A Better Mantrap

IN THE HEREAFTER HILTON

The apartment was neat, stylish and comfortable – not at all like a machine designed for killing people.

For a few seconds after the entrance door had locked itself behind him, Renfrew stood perfectly still, taking stock of the place, trying to identify the most likely sources of death. The kitchen – always the most complicated room in any habitat – was one area that obviously had to be avoided. Every particle of food and drop of liquid was suspect in case poisons had been administered; the appliances could have been wired in such a way as to electrocute the unwary user; and the bright-lettered canisters could be bombs which would explode on removal of their lids. Even the simple act of opening a cupboard door might release a cloud of instant-acting gas into his face, and one startled intake of breath would be enough to…

If you want to stay alive, Renfrew thought, keep out of the kitchen.

From his position near the entrance he could see into the bathroom, and that also looked dangerous – too many chromed fittings which could spring bad surprises. He was going to survive the mandatory seven days in the apartment, of that much he was sure, but to do so he would have to be fantastically careful. The best plan, the one he had already decided upon, was to make himself as comfortable as possible in the centre of the living room floor and to remain there until the seven days were up. It would not be easy or pleasant – the matter of bodily functions alone would see to that – but it was a straightforward choice between life and death, and Renfrew much preferred being alive.

He walked into the living room and checked it out against his requirements. It measured roughly ten by ten, had blue wall-to-wall carpeting, and was furnished with a good-quality settee, easy chairs and occasional tables. Several original paintings, restful abstracts featuring the exact blue of the carpet, adorned the cream-coloured walls. The room could have belonged to a youngish, intelligent, not-excessively-trendy person living just about anywhere between New York and Los Angeles – except for two atypical features. One was the complete absence of windows, and the other was the display tube built into the wall above the artificial fireplace.

On the screen, in pulsing amber sans serif lettering, were two words – JURY OUT.

Renfrew examined the room critically and decided at once that the largest table, positioned near the middle of the floor, would have to be moved against one of the walls to give him the clear central space he needed. When the room armed itself against him, as it was practically certain to do, he was not going to risk even the most fleeting contact with any of the artefacts it contained. For all he knew, every piece of furniture in the apartment would begin to ooze contact poison as soon as the jury returned the verdict of guilty, and he wanted to be sure he would not roll over in his sleep and touch something.

The table was surprisingly heavy when he tried to move it and for a moment Renfrew feared it was anchored to the floor. He changed tactics, pushing instead of lifting, and this time the table slid fairly easily, creating deep furrows in the carpet. When it had come to rest against the wall, he stepped back with widespread arms and gauged the size of the area he had cleared. It appeared ample for his needs.

This seems a shade too easy, he thought, his confidence faltering. Nobody knew what percentage of condemned murderers actually lasted out the week – it was the practice, for humane reasons, to whisk survivors off to colony worlds in total anonymity and secrecy – but if the system could be beaten merely by camping out in the centre of a room would they not modify it? Was there a chance that the carpet itself could become toxic? Or that rapiers zipped upwards through the floor during the night?

No, that wouldn’t be fair, Renfrew decided, his fears abating somewhat. That way the apartment would be nothing more than an execution chamber, and the whole point of the Capital Punishment Reform Act of 2061 had been that it removed the awful foreknowledge of death – the feature of earlier systems to which humanitarians had most strongly objected. There had to be some prospect of getting through the week alive, and if others had done it then so could he. It was simply a matter of intelligence, determination and self-control.

And of lasting for seven days without a drink of water.

The prison micropedia had been annoyingly imprecise about how long a man could survive on zero liquid intake. Some of the quoted authorities had avoided giving any estimate at all, and others had been content to state that death would occur after seven to ten days. The spread, Renfrew supposed, was due to factors such as the size, weight and general health of the subject and the rate of water loss from the tissues, and in that respect he was doing all he could to tip the balance in his favour. He was naturally pudgy around the middle, and throughout the four days of his trial had loaded all his food with salt and had drunk copiously of tea, coffee, milk and water. His tendency to retain fluids, something he had often bemoaned in the past, had enabled him to increase his body weight by approximately ten pounds – equal to a one-gallon reservoir of life-giving liquid.

That alone would probably be sufficient to ensure his survival, but Renfrew had gone further. Knowing in advance that he would be stripped of all personal possessions before being installed in the apartment, he had taken time after breakfast to spray most of his skin with an antiperspirant which, fortunately, was quite odourless. He suspected that its effectiveness would fade rather quickly, but by closing his pores and preventing evaporation for even part of a day it was giving him that extra edge in the battle for life. Only two more measures remained to be taken.

Renfrew glanced at the screen above the fireplace, checking that the jury were still deliberating. He had been in the apartment less than five minutes, but his defence had gone so seriously awry that he was half-prepared for a verdict to be reached in record time. Fortesque, the young state-appointed attorney, had tried to make capital from the fact that the store security guard shot by Renfrew had himself been indicted, only a year earlier, for the man-slaughter of an unarmed kid who had tried to run off with a tray of gold rings. The proposal had been that Renfrew was defending himself against a trigger-happy zealot, but the members of the jury appeared not to have been impressed. It had been obvious to Renfrew that, to a man, they were in favour of trigger-happy zealots and would have been pleased to employ teams of them to safeguard their own property. At that point he had begun thinking very hard indeed about ways of surviving for a week in – to give the apartment one of its more popular labels – the Hereafter Hilton.

The first of the remaining precautions was to reduce evaporation of bodily moisture even further by turning the heat down. Renfrew located the thermostat and adjusted it to its lowest level. He then went into the kitchen, filled a tumbler with water and began sipping it with the intention of increasing his fluid reserves. The notion of filling all available vessels and laying in a week’s supply of water was tempting, but he put it aside as being too dangerous. Any microscopic bubble in a glass could be a poison container to be opened by remote control as soon as the jury had pressed thirteen buttons and fed their votes into the computerized system. He had almost finished the glass of water when a low but insistent chiming sound filled the apartment. He set the tumbler down, went back into the living room and saw that the wording on the screen had changed.

It now said: JURY VOTING.

“Vote early and vote often,” Renfrew said aloud in jocular tones, trying to neutralize the spasms of alarm he had felt on realizing that the time for theorizing was over, that his very existence was now being laid on the line. He took a cushion from a chair and set it in the middle of the floor, then hesitated, frowning. A cushion was just as much an artefact as a microwave oven, just as capable of being booby-trapped. He skimmed it back on to the chair and squatted on the carpet, his face turned towards the screen as he waited for the final announcement. In addition to his fear he could feel powerful undercurrents of excitement, and it came to him that the provisions of the 2061 Act had been successfully implemented in the present system. He was about to be sentenced to death – yet he had absolutely no sense of imminent doom.

The inevitable reaction to the steady increase in violent crime had begun in the last quarter of the twentieth century with one state after another reintroducing the death penalty. By the middle of the twenty-first century capital punishment had become almost universal, coast to coast, and the moral dilemma facing the legislators had grown in proportion. How could one condemn killing on the one hand while going on taking human lives with the other? Variations in the actual method of execution had been tried, but the principal objections to legalized killing had remained the same – it was totally inhuman to tell a man exactly when and how he was going to die, then leave him to sweat out his time, counting off the weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. And if the State was inhuman, could its subjects be expected to be otherwise?

It was basically a question of how to be cruel in a kindly way – and a workable answer had come along in 2061. The lengthy, soul-destroying delays of earlier systems had been eliminated by direct implementation of the majority vote of a thirteen-man jury, and the dreadful certainty of death had been replaced by the challenge of a week in the Apartment. Not only were the exact time and method of execution decently shrouded in mystery – there was a ray of hope that the grim event could be avoided altogether. And that made all the difference.

Analysing his own feelings, Renfrew found that he was tense, alert, stimulated and – above all – confident that he was going to beat the system. There remained only a trace of furtive, niggling doubt. His idea seemed foolproof, but it had been rather too easy to conceive. It had, in fact, been the first scheme to blossom in his mind, and he knew perfectly well that he was anything but a genius – if he could come up with a successful plan anybody could do it. Did that mean that nobody but the occasional moron ever paid the supreme penalty? Or was there some factor he had overlooked?

There was another chiming sound and the message on the screen was replaced by a new set of words scribed in raw crimson: VOTING COMPLETED – AWAIT VERDICT.

On the lower part of the display a sweep hand began remorselessly erasing a sixty-second clock. Renfrew shifted to a more comfortable posture, making sure he was in the exact centre of the cleared area of carpet. I’m going to be all right, he thought. All I’ve got to do is stay put for seven days.

He was glancing around the room, assuring himself that nothing could go wrong, when his gaze picked out two vertical cracks in the skirting board of the wall opposite him. It looked as though a small flap-type door had been built into the base of the wall. He stared at the door, feeling oddly threatened as he tried to guess its purpose. It was nothing to do with ventilation, too awkwardly positioned to be an electrical system access hatch, too small to be a cupboard… Renfrew’s eyes widened as he noticed the slightest trace of wheel marks fanning out across the carpet from the flap and understanding blossomed in his mind.

Robotic cleaners!

The apartment was as immaculate as only an automated cleaning system could make it, which meant that at night when the occupants were asleep in bed silent little machines came out of the walls and scavenged every speck of dirt. But he wasn’t going to be in bed! He was going to be laid out on the floor while the busy robots came nosing and nuzzling around him, and any one of them could be capable of killing him in a dozen different ways. How fast did they travel? How many were there? Could he avoid them?

Renfrew looked at the clock. It had devoured most of itself. Only twenty seconds were left until the apartment declared war on him.

He half-rose, his face turning towards the kitchen. Was there time to run in there, snatch up the lightweight table and get back with it? Would he be safe squatting on top of the table? What if…?

His hands fluttered to his mouth as he heard the final chime which signalled the jury’s verdict. He glanced involuntarily in the direction of the screen, then froze, his chin sagging with incredulity as he read the three words electronically emblazoned across the face of the tube. VERDICT: NOT GUILTY.

The breath left his body in a noisy, quavering sob. He pushed a hank of hair away from his forehead as though giving himself a better view of the glowing words might change their import. The message remained the same. Against all the odds, his defence counsel had succeeded in carrying the jury. He was a free man!

Renfrew got to his feet, shaking his head in wonderment, suddenly conscious of how much he had been dreading the seven-day ordeal that had lain ahead. He took a last look at the apartment, gave a low chuckle which expressed relief and an almost insupportable feeling of happiness, then strode to the entrance door with a buoyant tread, keyed up for his first taste of liberty in many months.

The doorknob did not turn when he grasped it. Instead, it fired a cloud of poison through the skin of Renfrew’s palm, a poison which was so swift-acting that he had no time to realize he had been tricked by executioners who, in their determination to be humane, were not above telling a little white lie.