Norvell woke up.
He was very cold, very stiff. He looked dazedly around him.
The living room. But—— Yes. It was the living room. With the wall patterns off and
no light except a sickly dawn from outside. All of the walls were on full transparent and he was lying on the floor. The bed he had dialed out to sleep in had folded into the basic cube, dumping him on the floor. And the floor was cold.
No heat. No power. The house was turned off.
He got up, wincing, and hopelessly sidled to the window control. It didn’t respond; the windows remained full transparent.
He knew what had happened, and swore between clenched teeth. The skunks. Turning off the place without a word of warning, at daybreak, without even giving him a chance
He wearily began picking up his clothes from the floor where a rack had dumped them as it returned to folded storage state. Through the indecently transparent windows he saw the other bubble-houses, all decently opaqued with only their nightlights and entry lights and here and there a warmly lit upstairs window. By the time he was dressed he began to hear a clamor upstairs. His wife and daughter charged down in negligee, commanding him to do something about it.
“Get dressed,” he said, and pointedly disconnected his hearing aid.
He rambled about the house while they did. Absently he tried to dial coffee and gave up with a self-conscious laugh when the water would not flow. The closets, drawers, and dressers had rejected all their contents, upstairs and down. Pushers had calmly shoved them out and the doors had closed and locked—to him, forever. He contemplated the disordered piles of clothes and kitchenware, and began to pack a traveling case.
Two bored policemen wandered in while he was doing so; the door, of course, was no longer on lock. He plugged in his hearing aid, taking plenty of time about it. He said to them, “Well?”
They toltf him he had plenty of time; they weren’t in any hurry. Take an hour if you need it, bub. They’d tote him and his family and their stuff out to Belly Rave, help him pick out a good place. And—uh—don’t take this too hard, bub. Sometimes when people got busted out of contract status they—uh —got panicky and tried to, well, knock themselves off.
The moving had one golden moment. One of the cops help-
fully picked up a suitcase. Alexandra told him to remove his filthy hands from—— /
The cop clouted her and explained what they didn’t take none of off of Belly Rave brats. The police car handed Norvell a jolt. It was armored. “You—you get a lot of trouble in Belly Rave?” he guessed. The friendlier of the cops said, “Nab. Only once hi a while. They haven’t jumped a squad car hi six months, not with anything but pistols, anyway. You’ll be okay.” And they pulled away from Monmouth G.M.L. Unit W-97-AR. There was no sentiment to the parting. Norvell was sunk in worry, Alexandra was incandescent but still. And Virginia had not said two words to anyone that morning.
The car paused at the broad beltway circling the bubble-city, motor idling and the driver impatiently talking into his radio. Finally two more police cars rolled up and the three of them in convoy left the city roads for the cracked asphalt that led to Belly Rave. Once the road they traveled had been a six-lane superhighway, threading a hundred thousand commuters’ cars morning and night. Now it wound through a scraggly jungle, the toll booths at the interchanges crumbled into rock piles and rust.
They bumped along for a couple of miles, then turned off into a side road that was even worse. The first thing that hit Norvell was the smell. The second thing was worse. It was the horrible feeling of betrayal as he looked on Belly Rave. A man can reconcile himself to anything. If life is doomed to be an eternity of agony with duodenal cancer, or the aching and irremediable poverty of the crippled and friendless, he can manage to survive and make the best of it. But when he has steeled himself to disaster . . . and the event is a thousandfold worse than his fiercest nightmare … the pockets of strength are overrun and nothing remains inside him but collapse.