Coventry by Robert A. Heinlein A Puke (TM) Audiobook

Coventry.
By Robert A Heinlein.
“Have you anything to say before sentence is pronounced on you?” The mild eyes of the Senior Judge studied the face of the accused. His question was answered by a sullen silence.
“Very well-the jury has determined that you have violated a basic custom agreed to under the Covenant, and that through this act did damage another free citizen. It is the opinion of the jury and of the court that you did so knowingly, and aware of the probability of damage to a free citizen. Therefore, you are sentenced to choose between the Two Alternatives.”
A trained observer might have detected a trace of dismay breaking through the mask of indifference with which the young man had faced his trial. Dismay was unreasonable; in view of his offence, the sentence was inevitable-but reasonable men do not receive the sentence.
After waiting a decent interval, the judge turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”
The prisoner stood up suddenly, knocking over his chair. He glared wildly around at the company assembled and burst into speech.
“Hold on!” he yelled. “I’ve got something to say first!” In spite of his rough manner there was about him the noble dignity of a wild animal at bay. He stared at those around him, breathing heavily, as if they were dogs waiting to drag him down.
“Well?” he demanded, ‘Well? Do I get to talk, or don’t I? It ‘ud be the best joke of this whole comedy, if a condemned man couldn’t speak his mind at the last!”
“You may speak,” the Senior Judge told him, in the same unhurried tones with which he had pronounced sentence, ‘David MacKinnon, as long as you like, and in any manner that you like. There is no limit to that freedom, even for those who have broken the Covenant. Please speak into the recorder.”
MacKinnon glanced with distaste at the microphone near his face. The knowledge that any word he spoke would be recorded and analyzed inhibited him. “I don’t ask for records,” he snapped.
“But we must have them,” the judge replied patiently, ‘in order that others may determine whether, or not, we have dealt with you fairly, and according to the Covenant. Oblige us, please.”
“Oh-very well!” He ungraciously conceded the requirement and directed his voice toward the instrument. “There’s no sense in me talking at all-but, just the same, I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen … You talk about your precious “Covenant” as if it were something holy. I don’t agree to it and I don’t accept it.
You act as if it had been sent down from Heaven in a burst of light. My grandfathers fought in the Second Revolution-but they fought to abolish superstition… not to let sheep-minded fools set up new ones.
“There were men in those days!” He looked contemptuously around him. “What is there left today? Cautious, compromising “safe” weaklings with water in their veins. You’ve planned your whole world so carefully that you’ve planned the fun and zest right out of it. Nobody is ever hungry, nobody ever gets hurt. Your ships can’t crack up and your crops can’t fail. You even have the weather tamed so it rains politely after midnight. Why wait till midnight, I don’t know … you all go to bed at nine o’clock!
“If one of you safe little people should have an unpleasant emotion-perish the thought! -You’d trot right over to the nearest psychodynamics clinic and get your soft little minds readjusted.
Thank God I never succumbed to that dope habit. I’ll keep my own feelings, thanks, no matter how bad they taste.
“You won’t even make love without consulting a psychotechnician-Is her mind as flat and insipid as mine? Is there any emotional instability in her family? It’s enough to make a man gag.
As for fighting over a woman-if anyone had the guts to do that, he’d find a proctor at his elbow in two minutes, looking for the most convenient place to paralyze him, and inquiring with sickening humility, “May I do you a service, sir?”
The bailiff edged closer to MacKinnon. He turned on him. “Stand back, you. I’m not through yet.” He turned and added, ‘You’ve told me to choose between the Two Alternatives. Well, it’s no hard choice for me. Before I’d submit to treatment, before I’d enter one of your little, safe little, pleasant little reorientation homes and let my mind be pried into by a lot of soft-fingered doctors-before I did anything like that, I’d choose a nice, clean death. Oh, no-there is just one choice for me, not two. I take the choice of going to Coventry-and glad of it, too … I hope I never hear of the United States again!
“But there is just one thing I want to ask you before I go-Why do you bother to live anyhow? I would think that anyone of you would welcome an end to your silly, futile lives just from sheer boredom. That’s all.” He turned back to the bailiff. “Come on, you.”
“One moment, David MacKinnon.” The Senior Judge held up a restraining hand. “We have listened to you. Although custom does not compel it, I am minded to answer some of your statements. Will you listen?”
Unwilling, but less willing to appear loutish in the face of a request so obviously reasonable, the younger man consented.
The judge commenced to speak in gentle, scholarly words appropriate to a lecture room. “David MacKinnon, you have spoken in a fashion that doubtless seems wise to you.
Nevertheless, your words were wild, and spoken in haste. I am moved to correct your obvious misstatements of fact. The Covenant is not a superstition, but a simple temporal contract entered into by those same revolutionists for pragmatic reasons. They wished to insure the maximum possible liberty for every person.
“You yourself have enjoyed that liberty. No possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another. Even an act specifically prohibited by law could not be held against you, unless the state was able to prove that your particular act damaged, or caused evident danger of damage, to a particular individual.
“Even if one should willfully and knowingly damage another-as you have done-the state does not attempt to sit in moral judgment, nor to punish. We have not the wisdom to do that, and the chain of injustices that have always followed such moralistic coercion endanger the liberty of all. Instead, the convicted is given the choice of submitting to psychological readjustment to correct his tendency to wish to damage others, or of having the state withdraw itself from him-of sending him to Coventry.
“You complain that our way of living is dull and unromantic, and imply that we have deprived you of excitement to which you feel entitled. You are free to hold and express your esthetic opinion of our way of living, but you must not expect us to live to suit your tastes. You are free to seek danger and adventure if you wish-there is danger still in experimental laboratories; there is hardship in the mountains of the Moon, and death in the jungles of Venus-but you are not free to expose us to the violence of your nature.”
“Why make so much of it?” MacKinnon protested contemptuously. “You talk as if I had committed a murder-I simply punched a man in the nose for offending me outrageously!”
“I agree with your esthetic judgment of that individual,” the judge continued calmly, ‘and am personally rather gratified that you took a punch at him-but your psychometrical tests show that you believe yourself capable of judging morally your fellow citizens and feel justified in personally correcting and punishing their lapses. You are a dangerous individual, David
MacKinnon, a danger to all of us, for we cannot predict what damage you may do next. From a social standpoint, your delusion makes you as mad as the March Hare.
“You refuse treatment-therefore we withdraw our society from you, we cast you out, we divorce you. To Coventry with you.” He turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”
MacKinnon peered out of a forward port of the big transport helicopter with repressed excitement in his heart. There! That must be it-that black band in the distance. The helicopter drew closer, and he became certain that he was seeing the Barrier-the mysterious, impenetrable wall that divided the United States from the reservation known as Coventry.

His guard looked up from the magazine he was reading and followed his gaze. “Nearly there, I see,” he said pleasantly. “Well, it won’t be long now.”
“It can’t be any too soon for me!”
The guard looked at him quizzically, but with tolerance. “Pretty anxious to get on with it, eh?”
MacKinnon held his head high. “You’ve never brought a man to the Gateway who was more anxious to pass through!”
“Mmm-maybe. They all say that, you know. Nobody goes through the Gate against his own will.”
“I mean it!”
“They all do. Some of them come back, just the same.”
“Say-maybe you can give me some dope as to conditions inside?”
“Sorry,” the guard said, shaking his head, ‘but that is no concern of the United States, nor of any of its employees. You’ll know soon enough.”
MacKinnon frowned a little. “It seems strange-I tried inquiring, but found no one who would admit that they had any notion about the inside. And yet you say that some come out. Surely some of them must talk…”
“That’s simple,” smiled the guard, ‘part of their reorientation is a subconscious compulsion not to discuss their experiences.”
“That’s a pretty scabby trick. Why should the government deliberately conspire to prevent me, and the people like me, from knowing what we are going up against?”
“Listen, buddy,” the guard answered, with mild exasperation, ‘you’ve told the rest of us to go to the devil. You’ve told us that you could get along without us. You are being given plenty of living room in some of the best land on this continent, and you are being allowed to take with you everything that you own, or your credit could buy. What the deuce else do you expect?”
MacKinnon’s face settled in obstinate lines. “What assurance have I that there will be any land left for me?”
“That’s your problem. The government sees to it that there is plenty of land for the population. The divvy-up is something you rugged individualists have to settle among yourselves.
You’ve turned down our type of social co-operation; why should you expect the safeguards of our organization?” The guard turned back to his reading and ignored him.
They landed on a small field which lay close under the blank black wall. No gate was apparent, but a guardhouse was located at the side of the field. MacKinnon was the only passenger.
While his escort went over to the guardhouse, he descended from the passenger compartment and went around to the freight hold. Two members of the crew were letting down a ramp from the cargo port. When he appeared, one of them eyed him, and said, ‘O K, there’s your stuff. Help yourself.”
He sized up the job, and said, ‘It’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I’ll need some help. Will you give me a hand with it?”
The crew member addressed paused to light a cigarette before replying, ‘It’s your stuff. If you want it, get it out. We take off in ten minutes.” The two walked around him and reentered the ship.
“Why, you-” MacKinnon shut up and kept the rest of his anger to himself. The surly louts! Gone was the faintest trace of regret at leaving civilization. He’d show them! He could get along without them.
But it was twenty minutes and more before he stood beside his heaped up belongings and watched the ship rise. Fortunately the skipper had not been adamant about the time limit. He turned and commenced loading his steel tortoise. Under the romantic influence of the classic literature of a bygone day he had considered using a string of burros, but had been unable to find a zoo that would sell them to him. It was just as well-he was completely ignorant of the limits, foibles, habits, vices, illnesses, and care of those useful little beasts, and unaware of his own ignorance. Master and servant would have vied in making each other unhappy.
The vehicle he had chosen was not an unreasonable substitute for burros. It was extremely rugged, easy to operate, and almost foolproof. It drew its power from six square yards of sun-power screens on its low curved roof. These drove a constant-load motor, or, when halted, replenished the storage battery against cloudy weather, or night travel.

The bearings were ‘everlasting’, and every moving part, other than the caterpillar treads and the controls, were sealed up, secure from inexpert tinkering.
It could maintain a steady six miles per hour on smooth, level pavement. When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.
The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe-like independence. It did not occur to him his chattel was the end product of the cumulative effort and intelligent co-operation of hundreds of thousands of men, living and dead. He had been used all his life to the unfailing service of much more intricate machinery, and honestly regarded the tortoise as a piece of equipment of the same primitive level as a wood-man’s axe, or a hunting knife.
His talents had been devoted in the past to literary criticism rather than engineering, but that did not prevent him from believing that his native intelligence and the aid of a few reference books would be all that he would really need to duplicate the tortoise, if necessary.
Metal ores were necessary, he knew, but saw no obstacle in that, his knowledge of the difficulties of prospecting, mining, and metallurgy being as sketchy as his knowledge of burros.
His goods filled every compartment of the compact little freighter. He checked the last item from his inventory and ran a satisfied eye down the list. Any explorer or adventurer of the past might well be pleased with such equipment, he thought. He could imagine showing Jack London his knockdown cabin. See, Jack, he would say, it’s proof against any kind of weather, perfectly insulated walls and floor-and can’t rust. It’s so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself, yet it’s so strong that you can sleep sound with the biggest grizzly in the world snuffling right outside your door.
And London would scratch his head, and say, Dave, you’re a wonder. If I’d had that in the Yukon, it would have been a cinch!
He checked over the list again. Enough concentrated and desiccated food and vitamin concentrate to last six months. That would give him time enough to build hothouses for hydroponics, and get his seeds started. Medical supplies-he did not expect to need those, but foresight was always best. Reference books of all sorts. A light sporting rifle-vintage: last century. His face clouded a little at this. The War Department had positively refused to sell him a portable blaster. When he had claimed the right of common social heritage, they had grudgingly provided him with the plans and specifications, and told him to build his own. Well, he would, the first spare time he got.
Everything else was in order. MacKinnon climbed into the cockpit, grasped the two hand controls, and swung the nose of the tortoise toward the guardhouse. He had been ignored since the ship had landed; he wanted to have the gate opened and to leave.
Several soldiers were gathered around the guardhouse. He picked out a legate by the silver stripe down the side of his kilt and spoke to him. “I’m ready to leave. Will you kindly open the
Gate?”
“O K,” the officer answered him, and turned to a soldier who wore the plain gray kilt of a private’s field uniform. “Jenkins, tell the power house to dilate-about a number three opening, tell them,” he added, sizing up the dimensions of the tortoise.
He turned to MacKinnon. “It is my duty to tell you that you may return to civilization, even now, by agreeing to be hospitalized for your neurosis.”
“I have no neurosis!”
“Very well. If you change your mind at any future time, return to the place where you entered. There is an alarm there with which you may signal to the guard that you wish the gate opened.”
“I can’t imagine needing to know that.”
The legate shrugged. “Perhaps not-but we send refugees to quarantine all the time. If I were making the rules, it might be harder to get out again.” He was cut off by the ringing of an alarm. The soldiers near them moved smartly away, drawing their blasters from their belts as they ran. The ugly snout of a fixed blaster poked out over the top of the guardhouse and pointed toward the Barrier.
The legate answered the question on MacKinnon’s face. “The power house is ready to open up.” He waved smartly toward that building, then turned back. “Drive straight through the center of the opening. It takes a lot of power to suspend the stasis; if you touch the edge, we’ll have to pick up the pieces.”
A tiny, bright dot appeared in the foot of the barrier opposite where they waited. It spread into a half circle across the lampblack nothingness. Now it was large enough for MacKinnon to see the countryside beyond through the arch it had formed. He peered eagerly.
The opening grew until it was twenty feet wide, then stopped. It framed a scene of rugged, barren hills. He took this in, and turned angrily on the legate. “I’ve been tricked!” he exclaimed.
“That’s not fit land to support a man.”
“Don’t be hasty,” he told MacKinnon. “There’s good land beyond. Besides-you don’t have to enter. But if you are going, go!”
MacKinnon flushed, and pulled back on both hand controls. The treads bit in and the tortoise lumbered away, straight for the Gateway to Coventry.
When he was several yards beyond the Gate, he glanced back. The Barrier loomed behind him, with nothing to show where the opening had been. There was a little sheet metal shed adjacent to the point where he had passed through. He supposed that it contained the alarm the legate had mentioned, but he was not interested and turned his eyes back to his driving.
Stretching before him, twisting between rocky hills, was a road of sorts. It was not paved and the surface had not been repaired recently, but the grade averaged downhill and the tortoise was able to maintain a respectable speed. He continued down it, not because he fancied it, but because it was the only road which led out of surroundings obviously unsuited to his needs.
The road was untraveled. This suited him; he had no wish to encounter other human beings until he had located desirable land to settle on, and had staked out his claim. But the hills were not devoid of life; several times he caught glimpses of little dark shapes scurrying among the rocks, and occasionally bright, beady eyes stared back into his.
It did not occur to him at first that these timid little animals, streaking for cover at his coming, could replenish his larder-he was simply amused and warmed by their presence. When he did happen to consider that they might be used as food, the thought was at first repugnant to him-the custom of killing for ‘sport” had ceased to be customary long before his time; and inasmuch as the development of cheap synthetic proteins in the latter half of the preceding century had spelled the economic ruin of the business of breeding animals for slaughter, it is doubtful if he had ever tasted animal tissue in his life.
But once considered, it was logical to act. He expected to live off the country; although he had plenty of food on hand for the immediate future, it would be wise to conserve it by using what the country offered. He suppressed his esthetic distaste and ethical misgivings, and determined to shoot one of the little animals at the first opportunity.
Accordingly, he dug out the rifle, loaded it, and placed it handy. With the usual perversity of the world-as-it-is, no game was evident for the next half hour. He was passing a little shoulder of rocky outcropping when he saw his prey. It peeked at him from behind a small boulder, its sober eyes wary but unperturbed. He stopped the tortoise and took careful aim, resting and steadying the rifle on the side of the cockpit. His quarry accommodated him by hopping out into full view.
He pulled the trigger, involuntarily tensing his muscles and squinting his eyes as he did so. Naturally, the shot went high and to the right.
But he was much too busy just then to be aware of it. It seemed that the whole world had exploded. His right shoulder was numb, his mouth stung as if he had been kicked there, and his ears rang in a strange and unpleasant fashion. He was surprised to find the gun still intact in his hands and apparently none the worse for the incident.
He put it down, clambered out of the car, and rushed up to where the small creature had been. There was no sign of it anywhere. He searched the immediate neighborhood, but did not find it. Mystified, he returned to his conveyance, having decided that the rifle was in some way defective, and that he should inspect it carefully before attempting to fire it again.
His recent target watched his actions cautiously from a vantage point yards away, to which it had stampeded at the sound of the shot. It was equally mystified by the startling events, being no more used to firearms than was MacKinnon.
Before he started the tortoise again, MacKinnon had to see to his upper lip, which was swollen and tender and bleeding from a deep scratch. This increased his conviction that the gun was defective.

Nowhere in the romantic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which he was addicted, had there been a warning that, when firing a gun heavy enough to drop a man in his tracks, it is well not to hold the right hand in such a manner that the recoil will cause the right thumb and thumb nail to strike the mouth.
He applied an antiseptic and a dressing of sorts, and went on his way, somewhat subdued. The arroyo by which he had entered the hills had widened out, and the hills were greener. He passed around one sharp turn in the road, and found a broad fertile valley spread out before him. It stretched away until it was lost in the warm day’s haze.
Much of the valley was cultivated, and he could make out human habitations. He continued toward it with mixed feelings. People meant fewer hardships, but it did not look as if staking out a claim would be as simple as he had hoped. However-Coventry was a big place.
He had reached the point where the road gave onto the floor of the valley, when two men stepped out into his path. They were carrying weapons of some sort at the ready. One of them called out to him:
“Halt!”
MacKinnon did so, and answered him as they came abreast. “What do you want?”
“Customs inspection. Pull over there by the office.” He indicated a small building set back a few feet from the road, which MacKinnon had not previously noticed. He looked from it back to the spokesman, and felt a slow, unreasoning heat spread up from his viscera. It rendered his none too stable judgment still more unsound.
“What the deuce are you talking about?” he snapped. “Stand aside and let me pass.”
The one who had remained silent raised his weapon and aimed it at MacKinnon’s chest. The other grabbed his arm and pulled the weapon out of line. “Don’t shoot the dumb fool, Joe,” he said testily. “You’re always too anxious.” Then to MacKinnon, ‘You’re resisting the law. Come on-be quick about it!”
“The law?” MacKinnon gave a bitter laugh and snatched his rifle from the seat. It never reached his shoulder-the man who had done all the talking fired casually, without apparently taking time to aim. MacKinnon’s rifle was smacked from his grasp and flew into the air, landing in the roadside ditch behind the tortoise.
The man who had remained silent followed the flight of the gun with detached interest, and remarked, ‘Nice shot, Blackie. Never touched him.”
“Oh, just luck,” the other demurred, but grinned his pleasure at the compliment. “Glad I didn’t nick him, though-saves writing out a report.” He reassumed an official manner, spoke again to MacKinnon, who had been sitting dumbfounded, rubbing his smarting hands. “Well, tough guy? Do you behave, or do we come up there and get you?”
MacKinnon gave in. He drove the tortoise to the designated spot, and waited sullenly for orders. “Get out and start unloading,” he was told. He obeyed, under compulsion. As he piled his precious possessions on the ground, the one addressed as Blackie separated the things into two piles, while Joe listed them on a printed form. He noticed presently that Joe listed only the items that went into the first pile. He understood this when Blackie told him to reload the tortoise with the items from that pile, and commenced himself to carry goods from the other pile into the building. He started to protest-Joe punched him in the mouth, coolly and without rancor. MacKinnon went down, but got up again, fighting. He was in such a blind rage that he would have tackled a charging rhino. Joe timed his rush, and clipped him again. This time he could not get up at once.
Blackie stepped over to a washstand in one corner of the office. He came back with a wet towel and chucked it at MacKinnon. “Wipe your face on that, bud, and get back in the buggy. We got to get going.”
MacKinnon had time to do a lot of serious thinking as he drove Blackie into town. Beyond a terse answer of ‘Prize court” to MacKinnon’s inquiry as to their destination, Blackie did not converse, nor did MacKinnon press him, anxious as he was to have information. His mouth pained him from repeated punishment, his head ached, and he was no longer tempted to precipitate action by hasty speech.
Evidently Coventry was not quite the frontier anarchy he had expected it to be. There was a government of sorts, apparently, but it resembled nothing that he had ever been used to. He had visualized a land of noble, independent spirits who gave each other wide berth and practiced mutual respect. There would be villains, of course, but they would be treated to summary, and probably lethal, justice as quickly as they demonstrated their ugly natures. He had a strong, though subconscious, assumption that virtue is necessarily triumphant.
But having found government, he expected it to follow the general pattern that he had been used to all his life-honest, conscientious, reasonably efficient, and invariably careful of a citizen’s rights and liberties. He was aware that government had not always been like that, but he had never experienced it-the idea was as remote and implausible as cannibalism, or chattel slavery.
Had he stopped to think about it, he might have realized that public servants in Coventry would never have been examined psychologically to determine their temperamental fitness for their duties, and, since every inhabitant of Coventry was there-as he was-for violating a basic custom and refusing treatment thereafter, it was a foregone conclusion that most of them would be erratic and arbitrary.
He pinned his hope on the knowledge that they were going to court. All he asked was a chance to tell his story to the judge.
His dependence on judicial procedure may appear inconsistent in view of how recently he had renounced all reliance on organized government, but while he could renounce government verbally, but he could not do away with a lifetime of environmental conditioning. He could curse the court that had humiliated him by condemning him to the Two Alternatives, but he expected courts to dispense justice. He could assert his own rugged independence, but he expected persons he encountered to behave as if they were bound by the Covenant-he had met no other sort. He was no more able to discard his past history than he would have been to discard his accustomed body.
But he did not know it yet.
MacKinnon failed to stand up when the judge entered the court room. Court attendants quickly set him right, but not before he had provoked a glare from the bench. The judge’s appearance and manner were not reassuring. He was a well-fed man, of ruddy complexion, whose sadistic temper was evident in face and mien. They waited while he dealt drastically with several petty offenders. It seemed to MacKinnon, as he listened, that almost everything was against the law.
Nevertheless, he was relieved when his name was called. He stepped up and undertook at once to tell his story. The judge’s gavel cut him short.
“What is this case?” the judge demanded, his face set in grim lines. “Drunk and disorderly, apparently. I shall put a stop to this slackness among the young if it takes the last ounce of strength in my body!” He turned to the clerk. “Any previous offences?”
The clerk whispered in his ear. The judge threw MacKinnon a look of mixed annoyance and suspicion, then told the customs” guard to come forward. Blackie told a clear, straightforward tale with the ease of a man used to giving testimony. MacKinnon’s condition was attributed to resisting an officer in the execution of his duty. He submitted the inventory his colleague had prepared, but failed to mention the large quantity of goods which had been abstracted before the inventory was made.
The judge turned to MacKinnon. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I certainly have, Doctor,” he began eagerly. “There isn’t a word of -,
Bang! The gavel cut him short. A court attendant hurried to MacKinnon’s side and attempted to explain to him the proper form to use in addressing the court. The explanation confused him. In his experience, ‘judge” naturally implied a medical man-a psychiatrist skilled in social problems. Nor had he heard of any special speech forms appropriate to a courtroom. But he amended his language as instructed.
“May it please the Honorable Court, this man is lying. He and his companion assaulted and robbed me. I was simply-‘Smugglers generally think they are being robbed when customs officials catch them,” the judge sneered. “Do you deny that you attempted to resist inspection?”
“No, Your Honor, but -“
“That will do. Penalty of fifty percent is added to the established scale of duty. Pay the clerk.”
“But, Your Honor, I can’t -“
“Can’t you pay it?”
“I haven’t any money. I have only my possessions.”
“So?” He turned to the clerk. “Condemnation proceedings. Impound his goods. Ten days for vagrancy. The community can’t have these immigrant paupers roaming at large, and preying on law-abiding citizens. Next case!”
They hustled him away. It took the sound of a key grating in a barred door behind him to make him realize his predicament.
“Hi, pal, how’s the weather outside?” The detention cell had a prior inmate, a small, well-knit man who looked up from a game of solitaire to address MacKinnon. He sat astraddle a bench on which he had spread his cards, and studied the newcomer with unworried, bright, beady eyes.
“Clear enough outside-but stormy in the courtroom,” MacKinnon answered, trying to adopt the same bantering tone and not succeeding very well. His mouth hurt him and spoiled his grin.
The other swung a leg over the bench and approached him with a light, silent step. “Say, pal, you must ‘a” caught that in a gear box,” he commented, inspecting MacKinnon’s mouth.
“Does it hurt?”
“Like the devil,” MacKinnon admitted.
“We’ll have to do something about that.” He went to the cell door and rattled it. “Hey! Lefty! The house is on fire! Come arunnin’!”
The guard sauntered down and stood opposite their cell door. “Wha” d’yuh want, Fader?” he said noncommittally.
“My old school chum has been slapped in the face with a wrench, and the pain is inordinate. Here’s a chance for you to get right with Heaven by oozing down to the dispensary, snagging a dressing and about five grains of neoanodyne.”
The guard’s expression was not encouraging. The prisoner looked grieved. “Why, Lefty,” he said, ‘I thought you would jump at a chance to do a little pure charity like that.” He waited for a moment, then added, ‘Tell you what-you do it, and I’ll show you how to work that puzzle about “How old is Ann?” Is it a go?”
“Show me first.”
“It would take too long. I’ll write it out and give it to you.”
When the guard returned, MacKinnon’s cellmate dressed his wounds with gentle deftness, talking the while. “They call me Fader Magee. What’s your name, pal?”
“David MacKinnon. I’m sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your first name.”
“Fader. It isn’t,” he explained with a grin, ‘the name my mother gave me. It’s more a professional tribute to my shy and unobtrusive nature.”
MacKinnon looked puzzled. “Professional tribute? What is your profession?”
Magee looked pained. “Why, Dave,” he said, ‘I didn’t ask you that. However,” he went on, ‘it’s probably the same as yours, self-preservation.”
Magee was a sympathetic listener, and MacKinnon welcomed the chance to tell someone about his troubles. He related the story of how he had decided to enter Coventry rather than submit to the sentence of the court, and how he had hardly arrived when he was hijacked and hauled into court. Magee nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he observed. “A man has to have larceny in his heart, or he wouldn’t be a customs guard.”
“But what happens to my belongings?”
“They auction them off to pay the duty.”
“I wonder how much there will be left for me?”
Magee stared at him. “Left over? There won’t be anything left over. You’ll probably have to pay a deficiency judgment.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“It’s a device whereby the condemned pays for the execution,” Magee explained succinctly, if somewhat obscurely. “What it means to you is that when your ten days is up, you’ll still be in debt to the court. Then it’s the chain gang for you, my lad-you’ll work it off at a dollar a day.”
“Fader, you’re kidding me.”
“Wait and see. You’ve got a lot to learn, Dave.”
Coventry was an even more complex place than MacKinnon had gathered up to this time. Magee explained to him that there were actually three sovereign, independent jurisdictions. The jail where they were prisoners lay in the so-called New America. It had the forms of democratic government, but the treatment he had already received was a fair sample of the fashion in which it was administered.
“This place is heaven itself compared with the Free State,” Magee maintained.
“I’ve been there-” The Free State was an absolute dictatorship; the head man of the ruling clique was designated the ‘Liberator’. Their watchwords were Duty and Obedience; an arbitrary discipline was enforced with a severity that left no room for any freedom of opinion. Governmental theory was vaguely derived from the old functionalist doctrines. The state was thought of as a single organism with a single head, a single brain, and a single purpose. Anything not compulsory was forbidden. “Honest so help me,” claimed Magee, ‘you can’t go to bed in that place without finding one of their damned secret police between the sheets.”
“But at that,” he continued, ‘it’s an easier place to live than with the Angels.”
“The Angels?”
“Sure. We still got ‘em. Must have been two or three thousand die-hards that chose to go to Coventry after the Revolution-you know that. There’s still a colony up in the hills to the north, complete with Prophet Incarnate and the works. They aren’t bad hombres, but they’ll pray you into heaven even if it kills you.”
All three states had one curious characteristic in common-each one claimed to be the only legal government of the entire United States, and each looked forward to some future day when they would reclaim the ‘unredeemed” portion; i.e., outside Coventry. To the Angels, this was an event which would occur when the First Prophet returned to earth to lead them again. In New America it was hardly more than a convenient campaign plank, to be forgotten after each election. But in the Free State it was a fixed policy. Pursuant to this purpose there had been a whole series of wars between the Free State and New America. The Liberator held, quite logically, that New America was an unredeemed section, and that is was necessary to bring it under the rule of the Free State before the advantages of their culture could be extended to the outside.
Magee’s words demolished MacKinnon’s dream of finding an anarchistic utopia within the barrier, but he could not let his fond illusion die without a protest. “But see here, Fader,” he persisted, ‘isn’t there some place where a man can live quietly by himself without all this insufferable interference?”
“No-‘considered Fader, ‘no … not unless you took to the hills and hid. Then you ‘ud be all right, as long as you steered clear of the Angels. But it would be pretty slim pickin’s, living off the country. Ever tried it?”
“No … not exactly-but I’ve read all the classics: Zane Grey, and Emerson Hough, and so forth.”
“Well … maybe you could do it. But if you really want to go off and be a hermit, you ‘ud do better to try it on the Outside, where there aren’t so many objections to it.”

“No’-MacKinnon’s backbone stiffened at once-‘no, I’ll never do that. I’ll never submit to psychological reorientation just to have a chance to be let alone. If I could go back to where I was before a couple of months ago, before I was arrested, it might be all right to go off to the Rockies, or look up an abandoned farm somewhere… But with that diagnosis staring me in the face … after being told I wasn’t fit for human society until I had had my emotions re-tailored to fit a cautious little pattern, I couldn’t face it. Not if it meant going to a sanitarium”
“I see,” agreed Fader, nodding, ‘you want to go to Coventry, but you don’t want the Barrier to shut you off from the rest of the world.”
“No, that’s not quite fair … Well, maybe, in a way. Say, you don’t think I’m not fit to associate with, do you?”
“You look all right to me,” Magee reassured him, with a grin, ‘but I’m in Coventry too, remember. Maybe I’m no judge.”
“You don’t talk as if you liked it much. Why are you here?”
Magee held up a gently admonishing finger. “Tut! Tut! That is the one question you must never ask a man here. You must assume that he came here because he knew how swell everything is here.”
“Still … you don’t seem to like it.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I do like it; it has flavor. Its little incongruities are a source of innocent merriment. And anytime they turn on the heat I can always go back through the Gate and rest up for a while in a nice quiet hospital, until things quiet down.”
MacKinnon was puzzled again. “Turn on the heat? Do they supply too hot weather here?”
“Huh? Oh. I didn’t mean weather control-there isn’t any of that here, except what leaks over from outside. I was just using an old figure of speech.”
“What does it mean?”
Magee smiled to himself. “You’ll find out.”
After supper-bread, stew in a metal dish, a small apple-Magee introduced MacKinnon to the mysteries of cribbage. Fortunately, MacKinnon had no cash to lose. Presently Magee put the cards down without shuffling them. “Dave,” he said, ‘are you enjoying the hospitality offered by this institution?”
“Hardly-Why?”
“I suggest that we check out.”
“A good idea, but how?”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Do you suppose you could take another poke on that battered phiz of yours, in a good cause?”
MacKinnon cautiously fingered his face. “I suppose so-if necessary. It can’t do me much more harm, anyhow.”
“That’s mother’s little man! Now listen-this guard, Lefty, in addition to being kind of un-bright, is sensitive about his appearance. When they turn out the lights, you -“
“Let me out of here! Let me out of here!” MacKinnon beat on the bars and screamed. No answer came. He renewed the racket, his voice an hysterical falsetto. Lefty arrived to investigate, grumbling.
“What the hell’s eating on you?” he demanded, peering through the bars.
MacKinnon changed to tearful petition. “Oh, Lefty, please let me out of here. Please! I can’t stand the dark. It’s dark in here-please don’t leave me alone.” He flung himself, sobbing, on the bars.
The guard cursed to himself. “Another slugnutty. Listen, you-shut up, and go to sleep, or I’ll come in there, and give you something to yelp for!” He started to leave.
MacKinnon changed instantly to the vindictive, unpredictable anger of the irresponsible. “You big ugly baboon! You rat-faced idiot! Where’d you get that nose?”
Lefty turned back, fury in his face. He started to speak. MacKinnon cut him short. “Yah! Yah! Yah!” he gloated, like a nasty little boy, ‘Lefty’s mother was scared by a warthog-The guard swung at the spot where MacKinnon’s face was pressed between the bars of the door. MacKinnon ducked and grabbed simultaneously. Off balance at meeting no resistance, the guard rocked forward, thrusting his forearm between the bars. MacKinnon’s fingers slid along his arm, and got a firm purchase on Lefty’s wrist.
He threw himself backwards, dragging the guard with him, until Lefty was jammed up against the outside of the barred door, with one arm inside, to the wrist of which MacKinnon clung as if welded.
The yell which formed in Lefty’s throat miscarried; Magee had already acted. Out of the darkness, silent as death, his slim hands had snaked between the bars and imbedded themselves in the guard’s fleshy neck. Lefty heaved, and almost broke free, but MacKinnon threw his weight to the right and twisted the arm he gripped in an agonizing, bone-breaking leverage.
It seemed to MacKinnon that they remained thus, like some grotesque game of statues, for an endless period. His pulse pounded in his ears until he feared that it must be heard by others, and bring rescue to Lefty. Magee spoke at last:
“That’s enough,” he whispered. “Go through his pockets.”
He made an awkward job if it, for his hands were numb and trembling from the strain, and it was anything but convenient to work between the bars. But the keys were there, in the last pocket he tried. He passed them to Magee, who let the guard slip to the floor, and accepted them.
Magee made a quick job of it. The door swung open with a distressing creak. Dave stepped over Lefty’s body, but Magee kneeled down, unhooked a truncheon from the guard’s belt, and cracked him behind the ear with it. MacKinnon paused.
“Did you kill him?” he asked.
“Cripes, no,” Magee answered softly, ‘Lefty is a friend of mine. Let’s go.”
They hurried down the dimly lighted passageway between cells toward the door leading to the administrative offices-their only outlet. Lefty had carelessly left it ajar, and light shone through the crack, but as they silently approached it, they heard ponderous footsteps from the far side. Dave looked hurriedly for cover, but the best he could manage was to slink back into the corner formed by the cell block and the wall. He glanced around for Magee, but he had disappeared.
The door swung open; a man stepped through, paused, and looked around. MacKinnon saw that he was carrying a blacklight, and wearing its complement-rectifying spectacles. He realized then that the darkness gave him no cover. The blacklight swung his way; he tensed to spring-He heard a dull ‘clunk!” The guard sighed, swayed gently, then collapsed into a loose pile. Magee stood over him, poised on the balls of his feet, and surveyed his work, while caressing the business end of the truncheon with the cupped fingers of his left hand.
“That will do,” he decided. “Shall we go, Dave?”
He eased through the door without waiting for an answer; MacKinnon was close behind him. The lighted corridor led away to the right and ended in a large double door to the street. On the left wall, near the street door, a smaller office door stood open.
Magee drew MacKinnon to him. “It’s a cinch,” he whispered. “There’ll be nobody in there now but the desk sergeant. We get past him, then out that door, and into the ozone-” He motioned
Dave to keep behind him, and crept silently up to the office door. After drawing a small mirror from a pocket in his belt, he lay down on the floor, placed his head near the doorframe, and cautiously extended the tiny mirror an inch or two past the edge.
Apparently he was satisfied with the reconnaissance the improvised periscope afforded, for he drew himself back onto his knees and turned his head so that MacKinnon could see the words shaped by his silent lips. “It’s all right,” he breathed, ‘there is only-Two hundred pounds of uniformed nemesis landed on his shoulders. A clanging alarm sounded through the corridor. Magee went down fighting, but he was outclassed and caught off guard. He jerked his head free and shouted, ‘Run for it, kid!”
MacKinnon could hear running feet somewhere, but could see nothing but the struggling figures before him. He shook his head and shoulders like a dazed animal, then kicked the larger of the two contestants in the face. The man screamed and let go his hold. MacKinnon grasped his small companion by the scruff of the neck and hauled him roughly to his feet.
Magee’s eyes were still merry. “Well played, my lad,” he commended in clipped syllables, as they burst out the street door, ‘- if hardly cricket! Where did you learn La Savate?”
MacKinnon had no time to answer, being fully occupied in keeping up with Magee’s weaving, deceptively rapid progress. They ducked across the street, down an alley, and between two buildings.
The succeeding minutes, or hours, were confusion to MacKinnon. He remembered afterwards crawling along a roof top and letting himself down to crouch in the blackness of an interior court, but he could not remember how they had gotten on the roof. He also recalled spending an interminable period alone, compressed inside a most unsavory refuse bin, and his terror when footsteps approached the bin and a light flashed through a crack.
A crash and the sound of footsteps in flight immediately thereafter led him to guess that Fader had drawn the pursuit away from him. But when Fader did return, and open the top of the bin, MacKinnon almost throttled him before identification was established.
When the active pursuit had been shaken off, Magee guided him across town, showing a sophisticated knowledge of back ways and shortcuts, and a genius for taking full advantage of cover. They reached the outskirts of the town in a dilapidated quarter, far from the civic center. Magee stopped. “I guess this is the end of the line,” kid,” he told Dave. “If you follow this street, you’ll come to open country shortly. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” MacKinnon replied uneasily, and peered down the street. Then he turned back to speak again to Magee.
But Magee was gone. He had faded away into the shadows. There was neither sight nor sound of him.
MacKinnon started in the suggested direction with a heavy heart. There was no possible reason to expect Magee to stay with him; the service Dave had done him with a lucky kick had been repaid with interest-yet he had lost the only friendly companionship he had found in a strange place. He felt lonely and depressed.
He continued along, keeping to the shadows, and watching carefully for shapes that might be patrolmen. He had gone a few hundred yards, and was beginning to worry about how far it might be to open countryside, when he was startled into gooseflesh by a hiss from a dark doorway.
He did his best to repress the panic that beset him, and was telling himself that policemen never hiss, when a shadow detached itself from the blackness and touched him on the arm.
“Dave,” it said softly.
MacKinnon felt a childlike sense of relief and well-being. “Fader!”
“I changed my mind, Dave. The gendarmes would have you in tow before morning. You don’t know the ropes … so I came back.”
Dave was both pleased and crestfallen. “Hell’s bells, Fader,” he protested, ‘you shouldn’t worry about me. I’ll get along.”
Magee shook him roughly by the arm. “Don’t be a chump. Green as you are, you’d start to holler about your civil rights, or something, and get clipped in the mouth again.
“Now see here,” he went on, ‘I’m going to take you to some friends of mine who will hide you until you’re smartened up to the tricks around here. But they’re on the wrong side of the law, see? You’ll have to be all three of the three sacred monkeys-see no evil, hear no evil, tell no evil. Think you can do it?”
“Yes, but -“
“No “buts” about it. Come along!”
The entrance was in the rear of an old warehouse. Steps led down into a little sunken pit. From this open areaway-foul with accumulated refuse-a door let into the back wall of the building. Magee tapped lightly but systematically, waited and listened. Presently he whispered, ‘Psst! It’s the Fader.”
The door opened quickly, and Magee was encircled by two great, fat arms. He was lifted off his feet, while the owner of those arms planted a resounding buss on his cheek. “Fader!” she exclaimed, ‘are you all right, lad? We’ve missed you.”
“Now that’s a proper welcome, Mother,” he answered, when he was back on his own feet, ‘but I want you to meet a friend of mine. Mother Johnston, this is David MacKinnon.”
“May I do you a service?” David acknowledged, with automatic formality, but Mother Johnston’s eyes tightened with instant suspicion.
“Is he stooled?” she snapped.
“No, Mother, he’s a new immigrant-but I vouch for him. He’s on the dodge, and I’ve brought him here to cool.”
She softened a little under his sweetly persuasive tones. “Well -“
Magee pinched her cheek. “That’s a good girl! When are you going to marry me?”
She slapped his hand away. “Even if I were forty years younger, I’d not marry such a scamp as you! Come along then,” she continued to MacKinnon, ‘as long as you’re a friend of the Fader-though it’s no credit to you!” She waddled quickly ahead of them, down a flight of stairs, while calling out for someone to open the door at its foot.
The room was poorly lighted and was furnished principally with a long table and some chairs, at which an odd dozen people were seated, drinking and talking. It reminded MacKinnon of prints he had seen of old English pubs in the days before the Collapse.
Magee was greeted with a babble of boisterous welcome. “Fader!’-‘It’s the kid himself!’-‘How d’ja do it this time, Fader? Crawl down the drains?’-‘Set ‘em up, Mother-the Fader’s back!”
He accepted the ovation with a wave of his hand and a shout of inclusive greeting, then turned to MacKinnon. “Folks,” he said, his voice cutting through the confusion, ‘I want you to know Dave-the best pal that ever kicked a jailer at the right moment. If it hadn’t been for Dave, I wouldn’t be here.”
Dave found himself seated between two others at the table and a stein of beer thrust into his hand by a not uncomely young woman. He started to thank her, but she had hurried off to help Mother Johnston take care of the sudden influx of orders. Seated opposite him was a rather surly young man who had taken little part in the greeting to Magee. He looked MacKinnon over with a face expressionless except for a recurrent tic which caused his right eye to wink spasmodically every few seconds.
“What’s your line?” he demanded.
“Leave him alone, Alec,” Magee cut in swiftly, but in a friendly tone. “He’s just arrived inside; I told you that. But he’s all right,” he continued, raising his voice to include the others present, ‘he’s been here less than twenty-four hours, but he’s broken jail, beat up two customs busies, and sassed old Judge Fleishacker right to his face. How’s that for a busy day?”
Dave was the center of approving interest, but the party with the tic persisted. “That’s all very well, but I asked him a fair question: What’s his line? If it’s the same as mine, I won’t stand for it-it’s too crowded now.”
“That cheap racket you’re in is always crowded, but he’s not in it. Forget about his line.”
“Why don’t he answer for himself,” Alec countered suspiciously. He half stood up. “I don’t believe he’s stooled -“
It appeared that Magee was cleaning his nails with the point of a slender knife. “Put your nose back in your glass, Alec,” he remarked in a conversational tone, without looking up, ‘-or must I cut it off and put it there?”
The other fingered something nervously in his hand. Magee seemed not to notice it, but nevertheless told him, ‘If you think you can use a vibrator on me faster than I use steel, go ahead it will be an interesting experiment.”
The man facing him stood uncertainly for a moment longer, his tic working incessantly. Mother Johnston came up behind him and pushed him down by the shoulders, saying, ‘Boys! Boys! Is that any way to behave?-and in front of a guest, too! Fader, put that toad sticker away-I’m ashamed of you.”
The knife was gone from his hands. “You’re right as always, Mother,” he grinned. “Ask Molly to fill up my glass again.”
An old chap sitting on MacKinnon’s right had followed these events with alcoholic uncertainty, but he seemed to have gathered something of the gist of it, for now he fixed Dave with serum-filled eye, and enquired, ‘Boy, are you stooled to the rogue?” His sweetly sour breath reached MacKinnon as the old man leaned toward him and emphasized his question with a trembling, joint-swollen finger.
Dave looked to Magee for advice and enlightenment. Magee answered for him. “No, he’s not-Mother Johnston knew that when she let him in. He’s here for sanctuary-as our customs provide!”
An uneasy stir ran around the room. Molly paused in her serving and listened openly. But the old man seemed satisfied. “True … true enough,” he agreed, and took another pull at his drink, ‘sanctuary may be given when needed, if-‘His words were lost in a mumble.
The nervous tension slackened. Most of those present were subconsciously glad to follow the lead of the old man, and excuse the intrusion on the score of necessity. Magee turned back to Dave. “I thought that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you-or us-but the matter has been opened.”
“But what did he mean?”
“Gramps asked you if you had been stooled to the rogue-whether or not you were a member of the ancient and honorable fraternity of thieves, cutthroats, and pickpockets!”
Magee stared into Dave’s face with a look of sardonic amusement. Dave looked uncertainly from Magee to the others, saw them exchange glances, and wondered what answer was expected of him. Alec broke the pause. “Well,” he sneered, ‘what are you waiting for? Go ahead and put the question to him-or are the great Fader’s friends free to use this club without so much as a by-your-leave?”
“I thought I told you to quiet down, Alec,” the Fader replied evenly. “Besides-you’re skipping a requirement. All the comrades present must first decide whether or not to put the question at all.”
A quiet little man with a chronic worried look in his eyes answered him. “I don’t think that quite applies, Fader. If he had come himself, or fallen into our hands-in that case, yes. But you brought him here. I think I speak for all when I say he should answer the question. Unless someone objects, I will ask him myself.” He allowed an interval to pass. No one spoke up.
“Very well then … Dave, you have seen too much and heard too much. Will you leave us now-or will you stay and take the oath of our guild? I must warn you that once stooled you are stooled for life-and there is but one punishment for betraying the rogue.”
He drew his thumb across his throat in an age-old deadly gesture. Gramps made an appropriate sound effect by sucking air wetly through his teeth, and chuckled.
Dave looked around. Magee’s face gave him no help. “What is it that I have to swear to?” he temporized.
The parley was brought to an abrupt ending by the sound of pounding outside. There was a shout, muffled by two closed doors and a stairway, of ‘Open up down there!” Magee got lightly to his feet and beckoned to Dave.
“That’s for us, kid,” he said. “Come along.”
He stepped over to a ponderous, old-fashioned radiophonograph which stood against the wall, reached under it, fiddled for a moment, then swung out one side panel of it. Dave saw that the mechanism had been cunningly rearranged in such a fashion that a man could squeeze inside it. Magee urged him into it, slammed the panel closed, and left him.
His face was pressed up close to the slotted grill which was intended to cover the sound box. Molly had cleared off the two extra glasses from the table, and was dumping one drink so that it spread along the table top and erased the rings their glasses had made.
MacKinnon saw the Fader slide under the table, and reached up. Then he was gone. Apparently he had, in some fashion, attached himself to the underside of the table.
Mother Johnston made a great-to-do of opening up. The lower door she opened at once, with much noise. Then she clumped slowly up the steps, pausing, wheezing, and complaining aloud. He heard her unlock the outer door.
“A fine time to be waking honest people up!” she protested. “It’s hard enough to get the work done and make both ends meet, without dropping what I’m doing every five minutes, and“
“Enough of that, old girl,” a man’s voice answered, ‘just get along downstairs. We have business with you.”
“What sort of business?” she demanded.
“It might be selling liquor without a license, but it’s not-this time.”
“I don’t,this is a private club. The members own the liquor; I simply serve it to them.”
“That’s as may be. It’s those members I want to talk to. Get out of the way now, and be spry about it.”
They came pushing into the room with Mother Johnston, still voluble, carried along in by the van. The speaker was a sergeant of police; he was accompanied by a patrolman. Following them were two other uniformed men, but they were soldiers. MacKinnon judged by the markings on their kilts that they were corporal and private-provided the insignia in New America were similar to those used by the United States Army.
The sergeant paid no attention to Mother Johnston. “All right, you men,” he called out, ‘line up!”
They did so, ungraciously but promptly. Molly and Mother Johnston watched them, and moved closer to each other. The police sergeant called out, ‘All right, corporal-take charge!”
The boy who washed up in the kitchen had been staring round-eyed. He dropped a glass. It bounced around on the hard floor, giving out bell-like sounds in the silence.
The man who had questioned Dave spoke up. “What’s all this?”
The sergeant answered with a pleased grin. “Conscription-that’s what it is. You are all enlisted in the army for the duration.”
“Press gang!” It was an involuntary gasp that came from no particular source.
The corporal stepped briskly forward. “Form a column of twos,” he directed. But the little man with the worried eyes was not done.
“I don’t understand this,” he objected. “We signed an armistice with the Free State three weeks ago.”
“That’s not your worry,” countered the sergeant, ‘nor mine. We are picking up every able bodied man not in essential industry. Come along.”
“Then you can’t take me.”
“Why not?”
He held up the stump of a missing hand. The sergeant glanced from it to the corporal, who nodded grudgingly, and said, ‘Okay-but report to the office in the morning, and register.”
He started to march them out when Alec broke ranks and backed up to the wall, screaming, ‘You can’t do this to me! I won’t go!” His deadly little vibrator was exposed in his hand, and the right side of his face was drawn up in a spastic wink that left his teeth bare.
“Get him, Steves,” ordered the corporal. The private stepped forward, but stopped when Alec brandished the vibrator at him. He had no desire to have a vibroblade between his ribs, and there was no doubt as to the uncontrolled dangerousness of his hysterical opponent.
The corporal, looking phlegmatic, almost bored, levelled a small tube at a spot on the wall over Alec’s head. Dave heard a soft pop!, and a thin tinkle. Alec stood motionless for a few seconds, his face even more strained, as if he were exerting the limit of his will against some unseen force, then slid quietly to the floor. The tonic spasm in his face relaxed, and his features smoothed into those of a tired and petulant, and very bewildered, little boy.
“Two of you birds carry him,” directed the corporal. “Let’s get going.”
The sergeant was the last to leave. He turned at the door and spoke to Mother Johnston. “Have you seen the Fader lately?”
“The Fader?” She seemed puzzled. “Why, he’s in jail.”
“Ah, yes… so he is.” He went out.
Magee refused the drink that Mother Johnston offered him.
Dave was surprised to see that he appeared worried for the first time. “I don’t understand it,” Magee muttered, half to himself, then addressed the one-handed man. “Ed-bring me up to date.”
“Not much news since they tagged you, Fader. The armistice was before that. I thought from the papers that things were going to be straightened out for once.”
“So did I. But the government must expect war if they are going in for general conscription.” He stood up. “I’ve got to have more data. Al!” The kitchen boy stuck his head into the room.
“What ‘cha want, Fader?”
“Go out and make palaver with five or six of the beggars. Look up their “king”. You know where he makes his pitch?”
“Sure-over by the auditorium.”
“Find out what’s stirring, but don’t let them know I sent you.”
“Right, Fader. It’s in the bag.” The boy swaggered out.
“Molly.”
“Yes, Fader?”
“Will you go out, and do the same thing with some of the business girls? I want to know what they hear from their customers.” She nodded agreement. He went on, ‘Better look up that little redhead that has her beat up on Union Square. She can get secrets out of a dead man.
Here-” He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and handed her several. “You better take this grease … You might have to pay off a cop to get back out of the district.”
Magee was not disposed to talk, and insisted that Dave get some sleep. He was easily persuaded, not having slept since he entered Coventry. That seemed like a lifetime past; he was exhausted. Mother Johnston fixed him a shakedown in a dark, stuffy room on the same underground level. It had none of the hygienic comforts to which he was accustomed-air-conditioning, restful music, hydraulic mattress, nor soundproofing-and he missed his usual relaxing soak and auto-massage, but he was too tired to care. He slept in clothing and under covers for the first time in his life.
He woke up with a headache, a taste in his mouth like tired sin, and a sense of impending disaster. At first he could not remember where he was-he thought he was still in detention Outside. His surrounds were inexplicably sordid; he was about to ring for the attendant and complain, when his memory pieced in the events of the day before. Then he got up and discovered that his bones and muscles were painfully sore, and-which was worse-that he was, by his standards, filthy dirty. He itched.
He entered the common room, and found Magee sitting at the table. He greeted Dave. “Hi, kid. I was about to wake you. You’ve slept almost all day. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“Okay-shortly. Where’s the ‘fresher?”
“Over there.”
It was not Dave’s idea of a refreshing chamber, but he managed to take a sketchy shower in spite of the slimy floor. Then he discovered that there was no air blast installed, and he was forced to dry himself unsatisfactorily with his handkerchief. He had no choice in clothes. He must put back on the ones he had taken off, or go naked. He recalled that he had seen no nudity anywhere in Coventry, even at sports-a difference in customs, no doubt.
He put his clothes back on, though his skin crawled at the touch of the once-used linen.
But Mother Johnston had thrown together an appetizing breakfast for him. He let coffee restore his courage as Magee talked. It was, according to Fader, a serious situation. New America and the Free State had compromised their differences and had formed an alliance. They quite seriously proposed to break out of Coventry and attack the United States.
MacKinnon looked up at this. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? They would be outnumbered enormously. Besides, h