Edward Llewellyn

by Prelude to Chaos

  She seemed relieved to find that I was prompted by prac-tics rather than esthetics, and sat down slowly. “How beautiful! They do what they can to make our lives livable, don’t they?”

  “This place was designed to pen us up, not drive us mad. If such a thing as a humane prison can exist, this is it.” I slipped my arm round her waist and she stiffened. “Found a way to get out?”

  She stiffened further and I squeezed her gently. “We need to neck, but keep it light. They’ll get nosey if two loners like us turn suddenly passionate!” I kissed her ear. “And speak softly!”

  She gave a good imitation of a nervous girl on her first date. “You work in electronics. Can you glitch the cameras?” “I can dejust some of ’em to foul up their pics at Surveillance Center. Not too often or I’ll lose my reputation as their prize captive tech.”

  “The same with the mikes?”

  I nodded.

  “What about doors?”

  “Cell doors you mean?” We insisted on calling our rooms “cells,” to the annoyance of the staff.

  “The door of my cell?”

  I thought for a moment. “I could fake the interlock. But they’d find it at the next inspection. You’d get blamed. And then—” I tapped my head. “Mind-wash!”

  “But not until the next inspection?”

  “Not unless you were very unlucky. But what’s the point in being able to leave your cell after lock-up? You couldn’t go anywhere.”

  “If you’d faulted the corridor cameras I could reach the sector door.”

  “And that’s as far as you’d get. I can’t fake corridor interlocks.”

  She nodded, then asked, “Do you ever get a clear view of the John Howard?”

  “I saw her alongside last week. On a camera I was checking. Why?”

  “I’ve heard she carries a minicopter now. The skipper’s minicopter. Is that true?”

  “She had a minicopter on her poop when I saw her. But if her skipper, or anybody else, tries flying it within five klicks of Jonas Point he’ll be cooked by a
  “I know that! But can you fly a minicopter?” When I nodded she took off on another tack. “Graham Suttler was certified last week.”

  “Graham was definitely going stir-crazy.”

  “Naomi Houston waa certified too. I sneaked a scan of her lab reports. All normal by the old criteria.”

  “Naomi was normal! The bastards!” I jerked upright, forgetting my role of lover in my anger. “Are the psych boys turning crooked too?”

  “Not crooked. Just more demanding. They’ve narrowed the normality curve.” She shrugged. “Most would classify all of us as crazy without bothering over lab tests. Because we insist on staying locked up in here. Crazy or lazy!”

  “The lazy ones quit long ago!” She winced as my fingers dug into her arm. “Sorry!” I eased my grip. “Forced mind-wipe! They’ll have to hold me down!”

  “And they will.”

  “They swore they’d never wipe us unless we agreed. Or unless we went lunatic.” I made myself talk quietly and calmly. “There’ve been rumors about closing the Pen since long before they put me here. At one time they talked about shipping the hard-core to Moonbase. That died with the space program.”

  “Gavin, this time it’s serious. Not because of the expense. What government ever gave a damn about the cost of anything they really wanted? But now-—I think this Administration wants to use the Pen for something else.”

  I stared at her. “How can you know anything the rest of us don’t? Are they censoring the library?”

  “The Governor would quit before she’d allow that.”

  The Governor was a woman whose image was hard to like but whose integrity I didn’t doubt. She had maintained, in the face of growing criticism, the constitution which had governed the Pen from the beginning. And embedded in that constitution was a clause that all information contained in the public media would be available to prisoners. We probably kept ourselves better informed about what was going on outside the Pen than most outsiders. “Then how can you be so sure that the rumors are serious?”

  She hesitated. “I’m—I’m a surgeon.”

  “Not even surgeons know everything! Why should a surgeon know they’re going to close the Pen?”

  “I work in the hospital and the morgue—as I told you during supper.”

  “So they’re using you as an orderly. Like they’re using me as a technician.”

  “Doctor Shore lets me do more than an orderly’s work. He’s a good doctor.”

  “Better than that—he’s a good guy!” The Doc was one of the few guardians whom we ever met in the flesh.

  She nodded. “A good doctor and a good man. Do you remember that gale three weeks ago? One of the guards working on the wharf was knocked down by a wave. He hit his head and developed an acute subdural hematoma. That’s bleeding inside the brain—”

  “With rising intracranial pressure which, unless quickly relieved, progresses through coma to death. I watched a man die that way once. We were pinned down and couldn’t make the extraction.”

  “Where—-?” She checked a question that would have offended Pen etiquette. “We couldn’t evacuate this guard either. Because of the gale the John Howard couldn’t come alongside to collect him. And because of the CPB’s they couldn’t lift him out by air. So Doctor Shore had to bring him to the operating room. I helped put in burr holes to relieve the pressure, but that wasn’t going to be enough. The Doc knew he had to go inside and—well—he’s no neurosurgeon. He asked me to operate.”

  “And?”

  “And I did. Successfully. It wasn’t difficult—-we’ve a well-equipped operating room—but it looked impressive to anybody not used to craniotomy. He assisted, and afterward, when we were drinking coffee together, he let slip that forced mind-wipe for all of us is inevitable—and soon! He urged me to accept voluntary mind-wipe while I could. It’s much less traumatic than the forced variety. He swore that the Governor, all the staff, would make sure that I requalified. My talents mustn’t be wasted! I must practice neurosurgery again. He got quite emotional. ‘Accept character restructuring, Judith! Your brain will forget who you were. Your hands will know you’re a surgeon!’ I said I’d think about it.”

  “Is that true? I mean about your hands remembering?”

  “If they do it won’t help much. The hands bit is just the kind of sentimental myth people have about surgeons. My real skill’s in my brain. And there it’s so tied up with memory that it’ll probably go with all my other memories. One reason I’ve got to get out of here before they strap me to the table.” “You said you’d think about it. What did the Doc say to that?”

  “Warned me not to think for too long. The Department Of Justice is on the verge of a decision—”

  “Justice! Have they got us now?”

  “Apparently.” She shrugged. “What does it matter who gives the order? The results will be the same.”

  “If it’s Justice, then the Doc’s right. The order will come. What that bastard Futrell wants—he gets!” Even mentioning the name “Futrell” sent a surge of adrenalin-anger surging round me. “Okay—what’s your plan? Know how to beat the tell-tales?”

  Those were our real shackles, the bonds which no prisoner had ever been able to break. On admission I, like every other prisoner, had had a transponder implanted in the muscles of my back, beside my right shoulder-blade. A place which I could only see in a mirror and could not reach without contortion. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, that transponder was continuously being interrogated by the central surveillance system and was responding with my personal code. If a transponder stopped responding, or if it showed I was
somewhere I shouldn’t be, then the area was automatically closed and I was isolated. I had seen the system in operation too often to have any hope of evading it. At intervals a transponder failed and some surprised prisoner was whisked away for questioning and returned with a new implant.

  But Judith was a surgeon and I was an electronics technician. “Do you know a way?” I repeated.

  She stood up. “Perhaps. But I think we’ve talked enough for one night. Can we come up here again tomorrow?”

  “Sure!” I walked back with her through the orchard and gardens as a series of musical chimes rang through the zone, telling us it was time we returned to our cells. She took my arm, perhaps for the benefit of the watching cameras, perhaps because she found the same pleasure in being beside me that I had in being beside her. We strolled along together until the chiding voice of a guard told us to hurry home to bed.

  When the lock clicked behind me and I was alone in my cell the small spark of hope Judith had lit started to flicker. The Department of Justice now had responsibility for the Pen, and the Attorney General would make sure that I, as myself, would never get out of this place. And that what I knew would never be made public.

  The Pen was an “information black hole.” Its constitution insured that all public information would flow into us, but that no information from or about us would ever reach the public. A sentence to the Pen was the civilized substitute for a death sentence, but it was still a kind of death. Legally I had been executed when my sentence was handed down. I would leave the Pen only when I was physically or mentally dead. And nothing I could say, do, or write would ever be allowed to escape to show that I was still living. If I left alive I would leave as naked as a newborn, without a paper to my name. Without even a name. Without a memory. My mind wiped clear of how the Attorney General, Gerald Futrell, had engineered the assassination of his President.

  Most prisoners had some self-justifying statement hidden away. Their last desperate attempt to slip something of themselves past mind-wipe. If it had only been a case of surrendering my personality and my memories I would have accepted character restructuring long ago, glad to be rid of both. But I would not willingly get rid of either until I had published what I alone knew.

  However hopeless Judith’s plan might turn out to be, she was a woman with special opportunities and unique skills. We ourselves would not escape. But the attempt might offer that chance for which I had waited. The chance to pass my story on to somebody outside the Pen.

  I took the draft of what I had written from its hiding place and settled down on my bed to check through it once again.

  I

  My name is Gavin Knox, and in 2016 I transferred from the Special Strike Force to the Secret Service. At that time the Service was still an arm of the Treasury Department, originally charged with catching counterfeiters of the currency and protecting the person of the President. That protection had later been extended to any politician seeking his job.

  In 2019 I was Arnold Grainer’s only protector when he set out to win the Presidential nomination. I continued as his bodyguard during his campaign, and I was among those guarding him throughout his Presidency. Arnold Grainer was great before he became President, and is among the greatest of U.S. Presidents. That is my opinion, and it will be the opinion of history. In the opinion of most of his contemporaries he was an arrogant, overbearing sonofabitch, elected only because the machine-produced candidates of the other major parties showed themselves too tainted for the electorate to swallow.

  Arnold Grainer might be a sonofabitch, but he had shown himself to be an effective, intelligent, and honest sonofabitch, the kind of leader we needed during the crises of the early Affluence, but one whom the pundits decided must be shed when the crises were past. I was assigned to him when he became a serious contender for the Liberal nomination, but before the party mandarins had started to take him seriously. Even the then apolitical Secret Service did not see him as a potential nominee and decided that one agent, myself, was all it could spare for his protection.

  As a result he and I traveled together from primary to primary, and for the first few we traveled alone. He acquired disciples as he began to collect delegates and by the time we hit the big states he had a string of media-mongers, mobile politicians and assorted camp-followers trailing astern. During those months I got to know Arnold Grainer very well, while he learned more about me than I like anybody to know.

  Some woman once said that to hear the truth about a man you must ask his valet Today you must ask his bodyguard. Grainer, sitting beside me on innumerable flights between meetings, would ask what I, a nonpolitical Praetorian, thought of his political performance. By then my job had forced me to listen to more peddlers of political bogus than there were counterfeiters of the currency in the prisons of the United States, and I knew what to tell him: that he should curb his natural arrogance, disguise his intelligence, and humble himself before the political verities. He’d laugh, but did stop exposing the ignorance of television interviewers, and his comments on his opponents became too subtle for most of them to realize they had been insulted.

  Arnold Grainer had been the General commanding Moon-base during the confrontation with the Eastern bloc and his initiative in contacting the Eastern commander, General Lobachevsky, and the subsequent joint evacuation of both bases probably rescued the world from a panic-inspired holocaust and certainly saved the garrisons of the bases from slow death. As I had been one of the Special Strike Force in Western Moonbase I owed Grainer a personal debt. So did Lobachevsky. For after both Generals had been hailed as heroes Lobachevsky was on his way to the wall. Grainer saved him by letting the Eastern leaders know that if Lobachevsky was disgraced he Would make it his personal business to see that every field commander in the Eastern forces got both coded originals and decoded copies of the signals exchanged between Eastern Moonbase and the Kremlin during those hectic days—convincing evidence that many of them, with their staffs and armies, had been slated for sacrifice in the initial nuclear exchange. Knowledge that would make them uneasy about obeying future orders from their Supreme Command.

  Grainer only escaped court-martial himself because of bis transient popularity. He had used intercepted signals to save an enemy commander when the State Department had planned to use those same signals to blackmail the Kremlin. He was retired as soon as the Administration judged it was safe to retire him. Years later, when Lubachevsky came to power after the convulsions which always accompanied an Eastern change in leadership, Grainer’s action gave him an unique relationship with the Eastern bloc.

  The Affluence was an age in which the only heroes the media permitted to survive were those it had created itself. Editors, columnists, and commentators were not comfortable with the genuine article and started to cut Arnold Grainer down to size once he was no longer needed to save their necks. He was a man whom it was easy to dislike, and he infuriated them further by ignoring their criticism and advice. On becoming a civilian he joined Wrenshall in turning veralloy from a laboratory curiosity into the material which threatened the future of every metal-consuming industry. In ’09 planned obsolescence was economic dogma and the concept of a cheap, easily worked, wear-resistant alloy was anathema.

  Grainer believed that veralloy and other products of high technology could be the basis of a genuine and general affluence. He set out to prove it, and in the process both he and Wrenshall became multimillionaires. Wrenshall continued to mix metals happily. Grainer concentrated on changing the Affluence into the Millennium by converting industrial production into industrial productivity.

  Opposed by multinational corporations, international unions, and timid governments of every political hue and economic faith, he saw that logic was useless. Only by political action could he break the strangleholds. To beat the politicians he had to join them. He joined the least rigid of the three parties and put himself forward as a candidate for its presidential nomination. To the astonishment of everybody except his delegates he g
ot it. At that point the Service realized that somebody would probably try to kill him and that many would be delighted if somebody did. A pack of Secret Service men and women surrounded him throughout his campaign. And in 2020 the American people, with that gut instinct which had saved the Republic in the past, elected as their President a man too strong for their tastes and too tough for their stomachs.

  By the end of his third year in office Arnold Grainer was so hated by his party’s leaders that they were happy to believe the pollsters who were forecasting that he would be the first elected President in over a century to seek renomination and not get it. They prepared to make Vice-President Randolph the people’s choice. And during the early months of 2024 most people were saying loudly that they’d never vote for that bastard Grainer again.

  When Grainer let his name stand in the primaries but made no effort to campaign, the Party thought he was finished. When he went sailing with Helga and Gloria (both murdered within the year) and with myself on the eve of the New York primary, they were sure of it. They only realized that they were likely to be manipulated and harried by him for another four years when the party members who had cursed him publicly voted for him privately, suggesting that in November the electorate would do the same.

  The electorate never had the chance. President Arnold Grainer was assassinated on the twenty-fourth of October 2024, while waiting at Dulles Airport to greet the new President of the Soviet Union.

  That was one of his few public appearances when I was not near enough to throw him to the ground. McLean, in charge of overall security, had sent me with a section to investigate a report that there was an intruder on the observation deck of the Airport Terminal. We found nobody but, glancing across the reception area, I saw a curtain move behind the window of a room which should have been cleared.