The doctor said, “Conscious now? Good. Feeling better? No, don’t touch your face. That’s a nasty burn, but it’ll heal up. In time for your one-way trip.”
Gan Garrett gasped. For a minute he thought the red-and-green-speckled blackness was coming back. “One-way trip—” he fumbled out. “What—” But the doctor had already left.
Garrett knew the layout of these cells. He found his way to the tablet dispenser and swallowed a mouthful of condensed food. Damn these dispensers! No need now for a guard to bring meals. A guard could be questioned. But instead he must sit here wondering—
Had he indeed stabbed that Ainu? In some sort of muscular spasm after unconsciousness? If so— He straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. The laws were good. Man must not kill man. If he had done so, no matter under what circumstances, then a one-way trip was his only possible reward. But if he had been somehow framed by Stag Hartle— Could that have been what the jackal had meant by “what we’d planned for you”—
There was the buzz which meant that the cell door was being dilated for an official visitor. The man who came in was very young, very alert, and very precise. He said, “Garrett?”
“I guess so. I’m not too sure of anything.”
“Breckenridge. I’ve been appointed to defend you before the judicial council. I might as well warn you to start with that I have no hope whatsoever.” He made the statement with efficient impartiality.
“That’s cheery. But first of all—what are you defending me for?”
“Killing. It’s a one-way trip for sure. But if you’ll tell me your story—”
“First tell me the prosecution.”
“Very simple. And I may add, convincing. One Stag Hartle—not too good a witness, I know, but plentifully corroborated—was worried about the continued silence of the painter Emigdio Valentinez and took a searching party down to his beach studio. They did not find Valentinez, but they did find an unidentified Ainu lying dead on the sand, stabbed through the back. You lay beside him; apparently you had fainted from the shock of killing him and lain on the beach long enough to acquire a startlingly severe sunburn. Thie prosecution’s theory is that you disposed of Valentinez, perhaps into the ocean, and that this unknown was his bodyguard, or perhaps a mere tramp who saw you and so had to be finished off.”
“Nuts,” said Gan Garrett. “If that’s all they’ve got—”
“TheAinu’s blood was all over you—spurted out of his back when hewas stabbed. Positions of stains indicate your left arm did the stabbing. Besides, there are your prints all over the knife handle. Why on earth couldn’t you have had the sense to use paraderm?” the defense lawyer moaned sadly.
The trial took fifteen minutes. In the two days before it, Gan Garrett had worked harder than ever before in his life. He had managed to get an interview with the police chief himself, and spent an hour desperately trying to rip holes in the prosecution’s case, with no success whatsoever. In all his cases, the chief had never had a murderer before; he was loath to relinquish this one. And if a man can’t convince his own attorney of his of his innocence—
Through his lawyer he sent desperate but restrained appeals to Hesketh Uranov and Sacheverell Breakstone. He had no answer at all from the writer, which confirmed him in his growing belief that Uranov was a traitor rather than a weakling and had deliberately lured him down to the lonely beach studio. S.B. spent a half-hour with him, told him three new fictional sub-plots to the Devarupa epic—just groping with words, you understand—wondered if he could recommend another historical technician, regretted that he himself could not attend the trial because he’d be on the Moon by then, and heard not a word of Garrett’s defense or his accusations against Hartle.
Garrett knew that there was no hope in appealing to the secretary who had sent him on this job or to the W.B.I. itself. The standing rule was “Get yourself out.” At last a sort of stoic resignment settled on him. He spent the last twelve hours before the trial preparing a minute precis of everything he had learned about lovestonite, Valentinez, and Stag Hartle. His lawyer promised to see that it was forwarded to the Secretary of Allocation.
His trial began at 14:15, on a fine sunny California afternoon. At 14:30 it was over. At 15:45 he was looking at the one-man rocket through a hazy mist of the beginning effects of dormitol. By 16:00 the lid was down, the pressure screws turned, and Gan Garrett was ready to set out on the one-way trip.
Somewhere in Sollywood Stag Hartle was probably celebrating.
III.
The one-way trip is a form of punishment—or penalty is perhaps the better word— unique in the world’s history. But it evolved logically and inevitably from the fact of a world at peace, even if the world itself had paradoxically evolved as a direct consequence of the War of the Twentieth Century.
At any time in the world’s history before the year 2000, the voice of Devarupa would have gone unheard—unheard, that is, even as the voice of Christ went unheard by a nominally Christian world devoted to greed and murder. Only after the total destruction wrought by that world-wide and century-long war could man have listened seriously to the true message of peace.
The world had first heard of Devarupa when India was being overrun by both sides during the last vicious years of the German-Japanese War. The official Domei and DNB dispatches slurred over or perverted his acts; but the legend had seeped through somehow and spread over the world, the legend of that one province which had finally succeeded in practicing in its perfection the traditional doctrine of nonresistance, so successfully that each horde of invaders in turn at last drew back with almost supernatural awe.
But that was a minute island of success. Not until after the Revolt of
