understand that there may be permanent impairment to your ability to function
socially; there could be other psychological or physical impairments…”
He snatched the pen and signed the papers. The doctor took them and looked at
them. Finally the doctor drew a paper from his pocket, pushed it across the
table, a rumpled and much-folded scrap of paper.
He smoothed it out, saw a note with half a dozen signatures. Your account in
station comp has 50 credits. For anything you want on the side. Six of the
detention guards had signed it; the men and women he played cards with. Given
out of their own pockets. Tears blurred his eyes.
“Want to change your mind?” the doctor asked,
He shook his head, folded the paper. “Can I keep it?”
“It will be kept along with your other effects. You’ll get everything back on
your release.”
“It won’t matter then, will it?”
“Not at that point,” the doctor said, “Not for some time.”
He handed the paper back.
“I’ll get you a tranquilizer,” the doctor said, and called for an attendant, who
brought it in, a cup of blue liquid. He accepted it and drank it and felt no
different for it.
The doctor pushed blank paper in front of him, and laid the pen down. “Write
down your impressions of Pell. Will you do that?”
He began. He had had stranger requests in the days that they had tested him. He
wrote a paragraph, how he had been questioned by the guards and finally how he
felt he had been treated. The words began to grow sideways. He was not writing
on the paper. He had run off the edge onto the table and couldn’t find his way
back. The letters wrapped around each other, tied in knots.
The doctor reached and lifted the pen from his hand, robbing him of purpose.
Chapter Nine
« ^ »
i
Pell: 5/28/52
Damon looked over the report on his desk. It was not the procedure he was used
to, the martial law which existed in Q. It was rough and quick, and came across
his desk with a trio of film cassettes and a stack of forms condemning five men
to Adjustment.
He viewed the film, jaw clenched, the scenes of riot leaping across the large
wall-screen, flinched at recorded murder. There was no question of the crime or
the identification. There was, in the stack of cases which had flooded the LA
office, no time for reconsiderations or niceties. They were dealing with a
situation which could bring the whole station down, turn it all into the manner
of thing that had come in with Hansford. Once life-support was threatened, once
men were crazy enough to build bonfires on a station dock… or go for station
police with kitchen knives…
He pulled the files in question, keyed up printout on the authorization. There
was no fairness in it, for they were the five the security police had been able
to pull across the line, five out of many more as guilty. But they were five who
would not kill again, nor threaten the frail stability of a station containing
many thousands of lives. Total Adjustment, he wrote, which meant personality
restruct. Processing would turn up injustice if he had done one. Questioning
would determine innocence if any existed at this point. He felt foul in doing
what he did, and frightened. Martial law was far too sudden. His father had
agonized the night long in making one such decision after a board had passed on
it.
A copy went to the public defender’s office. They would interview in person,
lodge appeals if warranted. That procedure too was curtailed under present
circumstance. It could be done only by producing evidence of error; and evidence
was in Q, unreachable. Injustices were possible. They were condemning on the
word of police under attack and the viewing of film which did not show what had
gone before. There were five hundred reports of theft and major crimes on his
desk when before there had been a Q, they might have dealt with two or three
such complaints a year. Comp was flooded with data requests. There had been days