Free Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition by L. Neil Smith Page B

work without further comment, but I spoke again. “I meant to ask about that. You did not have my reasons for hating the Bailiff. I realize he was about to shout for help, but why—”
     
    “Constitution! I’d planned to fry the scum whether he made a peep or not!” Lucille answered cheerfully, tightening some adjustment at her weapon’s muzzle-end, “That’s standard policy with us—for his kind.”
     
    I must have goggled.
     
    Rogers stepped in: “Lucille’s standard policy, she means. Still, there’s something to be said for that, too. It’s a reliable method of measuring how civilized an individual—or an entire planet—really is. Savage cultures encourage torturers. Merely barbaric ones tolerate them, sometimes torture them back in revenge. While a truly advanced culture—”
     
    “Attempts to rehabilitate them?” I asked, beginning to feel that possibly I understood this fellow. The Vespuccian educational system warns everybody against the few like him at home, overrationalizing, sentimental—
     
    “Just another word for torture,” Rogers replied evenly, jerking my assessment of him out from under me, “Or a subtle variation on it. No, we kill them, as Lucille says, like any other vermin, swiftly and humanely. And it’s also lots cheaper than rehabilitation or any other alternative.”
     
    “A plasma-gun under the armpit,” Lucille added before I could readjust, “simply does wonders for the local rate of cultural advancement.”
     
    Rogers chuckled, “Not to mention underarm odor!”
     
    Suppressing a grin of his own, Couper grunted, wrapped the burlap back around the sleeping Lieutenant’s real bandage, fiddling with the temperature-adjusting lump at the edge of the unconscious officer’s robe.
     
    “Corporal, if I let this conversation go any further without ... ” He stopped, started up again: “Son, bloodthirsty comments to one side, we’re basically a scientific exploration team, assigned to study this garbage-dump of a planet. Other questions—and answers, do I make myself clear, Lucille?—had better wait until we get where we’re going.”
     
    Lucille stuck her tongue out but remained silent.
     
    “Which is where, scientifically speaking?” As I watched, the girl reholstered her weapon somewhere underneath her robe. Rogers began putting his gunsmithing tools away in a fabric roll, took the feed-bags from the animals’ faces, tossed them into the cart beside the Lieutenant.
     
    “That, Corporal, is a pretty good example of a question that’ll have to wait,” Couper replied, “Anyway, doing something is better than just being told about it. Saddle up, scientists, we’ve got miles to make!”
     
    -3-
     
     
     
    Thus it was back to the same plodding journey as before.
     
    Only this time, there were certain differences.
     
    I sat up on the end of the wagon, having had the little control panel on my own dressing examined, the burlap cover drawn back over it. All of my lights had been green. Except for the negligible weight of the thing—the burlap on the outside weighed more—plus an occasional surprising deep healing twinge, my broken foot felt good as new. The—Earthians?—did nothing to discourage me from walking on it.
     
    Of course they did nothing to discourage me from doing anything else, either, including lying down beneath the wheels of the moving cart, or blowing my brains out. (Although they did not offer to lend me a pistol.) The subject of parole had not arisen again. They did not seem to care, now, whether I escaped or not. They simply assumed that I would come along with them meekly. They were right about that, too: wherever they were headed had to be a lot better than where I had been.
     
    But now, at least, they talked to me, Also to one another, joking, arguing, even answering more questions that I sneaked in from time to time, almost as if trying to catch up for their earlier stoic silence, the purpose of which remained unexplained.