“Don’t you think you should wash your hands before supper, Mister Knox?”
“Of course! Sorry!” I went to the washbasin, suppressing my resentment of her reproof. It was hard to hate these well-intentioned tyrants. The elderly woman smiling at me from the screen had spent the first few years of her service trying, in the face of insult and provocation, to instil some elements of civilized behavior into urban savages.
It was a long walk to the mess-hall and I ran all the way. The architects had made sure prisoners got exercise by providing plenty of stairs but no elevators. To get from one segment to another one had to go down three flights and then back up another three. I had run up and down fifteen by the time I arrived at the mess hall.
Most of my fellow criminals were already eating, and I went to the serving counter to choose between roast pork, fried chicken, and lobster thermidor. (There were at least two first-class chefs among us.) I took the chicken and looked around for congenial company with whom to eat. A cafeteria designed to feed thousands now catered to only a few hundred and they were scattered in small groups across the hall. I had avoided becoming a regular member of any one clique and sometimes dined alone, though not too often. Any prisoner who showed antisocial tendencies was liable to be psychologically tested and so exposed to the threat of reclassification and compulsory character restructuring. Latterly the Board of Psychiatric Assessors had become more rigid in their definition of “normality” and all “unstable” minds were being wiped. We knew the reason. The Pen was a vastly expensive operation, the electorate was notably less liberal than it had been, and closing down the Pen would now be popular with the voters. The first step in that direction would be to certify as many as possible of us as “mentally unstable”; a diagnosis which justified forced mind-wipe while skirting the legal definitions of insanity.
A woman, sitting alone, glanced toward me. Judith Grenfell, among the most recent of the condemned. Titian hair—that glorious auburn-gold—flashing as she turned her head. When she looked at me a second time I noticed her eyes were green. We had never exchanged more than a few words, but that second glance was an invitation. Living under continuous observation by invisible guards, knowing that everything we said might be monitored and recorded, we had evolved a subtle sign language among us. And as the prison population had fallen in size but risen in education and intelligence that sign language had grown in complexity. I responded to her signal by circling the mess hall, tray in hand, before drifting over to her table, acting like any diffident man seeking to join a pretty woman.
“Mind if I sit down, Judith?” I asked. Manners were a must in the mess hall if one wished to avoid a later scolding from the guards.
“Of course!” She looked up and smiled what the screens would show as a smile of welcome. A smile that told me she had something both private and important to discuss. And a smile that raised her from “good-looking” to beautiful.
There was nothing unusual in sharing a table with a woman in this prison. It had been designed for sexual integration but none of the avant-garde penologists who had founded the Pen could have imagined it would become integrated in fact as well as in theory. Since the eighties of the last century the percentage of violent crimes committed by women had been steadily increasing as sexual equality became one of the better aspects of the Affluence and as more women were trained in the use of firearms. But even by the twenties most murderers were still male.
Yet there were now almost as many women as men among ms hard-core incorrigibles. A phenomenon which the experts whose opinions I had read in the library journals had never explained to even their own satisfaction, and all of whom had avoided giving the reason I thought obvious. Women defended their memories and identities more stubbornly than men because women are by nature more stubborn, more pigheaded than most men. And Judith Grenfell, extracting the last of the thermidor from her lobster, looked more stubborn than most women.
Still concentrating on her lobster she murmured, “Are they listening to us?”
I drank my juice and started noisily on my soup. “Not listening. Only taping. But they hardly ever check mess hall tapes these days.” I dropped my napkin and, reaching down, I knocked the microphone connection hidden in the leg of the table. “Now the tape will be too noisy to monitor. Daren’t do that too often or they’ll nab me. So I hope you’ve got something worth saying.”
“You work in electronics, don’t you?” She pushed away her lobster and started on apple pie. Prison had not affected her appetite nor spoiled her figure.
I nodded.
“I work in the hospital and morgue.”
“Interesting but depressing!” I waited for her to hint at why she should mention her job.
“Joshua Schwartz died last night.”
“Poor old Josh. They put him here in the beginning. He held out to the end.”
“There are now four bodies in the morgue. They’ve closed .down most of the lockers so there’s no cold-storage space left. They’ll have to ship those four out soon.” She looked at me with an expression suggesting escape.
At one time or another almost every man and woman in the mess hall must have dreamed up some plan of escape and I had listened to most of them. To maintain our morale we still reassured each other that no escape-proof prison had ever existed. Books telling of escapes from prisons, fortresses, camps, chain gangs, and harems were among the most popular reading in the library. The guards must have grown sick of hearing us plan escape for by now they seldom reprimanded us for discussing it openly among ourselves; they probably approved of such talk for its therapeutic value.
To some extent I think the remaining guards admired us remaining prisoners; men and women any of whom could be free with a new name, a new character, and an allowance adequate for reeducation merely by signing a “consent to restructuring” form. Moreover, although all of us had been condemned as killers, few of us later arrivals seemed to be the recidivist murderers for whom the Pen had originally been built. What we were we did not know for we avoided telling each other about our crimes, and only the Governor and her Deputy had the details. I watched Judith sipping coffee, wondering whom she had murdered and why. She didn’t look like a murderess, but then few killers look the part. I classified her as a professional woman, with a mouth that suggested passion and a jaw that showed stubborn determination. The kind of woman I had learned to avoid.
She had some ingenious plan she wanted to tell me about and, like all the others, I knew it would be hopeless. The kindest thing to do would be to listen and then gently point out how hopeless it was. To warn her that escape was safe to discuss but deadly to attempt. It was impossible to get out of the Pen, so an attempt to do so was madness and therefore prima facie evidence of that “mental instability” which justified the Assessors ordering mind-wipe. A crunch that for some reason was called “Catch-22.”
She finished her coffee and stood up. “Feel like a walk through the woods?”
A “walk through the woods” was usually an invitation to spend an amorous hour among the trees of the orchard. But Judith’s green eyes told me that it was not sex she had on her mind. She wanted a secluded place to unfold her plan, and the “woods” provided that. The patches of grass between the potted trees were monitored by microphones and cameras, as was everywhere else within the prisoners’ zone, but direct surveillance was relaxed when a couple were in each other’s arms. The Governor in her monthly pep talks to us always emphasized that the staff respected our privacy as much as possible; that any voyeurs among them had been screened out long ago.