“Don’t you see?” asked Derec pleadingly. “That’s why I had to tell the police it was you. We can’t have death rays! The police can’t let anybody go free who knows how to make them! This is a wonderful world, but there are lots of crackpots. They’ll do anything! The police daren’t let it even be suspected that death rays can be made! That’s why you weren’t charged with murder. People all over the planet would start doing research, and sooner or later would come up with what you discovered. With such a tool in the hands of the crackpots, life would be cheap, indeed! For the sake of our civilization your secret has to be suppressed—and you with it. It’s terrible for you, Bron, but there’s nothing else to do!”
Hoddan said dazedly:
“But I only have to put up a bond to be released!”
“The justice,” said Derec tearfully, “didn’t name it in court, because it would have to be published. But he’s set your bond at fifty million credits! Nobody could raise that for you, Bron! And with the reason for it what it is, you’ll never be able to get it reduced!”
“But anybody who looks at the plans of the receptor will know it can’t make death rays!” protested Hoddan blankly.
“Nobody will look,” said Derec tearfully. “Anybody who knows how to make it will have to be locked up. They checked the patent examiners. They’ve forgotten. Nobody dared examine the device you had working. They’d be jailed if they understood it! Nobody will ever risk learning how to make death rays—not on a world as civilized as this, with so many people anxious to kill everybody else. You have to be locked up forever, Bron. You have to!”
Hoddan said inadequately:
“Oh.”
“I beg your forgiveness for having you arrested,” said Derec in abysmal sorrow, “but I couldn’t do anything but tell…”
Hoddan stared at his cell wall. Derec went away weeping. He was an admirable, honorable, not-too-bright young man who had been Hoddan’s only friend.
Hoddan stared blankly at nothing. As an event, it was preposterous, and yet it was wholly natural. When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked. The high brass on the Power Board considered that everything was moving smoothly. There was no need to consider new devices. Hoddan’s drawings and plans had simply never been bothered with, because there was no recognized need for them. And when he forced acknowledgement that his receptor worked, the unwelcome demonstration was highly offensive in itself. It was natural, it was inevitable, it should have been infallibly certain that any possible excuse for not thinking about the receptor would be seized upon. And a single dead man found near the operating demonstrator… Now, if one assumed that the demonstrator had killed him, why one could react emotionally, feel vast indignation, frantically command that the device and its inventor be suppressed together—and then go on living happily without doing any thinking or making any other change in anything at all.
Hoddan was appalled. Now that it had happened, he could see that it had to. The world of Walden was at the very peak of human culture. It had arrived at so splendid a plane of civilization that nobody could imagine any improvement; unless a better tranquilizer could be designed to make the boredom more endurable. Nobody can want anything he doesn’t know exists, or that he can’t imagine to exist. On Walden nobody wanted anything, unless it was relief from the tedium of ultra-civilized life. Hoddan’s electronic device did not fill a human need only a technical one. It had therefore, no value that would make anybody hospitable to it.
And Hoddan would spend his life in jail for failing to recognize this fact soon enough.
He revolted immediately. He wanted something! He wanted out. He set about designing his escape. He put his mind to work on the problem, simply and directly. And this time he would not make the mistake of furnishing other people with what they did not want. He took the view that he must seem, at least, to give his captors and jailers and—as he saw it—his persecutors, what they wanted.
They would be pleased to have him dead, provided their consciences were clear. He built on that as a foundation.
Very shortly before nightfall he performed certain cryptic actions. He unraveled threads from his shirt and put them aside. There would be a vision-lens in the ceiling of his cell, and somebody would certainly notice what he did. He turned on a light. He put the threads in his mouth, set fire to his mattress, and lay down calmly upon it. The mattress was of excellent quality. It would smell very badly as it smoldered.
It did. Lying flat, he kicked convulsively for a few seconds. He looked like somebody who had taken poison. Then he waited.
It was a long time before his jailer came down the corridor, dragging a fire hose. Hoddan had been correct in assuming that he was watched. His actions had been those of a man who’d anticipated a possible need to commit suicide, and who’d had poison in a part of his shirt for convenience. The jailer did not hurry, because if the inventor of a death ray committed suicide, everybody would feel better. Hoddan had been allowed a reasonable time in which to die.
He seemed impressively dead when the jailer opened his cell door, dragged him out, removed the so-far-unscorched other furniture, and set up the fire hose to make an aerosol fog which would put out the fire. He went back to the corridor to wait for the fire to be extinguished.
Hoddan crowned him with a stool, feeling an unexpected satisfaction in the act. The jailer collapsed.
He did not carry keys. The system was for him to be let out of this corridor by a guard outside. Hoddan took the fire hose. He turned its nozzle back to make a stream instead of a mist. Water came out at four hundred pounds pressure. He smashed open the corridor door with it. He strolled through and bowled over a startled guard with the same stream. He took the guard’s stun-pistol. He washed open another door leading to the courtyard. He marched out, washed down two guards who sighted him, and took the trouble to flush them across the pavement until they wedged in a drain opening. Then he thoughtfully reset the hose to fill the courtyard with fog, climbed into the driver’s seat of a parked truck, started it, and smashed through the gateway to the street outside. Behind him, the courtyard filled with dense white mist.
He was free, but only temporarily. Around him lay the capital city of Walden—the highest civilization in this part of the galaxy. Trees lined its ways. Towers rose splendidly toward the skies, with thousands of less ambitious structures in between. There were open squares and parkways and malls, and it did not smell like a city at all. But he wasn’t loose three minutes before the communicator in the truck squawked the all-police alarm for him.
It was to be expected. All the city would shortly be one enormous man trap, set to catch Bron Hoddan. There was only one place on the planet, in fact, where he could be safe. And ironically, he wouldn’t have been safe there if he’d been officially charged with murder. But since the police had tactfully failed to mention murder, he could get at least breathing-time by taking refuge in the Interstellar Embassy.
He headed for it, bowling along splendidly. The police truck hummed on its way until the great open square before the embassy became visible. The embassy was not that of a single planet, of course. By pure necessity every human-inhabited world was independent of all others, but the Interstellar Diplomatic Service represented humanity at large upon each individual globe. Its ambassador was the only person who Hoddan could even imagine as listening to him, and that because he came from off-planet, as Hoddan did. But he mainly counted upon a breathing-space in the embassy, during which to make more plans as yet unformed and unformable. He began, though, to see some virtues in the simple, lawless, piratical world on which he had spent his