The Best of Joe Haldeman (82 page)

“And meaningless. I’ll be out before they open the envelope.”

“Well.” She stepped over to the small window and looked down at the sea. “We went over the pluses and minuses before you opted for virtual punishment.”

“So I serve a hundred years in one day—”

“Less than a day. Overnight.”

“—and then sometime down the pike some other jury decides I’m innocent, or at least not guilty, and then what? They give me back the hundred years I sat here?”

He was just talking, of course; he knew the answer. There might be compensation for wrongful imprisonment. A day’s worth, though, or a century? Nobody had yet been granted it; virtual sentencing was too new.

“You have to leave now, counselor,” a disembodied voice said. She nodded, opened her mouth to say something, and disappeared.

That startled him. “It’s already started?”

The door rattled open, and an unshaven trusty in an orange jumpsuit shambled in with a tray. Behind him was a beefy guard with a shotgun.

“What’s with the gun?” he said to the trusty. “This isn’t real; I can’t escape.”

“Don’t answer him,” the guard said. “You’ll wind up in solitary, too.”

“Oh, bullshit. Neither of you are real people.”

The guard stepped forward, reversed the weapon, and thumped him hard on the sternum. “Not real?” He hit the wall behind him and slid to the floor, trying to breathe, pain radiating from the center of his chest.

~ * ~

As the cell walls and Draper faded, a nurse gently wiggled the helmet until it came off her head. It was like a light bicycle helmet, white. With a warm gloved hand, she helped her sit up on the gurney.

She looked over at Draper, lying on the gurney next to hers. His black helmet was more complicated, a thick cable and lots of small wires. The same blue hospital gown as she was wearing. But he had a catheter, and there was a light black cable around his chest, hardly a restraint, held in place by a small lock with a tag she had signed.

The nurse set her white helmet down carefully on a table. “You don’t want to drive or anything for a couple of hours.” She had a sour expression, lips pursed.

“No problem. I have Autocar.”

She nodded microscopically.
Rich bitch.
“Take you where your things are.”

“Okay. Thank you.” As she scrunched off the gurney, the gown slid open, and she reached back to hold it closed, feeling silly. Followed the woman as she stalked through the door. “I take it you don’t approve.”

“No, ma’am. He serves less than one day for murdering his wife.”

“A, he didn’t murder her, and B, it will feel like a hundred years.”

“That’s what they say.” She turned with eyes narrowing. “They all say they didn’t do it. And they say it feels like a long time. What would you expect them to say? ‘I beat the system and was in and out in a day’? Here.”

As soon as the door clicked shut, she opened the locker and lifted out her neatly folded suit, the charcoal grey one she had appeared to be wearing in the cell a few minutes before.

~ * ~

The blow had knocked the wind out of him. By the time he got his voice back, they were gone.

The tray had a paper plate with something like cold oatmeal on it. He picked up the plastic spoon and tasted the stuff. Grits. They must have known he hated grits.

“They didn’t say anything about solitary. What, I’m going to sit here like this for a hundred years?” No answer.

He carried the plate over to the barred window. It was open to the outside. A fall of perhaps a hundred feet to an ocean surface. He could hear faint surf but, leaning forward, couldn’t see the shore, even with the cold metal bars pressing against his forehead. The air smelled of seaweed, totally convincing.

He folded the paper plate and threw it out between the bars. The grits sprayed out and the plate dipped and twirled realistically, and fell out of sight.

He studied the waves. Were they too regular? That would expose their virtuality. He had heard that if you could convince yourself that it wasn’t real—completely convince your body that this wasn’t happening—the time might slip quickly away in meditation. Time might disappear.

But it was hard to ignore the throbbing in his chest. And there were realistic irregularities in the waves. In the trough between two waves, a line of pelicans skimmed along with careless grace.

Maybe the illusion was only maintained at that level when he was concentrating. He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing.

Zen trick: four plain tiles. Make each one disappear. The no-thing that is left is just as real. Exactly as real. After a while, he opened his eyes again.

The pelicans came back. Did that mean anything?

Maybe he shouldn’t have thrown away the grits. You probably get hungry in virtual reality. But you couldn’t starve to death, not overnight. No matter how long it seemed.

He gave the iron bar a jerk. It squeaked.

He tugged on it twice, and it seemed to move a fraction of a millimeter each time. Was that possible? He looked closely, and indeed the hole the bar was seated in had slightly enlarged. He could wiggle it.

“Trusty?” he shouted. Nothing. He walked to the steel door and shouted through the little hole. “Hey! Your goddamn jail’s already falling apart!” He peered through the small peephole. Nothing but darkness.

He sniffed at the hole, and it smelled of drilled metal. “Hey! I know you’re out there!”

But what did he really know?

~ * ~

She popped her umbrella against the afternoon shower and was almost to the parking place when a young man came running out. “Ms. Hartley!” He was waving a piece of paper. “Ms. Hartley!” She stepped toward him and let him get under the umbrella.

“Your objection was approved. You can bring him out any time!”

She glanced at her watch. He’d only been in VR for about twenty minutes, counting the time she’d spent dressing. “Let’s go!” Two months passing each minute.

Security at the courthouse door took an agonizing five minutes. But the young man raced on ahead to make sure the room was ready.

She crashed through a door and rushed up the single flight of stairs rather than wait for the elevator. The sour-faced woman was blocking the entrance to the VR room.

“Get out of the way. Every second, he spends a day in that awful cell.”

“You know this won’t work if he doesn’t believe in his own innocence. If he blames himself in any way.”

“He wasn’t even
there
when his wife was murdered!” The woman’s eyes searched the lawyer’s face. “Look! I’ve been a defense attorney for eighteen years. I know when someone’s lying to me.
He
didn’t kill her!”

She pushed on in and the young man was standing by a chair, next to the gurney that Charlie Draper lay on, holding the white helmet. “Here. You don’t have to lie down. Just put this on.”

~ * ~

Crappy system can’t even make an illusion that works.

He went back to the iron bar and rotated it squeaking in its concrete socket, and gave it a good rattle. Concrete dust sifted down. He seized it in both hands and gave it all he had. “Bitch!” He squeezed it as hard as he had Maggie’s neck, and jerked, with the strength that had snapped it and killed her.

The bar came free in his hands. A piece of concrete fell to the floor with a solid thunk.”You call this a…”

A large crack crawled up and down from floor to ceiling. With a loud growl, half the wall tilted and fell piecemeal into the sea.”Wait.” A fine powder was drifting down. He looked up to see the ceiling disappear. “No.” All four walls crumbled into gravel and showered to the sea.

~ * ~

When they took the helmet off her, there was an older man, dressed like a doctor, standing there.

“It’s a temporary thing,” he said. “He’s resisting coming out of it. For some reason.”

“I didn’t go to the cell. I didn’t go anywhere,” she said, peering inside the helmet. “It was all just white, and white noise, static.”

“You’re out of the circuit. The electronics do test out. But he’s not letting you making contact.”

She looked into her client’s vacant eyes. She touched his cheek gently and he didn’t respond. “Has this happened before?”

“Not with people who know and trust each other. But we’ll get through to him.”

“Meanwhile...every ten hours is a hundred years?”

“That’s a safe assumption.” The doctor opened the manila folder in his hand and looked at the single piece of paper within. “He signed a waiver—”

“I know. I was there.” She lifted her client’s hand and let it drop back onto the sheet. “He’s a...social kind of guy. I hope he’s not too lonely.”

~ * ~

There was only the floor and the iron door. He touched the door and it fell away. It turned end over end once, and slid flawlessly into the water, like an Olympic diver.

Above him, a perfect cloudless sky that somehow had no sun. Below, the waves marched from one horizon to the opposite. A line of pelicans appeared.

He tried to throw himself into the water, but he hit something soft and invisible, and fell gently back.

He screamed until he was hoarse. Then he tried to sleep. But the noise of the waves kept him awake.