What the Great Transporters did was dispose of their criminals, and they had a lot of criminals. In their community there were two hundred and eighty statutory crimes punishable by their supreme penalty—it came to about one crime for every two persons in the community, and the sentence was passed frequently.
Of course, the sentence wasn't death. Not exactly, anyway. Execution was another of the life-taking sins that was prohibited. They had a better way. They put their criminals in the freezer.
It was fortunate for the Great Transporters that there was so much unused freezer space. The freezers had been big to begin with. Then they had been further enlarged when Newmanhome began to get too cold to support outside life, and tens of thousands of cattle and other livestock were slaughtered and frozen. The freezers had their own independent, long-lasting lines to the geothermal power plant; they were fully automatic and would last for the ages.
But that was one more of the many sources of friction among the communities, because the Greats were rapidly filling them up.
The four communities rubbed abrasively against each other in plenty of other ways. The Great Transporters hated to see even unbelievers profane their Sabbath. The Moslems lost their tempers when they saw anyone drinking alcohol; the Peeps were constantly irate about the wasteful, sinful "luxuries" of the other three groups, while the Reformers simply hated everyone else.
That was where the work of the Four-Power Council came in. They usually made sure that the frictions were kept minor. The system worked pretty well. They had not fought a real war for nearly eighteen years.
Viktor slept badly that night, in his barracks with forty other unattached male Greats sniffling and snoring and muttering in their sleep all around him, and the next day at his loathsome job was no better than the last.
Even the children seemed to have second thoughts about their undisciplined behavior of the day before. When Viktor asked Mooni-bet if she had seen Reesa the girl hung her head. She looked worriedly to see if anyone was listening, then whispered,
"We are on overload now, Viktor. She has been moved to the Peeps."
And then, when Viktor tried to ask Vandot, the boy from the People's Republic snapped at him. "We are here to work, not to chatter like religious fanatics."
"Watch your mouth!" the girl from the Reformers snarled at him.
"I only say what is true," Vandot muttered. "In any case, I know nothing of your wife, Viktor. It is not my business. Nor is it yours; because your duty is to pay us all back for reviving you from—" He hesitated, not willing to say the word. "For reviving you," he finished. "Now get to work."
Viktor didn't answer that. It wasn't because he had been ordered by a child. He hadn't quite figured out what an answer to that sort of remark ought to be. It was true that he was alive. That is to say, his heart pumped, his eyes saw, his bowels moved. Even his genital organs were still in working condition, at least he thought they would be if he were allowed to be with Reesa long enough, in enough privacy, to test them out.
But was that really a "life"?
It was certainly a kind of life, but Viktor could not believe that it was the only life he was ever going to have again. It was not at all his life.
His life had been on a very different Newmanhome, with very different friends, family, and job. Especially job. Viktor Sorricaine's job had never been simply the thing he put hours into in order to keep himself fed. Viktor's job had been his profession. His position. His skills. It was the thing he could organize his life around, the thing he was. And Viktor Sorricaine could not recognize himself as a shoveler of human dung. He was a trained pilot! More than that, he was at least an amateur, thanks to his father's endless lecturing, of such things as astrophysics—the very person these people needed to investigate this eerie ghost in the sky that they called the universe. That was what Viktor Sorricaine was …
From which it followed that this chilly, weary dung shoveler wasn't the real Viktor Sorricaine, and this life was not his.
And when Mooni-bet came near him again in her gathering of dung beetles, he spoke to her, not keeping his voice down. "I do have a complaint, Mooni-bet," he told her. "I'm being wasted here. I have skills that ought to be used."
The girl looked at him desperately. "Please," she whispered, looking over her shoulder.
"But it's important," Viktor insisted. "That thing they call the universe. It needs to be understood, and I have scientific training—"
"Be still!" the Peeps boy cried, coming up to them. "You are interfering with the work!"
"Anyone can do this work," Viktor said reasonably, refraining from pointing out that it was a task that even silly children could handle. Obviously.
"We all must work," Vandot cried, his shrill boy's voice almost cracking. He rubbed his hands nervously on his smeared kilt, staring around at the others in the gloom. Mordi, the Great Transporter girl, averted her eyes, but when she glanced toward Viktor her look was almost guilty. Vandot asserted his righteous young masculinity. "The most important thing is survival," the boy declared. "And the most important part of that is food. Shut up and get those beds prepared!"
Survival, Viktor thought bleakly. True enough. That seemed to be the central rule of the game.
It was natural enough that the social structure for these people had to bend to conform. Their rigid ways were a pattern for survival. Earth's Eskimos, in their far milder climate, had developed unusual social institutions of their own to deal with the brutal facts of their lives. True, the Eskimos had solved the problem in a different way—without rigid laws and stern central government, without punishment (and these people were absolutely devoted to punishment)—but then the Eskimos had started from a different position. They hadn't had long-ingrained traditions of certain kinds of governments and religions to try to preserve. They came into their harsh new environment without the baggage of any real government or religion at all.
The people of this new Newmanhome, in Viktor's eyes, were both authoritarian in government and fanatic in religion. So they lived their dreary, deprived, regimented lives in the caverns under the ice crags that had once been the city of Newmanhome. They had a few things going for them—fortunately, because otherwise they could not have survived at all. The most important one was that, although their sun had gone pale, the fires inside the planet still burned as hot as ever. The geothermal wells produced heat to keep their warrens livable, and even power enough to run their little factories (not to mention their freezers). The supply was not at all lavish. There certainly wasn't enough energy to be had to keep Newmanhome's tens of thousands of people alive …
But then there weren't that many people left alive anymore. Not on Newmanhome. Not anywhere.
When, grudgingly, Vandot allowed that work was through for the day, Viktor tried to scrape some of the filth off his hands. He looked around for Mordi, expecting to walk back to the Greats residence together, but she had already left the growing cavern.