“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.