Robert Silverberg: The World Inside

Puzzled, Gortman asks, “But where do you find room for them all? I assume the every room in the building is full, and yon can’t possibly have as many deaths as births, so — how—?”

“Deaths do create vacancies, of course. If your mate dies and your children are grown, you go to a senior citizen dorm, creating room for the establishment of a new family unit. But you’re correct that most of our young people don’t get accommodations in the building, since we form new families at about two percent a year and deaths are far below that. As new urbmons are built, the overflow from the newlywed dorms is sent to then. By lot. It’s hard to adjust to being expelled, they say, but there are compensations in being among the first group into a new building. You acquire automatic status. And so we’re constantly overflowing, casting out our young, creating new combinations of social units — utterly fascinating, eh? Have you read my paper, ‘Structural Metamorphosis in the Urbmon Population’?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t encountered it,” Gortman replies. “I’ll be eager to look it up.” He glances around the dorm. A dozen couples are having intercourse on a nearby platform. “They seem so young,” he says.

“Puberty comes early among us. Girls generally marry at twelve, boys at thirteen. First child about a year later, god blessing.”

“And nobody tries to control fertility at all?”

“Control fertility?” Mattern clutches his genitals in shock at the unexpected obscenity. Several copulating couples look up, amazed. Someone giggles. Mattern says. “Please don’t use that phrase again. Particularly if you’re near children. We don’t — ah — think in terms of control.”

“But—”

“We hold that life is sacred. Making new life is blessed. One does one’s duty to god by reproducing.” Mattern smiles, feeling that he sounds too earnest. “To be human is to meet challenges through the exercise of intelligence, right? And one challenge is the multiplication of inhabitants in a world that has seen the conquest of disease and the elimination of war. We could limit births, I suppose, but that would be sick, a cheap, anti-human way out. Instead we’ve met the challenge of overpopulation triumphantly, wouldn’t you say? And so we go on and on, multiplying joyously, our numbers increasing by three billion a year, and we find room for everyone, and food for everyone. Few die, and many are born, and the world fills up, and god is blessed, and life is rich and pleasant, and as you see we are all quite happy. We have matured beyond the infantile need to place layers of insulation between man and man. Why go outdoors? Why yearn for forests and deserts? Urbmon 116 holds universes enough for us. The warnings of the prophets of doom have proved hollow. Can you deny that we are happy here? Come with me. We will see a school now.”

The school Mattern has chosen is in a working-class district of Prague, on the 108th floor. He thinks Gortman will find it especially interesting, since the Prague people have the highest reproductive rate in Urban Monad 116, and families of twelve or fifteen are not at all uncommon. Approaching the school door, Mattern and Gortman hear the clear treble voices singing of the blessedness of god. Mattern joins the singing; it is a hymn he sang too, when he was their age, dreaming of the big family he would have:

There is an unpleasant and unscheduled interruption. A woman rushes toward Mattern and Gortman in the corridor. She is young, untidy, wearing only a flimsy gray wrap; her hair is loose; she is well along in pregnancy. “Help!” she shrieks. “My husband’s gone flippo!” She hurls herself, trembling, into Gortman’s arms. The visitor looks bewildered.

Toward her there runs a man in his early twenties, haggard, eyes bloodshot. He carries a fabricator torch; its tip glows with heat. “Goddamn bitch,” he mumbles. “Allatime babies! Seven babies already and now number eight and I gonna go off my head !” Mattern is appalled. He pulls the woman away from Gortman and shoves the dismayed visitor through the door of the school.

“Tell them there’s a flippo out here,” Mattern says. “Get help, fast!” He is furious that Gortman should witness so atypical a scene, and wishes to take him away from it.

The trembling girl cowers behind Mattern. Quietly, Mattern says, “Let’s be reasonable, young man. You’ve spent your whole life in urbmons, haven’t you? You understand that it’s blessed to create. Why do you suddenly repudiate the principles on which—”

“Get the hell away from her or I gonna burn you too!”

The young man feints with the torch, jabbing it straight at Mattern’s face. Mattern feels the heat and flinches. The young man swipes past him at the woman. She leaps away, but she is clumsy with girth, and the torch slices her garment. Pale white distended flesh is exposed, with a brilliant bum-streak slashed across it. She cups her jutting belly and falls, screaming. The young man jostles Mattern out of the way and prepares to thrust the torch into her side. Mattern tries to seize his arm. He deflects the torch; it chars the floor. The young man, cursing, drops it and throws himself on Mattern, pounding frenziedly with his fists. “Help me!” Mattern calls. “Help!”

Into the corridor erupt dozens of schoolchildren. They are between eight and eleven years of age. They continue to sing their hymn as they pour forth. They pull Mattern’s assailant from him. Swiftly, smoothly, they cover him with their bodies. He can dimly be seen beneath the flailing, thrashing mass. Dozens more rush from the schoolroom and join the heap. A siren wails. A whistle blows. The teacher’s amplified voice booms, “The police are here! Everyone off!”

Four men in uniform have arrived. They survey the situation. The injured woman lies groaning, rubbing her burn. The insane man is unconscious; his face is bloody and one eye appears to be destroyed. “What happened?” a policeman asks. “Who are you?”

“Charles Mattern, sociocomputator, 799th level, Shanghai. The man’s a flippo. Attacked his pregnant wife with the torch. Attempted to attack me.”

The policemen haul the flippo to his feet. He sags, dazed, battered, in their midst. The police leader says, rattling the words into one another, “Guilty of atrocious assault on woman of childbearing years currently carrying unborn life, dangerous countersocial tendencies, menace to harmony and stability, by virtue of authority vested in me I pronounce sentence of erasure, carry out immediately. Down the chute with the bastard, boys!” They haul the flippo away. Medics appear and cluster about the fallen woman. The children, once again gaily singing, return to the classroom. Nicanor Gortman looks stunned and shaken. Mattern seizes his arm and whispers fiercely, ” All right, so those things happen sometimes. I don’t deny it. But it was a billion to one against having it happen where you’d see it! It isn’t typical! It isn’t typical!”

They enter the classroom.

The sun is setting. The Western face of the neighboring urban monad is streaked with red. Nicanor Gortman sits quietly at dinner with the members of the Mattern family. The children, voices tumbling in chaotic interplay, chatter of their day at school. The evening news comes on the screen; the announcer mentions the unfortunate event on the 108th floor. “The mother was not seriously injured,” he says, “and no harm came to her unborn child. Sentence on the assailant has been carried out and a threat to the security of the whole urbmon has thus been eliminated.” Principessa murmurs, “Bless god.” After dinner Mattern requests copies of his most recent technical papers from the data terminal and gives the whole sheaf to Gortman to read at his leisure. Gortman thanks him energetically.