

My name is Herschel Lichter. He spoke with his head hung so far down that his chin bumped against his chest with every word. I got an order to report here.

She treated him sternly, the way a parent might a rambunctious child. Lichter, you say. She consulted her desk terminal. Okay. I’ve got you down. Go on in.

She pointed to the door, repeatedly poking her finger in the proper direction, as though she suspected he would, if left to his own devices, get lost covering the short distance he had to travel.

Once inside the Captain’s office, Herschel did a left half turn to bring his body to a halt in front of the Captain’s desk.

The Captain sat leaning forward in his plush desk chair, his knees spread in a wide V.

He was obese to the point of obscenity. Waterfalls of flesh washed down both sides of his cheeks to the stump of his monstrous neck. His arms, bared to the elbow, were as big around as Herschel’s legs; his fingers protruded from the ends of them like overstuffed soysages. He had a miniature buffet set out in front of him. Herschel could smell the delightful aroma of hamburgers and cheese, two of his favorite foods, items he hadn’t eaten, much less seen in stores, for years.

The Captain’s gun butt protruded from a shoulder holster worn outside his coveralls.

As with anyone between the ages of twelve and twenty, he had the legal right to choose his own name. For obvious reasons, he had picked Captain. He had that name embroidered in red on a white silk patch that he wore sewn over his heart. Below that patch he had his seamstress affix a blue rectangular silk swatch. Exactly in the center he pinned his badge.

You Lichter? asked Captain, snatching a sardine from out of a tin in front of him. He talked with his mouth open, displaying to Herschel a large, gruesome wad of partially masticated fish.

Yes, sir.

Assuming this to be the start of his reprimand, Herschel hung his head contritely. Long experience with teen-aged administrators had taught him there was no point in argument.

I’ve been reading about you, Lichter. Captain waved his whole hand at Herschel, forming a complex series of horizontal and vertical circles in the air, instructing Herschel to lift his head and turn around.

Behind him Herschel discovered the largest data terminal he had ever seen. The glass screen took up nearly one whole wall. The letters in the upper right-hand quadrant were nearly six inches high. Even with his poor eyesight, he had no trouble reading the name they spelled out. His name. Herschel Lichter. That was his file on display.

Starting at the top and zigzagging downward he skimmed through the data, searching for the slightest notation of impropriety. He found none.

As he turned back, Captain was just finishing off the last in a bottle of maraschino cherries. Holding the far edge of the bottle between his thumb and forefinger, he swigged down what was left of the juice, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Lichter, he asked bluntly, you ever hear of the OPA?

OPA. The Old People’s Army. A small band of aged radicals struggling