In a rare display of emotion, he clenched his fists and let a cry of rage escape his lips. It wasn’t anger at them—he had no feelings at all about the citizens of Mega-City who broke the Law. When they crossed that fine line, they were subject to arrest, judgement, imprisonment, or instant execution, depending on their crime. It was his job, his duty, his purpose in life to see that these actions were properly done.
The fury he felt was not for them but for himself—for the hours he was not allowed to do his job, for the crimes being committed at that very moment he didn’t know about—and, though they were few—for the times he had pursued a lawbreaker and failed. Each day he promised himself he would push himself harder, that he would bring the cause of justice another step closer to the goal he knew was impossible to reach. Most of all, he promised himself that he would never fail again.
He drew the shutters back from the one narrow window in the room. The sun had disappeared behind the great wall in the west. The galaxy of Mega-City sparkled like a hundred-million stars. He turned away and faced the wall. He pressed his palm against the black plate of carbon and a panel slid away. The armored suit was black as space, so black it seemed to drink in all the light. The heavy gauntlets lay on a shelf. His boots were on the floor. Resting in its holster was the Lawgiver, the deadliest handgun in the world. In the left boot was a blue-steel knife. In the belt of the dark armored suit was a daystick and a cluster of studded mini-grenades. A visored helmet hung just above the collar of the suit.
On the left breast of the armor was a shield-and-eagle badge. Every Judge in Mega-City wore one, from the Street Judge to those trusted few who sat in the high, vaulted chambers of the Hall of Justice. Every badge was the same, and each was engraved with the name of the Judge who had earned it, and sworn to wear it proudly for life. The blood-bones, the clutchers, and the slicers feared every Judge in Mega-City, every chrome-and-cop-per badge. And every scummer who prowled the dark belly of the city prayed that he would be the one that fired the bullet that pierced the badge that bore the name of Dredd…
FIVE
“Move along, damn you, I ain’t got all day!”
Fergie took a short step. The line shuffled forward. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the broad curve of the shuttle’s hull. Like the cons it had carried, the shuttle had gotten its cleansing spray as well. Fingers of dirt dripped down its eroded sides. Nearly-faded letters on the side read:
MEGA-CITY JUDGE SYSTEM: ASPEN PRISON SHUTTLE # THREE
I hope to hell I never see your ugly self again, Fergie thought to himself.
“Next,” the guard said.
He stuck his right hand into the blinking red slot. The robot sensor whirred, then winked at him in green.
“Ferguson, Herman, ASP-niner-zero-zero-seven-six-four… Sentence served: Six months, three days. Welcome back, Cit-i-zen…”
“Thanks,” Fergie said.
The robot didn’t answer back. It made a bleeting sound, and flipped him a blue plastic card. The card showed Fergie’s face the day he’d entered prison. That was not a good day. He decided he looked better now.
He walked through a gate. He looked down at the ground. He waited for someone to tell him what to do. It struck him, then, and the thought nearly brought him to his knees. There was no one watching, no one telling him where to go, no one telling him what to do. He was free. He didn’t feel free, but he’d be damned if he let that hold him back.
The back of his card read:
LIVING ASSIGNMENT:
RED QUAD
BLOCK Y
“HEAVENLY HAVEN”
SUITE 666
“Sounds great,” Fergie said aloud. “Better than where I’ve been.”
A passerby saw him talking to himself. He glanced at Fergie’s prison-issue clothes, gave him a sour look, and hurried on. The man’s face was painted half cobalt-blue, half Chinese-red. His hair was coiled in a pile atop his head and tied with razor wire. It was impossible to guess the current fashion trend. Everyone he passed looked totally different from the person who’d passed before.
Poking his card in an infoslot led him to the Skycab station that would take him to the Red Quad sector, some sixty miles away. He hadn’t seen a woman on the street—or if he had, he didn’t recognize them as such. The Skycab ride made up for that. The great towers of Mega-City swept by below, but Fergie hardly noticed the sight. As the Skycab veered sharply to the left, he glanced down and saw a dazzling blue rooftop pool. Under a brightly-striped umbrella were three young women, standing and laughing by themselves. All of them were lean and impossibly tall. All of them had bright scarlet mouths and silver eyes. They wore their thick raven hair down to their thighs, and little else.
Fergie felt a knot in his stomach. He wanted to cry. He wanted to follow the women wherever they planned to go. One of the cons in the electronics shop had patched together a VIRG program, a Virtual Reality Girl. It tended to overload. Several prisoners burned out their skulls before the guards found the thing and hauled it away.
The Skycab set him down on a pleasant street. Fergie stood and stared at the breathtaking sight before his eyes. There was a shady green path winding through a forest of thick-boled trees. Sunlight filtered through the branches to sparkle in a gentle waterfall. Couples strolled hand in hand. Children chased each other across the lush lawn.
The scene brought a smile to Fergie’s face. Man, can these frigs possibly be as dumb as they look?
New variations on old schemes danced through his head. The platinum-brick routine, the antique-Coke bottle scam. These groons mooning in the park would buy a sackful of spiders if they thought they could get them half-price.
“Wonderful,” Fergie said aloud. “Herman Ferguson loves Heavenly Haven. Herman Ferguson is going to fit right in!”
“…coming soon, Citizens, the Heavenly Haven Pocket Park. Bringing fresh air and recreation to your lives. Another design for better living from the Mega-City Council…”
Fergie blinked, startled by the kindly, sonorous voice that seemed to come from everywhere. It was a warm, commanding voice, a voice you knew you could trust.
“—ing soon, Citizens, the Heavenly Haven Pocket Park. Bringing fresh air and…”
Heavenly Haven Pocket Park suddenly disappeared. Fergie stared at a dirty, graffiti-covered wall and felt the color rise to his face. Six months in Aspen and he’d let himself be conned by a damn holo poster!
“I gotta get with it,” he said, shaking his head. “I got to get straight before some scammer starts sellin’ me spiders…”
With the holo poster gone, Heavenly Haven didn’t look all that terrific anymore. Dark, skeletal tenements formed brooding canyon walls on every side. Citizens scurried through the murky streets. This part of the city was obviously incredibly old. Reminders of the Way Back When were squeezed between the tenement walls. Fergie saw a row of marble columns that held up nothing at all. Something that might have been a twentieth-century church was imbedded in a bleak slab of stone. Swallowed by the years, its brick entry surfaced now and then like the bones of some long-dead creature buried in a geologic fault.