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’n 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 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 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 balls. 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 worn 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 girl’s 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.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they
remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they
kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General,
came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge
shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were
dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the
musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their
handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.
But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap
signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been
crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said,
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound
of a riveting gun in his head.
“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”
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