Xchange

by Stan Mason

  ‘I’m not sure you’re telling us the truth, Governor,’ declared the woman point-blank. ‘Why did they empty this jail?’

  Anger rose in Preston’s mind at the accusation and he bridled at the woman’s remark. ‘I think we’ve discussed this matter enough,’ he concluded moving towards the front gate. ‘It’s time you made your research elsewhere. I wish you luck.’

  He shepherded the two visitors outside the penitentiary closing the gate firmly behind them. However they stayed exactly where they were, unwilling to move away.

  ‘We know a lot more than he’s letting on,’ said the woman to her partner. ‘He’s holding a lot of information back from us. I don’t believe that the Government would close a high security jail when all the other prisons are full. What did they do with the inmates?’

  ‘I know,’ returned the man, ‘but how do we extract the truth?’

  The woman rattled her camera on the iron bars surround the prison but the Governor was not to be intimidated by two students out to earn themselves some money. He ignored the woman’s plea for further information as she shouted out questions to him from outside the jail. He returned to his private quarters and picked up his book of crosswords. It was incredible how the public could penetrate the secrecy of the exchange programme. It seemed likely that they would come at him from all quarters but it wasn’t his concern any more.

  He waited for half-an-hour and then went to the front gate to check that the two students had left without gaining any further knowledge of the truth. Preston felt satisfied that he had seen them off. He felt that he had given them good advice to contact the Home Secretary if they wanted further details. No doubt, if they did so, they would be fobbed off with political jargon. Sadly for them, they would end up with no extra money to repay their student loans. But that wasn’t the Governor’s concern. Beneath his stolid exterior, and his penchant for rules, he was still in charge of an empty jail and suffering from the consequences of loneliness. As far as he was concerned, Jordan and the Government had a lot to answer for and, if they failed ito consider him in the loop, he would never forgive them!

  ***

  In the order of classification, Blackstock jail; always took second place to Lancaster prison. To begin with, the security there was far more relaxed and the prisoners were allowed numerous types of recreation which included watching television, enjoying games of pool, playing football on netball in the compound, and they were permitted to play cards and listen to the radio. This was totally in contravention of the rules employed at Lancaster jail. The Governor of Blackstock jail was far less demanding with the rules. His only interest was to control the inmates, appeasing them at all times in case they decided to riot. In his opinion, an a prisoner who could fill his mind with leisure activities was one who would be relatively satisfied with his incarceration. The last think he wanted was any kind of trouble. Not surprisingly however, the exchange programme carried out on a large number of his prisoners unsettled them badly. Those that survived the process resented the fact that their bodies had been swapped with other people and that they were now much older, by a long span of years, than they should have been. Two inmates, in particular, came to resent their fate most strongly and they decided to react against it. Paul Styles and Johnny Metcalf had both been sentenced to life imprisonment for heinous crimes which included the murder of a number of people in a spate of gang warfare. They were both in their early forties but, after the exchange process, their bodies were double their original age. They were extremely angry at losing their younger bodies and were filled with resentment which bordered on taking action against the authorities. However, not only were they incarcerated behind bars in jail, which seriously reduced their capacity to act, but they were now weak, feeble and tired in their aged bodies.

  Early one afternoon, they were working together in the laundry room, listening to the radio, as they emptied the large baskets of dirty clothes which they placed in the washing-machines. The radio had been turned on to almost deafening capacity well above the noise of the machines. The newsreaders voice came to the fore as the music stopped and they paused to listen to the latest news.

  ‘A team of researchers at the University of California in Berkely have developed a material which can bend light-making objects disappear,’ related the news reader in a slow undulating voice. ‘The material does not occur naturally but has been created on a nano scale measured in billionths of a metre. The team says that the principles could one day be scaled up to making invisibility cloaks large enough for individuals hide.’

  Styles turned down the radio at that point as his colleague turned to talk to him.

  ‘Hey... did you hear that?’ exclaimed Metcalfe in awe. ‘They can one day make people invisible!’

  Styles screwed up his face with disinterest. ‘It’s a pity they didn’t find out about it years ago,’ he muttered with an element of rancour in his voice. ‘We wouldn’t be rotting away in a dump like this! It’s be like the Scarlet Pimpernel. They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek the bastard everywhere!’ He laughed at his own joke but his colleague failed to find it amusing.

  ‘We ought to do something, you know,’ said Metcalfe becoming angry every time he thought about the body exchange. ‘If only to stop it happening somewhere else. I mean to say, it isn’t right doing what they did!’

  Styles was surprised at the humane comment from the other man who was well-known for his sheer selfishness and abject indifference to others when it came to the welfare of anyone but himself. Suddenly he had become a humanist, supporting the cause of other people.

  ‘It would be much easier if we weren’t stuck in this bloody jail!’ returned Styles more interested in his freedom than for any other reason. He rued the fact that he probably had only a short time to live... maybe just a few months... before the organs of his aged body began to fail. Oddly enough, he had adjusted to having to serve out his sentence for the rest of his life in prison, but now that he knew he had only a short time to live, freedom became the most important thing in his mind.

  ‘We’ve got to find a way of getting out of here,’ he muttered thoughtfully.

  ‘And pigs have wings!’ retorted his colleague vehemently.

  ‘Think about it... there has to be a way! This isn’t Lancaster jail. The rules in this place are made to be broken. Everything’s soft here!’

  Styles stopped to think for a moment and then inspiration came to him and he came up with an excellent idea. ’You know two screws come to check the cell doors at one o’clock every day, just to make sure we’re all locked in.

  Metcalfe nodded. ‘What’s so unusual about that?’

  ‘Say we weren’t in our cells. We wait for them to find us and then we overpower them. ‘

  ‘You mean you and me knock them down. I don’t think so. We’re too weak to do that with these old bodies.’

  ‘I don’t mean just us. We can organise the rest of the guys to do the same. There would be enough of us to overpower them in a flash,’ rattled Styles eagerly.

  ‘And what do we do then? Face a month in the isolation box for knocking out two screws.

  ‘No!’ countered Styles with the bit between his teeth. ‘We take their uniforms and dress up like them. Then we get the keys from the office and open the front gate ourselves. The screws are always at lunch at that time. If the odd one tries to stop us, I’m sure that we can take him.’

  Metcalfe screwed up his face in thought and then began to warm to the idea. ‘We could then go to Lancaster jail and bust up the equipment. That would be a start,’ he returned with a gleam in his eyes. ‘We would be heroes in the eyes of the people.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ laughed Styles, hardly wishing to dignify the comment. ‘We can smash up all the equipment and save the planet from the body swaps in the future.’

  ‘What happens after that?’ aske
d Metcalfe, unable to look into the future.

  ‘We find out families, hide away where they won’t find us, and die in freedom,’ uttered the other man solemnly. ‘At least when we get to Heaven, we can say that we tried to reconcile the crime which got us into jail by saving other people.’

  ‘Okay I’m with you,’ Metcalfe told him confidently. I mean what have we got to lose with these bodies? When do we do it?’

  Styles glanced at his wristwatch. ‘It’s a quarter to two. Let’s say in fifteen minutes. We’ve just got time to tell our plan to the others.’

  They moved off as fast as their arthritic-ridden bodies could allow in order to divulge their plot to the other inmates. They truly needed them if they were going to overpower the security guards. It wasn’t very long before the scene was set for action. The two unsuspecting security guards arrived at the cells wondering why the prisoners were all standing outside them. Suddenly, they were pounced upon by a group of aged bodies and were knocked unconscious. Without delay, they were stripped of their uniforms which Styles and Metcalfe donned as quickly as they could. The two inmates went to the office which was unattended and took the keys to the front gate off a wooden rack affixed to the wall. They then proceeded to the main gate where one security guard sat eating his sandwiches and watching a football match on television. They sneaked past him without being noticed and opened the front gate with the keys. The escape had been so simple, they failed to understand why they hadn’t thought of it before.

  As quickly as their legs would carry them, they wandered away through the car park until they found a car with the keys in the ignition. Two minutes later they were driving away from Blackstock jail. Metcalfe slapped Styles on the shoulder with a triumphant grin on his face as they raced away through the countryside. It took them half-an-hour to get to Lancaster jail and they rang the bell at the front gate waiting patiently for someone to answer.

  Preston was finishing one of the crosswords in his private room when he heard the bell. He rose from his chair and sauntered down to the front gate to face the two men dressed in uniforms which didn’t seem to fit them.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded, not recognising either of the men.

  ‘Open the gate!’ yelled Styles. ‘We have business here!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ responded the Governor wondering what the men had in mind. ‘This jail is empty. Completely empty. I’m the only one here.’

  ‘What about the equipment that exchanges bodies?’ enquired Metcalfe uneasily.

  ‘It’s all been taken back to Lytham St. Annes,’ related Preston. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Never mind!’ snapped Styles, pulling at Metcalfe’s sleeve. ‘Come on! We’re in the wrong place!’

  The men turned and went back to their car. They were determined to fulfil their task as a token of revenge for what had happened to them but Lancaster jail was no longer the place for it. Preston watched them going to their vehicle before they drove off. His suspicion was aroused by the presence of the two men but he had not information to draw a conclusion. They could have been two men with an axe to grind about the exchange programme. He returned to his quarters and continued to finish one of the crosswords. He was at odds with the world at present... angry, incensed, dismayed and disappointed at his lot in life.

  When the two security guards recovered at Blackstock jail there was hell to play. They went directly to the Governor’s office where they stood embarrassed in their underwear. The Senior Warden fumed at the fact that two of his light-level prisoners had escaped. He knew that he had to recapture them quickly before the authorities were told of the matter. If not, his reputation was on the line. There would be an intensive investigation as to how the two men escaped from the jail and he would have no reasonable answers.

  ‘Where have they gone?’ he demanded, staring fiercely at the two half-naked men.

  ‘Mulcahy says he knows the answer,’ returned one of the guards weakly.

  ‘Where is Mulcahy?’ The Governor was becoming angrier by the minute.

  ‘He’s outside, sir,’ bleated one of the guards. ‘He won’t talk to us. We brought him here to see you.’

  ‘For God’s sake! Let him in!’ The order echoed urgently around the room.

  One of the guards opened the door to allow the prisoner into the office.

  ‘Okay, Mulcahy. Don’t mess us around! Spill the beans!’ growled the Governor irately.

  ‘Usual terms, Guv?’ advanced the inmate calmly with a slight grin on his face. ‘Special rations and more leisure time?’ He was the main mole who reported everything that the other prisoners were planning all the time and he knew that the information he had was more than enough to establish a more comfortable life for him in jail.

  ‘Get on with it!’ came the order sharply.

  Mulcahy paused for a few moments to make his point before the Governor nodded his head. ‘They’ve gone to Lancaster jail to smash up the equipment there,’ informed the grass impertinently. ‘They’ve turned moral in their old age.’

  The Governor drummed his fingers on his desk thoughtfully. He had heard through the grapevine that the exchange programme had been moved from Lancaster jail. After a brief hesitation, he picked up his mobile telephone and dialled a number.

  ‘Chester,’ he muttered down the line. ‘There’ll be two men who escaped from Blackstock jail, dressed in security guard’s clothing, arriving at Lancaster jail. Pick them up and bring them back here, will you?’

  He ended the conversation abruptly and cleared his office of the security guards and the prisoner. He was taking a big chance with Ralph Chester. The man was an independent private detective who owed the Governor a debt for past services which had kept him out of jail. This However the detective was reluctant to chase through the countryside to search for the two escapees. Nonetheless he had no option but to do so. Clearly it was necessary to recapture the two men before the authorities got wind of their escape.

  Indeed, it was the main task of the Governor of Blackstock jail to ensure that all the prisoners in his high-security prison were kept there for the remainder of their sentence. On this occasion, he failed to recognise that it was going to be more difficult to find the men especially as Chester had arranged a late lunch and was reluctant to forego it. Subsequently by the time the detected arrived at Lancaster jail, the two escaping prisoners had long gone and he had no idea where they were heading. Styles and Metcalfe would almost certainly disappear into the woodwork and die an early death. It was quite probably that no one would hear anything about them ever again. One thing was certain though. The rules at Blackstock jail were about to be changed with a certain amount of severity. There would be much tighter security and far less leisure activities. Such measures were in the forefront of the Governor’s mind as he was going to face criticism for the lax attitude which allowed dangerous prisoners to escape.

  ***

  Sky Summers sat in her office at the television studio with a rueful expression on her face. She knew that she wasn’t allowed to develop the story about the Government’s project of body-swapping with high security prisoners but she was extremely annoyed about the embargo. Her role was to bring interesting news items of an unusual nature to the public but, on this occasion, she was refused permission to do so. From her point of view, it went very much against the grain. She sat quite still in front of her computer pulling up stories about people who had been involved in the body exchange programme. They had revealed what was going on but the story was so preposterous no one was prepared to listen to them. There was one incredible story of an athletic sprinter and major athletic coach who was eighty-nine years of age. His new claim to fame, after his body was exchanged with a twenty-six year old criminal, was that he wanted to run in the one hundred metre hurdles in the next Olympic games. He astonished everyone by sprinting against other competitors in one of the local athle
tic events and managed to come third out of sixteen contestants. That story, in itself, was remarkable to say the least. In a second story, there was the case of a scientist aged eighty-seven who suddenly started to row a boat vigorously on the River Thames. At the same time, he applied for a senior post at a research university, intent on taking up the reins as though he was forty years .younger. Such tales were too good not to bring to the attention of the television viewers and Sky’s mind worked in a number of ways to find a solution to the problem. Eventually, she decided to create a new programme identifying old people who had suddenly found a new lease of life. By doing so, she avoided exposing the Government’s programmed of body exchange... unless someone blew the whistle on the project. Subsequently, she arranged to compile the information to establish the exact details on the people she intended to interview.

  However before embarking on the exercise, she had the wisdom to approach her superior to ask his permission. He was far less enthusiastic about her idea, bearing in mind the edict from the Government, but after she explained her mission he offered her his support providing that she made certain that no one revealed any details concerning the Government’s exchange programme.

  ‘Just let it be known that these people are a phenomenon... just like Mozart at the age of six,’ he told her candidly. ‘They’re exceptional folk, few in number, who somehow have overcome the problem of age. People are living much longer these days. You know they say that the first person to live to one hundred-and-fifty has already been born. I think it might be the chemicals they spray on food that’s done it.’

  Sky nodded her agreement and returned to her office with new vigour. She knew that the truth would have to come out eventually and she would have a number of stories to embellish the news item. Until then, there was little that she could do about it.

  She made an appointment to visit the athlete and coach, Terry Forster, at his home in Wolverhampton. He was a tall slender man although she noticed that he looked a few inches shorter in the photographs displayed on his sideboard. This was clearly due to the size of the person with whom he exchanged his body.