William Tenn: Time in Advance

Twenty minutes after the convict ship landed at the New York Spaceport, reporters were allowed aboard. They came boiling up the main corridor, pushing against the heavily armed guards who were conducting them, the feature-story men and byline columnists in the lead, the TV people with their portable but still heavy equipment cursing along behind.

As they went, they passed little groups of spacemen in the black-and-red uniform of the Interstellar Prison Service walking rapidly in the opposite direction, on their way to enjoy five days of planetside leave before the ship roared away once more with a new cargo of convicts.

The impatient journalists barely glanced at these drab personalities who were spending their lives in a continuous shuttle from one end of the Galaxy to the other. After all, the life and adventures of an IPS man had been done thousands of times, done to death. The big story lay ahead.

In the very belly of the ship, the guards slid apart two enormous sliding doors—and quickly stepped aside to avoid being trampled. The reporters almost flung themselves against the iron bars that ran from floor to ceiling and completely shut off the great prison chamber. Their eager, darting stares were met with at most a few curious glances from the men in coarse gray suits who lay or sat in the tiers of bunks that rose in row after sternly functional row all the way down the cargo hold. Each man clutched—and some caressed—a small package neatly wrapped in plain brown paper.

The chief guard ambled up on the other side of the bars, picking the morning’s breakfast out of his front teeth. “Hi, boys,” he said. “Who’re you looking for—as if I didn’t know?”

One of the older, more famous columnists held the palm of his hand up warningly. “Look, Anderson: no games. The ship’s been almost a half-hour late in landing and we were stalled for fifteen minutes at the gangplank. Now where the hell are they?”

Anderson watched the TV crews shoulder a place for themselves and their equipment right up to the barrier. He tugged a last bit of food out of one of his molars.

“Ghouls,” he muttered. “A bunch of grave-happy, funeral-hungry ghouls.” Then he hefted his club experimentally a couple of times and clattered it back and forth against the bars. “Crandall!” he bellowed. “Henck! Front and center!”

The cry was picked up by the guards strolling about, steadily, measuredly, club-twirlingly, inside the prison pen. “Crandall! Henck! Front and center!” It went ricocheting authoritatively up and down the tremendous curved walls. “Crandall! Henck! Front and center!”

Nicholas Crandall sat up cross-legged in his bunk on the fifth tier and grimaced. He had been dozing and now he rubbed a hand across his eyes to erase the sleep. There were three parallel scars across the back of his hand, old and brown and straight scars such as an animal’s claws might rake out. There was also a curious zigzag scar just above his eyes that had a more reddish novelty. And there was a tiny, perfectly round hole in the middle of his left ear which, after coming fully awake, he scratched in annoyance.

“Reception committee,” he grumbled. “Might have known. Same old goddam Earth as ever.”

He flipped over on his stomach and reached down to pat the face of the little man snoring on the bunk immediately under him. “Otto,” he called. “Blotto Otto—up and at ’em! They want us.”

Henck immediately sat up in the same cross-legged fashion, even before his eyes had opened. His right hand went to his throat where there was a little network of zigzag scars of the same color and size as the one Crandall had on his forehead. The hand was missing an index and forefinger.

“Henck here, sir,” he said thickly, then shook his head and stared up at Crandall. “Oh—Nick. What’s up?”

“We’ve arrived, Blotto Otto,” the taller man said from the bunk above. “We’re on Earth and they’re getting our discharges ready. In about half an hour, you’ll be able to wrap that tongue of yours around as much brandy, beer, vodka and rotgut whiskey as you can pay for. No more prison-brew, no more raisin-jack from a tin can under the bed, Blotto Otto.”

Henck grunted and flopped down on his back again. “In half an hour, but not now, so why did you have to go and wake me up? What do you take me for, some dewy, post-crime, petty-larceny kid, sweating out my discharge with my eyes open and my gut wriggling? Hey, Nick, I was dreaming of a new way to get Elsa, a brand-new, really ugly way.”

“The screws are in an uproar,” Crandall told him, still in a low, patient voice. “Hear them? They want us, you and me.”

Henek sat up again, listened a moment, and nodded. “Why is it,” he asked, “that only space-screws have voices like that?”

“It’s a requirement of the service,” Crandall assured him.

“You’ve got to be at least a minimum height, have a minimum education and with a minimum nasty voice of just the right ear-splitting quality before you can get to be a space-screw. Otherwise, no matter how vicious a personality you have, you are just plain out of luck and have to stay behind on Earth and go on getting your kicks by running down slowpoke ’copters driven by old ladies.”

A guard stopped below, banged angrily at one of the metal posts that supported their tier of bunks. “Crandall! Henck! You’re still convicts, don’t you forget that! If you don’t front-and-center in a double-time hurry, I’ll climb up there and work you over once more for old-time’s sake!”

“Yes, sir! Coming, sir!” they said in immediate, mumbling unison and began climbing down from bunk to bunk, each still clutching the brown-paper package that contained the clothes they had once worn as free men and would shortly be allowed to wear again.

“Listen, Otto.” Crandall leaned down as they climbed and brought his lips close to the little man’s ear in the rapid-fire, extremely low-pitched prison whisper. “They’re taking us to meet the television and news boys. We’re going to be asked a lot of questions. One thing you want to be sure to keep your lip buttoned about—”

“Television and news? Why us? What do they want with us?”

“Because we’re celebrities, knockhead! We’ve seen it through for the big rap and come out on the other side. How many men do you think have made it? But listen , will you? If they ask you who it is you’re after, you just shut up and smile. You don’t answer that question. Got that? You don’t tell them whose murder you were sentenced for, no matter what they say. They can’t make you. That’s the law.”

Henck paused a moment, one and a half bunks from the floor. “But, Nick, Elsa knows! I told her that day, just before I turned myself in. She knows I wouldn’t take a murder rap for anyone but her!”

“She knows, she knows, of course she knows!” Crandall swore briefly and almost inaudibly. “But she can’t prove it, you goddam human blotter! Once you say so public, though, she’s entitled to arm herself and shoot you down on sight—pleading self-defense. And till you say so, she can’t; she’s still your poor wife whom you’ve promised to love, honor and cherish. As far as the world is concerned—

The guard reached up with his club and jolted them both angrily across the back. They dropped to the floor and cringed as be snarled over them: “Did I say you could have a talk-party? Did I? If we have any time left before you get your discharge, I’m taking you cuties into the guardroom for one last big going-over. Now pick them up and put them down!”

They scuttled in front of him obediently, like a pair of chickens before a snapping collie. At the barred gate near the end of the prison hold, he saluted and said: “Pre-criminals Nicholas Crandall and Otto Henck, sir.”