I picked up my tray. “Suits me fine!” It would suit me very well to be seen spending the hours before lights-out with a woman. I had been getting hints from the staff that a normal sexual outlet was essential for my mental health and that they would be happier if I sought one more often. I had certainly not been celibate during my three years in the Pen, but my affairs had been brief and intense, fired by physical hunger rather than by a need for female companionship. And that, as judged by our supervisors, partook more of carnality than normality.
We put our trays on the disposal belt and walked together across the mess hall, exchanging pleasantries with the men and women still talking at the tables. It was obvious where we must be heading but there were none of the crude jibes I would have heard had I escorted a woman across other mess halls where I have eaten. That was partly due to staff disapproval of crude jibes and partly because few of our hard-core colleagues were crude by nature.
Outside the mess hall Judith took the first flight of stairs at a run, and I ran after her up and down six more flights before we reached the gardens under the lucaplex dome. She seemed surprised to find me still on her heels, and as we walked between the hydroponics toward the orchard I asked, “Do you check the fitness of every guy you ask to walk through the woods?”
“I haven’t invited many!” She glanced at me. “And you’re the first to stay With me on that run. You keep in training. Why?”
That was a question I had often asked myself, and to which I had no convincing answer. “I aim to reach the handball finals this year. Did you know handball was a popular game among the debtors in the old Fleet Prison in London? Interesting that it should be so popular here too.”
She showed no interest in the popularity of handball but walked quickly past the vegetable tanks toward the comparative seclusion of the orchard. As soon as we were among the first trees, heavy with ripe fruit, she turned toward a strip of grass. I caught her arm. “Let’s go farther. To where they’re in flower. The cherries have just blossomed.”
She glanced at me, as though surprised at some out-of-character remark, then walked with me through the fruiting sector into the division where the trees were foaming with the pinks and whites of cherry, apple, and pear. In the controlled environment of the Pen we could practice continuous rotatioa of crops so that by walking through the orchard we had gone from winter through fall across summer and into spring. I urged her toward a rustic bench. “Let’s sit here and smell the flowers,” I said, then added softly, “The local mikes are noisy and the blossoms block the videos.”
She seemed relieved to find that I was prompted by practice 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 CPB.” The ban on flying in the vicinity of the Pen was absolute, enforced by an integrated Charged Particle Beam-radar system programmed to automatically destroy any aircraft that entered the forbidden zone. Together with our fusion generator and metallic hydrides plant, that system put us among the most technologically advanced establishments on earth.
“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 was 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—”