Fool's Run (v1.1) Read Free Page B

carpet was spotless. There was no dust even between the console keys. The air smelled strange. Jase, distracted, found himself taking short, tentative sniffs. What odor was it?
    Ward 14BL. No incidents .
    Ward 15AD. No incidents .
    Ward 14CL. Accident report, Ward Officer P. C. Lawson. Prisoner D186521C1: superficial hand burns from contact with cell shield. Treated Infirmary Ward F. Returned to cell 5:47 GTE.
    Nothing. The recycled, purified air smelled of nothing. “Christ,” he muttered, and Nils’ fingers stilled on his noiseless keyboard.
    “Sir?”
    “Nothing.” He tapped at his own keyboard, scanned a list of security officers and dock guards for the next shift. Then a report on incoming cruisers and their prisoners. Then he okayed a request for two cruisers in the L1 vicinity, and his meal-menu for the next day. Then he read Nils’ report. Nothing. Nothing.
    “Good. Good.” He wanted to say: “I’m so bored I could eat carpet.” But in the face of Nils’ frustrations it seemed cruel. So he said instead, “I’m going to try another transfer request.”
    Nils’ habitually serious expression relaxed. “Where to this time?”
    “I don’t know. The south pole.” He pushed the message-key. Halpren , the screen said.
    Again: Halpren . Then: FWGBI . “Who called from FWGBI ?”
    “Darrel Collins.”
    “Mm. He wants us to throw some lifer into solitary and stick pins under his nails for information, I bet. Or it’s a court-gambit with some temp.”
    “You could ask him,” Nils said mildly, and Jase smiled.
    “I could. I will.”
    Nilson, his own shift finished, didn’t move. For a moment the air was tranquil. No lights burned in it, no voices caused tremors. Jase moved to the front of his desk, sat on it. Nils lounged back in his air-chair, sipping a vitamin-shake. He was a lean, rangy, red-haired man whose brain was focused on the Underworld twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t understand Jase’s lack of enthusiasm, but his respect was genuine, and Jase trusted him more than any other man he knew.
    “The south pole…” Nils murmured. “Penguins. Tourists.”
    “Beats me why you like this place so much.”
    Nils shrugged. “It’s not all administrative. We’re the Command Station for all the off-world patrol stations. I guess I like pushing buttons, sending cruisers out, getting them back with lawbreakers, sending them back to Earth, reading the trial reports, getting prisoners back again, putting them where they belong—When I was a kid I had the cleanest desk in school. There wasn’t a speck of dust on my rock collection. There were no fuzz balls under my bed.”
    “Is there a point to this?”
    “You asked. I like things tidy. All the bad guys in their cells, and me without dust, grime or blood on my hands. I had enough of that Earthside.”
    Jase grunted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d send you to New Horizon for observation.”
    Nils tapped his temple. “That’s just it. It’s patrol work by the brain. Battling the forces of evil by computer.”
    “A game.”
    “I always did like those old video war-games. If I had your job—” He stopped, shaking his head. “I’ll never have your job.”
    “I’d give it to you for breakfast if it were my choice.”
    “I know.” He swallowed the last of his shake, brooding without rancor. “I watch you. You know that? I watch you a lot. To see why you’re sitting there and I’m here. You know what I think it is?”
    “Some idiot in L. E. Central.”
    “No. Well, maybe that too. But it’s something I don’t have. A feel for when to cut through the rules. An instinct that tells you how to get to the heart of things. You used it as a patroller, but you can’t use it here, that’s why you can’t stand the job. But that’s why you got the job. Because this place could easily be run by someone with a microchip for a brain; it could almost be run by robots. But it’s the Underworld, the only isolated, self-sufficient, armed