Mr. “Smith,” as it turns out, is a VIP (for Professor) of Sociology at a school near enough to Washington to make things convenient when the Slate Department calls. (He is surely the only ambassador — small “a,” generic, not diplomatic — of the U.S. who has ever established friendly relations with an astatic governmental official by talking science fiction all night.) Outside s-f, his writing is almost all in his main field of specialty) inside the field, a large part has been devoted to speculation about the possible physiological evolution (externally caused or self-effected) of mankind.
There was a tremendous difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer’s treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food.
“Scream good and loud,” said one rat-faced steward, “and then we’ll know it’s you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor’s birthday.”
The other, fat steward ran the tip of his wet, red tongue over his thick, purple-red lips one time and said, “Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die. Something pretty good must happen, along with the — whatchamacallit. Maybe you turn into a woman. Maybe you turn into two people. Listen, cousin, if it’s real crazy fun, let me know… “ Mercer said nothing. Mercer had enough troubles of his own not to wonder about the daydreams of nasty men.
At the ferry it was different. The biopharmaceutical staff was deft, impersonal, quick in removing his shackles. They took off all his prison clothes and left them on the liner. When he boarded the ferry, naked, they looked him over as if he were a rare plant or a body on the operating table. They were almost kind in the clinical deftness of their touch. They did not treat him as a criminal, but as a specimen.
Men and women, clad in their medical smocks, they looked at him as though he were already dead.
He tried to speak. A man, older and more authoritative than the others, said firmly and clearly, “Do not worry about talking. I will talk to you myself in a very little time. What we are having now are the preliminaries, to determine your physical condition. Turn around, please.” Mercer turned around. An orderly rubbed his back with a very strong antiseptic.
“This is going to sting,” said one of the technicians, “but it is nothing serious or painful. We are determining the toughness of the different layers of your skin.”
Mercer, annoyed by this impersonal approach, spoke up just as a sharp little sting burned him above the sixth lumbar vertebra. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Of course we know who you are,” said a woman’s voice. “We have it all in a file in the corner. The chief doctor will talk about your crime later, if you want to talk about it. Keep quiet now. We are making a skin test, and you will feel much better if you do not make us prolong it.”
Honesty forced her to add another sentence: “And we will get better results as well.”
They had lost no time at all in getting to work.
He peered at them sidewise to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the antechambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name.
They changed from one routine to another. A woman, wearing a surgical mask, waved her hand at a white table.
“Climb up on that, please.”
No one had said “please” to Mercer since the guards had seized him at the edge of the palace. He started to obey her and then he saw that there were padded handcuffs at the head of the table. He stopped.
“Get along, please,” she demanded. Two or three of the others turned around to look at both of them.
The second “please” shook him. He had to speak. These were people, and he was a person again. He felt his voice rising, almost cracking into shrillness as he asked her, “Please, Ma’am, is the punishment going to begin?”
“There’s no punishment here,” said the woman. “This is the satellite. Get on the table. We’re going to give you your first skin-toughening before you talk to the head doctor. Then you can tell him all about your crime—”
“You know my crime?” he said, greeting it almost like a neighbor.
“Of course not,” said she, “but all the people who come through here are believed to have committed crimes. Somebody thinks so or they wouldn’t be here. Most of them want to talk about their personal crimes. But don’t slow me down. I’m a skin technician, and down on the surface of Shayol you’re going to need the very best work that any of us can do for you. Now get on that table. And when you are ready to talk to the chief you’ll have something to talk about besides your crime.”
He complied.
Another masked person, probably a girl, took his hands in cool, gentle fingers and fitted them to the padded cuffs in a way he had never sensed before. By now he thought he knew every interrogation machine in the whole empire, but this was nothing like any of them.
The orderly stepped back. “All clear, Sir and Doctor.”
“Which do you prefer?” said the skin technician. “A great deal of pain or a couple of hours’ unconsciousness?”
“Why should I want pain?” said Mercer.
“Some specimens do,” said the technician, “by the time they arrive here. I suppose it depends on what people have done to them before they got here. I take it you did not get any of the dream-punishments.”
“No,” said Mercer. “I missed those.” He thought to himself, I didn’t know that I missed anything at all.
He remembered his last trial, himself wired and plugged in to the witness stand. The room had been high and dark. Bright blue light shone on the panel of judges, their judicial caps a fantastic parody of the episcopal mitres of long, long ago. The judges were talking, but he could not hear them. Momentarily the insulation slipped and he heard one of them say, “Look at that white, devilish face. A man like that is guilty of everything. I vote for Pain Terminal.”
“Not Planet Shayol?” said a second voice.
“The dromozoa place,” said a third voice.
“That should suit him,” said the first voice. One of the judicial engineers must then have noticed that the prisoner was listening illegally. He was cut off. Mercer then thought that he had gone through everything which the cruelty and intelligence of mankind could devise.
But this woman said he had missed the dream-punishments. Could there be people in the universe even worse off than himself? There must be a lot of people down on Shayol. They never came back.
He was going to be one of them; would they boast to him of what they had done, before they were made to come to this place?
“You asked for it,” said the woman technician. “It is just an ordinary anesthetic. Don’t panic when you awaken. Your skin is going to be thickened and strengthened chemically and biologically.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Of course,” said she. “But get this out of your head. We’re not punishing you. The pain here is just ordinary medical pain. Anybody might get it if they needed a lot of surgery. The punishment, if that’s what you want to call it, is down on Shayol. Our only job is to make sure that you are fit to survive after you are landed. In a way, we are saving your life ahead of time. You can be grateful for that if you want to be. Meanwhile, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that your nerve endings will respond to the change in the skin. You had better expect to be very uncomfortable when you recover. But then, we can help that, too.” She brought down an enormous lever and Mercer blacked out.