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authorities, or from anyone else.
Outside the door his guardthing winked and whispered, "What do you say,
Heimat? Was she all right?"
"Not really." Heimat kept walking and finished the conversation without
turning his head: "I told you I like blondes. Little young ones. Fragile."
The guard called after him, "I'll see what I can do tonight," but Heimat
didn't answer. He was thinking of the word he had just used- "fragile"-and the
way it made him feel. Fragile. A tiny fragile blonde. A live one! A real
female human one, with her fragile little limbs twisted and broken and her
mouth screaming and her face contorted in pain- He stopped the thought at that
point. He didn't stop because what he was thinking shamed him, because Heimat
was long past shame. He stopped because he was enjoying it so much, with such
desperate yearning, that he was afraid his face might give away something of
what he was feeling; and the only victory Heimat ever had anymore was to keep
some secrets to himself.
Heimat's island prison was very far from any continent or any major city. It
had been built to hold thirty-eight hundred desperate convicts and keep them
inside no matter what they planned or did.
Now all that construction was overkill, because the only active survivor in
the prison was Heimat himself. There weren't thirty-eight hundred desperate
prisoners left in his prison. There weren't that many in the whole world.
Recruitment had fallen off greatly since the bad old days of terrorism and
famine. Oh, sociopaths turned up every now and then, of course, but what
Albert (when he and I discussed such matters) called "the preconditions for
opportunistic crime" were scarce. -
The thing was, conditions had got a lot better. Nowhere in the human galaxy
were there places where whole generations grew up to mug or murder or destroy
because they had no easier way to ease their miseries. Most of the worst of
the prisoners still somewhere jailed were veterans of the days of terrorism
and mass crime, and there weren't many of those left. Many of the malcontents
had long since let themselves be plea-bargained into a different kind of
imprisonment in one of the hard-service colonies. Most of the others had
finally become either sufficiently rehabilitated or sufficiently dead.
Heimat himself was quite an old man-older than I, a hundred and thirty at
least. Of course, he got Full Medical. He might go on another fifty years in
the flesh, because the prisoners were repaired and reconditioned as often as
necessary; it wasn't usually age, sickness, or accident that they died of when
they died. It was almost always simple, terminal boredom. On one morning just
like every other morning they would wake up and look around and decide that
enough was at last enough and machine storage could be no worse. Then they
would find the right chance and kill themselves.
But not Heimat.
The only other living meat inmate of the prison was a former Soviet marshal
named Pernetsky. Like Heimat, he had been a mole for the terrorists, using his
military position to help them kill and wreck. The two had been colleagues in
the secret underground, then fellow prisoners for hell's own years. Not
friends, exactly. Neither of them had any real friends. But close enough as
inmates that Heimat had been really surprised when he heard one day that
Pernetsky had eaten out his entire digestive system with cleaning fluids.
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It was not an efficient suicide attempt. The guardthings had spotted it at
once, and now Pernetsky was in intensive care in the prison hospital.
One destination is as good as any other for a man who has none, and
Heimat decided to look in on Pernetsky.
The prison hospital was on the same scale as the great penitentiary complex
itself. The hospital had a hundred and thirty beds, each one capable of being
isolated with partitions of shatterproof glass and steel. Pernetsky was the
only patient.
Heimat crossed the warm, wide lawn with its hibiscus and palm trees to
the hospital, ignoring the workthings that picked the blossoms for his table
and tidied up the fallen fronds. He could not ignore the medic in the
reception room, though. As he entered she peered out at him and called, with a
smile of professional cheer, "Good morning, General Heimat! You're looking a
little flushed. Would you like me to check your blood pressure?"
"No chance," sneered Heimat, but he stopped within conversational range of
her. He was always more courteous to the medics than to any other prison
personnel-it was his theory, which he never chose to put to the test, that
some of them, sometimes, were living humans. It was also his habit, because in
the presence of the medical staff he could think of himself as hospital
patient rather than jailbird. Role playing was important to Heimat. He had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]