Tom moved into the underbrush. He trotted silently along until he was opposite Grent and the inspector. He took aim and his finger tightened on the trigger…
He didn't want to kill Grent, though. He was supposed to commit only one murder.
He ran on, past the inspector's party, and came out on the road in front of them. His weapon was poised as the party reached him.
"What's this?" the inspector demanded.
"Stand still," Tom said. "The rest of you drop your weapons and move out of the way."
The soldiers moved like men in shock. One by one they dropped their weapons and retreated to the underbrush. Grent held his ground.
"What are you doing, boy?" he asked.
"I'm the town criminal," Tom stated proudly. "I'm going to kill the inspector. Please move out of the way."
Grent stared at him. "Criminal? So that's what the mayor was prattling about."
"I know we haven't had any murder in two hundred years," Tom explained, "but I'm changing that right now. Move out of the way!"
Grent leaped out of the line of fire. The inspector stood alone, swaying slightly.
Tom took aim, trying to think about the spectacular nature of his crime and its social value. But he saw the inspector on the ground, eyes glaring open, limbs stiff, mouth twisted, no air going in or out the nostrils, no beat to the heart.
He tried to force his finger to close on the trigger. His mind could talk all it wished about the desirability of crime; his hand knew better.
"I can't!" Tom shouted.
He threw down the gun and sprinted into the underbrush.
The inspector wanted to send a search party out for Tom and hang him on the spot. Mr. Grent didn't agree. New Delaware was all forest. Ten thousand men couldn't have caught a fugitive in the forest, if he didn't want to be caught.
The mayor and several villagers came out, to find out about the commotion. The soldiers formed a hollow square around the inspector and Mr. Grent. They stood with weapons ready, their faces set and serious.
And the mayor explained everything. The village's uncivilized lack of crime. The job that Tom had been given. How ashamed they were that he had been unable to handle it.
"Why did you give the assignment to that particular man?" Mr. Grent asked.
"Well," the mayor said, "I figured if anyone could kill, Tom could. He's a fisher, you know. Pretty gory work."
"Then the rest of you would be equally unable to kill?"
"We wouldn't even get as far as Tom did," the mayor admitted sadly.
Mr. Grent and the inspector looked at each other, then at the soldiers. The soldiers were staring at the villagers with wonder and respect. They started to whisper among themselves.
"Attention!" the inspector bellowed. He turned to Grent and said in a low voice, "We'd better get away from here. Men in our armies who can't kill…"
"The morale," Mr. Grent said. He shuddered. "The possibility of infection. One man in a key position endangering a ship — perhaps a fleet — because he can't fire a weapon. It isn't worth the risk."
They ordered the soldiers back to the ship. The soldiers seemed to march more slowly than usual, and they looked back at the village. They whispered together, even though the inspector was bellowing orders.
The small ship took off in a flurry of jets. Soon it was swallowed in the large ship. And then the large ship was gone.
The edge of the enormous watery red sun was just above the horizon.
"You can come out now," the mayor called. Tom emerged from the underbrush, where he had been hiding, watching everything.
"I bungled it," he said miserably.
"Don't feel bad about it," Billy Painter told him. "It was an impossible job."
"I'm afraid it was," the mayor said, as they walked back to the village. "I thought that just possibly you could swing it. But you can't be blamed. There's not another man in the village who could have done the job even as well."
"What'll we do with these buildings?" Billy Painter asked, motioning at the jail, the post office, the church, and the little red schoolhouse.
The mayor thought deeply for a moment. "I know," he said. "We'll build a playground for the kids. Swings and slides and sandboxes and things."
"Another playground?" Tom asked.
"Sure. Why not?"
There was no reason, of course, why not.
"I won't be needing this any more, I guess," Tom said, handing the skulking permit to the mayor.
"No, I guess not," said the mayor. They watched him sorrowfully as he tore it up. "Well, we did our best. It just wasn't good enough."
"I had the chance," Tom muttered, "and I let you all down."
Billy Painter put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It's not your fault, Tom. It's not the fault of any of us. It's just what comes of not being civilized for two hundred years. Look how long it took Earth to get civilized. Thousands of years. And we were trying to do it in two weeks."
"Well, we'll just have to go back to being uncivilized," the mayor said with a hollow attempt at cheerfulness.
Tom yawned, waved, went home to catch up on lost sleep. Before entering, he glanced at the sky.
Thick, swollen clouds had gathered overhead and every one of them had a black lining. The fall rains were almost here. Soon he could start fishing again.
Now why couldn't he have thought of the inspector as a fish? He was too tired to examine that as a motive. In any case, it was too late. Earth was gone from them and civilization had fled for no one knew how many centuries more.
He slept very badly.
Citizen in Space
I'm really in trouble now, more trouble than I ever thought possible. It's a little difficult to explain how I got into this mess, so maybe I'd better start at the beginning.
Ever since I graduated from trade school in 1991 I'd had a good job as sphinx valve assembler on the Starling Spaceship production line. I really loved those big ships, roaring to Cygnus and Alpha Centaurus and all the other places in the news. I was a young man with a future, I had friends, I even knew some girls.
But it was no good.
The job was fine, but I couldn't do my best work with those hidden cameras focused on my hands. Not that I minded the cameras themselves; it was the whirring noise they made. I couldn't concentrate.
I complained to Internal Security. I told them, look, why can't I have new, quiet cameras, like everybody else? But they were too busy to do anything about it.
Then lots of little things started to bother me. Like the tape recorder in my TV set. The F.B.I. never adjusted it right, and it hummed all night long. I complained a hundred times. I told them, look, nobody else's recorder hums that way. Why mine? But they always gave me that speech about winning the cold war, and how they couldn't please everybody.
Things like that make a person feel inferior. I suspected my government wasn't interested in me.
Take my Spy, for example. I was an 18-D Suspect — the same classification as the Vice-President — and this entitled me to part-time surveillance. But my particular Spy must have thought he was a movie actor, because he always wore a stained trench coat and a slouch hat jammed over his eyes.
He was a thin, nervous type, and he followed practically on my heels for fear of losing me.
Well, he was trying his best. Spying is a competitive business, and I couldn't help but feel sorry, he was so bad at it. But it was embarrassing, just to be associated with him. My friends laughed themselves sick whenever I showed up with him breathing down the back of my neck. "Bill," they said, "is that the best you can do?" And my girl friends thought he was creepy.
Naturally, I went to the Senate Investigations Committee, and said, look, why can't you give me a trained Spy, like my friends have?