Mast hummed meditatively to himself, looking out on to the landing where the other prisoners were playing with improvised cards. He essayed one or two further remarks, to which Peder made no reply, and after a while wandered off.
Several nights later the humming of the lock on his cell door woke him from his sleep. He raised his head from his pillow. The cell was in darkness, the infra-red bulb, which allowed any passing warder to survey the cell through the sensitized peephole, being invisible to him. But normal yellow-grey light from the landing was filtering through the outlines of the door as it swung open. Peder became aware of a presence moving into the narrow cell.
The interior light came on. A warder stood there, though Peder knew him as a warder only because he recognized his face. He was not wearing his usual black serge uniform. He was wearing the Frachonard Prossim suit.
A chilling thrill of fright and shock ran through Peder. He shrank to the farther end of the bunk, his eyes wide with terror, trembling with anticipation. The warder’s expression was glassy and unseeing. Without a word he undressed, neatly laying out the Frachonard suit on the bunk.
Then both face and body crumpled. The warder collapsed on to the floor.
How the suit had found its way here was too large a concept for Peder even to think about. But he knew now, accepting the fact with a dumb, animal-like resignation, that he could never be free of it. Slipping from the bunk, he stood up. With deft movements he removed his sack-like sleeping garb, took undergarments from his locker – hesitating at the thought of bringing Prossim in contact with their rough, churlishly cut cloth – and drew them on.
As he donned the suit its field of influence settled on him once more. There was the usual instant change of outlook, but this time in a way that was different from before. Impressions of a hitherto unknown order crowded into his brain, as though the whole prison around him was open to his inner gaze.
Nor was that all. Never before had the suit buried his ego almost completely beneath the thoughts and actions it suggested. It had always allowed him some independent consciousness. Now this changed. It was still his own brain that formed his thoughts, but that brain took its cue from something that was outside of him, something that surrounded him and supported him.
In the face of this invasion his ego at first struggled feebly but it had time for only one complete thought of its own.
Clothes robot.
Then it gave up as an entity on its own account, collapsing into a pale reflection of what went on around it.
And Peder the New Man, creature of Prossim, emerged. He went through the pockets of his suit and found several electronic pass keys. Kneeling, he inspected the unconscious warder. The man’s breathing was light. He was in a deep coma.
He straightened. The beat of Ledlide prison was all around him. He became aware of facts, details, names that the unaided senses could never have told him, all interlocking throughout the huge ramification. The sleeping shifts, the working shifts, the rest-and-association shifts.
And he realized that escape from Ledlide was possible.
Leaving his cell, he padded the length of the silent landing. Men snored and muttered in their sleep behind the locked doors. On his left-hand side was a railing. The gallery well, screened at regular intervals by safety nets, dropped down for a thousand feet. On the opposite side of the well Peder could see the standard historical pattern of large-scale prisons: tier upon tier of landings and cells, a giant honeycomb of prisoners.
At the end of the gallery he halted. Using one of his electronic keys, he opened the door to Mast’s cell. Quietly he went inside.
Mast was a light sleeper. He awoke immediately the light came on. He greeted Peder with a befuddled frown, then climbed from his bunk and stood staring at him.
‘Peder… how did you do it? They are letting you wear your suit!’
‘I’m leaving here,’ Peder announced. ‘You may come with me. It will be convenient.’
‘Leaving where? Ledlide?’ Mast chuckled softly, still puzzled, and shook his head. ‘That isn’t possible, Peder. You have to stay here. Better just to accept it.’
‘I can get us out. To Caean. That is better than Ledlide, even for you.’
‘Caean?…’ Mast frowned. ‘But there just isn’t any way out.’
‘I know a way. A ship is waiting for me on the surface. But it is difficult for someone like myself to man it alone. Better if you come with me. Caean is a long way.’
Mast took a step back. ‘No,’ he said in alarm. ‘It’s an automatic extension of sentence if you do anything…’
He trailed off. Peder leaned against the door jamb, the lines of his jacket falling away in a codicil of grace and perfection.
‘Twenty years,’ he reminded Mast. ‘Twenty years of this grey routine, of never seeing outside. Come with me and you’ll be freeeee…’ His voice soared and caressed. ‘Free on new worlds.’
Mast gave a cynical quirk of his lips. ‘Free?’
He sighed.
‘All right, Peder,’ he said, ‘I’ll try you out.’
He reached for his prison clothes. Together they left the cell. At the end of the gallery one of Peder’s pass keys gained them entry to a door which opened on a tiny station where waited a bullet-shaped vehicle containing two seats, side by side. The shuttle service was normally never used by prisoners unless accompanied by a warder, but at a gesture from Peder they took their places in the seats and the shuttle moved forward on its guide rails, coursing along the efficient transport system. They traversed the sleeping silence of their own segment and entered others which, though identical, were like foreign territory to them. Here men were awake and working, for the rotation of shifts was designed never to leave a machine idle.
Other shuttles swept past them in a blur of motion. Peder steered the vehicle unhesitatingly. When they eventually came to a stop it was in a factory area where the hum of machinery mingled with the bustling of prisoners shuffling to the canteens, to the sleeping galleries, or to the baths and the recreation halls.
Peder’s stride was unhesitating as he led Mast along the outside wall of one of the factory workshops. Mast was becoming increasingly nervous to see so many warders about, and he stiffened as one approached them. But the officer strolled on with only a passing nod to Peder.
‘Relax,’ Peder murmured. ‘I am a warder; you are a prisoner I am taking to the medical room.’
‘But you’re wearing civilian clothes!’
Peder smiled. ‘I’m in disguise,’ he said.
‘It’s some kind of hypnotism?’ Mast asked after a pause. ‘People see what you want them to see?’
Peder did not answer. The truth was not quite as Mast had stated, but in a sense it was close to it. The suit could make itself inconspicuous; it could cause its wearer to adopt a role so convincingly that a detail like the absence of the correct uniform went unnoticed. The warder’s mind had been subliminally tricked, distracted.
He had considered tricking his way in this manner through the official portals in the prison roof, but had decided it was impossible. Even if he could get through the cage that separated the prisoner compound from the outer administrative shell, he still would not be able to leave the prison without setting off the automatic alarms.
Besides, the suit had a better way. Peder turned into a narrow down-sloping passage ending in a metal door which needed no pass key. They stepped into an engine room filled with row upon row of power units.
The high-pitched whine the machines gave off made a din in which hearing was difficult. As they passed by, the prisoners tending the power units looked up once, then took no further notice. Peder made his way to the far corner of the room and moved aside one of a series of what looked like filing cabinets or store cupboards. He beckoned to Mast, then began testing the wall behind the cabinet.