Well, I’d write more but I have to get up early in the morning. I’m having breakfast with Tonda to give her some last-minute run throughs before she solos. I think she’ll pass all right. She surely has a lot of smarts for somebody who was a former Miss Illinois!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 03 late
Dear Mom:
Your Christmas package got here today, and it was really nice. I loved the socks. They’ll come in real handy in case I come back to Chicago for a visit before it gets warm. But the cookies were pretty crumbled, I’m afraid—delicious, though! Tonda said she could tell that they were better than anything she could bake, before they went through the CAS 43-G customs, I mean.
Torklemiggen is just about ready to solo. To tell you the truth, I’ll be glad to see the last of him. The closer he gets to his license the harder he is to get along with. This morning he began acting crazy as soon as we got into high orbit. We were doing satellite-matching curves. You know, when you come in on an asymptotic tractrix curve, just whistling through the upper atmosphere of the satellite and then back into space. Nobody ever does that when they’re actually driving, because what is there on a satellite in this system that anybody would want to visit? But they won’t pass you for a license if you don’t know how.
The trouble was, Torklemiggen thought he already did know how, better than I did.
So I took the controls away to show him how, and that really blew his cool. “I could shoot better curves than you in my fourth instar!” he snarled out of his left head, while his right head was looking at me like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. I mean, mean. Then when I let him have the controls back he began shooting curves at one of the miniblack holes. Well, that’s about the biggest no-no there is. “Stop that right now,” I ordered. “We can’t go within a hundred thousand miles of one of those things! How’d you pass your written test without knowing that?”
“Do not exceed your life-station, mammal!” he snapped, and dived in toward the hole again, his fore hands on the thrust and roll controls while his hind hands reached out to fondle the buttons for the new equipment. And all the time his left-hand head was chuckling and giggling like some fiend out of a monster movie.
“If you don’t obey instructions,” I warned him, “I will not approve you for your solo.” Well, that fixed him. At least he calmed down. But he sulked for the rest of the lesson. Since I didn’t like the way he was behaving, I took the controls for the landing. Out of curiosity I reached to see what the new buttons were. “Severely handicapped mammalian species!” his left head screeched, while his right head was turning practically pale pink with terror. “Do you want to destroy this planet?”
I was getting pretty suspicious by then, so I asked him straight out: “What is this stuff, some kind of weapon?”
That made him all quiet. His two heads whispered to each other for a minute, then he said, very stiff and formal, “Do you speak to me of weapons when you mammals have these black holes in orbit? Have you considered their potential for weaponry? Can you imagine what one of them would do, directed toward an inhabited planet?” He paused for a minute, then he said something that really started me thinking. “Why,” he asked, “do you suppose my people have any wish to bring culture to this system, except to demonstrate the utility of these objects?”
We didn’t talk much after that, but it was really on my mind.
After work, when Tonda and I were sitting in the park, feeding the flying crabs and listening to the singing trees, I told her all about it. She was silent for a moment. Then she looked up at me and said seriously, “Jim Paul, it’s a rotten thing to say about any being, but it almost sounds as though Torklemiggen has some idea about conquering this system.”
“Now, who would want to do something like that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It was just a thought,” she apologized. But we both kept thinking about it all day long, in spite of our being so busy getting our gene tests and all-but I’ll tell you about that later!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 05 2200ugt
Dear Mom:
Take a
good look
at this date, the 5th of January, because you’re going to need to remember it for a while! There’s big news from CAS 43-G tonight … but first, as they say on the tube, a few other news items.
Let me tell you about that bird Torklemiggen. He soloed this morning. I went along as check pilot, in a school ship, flying matching orbits with him while he went through the whole test in his own yacht. I have to admit that he was really nearly as good as he
thought he was. He slid in and out of hyperdrive without any power surge you could detect. He kicked his ship into a corkscrew curve and killed all the drives, so he was tumbling and rolling and pitching all at once, and he got out of it into a clean orbit using only the side thrusters. He matched parking orbits—he ran the whole course without a flaw. I was still sore at him, but there just wasn’t any doubt that he’d shown all the skills he needed to get a license. So I called him on the private TBS frequency and said, “You’ve passed, Torklemiggen. Do you want a formal written report when we land, or shall I call in to have your license granted now?”
“Now this instant, mammal!” he yelled back, and added something in his own language. I didn’t understand it, of course. Nobody else could hear it, either, because the talk-between-ships circuits don’t carry very far. So I guess I’ll never know just what it is he said, but, honestly, Mom, it surely didn’t sound at all friendly. All the same, he’d passed.
So I ordered him to null his controls, and then I called in his test scores to the master computer on 43-G. About two seconds later he started screeching over the TBS, “Vile mammal! What have you done? My green light’s out, my controls won’t respond. Is this some treacherous warm-blood trick?”
He sure had a way of getting under your skin. “Take it easy, Torklemiggen,” I told him, not very friendlily—he was beginning to hurt my feelings. “The computer is readjusting your status. They’ve removed the temporary license for your solo, so they can lift the suppressor field permanently. As soon as the light goes on again you’ll be fully licensed, and able to fly anywhere in this system without supervision.”
“Hah,” he grumbled, and then for a moment I could hear his heads whispering together. Then—well, Mom, I was going to say he laughed out loud over the TBS. But it was more than a laugh. It was mean, and gloating. “Depraved retarded mammal,” he shouted, “my light is on—and now all of Cassiopeia is mine!”
I was really disgusted with him. You expect that kind of thing, maybe, from some spacehappy sixteen-year-old who’s just got his first license. Not from an eighteen-hundred-year-old alien who has flown all over the Galaxy. It sounded sick! And sort of worrisome, too. I wasn’t sure just how to take him. “Don’t do anything silly, Torklemiggen,” I warned him over the TBS.
He shouted back: “Silly? I do nothing silly, mammal! Observe how little silly I am!” And the next thing you know he was whirling and diving into hyperspace—no signal, nothing! I had all I could do to follow him, six alphas deep and going fast. For all I knew we could have been on our way back to Fomalhaut. But he only stayed there for a minute. He pulled out right in the middle of one of the asteroid belts, and as I followed up from the alphas I saw that lean, green yacht of his diving down on a chunk of rock about the size of an office building.
I had noticed, when he came back from his trip, that one of the new things about the yacht was a circle of ruby-colored studs around the nose of the ship. Now they began to glow, brighter and brighter. In a moment a dozen streams of ruby light reached out from them, ahead toward the asteroid—and there was a bright flare of light, and the asteroid wasn’t there anymore!
Naturally, that got me upset. I yelled at him over the TBS: “Listen, Torklemiggen, you’re about to get yourself in real deep trouble! I don’t know how they do things back on Fomalhaut, but around here that’s grounds for an action to suspend your license! Not to mention they could make you pay for that asteroid!”
“Pay?” he screeched. “It is not I who will pay, functionally inadequate live-bearer, it is you and yours! You will pay most dreadfully, for now we have the black holes!” And he was off again, back down into hyperspace, and one more time it was about all I could do to try to keep up with him.
There’s no sense trying to transmit in hyperspace, of course. I had to wait until we were up out of the alphas to answer him, and by that time, I don’t mind telling you, I was
peeved.
I never would have found him on visual, but the radar-glyph picked him up zeroing in on one of the black holes. What a moron! “Listen, Torklemiggen,” I said, keeping my voice level and hard, “I’ll give you one piece of advice. Go back to base. Land your ship. Tell the police you were just carried away, celebrating passing your test. Maybe they won’t be too hard on you. Otherwise, I warn you, you’re looking at a thirty-day suspension plus you could get a civil suit for damages from the asteroid company.” He just screeched that mean laughter. I added, “And I told you, keep away from the black holes!”
He laughed some more, and said, “Oh, lower than a smiggs-troffle, what delightfully impudent pets you mammals will make now that we have these holes for weapons—and what joy it will give me to train you!” He was sort of singing to himself, more than to me, I guess. “First reduce this planet! Then the suppressor field is gone, and our forces come in to prepare the black holes! Then we launch one on every inhabited planet until we have destroyed your military power. And then—”
He didn’t finish that sentence, just more of that chuckling, cackling,
mean
laugh.
I felt uneasy. It was beginning to look as though Torklemiggen was up to something more than just high jinks and deviltry. He was easing up on the black hole and kind of crooning to himself, mostly in that foreign language of his but now and then in English: “Oh, my darling little assault vessel, what destruction you will wreak! Ah, charming black hole, how catastrophic you will be! How foolish these mammals who think they can forbid me to come near you—”
Then, as they say, light dawned. “Torklemiggen,” I shouted, “you’ve got the wrong idea! It’s not just a traffic regulation that we have to stay away from black holes! It’s a lot more serious than that!”
But I was too late. He was inside the Roche limit before I could finish.
They don’t have black holes around Fomalhaut, it seems. Of course, if he’d stopped to think for a minute he’d have realized what would happen—but then, if Fomalhautians ever stopped to think they wouldn’t be Fomalhautians.
I almost hate to tell you what happened next. It was pretty gross. The tidal forces seized his ship, and they stretched it.
I heard one caterwauling astonished yowl over the TBS. Then his transmitter failed. The ship ripped apart, and the pieces began to rain down into the Schwarzschild boundary and plasmaed. There was a quick, blinding flash of fall-in energy from the black hole, and that was all Torklemiggen would ever say or do or know.
I got out of there as fast as I could. I wasn’t really feeling very sorry for him, either. The way he was talking there toward the end, he sounded as though he had some pretty dangerous ideas.
When I landed it was sundown at the field, and people were staring and pointing toward the place in the sky where Torklemiggen had smeared himself into the black hole. All bright purplish and orangey plasma clouds—it made a really beautiful sunset, I’ll say
that much for the guy! I didn’t have time to admire it, though, because Tonda was waiting, and we just had minutes to get to the Deputy Census Director, Division of Reclassification, before it closed.
But we made it.
Well, I said I had big news, didn’t I? And that’s it, because now your loving son is
Yours truly,
James Paul Aguilar-Madigan,
the newlywed!
Prisons have provided the setting for a number of memorable works of fiction—in particular, there have been some terrific films set in prisons. Not a lot of science fiction has been set in prisons, though. Frederik Pohl, however, has never been one to shy away from something that hasn’t been done before.
The definition of “science fiction” is something endlessly debated among readers, fans, and academics interested in the genre. The debate will not be decided within these pages, but the limits of what may be called “science fiction” will perhaps be stretched in these stories.
One sort of SF is that in which it isn’t technology, but rather social institutions that are different from those we know in the real world. In “My Lady Green Sleeves,” first published in 1957, things are different. Prison life will seem familiar to readers who have read or seen prison tales, but the class system of the world of this story is one that one doesn’t see in everyday life. However, a warning: If you think this is an idle speculation, you underestimate the author.
His name was Liam O’Leary and there was something stinking in his nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn’t found what the trouble was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn’t been able to detect the scent of trouble brewing a cell block away he would never have survived to reach his captaincy.
And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.
He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she couldn’t adjust herself to it, now that she was in.
He demanded, “Why wouldn’t you mop out your cell?”
The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block guard, Sodaro, growled warningly, “Watch it, auntie!”
O’Leary shook his head. “Let her talk, Sodaro.” It said in the
Civil Service Guide to Prison Administration:
“Detainees will be permitted to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.” And O’Leary was a man who lived by the book.
She burst out, “I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told me I was
supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, ‘Slush up, sister!’ And then ten minutes later she called the guards and told them I refused to mop.”
The block guard guffawed. “Wipe talk! That’s what she was telling you to do. Cap’n, you know what’s funny about this? This Bradley is—”
“Shut up, Sodaro.” Captain O’Leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for him to judge their cases. He said patiently, “Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your cell. If you didn’t understand what Mathias was talking about you should have asked her. Now, I’m warning you, the next time—”
“Hey, Cap’n, wait!” Sodaro was looking alarmed. “This isn’t a first offense. Look at the rap sheet—yesterday she pulled the same thing in the mess hall.” He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. “The block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench, and she claimed the same business—said she didn’t understand when the other one asked her to move along.” He said virtuously, “The guard warned her then that next time she’d get the Green Sleeves for sure.”
Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly, “I don’t care. I don’t care!”
O’Leary stopped her. “That’s enough! Three days in Block O,” he snapped, and waved her away. It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted to say “sir” every time she spoke to him; but he couldn’t keep it up forever, and he certainly couldn’t overlook hysteria. And hysteria was clearly the next step for her.
All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet to Sodaro and said absently, “Too bad a kid like her has to be here. What’s she in for?”
“You didn’t know, Cap’n?” Sodaro leered. “She’s in for conspiracy to violate the Categoried Class laws. Don’t waste your time with her, Cap’n—she’s a figger-lover!”
Captain O’Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked “Civil Service.” But it didn’t wash the taste out of his mouth.
What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the yard, wondering about her. She’d had every advantage—decent Civil Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If anything, she had had a better environment than O’Leary himself, and look what she had made of it.
“Evening, Cap’n.” A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and touched his cap as O’Leary passed by.
“Evening.” O’Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he’d noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn’t much to sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate’s job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain’s job to notice when they didn’t.
There wasn’t anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a perfectly good civil-service position—better than post-office clerk, not as good as congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He
was
proud of it. It was
right
that he should be proud of it. He was civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content
to do a good, clean civil-service job. If he had happened to be born a fig—a
clerk,
he told himself; if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been proud of that too. There wasn’t anything wrong with being a clerk—or a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer for that matter. Good laborers were the salt of the earth! They weren’t smart, maybe, but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O’Leary was a broadminded man, and many times he had thought almost with a touch of envy how
comfortable
it must be to be a wipe—a
laborer,
he corrected himself. No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and loaf, work and loaf.
Of course, he wouldn’t
really
want that kind of life, because he was Civil Service, and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that weren’t
meant
to be—
“Evening, Cap’n.”
He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of maintaining the prison’s car pool, just inside the gate. “Evening, Conan,” he said. Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser, and he would be there for the next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the cars going—and, O’Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.
So why didn’t this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?
Every prison has its Green Sleeves—sometimes they are called by different names. Old Marquette called it “the canary”; Louisiana State called it “the red hats”; elsewhere it was called “the hole,” “the snake pit,” “the Klondike.” When you’re in it you don’t much care what it is called; it is a place for punishment.
And punishment is what you get.
Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its inhabitants wore it was called the Green Sleeves. It was a community of its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And like any other community, it had its leading citizens … two of them. Their names were Sauer and Flock.
Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Green Sleeves. She was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor below, when she heard the yelling.
“Owoo-o-o,” screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block; and “Yow-w-w!” shrieked Flock at the other.
The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on the outside. The inside guard muttered, “Wipe rats! They’re getting on my nerves.”
The outside guard shrugged.
“Detail,
halt!”
The two guards turned to see what was coming in as the three new candidates for the Green Sleeves slumped to a stop at the head of the stairs. “Here they are,” Sodaro told them. “Take good care of ’em, will you? Especially the lady—she’s going
to like it here, because there’s plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her company.” He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O guards.
The outside guard said sourly, “A woman, for God’s sake. Now, O’Leary knows I hate it when there’s a woman in here. It gets the others all riled up.”
“Let them in,” the inside guard told him. “The others are riled up already.”
Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough, against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a rule that even in Block O you didn’t leave the tangler fields on all the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner’s restraining garment removed.
Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat on her face. It was like walking through molasses; it was her first experience of a tanglefoot field.
The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. “Take it easy, auntie. Come on, get in your cell.” He steered her in the right direction and pointed to a green-sleeved straitjacket on the cell cot. “Put that on. Being as you’re a lady, we won’t tie it up—but the rules say you got to wear it, and the rules—Hey! She’s crying!” He shook his head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry in the Green Sleeves.
However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann shoulders were shaking, but not from tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she passed them by, and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge to retch.
Sauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were laborers—“wipes,” for short—or at any rate they had been once; they had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big, grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe five-footer, with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid eyes of a calf.
Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. “Hey, Flock,” he cried.
“What do you want, Sauer?” called Flock from his own cell.
“Didn’t you see, Flock?” bellowed Sauer. “We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so as not to disturb the lady!” He screeched with howling, maniacal laughter. “Anyway, if we don’t cut this out, they’ll get us in trouble, Flock!”
“Oh, you think so?” shrieked Flock. “Jeez, I wish you hadn’t said that, Sauer. You got me scared! I’m so scared I’m gonna have to yell!”
The howling started all over again.
The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. “Say, you want to take a turn in here for a while?”
“Uh-uh,” said the outside guard.
“You’re yellow,” the inside guard said moodily. “Ah, I don’t know why I don’t quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I’ll come in and beat your head off!”
“Ee-ee-ee!” shrieked Sauer. “I’m scared!” Then he grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. “Don’t you know you can’t hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, boss?”
“Shut
up!”
yelled the inside guard … .
Sue-Ann Bradley’s weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting under her skin. They weren’t
even—even
human,
she told herself miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the satisfaction of hearing her. They were animals!
Resentment and anger she could understand—she told herself doggedly that resentment and anger were
natural
and
right.
They were perfectly normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen’s rebellion against the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was
good
that Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious system—
But did they have to scream so?
The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to weeping, and she didn’t even care who heard her any more. Senseless!
It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless, because noise hides noise. But then, she hadn’t been a prisoner very long.