by William Tenn
“Remember what I said about three out of four applying for abrogation of sentence in their very first year? Now these are individuals who were sensible enough to try to get a discount on their sentence. Are they likely to be foolish enough to risk twice as much when they have found out conclusively they can’t stand a bare twelve months of it? Not to mention what they have discovered about the value of human life, the necessity for social cooperation and the general desirability of civilized processes on those worlds where simple survival is practically a matter of a sweepstakes ticket.
“The man who doesn’t apply for abrogation of sentence? Well, he has that much more time to let the desire to commit the crime go cold—and that much greater likelihood of getting killed with nothing to show for it. Therefore, so few pre-criminals in any of the categories return to tell the tale and do the deed that the social profit is absolutely enormous! Let me give you a few figures.
“Using the Lazarus Scale, it has been estimated that the decline in premeditated homicides alone, since the institution of the pre-criminal discount, has been forty-one per cent on Earth, thirty-three and a third per cent on Venus, twenty-seven per cent—”
Cold comfort, chillingly cold comfort, that would be to Stephanson, Nicholas Crandall reflected pleasurably, those forty-one per cents and thirty-three and a third per cents. Crandall’s was the balancing statistic: the man who wanted to murder, and for good and sufficient cause, one Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. He was a leftover fraction on a page of reductions and cancellations—he had returned, astonishingly, unbelievably, after seven years to collect the merchandise for which he had paid in advance.
He and Henck. Two ridiculously long long-shots. Henck’s’ wife Elsa—was she, too, sitting in a kind of bird-hypnotized-by-a-snake fashion before her television set, hoping dimly and desperately that some comment of the Interstellar Prison, Service official would show her how to evade her fate, how to get out from under the ridiculously rare disaster that was about to happen to her?
Well, Elsa was Blotto Otto’s affair. Let him enjoy it in his own way; he’d paid enough for the privilege. But Stepharson was Crandall’s.
Oh, let the arrogant bean-pole sweat, he prayed. Let me take my time and let him sweat!
The newsman kept squeezing them for story angles until a loudspeaker in the overhead suddenly cleared its diaphragm and announced:
“Prisoners, prepare for discharge! You will proceed to the ship warden’s office in groups of ten, as your name is called. Convict ship discipline will be maintained throughout. Arthur, Augluk, Crandall, Ferrara, Fu-Yen, Garfinkel, Gomez, Graham, Henck—”
A half hour later, they were walking down the main corridor of the ship in their civilian clothes. They showed their discharges to the guard at the gangplank, smiled still cringingly back at Anderson, who called from a porthole, “Hey, fellas, come back soon!” and trotted down the incline to the surface of a planet they had not seen for seven agonizing and horror-crowded years.
There were a few reporters and photographers still waiting for them, and one TV crew which had been left behind to let the world see how they looked at the moment of freedom.
Questions, more questions to answer, which they could afford to be brusque about, although brusqueness to any but fellow prisoners still came hard.
Fortunately, the newsmen got interested in another pre-criminal who was with them. Fu-Yen had completed the discounted sentence of two years for aggravated assault and battery. He had also lost both arms and one leg to a corrosive moss on Procyon III just before the end of his term and came limping down the gangplank on one real and one artificial leg, unable to grasp the handrails.
As he was being asked, with a good deal of interest, just how he intended to commit simple assault and battery, let alone the serious kind, with his present limited resources, Crandall nudged Henck and they climbed quickly into one of the many hovering gyrocabs. They told the driver to take them to a bar—any quiet bar—in the city.
Blotto Otto nearly went to nieces under the impact of actual free choice. “I can’t do it,” he whispered. “Nick, there’s just too damn much to drink!”
Crandall settled it by ordering for him. “Two double scotches,” he told the waitress. “Nothing else.”
When the scotch came, Blotto Otto stared at it with the kind of affectionate and wistful astonishment a man might show toward an adolescent son whom he saw last as a bubo in arms. He put out a gingerly, trembling hand.
“Here’s death to our enemies,” Crandall said, and tossed his down. He watched Otto sip slowly and carefully, tasting each individual drop.
“You’d better take it easy,” he warned. “Elsa might have no more trouble from you than bringing flowers every visiting day to the alcoholic ward.”
“No fear,” Blotto Otto growled into his empty glass. “I was weaned on this stuff. And, anyway, it’s the last drink I have until I dump her. That’s the way I’ve been figuring it, Nick: one drink to celebrate, then Elsa. I didn’t go through those seven years to mess myself up at the payoff.”
He set the glass down. “Seven years in one steaming hell after another. And before that, twelve years with Elsa. Twelve years with her pulling every dirty trick in the book on me, laughing in my face, telling me she was my wife and had me legally where she wanted me, that I was gonna support her the way she wanted to be supported and I was gonna like it. And if I dared to get off my knees and stand on my hind legs, pow, she found a way to get me arrested.
“The weeks I spent in the cooler, in the workhouse, until Elsa would tell the judge maybe I’d learned my lesson, she was willing to give me one more chance! And me begging for a divorce on my knees—hell, on my belly!—no children, she’s able-bodied, she’s young, and her laughing in my face. When she wanted me in the cooler, see, then she’s crying in front of the judge; but when we’re alone, she’s always laughing her head off to see me squirm.
“I supported her, Nick. Honest, I gave her almost every cent I made, but that wasn’t enough. She liked to see me squirm; she told me she did. Well, who’s squirming now?” He grunted deep in his throat. “Marriage—it’s for chumps!”
Crandall looked out of the open window he was sitting against, down through the dizzy, busy levels of Metropolitan New York.
“Maybe it is,” he said thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t know. My marriage was good while it lasted, five years of it. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t good any more, just so much rancid butter.”
“At least she gave you a divorce,” said Henck. “She didn’t take you.”
“Oh, Polly wasn’t the kind of girl to take anyone. A little mixed up, but maybe no more than I was. Pretty Polly, I called her; Big Nick, she called me. The starlight faded and so did I, I guess. I was still knocking myself out then trying to make a go out of the wholesale electronics business with Irv. Anyone could tell I wasn’t cut out to be a millionaire. Maybe that was it. Anyway, Polly wanted out and I gave it to her. We parted friends. I wonder, every once in a while, what she’s—”
There was a slight splashy noise, like a seal’s flipper making a gesture in the water. Crandall’s eyes came back to the table a moment after the green, melonlike ball had hit it. And, at the same instant, Henck’s hand had swept the ball up and hurled it through the window. The long, green threads streamed out of the ball, but by then it was falling down the side of the enormous building and the threads found no living flesh to take root in.
From the corner of his eye, Crandall had seen a man bolt out of the bar. By the way people kept looking back and forth fearfully from their table to the open doorway, he deduced that the man had thrown it. Evidently Stephanson had thought it worthwhile to have Crandall followed and neutralized.
Blotto Otto saw no point in preening over his reflexes. The two of them had learned to move fast a long time ago over a lot of dead bodies. “A Venusian dandelion bomb,” he observed. “Well, at least the guy doesn’t want to kill you, Nick. He just wants to cripple you.”
“That would be Stephanson‘s style,” Crandall agreed, as they paid their check and walked past the faces which were just now beginning to turn white. “He’d never do it himself. He’d hire a bully-boy. And he’d do the hiring through an intermediary just in case the bully-boy ever got caught and blabbed. But that still wouldn’t be safe enough: he wouldn‘t want to risk a post-criminal murder charge.
“A dose of Venusian dandelion, he’d figure, and he wouldn’t have to worry about me for the rest of my life. He might even come to visit me in the home for incurables—like the way he sent me a card every Christmas of my sentence. Always the same message: ‘Still mad? Love, Freddy.’ “
“Quite a guy, this Stephanson,” Blotto Otto said, peering around the entrance carefully before stepping out of the bar and onto the fifteenth level walkway.
“Yeah, quite a guy. He’s got the world by the tail and every once in a while, just for fun, he twists the tail. I learned how he operated when we were roommates way back in college, but do you think that did me any good? I ran into him just when that wholesale electronics business with Irv was really falling apart, about two years after I broke up with Polly.
“I was feeling blue and I wanted to talk to someone, so I told him all about how my partner was a penny-watcher and I was a big dreamer, and how between us we were turning a possible nice small business into a definite big bankruptcy. And then I got onto this remote-control switch I’d been fooling around with and how I wished I had time to develop it.”
Blotto Otto kept glancing around uneasily, not from dread of another assassin, but out of the unexpected sensation of doing so much walking of his own free will. Several passersby turned around to have another stare at their out-of-fashion knee-length tunics.
“So there I was,” Crandall went on. “I was a fool, I know, but take my word, Otto, you have no idea how persuasive and friendly a guy like Freddy Stephanson can be. He tells me he has this house in the country he isn’t using right now and there’s a complete electronics lab in the basement. It’s all mine, if I want it, as long as I want it, starting next week; all I have to worry about is feeding myself. And be doesn’t want any rent or anything—it’s for old time’s sake and because he wants to see me do something really big in the world.
“How smart could I be with a con-artist like that? It wasn’t till two years later that I realized he must have had the electronics lab installed the same week I was asking Irv to buy me out of the business for a couple of hundred credits. After all, what would Stephanson, the owner of a brokerage firm, be doing with an electronics lab of his own? But who figures such things when an old roommate’s so warm and friendly and interested in you?”
Otto sighed. “So he comes up to see you every few weeks. And then, about a month after you’ve got it all finished and working, he locks you out of the place and moves all your papers and stuff to another joint. And he tells you he’ll have it patented long before you can get it all down on paper again, and anyhow it was his place—he can always claim he was subsidizing you. Then he laughs in your face, just like Elsa. Huh, Nick?”
Crandall bit his lip as he realized how thoroughly Otto Henck must have memorized the material. How many times had they gone over each other’s planned revenge and the situations which had motivated it? How many times had they told and retold the same bitter stories to each other, elicited the same responses from each other, the same questions, the same agreements and even the very same disagreements?
Suddenly, he wanted to get away from the little man and enjoy the luxury of loneliness. He saw the sparkling roof of a hotel two levels down.
“Think I’ll move into that. Ought to be thinking about a place to sleep tonight.”
Otto nodded at his mood rather than at his statement. “Sure. I know just how you feel. But that’s pretty plush, Nick: The Capricorn-Ritz. At least twelve credits a day.”
“So what? I can live high for a week, if I want to. And with my background, I can always pick up a fast job as soon as I get low. I want something plush for tonight, Blotto Otto.”
“Okay, okay. You got my address, huh, Nick? I’ll be at my cousin’s place.”
“I have it, all right. Luck with Elsa, Otto.”
“Thanks, Luck with Freddy. Uh—so long.” The little man turned abruptly and entered a main street elevator. When the doors slid shut, Crandall found that he was feeling very uncomfortable. Henck had meant more to him than his own brother. Well, after all, he’d been with Henek day and night for a long time now. And he hadn’t seen Dan for—how long was it?—almost nine years.
He reflected on how little he was attached to the world, if you excluded the rather negative desire of removing Stephanson from it. One thing he should get soon was a girl—almost any girl.
But, come to think of it, there was something he needed even more.
He walked swiftly to the nearest drugstore. It was a large one, part of a chain. And there, featured prominently in the window, was exactly what he wanted.
At the cigar counter, he said to the clerk: “It’s pretty cheap. Do they work all right?”
The clerk drew himself up. “Before we put an item on sale, sir, it is tested thoroughly. We are the largest retail outlet in the Solar System—that’s why it’s so cheap.”
“All right. Give me the medium-sized one. And two boxes of cartridges.”
With the blaster in his possession, he felt much more secure. He had a good deal of confidence—based on years of escaping creatures with hair-trigger nervous systems—in his ability to duck and wriggle and jump to one side. But it would he nice to be able to fight back. And how did he know how soon Stephanson would try again?
He registered under a false name, a ruse he thought of at the last moment. That it wasn’t worth much, as ruses went, he found out when the bellhop, after being tipped, said: “Thank you, Mr. Crandall. I hope you get your victim, sir.”
So he was a celebrity. Probably everyone in the world knew exactly what he looked like. All of which might make it a bit more difficult to get at Stephanson.
While he was taking a bath, he asked the television set to check through Information’s file on the man. Stephanson had been rich and moderately important seven years ago; with the Stephanson Switch—how do you like that, the Stephanson Switch!—he must be even richer now and much more important.
He was. The television set informed Crandall that in the last calendar month, there were sixteen news items relating to Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. Crandall considered, then asked for the most recent.
That was datelined today. “Frederick Stephanson, the president of the Stephanson Investment Trust and Stephanson Electronics Corporation, left early this morning for his hunting lodge in Central Tibet. He expects to remain there for at least—”
“That’s enough!” Crandall called through the bathroom door.
Stephanson was scared! The arrogant beanpole was frightened silly! That was something; in fact, it was a large part of the return on those seven years. Let him seethe in his own sweat for a while, until he found the actual killing, when it did come at last, almost welcome.
Crandall asked the set for the fresh news and was immediately treated to a bulletin about himself and how he had registered at the Capricorn-Ritz under the name of Alexander Smathers. “But neither is the correct name, ladies and gentlemen,” the playback rolled out unctuously. “Neither Nicholas Crandall nor Alexander Smathers is the right name for this man. There is only one name for that man—and that name is death! Yes, the grim reaper has taken up residence at the Ritz-Capricorn Hotel tonight, and only he knows which one of us will not see another sunrise. That man, that grim reaper, that deputy of death, is the only one among us who knows—”
“Shut up!” Crandall yelled, exasperated. He had almost forgotten the kind of punishment a free man was forced to endure.
The private phone circuit on the television screen lit up.
He dried himself, hurried into clothes and asked, “Who’s calling?”
>
“Mrs. Nicholas Crandall,” said the operator’s voice.
He stared at the blank screen for a moment, absolutely thunderstruck. Polly! Where in the world had she come from? And how did she know where he was? No, the last part was easy—he was a celebrity.
“Put her on,” he said at last.
Polly’s face filled the screen. Crandall studied her quizzically. She’d aged a bit, but possibly it wasn’t obvious at anything but this magnification.
As if she realized it herself, Polly adjusted the controls on her set and her face dwindled to life-size, the rest of her body as well as her surroundings coming into the picture. She was evidently in the living room of her home; it looked like a low-to-middle-income-range furnished apartment. But she looked good—awfully good. There were such warm memories ...
“Hi, Polly. What’s this all about? You’re the last person I expected to call me.”
“Hello, Nick.” She lifted her hand to her mouth and stared over its knuckles for some time at him. Then: “Nick. Please. Please don’t play games with me.”
He dropped into a chair. “Huh?”
She began to cry. “Oh, Nick! Don’t! Don’t be that cruel! I know why you served that sentence those seven years. The moment I heard your name today, I knew why you did it. But, Nick, it was only one man—just one man, Nick!”
“Just one man what?”
“It was just that one man I was unfaithful with. And I thought he loved me, Nick. I wouldn’t have divorced you if I’d known what he was really like. But you know, Nick, don’t you? You know how much he made me suffer. I’ve been punished enough. Don’t kill me, Nick! Please don’t kill me!”
“Listen, Polly,” he began, completely confused. “Polly girl, for heaven’s sake—”
“Nick!” she gulped hysterically. “Nick, it was over eleven years ago—ten, at least. Don’t kill me for that, please, Nick! Nick, truly, I wasn’t unfaithful to you for more than a year, two years at the most. Truly, Nick! And, Nick, it was only that one affair—the others didn’t count. They were just—just casual things. They didn’t matter at all, Nick! But don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” She held both hands to her face and began rocking back and forth, moaning uncontrollably.