Isaac Asimov: Profession

George muttered, “Do they know—”

Ellenford assured him at once, “We gave no details.”

At first George had refused to eat. They fed him intravenously. They hid sharp objects and kept him under guard. Hali Omani came to be his roommate and his stolidity had a calming effect.

One day, out of sheer desperate boredom, George asked for a book. Omani, who himself read books constantly, looked up, smiling broadly. George almost withdrew the request then, rather than give any of them satisfaction, then thought: What do I care?

He didn’t specify the book and Omani brought one on chemistry. It was in big print, with small words and many illustrations. It was for teen-agers. He threw the book violently against the wall.

That’s what he would be always. A teen-ager all his life. A pre-Educate forever and special books would have to be written for him. He lay smoldering in bed, staring at the ceiling, and after an hour had passed, he got up sulkily, picked up the book, and began reading.

It took him a week to finish it and then he asked for another.

“Do you want me to take the first one back?” asked Omani.

George frowned. There were things in the book he had not understood, yet he was not so lost to shame as to say so.

But Omani said, “Come to think of it, you’d better keep it. Books are meant to be read and reread.”

It was that same day that he finally yielded to Omani’s invitation that he tour the place. He dogged at the Nigerian’s feet and took in his surroundings with quick hostile glances.

The place was no prison certainly. There were no walls, no locked doors, no guards. But it was a prison in that the inmates had no place to go outside.

It was somehow good to see others like himself by the dozen. It was so easy to believe himself to be the only one in the world so—maimed.

He mumbled, “How many people here anyway?”

“Two hundred and five, George, and this isn’t the only place of the sort in the world. There are thousands.”

Men looked up as he passed, wherever he went; in the gymnasium, along the tennis courts; through the library (he had never in his life imagined books could exist in such numbers; they were stacked, actually stacked, along long shelves). They stared at him curiously and he returned the looks savagely. At least they were no better than he; no call for them to look at him as though he were some sort of curiosity.

Most of them were in their twenties. George said suddenly, “What happens to the older ones?”

Omani said, “This place specializes in the younger ones.” Then, as though he suddenly recognized an implication in George’s question that he had missed earlier, he shook his head gravely and said, “They’re not put out of the way, if that’s what you mean. There are other Houses for older ones.”

“Who cares?” mumbled George, who felt he was sounding too interested and in danger of slipping into surrender.

“You might. As you grow older, you will find yourself in a House with occupants of both sexes.”

That surprised George somehow. “Women, too?”

“Of course. Do you suppose women are immune to this sort of thing?”

George thought of that with more interest and excitement than he had felt for anything since before that day when—He forced his thought away from that.

Omani stopped at the doorway of a room that contained a small closed-circuit television set and a desk computer. Five or six men sat about the television. Omani said, “This is a classroom.”

George said, “What’s that?”

“The young men in there are being educated. Not,” he added, quickly, “in the usual way.”

“You mean they’re cramming it in bit by bit.”

“That’s right. This is the way everyone did it in ancient times.”

This was what they kept telling him since he had come to the House but what of it? Suppose there had been a day when mankind had not known the diatherm-oven. Did that mean he should be satisfied to eat meat raw in a world where others ate it cooked?

He said, “Why do they want to go through that bit-by-bit stuff?”

“To pass the time, George, and because they’re curious.”

“What good does it do them?”

“It makes them happier.”

George carried that thought to bed with him.

The next day he said to Omani ungraciously, “Can you get me into a classroom where I can find out something about programming?”

Omani replied heartily, “Sure.”

It was slow and he resented it. Why should someone have to explain something and explain it again? Why should he have to read and reread a passage, then stare at a mathematical relationship and not understand it at once? That wasn’t how other people had to be.

Over and over again, he gave up. Once he refused to attend classes for a week.

But always he returned. The official in charge, who assigned reading, conducted the television demonstrations, and even explained difficult passages and concepts, never commented on the matter.

George was finally given a regular task in the gardens and took his turn in the various kitchen and cleaning details. This was represented to him as being an advance, but he wasn’t fooled. The place might have been far more mechanized than it was, but they deliberately made work for the young men in order to give them the illusion of worth-while occupation, of usefulness. George wasn’t fooled.

They were even paid small sums of money out of which they could buy certain specified luxuries or which they could put aside for a problematical use in a problemical old age. George kept his money in an open jar, which he kept on a closet shelf. He had no idea how much he had accumulated. Nor did he care.

He made no real friends though he reached the stage where a civil good day was in order. He even stopped brooding (or almost stopped) on the miscarriage of justice that had placed him there. He would go weeks without dreaming of Antonelli, of his gross nose and wattled neck, of the leer with which he would push George into a boiling quicksand and hold him under, till he woke screaming with Omani bending over him in concern.

Omani said to him on a snowy day in February, “It’s amazing how you’re adjusting.”

But that was February, the thirteenth to be exact, his nineteenth birthday. March came, then April, and with the approach of May he realized he hadn’t adjusted at all.

The previous May had passed unregarded while George was still in his bed, drooping and ambitionless. This May was different.

All over Earth, George knew, Olympics would be taking place and young men would be competing, matching their skills against one another in the fight for a place on a new world. There would be the holiday atmosphere, the excitement, the news reports, the self-contained recruiting agents from the worlds beyond space, the glory of victory or the consolations of defeat.

How much of fiction dealt with these motifs; how much of his own boyhood excitement lay in following the events of Olympics from year to year; how many of his own plans—

George Platen could not conceal the longing in his voice. It was too much to suppress. He said, “Tomorrow’s the first of May. Olympics!”

And that led to his first quarrel with Omani and to Omani’s bitter enunciation of the exact name of the institution in which George found himself.

Omani gazed fixedly at George and said distinctly, “A House for the Feeble-minded.”

George Platen flushed. Feeble-minded!

He rejected it desperately. He said in a monotone, “I’m leaving.” He said it on impulse. His conscious mind learned it first from the statement as he uttered it.

Omani, who had returned to his book, looked up. “What?”

George knew what he was saying now. He said it fiercely, “I’m leaving.”