Crandall and Henck dutifully emitted big smiles, which made three smiles, for Anderson had moved into the cheerful little group.
The two cameras shot out of the grasp of their technicians, one hovering over them, one moving restlessly before their faces, both controlled, at a distance, by the little box of switches in. the cameramen’s hands. A red bulb in the nose of one of the cameras lit up.
“Here we are, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience,” the announcer exuded in a lavish voice. “We are on board the convict ship Jean Valjean, which has just landed at the New York Spaceport. We are here to meet two men—two of the rare men who have managed to serve all of a voluntary sentence for murder and thus are legally entitled to commit one murder apiece.
“In just a few moments, they will be discharged after having served out seven full years on the convict planets—and they will be free to kill any man or woman in the Solar System with absolutely no fear of any kind of retribution. Take a good look at them, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience—it might be you they are after!”
After this cheering thought, the announcer let a moment or two elapse while the cameras let their lenses stare at the two men in prison gray. Then he stepped into range himself and addressed the smaller man.
“What is your name, sir?” he asked.
“Pre-criminal Otto Henck, 525514,” Blotto Otto responded automatically, though not able to repress a bit of a start at the sir.
“How does it feel to be back?”
“Fine, just fine.”
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get your discharge?”
Henck hesitated, then said, “Eat a good meal,” after a shy look at Crandall.
“How were you treated while you were a prisoner?”
“Oh, pretty good. As good as you could expect.”
“As good as a criminal could expect, eh? Although you’re not really a criminal yet, are you? You’re a pre-criminal.”
Henck smiled as if this were the first time he was hearing the term. “That’s right, sir. I’m a pre-criminal.”
“Want to tell the audience who the person is you’re going to become a criminal for?”
Henck looked reproachfully at the announcer, who chuckled throatily—and alone.
“Or if you’ve changed your mind about him or her?” There was a pause. Then the announcer said a little nervously: “You’ve served seven years on danger-filled, alien planets, preparing them for human colonization. That’s the maximum sentence the law allows, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, sir. With the pre-criminal discount for serving the sentence in advance, seven years is the most you can get for murder.”
“Bet you’re glad we’re not back in the days of capital punishment, eh? That would make the whole thing impractical, wouldn’t it? Now, Mr. Henck—or pre-criminal Henck, I guess I should still call you—suppose you tell the ladies and gentlemen of our television audience: What was the most horrifying experience you had while you were serving your sentence?”
“Well,” Otto Henck considered carefully. “About the worst of the lot, I guess, was the time on Antares VIII, the second prison camp I was in, when the big wasps started to spawn. They got a wasp on Antares VIII, see, that’s about a hundred times the size of—”
“Is that how you lost two fingers on your right hand?”
Henck brought his hand up and studied it for a moment. “No. The forefinger—I lost the forefinger on Rigel XII. We were building the first prison camp on the planet and I dug up a funny kind of red rock that had all sorts of little humps on it. I poked it, kind of—you know, just to see how hard it was or something-and the tip of my finger disappeared. Pow—just like that. Later on, the whole finger got infected and the medics had to cut it off.
“It turned out I was lucky, though; some of the men—the convicts, I mean—ran into bigger rocks than the one I found. Those guys lost arms, legs—one guy even got swallowed whole. They weren’t really rocks, see. They were alive—they were alive and hungry! Rigel XII was lousy with them. The middle finger—I lost the middle finger in a dumb kind of accident on board ship while we were being moved to—”
The announcer nodded intelligently, cleared his throat and said: `But those wasps, those giant wasps on Antares VIII—they were the worst?”
Blotto Otto blinked at him for a moment before he found the conversation again.
“Oh. They sure were! They were used to laying their eggs in a kind of monkey they have on Antares VIII, see? It was real rough on the monkey, but that’s how the baby wasps got their food while they were growing up. Well, we get out there and it turns out that the wasps can’t see any difference between those Antares monkeys and human beings. First thing you know, guys start collapsing all over the place and when they’re taken to the dispensary for an X-ray, the medics see that they’re completely crammed—
“Thank you very much, Mr. Henck, but Herkimer’s Wasp has already been seen by and described to our audience at least three times in the past on the Interstellar Travelogue, which is carried by this network, as you ladies and gentlemen no doubt remember, on Wednesday evening from seven to seven-thirty P.M. terrestrial standard time. And now, Mr. Crandall, let me ask you, sir: How does it feel to be back?”
Crandall stepped up and was put through almost exactly the same verbal paces as his fellow prisoner.
There was one major difference. The announcer asked him if he expected to find Earth much changed. Crandall started to shrug, then abruptly relaxed and grinned. He was careful to make the grin an extremely wide one, exposing a maximum of tooth and a minimum of mirth.
“There’s one big change I can see already,” he said. “The way those cameras float around and are controlled from a little switchbox in the cameraman’s hand. That gimmick I wasn’t around the day I left. Whoever invented it must have been pretty clever.”
“Oh, yes?” The announcer glanced briefly backward. “You mean the Stephanson Remote Control Switch? It was invented by Frederick Stoddard Stephanson about five years ago—Was it five years, Don?”
“Six years,” said the cameraman. “Went on the market five years ago.”
“It was invented six years ago,” the announcer translated. “It went on the market five years ago.”
Crandall nodded. “Well, this Frederick Stoddard Stephanson must be a clever man, a very clever man.” And he grinned again into the cameras. Look at my teeth, he thought to himself. I know you’re watching, Freddy. Look at my teeth and shiver.
The announcer seemed a bit disconcerted. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. Now, Mr. Crandall, what would you describe as the most horrifying experience in your entire… ”
After the TV men had rolled up their equipment and departed, the two pre-criminals were subjected to a final barrage of questions from the feature writers and columnists in search of odd shreds of color.
“What about the women in your life?”
“What books, what hobbies, what amusements filled your time?”
“Did you find out that there are no atheists on convict planets?”
“If you had the whole thing to do over again—”
As he answered, drably, courteously, Nicholas Crandall was thinking about Frederick Stoddard Stephanson seated in front of his luxurious wall-size television set.
Would Stephanson have clicked it off by now? Would he be sitting there, staring at the blank screen, pondering the plans of the man who had outlived odds estimated at ten thousand to one and returned after seven full, unbelievable years in the prison camps of four insane planets?
Would Stephanson be examining his blaster with sucked-in lips—the blaster that he might use only in an open-and-shut situation of self-defense? Otherwise, he would incur the full post-criminal sentence for murder, which, without the fifty per cent discount for punishment voluntarily undergone in advance of the crime, was as much as fourteen years in the many-pronged hell from which Crandall had just returned?
Or would Stephanson be sitting, slumped in an expensive bubblechair, glumly watching a still-active screen, frightened out of his wits but still unable to tear himself away from the well-organized program the network had no doubt built around the return of two—count ’em: two!—homicidal pre-criminals?
At the moment, in all probability, the screen was showing an interview with some Earthside official of the Interstellar Prison Service, an expansive public relations character who had learned to talk in sociology.
“Tell me, Mr. Public Relations,” the announcer would ask (a different announcer, more serious, more intellectual), “how often do pre-criminals serve out a sentence for murder and return?”
“According to statistics—” a rustle of papers at this point and a penetrating glance downward—“according to statistics, we may expect a man who has served a full sentence for murder, with the 50 per cent pre-criminal discount, to return only once in 11.7 years on the average.”
“You would say, then, wouldn’t you, Mr. Public Relations, that the return of two such men on the same day is a rather unusual situation?”