Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

And it was a valid pardon, too. Andy didn’t intend to write any stiffs while he was here. The guild might require its pardoners to write the occasional stiff, but he wasn’t working with the guild just now. And though Andy could understand the need to fudge up a pardon now and then if you were going to work the same territory for any prolonged period, he had never cared for the idea of doing it. It was offensive to his professional pride. He didn’t plan to be in town long enough, anyway, this time around, for anybody—the Entities, their human puppets, or, for that matter, the guild itself—to be unduly disturbed by the skill with which he was practicing his trade.

The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that Andy thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby blue business suit—her grandfather, perhaps—was trying to comfort her. Public crying was a good indicator, Andy knew, that someone was in bad Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” he said, and they were both so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.

He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which of course wasn’t likely to happen: the assignments were pretty random, but they seemed rarely to be crazy, and what use would a ninety-pound girl be in hauling stone blocks around?

The father-in-law, though, had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. That was bad news. And they had given her a TTD classification. Even worse.

“The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see, right away, she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”

“So you know what Area Five is, do you?” Andy said, surprised.

“The medical experiment place. And this mark here, TTD. I know what that stands for too.”

She began to moan again. Andy couldn’t really blame her. TTD meant Test To Destruction. So far as he understood the TTD program, it had to do with a need the Entities felt for finding out how much physical labor humans were really capable of doing. The only reliable way to discover that, apparently, was to put a sampling of the populace through tests that showed where the endurance limits lay.

“I will die,” the woman wailed. “My babies! My babies!”

“Do you know what a pardoner is?” Andy asked the father-in-law.

Which produced a quick excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. And just as quickly the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.

“They all cheat you,” he said.

“Not all.”

“Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”

“You know that isn’t true. Sometimes things don’t work out, sure. It isn’t an exact science. But everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”

“Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly.

“You know of such a person?”

“For three thousand dollars,” Andy said quietly, “I can take the TTD off her ticket. For five I can write an exemption from service that’ll be good until her children are in high school.”

He wondered why he was being so tenderhearted. A fifty percent discount, and he hadn’t even run an asset check. For all he knew the father-in-law was a millionaire. But no, if that was so he’d have been off long ago cutting a deal for a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this, weeping and wailing in Pershing Square.

The old man gave Andy a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.

“How can we be sure you’ll do what you say you’ll do?” he asked.

Andy might have told him that he was the king of his profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch. Who could slip into any data network there was and get it to dance to his tune. That would have been nothing more than the truth. But all he said was that the man would have to make up his own mind, that Andy couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that he was available if they wanted him and otherwise it was all the same to him if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket.

They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, the old man silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant. Andy keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. He transferred eight of it to his accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Honolulu. Then he took the woman’s wrist, which was about two of his fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life.

“Go on,” Andy said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”

Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow—”

“I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”

“This will work?” the old man asked.

“You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

He didn’t seem convinced. Andy suspected the man was more than half sure that he had just been swindled out of one fourth of his life’s savings. The hatred in his eyes was all too visible. But in a week he would find out that Andy really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he would rush down to the Square to tell Andy how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward him. Only by that time Andy expected to be somewhere else far away.

They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to look back over their shoulders at Andy as if they thought he was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.

In short order Andy had earned enough now to get him through his week in L.A. But he stuck around the park anyway, hoping for a little more. That proved to be a mistake.

The next customer was Little Mr. Invisible, the sort of man no one would ever notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. He and Andy struck up a conversation and very quickly they were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told Andy he was from the Silver Lake neighborhood. That conveyed very little to Andy. Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big LACON building on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. Andy smelled a deal.

Then the gray little man wanted to know where Andy was from—Santa Monica? West L.A.? Andy wondered if people had a different kind of accent on that side of town. “I’m a traveling man,” he said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.”

The little man looked at Andy as though he had said he was planning a voyage to Jupiter.

He knew now, though, that Andy had wall-transit clearance, or else that he had some way of getting it when he wanted it, or at least was willing to claim openly that he did. Which was as good as Andy’s advertising that he was something special. That was what the little man was looking to find out, obviously.

In no time at all they were down to basics.

The little gray man said that he had drawn a new labor ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. Bad news, bad, bad, bad. People died like mayflies out there, Andy had heard. What he wanted, naturally, was a transfer to something softer, like Operations & Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean where the air was cool and clear.