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.’