Tomorrow's Crimes

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Put it on the table,” he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.

  I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, “What did they tell you I was? A spy?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. “Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I’m going to spy on?”

  He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return.

  “I—I wouldn’t know, exactly,” I stammered. “Military equipment, I suppose.”

  “Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that’s about it.”

  “The defenses—” I started.

  “The defenses,” he interrupted me, “are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they’re rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None.”

  “If you say so,” I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.

  “Your people send out spies, too, don’t they?” he demanded.

  “Well, of course.”

  “And what are they supposed to spy on?”

  “Well—” it was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. “They’re supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects.”

  “And do they find any indications, ever?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” I told him frostily. “That would be classified information.”

  “You bet it would,” he said, with malicious glee. “All right, if that’s what your spies arc doing, and if I’m a spy, then it follows that I’m doing the same thing, right?”

  “I don’t follow you,” I admitted.

  “If I’m a spy,” he said impatiently, “then I’m supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project.”

  I shrugged. “If that’s your job,” I said, “then that’s your job.”

  He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. “That’s not my job, you blatant idiot!” he shouted. “I’m not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!”

  The maniac had returned, in full force. “All right,” I said hastily. “.All right, whatever you say.”

  He glowered at me a moment longer, than shouted, “Bah!” and dropped back into the chair.

  He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. “All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I bad found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?”

  I stared at him. “That’s impossible!” I cried. “We aren’t planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!”

  “How do I know that?” he demanded.

  “It’s the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?”

  “Ah hah!” He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. “Now, then,” he said. “If you know it doesn’t make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you?”

  I shook my head, dumbfounded. “I can’t answer a question like that,” I said. “How do I know what they’re thinking?”

  “They’re human beings, aren’t they?” he cried. “Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?”

  “Now, wait a minute—”

  “No!” he shouted. “You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I’m a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I’m a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I’m a spy. But I’m not a spy, and I’m going to tell you what I am.”

  I waited, looking as attentive as possible.

  “I come.” he said, “from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any son of radiation shield at all to protect me.”

  The maniac was back. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.

  “The radiation level.” he went on, “is way down. It’s practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don’t know how long it’s been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.” He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. “The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this rime he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There’s no need any longer for the Projects,”

  And that was like saying there’s no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say anything at all.

  “I’m a trained atomic engineer,” he went on. “In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now-, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn’t let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside w ere safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.

  “Well, I went ahead with the test anyway, and I was caught at it. For my punishment, I was banned from the Project. They kicked me out, telling me if I thought it was safe Outside I could live Outside. And if it really was safe, I could come back and tell them. Except that they also made it clear that I would be shot if I tried to get back in, because I would be carrying deadly radiation.”

  He smiled bitterly. “They had it all their own way,” he said. “But it is safe out there. I’m living proof of it. I lived outside for five months. And gradually I realized I had to tell others. I had to spread the word that Man could have his world back. I didn’t dare try to get back into my own Project; I would have been recognized and shot before I could say a word. So I came here.”

  He paused to finish the cup of chico that I should have had with lunch. “I knew better,” he continued, “than to simply walk into the building and announce that I came from Outside. Man has an instinctive distrust for strangers anyway; the Projects only intensify it. Once again. I would have been shot. So I’ve been working in a more devious way. I snuck into the Project—not a difficult thing for a man with no metal on his person, no radiation shield cocooning him—and for the last two months I’ve been wandering around the building, talking with people. I strike up a conversation. I try to plant a few seeds of doubt about the deadliness of Outside, and I hope that at least a few of the people I talk to will begin to wonder, as I once did.”

  Two months! This spy, by his own admission, had been in the Project two months before being detected. I’d never heard of such a thing, and I hoped I’d never hear of such a thing again.

  “Things worked out pretty well,” he said, “until today. I said something wrong—I’m still not sure what—and the man I was talking to hollered for Army, shouted I was a spy.” He pounded the chair arm. “But I’m not a spy! And it’s the truth. Outside is safe!” He glared suddenly at the window. “Why’ve you got that drape up there?”

  “The window broke down.” I explained. “It’s stuck at transparent.”

  “Transparent? Fine!” He got up from the chair, strode across the room, and ripped the drape down from the window.

  I cowered away from the sunglare, turning my back to the window.

  “Come over here!” he shouted. When I didn’t move, he snarled, “Get up and come over here, or I swear I’ll shoot!”

  And he would have, it was plain in his voice. I got to my feet, hesitant, and walked trembling to the window, squinting against the glare.

  “Look out there,” he ordered. “Look!”

  I looked.

  IV

  Terror. Horror. Dizziness and nausea.

  Far and away and far. nothing and nothing. Only
the glare, and the high blue, and the far far horizon, and the broken gray slag stretching out, way down below.

  “Do you see?” he demanded. “Look down there! We’re so high up it’s hard to see, but look for it. Do you see it? Do you see the green? Do you know what that means? There are green things growing again Outside! Not much vet. It’s only just started

  back, but it’s begun. The radiation is down. Plants are growing again.”

  The power of suggestion. And, of course, the heightened sensitivity caused by the double threat of a man beside me carrying a gun and that yawning aching expanse of nothing beyond the window. I nearly fancied that I did see faint specks of green.

  “Do you see it?” he asked me.

  “Wait,” I said. I leaned closer to the window, though every nerve in me wanted to leap the other way. “Yes!” I said. “Yes, I see it! Green!”

  He sighed, a long painful sigh of thanksgiving. “Then now you know,” he said. “I’ve been telling the truth. It is safe Outside.”

  And my lie worked. Tor the first time, his guard was completely down.

  I moved like a whirlwind. I leaped, and twisted his arm in a hard hammerlock, which caused him to cry out and drop the gun. That was wrestling. Then I turned and twisted and dipped, causing him to fly over my head and crash to the floor. That was judo. Then I jabbed one rigid forefinger against a certain spot on the side of his neck, causing the blood in his veins to forever stop its motion. That was karate.

  Well, by the time the Army men had finished questioning me, it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and I was five hours late. The Army men corroborated my belief that the man had been a spy, who had apparently lost his mind when cornered in the elevator. Outside was still dangerous, of course, they assured me of that. And he’d been lying about having been here two months. He’d been in the Project less than two days. Not only that, the Army men told me they’d found the radiation-proof car he’d driven, and in which he had hoped to drive back to his own Project once he’d discovered all our defenses.

  Despite the fact that I had the most legitimate excuse for tardiness under the roof, Linda refused to forgive me for not making our ten o’clock meeting. When I asked her to marry me she refused, at length and descriptively.

  But I was surprised and relieved to discover how rapidly I got over my heartbreak. This was aided by the fact that once the news of my exploit spread, there were any number of girls more than anxious to get to know me better, including the well-cleavaged young lady from the Transit Staff. After all, I was a hero.

  They even gave me a medal.

  THE WINNER

  Wordman stood at the window, looking out, and saw Revel I walk away from the compound. “Come here,” he said to the interviewer. “You’ll see the Guardian in action.”

  The interviewer came around the desk and stood beside Wordman at the window. He said, “That’s one of them?”

  “Right.” Wordman smiled, feeling pleasure. “You’re lucky,” he said. “It’s rare when one of them even makes the attempt. Maybe he’s doing it for your benefit.”

  The interviewer looked troubled. He said, “Doesn’t he know what it will do?”

  “Of course. Some of them don’t believe it, not till they’ve tried it once. Watch.”

  They both watched. Revell walked without apparent haste, directly across the field toward the woods on the other side. After he’d gone about two hundred yards from the edge of the compound he began to bend forward slightly at the middle, and a few yards farther on he folded his arms across his stomach as though it ached him. He tottered, but kept moving forward, staggering more and more, appearing to be in great pain. He managed to stay on his feet nearly all the way to the trees, but finally crumpled to the ground, where he lay unmoving.

  Wordman no longer felt pleasure. He liked the theory of the Guardian better than its application. Turning to his desk, he called the infirmary and said, “Send a stretcher out to the east, near the woods. Revell’s out there.”

  The interviewer turned at the sound of the name, saying, “Revell? Is that who that is? The poet?”

  “If you can call it poetry.” Wordman’s lips curled in disgust. He’d read some of Revell’s so-called poems; garbage, garbage.

  The interviewer looked back out the window. “I’d heard he was arrested,” he said thoughtfully.

  Looking over the interviewer’s shoulder, Wordman saw that Revell had managed to get back up onto hands and knees, was now crawling slowly and painfully toward the woods. But a stretcher team was already trotting toward him and Wordman watched as they reached him, picked up the pain-weakened body, strapped it to the stretcher, and carried it back to the compound.

  As they moved out of sight, the interviewer said, “Will he be all right?”

  “After a few days in the infirmary. He’ll have strained some muscles.”

  The interviewer turned away from the window. “That was very graphic.” he said carefully.

  “You’re the first outsider to see it,” Wordman told him, and smiled, feeling good again. “What do they call that? A scoop?”

  “Yes,” agreed the interviewer, sitting back down in his chair. “A scoop.”

  They returned to the interview, just the most recent of dozens Wordman had given in the year since this pilot project of the Guardian had been set up. For perhaps the fiftieth time he explained what the Guardian did and how it was of value to society.

  The essence of the Guardian was the miniature black box, actually a tiny radio receiver, which was surgically inserted into the body of every prisoner. In the center of this prison compound was the Guardian transminer, perpetually sending its message to these receivers. As long as a prisoner stayed within the hundred-and-fifty-yard range of that transminer, ail was well. Should he move beyond that range, the black box inside his skin would begin to send messages of pam throughout his nervous system. This pain increased as the prisoner moved farther from the transminer, until at its peak it was totally immobilizing.

  “The prisoner can’t hide, you see.” Wordman explained. “Even if Revell had reached the woods, we’d have found him. His screams would have led us to him.”

  The Guardian had been initially suggested by Wordman himself, at that time serving as assistant warden at a more ordinary penitentiary in the Federal system. Objections, mostly from sentimentalists, had delayed its acceptance for several years, but now at last this pilot project had been established, with a guaranteed five-year trial period, and Wordman had been placed in charge.

  “If the results are as good as I’m sure they will be,” Wordman said, “all prisons in the Federal system will be converted to the Guardian method.”

  The Guardian method had made jailbreaks impossible, riots easy to quell—by merely turning off the transminer for a minute or two—and prisons simplicity to guard. “We have no guards here as such,” Wordman pointed out. “Service employees only are needed here, people for the mess hall, infirmary and so on.”

  For the pilot project, prisoners were only those who had committed crimes against the State rather than against individuals. “You might say,” Wordman said, smiling, “that here are gathered the Disloyal Opposition.”

  “You mean, political prisoners,” suggested the interviewer.

  “We don’t like that phrase here,” Wordman said, his manner suddenly icy. “It sounds Commie.”

  The interviewer apologized for his sloppy use of terminology, ended the interview shortly afterward, and Wordman, once again in a good mood, escorted him out of the building. “You see,” he said, gesturing. “No walls. No machine guns in towers. Here at last is the model prison.”

  The interviewer thanked him again for his time, and went away to his car. Wordman watched him leave, then went over to the infirmary to see Revell. But he’d been given a shot, and was already asleep.

  Revell lay flat on his back and stared at the ceiling. He kept thinking, over and over again, “I didn’t know it would be as bad as that. I didn’t know it
would be as bad as that.” Mentally, he took a big brush of black paint and wrote the words on the spotless white ceiling: “I didn’t know it would be as bad as that.”

  “Revell.”

  He turned his head slightly and saw Wordman standing beside the bed. He watched Wordman, but made no sign.

  Wordman said, “They told me you were awake.”

  Revell waited.

  “I tried to tell you when you first came,” Wordman reminded him. “I told you there was no point trying to get away.”

  Revell opened his mouth and said, “It’s all right, don’t feel bad. You do what you have to do, I do what I have to do.”

  “Don’t feel bad!” Wordman stared at him. “What have I got to feel bad about?”

  Revell looked up at the ceiling, and the words he had painted there just a minute ago were gone already. He wished he had paper and pencil. Words were leaking out of him like water through a sieve. He needed paper and pencil to catch them in. He said, “May I have paper and pencil?”

  “To write more obscenity? Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” echoed Revell. He closed his eyes and watched the words leaking away. A man doesn’t have time both to invent and memorize, he has to choose, and long ago Revell had chosen invention. But now there was no way to put the inventions down on paper and they trickled through his mind like water and eroded away into the great outside world. “Twinkle, twinkle, little pain,” Revell said softly, “in my groin and in my brain, down so low and up so high, will you live or will I die?”

  “The pram goes away,” said Wordman. “It’s been three days, it should be gone already.”

  “It will come back,” Revell said. He opened his eyes and wrote the words on the ceiling. “It will come back.”

  Wordman said, “Don‘t be silly. It’s gone for good, unless you run away again.”

  Revell was silent.

  Wordman waited, half-smiling, and then frowned. “You aren’t,” he said.

  Revell looked at him in some surprise. “Of course I am,” he said. “Didn’t you know I would?”