William Tenn - Time in Advance

“Using the Lazarus Scale, it has been estimated that the decline in premeditated homicides alone, since the institution of the pre-criminal discount, has been forty-one per cent on Earth, thirty-three and a third per cent on Venus, twenty-seven per cent—”

Cold comfort, chillingly cold comfort, that would be to Stephanson, Nicholas Crandall reflected pleasurably, those forty-one per cents and thirty-three and a third per cents. Crandall’s was the balancing statistic: the man who wanted to murder, and for good and sufficient cause, one Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. He was a leftover fraction on a page of reductions and cancellations—he had returned, astonishingly, unbelievably, after seven years to collect the merchandise for which he had paid in advance.

He and Henck. Two ridiculously long long-shots. Henck’s’ wife Elsa—was she, too, sitting in a kind of bird-hypnotized-by-a-snake fashion before her television set, hoping dimly and desperately that some comment of the Interstellar Prison, Service official would show her how to evade her fate, how to get out from under the ridiculously rare disaster that was about to happen to her?

Well, Elsa was Blotto Otto’s affair. Let him enjoy it in his own way; he’d paid enough for the privilege. But Stepharson was Crandall’s.

Oh, let the arrogant bean-pole sweat, he prayed. Let me take my time and let him sweat!

The newsman kept squeezing them for story angles until a loudspeaker in the overhead suddenly cleared its diaphragm and announced:

“Prisoners, prepare for discharge! You will proceed to the ship warden’s office in groups of ten, as your name is called. Convict ship discipline will be maintained throughout. Arthur, Augluk, Crandall, Ferrara, Fu-Yen, Garfinkel, Gomez, Graham, Henck—”

A half hour later, they were walking down the main corridor of the ship in their civilian clothes. They showed their discharges to the guard at the gangplank, smiled still cringingly back at Anderson, who called from a porthole, “Hey, fellas, come back soon!” and trotted down the incline to the surface of a planet they had not seen for seven agonizing and horror-crowded years.

There were a few reporters and photographers still waiting for them, and one TV crew which had been left behind to let the world see how they looked at the moment of freedom.

Questions, more questions to answer, which they could afford to be brusque about, although brusqueness to any but fellow prisoners still came hard.

Fortunately, the newsmen got interested in another pre-criminal who was with them. Fu-Yen had completed the discounted sentence of two years for aggravated assault and battery. He had also lost both arms and one leg to a corrosive moss on Procyon III just before the end of his term and came limping down the gangplank on one real and one artificial leg, unable to grasp the handrails.

As he was being asked, with a good deal of interest, just how he intended to commit simple assault and battery, let alone the serious kind, with his present limited resources, Crandall nudged Henck and they climbed quickly into one of the many hovering gyrocabs. They told the driver to take them to a bar—any quiet bar—in the city.

Blotto Otto nearly went to nieces under the impact of actual free choice. “I can’t do it,” he whispered. “Nick, there’s just too damn much to drink!”

Crandall settled it by ordering for him. “Two double scotches,” he told the waitress. “Nothing else.”

When the scotch came, Blotto Otto stared at it with the kind of affectionate and wistful astonishment a man might show toward an adolescent son whom he saw last as a bubo in arms. He put out a gingerly, trembling hand.

“Here’s death to our enemies,” Crandall said, and tossed his down. He watched Otto sip slowly and carefully, tasting each individual drop.

“You’d better take it easy,” he warned. “Elsa might have no more trouble from you than bringing flowers every visiting day to the alcoholic ward.”

“No fear,” Blotto Otto growled into his empty glass. “I was weaned on this stuff. And, anyway, it’s the last drink I have until I dump her. That’s the way I’ve been figuring it, Nick: one drink to celebrate, then Elsa. I didn’t go through those seven years to mess myself up at the payoff.”

He set the glass down. “Seven years in one steaming hell after another. And before that, twelve years with Elsa. Twelve years with her pulling every dirty trick in the book on me, laughing in my face, telling me she was my wife and had me legally where she wanted me, that I was gonna support her the way she wanted to be supported and I was gonna like it. And if I dared to get off my knees and stand on my hind legs, pow, she found a way to get me arrested.

“The weeks I spent in the cooler, in the workhouse, until Elsa would tell the judge maybe I’d learned my lesson, she was willing to give me one more chance! And me begging for a divorce on my knees—hell, on my belly!—no children, she’s able-bodied, she’s young, and her laughing in my face. When she wanted me in the cooler, see, then she’s crying in front of the judge; but when we’re alone, she’s always laughing her head off to see me squirm.

“I supported her, Nick. Honest, I gave her almost every cent I made, but that wasn’t enough. She liked to see me squirm; she told me she did. Well, who’s squirming now?” He grunted deep in his throat. “Marriage—it’s for chumps!”

Crandall looked out of the open window he was sitting against, down through the dizzy, busy levels of Metropolitan New York.

“Maybe it is,” he said thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t know. My marriage was good while it lasted, five years of it. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t good any more, just so much rancid butter.”

“At least she gave you a divorce,” said Henck. “She didn’t take you.”

“Oh, Polly wasn’t the kind of girl to take anyone. A little mixed up, but maybe no more than I was. Pretty Polly, I called her; Big Nick, she called me. The starlight faded and so did I, I guess. I was still knocking myself out then trying to make a go out of the wholesale electronics business with Irv. Anyone could tell I wasn’t cut out to be a millionaire. Maybe that was it. Anyway, Polly wanted out and I gave it to her. We parted friends. I wonder, every once in a while, what she’s—”

There was a slight splashy noise, like a seal’s flipper making a gesture in the water. Crandall’s eyes came back to the table a moment after the green, melonlike ball had hit it. And, at the same instant, Henck’s hand had swept the ball up and hurled it through the window. The long, green threads streamed out of the ball, but by then it was falling down the side of the enormous building and the threads found no living flesh to take root in.

From the corner of his eye, Crandall had seen a man bolt out of the bar. By the way people kept looking back and forth fearfully from their table to the open doorway, he deduced that the man had thrown it. Evidently Stephanson had thought it worthwhile to have Crandall followed and neutralized.

Blotto Otto saw no point in preening over his reflexes. The two of them had learned to move fast a long time ago over a lot of dead bodies. “A Venusian dandelion bomb,” he observed. “Well, at least the guy doesn’t want to kill you, Nick. He just wants to cripple you.”

“That would be Stephanson’s style,” Crandall agreed, as they paid their check and walked past the faces which were just now beginning to turn white. “He’d never do it himself. He’d hire a bully-boy. And he’d do the hiring through an intermediary just in case the bully-boy ever got caught and blabbed. But that still wouldn’t be safe enough: he wouldn’t want to risk a post-criminal murder charge.