Read Online Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh - Free Book Online Page B

Damon said bitterly, “who’d balk at boarding one of Mazian’s ships, stationers who’d swear an honest man’s survival wasn’t that likely. But I’d reckon you had a soft passage, didn’t you? Enough to eat and no worries about the air? The old spacer-stationer quarrel: leave the stationers to suffocate and keep her own deck spotless. But you rated differently. You got special treatment.”
    “It wasn’t all that pleasant, Mr. Konstantin.”
    “Not your choice either, was it?”
    “No,” the answer came hoarsely. Damon suddenly repented his baiting, nagged by suspicions, evil rumor of the Fleet. He was ashamed of the role in which he was cast. In which Pell was. War and prisoners of war. He wanted no part of it.   “You refuse the solution we offer,” he said. “That’s your privilege. No one will force you. We don’t want to endanger your life, and that’s what it would be if things are what you say. So what do you do? I suppose you go on playing midge with the guards. It’s a very small confinement. Did they give you the tapes and player? You got that?”
    “I would like—” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”
    Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.   “If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”
    “Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.” “I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or—” “I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”
    “Don’t they test—when they process for Adjustment?”
    Damon looked at Jacoby.
    “He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”
    “We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”
    “Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?” “Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”
    “A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.
    “I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”
    “It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.
    “I want to know why he wants it”
    “I want out!”
    Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.   “Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands.   And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability—” “I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the