. Then we
sing hymns, the Hymn of Brotherhood, and the Hymn of Equality, and the
Hymn of the Collective Spirit. The sky is a soggy purple when we return
to the Home. Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to the
City Theatre for three hours of Social Recreation. There a play is shown
upon the stage, with two great choruses from the Home of the Actors,
which speak and answer all together, in two great voices. The plays
are about toil and how good it is. Then we walk back to the Home in a
straight column. The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops
that tremble, ready to burst through. The moths beat against the street
lanterns. We go to our beds and we sleep, till the bell rings again.
The sleeping halls are white and clean and bare of all things save one
hundred beds.

Thus have we lived each day of four years, until two springs ago when
our crime happened. Thus must all men live until they are forty. At
forty, they are worn out. At forty, they are sent to the Home of the
Useless, where the Old Ones live. The Old Ones do not work, for the
State takes care of them. They sit in the sun in summer and they sit by
the fire in winter. They do not speak often, for they are weary. The
Old Ones know that they are soon to die. When a miracle happens and some
live to be forty-five, they are the Ancient Ones, and children stare at
them when passing by the Home of the Useless. Such is to be our life, as
that of all our brothers and of the brothers who came before us.

Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which has
changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our
crime. We had been a good Street Sweeper and like all our brother Street
Sweepers, save for our cursed wish to know. We looked too long at the
stars at night, and at the trees and the earth. And when we cleaned
the yard of the Home of the Scholars, we gathered the glass vials, the
pieces of metal, the dried bones which they had discarded. We wished to
keep these things and to study them, but we had no place to hide them.
So we carried them to the City Cesspool. And then we made the discovery.

It was on a day of the spring before last. We Street Sweepers work
in brigades of three, and we were with Union 5-3992, they of the
half-brain, and with International 4-8818. Now Union 5-3992 are a sickly
lad and sometimes they are stricken with convulsions, when their
mouth froths and their eyes turn white. But In