Cristopher Stasheff - Escape Velocity

“And if he doesn’t, half an hour here should do the trick. But Shacklar’s a masochist!”

“Who else could survive in a job like this?” Dar looked around, surveying the “battlefield.”

“Things have quieted down enough. Let’s go.”

He shouldered the rope and trudged off across the plain. Sam stayed a moment, then followed, brooding.

She caught up with him. “I hate to admit it—but you’ve really scrambled my brains.”

Dar looked up, surprised. “No offense taken.”

“None intended. In fact, it was more like a confession.”

“Oh—a compliment. You had us pegged wrong, huh?”

“Thanks for not rubbing it in,” she groused. “And don’t start crowing too soon. I’m not saying I was wrong, yet. But, well, let’s say it’s not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“The dregs of society,” she snapped.

“Well, we are now. I mean, that’s just a matter of definition, isn’t it? If you’re in prison, you’re the lowest form of social life.”

“But people are supposed to go to prison because they’re the lowest of the low!”

“ ‘Supposed to,’ maybe. Might even have been that way, once. But now? You can get sent here just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Isn’t that stretching it?”

“No.” Dar’s mouth tightened at the corners. “Believe me, it’s not.”

“Convince me.”

“Look,” Dar said evenly, “on a prison planet, one thing you don’t do is ask anybody why he’s there.”

“I figured that much.” Sam gazed at him, very intently. “I’m asking.”

Dar’s face went blank, and his jaw tightened. After a few seconds, he took a deep breath. “Okay. Not me, let’s say—just someone I know. All right?”

“Anything you say,” Sam murmured.

Dar marched along in silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “Call him George.”

Sam nodded.

“George was a nice young kid. You know, good parents, lived in a nice small town with good schools, never got into any real trouble. But he got bored with school, and dropped out.”

“And got drafted?”

“No—the young idiot enlisted. And, since he had absolutely no training or experience in cargo handling, bookkeeping, or stocking, of course he was assigned to the Quartermaster’s Corps.”

“Which is where you met him?”

“You could say that. Anyway, they made him a cargo handler—taught him how to pilot a small space-tug—and he had a whale of a time, jockeying cargo off shuttles and onto starships. Figured he was a hotshot Navy pilot, all that stuff.”

“I thought he was in the Army.”

“Even the Army has to run a few ships. Anyway, it was a great job, but after a while it got boring.”

Sam closed her eyes. “He wanted a change.”

“Right,” Dar said sourly. “So he applied for promotion—and they made him into a stock clerk. He began to go crazy, just walking around all day, making sure the robots had put the right items into the right boxes and the right boxes into the right bins—especially since they rarely took anything out of those bins, or put in anything new. And he heard the stories in the mess about how even generals have to be very nice to the sergeants in charge of the routing computers, or the goods they order will ‘accidently’ get shipped halfway across the Sphere.”

“Sounds important.”

“It does, when you’re a teenager. So George decided he was going to get promoted again.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Sam said quietly. “The young man’s supposed to find himself in the Army, and study and work hard to make something better out of himself.”

“Sure,” Dar said sourly. “Well, George did. He knew a little about data processing, of course, but just the basics they make you learn in school. He’d dropped out before he’d learned anything really useful—so now he learned it. You know, night classes, studying three hours a day, the rest of it. And it worked—he passed the test, and made corporal.”

“Everything’s fine so far. They assign him a computer terminal?”

Dar nodded. “And for a few months, he just did what he was told, punched in the numbers he was given. By the end of the first month, he knew the computer codes for every single Army platoon and every single Navy ship by heart. By the end of the second month, he knew all their standard locations.”

“And by the end of the third month, he’d begun to realize this wasn’t much better than stocking shelves?”

“You got it. Then, one day, the sergeant handed him some numbers that didn’t make sense. He’d been on the job long enough to recognize them—the goods number was for a giant heating system, and the destination code was for Betelgeuse Gamma.”

“Betelgeuse Gamma?” Sam frowned. “I think that one went across my desk once. Isn’t it a jungle world?”

Dar nodded. “That’s what George thought. He’d seen such things as insecticides and dehumidifiers shipped out there. This heating unit didn’t seem to make sense. So he ran to his sergeant and reported it, just bursting with pride, figuring he’d get a promotion out of catching such an expensive mistake.”

“And the sergeant told him to shut up and do what he was told?”

“You have worked in a bureaucracy, haven’t you? Yeah, ‘Ours not to question why, ours but to do and fry.’ That sort of thing. But. George had a moral sense! And he remembered the scuttlebutt about why even generals have to treat supply sergeants nicely.”

“Just offhand, I’d say his sergeant was no exception.”

“Kind of looked that way, didn’t it? So George did the right thing.”

“He reported the sergeant?”

“He wasn’t that stupid. After all, it was just a set of numbers. Who could prove when they’d gotten into the computer, or where from? No, nobody could’ve proven anything against the sergeant, but he could have made George’s next few years miserable. Reporting him wouldn’t do any good, so George did the next best thing. He changed the goods number to one for a giant air-cooling system.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “Oh, no!”

“Ah,” Dar said bitterly, “I see you’ve been caught in the rules, too. But George was an innocent—he only knew the rules for computers, and assumed the rules for people would be just as logical.”

Sam shook her head. “The poor kid. What happened to him?”

“Nothing, for a while,” Dar sighed, “and there never were any complaints from Betelgeuse Gamma.”

“But after a while, his sergeant started getting nasty?”

“No, and that should’ve tipped him off. But as I said, he didn’t know the people-rules. He couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting. So, after a while, he put a query through the system, to find out what happened to that shipment.”

Sam squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes. Not quite as good as waving a signal flag to attract attention to the situation, but almost. And everything was hunky-dory on Betelgeuse Gamma; the CO there had even sent in a recommendation for a commendation for the lieutenant who had overseen the processing of the order, because that air-cooling plant had already saved several hundred lives in his base hospital. And before the day was out, the sergeant called George into his office.”

“A little angry?”

“He was furious. Seems the lieutenant had raked him over the coals because the wrong order number had been filed—and against the sergeant’s direct order. George tried to explain, but all that mattered to the sergeant was that he was in trouble. He told George that he was remanding him to the lieutenant’s attention for disciplinary action.”