It wasn’t so bad as it sounded. Their shiftmates were a couple of dozen ragged-looking wrecks, half-heartedly assembling a short of meccano-toy wall out of sheets of perforated steel and clip-spring bolts. All the parts seemed well worn; some of the bolts hardly closed. It took Ross the better part of his first detail, whispering when the guards were looking the other way, to find out why. Their half of the prisoners were Construction; the other half was Demolition. What Construction in the morning put up, Demolition in the evening tore down. Neither side was anxious to set any speed records, and the guards without exception were too bored to care.
With any kind of luck, Ross found, he could hope eventually to get a real job—manning the “Minerva’s” radar, signal, or generating facilities, working in the kitchens or service shops, perhaps even as an orderly in the guard quarters. (Although Ross quite by accident chanced to see a guard’s orderly as he passed through a corridor near the work area, a handkerchief held daintily to his nose. And though the orderly’s clothing was neat and his plump cheeks indicated good eating, the haunted expression in his eyes made Ross think twice.)
The one thing he could not do, according to the testimony of every man he spoke to, was escape.
The fifth time Ross got that answer, the guard had stepped out of the room. Ross took the opportunity to thrash the thing through. “Why?” he demanded. “Back where I come from we’ve got lots of prisons. I never heard of one nobody escaped from.”
The other prisoner laughed shortly. “Now you have,” he said. “Go ahead, try. Every one of us has tried, one time or another. There’s only one thing stopping you—there’s no place to go. You can get past the guards easy enough— they’re lazy, when they’re not either drunk or boy-chasing. You can roam around ‘Minerva’ all you like. You can even get to the spacelock, and if you want to-you can walk right through it. But not in a spacesuit, because there aren’t any on board. And not into the tender that brings us up from Azor, because you aren’t built right.”
Ross looked puzzled. “Not built right?”
“That’s right. There’s telescreens and remote-control locks built into that tender. The pilot brings you up, but once she couples with ‘Minerva’ the controls lock. And die only way they get unlocked is when three women, in three different substations down on Azor, push the RC releases. And they don’t do that until they look in their screens, and see that everybody who has turned up in the tender has stripped down to nothing at all, and every one of them is by-God female. Any further questions?” He grinned wryly. “Don’t even think about plastic surgery, if that happens to cross your mind,” he said. “We have two men here who tried it. You don’t have much equipment here; you can’t do a neat enough job.”
Ross gulped. “Hadn’t given it a thought,” he assured the other man. “You can’t even hide away in a trunk or something?”
The prisoner shook his head. “Aren’t any trunks. Everything’s one way—Azor to ‘Minerva’—except pilots and guards. No men ever go back. When you die, you go out the lock—without a ship. Same with everything else that .they want to get rid of.”
Ross thought hard. “What if they—well, what if you’re sent up here and all, and then some new evidence turns up and you’re found innocent? Don’t they send you back then?”
“Found innocent?” The man looked at Ross pityingly. “Man, you are new. Hey,” he called. “Hey, Chuck! This guy wants to know what happens if they find out back on Azor that he’s innocent!”
Chuck exploded into laughter. Wiping his eyes, he walked over to Ross. “Thanks,” he grinned. “Haven’t had a good laugh in fifteen years.”
“I don’t see that that’s so funny,” Ross said defensively. “After all, the judge can make a mistake, none of us is per—awk!”
“Shut up!” Chuck hissed, holding a hand over Ross’s mouth. “Do you want to get us all in real trouble? Some of these guys would rat to the guards for an extra hunk of bread! The judges never make a mistake.” And his lips formed the silent word: “Officially.”