“Oh, yes. The traditional interview with the village elder. I thought Johnny had done away with all that.”
“He would like to, but a lot of people remember my father lifted this village out of the Stone Age when he came here. He won’t be cast aside so easily, no matter what you or your brother think.”
“Hold on a minute! I don’t want to cast him aside. All I want is to get off the He—that’s why I’m in here, remember.”
“That’s an even more futile ambition than your brother’s. Nobody goes back.”
Stirling nodded disbelievingly. “When do I see your father?”
“He would like you to come along to our hut during your lunch break today.”
“You mean I’m allowed to go outside?”
“Of course. If prisoners did no work, we’d have a queue waiting to get into the stockade. No work, no food.”
“Is that the lex non scripta?”
“My father will write the law out for you, if necessary,” Melissa said curtly, demonstrating that she had understood the Latin tag. As if to further emphasize the point, she lifted the tray from Stirling’s lap before he had quite finished, and went out with it. Her massive battle-plume of black hair was momentarily limned with bronze by the morning light, then the door closed ‘behind her. Stirling got up and folded away his sleeping bag, uneasily aware that Melissa’s after-image was persisting an unusually long time.
He spent the morning emptying bird traps from plastic sacks, checking and repairing the mechanisms, and coating them with goose grease. The traps were treacherous devices made from metal scraps over a period of many years by men with different ideas and varying standards of professionalism. In the comparatively moist, oxygen-rich atmosphere of the lie, the rate of oxidization of unprotected ferrous metals was high and added to the unreliability of the traps. Stirling found it necessary to give the work all his attention in the interests of retaining a complete set of fingers; and the time passed quickly.
A constant stream of villagers, thin, brown individuals who showed an amiable curiosity about Stirling’s personal background, came by the storage hut beside which he was working. Although there was no marriage or giving in marriage in Heaven, a good proportion of them were paired off in apparent monogamy, and he saw—at last— several children. They seemed to have no ambition in life but to eat, sleep, and gather food. The sinless, blameless life of a primitive tribe seemed to suit them perfectly: they were super-hoboes riding a celestial freight car on a journey to nowhere. Stirling tried without success to see things from their point of view. The Compression was bad—but not all that bad.
Late in the morning Pete Biquard came by, carrying a load of the thin black plastic used so much by the villagers. This plastic, Stirling had learned, was the standard weather-proofing for robot replacement units. He spoke briefly, completely without animosity; but Stirling got the impression Biquard realized he had been chosen as the guinea pig for Johnny’s trial of his brother’s trustworthiness, and was not happy about it. Stirling filed the fact away for possible future use.
At lunchtime the middle-aged woman who had served him the previous morning brought a tray of food, much of it uncooked lettuce and cabbage dressed with green-flecked vegetable oil. Stirling suspected his new diet was deficient in protein; but he was feeling better than ever before in his life and already had detected a certain roominess in the waistband of his trousers. The gray uniform supplied by Bennett less than a week earlier was dirty, torn, and stained with blood and goose fat, but Stirling preferred it to the black plastic. He cleaned up his tray and tentatively began walking in the direction in which he believed the Lathams’ hut to lie.
Apart from the man whom he vaguely remembered— from his first night—as a Council member and who had directed him to his work on the traps, Stirling had seen no evidence that he was under guard. His leaving the vicinity of the storage hut would give an indication of how much prison life on the He differed from its counterpart three miles below. Stirling had once visited Newburyport’s main penitentiary, but had locked the memory away in a place where it would not easily be stumbled upon.
Immediately after he began to walk, a small, blackened stick of a man, who had been sleeping against a storage bin, got to his feet and moved after him. Stirling gave the little man a contented wave—this amount of surveillance he could stand—and concentrated on finding the Lathams’ hut. The villagers had made a good job of protecting their dwellings from inquisitive eyes or satellite-borne cameras. The surface of the lie outside the area occupied by the soil beds was covered by a brown lightweight composition; but it had been silted over with the dust of many summers, and insouciant grasses had taken hold. In the half-mile length of the village most of the elevated tank structures had been adapted as living quarters, and the individual foxholes constructed in the open were roofed with matted straw and leaves. Even at close range, a casual observer glancing along the eastern margin was likely to see nothing but complex rail systems and an occasional agricultural robot satisfying its appetites at the grass-blurred tanks.
Stirling found the Latham place in about ten minutes, with some assistance from passers-by. It was constructed on the same lines as the stockade and was considerably larger than most of the villagers’ private dwellings. He knocked at the low entrance and a thin but hoarse voice told him to enter. Inside he found the hut was divided into several rooms by woven grass screens. In the room to his right he found an old man lying on a low bed which was covered in genuine fabrics. The man raised himself on one arm.
“Are you Victor Stirling?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s right? I didn’t make any statement—I only asked you a question, so how could anything be ‘right’?” Judge Latham’s blurry, gray eyes fixed themselves ferociously on Stirling’s face for a few seconds; then he gave a triumphant smile. “You journalists! Biggest butchers of the language I’ve ever seen. You get your money for nothing. You know that, don’t you?”
“My editor often said that too, Judge,” Stirling replied, grinning. “I never appreciated his viewpoint.”
“You probably gave him ulcers. Well, don’t stand there blocking the light. Pull up a heap of dust and sit down.”
Stirling found a stool and tested his weight on it carefully. Judge Latham sounded like a man he was going to like. He looked around the interior of the hut. He noted color sketches on the walls and a gray box which looked as though it could contain a micro-library.
“Melissa isn’t here,” Latham said abruptly. “Jaycee sent for her.”
Stirling felt a pang of regret, then saw the older man was staring at him appraisingly. The pupils of the judge’s eyes seemed almost to have dissolved into the whites; but his gaze went deep, and Stirling shifted uneasily. It was too soon for anyone to start thinking what the judge seemed to be thinking.
“She said you wanted to see me, Judge.”
“Never mind the title, Victor. Call me Ford. My real name is Clifford, but it doesn’t sound like a real name. Well, what do you think of my little place?” Latham stared at him eagerly from behind a nose which acne had turned into an enormous strawberry. “It’s the first home I’ve seen on the He,” Stirling said. Latham relaxed slightly. “What brought you up here, son?”
“I thought I was doing something for my brother. Now … What are you doing here?” “Dying, mostly. Under the fourth sign of the zodiac.”
“Cancer?” Stirling found the word difficult to say in the circumstances, but Latham seemed to have a detached interest in his own condition.
“You know your astrology, boy. It started over ten years ago; so I suppose I’ve been more fortunate ‘than most.”