Or perhaps it would become a footnote to history.
II
We lay in each other’s arms on the grass under the cherry blossoms, pretending to make love while talking escape. My attention was divided between Judith’s voice, soft in my ear, and her body, firm against mine. When she started to outline a plan which would probably leave us dead or mind-wiped, her woman-scent became more exciting than her words and my hands went off on a program of their own, sliding over her taut jumpsuit.
She brought them to an abrupt halt as they started to explore further. “Stop it, Gavin!”
“I’m only trying to show our closed-circuit nursemaids that I’m maneuvering for a lay!”
“You’re getting me worked up! And this is no time for that.” She caught my fingers. “Are you with me so far?”
“I degrade the cameras and mikes in your cell and in the passage. I fake the interlocks in your cell. You haven’t told me how you plan to fix the block doors.”
“Doctor Shore came to fetch me himself on that night we operated. I saw the codes he used to get from the block to the hospital. So if you can let me out of my cell I can take us as far as the hospital.”
“What then?” My hands stopped moving as I became more interested in what she was saying than in how she felt.
“At two in the morning the duty nurse will probably be asleep. There are no serious cases in the ward at present and, like everywhere else, the hospital is short-staffed. We can go through the operating room into the surgeon’s lounge. There’s a door from the lounge into the guards’ zone, and I saw Doctor Shore key that too.”
“Did he see you key it?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe the doc was laying a trap. He wants you to volunteer for—”
“Doctor Shore isn’t that kind of bastard!” she hissed.
“Okay! Okay!” I hoped he wasn’t. “Go on.”
“There aren’t any circulating patrols now.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Certain. Not at night, anyway. The staff knows this place is closing down. They’ve been leaving to take permanent jobs.”
That I knew. The social atmosphere outside the Pen had been changing fast. There was a generalized uneasiness which seemed to have its origin in a sudden decline in births to young mothers. The decline was unexplained but was continuing, so that within a few years the population profile of every country in the world, First, Second, and Third, would show a gap like a knocked out tooth, even if birthrates started to increase immediately. Economists were at odds about what this gap would do to the economy, but most ordinary people could see uncertain personal futures and were putting pressure on government to prepare for the unknown by sacrificing the present—including social luxuries like the Pen. And the staff of the Pen, no longer certain that pensions would be inviolable, looked around for jobs that would continue into old age.
“Once we’re into the guard zone we can reach the elevator to the morgue.”
“The morgue? Why the morgue?”
“I told you! Cold-storage is full. There are four bodies waiting to be shipped out on Saturday morning. It’s high tide at six, just before sunrise.” The sailings of the John Howard were governed more by the tides than by the clock.
“You mean we switch with the corpses? That won’t work. If we take their places—”
“We don’t go out in place of the bodies. We go out under the bodies. The coffins come in one size—large. They’re deep enough to take a corpse with a hundred and fifty centimeter waistline. Poor old Josh was down to skin and bone by the time he died, and Greta was a small woman. They pack the coffin with foamed styro to make a nest for the body. We can burrow our own nests under that.”
“My God!” I stared at her, appalled.
She stared back. “Don’t soldiers sometimes hide under dead bodies?”
“Fresh dead bodies! And I’ve never had to—” I swallowed.
“Okay, so we’re nested down underneath Josh and Greta. What then?”
“The coffins are already in the shipping container. On Friday I’ll be helping them move Josh and Greta from the cold-storage lockers to lay out in the coffins. The lids will be off und the container left open so that they can be checked in the morgue and at the inspection station. That’s where they’ll put on the lids and close the container. Then it’ll go through the tunnel, out onto the wharf, and be loaded on the deck-rails of the John Howard."
“And crews in the morgue and the inspection station will examine the coffins and every square centimeter of the containers. They’ll be scanned by thermistor beams, gas analyzers, and God knows what else. They showed me what they do to anything that goes out of here. When I first arrived. So I’d see how useless it was to try. Didn’t they show you their gadgetry?”
“They did. But two years later. By then most of it wasn’t operating to spec—I saw that. As you said, they’re short of techs. I’ll bet the ones they have aren’t wasting time fixing things they consider useless gadgets. Two inspections by guards should be enough to pick up any nut trying to go out with the garbage.”
“They should. And probably will.”
“How closely would you inspect a coffin and a body at dawn on a March morning? Would you move poor old Josh around to probe underneath him?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Okay—we can hope they won’t. So they snap down the lids. Close up the container. And slide it aboard. The John Howard puts to sea. It’s a six-hour trip to Clarport. At about eight Surveillance Center finds we’re missing. They’ll radio her to come about and alert the guards to shoot us on sight. Or are you hoping Surveillance will let us lovers sleep late on a Saturday morning? That we’ll be buried and digging our way out before they come to dig us up?”
“There’ll be no digging by anyone. All prisoners from the Pen are buried at sea.”
“Balls! When I arrived they made me sign a form saying where I wanted to be buried when the time came. And if cremated what was to be done with my ashes. I said I didn’t give a damn what they did with my body, just so long as they made sure it was dead first. But they insisted I made a choice and signed the form. It didn’t offer sea burial as an option!” “That form’s a fake. A justifiable fake, perhaps. It makes some people happier while they’re alive if they think they’ve chosen the place where they’ll be planted when dead. In fact, no corpse leaving the Pen ever reaches the mainland. The container they use to haul away the coffins is like a garbage container. It’s loaded onto the same deck rails. When the John Howard reaches deep water, and that should be well before eight o’clock, the Skipper stops the engines, reads a non-denominational burial service, and pulls the ‘dump garbage’ lever. The container tips, the side swings open, and the coffins slide overboard like garbage bales. Those coffins have a concrete block built in at the foot. I’ve checked on that! So they’re shot out into sis hundred meters of water and go straight to the bottom.”
“And we swim back to the surface after the John Howards sailed on?”
“Gavin, if you haven’t managed to get out of your coffin by then, you deserve to go down with it! We leave the container when it starts to tilt and the side swings open, grab the minicopter, and take off. By then we should be outside the CPB zone.”
“How the hell do you know so much about this sea-burial business?”
Judith hesitated, then murmured, “Greta was a Believer.”
“A what?”