That was the first time any of us realized how the Social Stability Act allowed the Administration to tighten its hold over all information dissemination. As soon as I suspected that the gag would be applied to us stored my draft in the NIH “data-dump,” the mammoth computerized filing system where the mountains of data produced by NIH research are stored for possible future reference. I filed mine under “Meprobamate,” an obsolete drug which nobody had worked with for many years and so an address which nobody was likely to access for many more.
Jim continued to protest the gag and finally by-passed Doctor Drummond, who had been acting as an unhappy intermediary between us and the FTA. He told the bureaucrats bluntly that he would only respect their security order long enough for them to prepare a soothing public statement on Paxin and amend their regulations so that it was returned to the list of Schedule II Restricted drugs. In the heated discussions he had with FTA he must have let slip the information that I still had my draft report, for several days later Doctor Drummond urged me to turn it in. I told him that I had put I where there was no chance of it surfacing accidentally and that.I did not intend to retrieve it while the gag was in force.
Two days after I had refused to surrender my report I got a note from Jim asking me to drop round to his apartment at seven that evening to discuss our future plans with Audrey and himself. The message was marked “Very Important,” and was the first invitation I had had from him since we split. I couldn’t get an answer when I phoned, so at seven I dutifully went to his apartment.
The door was unlocked and I let myself in. The lounge was empty. I went to look in the bedroom and found Jim and Audrey in a collapsed missionary position. Both were naked and both appeared to be dead.
I was confirming that they were when two detectives burst into the apartment. I was standing by the bed with blood on my hands and the murder weapon on the floor. A gun I had never seen but which the records later showed I had purchased. And which bore my fingerprints.
I was arrested and charged with a double murder. Because of the FTA’s ukase neither my arrest nor my trial were made public and my court-appointed lawyer wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell him the truth. What the judge believed was the plethora of genuine evidence that I had quarreled bitterly with Audrey and the purely synthetic evidence that I had threatened to kill both her and Jim.
Even Doctor Drummond, one of the few people allowed to visit me in jail, seemed convinced that I had killed my colleagues. He tried to suggest that our frustration over not being allowed to publish our research added to my own frustration at having lost Jim to Audrey, had led the three of us into one of those escalating quarrels which result in killings. If I would tell him where I had hidden my draft he would produce it as evidence which might persuade the authorities to reduce the charge against me.
By the time Doctor Drummond had finished outlining the reasons for me to surrender the draft I knew what would happen if I did. I’d be silenced, as they had silenced Jim and Audrey, and Drummond would be next for the axe. I told him that by refusing his offer I was prolonging his life as well as my own. He was trying to argue me out of such an absurd idea when his visiting time was cut short, and he left lamenting my fate and worrying about his own.
I was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, and an addendum to my sentence confirmed my confidence that I was not paranoid, but was indeed the target of an Administration growing desperate. For I was sent to the Pen without the routine examination by the Board of Psychiatric Assessors, and without the option of voluntary restructuring until I had served at least one year. The Judge tried to pretend this was “a partial punishment for my revolting crime.” (The concept of punishment is returning to the judicial process with a vengeance, as the Administration becomes more frightened and the public more bitter.)
It was not my punishment the Administration wanted, it was my draft. They didn’t want my memory wiped until I’d told them where my report was hidden. The accidental reappearance of my data in the hands of any reputable scientist would blow the whole Paxin play.
They had not allowed for the integrity of the Federal Penal Service. Immediately after I had been sentenced the FPS took me into custody and, as the law directed, held me incommunicado. Inadvertently they saved me from the intensive interrogation that is also starting to become customary with an Administration determined to maintain law and order. Or perhaps the FPS did know what would happen to me if I was given to the police and purposely protected me. Whatever the cause, I was vastly relieved to arrive here because it was the only place where nobody could get their hands on me.
Now my fears are being renewed. Not fears for myself; I am already doomed. Doomed to either clandestine execution or regulation mind-wipe. If the Pen is closed down and all the remaining prisoners restructured I may be detached and surrendered to the police for interrogation. In which event you—my new persona—will never exist.
Or the Administration may have given up on me, and is too involved in other mounting problems to trouble itself with interrogating and executing me. If I am restructured and you are born from me, I pray to the light that this letter will reach you and that, somehow or other, you will gain access to the “Meprobamate” file at NIH and retrieve my—our—report. It must be published. The implications of Paxin when used as a social stabilizer are too immense for the decisions about it to be made by some faceless group.
IV
The similarity to my own entrapment was not coincidental. I lay awake half the night fitting the various pieces of the jigsaw together and the nearer the picture approached completion, the uglier it looked.
When I sat down opposite Judith at breakfast the next morning she played with her roll and avoided my eye. “Well—what do you think?”
“You write like a true scientist.”
She took my remark as a compliment. “Thanks. But I mean about—”
“At times the woman breaks through. Unexpectedly. The sudden changes in style are disconcerting.”
To glare at me she had to look at me. “About what I say! Not about how I say it!” She bit her lip. “I suppose everybody here claims they’re innocent!”
“Not me. I admit I killed a woman.” I saw the shock in her face. “But you—you never killed anybody in your life.” I sipped my coffee. “Tell me—those detectives who caught you red-handed. Did either of them have laid-back teeth? Look rather like a shark with acne?”
“One looked like a rat with acne.”
“Near enough. I wonder how many of us hard-core holdouts were framed?”
Her eyes widened. “Were you framed too? Are there others like me?” She looked round the mess-hall, as though seeing her fellow-prisoners through fresh eyes.
“None of ’em are like you, Judy. But I’m damned sure most of the later arrivals aren’t premeditated murderers. That woman priest, for instance. Look at her holding forth over there! Can you imagine her killing anybody on purpose? Equally, can you imagine her keeping quiet about any evil she’s unearthed? I’ll bet she stumbled on something the Ad- 1 ministration didn’t want publicized and started to shout it | from the rooftops. So she was grabbed and gagged under the f Social Stability Act. There must be dozens who were either 3 maneuvered into fixing themselves or were framed.”