"You passed out again." It was Hygeia.
"There's no pain," I told her. "Don't be afraid."
Circum-Luna 6 was a metal shell, five hundred meters in radius. The gravity on the outer surface was five meters per second squared, but a visitor descending through one of the three entrances would experience a perceptible rise in weight for each step downward. CL-6 had few visitors.
All orbital power stations were "holes," but only CL-6 was known as The Hole. Five or six times a year it was shut down for a few hours so people could descend into what had recently been a hell of radioactivity.
It was shut down now. At the one-gee level a terrace hung beneath the gargantuan field generators which held the black hole suspended in the center of the station. Arcing away from the terrace was a span of unsupported metal with rails on each side and low steps built into it. The thirteen steps were traditional, just a few centimeters high. The stretcher rolled over them easily, the body strapped to it bouncing as the black-clad man and woman pushed it out to the end of the arc.
One of the executioners removed the drape from Lilo's body while the other attached the stretcher to an ejection mechanism. Finished, they stood for a moment under the eye of the camera, then walked down the span and climbed to the surface.
The stretcher tilted, hung suspended for an instant, and then fell. It picked up speed asymptotically, and the interior of CL-6 blazed in hard light. Far down the slope of the hole, halfway to infinity, a tiny mass of neutronium that had been Lilo was orbiting at almost the speed of light, releasing energy as it was stressed to the limits of matter before it finally decayed into oblivion.
2
Living Together: A Child's Introduction to the Law, by Ariadna-Clel-Joule. Tycho-Under Educational, 552. Read-rating I.
There are three kinds of lawbreakers. From bad to worst, they are violators, misdemeanants, and felons.
Violations are crimes like jostling, creating a nuisance, verbal abuse, and body odor: crimes of bad behavior. If you are accused of a violation, you may defend yourself in court. You may demand a human jury. If you are found guilty, violations are punished by fine, either to the offended party or the State.
Misdemeanors are crimes like robbery, burglary, assault, rape, and murder: crimes of property. The more serious misdemeanors are those where the property involved is a citizen's body. All misdemeanors are punished by fines of 90% of the criminal's possessions. In cases of violence to a citizen's body there is a mandatory death penalty with automatic reprieve. The criminal's right to life remains in force, so after execution the criminal is revived at a subjective lifeline point before the first conception of the crime and is required to undergo preventive rehabilitation.
The worst crimes are felonies. These are crimes like arson, sabotage, possession of fissionables, vectoring, blowouting, and tampering with human DNA. Felonies involve a threat to the whole human race, or a large part of it, and are known as Crimes Against Humanity. The punishment for convicted felons is revocation of the right to life. The State will search out and destroy every memory recording and tissue sample of the executed criminal. The criminal's genotype is published and declared outlaw, and if detected again will be put to death, as many times as is necessary.
(Read-rating II, see companion volume: Crime Does Not Pay. Comics and tapes accessible to verbal request.)
Vaffa took me from my cell. He hustled me through deserted corridors and into an elevator. I had been curious to see how they were going to get me out of there; thinking about doing it on my own had occupied a great deal of my time over the last year. I had made a study of escapes. Most of them involved bribery, help from the outside, or perseverance, in that order. I had nothing to bribe with, and no one on the outside I could appeal to. As for perseverance, the Count of Monte Cristo would have been stymied by the Terminal Institute. It was three kilometers below the surface. Worse, it was fifty kilometers from the nearest tube station. The only way to get out of it was to walk, or ride the unpressurized induction-rail. For that, a suit was helpful. Naturally, keeping track of suits was the major security precaution.
On the way up, I suddenly remembered what Tweed had been doing in the years since his last term of office. He had been appointed Commissioner of Corrections.
The elevator stopped and Vaffa motioned for Lilo to get out. She had gone about ten steps when he grabbed her arm and directed her through a door. The corridor on the other side was dim and narrow. Vaffa didn't seem worried. Obviously Tweed had many people he trusted at the institute. It looked as though it was going to be easy.
She stopped thinking that when Vaffa directed her to a door marked EMERGENCY AIRLOCK. She stepped inside, and noted with more than casual interest that there was no suit in the small chamber. She stared at the red light on the second door. Beyond it was vacuum.
"Wait a minute," she said, abruptly. "What are you doing?"
"There was no way we could get an unauthorized suit into the institute," he said. "Suits are monitored by a section we don't control."
"Yeah, but—"
"The sensor on this airlock has been disconnected. The computer won't know it's in use. Take these, and put them on." He handed her a pair of thick, flexible boots.
"Wait a minute. I can't."
"You must."
"I can't! You're trying to kill me, that's it! I should never have listened to you people. Let me out of here!" She was on the edge of panic. Like all Lunarians, Lilo had a powerful fear of vacuum. It was the enemy they fought from the day they were born, as fearful as Hell had been to earlier humans. She felt physically ill.
"Put them on," Vaffa said, reasonably. "You need them to protect your feet."
"What's... what is it I have to do?"
"If you hurry, you'll be in vacuum for five seconds. A crawler will be near the door, two meters away, at the most."
"What time of day is it out there?"
"The lock is in shadow."
She felt the panic rising again. "No. No, it's impossible." She was going to say more, but he touched her shoulder and held it tightly for a moment.
"If I have to knock you out and carry you, it will be much slower."
She saw that he meant it. He smiled slightly as he saw her realize he was too big for her to fight. So there was only one way out of the lock for her. She put the boots on and faced the door. Vaffa released the latches. The door was still tightly shut, held in place by fourteen thousand kilograms of pressure.
"When?" she asked.
"The crawler must not stop. The guard in the tower must be distracted at the right moment, because we don't trust him. The car will be in range for ten seconds, and it should arrive in one minute." He looked up from his watch, and smiled. "If everything is still going according to plan." For the first time, she thought he had said something he had not been told to say. He stepped out of the lock and closed the inner door.
Suddenly, it was time. She heard a scream that was very familiar, but she had always been in a suit when she heard it before. It was the quick-release valve. Strangely, she didn't feel anything. She belched continually. The sound died away in a few seconds. She yanked the door open, and was running in silence. There was a dark moving shape, a hand reaching out for her, and she was pulled into the crawler. The door shut, and a shriek took form in the air that rushed in to fill the sealed cabin. Lilo was suddenly shivering.