A Reasonable World

8

Randy Geller and Yvonne Barlow lived in a comfortable apartment in the perm section of CV. Perm was laid out almost like a small town; the corridors had street names, and there was a park and a town square. A lively group of young people circulated in the neighborhood, and somebody threw a party every weekend.

The Ottenburgs were one of the couples Geller and Barlow saw frequently. Steve was an engineer who worked in the machine shop, and Andrea was a kindergarten teacher. One evening at a party Geller took Andrea aside and said, “Hey, how’s it going?”

“Not too bad. How about you?”

“Could be worse. Listen, can you get me some spray paint, preferably green?”

“Sure. One can?”

“No, say about twenty?”

“Twenty cans? What are you going to do with it?”

“A special project. Very hush-hush.”

She looked at him seriously. “All right. I’ll bring it home a few cans at a time, all right?”

“Sure. And maybe some green markers—twenty or thirty?”

“Okay. Sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re up to?”

“If you don’t know, you can’t tell. Do you have to sign requisitions or anything?”

“I’m supposed to, but everybody just takes it from the storeroom.”

“That’s fine.”

The next night, after Yvonne and the child were asleep, he got up quietly and dressed in slacks, tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. He got a spray can out of the closet and put it in the sweatshirt pocket. He left without waking Yvonne, went out the back way into the service alley and emerged into the main street a block away. Only the nightlights were on, but the dim blue light was enough to make out the spy-eyes and their wiring scabbed to the walls near the ceiling—little fisheye lenses, one about every fifty feet. Geller did a dry run and timed it; it took him forty seconds to do the six hundred feet between Pacific and Oak. Were the spy-eyes tracking him, even in this dim light? More likely they were infrared sensitive, but that would give a blurred image anyhow.

The echo of his footsteps died away. The street was still empty; nobody had come out to see what he was up to. Geller took the spray can out of his pocket and wrote on the wall, “THE GREEN HORNET STRIKES.” He aimed the spray at the nearest lens. After a couple of seconds an alarm bell began to ring. Geller sprayed that, too, and after a moment it stopped. He raced along the street, hitting one lens after another. Then another alarm bell. He dropped the spray can in a trash receptacle and went home.

“You did that, didn’t you?” Yvonne asked.

“Yup.”

“What’s this Green Hornet supposed to be?”

“1 don’t know, a comix hero, maybe. It’s a story my dad used to tell when he thought I wasn’t listening. This first-grade teacher happens to notice one day there’s a puddle of pee in the cloakroom. So she calls all the kids together, and she tells them she’s going to turn out the lights and leave the room for five minutes. While she’s gone, whoever made the puddle is supposed to mop it up, and that’ll be the end of it, okay? So she goes and comes back, and now there are two puddles of pee in the cloakroom, and a note that says, ‘The Green Hornet strikes again.’ ”

In the lab, he concocted a colorless hygroscopic goo that would turn liquid and green in about three hours. At five o’clock in the morning, when the snack bar was still dark, he went in, climbed on a table with his bucket, and painted goo in a stripe six inches wide and five feet long at the top of the end wall. At breakfast three hours later, he was rewarded by the sound of laughter and cheering. The green goo, appearing out of nowhere, was dripping in slow gouts down the wall. There were shouts of “The Green Hornet!” and more cheers.

During the next few days Geller left spray cans and green markers in inconspicuous places throughout the Main Deck. By Friday evening they were all gone.

After dinner on Tuesday, the face of Captain MacDonald Trilling appeared in all the holos. He was the chief of the Wackenhuts, the contract security people. “You know,” he said with his meaningless smile, “we have talked before about keeping CV a pleasant place for all of us to live. Well, what does that mean, a pleasant place to live? I suppose it means a place where we can all be comfortable and get everything we need. And it means a place where we can have stimulating experiences. By that I mean all kinds of things—social meetings, parties, entertainments, and so on. Well, lately we’ve been having a new kind of entertainment—the Green Hornet.

“I want to talk to you about that. Where do we draw the line between things that are entertaining and things that are dangerous? The Green Hornet, whoever he or she may be, has been doing some things that endanger all of us. For instance, blinding the security cameras in the corridors. That’s just a nuisance, in the sense that it takes somebody’s time to clean the paint off, but what if they ruined the lenses? Then there would be no way to detect and punish crime in the corridors. And believe me, it’s happened before. Violent assault, rape—do you want that to happen again? Talk to your friends. If you know anybody who is involved in these games, see if you can explain to them what they’re risking. That’s all. Have a good evening.”

Security people came and took away all the green markers in storerooms, the green paint, green tape, green construction paper. Two days later, the camera lenses in the corridors were sprayed with blue paint. On the wall was smeared, THE BLUE HORNET STRIKES AGAIN!

At the staff meeting the next day Melanie Kurtz said, “I’m absolutely opposed to any room searches or anything of that kind. If we create an oppressive atmosphere for the grownups, it can’t help affecting the children.”

“Which ones are the children?” Cunningham wanted to know.

“Well, they’re behaving childishly, of course. It’s probably just a few people, not more than a dozen or so out of the whole detainee population. Teenagers, maybe. But the rest of the detainees seem to be enjoying it. If we do anything of a disciplinary or retaliatory nature, we’re going to see some resentment.”

“We can’t let this go on. What do you suggest, Melanie?”

“Let them have their fun. They’ll get tired of it.”

Two Wackenhut guards, Ronald Guest and Daryl Singlaub, entering the cafeteria where they usually had their lunch, heard a peculiar noise behind them: first a single “Oink,” barely audible, then a low-voiced chorus. “Oink. Oink. Oink.” When they turned around, the noises stopped; the diners looked at them innocently. As soon as they started walking again, the noises resumed.

Singlaub turned and said, “Look, people, we’re just doing our job. How about a little courtesy?”

No one replied. When they went to the steam table, the chorus resumed. The unsmiling food handler gave them their dishes; one of them tipped and spilled gravy on Guest’s hand.

Guest wiped his hand with a paper napkin. The two young men took their trays to a table against the wall where they could see the length of the room, but as soon as they sat down, from left and right came the chorus of “Oink.” They stood it for five minutes, then got up and walked out, pursued by a chorus of “Oink” that grew louder and louder.

“Some of you,” Trilling’s voice said on the loudspeakers, “have been making insulting noises to our security people. You must realize—”

In the mall and the corridors, oinking sounds were heard, almost drowning out his voice.

“—as sensitive to this kind of abuse as you would be yourselves. All we’re asking is a little cooperation and courtesy. We have to work this out together. Ask yourselves—”

“Oink. Oink. Oink.”

“—this were happening to you. I know that when you think it over—”

“Oink. Oink. Oink.”

“Thank you.”

Trilling called in the chairperson of the Detainee Council, the body that theoretically made and enforced those rules for detainees that were not made administratively from above. The chairperson was a ruddy man in his sixties named Davidson. “What do you want me to do, tell them not to say ‘Oink’? They want to say ‘Oink,’ they’ll say it.”

“No, no, Mr. Davidson, I just want to consult with you and get your suggestions. What can we do to improve relations with the detainees?”

“The prisoners, you mean.”

“No, you’re not prisoners—I mean, you’re not here because of any crime.”

“You think that makes it better?”

“If that’s your attitude—”

“Oink,” said Davidson.

Keeping a low profile, Trilling withdrew his people from routine patrols and ordered them to take their meals in a cafeteria that had been made off-limits to detainees. The result was an increase in graffiti. Scurrilous poems began to appear on the walls. One of them went:

Trilling sent out night crews to clean the walls, and bided his time. One afternoon there was a food fight in a cafeteria, and the manager phoned for assistance. Trilling refused to send anyone, and he persuaded the Maintenance director not to let his people clean up the room. After two days the detainees cleaned it up themselves. Then things went a little better, but morale among the Wackenhuts was not what it had been.