Brute Orbits (5 page)

After dinner, the men wandered back toward their tents. There was an appalling sense of the waiting days that stretched ahead for three decades. The absence of authority seemed strange and unreal.

Emmons went back into the tent and lay down. The light was dimming outside, and he wondered if he would be able to go to sleep.

“What can we do!” shouted a voice.

“We can’t let this happen!” shouted another.

Emmons got up and stood outside the tent. Men seemed to be gathering around a few figures a hundred yards away.

“But what can we do?” a figure demanded.

“What we need to do,” another started to say, “is talk to someone. There’s got to be a communications center somewhere.”

“But where?” asked the first speaker.

“Under our feet,” said another man, “there’s an engineering and maintenance level. The way we came in. That’s where the communications gear has to be.”

“We’ve got to get in touch with someone…back home. Tell them what’s been done to us…maybe get it stopped.”

“Who do you know?” a fourth man demanded.

There was a silence, and Emmons suddenly knew that, like himself, few of the men here would have anyone close to call besides a lawyer, and for most a court appointed one; but it was a dead certainty that all legal objections had long been silenced. The law had a right to put its prisons anywhere it saw fit.

An older man stood up and said, “We must talk to everyone here. I mean we should broadcast and complain.”

That sounded like a good idea, Emmons thought, if they could find a way out of this sealed world. Something in him remembered how to estimate the surface area of an orange. The inside of this place was more like the inner surface of a hollow potato, with centrifugal spin letting everyone walk around with their heads pointed toward the central horizontal axis. The sunplate sat against the forward end and shone down the five-kilometer length of the hollow potato. Beneath their feet was an engineering level, but it might be only in certain places. Beyond that was the asteroid’s outer crust.

The stars are beneath our feet, he thought, estimating that the asteroid’s inner surface was about a hundred square kilometers. To find the place where they had all been brought in might take weeks or months of searching. If it was well hidden, they might never find it, or find it locked. A search would have to be systematic, and if that failed, digging might have to be attempted. That might also fail, or become dangerous if they dug through to the outside where there was no shielding. The engineering level was certain to be protected with surfaces that only industrial tools could penetrate, making it impossible to enter even if they found where to dig.

This was still a prison, guards or no guards, with a wall of space around it.

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“Economic systems create criminals by giving them opportunities—a certain number. Not everyone, but some. We do in fact manufacture them, and we don’t know how to stop them completely. Since we don’t know how, we have to restrain or get rid of them. Look, most people don’t become criminals! It’s quite an accomplishment to have that much civil order even when the cops are not nearby. I’ll admit that the enemies of society are sometimes right about one thing or another. That’s why they must be restrained, even destroyed. We can’t just let them walk in and take over, can we? I suppose we’re only human…too bad, but it can’t be helped.”

When Philip Emmons awoke the next day and went outside, he saw that work on the housing was continuing as if nothing had changed. The men clung to familiar routines against the reality of their new situation. Emmons accepted it as simply a new given in a short line of givens presented to him by a very short past. It seemed to him that he had always worked by recognizing the difference between things he could do something about and those outside his control.

“Well, here he is,” Polau said as Emmons neared the work site. “No breakfast? We missed you.”

“I wasn’t hungry,” Emmons said. He didn’t remember waking up at all for breakfast.

Howes came up with a panel, and Emmons took one end of it. They carried it up against the building and Polau began slipping in the fastener bolts.

Howes said, “Another month and all these buildings will be up.” He sounded almost hopeful.

Emmons nodded. “Maybe sooner.”

And then what, he asked himself. What will we do? Sleep and eat? He wondered what surprises waited for them. Had the prison authority arranged something for later? What did they expect to greet thirty years from now, when the Rock came back?

He knew the answer to that: some old men, many dead.

■

In the twilight of the tent, as they were trying to sleep, Polau said, “What’s with you, Emmons?”

Emmons ignored him.

“See? That’s what I mean. Are you too good to say something once in a while?”

Emmons wondered if Howes would speak, but the young man was silent.

“What were you?” Polau asked. “What did you do? Something sick, I’ll bet.”

Emmons felt a twinge. Polau was not really annoying him, he realized, but the little thief was trying. Why? What could he gain by it? He heard Howes stir, obviously irritated…

Distant cries roused Emmons from an amnesiac sleep. One stopped just as he awoke, and he thought that he had been dreaming, but the next cry came in less than a minute and from another direction. It stopped just as suddenly.

Emmons opened his eyes and lay on his back, listening in a twilight that never became night. Then he heard Polau laughing to himself, stopping, then laughing again.

Another scream reached them from a distance and stopped; and then another—nearby.

Polau laughed again.

“What is it?” Howes whispered. “What’s going on?”

“Can’t you tell?” Polau said derisively.

“What!” Howes cried out.

Emmons knew that he should care, but he didn’t.

“It’s payback time. They’re settling old scores, and there’s no one to stop them now.”

Next came a shriek, as if an animal was being killed, all its pain coiled up and released into one hopeless cry. Sound the alarm was the last useful thing it could do, except that there were no females or offspring to benefit from the signal, and no one else cared. A friend or two might be distressed and plan to retaliate, but the savagery of the killings was meant to discourage vendettas. Sooner or later, the killing would wear itself out as the objects of violence became scarce. Those who were left might even get along better.

Emmons turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but then wondered if Polau might try to kill him. The little thief had no grudge against him, but maybe simple dislike was enough for him. Maybe not.

■

Seventy-three men were killed within the next week. A few of these wanted to die and either killed themselves or asked to be killed. Many bodies were left in their tents as the barracks were completed and groups of men moved in.

Emmons was glad to be rid of Polau and Howes when a barracks became available, and he was able to pick a corner bunk near a screened window where he had a view through the skylight.

On the day he left the tent for the last time, he noticed that in the distance, up the curve of the land, a large group of men were digging graves. He saw looks of dismay, if not shame, on the looks of some of the diggers later that day, and knew that the burials were a protest against the disposal chutes.

At mess he heard one man say, “We’re all we got, and we’re going to kill each other off?”

“We got nothing,” his companion muttered angrily. “Nothing at all.”

The first, a younger man, became fearful at the sound of his voice and said, “Yeah, sure, you’re right.”

“Damned right.”

Howes and Polau were in another barracks, but Emmons often caught the little thief glaring at him as they passed each other, as if Emmons were an old lover. Howes threw him a shy look once in a while during work as if saying, I have to be with him, because we did murder together, and he does stick up for me. Would you stick up for me? Emmons disliked these imagined exchanges when they came into his mind, but felt that they told him something of the truth.

One afternoon, the work was nearly done. Fewer than a dozen barracks remained to be built. There was almost nothing left to do except eat, sleep, and pick fights; but even these were fewer now that so many expected antagonists had eliminated each other. Emmons lay in his bunk looking up through the skylight at the other side of the muddy world, thinking that no one would ever live there, and he imagined that he could feel the asteroid turning under his back. He knew that he couldn’t really feel any significant portion of this centrifugal acceleration—it wasn’t really gravity—that held him to the inner surface of the Rock, but somehow the spin became a dizziness in his head, and he closed his eyes. Imagined stars whipped around him. Earth, Moon, and Sun were smaller somewhere off to his right as he tumbled in the void…and something began to flow into him, like a stream beginning in some mountainous region at the back of his mind, then growing into a river, and pouring into his full awareness…

He remembered getting his new documents, then finding the wiper to give him a temporary identity, then shipping out to work on the Moon, the murder trial…

He sat up, realizing that the wipe had gone wrong and lasted much too long. He would never have killed if the pit inside him had not remained open so long; Yevgeny Tasarov had more self-control than that. When he killed, it was because he meant to do it!

He lay back for a moment, trembling from the shock of finding himself, then realizing how much he disliked Philip Emmons. The man had lived in a daze this last year, scarcely reacting to anything around him. That daze, Tasarov realized, had been his true self struggling to break out, and the result had been inner immobility. He had not been completely asleep within Philip Emmons. The wiper’s available superimposition had been a deliberately weaker personality, which should not have been able to hang on for so long. There was either some hidden strength in the personality, or some mistake in the wiper’s technique. Whatever the cause, Philip Emmons had persisted far too long, and that delay had brought him here to recover himself. Now there was no going back, not for three decades. He felt like a man who had over-slept the most important appointment of his life.

What was he going to do here? Tasarov asked himself, taking a deep breath and sitting up. After a few moments he stood up by his bunk and stretched, feeling that he was also stretching in mental ways, reaching into himself and judging. The escape from Dannemora had succeeded, only to land him here; and he did not remember much of it at all. That was disturbing, but it would all come back to him. He was more worried about his ability to plan and execute. He recalled worrying about that before the break. But a part of him rebelled and insisted that he measure the difficulty of what he had done; perhaps a partial success was the only possible outcome. He had not foreseen that the wiper might make a mistake; but then wiper techniques were not perfect. It was a chance he had to take, and it might have turned out worse. He might have died as Philip Emmons without ever recovering himself.

As he began to delight in the repossession of himself, however partial, he knew what he would do here.

■

Outside, Tasarov stood on the steps to the barracks and gazed out over the muddy countryside. Here and there the brown soil was showing a growth of grass. Men were strewn everywhere, now that the barracks were done—lounging, exercising, even playing ball.

Beyond the small town of barracks, he saw the patch of crosses and grave markers. It had been inevitable. Remove the guards, and all outstanding scores would be settled. It was the beginning of lawful behavior. Make no new enemies after you have eliminated the old.

He wondered how long that would last. Not long. Whatever law crept in here would have to be of his making, or he would find himself subject to arrangements he might despise.

These men needed something to live for, at least for the next few months; and only a leader could give them that. Not just anyone professing to lead, but someone who could say convincing things to them.

He was that man. If not, he would fail; it was as simple as that.

How to go about it? There was no way to speak to all four thousand men at once. He would visit each mess hall for a week and reach every man; word of mouth would also help.

Now what was he going to say?

■

He started in the mess hall where at least two people knew him; it would be better to get that out of the way first.

When the men were nearly finished eating, he stood up on his table, raised his arms, and waited to be noticed.

“Men! I have a few words to say to you!”

Polau looked up from his plate and said, “Well, well, what have we here? The sleepwalker!” and laughed derisively.

“You all know,” Tasarov continued, “what has been done to us, and what we have done to ourselves in the last few days. By killing each other, we are finishing the work that Earth’s authorities were unwilling to do themselves!” He paused, then said, “Are all the old grudges settled now? Who still wishes to kill his enemy?”

He did not expect an answer, but he saw that Polau was watching him carefully, waiting for his chance.

“We must get a hold of ourselves, before we end up hunting each other in this desert…”

Polau stood up and said, “Who do you think you are?”

Tasarov knew Polau—the resentful type who had never gotten past taking guff from bullies and working hard to be one himself.

But Polau knew what to say—he could smell what was coming. There were too many others like him to ignore. So he had to get past him quickly.

“So you’re going to lead us!” Polau shouted, stabbing to the heart of the matter. “Where can you lead us? What can you or any of us do?”

Tasarov smiled to himself at the little thief s shrewdness. His intellect was minor, but his savvy was sharp—instinctive rather than self aware; dangerous, because it could lead to unexpected acts.