The ones that disappear, nobody ever bothers about. Usually they haven't told anybody where they were going. If they have, and I'm asked, I just say they never came, and nobody can prove they did.
So here's Number 78. Female, nineteen, nice and plump but not muscle-bound yet.
Once home, the rest's easy. "Get into your tutu, sister, and we'll go to the practice room. Dressing room right in there."
The dressing room's gassed when I press the button. It takes about six minutes. Then to my specially fitted kitchen. Clothes into the incinerator. Macerator and dissolver for metal and glass. Contact lenses, jewelry, money, all goes in: I'm no thief. Then into the oven, well greased and seasoned.
About half an hour, the way I like it. After dinner, when I clean up, the macerator will take care of the bones and teeth. (And gallstones once, believe it or not.) I dial a few drinks to sharpen my appetite, and get out my knife and fork—genuine antiques, cost me a lot, from the days when people ate real meat.
Rich and steaming, brown on the outside and oozing juice. My stomach rumbles in delight. I take my first delicious bite.
Aagh! What in the name of all—What was wrong with her? She must have been in one of those far-out poison-fancier teenster gangs! An awful pain shot right through me. I doubled up. I don't remember screaming, but they tell me they heard me clear out on the speedway, and somebody finally broke in and found me.
They flew me to the hospital, and I had to have half my stomach replaced.
And of course they found her too.
"Extremely interesting," said the visiting criminologist from the African Union. He and the warden, sitting in the warden's office, watched on the wide screen as the techs removed the brain probes and, flanked by the roboguards, led out the four men and the woman—or was that last one a woman too? it was hard to tell—dazed and shuffling, to the rest cubicles. "You mean this is done every day?"
"Every single day of their term. Most of them have life sentences."
"And is it done with all prisoners? Or just all felons?"
The warden laughed.
"Not even all felons," he answered. "Only what we call Class 1: homicide, rape, and mayhem. It would hardly be advisable to let a pro burglar live daily through his latest burglary—he'd just note the weak points and educate himself to make a better job of the next one after he got out!"
"And does it act as a deterrent?"
"If it didn't, we couldn't use it. We have a provision, you know, in the Inter-American Union, against 'cruel and unusual punishment.' This is no longer unusual, and our Supreme Court and the Appeals Court of the Terrestrial Regions have both ruled that it is not cruel. It is therapeutic."
"I meant deterrent to other would-be criminals on the outside."
"All I can say is that every secondary school in the Union includes a course in elementary penology, with a dozen screen-viewings of this procedure. We've had a lot of publicity. I've been interviewed often. And out of two thousand inmates of this institution, which is of average size, those five are the only present subjects for this treatment. Our homicide rate in this Union has gone down from the highest to the lowest on Earth in the ten years since we began."
"Ah, yes, I was aware of that, of course. It is why I was delegated to investigate. to see whether it might be desirable for us too. I understand I am only the latest of such visitors."
"Quite true. The East Asian Union is considering it now, and several other Unions are hoping to put it on their agenda."
"But in the other sense of deterrence, as it affects the people themselves? How does that work out? Of course I know they couldn't continue their criminal careers at present, but what is the psychological effect on them here and now?"
"The principle," said the warden, "was defined by Lachim Malley, our noted penologist—"
"Indeed yes, one of the very great."
"We think so. His idea came originally from a very minor and banal bit of folk history. Back in the old days, when they had privately owned stores and people were paid wages to work in them, it used to be the custom, in shops that sold pastries and confectionery and such delicacies, which the young particularly crave—and also, I believe, in breweries and wineries—to allow new employees to eat or drink their fill. It was found that soon they became satiated, and then actually averse to the very thing they had so much craved—which of course saved a good deal of money in the long run.
"It occurred to Malley that if an atrocious criminal should be obliged to relive constantly the episode which led to his incarceration—have it stuffed into him daily, so to speak—the incessant repetition would have a similar effect on him. Since we can now activate any part of the brain painlessly by electric probes in exact areas, the experiment was feasible. We here in this prison were the first to put it into practice."
"And does it so affect them?"
"At first some of the most vicious—that mass cannibal you saw, or the child molester, for example—seem actually to revel in the reliving of their crimes. The less deteriorated dread and shrink from it from the beginning. And even the worst—those two are only at the beginning of their terms—gradually become first bored, then sated, and eventually, in time, completely alienated from their former impulses. Terribly remorseful, too, some of them; I've had hardened criminals get down on their knees and beg me to let them forget. But of course I can't."
"And after they have served their time? For I suppose, as in our Union, a life sentence really means not more than fifteen years."
"About twelve, with us, on the average. But some of these—that last case, for instance—can never be safely released. They become reconciled, on the whole. For, apart from that daily ordeal, their lives aren't bad here. They live comfortably, they have every opportunity for education and recreation, where possible we arrange for conjugal visits, and many of them pursue useful careers as if they were not imprisoned."
"But what of those who are freed? Have any of them reverted to crime? Have you had any recidivists among them?"
The warden looked embarrassed.
"No, we've never had any subject on the Malley System come back here," he said reluctantly. "In fact, I feel it my duty to tell you that there is one slight disadvantage in the System.
"So far, we've never had one subject who could be released to the general community when his term was over. Every one of them up to now has had to be transferred instead to a mental hospital."
The African criminologist was silent. Then his eyes strayed around the office in which he sat. For the first time he noticed the armorplated walls, the shatterproof glass, the electronic weapons trained on the door and ready to be activated by pressure on a button on the warden's desk.
The warden followed his glance, and flushed.
"I'm afraid I'm just chicken," he said defensively. "Actually, the subjects are kept under strict surveillance and the roboguards have orders to shoot to kill. But I keep remembering my predecessor's experience, when he and Lachim Malley—"
"I know, naturally," said the African, "that Malley died suddenly while he was visiting the prison. A heart attack, I understand."
"My predecessor was a little too careless," remarked the warden with a grim smile. "He had complete faith in Malley's System, and he didn't even have roboguards to back up the techs, or have the subjects frisked for shivs before their daily recapitulation. There were more subjects then, too—at least fourteen that day. So when they simultaneously overpowered the techs, with the probes already in place, and broke for this office—
"Oh yes. Malley died of a heart attack. So did my predecessor. Right through the heart, in both cases."