by Ryder Stacy
Rock nodded sadly, seeing in his mind the next poor victim of the Zrano’s wrath. “Yes, I think I understand that. I guess I’m lucky!”
Dovine nodded. “So much so that you’re about to be visited by the council head, Esmerelda’s great Panxux himself.”
Rock remembered the furrowed brow and irritable look of the man who had occupied a cloth-draped box in the second row at the arena, the man sitting behind the warden when the warden had given him the laurel crown he still wore. “When is the Panxux coming here?”
“Soon. He wants to congratulate you Rockson, and help make arrangements for your future. The warden has no power over you now. You’re no longer a convict!”
“All he has to do is get me on a space rocket, and that’ll be all the future of mine I can care about.”
Dovine said, “Fat chance. Be happy if he doesn’t find something else nasty for you. You survived the Zrano, let’s see if you can survive meeting Panxux. He’s—quite changeable. A fruitcake, some say. You will see. Goodbye!”
A few moments after these words, an impatient knock led to the door’s being opened quickly. The man who walked in at the front of a small group was smaller than Rockson would have guessed from the stadium. His chin was not as assertive as it had seemed. Yet the eyes were the same, wide apart and darkly feral, and the lips as generously twisted.
“My congratulations and those of all Esmerelda!” Panxux spoke out clearly and robustly, shaking Rock’s hand. “You shall be permitted to live out your days with us in peace and honor as a citizen first class!”
“I don’t want that. I have the right to leave, according to the rules.”
“Are you not a criminal? You would just be rearrested on Venus and sent back! Only here is your ‘rehabilitation’ recognized!”
“I am a playboy. That used to be legal. I was railroaded.”
“You’re now respected on Esmerelda. Why do you want to leave? There is much you haven’t seen here. Very interesting pleasant jobs will be offered to you. The women will please you.”
“I know as much about this asteroid as I’d like to know, ever. And work of any kind doesn’t suit me, really,” Rockson picked at his nails. “I insist on leaving.”
“But you haven’t seen it all!”
“Nothing about this asteroid is worth knowing!”
“Not true.” The voice was growing unpleasantly whining. If he had been an Earthman, Rock would have guessed the ruler’s age at about forty, but now he sounded like a spoiled infant. He raged, “On this asteroid everybody has to work in order to survive! In your case, you will be offered a good option. You can run a large industry, a factory of any kind at all!”
“I have an option to leave: that’s the one I want to take,” Rock insisted. “I read the rules. Over in that pile of books.” Rockson pointed at his mass of night readings.
The council head sighed. “There are certain problems of which you might not be aware,” Panxux said calmly. “To start, a supply rocket doesn’t take off until the end of the month. Twenty more day-night units.”
“I want to be on it, as soon as it arrives. I have the right.”
“Passage has been strictly apportioned out among diplomats, trade mission people, and vital cargo. There isn’t room for any luxury cargo like you. We didn’t—anticipate—your survival, you see. I suspect the warden’s daughter’s hand in that.”
“When will there be room?” Rockson wanted to keep off the subject of Kimetta.
“Perhaps four or five cargo runs from now.”
Rock sighed. “I want to be on the first available rocket in that case.”
“Yes. I see . . . well, you are a cool customer aren’t you? A tough cookie! It will be attended to, if you insist. But the wait will be very very long. You will go on a tour of Esmerelda in the meanwhile. Maybe you will decide to stay.”
“I might take a tour, since I have time. I’ll relax and go on a tour. But don’t welsh on me. I can be bad luck to cross. Remember the Zrano!”
If Rock hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn that the ruler of Esmerelda had blinked at the threat. Then Panxux laughed, long and hard. “Say you are a corker! What work will you accept in the meantime?”
“None. I will just tour around, if that’s OK.”
“But how will you earn your food and board? You need credits now. Say, didn’t you once have a managerial job? Wasn’t that in your file?”
“I never have.” The comic remarks that surged to Rock’s lips remained unspoken. “I never worked. Not ever,” he insisted.
Panxux smiled again. “What a strange man you are! Not before this have I encountered anybody who lived to your age without having done any work. Don’t you want to be socially useful?”
“I consider that many of the things I’ve done are socially useful. The women think so.”
Panxux didn’t follow that up directly, but Dovine put in, over a concealed mike, “I believe he refers to his well-known and many relations with women. He claims to have made many women happy. Indeed Rockson has been with one A-1 each and every night since arriving here. A different A-1 every night.”
“But where is the usefulness in that?” Panxux shrugged at Rock. “You may have an interesting philosophy, but it is bankrupt, Rockson. I don’t have the wish or the time for a long conversation about your bankrupt philosophy.”
Rock told him quietly, “You might be a better person if you did think about something more than toil on occasion.”
“Of course I might,” Panxux agreed surprisingly, “but I’m far too busy. My question is this: What do you mean by saying that to make a woman happy can be socially useful?”
“I’m not sure I know the full answer, myself,” Rock admitted. “But let a man make a woman happy and he’ll be happy himself. If they’re workers, they can work better as a result of a certain amount of mutual pleasure in sex.”
“You’re saying that to make bed with a woman is enough to sustain social usefulness?” Panxux shook his head fiercely. “Not here. If you knew this planetoid better, you’d agree. When you tour, you will understand, and then, I am sure, you will want to stay. I’m certain of it!”
“To do something nice for another human being is itself useful, I say.”
Panxux, with a wave of the hand, dismissed the subject. “The matter had been fully discussed. During the next five or six months, while you wait for a space ride,” Panxux said, “you will be studied by a group of our leading scientists and theorists and scholars. Their reports ought to be of some interest to the council—perhaps giving us all better knowledge of the latent criminality in some earthlings. An insight into the great crime of laziness.”
Rock ignored the racial slur. “But you’ll still put me on a supply rocket, see that I’m reserved for it?”
“Yes, provided you will assist our studies. Is that clear?”
Without waiting for an answer, the ruler started to the door. Watching his swagger intently, Rock realized how much the two of them really shared. Each was intelligent and opinionated, each was willing to talk from a point of wary mutual respect, a respect that shaded into a liking of sorts. But there was yet something else that the two of them shared: at no time would either be able to understand the other!
Rockson had a bad dream again that night, the worst yet. He dreamed that some strange clone of Dovine’s by the name of Zhabnov buried Rockson alive.
Nineteen
One month later:
A man in a gray lab smock got up and addressed the twelve-man Esmereldan council. “Rockson has seen the mines, and refused work there. He has been studied for a month,” said Dr. Kreister, the philo-scientist, as he directed his piercing black eyes toward Panxux in particular. “Four months approximately are left until Rockson leaves us. Four months during which he will continue to be totally useless, taking up needed air and space and eating precious tiblets. Tiblets that only workers deserve. No work, no air! And he affects women in a bad way. Makes them rebellious.”
Panxux’s lips were briefly pursed. “So you suggest—?”
“That he be put to death,” the scientist said. “I see no other alternative. The rulebook allows for exceptions under emergency situations. Rockson is an emergency.”
Rock, who had been summoned to attend the meeting, was not happy with its first pronouncements. He stood up from his place in the back of the large meeting room and shouted, “Dammit, you can’t change the rules! Listen to me too!”
Panxux frowned. “No time. Sorry! I’ve allotted twenty-two minutes for a deposition of this matter. We can’t hear you.” Panxux’s eyes were back on the scientist. “You may continue, noble Doctor Kreister.”
The gray-bearded man smiled and spoke on crisply. Rock was held at riflepoint by a guard, and with his pain-bracelet “heating up,” couldn’t speak, couldn’t disagree with anything. All human feelings were left out of what the doctor was saying. Facts were slanted against him. The conclusion was that Rockson should be sent to the “Bureau of Corrections.” The council agreed.
He was brought by compu-car to the looming, blue, glass building and deposited in a room that was comfortable without being an inch larger than what was needed to contain eight chairs, a small room off the largest corridor. After five hours, he met Ezlin and half a dozen other Esmereldans concerned with “correction.” Twenty minutes into the long examination of his papers, Ezlin called for a decision.
“What do you think of Rockson?” Ezlin asked. “According to Dr. Kreister, the Earthman doesn’t use his eyes for work or study, just for pleasures. His hands and shoulders and arms are developed oddly—as in somebody who has sex, not somebody who works. I’d agree and say that Rockson isn’t ever likely to be a worker. He must be corrected surgically.”
Rockson didn’t like that statement one bit! He would have dived out the window, but the bracelet sent a paralyzing drug into his veins, and a warning pain.
Broomak, the liberal among the red-tunicked men, suggested, “We can perhaps do without surgery. We must show him how different types of work are done and by whom, and try to change his mind. Give him a great choice.”
“You won’t succeed,” Ezlin said, “but you may try.”
Much relieved, a tired Rockson was taken to the home of a contented factory worker, a man supposedly at ease with his women and their children. Rock was startled at the tiny room in an apartment complex that the three women, three children, and one husband lived in.
“Do all of you live here?” Rock asked, Broomak looking on.
“Of course,” the husband said. “This unit is twelve by fourteen. The roof is made of soft warm glassov and the floor is polywood. The toilet is under the bed—it pops out, as do six bunks from the wall. We have to conserve space, do what’s best for the community. We manage, as long as we can work.”
Rock was still muttering when Broomak took him on to a portahouse, a complex with a dozen so-called detach-homes put down one on top of another. The units could be, he said, dismantled, unstacked at will, and taken somewhere else by crane. They used a key to go in an empty ground-floor unit.
“How big is each of these units?” Rock asked.
“Seventeen by sixteen, on average. Bigger than the one you saw, but the family units are larger.”
“That’s what I’d have guessed.”
They went into a small utility bathroom, equipped with a jet-shower. Broomak was proud of the feature, a new one.
“But what about the ordinary comforts of living?” Rock asked. “A sink for instance.”
“The sink is unnecessary as there is a shower.”
“I don’t notice a compu-range for cooking.”
“The range and freezall and visi-screen are part of the same unit, stored under the bed. This unit will service three one-man, two-women units with nine children.”
Rock nodded. He had been reading about the multi-partner Esmereldan family units. The work in the mines was dangerous, and families that lost husbands or wives were by law absorbed by other families, according to some sort of lottery. “How can living beings live like this, after working as hard as these people do?” Rock asked. He felt suffocated, boxed in.
“Like all of us,” Broomak said, “they have to conserve space and energy. Each person here is a work unit, no more. Except the children under five years old.” Broomak raised a bushy black eyebrow. “Your responses are intensely interesting from an academic point of view, but you have not a very practical mind. I would hate to lose such a fine specimen as you!”
“What next?”
“I’ll continue showing you the importance that we Esmereldans attach to work, Rockson. I have faith that all men, even you, will see that work is its own reward.”
A compu-car took them through a stretch of flat land with artificial trees and metallic birds imitating life in the artificial air. At a robotoid factory, producing, as part of a trade agreement, spare parts for androids on Venus and Alpha Centauri Four, the thin-lipped officer in charge escorted them along the noisy work floor. A lot of arc-welding was going on.
“After my time here,” he told Rockson, “I go home for an hour with my women and boy-child, then have a meal, and go out to my other job—I am a miner in pit 397-691.”
“You’ve got two jobs?”
“I used to have three, but found myself falling asleep at odd times and had to give up one of them.”
“Do you need credits so much?”
“I work for the pleasure of occupying additional waking time. What’s there in life except work—and the arena-games, of course?”
Rock wanted to say that he’d never understand such a point of view. The man was staring at a point down the line of parts makers, where there was a jam-up. The lapse was handled by somebody, and he relaxed.
“What was your other job?” Rock asked. “The third one?”
“Oh, I worked at the human factory.”
“The what?”
“The place where—oh, dammit!” The small man wheeled and ran down the line of parts makers, shouting. Broomak took Rock from there as soon as it dawned on him that the wait for the worker to return was likely to be a long one.
“I should think a man like that one would have a breakdown,” Rock said as they got in their car.
“Breakdown? Here?” Broomak tapped his shiny forehead. “The possibility is handled nicely on this asteroid. I’ll show you, if you think you’d be interested. Maybe . . . yes, maybe you’ll be interested to work in that section: mind-preservation.”
“I’d like to look at what you do about mental health,” Rock said evasively.
Broomak made some computations in the computer under the car’s steering wheel. The compu-car diverted, took them through a silent stand of artificial trees and under a waterfall with liquid shooting down in color sprays. Not real—a hologram.
Shortly, Broomak eased the car down into a slot by a small, white-painted shingle building. Inside, twenty men and women were sitting stiffly on chairs; the nearest woman had a pained look on her shiny features. Rock’s smile wasn’t returned. He looked for some possible cause besides bad manners, and saw that the woman’s hands had been tied to the plastex arms of the chair, her waist to the chair back.
“What’s wrong with her? With all of these people?”
Broomak said, “Mental instability. But that will be fixed.” He pressed a button labeled Therapy. Voltage shot into devices in the seats. The strapped-in victims started jerking and they repeated, “I feel well, I feel perfectly well. I want to go back to work, to both of my jobs, very soon, very soon.” They kept repeating it.
Rock whirled on Broomak. “Is this what you do to anybody who says he’s had enough? You tie them down and shoot them full of electricity so they do nothing except recite bullcrap? Is that it?”
“Look, Rockson,” said his guide, “this is nothing compared to the next room. That’s reserved for prisoners like you, people who don’t accept jobs, don’t accept limits on freedom. You’ve got friends in high plac
es, but once the council gives up on you—you’ll be corrected, I warn you!”
For a second Rock had some sort of weird déjà vu. He pictured himself in the same sort of contraption—only with a headset—and needles, hot needles going into his brain. A mind-fucker machine? Something like that! And he was, in this vision, in another place, another reality entirely. There in the other world’s coffin machine was himself, but he wasn’t a playboy-prisoner. He was a hero, known as the DOOMSDAY WARRIOR! A man in deep, deep shit trouble!
Broomak, who’d been watching Rock’s face with a look of anxious curiosity, asked, “What else would you suggest? It gets them back to work. They don’t remember this anyway.”
“What about—er—vacations for them?” Rock’s head was swimming.
“There’s too much work to be done,” Broomak bristled. “Everybody who wakes up with a headache or nosebleed would soon be demanding a vacation.”
“Once a year, at least. It could be a big help,” Rock said.
“Do you know what happens to men and women on a vacation? They spend all the time hating each other and their families. They play too much and then become ill. Many a man or woman has become deathly ill in the course of a vacation, as you call it, and many have died as a result.”
“Many people don’t die as a result, but are able to do better work when they come back.”
“People are bitterly unhappy during the vacation periods, I’m telling you; it hurts production. On Esmerelda there’s hardly enough of anything to go around. We live on a frontier of the galaxy. This is a hard life, and every possible area of productivity must be pushed forward.”
Rock nodded slowly. “I think I can understand that, but I can’t understand this sort of therapy. Maybe production could be better if people were allowed freedom.”
“I take it,” the official said, “you don’t want to work here? All you have to do is feed them and turn the therapy on and off—and some paperwork.”
“I’d rather not!”
“We ought to leave then. Next, Rockson, you’ll see the—”
