But not Heimat.
The only other living meat inmate of the prison was a former Soviet marshal named Pernetsky. Like Heimat, he had been a mole for the terrorists, using his military position to help them kill and wreck. The two had been colleagues in the secret underground, then fellow prisoners for hell’s own years. Not friends, exactly. Neither of them had any real friends. But close enough as inmates that Heimat had been really surprised when he heard one day that Pernetsky had eaten out his entire digestive system with cleaning fluids.
It was not an efficient suicide attempt. The guardthings had spotted it at once, and now Pernetsky was in intensive care in the prison hospital.
One destination is as good as any other for a man who has none, and Heimat decided to look in on Pernetsky.
The prison hospital was on the same scale as the great penitentiary complex itself. The hospital had a hundred and thirty beds, each one capable of being isolated with partitions of shatterproof glass and steel. Pernetsky was the only patient.
Heimat crossed the warm, wide lawn with its hibiscus and palm trees to the hospital, ignoring the workthings that picked the blossoms for his table and tidied up the fallen fronds. He could not ignore the medic in the reception room, though. As he entered she peered out at him and called, with a smile of professional cheer, “Good morning, General Heimat! You’re looking a little flushed. Would you like me to check your blood pressure?”
“No chance,” sneered Heimat, but he stopped within conversational range of her. He was always more courteous to the medics than to any other prison personnel-it was his theory, which he never chose to put to the test, that some of them, sometimes, were living humans. It was also his habit, because in the presence of the medical staff he could think of himself as hospital patient rather than jailbird. Role playing was important to Heimat. He had acted well in consecutive roles as West Point cadet, grunt lieutenant, company commander, division 0-2, two-star general-secret soldier in the liberation forces!—convict. “I don’t want you to take my blood pressure,” he said, “because you already know perfectly well what it is and you just want to give me some medication I don’t want. But I’ll tell you. If you were about six centimeters shorter and ten years younger I’d let you raise it a little. Especially if you were blond.” (And fragile.)
The nurse’s professional smile stayed professional. “You want a lot from me,” she murmured.
“You’re supposed to give me everything I need,” he said. The conversation had begun to bore him. He decided this one wasn’t really human anyway, and moved on.
No one stopped him. What was the point? The shatterproof walls were not up around Pernetsky’s bed, either. There was even less point in that, because Pernetsky’s transplants were a long way from healed and he was tied to his life-support systems more firmly than by any chains.
Heimat looked down on his last living companion, trussed in his bed with the tubes in his nose and the tiny pumps whirring away. “Well, Pyotr,” he said, “are you going to get up from there? Or is your next stop the Dead File?”
The Russian didn’t respond. He hadn’t responded to anything for weeks. It was only the traitorous CRT at the foot of his bed, with its telltale sine waves billowing and sometimes erupting, that showed he was not only alive but sometimes even awake. “I almost miss you,” Heimat said meditatively, and lit a cigarette, heedless of the signs that warned of oxygen and risks of fire. A wardthing moved unobtrusively closer but did not interfere.
Once this had been the military ward of the prison. Beyond the glass doors of the wardrobes Heimat could see the racks of uniforms, American blue and khaki, Russian white and drab, that would never be worn again. “If you get up,” Heimat wheedled, “I’ll take off this stupid hospital robe and put on my Class As. You can too. We’ll have a war game or something; remember how you used to nuke New York and Washington, and I’d wipe out your whole missile complex?”
There was no response from the patient. This was beginning to be boring, too, Heimat decided. “Ah, well,” he said, blowing smoke in Pernetsky’s face, “we knew all along that the winners always put the losers on trial. Foolish of us to lose.”
As Heimat turned to leave, the Soviet marshal’s head moved ever so slightly and one eye winked. “Ah, Pyotr!” cried Heimat. “You’ve been fooling them!”
The marshal’s lips opened. “Last night,” he whispered. “The hover-trucks. Find out why.”
And then he closed lips and eyes and would not open either again.
Naturally none of the prisonthings would answer Heimat’s questions. He had to go and find out what Pernetsky had been talking about for himself.
He roamed the prison compound, all the three square kilometers of it on the side of the mountain, with its heartbreaking view of the sea no prisoner could ever reach. Most of the cell blocks were empty and sealed. The engineering buildings-the power sources and the disposal units and the laundries-weren’t empty because they had to keep on chugging away at their tasks. But they were sealed to Heimat anyway.
Everything else was open, but there wasn’t much of everything else. The prison had a farm; it had been work for the inmates when there were enough inmates to matter, and it was kept going by the work-things even now because it produced a number of valuable, if sometimes peculiar, crops. But there was nothing there that hadn’t always been there. Nor around the pool, nor in the gymnasium, nor in the vast, empty recreation hall, with its games and books and screens.
So what had Pernetsky meant about trucks?
Heimat wondered if it would be worth the trouble to look at the Dead File. It was trouble, because the building was off all by itself, upslope, near the outer barriers of the prison, and it was quite a climb. It had been some time since Heimat had made the effort.
When he realized this, he decided promptly to do it now. It was always a good idea to keep checking the prison perimeters. One day, just for a moment, someone might slip up, and then there would be a chance of—Of what?
Heimat grinned sourly to himself as he climbed the flower-bordered walk to the Dead File. Of escape, of course. Even after all these years, that hope was what kept him going.
“Hope” was too strong a word. Heimat had no real hope of escaping, or at least not of staying escaped even if somehow he were able to get out of the prison itself. With all the wise and watching computer programs in the world, it would not be long before one or another of them penetrated any disguise.
On the other hand.
On the other hand, thought Heimat, careful not to show any expression on his face lest some nearby workthing catch a glimpse of it-on the other hand a man who was sufficiently courageous and daring, a natural leader gifted with charisma and power-a man like himself, in fact-might easily overturn the odds! Think of Napoleon back from Elba! The people flocking to him! Armies springing out of nowhere! Once free he would find followers, and then the hell with their machines and spies, the people would shield him. Of this Heimat had no doubt. He was certain in his heart that, whatever people pretended to themselves, most of the human race was as greedy and arrogant as himself, and what they really wanted most was a leader to tell them that greed and arrogance were permissible, even admirable, behavior.
But first one had to escape.
Heimat stopped at the fork in the walk, panting slightly. It was a hard climb for a man a hundred and some years old, even with so many new parts that he had long lost count, and the sun was hot. He surveyed the perimeter walls of the prison resignedly. They had not changed. They weren’t even walls; there was a barrier of bushes, handsomely ornamental but filled with sensors, then a space and another barrier, equally beautiful to the eye but this time filled with paralyzing circuits—and, just to make sure, a third line behind them, and this one was lethal. The late Major Adrian Winterkoop had proven that for all of them, because that was the way he had chosen for his own suicide. The experiment had worked well. (Or as well as dying ever worked, when all that happened was that they put you into machine storage in the Dead File.)