by William Tenn
Henck grunted and flopped down on his back again. “In half an hour, but not now, so why did you have to go and wake me up? What do you take me for, some dewy, post-crime, petty-larceny kid, sweating out my discharge with my eyes open and my gut wriggling? Hey, Nick, I was dreaming of a new way to get Elsa, a brand-new, really ugly way.”
“The screws are in an uproar,” Crandall told him, still in a low, patient voice. “Hear them? They want us, you and me.”
Henek sat up again, listened a moment, and nodded. “Why is it,” he asked, “that only space-screws have voices like that?”
“It’s a requirement of the service,” Crandall assured him.
“You’ve got to be at least a minimum height, have a minimum education and with a minimum nasty voice of just the right ear-splitting quality before you can get to be a space-screw. Otherwise, no matter how vicious a personality you have, you are just plain out of luck and have to stay behind on Earth and go on getting your kicks by running down slowpoke ‘copters driven by old ladies.”
A guard stopped below, banged angrily at one of the metal posts that supported their tier of bunks. “Crandall! Henck! You’re still convicts, don’t you forget that! If you don’t front-and-center in a double-time hurry, I’ll climb up there and work you over once more for old-time’s sake!”
“Yes, sir! Coming, sir!” they said in immediate, mumbling unison and began climbing down from bunk to bunk, each still clutching the brown-paper package that contained the clothes they had once worn as free men and would shortly be allowed to wear again.
“Listen, Otto.” Crandall leaned down as they climbed and brought his lips close to the little man’s ear in the rapid-fire, extremely low-pitched prison whisper. “They‘re taking us to meet the television and news boys. We’re going to be asked a lot of questions. One thing you want to be sure to keep your lip buttoned about—”
“Television and news? Why us? What do they want with us?”
“Because we’re celebrities, knockhead! We’ve seen it through for the big rap and come out on the other side. How many men do you think have made it? But listen, will you? If they ask you who it is you’re after, you just shut up and smile. You don’t answer that question. Got that? You don’t tell them whose murder you were sentenced for, no matter what they say. They can’t make you. That’s the law.”
Henck paused a moment, one and a half bunks from the floor. “But, Nick, Elsa knows! I told her that day, just before I turned myself in. She knows I wouldn’t take a murder rap for anyone but her!”
“She knows, she knows, of course she knows!” Crandall swore briefly and almost inaudibly. “But she can’t prove it, you goddam human blotter! Once you say so public, though, she’s entitled to arm herself and shoot you down on sight—pleading self-defense. And till you say so, she can’t; she’s still your poor wife whom you’ve promised to love, honor and cherish. As far as the world is concerned—”
The guard reached up with his club and jolted them both angrily across the back. They dropped to the floor and cringed as be snarled over them: “Did I say you could have a talk-party? Did I? If we have any time left before you get your discharge, I’m taking you cuties into the guardroom for one last big going-over. Now pick them up and put them down!”
They scuttled in front of him obediently, like a pair of chickens before a snapping collie. At the barred gate near the end of the prison hold, he saluted and said: “Pre-criminals Nicholas Crandall and Otto Henck, sir.”
Chief Guard Anderson wiped the salute back at him carelessly. “These gentlemen want to ask you fellas a couple of questions. Won’t hurt you to answer. That’s all, O’Brien.”
His voice was very jovial. He was wearing a big, gentle, half-moon smile. As the subordinate guard saluted and moved away, Crandall let his mind regurgitate memories of Anderson all through this month-long trip from Proxima Centaurus. Anderson nodding thoughtfully as that poor Minelli—Steve Minelli, hadn’t that been his name?—was made to run through a gauntlet of club-swinging guards for going to the toilet without permission. Anderson chuckling just a moment before he’d kicked a gray-headed convict in the groin for talking on the chow-line. Anderson—
Well, the guy had guts, anyway, knowing that his ship carried two pre-criminals who had served out a murder sentence. But he probably also knew that they wouldn’t waste the murder on him, however viciously he acted. A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils.
“Do we have to answer these questions, sir?” Crandall asked cautiously, tentatively.
The chief guard’s smile lost the tiniest bit of its curvature. “I said it wouldn’t hurt you, didn’t I? But other things might. They still might, Crandall. I’d like to do these gentlemen from the press a favor, so you be nice and cooperative, eh?” He gestured with his chin, ever so slightly, in the direction of the guard-room and hefted his club a bit.
“Yes, sir,” Crandall said, while Henck nodded violently. “We’ll be cooperative, sir.”
Dammit, he thought, if only I didn’t have such a use for that murder! Let‘s keep remembering Stephanson, boy, no one but Stephanson! Not Anderson, not O’Brien, not anybody else: the name under discussion is Frederick Stoddard Stephanson!
While the television men on the other side of the bars were fussing their equipment into position, the two convicts answered the preliminary, inevitable questions of the feature writers :
“How does it feel to be back?”
“Fine, just fine.”
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get your discharge?”
“Eat a good meal.” (From Crandall.)
“Get roaring drunk.” (From Henck.)
“Careful you don’t wind up right behind bars again as a post-criminal.” (From one of the feature writers.) A good-natured laugh in which all of them, the newsmen, Chief Guard Anderson, and Crandall and Henck, participated.
“How were you treated while you were prisoners?”
“Oh, pretty good.” (From both of them, concurrent with a thoughtful glance at Anderson’s club,)
“Either of you care to tell us who you’re going to murder?”
(Silence.)
“Either of you changed your mind and decided not to commit the murder?”
(Crandall looked thoughtfully up, while Henck looked thoughtfully down.) Another general laugh, a bit more uneasy this time, Crandall and Henck not participating.
“All right, we’re set. Look this way, please,” the television announcer broke in. “And smile, men—let’s have a really big smile.”
Crandall and Henck dutifully emitted big smiles, which made three smiles, for Anderson had moved into the cheerful little group.
The two cameras shot out of the grasp of their technicians, one hovering over them, one moving restlessly before their faces, both controlled, at a distance, by the little box of switches in. the cameramen’s hands. A red bulb in the nose of one of the cameras lit up.
“Here we are, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience,” the announcer exuded in a lavish voice. “We are on board the convict ship Jean Valjean, which has just landed at the New York Spaceport. We are here to meet two men—two of the rare men who have managed to serve all of a voluntary sentence for murder and thus are legally entitled to commit one murder apiece.
“In just a few moments, they will be discharged after having served out seven full years on the convict planets—and they will be free to kill any man or woman in the Solar System with absolutely no fear of any kind of retribution. Take a good look at them, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience—it might be you they are after!”
After this cheering thought, the announcer let a moment or two elapse while the cameras let their lenses stare at the two men in prison gray. Then he stepped into range himself and addressed the smaller man.
“What is your name, sir?” he asked.
“Pre-criminal Otto Henck, 525514,” Blotto Otto responded automatica
lly, though not able to repress a bit of a start at the sir.
“How does it feel to be back?”
“Fine, just fine.”
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get your discharge?”
Henck hesitated, then said, “Eat a good meal,” after a shy look at Crandall.
“How were you treated while you were a prisoner?”
“Oh, pretty good. As good as you could expect.”
“As good as a criminal could expect, eh? Although you’re not really a criminal yet, are you? You’re a pre-criminal.”
Henck smiled as if this were the first time he was hearing the term. “That’s right, sir. I’m a pre-criminal.”
“Want to tell the audience who the person is you’re going to become a criminal for?”
Henck looked reproachfully at the announcer, who chuckled throatily—and alone.
“Or if you’ve changed your mind about him or her?” There was a pause. Then the announcer said a little nervously: “You’ve served seven years on danger-filled, alien planets, preparing them for human colonization. That’s the maximum sentence the law allows, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, sir. With the pre-criminal discount for serving the sentence in advance, seven years is the most you can get for murder.”
“Bet you’re glad we’re not back in the days of capital punishment, eh? That would make the whole thing impractical, wouldn’t it? Now, Mr. Henck—or pre-criminal Henck, I guess I should still call you—suppose you tell the ladies and gentlemen of our television audience: What was the most horrifying experience you had while you were serving your sentence?”
“Well,” Otto Henck considered carefully. “About the worst of the lot, I guess, was the time on Antares VIII, the second prison camp I was in, when the big wasps started to spawn. They got a wasp on Antares VIII, see, that’s about a hundred times the size of—”
“Is that how you lost two fingers on your right hand?”
Henck brought his hand up and studied it for a moment. “No. The forefinger—I lost the forefinger on Rigel XII. We were building the first prison camp on the planet and I dug up a funny kind of red rock that had all sorts of little humps on it. I poked it, kind of—you know, just to see how hard it was or something--and the tip of my finger disappeared. Pow—just like that. Later on, the whole finger got infected and the medics had to cut it off.
“It turned out I was lucky, though; some of the men—the convicts, I mean—ran into bigger rocks than the one I found. Those guys lost arms, legs—one guy even got swallowed whole. They weren’t really rocks, see. They were alive—they were alive and hungry! Rigel XII was lousy with them. The middle finger—I lost the middle finger in a dumb kind of accident on board ship while we were being moved to—”
The announcer nodded intelligently, cleared his throat and said: “But those wasps, those giant wasps on Antares VIII—they were the worst?”
Blotto Otto blinked at him for a moment before he found the conversation again.
“Oh. They sure were! They were used to laying their eggs in a kind of monkey they have on Antares VIII, see? It was real rough on the monkey, but that’s how the baby wasps got their food while they were growing up. Well, we get out there and it turns out that the wasps can’t see any difference between those Antares monkeys and human beings. First thing you know, guys start collapsing all over the place and when they’re taken to the dispensary for an X-ray, the medics see that they’re completely crammed—”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Henck, but Herkimer’s Wasp has already been seen by and described to our audience at least three times in the past on the Interstellar Travelogue, which is carried by this network, as you ladies and gentlemen no doubt remember, on Wednesday evening from seven to seven-thirty P.M. terrestrial standard time. And now, Mr. Crandall, let me ask you, sir: How does it feel to be back?”
Crandall stepped up and was put through almost exactly the same verbal paces as his fellow prisoner.
There was one major difference. The announcer asked him if he expected to find Earth much changed. Crandall started to shrug, then abruptly relaxed and grinned. He was careful to make the grin an extremely wide one, exposing a maximum of tooth and a minimum of mirth.
“There’s one big change I can see already,” he said. “The way those cameras float around and are controlled from a little switchbox in the cameraman’s hand. That gimmick I wasn’t around the day I left. Whoever invented it must have been pretty clever.”
“Oh, yes?” The announcer glanced briefly backward. “You mean the Stephanson Remote Control Switch? It was invented by Frederick Stoddard Stephanson about five years ago—Was it five years, Don?”
“Six years,” said the cameraman. “Went on the market five years ago.”
“It was invented six years ago,” the announcer translated. “It went on the market five years ago.”
Crandall nodded. “Well, this Frederick Stoddard Stephanson must be a clever man, a very clever man.” And he grinned again into the cameras. Look at my teeth, he thought to himself. I know you’re watching, Freddy. Look at my teeth and shiver.
The announcer seemed a bit disconcerted. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. Now, Mr. Crandall, what would you describe as the most horrifying experience in your entire...”
After the TV men had rolled up their equipment and departed, the two pre-criminals were subjected to a final barrage of questions from the feature writers and columnists in search of odd shreds of color.
“What about the women in your life?”
“What books, what hobbies, what amusements filled your time?”
“Did you find out that there are no atheists on convict planets?”
“If you had the whole thing to do over again—”
As he answered, drably, courteously, Nicholas Crandall was thinking about Frederick Stoddard Stephanson seated in front of his luxurious wall-size television set.
Would Stephanson have clicked it off by now? Would he be sitting there, staring at the blank screen, pondering the plans of the man who had outlived odds estimated at ten thousand to one and returned after seven full, unbelievable years in the prison camps of four insane planets?
Would Stephanson be examining his blaster with sucked-in lips—the blaster that he might use only in an open-and-shut situation of self-defense? Otherwise, he would incur the full post-criminal sentence for murder, which, without the fifty per cent discount for punishment voluntarily undergone in advance of the crime, was as much as fourteen years in the many-pronged hell from which Crandall had just returned?
Or would Stephanson be sitting, slumped in an expensive bubblechair, glumly watching a still-active screen, frightened out of his wits but still unable to tear himself away from the well-organized program the network had no doubt built around the return of two—count ‘em: two!—homicidal pre-criminals?
At the moment, in all probability, the screen was showing an interview with some Earthside official of the Interstellar Prison Service, an expansive public relations character who had learned to talk in sociology.
“Tell me, Mr. Public Relations,” the announcer would ask (a different announcer, more serious, more intellectual), “how often do pre-criminals serve out a sentence for murder and return?”
“According to statistics—” a rustle of papers at this point and a penetrating glance downward—”according to statistics, we may expect a man who has served a full sentence for murder, with the 50 per cent pre-criminal discount, to return only once in 11.7 years on the average.”
“You would say, then, wouldn’t you, Mr. Public Relations, that the return of two such men on the same day is a rather unusual situation?”
“Highly unusual or you television fellas wouldn’t be in such a fuss over it.” A thick chuckle here, which the announcer dutifully echoes.
“And what, Mr. Public Relations, happens to the others who don’t return?”
A large, well-fed hand gestures urbanely. “They get killed. Or
they give up. Those are the only two alternatives. Seven years is a long time to spend on those convict planets. The work schedule isn’t for sissies and neither are the life-forms they encounter—the big man-eating ones as well as the small virus-sized types.
“That’s why prison guards get such high salaries and such long leaves. In a sense, you know, we haven’t really abolished capital punishment; we’ve substituted a socially useful form of Russian Roulette for it. Any man who commits or pre-commits one of a group of particularly reprehensible crimes is sent off to a planet where his services will benefit humanity and where he’s forced to take his chances on coming back in one piece, if at all. The more serious the crime, the longer the sentence and, therefore, the more remote the chances.”
“I see. Now, Mr. Public Relations, you say they either get killed or they give up. Would you explain to the audience, if you please, just how they give up and what happens if they do?”
Here a sitting back in the chair, a locking of pudgy fingers over paunch. “You see, any pre-criminal may apply to his warden for immediate abrogation of sentence. It’s just a matter of filling out the necessary forms. He’s pulled off work detail right then and there and is sent home on the very next ship out of the place. The catch is this: Every bit of time he’s served up to that point is canceled—he gets nothing for it.
“If he commits an actual crime after being freed, he has to serve the full sentence. If he wants to be committed as a pre-criminal again, he has to start serving the sentence, with the discount, from the beginning. Three out of every four pre-criminals apply for abrogation of sentence in their very first year. You get a bellyful fast in those places.”
“I guess you certainly do,” agrees the announcer. “What about the discount, Mr. Public Relations? Aren’t there people who feel that’s offering the pre-criminal too much inducement?”
The barest grimace of anger flows across the sleek face, to be succeeded by a warm, contemptuous smile. “Those are people, I’m afraid, who, however well-intentioned, are not well versed in the facts of modern criminology and penology. We don’t want to discourage pre-criminals; we want to encourage them to turn themselves in.