THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal.
They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which
way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than
anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All
this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the
Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States
Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right,
though. April for instance, still drove people
crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that
the H-G men took George
and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't
think about it very hard. Hazel had a
perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about
anything except in short
bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had
a little mental handicap
radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It
was tuned to a government
transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send
out some sharp noise to keep
people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There
were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd
forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts
fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just
did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about
the ballerinas. They weren't really very
good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were
burdened with
sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that
no one, seeing a free and
graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat
drug in. George was toying
with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped.
But he didn't get very far
with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap
herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with
a ball peen hammer," said George.
"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing
all the different sounds," said Hazel a little
envious. "All the things they think up."
"Um," said George.
"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what
I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a
matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General,
a woman named Diana
Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have
chimes on Sunday-just
chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."
"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.
"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I
think I'd make a good Handicapper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said
Hazel.
"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly
about his abnormal son who was now in
jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped
that.
"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling,
and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas
had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel.
"Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap
bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds
of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck.
"Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if
you're not equal to me for a while."
George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't
mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."
"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said
Hazel. "If there was just some way we could
make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few
of them lead blls. Just a few."
"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine
for every ball I took out," said George. "I
don't call that a bargain."
"If you could just take a few out when you came
home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody
around here. You just set around."
"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then
other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the
dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't
like that, would you?"
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. The minute people
start cheating on laws, what do you think
happens to society?"
If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer
to this question, George couldn't have
supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.
"What would?" said George blankly.
"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that
what you just said? "Who knows?" said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted
for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was
about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech
impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement,
the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina
to read.
"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer,
"he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the
best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for
trying so hard."
"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading
the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the
mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that
she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her
handicap bags were as big as
those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice,
which was a very unfair voice for a woman to
use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-"
she said, and she began
again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a
grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail,
where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government.
He is a genius and an
athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely
dangerous."
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed
on the screen-upside down, then
sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed
the full length of Harrison
against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly
seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween
and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances
faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio
for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles
with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only
half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there
was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to
strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race
of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required
that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows
shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth
random.
"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not-I
repeat, do not-try to reason with him."
There was the shriek of a door being torn
from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came
from the television set. The photograph of
Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing
to the tune of an
earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake,
and well he might have-for many was the
time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said
George, "that must be
Harrison!"
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly
by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph
of Harrison was gone. A living,
breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood
- in the center of the studio. The knob of the
uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians,
musicians, and announcers
cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear?
I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his
foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled,
sickened-I am a greater ruler than any
man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness
like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand
pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the
padlock that secured his head harness. The bar
snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles
against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man
that would have awed Thor, the god of
thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking
down on the cowering people. "Let the first
woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying
like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear,
snapped off her physical handicaps with
marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we
show the people the meaning of the word
dance? Music!" he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs,
and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he
told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly,
false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them
like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them
back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the
music for a while-listened gravely, as though
synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny
waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that
would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into
the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but
the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced,
capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each
leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
