Chapter 9

THE guard spat disgustedly. “Fine lot of wrecks we’re getting,” she complained. “Not like the old days. They used to send real men here.” She glowered at Ross and Bernie, holding their commitment papers loosely in her hand. “And for treason, too!” she added. “Used to be it took guts to commit a crime against the state.” She shook her head, then made a noise of distaste and scribbled initials on the commitment papers. She handed them back to the pilot who had brought them up from Azor, who grinned, waved, and got out of there. “All right,” said the guard, “we have to take what we get. I’ll have to put you two on construction; you’ll never stand up under hard work. Keep your noses clean, that’s all. Up at 0500; breakfast till 0510; work detail till 1950; dinner and recreation till 2005; then lights out. Miss a formation and you miss a meal. Miss two, and you get punishment detail. Nobody misses three.”

Ross and Bernie found themselves sharing a communal cell. They had all of five minutes to look around and get oriented; then they were out on their first work detail.

It wasn’t so bad as it sounded. Their shiftmates were a couple of dozen ragged-looking wrecks, half-heartedly assembling a sort of meccano-toy wall out of sheets of perforated steel and clip-spring bolts. All the parts seemed well worn; some of the bolts hardly closed. It took Ross the better part of his first detail, whispering when the guards were looking the other way, to find out why. Their half of the prisoners were Construction; the other half was Demolition. What Construction in the morning put up, Demolition in the evening tore down. Neither side was anxious to set any speed records, and the guards without exception were too bored to care.

With any kind of luck, Ross found, he could hope eventually to get a real job—manning the “Minerva’s” radar, signal, or generating facilities, working in the kitchens or service shops, perhaps even as an orderly in the guard quarters. (Although Ross quite by accident chanced to see a guard’s orderly as he passed through a corridor near the work area, a handkerchief held daintily to his nose. And though the orderly’s clothing was neat and his plump cheeks indicated good eating, the haunted expression in his eyes made Ross think twice.)

The one thing he could not do, according to the testimony of every man he spoke to, was escape.

The fifth time Ross got that answer, the guard had stepped out of the room. Ross took the opportunity to thrash the thing through. “Why?” he demanded. “Back where I come from we’ve got lots of prisons. I never heard of one nobody escaped from.”

The other prisoner laughed shortly. “Now you have,” he said. “Go ahead, try. Every one of us has tried, one time or another. There’s only one thing stopping you—there’s no place to go. You can get past the guards easy enough—they’re lazy, when they’re not either drunk or boy-chasing. You can roam around ‘Minerva’ all you like. You can even get to the spacelock, and if you want to you can walk right through it. But not in a spacesuit, because there aren’t any on board. And not into the tender that brings us up from Azor, because you aren’t built right.”

Ross looked puzzled. “Not built right?”

“That’s right. There’s telescreens and remote-control locks built into that tender. The pilot brings you up, but once she couples with ‘Minerva’ the controls lock. And the only way they get unlocked is when three women, in three different substations down on Azor, push the RC releases. And they don’t do that until they look in their screens, and see that everybody who has turned up in the tender has stripped down to nothing at all, and every one of them is by-God female. Any further questions?” He grinned wryly. “Don’t even think about plastic surgery, if that happens to cross your mind,” he said. “We have two men here who tried it. You don’t have much equipment here; you can’t do a neat enough job.”

Ross gulped. “Hadn’t given it a thought,” he assured the other man. “You can’t even hide away in a trunk or something?”

The prisoner shook his head. “Aren’t any trunks. Everything’s one way—Azor to ‘Minerva’—except pilots and guards. No men ever go back. When you die, you go out the lock—without a ship. Same with everything else that they want to get rid of.”

Ross thought hard. “What if they—well, what if you’re sent up here and all, and then some new evidence turns up and you’re found innocent? Don’t they send you back then?”

“Found innocent?” The man looked at Ross pityingly. “Man, you are new. Hey,” he called. “Hey, Chuck! This guy wants to know what happens if they find out back on Azor that he’s innocent!”

Chuck exploded into laughter. Wiping his eyes, he walked over to Ross. “Thanks,” he grinned. “Haven’t had a good laugh in fifteen years.”

“I don’t see that that’s so funny,” Ross said defensively. “After all, the judge can make a mistake, none of us is per—awk!”

“Shut up!” Chuck hissed, holding a hand over Ross’s mouth. “Do you want to get us all in real trouble? Some of these guys would rat to the guards for an extra hunk of bread! The judges never make a mistake.” And his lips formed the silent word: “Officially.”

He let go of Ross and stood back, but didn’t walk away. He scratched his head. “Say,” he said, “you ask some stupid questions. Where are you from, anyhow?”

Ross said bitterly, “What’s the use? You won’t believe me. I happen to be from a place called Halsey’s Planet, which is a good long distance from here. About as far as light will travel in two hundred years, if that gives you an idea. I came here in an F-T-L—that is, a faster-than-light ship. You don’t know what that is, of course, but I did. It was a mistake, I admit it. But here I am.”

Somewhat to Ross’s surprise, Chuck didn’t laugh again. He looked dubious, and he scratched his head some more, but he didn’t laugh. To the other prisoner he said, “What do you think, Sam?”

Sam shrugged. “So maybe we were wrong,” he observed.

Ross demanded, “Wrong about what?”

“Well,” Chuck said hesitantly, “there’s a guy here named Flarney. He’s a pretty old son-of-a-gun by now, must be at least ninety, and he’s been here a good long time. Dunno how long. But he talks crazy, just like you. No offense,” he added, “it’s just that we all thought he’d gone space-happy. But maybe we’re wrong. Unless——” his eyes narrowed “unless the two of you are both space-happy, or trying to kid us, or something.”

Ross said urgently, “I swear, Chuck, there’s no such thing. It’s true. Who’s this Flarney? Where does he say he came from?”

“Who can make sense out of what he says? All I know is, he talked a lot about something faster than light. That’s crazy; that’s like saying slower than dark, or bigger than green, or something. But I don’t know, maybe it means something.”

“Believe me, Chuck, it does! Where is this man—can I see him?”

Chuck looked uncertain. “Well, sure. That is, you can see him all right. But it isn’t going to do you a whole hell of a lot of good, because he’s dead. Died yesterday; they’re going to pitch him out into space sometime today.”

Sam said, “This is when Whitker flips. One week without his old pal Flarney and he’ll begin to look funny. Two weeks and he starts acting funny. Three and he’s talking funny and the guards begin to crack down. I give him a month to get shot down and heaved through the locker.”

Old pal? Ross demanded, “Who’s this Whitker? Where can I get in touch with him?”

“Him and Flarney were both latrine orderlies. That’s where they put the feeble old men, mopping and polishing. Number Two head, any hour of the day or night. Old buzzard has his racket—we’re supposed to get a hank of cellosponge per man per day, but he’s always ‘fresh out’—unless you slip him your saccharine ration every once in a while.”

Ross asked the way to Number Two head and the routine. But it was an hour before he could bring himself to ask the hulking guard for permission.

“Sure, sonny,” she boomed. “I’ll show you the way. Need any help?”

“No, thanks, ma’am,” he said hastily, and she roared with laughter. So did the members of the construction gang; it must have been an ancient gag. He hurried on his way thinking dark and bloody thoughts.

“Whitker?” he asked a tottering ancient who nodded and drowsed amid the facilities of the head.

The old man looked up blearily and squeaked: “Fresh out. Fresh out. You should’ve saved some from yesterday.”

“That’s all right. I’m a new man here. I want to ask you about your friend Flarney——”

Whitker bowed his head and began to cry noiselessly.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Whitker. I heard. But there’s something we can do about it—maybe. Flarney was a faster-than-light man. He must have told you that. So am I. Ross, from Halsey’s Planet.”

He hadn’t the faintest idea as to whether any of this was getting through to the ancient.

“It seems Flarney and I were both on the same mission, finding out how and why planets were dropping out of communication. You and he used to talk a lot, they tell me. Did he ever tell you anything about that?”

Whitker looked up and squeaked dimly. “Oh, yes. All the time. I humored him. He was an old man, you know. And now he’s dead.” The tears leaked from his rheumy eyes and traced the sad furrows beside his nose.

Was he getting through? “What did he say, Mr. Whitker? About faster-than-light?”

The old man said, “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”

That damned formula again! “But what does it mean, Mr. Whitker? What did he say it meant?” Ross softly urged.

The old man looked surprised. “Genes?” he asked himself hazily. “Generations? I don’t remember. But you go to Earth, young man. Flarney said they’d know, and know what to do about it, too, which is more than he did. His very words, young man!”

Ross didn’t dare stay longer. Furthermore he suspected that the old man’s attention span had been exhausted. He started from the room with a muttered thanks, and was stopped at the door by Whitker’s hand on his shoulder.

“You’re a good boy,” Whitker squeaked. “Here.”

Ross found himself walking down the corridor with an enormous wad of cellosponge in his hand.

The bunks were hard, but that didn’t matter. Dormitories were the outermost layer of the hulk, pseudogravity varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance, and the field generator was conventionally located near “Minerva’s” center. When your relative weight is one-quarter normal you can sleep deliciously on a gravel driveway. This was the dormitory’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was too many steel slabs, tiered and spotted too close, too many unwashed males, too much weary snoring. The only things in short supply were headroom and air.

Not everybody slept. Insomniacs turned and grunted; those who had given up the struggle talked from bunk to bunk in considerately low tones.