Downbelow Station

An angel’s face.

“No trouble to you, is he?” Damon asked the supervisor.

“No.”

“I’ve heard he’s a good midge player.”

That got a flicker from both of them. There were illicit gamblings at the detention station, as in most slow posts during alterday. Damon offered a smile when the prisoner looked his way, the least shifting of the pale blue eyes… went sober again as the prisoner failed to react. “I’m Damon Konstantin, Mr. Talley, of the station legal office. You’ve given us no trouble and we appreciate that. We’re not your enemies; we’d dock a Union fleet as readily as a Company ship — in principle; but you don’t leave stations neutral any longer, not from what we hear, so our attitude has to change along with that. We just can’t take chances having you loose. Repatriation… no. We’re given other instructions. Our own security. You understand that.”

No response.

“Your counsel’s made the point that you’re suffering in this close confinement and that the cells were never meant for long-term detention. That there are people walking loose in Q who are far more a threat to this station; that there’s a vast difference between a saboteur and an armscomper in uniform who had the bad luck to be picked up by the wrong side. But having said all that, he still doesn’t recommend your release except to Q. We have an arrangement worked out. We can fake an id that would protect you, and still let us keep track of you over there. I don’t like the idea, but it seems workable.”

“What’s Q?” Talley asked, a soft, anxious voice, appealing to the supervisor and to his own counsel, the elder Jacoby, who sat at the end of the table. “What are you saying?”

“Quarantine. The sealed section of the station we’ve set apart for our own refugees.”

Talley’s eyes darted nervously from one to the other of them. “No. No. I don’t want to be put with them. I never asked him to set this up. I didn’t.”

Damon frowned uncomfortably. “We’ve got another convoy coming in, Mr. Talley, another group of refugees. We have arrangements underway to mix you with them with faked papers. Get you out of here. It would still be a kind of confinement, but with wider walls, room to walk where you want, live life… as it’s lived in Q. That’s a good part of the station over there. Not regimented — open. No cells. Mr. Jacoby’s right: you’re no more dangerous than some over there. Less, because we’d always know who you are.”

Talley cast another look at his counsel. Shook his head, pleading.

“You absolutely reject it?” Damon prodded him, vexed. All solutions and arrangements collapsed. “It’s not prison, you understand.”

“My face — is known there. Mallory said — ”

He lapsed into silence. Damon stared at him, marked the fevered anxiety, the sweat which stood on Talley’s face. “What did Mallory say?”

“That if I made trouble — she’d transfer me to one of the other ships. I think I know what you’re doing: you think if there are Unionists with them they’d contact me if you put me over there in your quarantine. Is that it? But I wouldn’t live that long. There are people who know me by sight. Station officials. Police. They’re the kind who got places on those ships, aren’t they? And they’d know me. I’ll be dead in an hour if you do that. I heard what those ships were like.”

“Mallory told you.”

“Mallory told me.”

“There are some, on the other hand,” Damon said bitterly, “who’d balk at boarding one of Mazian’s ships, stationers who’d swear an honest man’s survival wasn’t that likely. But I’d reckon you had a soft passage, didn’t you? Enough to eat and no worries about the air? The old spacer-stationer quarrel: leave the stationers to suffocate and keep her own deck spotless. But you rated differently. You got special treatment.”

“It wasn’t all that pleasant, Mr. Konstantin.”

“Not your choice either, was it?”

“No,” the answer came hoarsely. Damon suddenly repented his baiting, nagged by suspicions, evil rumor of the Fleet. He was ashamed of the role in which he was cast. In which Pell was. War and prisoners of war. He wanted no part of it.

“You refuse the solution we offer,” he said. “That’s your privilege. No one will force you. We don’t want to endanger your life, and that’s what it would be if things are what you say. So what do you do? I suppose you go on playing midge with the guards. It’s a very small confinement. Did they give you the tapes and player? You got that?”

“I would like — ” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”

Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.

“If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”

“Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.”

“I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or — ”

“I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”

“Don’t they test — when they process for Adjustment?”

Damon looked at Jacoby.

“He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”

“We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”

“Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?”

“Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”

“A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.

“I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”

“It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.

“I want to know why he wants it”

“I want out!”

Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.

“Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands. And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability — ”

“I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the largest station on a ship.

“ — or condition which would cause you unusual duress. Don’t you have kin, relatives, someone who would try to talk you out of this if they heard about it?”

The eyes reacted to that, ever so slightly.

“Do you have someone?” Damon asked, hoping he had found a handhold, some reason to apply against this, “Who?”

“Dead,” Talley said.

“If this request is in reaction to that — ”

“A long time ago,” Talley said, cutting that off. Nothing more.

An angel’s face. Humanity without flaw. Birth labs? The thought came to him unbidden. It had always been abhorrent to him, Union’s engineered soldiers. His own possible prejudice worried at him. “I haven’t read your file in full,” he admitted. “This has been handled at other levels. They thought they had this settled. It bounced back to me. You had family, Mr. Talley?”

“Yes,” Talley said faintly, defiantly, making him ashamed of himself.

“Born where?”

“Cyteen.” The same small, flat voice, “I’ve given you all that. I had parents. I was born, Mr. Konstantin. Is that really pertinent?”

“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I want you to understand this: it’s not final. You can change your mind, right up to the moment the treatment begins. All you have to say is stop, I don’t want this. But after it goes so far, you’re not competent. You understand… you’re no longer able. You’ve seen Adjusted men?”

“They recover.”

“They do recover. I’ll follow the case, Mr. Talley… Lt Talley… so much as I can. You see to it,” he said to the supervisor, “that any time he sends a message, at any stage of the process, it gets to me on an emergency basis, day or night You see that the attendants understand that too, down to the orderlies. I don’t think he’ll abuse the privilege.” He looked at Jacoby. “Are you satisfied about your client?”

“It’s his right to do what he’s doing. I’m not pleased with it. But I’ll witness it. I’ll agree it solves things… maybe for the best.”

The comp printout arrived. Damon handed the papers to Jacoby for scrutiny. Jacoby marked the lines for signature and passed the folder to Talley. Talley folded it to him like something precious.

“Mr. Talley,” Damon said, rising, and on impulse offered his hand, against all the distaste he felt The young armscomper rose and took it, and the look of gratitude in his suddenly brimming eyes cancelled all certainties. “Is it possible,” Damon asked, “is it remotely possible that you have information you want wiped? That that’s why you’re doing this? I warn you it’s more likely to come out in the process than not. And we’re not interested in it, do you understand that? We have no military interests.”

That was not it. He much doubted that it could be. This was no high officer, no one like himself, who knew comp signals, access codes, the sort of thing an enemy must not have. No one had discovered the like in this man… nothing of value, not here, not at Russell’s.

“No,” Talley said. “I don’t know anything.”

Damon hesitated, still nagged by conscience, the feeling that Talley’s counsel, if no one else, ought to be protesting, doing something more vigorous, using all