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Updated from the prophetic Classic Genius of DALE FRANCIS

by Ralph Forbes

When they had walked into The Waiting Room together, holding hands to give one another courage, the other people had looked at them and she felt a necessity to explain.

She sat there with her husband, looking around at the others in the room, then she turned to a man beside her, “My husband and I are exactly the same age, born the same day, that’s how we happen to be here together.”

The others looked at them, smiled, then turned inward to their own thoughts, having had the mystery solved.

One of the most terrible things about The Waiting Room was being there alone, without someone who loved you and cared about you. She thought to herself that she and Harry were among the fortunate ones, the only ones who had the same birthdays of all the couples she knew. It was the second time in The Waiting Room for both of them. They were fifty-five.

The first time was the hardest of all. It was the dread of a new experience. Not that she doubted the wisdom of the government decision. There were too many people, everyone knew that, too many people. It was only reasonable to insist that people who did not contribute sufficiently to society should be — she hated to even think the words — be put to sleep.

The truth was the population hadn’t really grown all that much. It was as one of the senators had said, today’s young people are too few to support a society that is predominantly aged—that’s why they had been importing millions of immigrants from South America, Africa and Asia to replace the descendants of the now-hated Old-Think Founderists.

But she couldn’t keep a shadow of doubt from crossing her mind. Fifty didn’t seem at all old to her. She could understand why it was necessary to put all people more than 75 to sleep—except for the wise leaders who kept the system running, of course. ObamSecSoc (the new changed Social Security System) and GoodFeel, the Health Plan, would go broke if it had to pay for all these old people.

But fifty was only middle-aged. That was the age GoodFeel (the government Health Plan Bureaucracy) had decided on for the first of the Fives, though, and there was very little good that could come from arguing about it, one wouldn’t want to be reported as uncooperative a required counseling session.

The first Five, when they were 50, was bad because it was first. But it was rare that anyone failed the first Five, only the criminal elements, the drunkards, the disruptive, the uncooperative. The second Five was different, there were more who didn’t make it and for lesser reasons.

That was why she worried about Harry. He wasn’t really doing very well at his job, he never had quite gotten used to the new computer equipment. His quality ratings hadn’t been high, partly because Mr. Holder didn’t seem to like him.

Louise worried more about Harry than herself. She was a volunteer worker at the 24-hour-a-day “It Takes a Village” government child care center and she was good with children. One of true saddest regrets of her life was that they had never had any children. There had been diabetes on Harry’s side of the family, that had meant they never were able to get a license to have a child. A child had been conceived but when she reported this to the doctor after six months, government officials placed her in the hospital. One of the nurses had told her the baby was a little girl. In her mind she had named her little girl Rita, her favorite name. Rita would have been 25 now.

The irony was she would be needed now, the government no longer required abortions and young people were encouraged to have children but 30 years ago it was different. After the death of Rita — she never could think of it as anything but death although abortions were no more registered than appendectomies in those days — Harry had been sterilized and she had been sterilized, too; it was one of the penalties for conceiving a child without a license.

A tall, military-looking man was called and he went into one of the examining rooms. He walked straight, his face set. He must have been 60.

She remembered the procedure. Three officials sat there, the record before them. They asked questions, more to perceive alertness than for the answers. One of her questioners had been a woman who was very kind to her, who spoke softly, comforting her in her nervousness. When the interview was finished the chairman of the committee nodded, either to the door behind