It was basically a question of how to be cruel in a kindly way – and a workable answer had come along in 2061. The lengthy, soul-destroying delays of earlier systems had been eliminated by direct implementation of the majority vote of a thirteen-man jury, and the dreadful certainty of death had been replaced by the challenge of a week in the Apartment. Not only were the exact time and method of execution decently shrouded in mystery – there was a ray of hope that the grim event could be avoided altogether. And that made all the difference.
Analysing his own feelings, Renfrew found that he was tense, alert, stimulated and – above all – confident that he was going to beat the system. There remained only a trace of furtive, niggling doubt. His idea seemed foolproof, but it had been rather too easy to conceive. It had, in fact, been the first scheme to blossom in his mind, and he knew perfectly well that he was anything but a genius – if he could come up with a successful plan anybody could do it. Did that mean that nobody but the occasional moron ever paid the supreme penalty? Or was there some factor he had overlooked?
There was another chiming sound and the message on the screen was replaced by a new set of words scribed in raw crimson: VOTING COMPLETED – AWAIT VERDICT.
On the lower part of the display a sweep hand began remorselessly erasing a sixty-second clock. Renfrew shifted to a more comfortable posture, making sure he was in the exact centre of the cleared area of carpet. I’m going to be all right, he thought. All I’ve got to do is stay put for seven days.
He was glancing around the room, assuring himself that nothing could go wrong, when his gaze picked out two vertical cracks in the skirting board of the wall opposite him. It looked as though a small flap-type door had been built into the base of the wall. He stared at the door, feeling oddly threatened as he tried to guess its purpose. It was nothing to do with ventilation, too awkwardly positioned to be an electrical system access hatch, too small to be a cupboard… Renfrew’s eyes widened as he noticed the slightest trace of wheel marks fanning out across the carpet from the flap and understanding blossomed in his mind.
Robotic cleaners!
The apartment was as immaculate as only an automated cleaning system could make it, which meant that at night when the occupants were asleep in bed silent little machines came out of the walls and scavenged every speck of dirt. But he wasn’t going to be in bed! He was going to be laid out on the floor while the busy robots came nosing and nuzzling around him, and any one of them could be capable of killing him in a dozen different ways. How fast did they travel? How many were there? Could he avoid them?
Renfrew looked at the clock. It had devoured most of itself. Only twenty seconds were left until the apartment declared war on him.
He half-rose, his face turning towards the kitchen. Was there time to run in there, snatch up the lightweight table and get back with it? Would he be safe squatting on top of the table? What if…?
His hands fluttered to his mouth as he heard the final chime which signalled the jury’s verdict. He glanced involuntarily in the direction of the screen, then froze, his chin sagging with incredulity as he read the three words electronically emblazoned across the face of the tube. VERDICT: NOT GUILTY.
The breath left his body in a noisy, quavering sob. He pushed a hank of hair away from his forehead as though giving himself a better view of the glowing words might change their import. The message remained the same. Against all the odds, his defence counsel had succeeded in carrying the jury. He was a free man!
Renfrew got to his feet, shaking his head in wonderment, suddenly conscious of how much he had been dreading the seven-day ordeal that had lain ahead. He took a last look at the apartment, gave a low chuckle which expressed relief and an almost insupportable feeling of happiness, then strode to the entrance door with a buoyant tread, keyed up for his first taste of liberty in many months.
The doorknob did not turn when he grasped it. Instead, it fired a cloud of poison through the skin of Renfrew’s palm, a poison which was so swift-acting that he had no time to realize he had been tricked by executioners who, in their determination to be humane, were not above telling a little white lie.
AMPHITHEATRE
The retro-thrusters were unpleasantly fierce in operation, setting up vibrations which Bernard Harben could feel in his chest cavity.
He had little knowledge of engineering, but he could sense the stress patterns racing through the structure of the shuttle craft, deflecting components and taking them close to their design limits. In his experience, all machines – especially his cameras – gave of their best when treated with the utmost gentleness, and he wondered briefly how the shuttle pilot could bear to subject his craft to such punishment. Every man to his trade, he thought, for the moment incapable of originality, and as if to reward him for his faith the precisely-timed burst of power came to an abrupt end. The shuttle was falling freely, in sweet silence.
Harben looked upwards through the crystal canopy and saw the triple cylinder of the mother ship, the Somerset, dwindling to a bright speck as it slid ahead on its own orbit. The shuttle was brilliantly illuminated from above by the sun, and from below by the endless pearl-white expanses of the alien planet, which meant that every detail of it stood out with a kind of phosphorescent clarity against the background of space. Up at the front end the pilot was almost hidden by the massive back of his G-seat. He sat without moving, yet controlling their flight. Harben felt an ungrudging admiration for his skill, and for the audacity which enabled him to drive a splinter of metal and plastics down through the all-enveloping cloud layers to a predestined point on an unknown world.
At that moment Harben felt a rare pride in his humanity. He turned to Sandy Kiro, who was in the seat next to him, and placed his hand over hers. She continued to stare straight ahead, but the fullness of her lips altered a little and he knew she shared his mood.
“Let’s claim this planet tonight,” he said, referring to a secret game in which love-making established their title to any place in which it occurred.
Her pale lips parted slightly, giving him the answer he wanted, and he relaxed back into his own seat. In a few minutes the silence of their descent was replaced by a thin, insistent whistle as they penetrated the uppermost layers of the stratosphere, and the ship began to stir in response. Presently its movements became more assertive, more violent, and when he looked up front Harben saw the pilot had abandoned his Godlike immobility and was toiling like any other mortal. Quite abruptly, they were surrounded by greyness and the space shuttle had become an aircraft contending with wind, cloud and ice. Their pilot, his stature reduced in proportion, might have been a twentieth-century aviator trying for a touchdown in an unpredicted storm.
Sandy, unaccustomed to blind planetfalls, turned anxiously to Harben.
He smiled and pointed at his chronometer. “It’s almost time for lunch. We’ll eat as soon as we set up camp.”
His apparent preoccupation with domestic routine seemed to reassure her, and she settled back with a tentative preening of her shoulders. Again his trust in the pilot was justified. The ship broke through the cloud cover and steadied in its course as a grey-green landscape materialized below – ranges of hills, terraces and ramparts formed by broken strata, dark vegetation, and a pewter filigree of small rivers. Harben assessed the view with professional speed, took a panoramic camera from his breast pocket and recorded the rest of their descent. In a surprisingly short time the pilot had grounded the shuttle amid a turmoil of vertical jets, and the three of them were outside and testing their Northampton-made boots against wafers of alien shale.