Norman Spinrad

- At any rate, the queue was moving along quite swiftly into the customs fortress; no doubt very rapid processing and rejection of most of the Borgravians was taking place inside. It was not long before Feric passed by the portal guards, through the portal itself, and stood on what might in a sense be regarded as Helder soil for the first time in his life.

The interior of the customs fortress was unmistakably Helder, in sharp contrast to everything else south of the Ulm, where unfortunate circumstance had confined Feric during his growth to manhood. The large antechamber bad a floor of smart red, black, and white tile, and similarly styled paintwork embellished the polished oaken walls. The chamber was brightened by powerful electric globes. What a far cry from the crudely finished, poured concrete interiors and tallow candles of the typical Borgravian public building!

A few yards inside the portal, a Helder customs guard in a somewhat slovenly gray uniform with tarnished brasswork divided the queue into two streams. All the more obvious mutants and mongrels were directed across the chamber and out through a door in the far wall. Feric approved heartily—there was no point in wasting the time of a genetic analyst with shambling quasi-humans such as these. An ordinary customs guard was quite qualified to dismiss them without further examination. The smaller number of hopefuls that the guard directed through a nearer door included quite a number of very dubious cases, such as the foul-smelling Borgravian who preceded Feric, but nothing on the order of a Blueskin or Parrotface.

However, as he approached the guard, Feric noticed a strange and disquieting thing. The guard seemed to nod to a good many of the mutants he guided into the reject line as if acknowledging familiarity; moreover, the Borgravians themselves acted as if they knew the drill, and, strangest of ally uttered not a word of protest at their exclusion, indeed displayed little emotion at all. Could it be that these sorry creatures were all so below the human geno-18

type in intelligence that they were incapable of retaining memories for more than a day or so and thus returned day after day ritualistically? Feric had heard that such fixated behavior was not unknown in the real genetic sinkholes of Cressia and Arbona, but he had never observed anything of the like in Borgravia, where the gene pool was constantly enriched by the exile of native-born Helder who could not quite be certified true humans, but who certainly were close enough to bring the level of the Borgravian gene pool far above that of places like Arbona or Zind.

As Feric reached the head of the queue, the customs guard addressed him in a flat, rather bored tone. "Day pass, citizen, or citizen candidate?"

"Citizen candidate," Feric replied crisply. Surely the only conceivable pass into Heldon was an official certificate of genetic purity! Either you already held Helder citizenship or you applied for certification and were found pure or you were refused admission to Heldon. What was this impossible third category?

The guard directed Feric into the smaller line with no more significant a gesture than the slack nodding of his head in the indicated direction. There was a pattern in all this, something about the whole tone of the operation, that Feric found profoundly disturbing, a wrongness that seemed to hover in the air, a deadness, a definite lack of the traditional Helder snap and dash. Had their daily isolation on the Borgravian side of the Ulm had some subtle detrimental effect on the esprit and will of these genetically robust Helder?

Wrapped in these somewhat somber musings, Feric followed the queue through the indicated doorway and into a long narrow room paneled in pine set off tastefully with ornately carved wooden trim depicting typical scenes from the Emerald Wood. A counter of black stone, polished to a high gloss and accented with inlaid stainless steel, ran down the length of the room, separating the queue from the four Helder customs officers who stood behind it.

These fellows seemed fine specimens of true humanity, but their uniforms were somewhat slovenly, and a certain proper soldierliness was absent from their bearing. They looked more like clerks in a money depository or a public post office than customs troops manning a citadel of genetic purity.

Feric's uneasiness grew as the sour-reeking Borgravian 19

preceding him finished his short interview with the first of the officers, wiped fingerprint ink off his hands with a rather soiled cloth, and followed the queue on down the line to the next Helder official. At the far end of the long room, Feric perceived the entrance to the bridge itself, where a guard armed with a truncheon and a pistol seemed to be passing an extremely dubious collection of genetic baggage on through to Heldon. In fact there was an insane perfunctory air about the whole operation.