EXILE

Stein was led out of the courtroom, back through the waiting room. He looked briefly at the two prisoners who were waiting there with their guards. The man who had come in shortly before Stein’s appearance appeared to be shell-shocked, sitting motionless with a dazed, vacant look on his face. The other man was quietly sobbing. Each to his own, thought Stein.

From the hallway, he was taken to the central group of elevators, and once more he found himself on the basement level of the building, in the booking hall that he had first entered and been processed in all those days ago. This time, though, he was taken to the exit-processing hall, which performed the exact reverse function of the booking hall. Passing through secure doors and a low-security checkpoint, Stein was taken first to a small booth. In front of him, recessed into the wall, was an automatic medical review unit. Stein was familiar with the design of the unit, as he had sometimes had to accommodate a unit in buildings that he had helped to design. He stepped up to the wall, holding his arms out in front of him. His arms slid up to his armpits into two holes in the wall. His body fitted into a concave wall panel, and his chin rested on a padded bar as his face fitted neatly into a confined, restraining box. As his arms entered to the full length of the tubes, his hands found the grips at the far ends, and he grabbed hold of each firmly. The pressure of his grip activated the machine.

Stein experienced several sensations simultaneously. The band around his upper arm tightened, and as his blood pressure was monitored he felt the prick of the auto-syringe in the crook of his elbow. An infra-red scanner was viewing his arm, and as his veins expanded with the pressure around his upper arm, the scanner used the localised increases in surface body temperature to guide the syringe. As the syringe drew his blood, a wrap-around dental x-ray was taken, as was a total retinal image for later identification purposes. Although he could not hear it, Abe knew that in addition to the other tests, his ears were being probed and imaged by an ultrasound unit - any defects or injuries to his ears could cause problems in the reduced gravity of the moon.

As the band around his upper arm was released, his blood sample was split into several smaller samples for immediate testing. While the blood splits were tested for haemoglobin, sugar levels and electrolytes, a refined, high-power ultrasound unit measured his arm’s bone density, from which his assumed total skeletal bone density would be calculated. Again, to screen his suitability for long-term residence in low gravity. This was little more than lip-service to human-rights activists, as no-one yet had been refused their lunar prison term. The blanket acceptance of all prisoners, regardless of their physical suitability, contributed to the high mortality rate of the penal colonies, which in turn helped to ensure continuity of pleas for newly-convicted prisoners.

The tests complete, Stein withdrew his arms and stood back from the unit. The guards waited for a few moments, at the end of which the small control unit produced a polycarbonate neck-tag that had embedded in it a small silicon chip with the summary of Stein’s identity, trial record and sentence, and his physical characteristics as of that moment. One of the guards picked up the tag, and pushed a call button. In response to the summons, a CSA physician came over to the both, and took the tag from the guard. From his pocket the doctor took an anaesthetic stamp, and told Stein to expose his thigh. Stein opened his overalls, and pulled his arms out of the sleeves. The top fell down around his waist, and he pushed them down over his hips, exposing his thighs. The doctor then placed each of Stein’s hands on the wall, and stamped the inside of his left thigh.

With the thigh numb, the doctor loaded the tiny chip into a sterile subcutaneous pelletiser. He placed his hand on Stein’s thigh, and pinched up the skin and underlying fat layer. Placing the probe of the pelletiser against the pinched fold, he pulled the trigger, causing a small, scalpel-like probe to shoot forward and pierce the fold. The probe was made of not one, but several smaller points that sprang apart, stretching the skin to form a small hole, into which the central spike slid forward, carrying the silicon wafer on the point into the stretched hole, and instantly pulled out without the chip. The medic then pulled the probe out, causing the hole in the skin to pull itself closed with a wet, sucking slap.

With Stein’s personal i.d. and physical record now embedded beneath the skin of his inner thigh, the doctor mopped up the small amount of blood with a cotton swab, and placed a self-adhesive bandage patch on the wound. Before he left, he took a hand-held scanner unit from the med-unit panel and scanned the wound. Instantly, the information that was stored on the chip began to scroll across the small screen. Satisfied that it was working, and that he wouldn’t have to cut Stein’s thigh open to recover a dud chip, he nodded to the guard, and moved on down to the next booth, where another convict was having his details recorded on a similar chip.

Stein’s thigh was still numb, and as he was taken down into a barred, concrete cell he did not feel any pain from where the i.d. chip had been inserted, only a dull itch from the edges of the numb patch. There were already two other convicts in the cell, one of whom Stein recognised - the hapless Morecamb, who had appeared before Stein. The guards remained outside, leaving the convicts free to talk. Stein sat down on the fold-out bench, facing Morecamb.

“Gidday.” Morecamb gave no reply. He still looked dazed, and only looked up at Stein furtively. “You’re Morecamb, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?” His words were grunted, rather than spoken.

“You were tried before me. One of the guards knew you. They talked.”

“Really.”

“Surprised to see you here, really. They thought you were about to be famous.” Public executions were well publicised events, designed to achieve maximum impact on the population, and to leave a lasting reminder as to who was actually in charge. The whole execution process had been developed not by a tyrant judiciary, but by a well-respected and successful advertising agency, on contract to the tyrant judiciary.

“I had a lawyer.”

“McCulloch? Haven’t heard anything too inspiring about him.”

“Yeah, well. He convinced the judge to show mercy at least once in his career.”

“So, hard labour on the moon is preferable to death at dawn?”

“I’m alive.”

“But will it be living?”

“There’s a chance. Who knows? We might just like it.”

“You say so. But I ought to warn you.”

“What?”

“There’s no lamb on the moon.” Morecamb stared at Stein, and then burst out laughing. Stein joined him, glad to see someone else enjoying themselves. He felt good, the laughter breaking down in seconds much of the emotional tension that had governed his life for so many months. God, it felt good. The two men were roaring, the gales of laughter reaching the guards outside. The other convict was laughing every bit as hard, but just for the hell of it, as he didn’t know Morecamb’s crime. But who needed a reason? When the cell door was opened a minute later to let in the convict who had been in the next med-booth from Stein, the guards were perplexed, finding three convicts, enemies of the state who were about to be exported to the moon’s labour colony, all but rolling on the floor, laughing themselves hoarse. The guards opened the door and shoved the convict inside, pausing to gaze, incredulously, upon the hysterics. Shaking their heads slowly, they pulled the door shut, leaving them to it.

Gradually, the laughter subsided, the cause long since forgotten. Pulling himself back up onto the bench, Stein gathered his breath. “I’m Stein. Abraham Stein.”

“Taylor Morecamb. What about you two?”

The first inmate spoke up first, still panting from his laughter.

“Alfred Newman. Life. You remember the soapbox preacher? Looking at him.” Stein, Morecamb and the other convict nodded appreciatively. Two years before, a man had been arrested in Chicago’s central television platform for inciting civil insurrection. A technician at the platform, he had re-engineered the live broadcast set-up, and had stood up in front of a camera that he had set to operate automatically. Patched into the national network, the pirate camera caught his speech, his active denouncement of the Global Union and his “call to arms” of the Earth’s population against all Union employees and agencies. His call had been heeded by some of the least self-controlled and more disillusioned populace, with the result being several dozen deaths across the North American continent, on the whole lower-level employees, such as reception-desk clerks at CSA and tax offices. No-one who had any influence, except in death. He had been dubbed the soap-box preacher, as he was a tad on the short-size - his broadcast had ended when the camera slipped down slightly, revealing the box that he had been standing on.

“How did you get off with life? I would have thought that that was a capital crime.”

“Well,” Newman replied, “I didn’t actually kill anyone. I didn’t even touch anyone. By openly voicing my opposition to the Union, I was labelled an Enemy of the State, as all of you here. For the same reason, the judge, in his wisdom, decided to remove the threat from the good, fair public whose security I place at risk. Or so he said.”

“Well, hey,” Morecamb started, “At least the air’s clean, and all meals are provided.”

“And there’s no unemployment,” Stein added, looking at the newcomer. “That reminds me - who are you?”

““Bill Hulce. Thirty years for armed robbery.”

“That’s a bit steep. Who did you knock off?”

“Who didn’t I, is more the question. Gas platforms, post offices, hypermarkets. I was good - I must have been. I’d been at it for five years. Not always armed, mind you. My bigger jobs involved some psychology.”

“What?”

“Simply, I would hypnotise the clerks, for want of a better description. They would be most willing in giving me what I wanted, with no coercion at all, no disguise, and they would have no ready memory of the event.”

“How did they get onto you?” Stein was intrigued.

“I got careless, and bored. Armed robbery still has some of the grubby, romantic glamour of the nineteen hundreds. Mesmerism was too easy. I could live off it, but it gave me no challenge. You could say I had no job satisfaction. So, there I was, ski mask and an antique uzi, the micro model, when I met a guard who was a bit of a movie buff. Of all of the security bulldogs, I had to choose a Clint Eastwood revivalist.”

“Bad karma.”

“You can say that again. From `Dirty Harry’ to “The Unforgiven” in thirty seconds. I spent the next six months in the Justice Department infirmary, recovering until I was judged to be fit enough to go orbital. At the time, there was a shortage of labour in the colony.”

“Like there is now, and like there always has been,” Stein said. “Their only limit has been the economics of drip-feeding convicts up to the camp.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Morecamb asked.

“Jungle telegraph, you might say. I keep my ear to the ground.”

“What are you in for, anyway?” Hulce asked.

“They tried to pin me with the spaceport assassinations.”

“Hard call. Did they?”

“They had a little problem. They arrested me before it happened. When it did, I was sitting in the interview room down the hall from here.” Stein shrugged, not giving too much away. Chances were, this room above all others was bugged, and if he gave away too much, he might not actually make it to the moon, instead fast-tracking it back to the courtrooms and remand cells on the top floor.

Newman carried on. “So, Stein, what did stick?”

“Well, they claim that I wrote some documents for the Freedom Movement, and that I am a member.”

“So, are you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Guess not, I suppose,” Newman answered.

“Good. Let it rest there. Does anyone have the time?” Stein asked. Three heads shook slowly. There was no clock in the cell, and they had all been long relieved of any hardware and jewellery. “Guess not. Hell, not that it matters much. It isn’t as if we have any urgent appointments to keep. Try this one - does anyone know the spaceport timetable?” Again, shaking heads. Morecamb spoke up.

“You keep forgetting, Stein. We’ve all been here on remand for several months each. The spaceport was just a building site when most of us went inside. How long were you on remand for?”

“A week or so. They fast-tracked me, I think to save face. Show the public that their response time is to be admired.”

“Even if it means arresting you before you could assassinate anyone?”

“Exactly. But claiming that I’m a member of the Freedom Movement seems to be as good as they could hope for.”

“Are you?” Morecamb asked.

“They reckon I am, and the judge believes that I am. That’s all that’s important, it seems. Why do you keep asking?”

“Curiosity, I suppose,” Morecamb replied.

Stein was mildly suspicious. The CSA could save on technology and improve results merely by having an agent go undercover as a convict. The more that he thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, without really bordering on the paranoid. After all, hadn’t he been landed here by the infiltration of the Movement by Franklin? What he could be certain of was that however long their wait was to be, it wouldn’t be for long, owing to the lack of toilet or food facilities. It was entirely likely that they wouldn’t be waiting for more than a couple of hours, after which they would be taken to the spaceport directly.

As the conversation turned to more mundane topics, mostly just speculation as to what space would be like, and the labour colony on the moon, Stein searched his memory for what he knew about the spaceport and its operation. Considering what his mission was to have been that fateful day not so long ago, he knew probably as much as any other member of the public could be expected to know, and possibly a bit more. In his preparatory research for the mission, he had used his professional network as an architect to touch on the functional capacity and workload of the spaceport, and other contracts for the proposed schedule. For the site to become profitable, it would need to maximise the turnover in traffic. Although designed primarily to serve as a port for importing industrial raw materials from the mines on the moon, each incoming shipment had to be balanced by an equally profitable export. Typically, the exports were new materials for the development of the orbital platforms and the lunar colonies themselves, and of course, people. Owing to the cost of taking cargo between the Earth and the moon, a two-step journey had been developed.

For the same cost of taking a small payload from the Earth into orbit, over ten times that payload could be taken from the orbital stage to the moon. To capitalise on this, several orbital platforms had been developed. Using technology and construction methods and materials that had been developed using the experimental, laboratory-platform stations during late nineteen hundreds, the platforms were permanent structures in orbits that would not decay appreciably for many decades. The platforms acted as way-platforms for material and people in transit between the Earth and the moon, as communication points in the global network, chemical processing units, and as platforms for the arrays of global surveillance devices that had formerly been hoisted aloft in automatic, short-lived satellites with limited capabilities.

Also on every shuttle flight up from Earth would be a limited tonnage of pure water from the distillation plants on the shores of the Great Lakes. The platforms had large arrays of solar panels that used the intense, undiffracted, unfiltered sunlight to create constant, high currents of electricity from the latest generation of photo-voltaic cells. The current was used for several purposes. Certainly, the platform’s operational usage was drawn from the current, but it only accounted for an average of forty percent of the peak output. The balance of the power was used to electrolyse the imported water payloads in large, U-shaped cells, each arm with its own electrolyte. The two gases that were produced, hydrogen and oxygen, were continually drawn from the cells and compressed for tank storage by high-efficiency pumps and compressors. The electrolysis of the water was the bread-and-butter function of the platforms, paying for their high operation and maintenance costs. The platforms were necessary from the point of view of not having to hoist payloads directly to the moon from Earth, and the water processing earned the revenue to keep them working, while at the same time producing the hydrogen fuel for the hot-fusion engines of the lunar transports, and the oxygen for the expanding colonies. As the colony convicts developed new hab-spaces, the colony atmosphere could not be expected to expand to fill the new space, effectively diluting it. Each new space, then, needed additional atmosphere imported from the platforms.

In much the same way that, decades earlier, Mussolini had achieved punctuality of the Italian train system, the Global Union had developed and enforced a strict, regular and punctual schedule of shuttle flights to and from the platforms. The spaceport had been built to improve the service. Until its construction, shuttles had continued to be flown from the traditional bases, developed for the original space race of their fore-fathers. The old bases had met the demand until the lunar colonies had snowballed from surface scientific outposts to a deportation centre, exploitation base and, to be soon, a valid alternative to the increasingly hostile environment of Earth. Purpose-built for a rapid turn-around in space traffic, Port Chicago was the jewel in the crown of the Union Space Agency. Although no-one was allowed near it except on business, Stein knew that he and his fellow convicts would soon be very familiar with it. The more so when flights were, on average, once a week, typically on Wednesdays. Monday and Tuesday working days to complete preparation, and Thursday and Friday to clean up. And today was Tuesday, afternoon. Visitors on Monday, trial the day after.

“We should be out of here soon, at any rate,” Stein said, breaking the silence. The others turned to listen. “I followed the development of the spaceport from early on,” he added. “I am - was an architect. It was my business to keep tabs on all projects, to look for business opportunities. The routine traffic between the platforms and Earth have been consolidated to the port, which was purpose-built to handle the traffic in much the same way as airports were, last century. With all operations and missions, there is one outgoing shuttle flight each week, usually on Wednesday. Each shuttle, as you know, has set places for passengers, either professionals or convicts.”

“So, how long do you reckon?” Hulce asked.

“Minutes, most like,” Stein answered. “If we’re to be on the dawn flight, then they’d better get their skates on. Personally, I’m looking forward to it.”

“Yeah?” Morecamb.

“Yup. That spot under my butt is getting sore. It’ll be good to take the weight off it.”

A couple of the other convicts groaned in agreement, muttering odd comments about the CSA, permanent chip implants and lunar mortality rates. Gradually, the chat slowed down and vanished, leaving four apprehensive convicts brooding over their own thoughts in silence. Conversation, company even, was still a minor novelty for most of them, as they had all, until that morning, been in solitary remand on the top floor. Being alone with their thoughts was more comfortable to them than talking with other people, freely or otherwise. It was barely half an hour later that the four thought trains were simultaneously derailed by the sudden opening of the cell door.

Four heads immediately turned to face the light opening, which was filled by the bulky form of Sergeant Jordan Michaels, of the Global Union Armed Forces, Space Unit. Well over six feet in height, his build had been likened to that of a Hereford bull on steroids. Pausing in the doorway to wait for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, he barked a single order. “STAND!”. As one, the convicts stood to their feet. From where they stood, Michaels was a tall, wide silhouette that embodied brute physical strength, and the willingness to use it. As they stood, his watery blue eyes darted back and forth, quickly appraising his latest assignment.

Sergeant Michaels was one of a small corps of prisoner escorts, soldiers who would oversee the transportation of convicts around the Earth, from the Earth to the platforms, and from the platforms to the moon. Michaels always operated alone - he liked it that way, had a zero escape record, and had never had to draw his pulse-repeater in anger. Had never needed to, mainly because his hands were every bit as lethal as the plasma bolts that were used in place of the antiquated projectile weapons.

From where he stood, Michaels saw a familiar sight - four blinking, questioning faces, all pale from having been closeted away from the outside world for too long. Not long enough, in his opinion. Still, he was paid to do a job, and paid well. He was not, he reminded himself, supposed to have opinions or thoughts. God, how he loved his job! Free space travel, and the freedom to be judiciously brutal. He liked that word - judicious. Sounded good. And his uniform was impressive, too. He stood silent for a calculated pause, to instil the appropriate degree of awe, respect, and shit-loosening fear into his latest charges.

Stein’s one thought was “What a jerk!”

Hulce thought, “Dorkus Giganticus.”

Newman was thinking, “This wank sure loves himself.”

Morecamb tried hard to stifle a fit of giggles. All of them, smartly, tried hard to look terrified, petrified with fear. They all knew that their situation was bad enough. No point in making it worse by pissing off their simple-mindedly psychotic escort. Their act seemed to work, as the man-mountain spoke again.

“I am Sergeant Michaels, and I am your escort to the orbital platform. Some of you may be fortunate enough to have my company all of the way to the moon. If any of you try to escape, you will have me on your case. And,” he sneered, “I don’t take prisoners.” The four men tried even harder not to laugh at the man whose job it was to look after prisoners. Michaels continued. “Three golden rules to remember. Do not talk in my presence unless I permit it. Do as I say, when I say it, and do it fast. And lastly, don’t try anything stupid.” As he spoke, he first cracked his knuckles, pushed his short sleeves around a bit to show off his inflated biceps, and then fondly patted his holster, in the same way as any other person would pat a favourite pet dog.

“Now, you are mine, and don’t forget it. Line up.”

The four formed a line. Michaels opened a small cabinet outside the door, and took from it a set of leg bracelets. Moving down the line, he chained them together, in line. As he worked his way back, he individually cuffed each man’s hands together. With the men all shackled to each other and ready to be led out of the building, Michaels started to whistle. It was a familiar tune, one that Stein was sure had been whistled by some small miners in a Walt Disney movie. Finally, he couldn’t believe it was for real.

But then, was anything real anymore?