Free Worlds by Joe Haldeman Page A

left me a tape of Monday’s session, and said he’d make another one tonight). Hawkings had checked with a friend in the New York Police Department, who said the man was probably responsible for five rape-murders over the past two years. They wouldn’t know for sure unless he regained consciousness, to be questioned.
    Dr. Schaumann came in after dinner (Benny had told him why I wasn’t in class) and probably did me more good than the therapist ever would. He was all grandfatherly and comforting, but at the same time he was armed with ruthlessly pragmatic philosophy. You were lucky enough to survive, but now you have to realize that it’s within the man’s power, living or not, to keep hurting you for the rest of your life, unless you vigorously deny him access. It’s like being struck by lightning (something I’d never thought to worry about); you’re not responsible for it happening, but you
are
responsible if afterward you’re afraid to go outdoors. No amount of rationalization or sympathy from others can alter the fact of your responsibility. He even kissed me. His mustache smells of pipe tobacco.
    They let me stay up to watch the elections. Markus was reelected as Policy Coordinator and announced that he planned to step down after five years. Good thing; fifteen years is plenty. Wouldn’t do to have his coordinator-elect die of old age, in office.
    The new Engineering Coordinator-elect is a woman named Berrigan, a park service engineer. I vaguely remember her name. Didn’t study the candidates this time, since I knew I’d be on Earth. My new floor rep to the Privy Council is Theodore Campbell, whom I had for a disastrous course in algebra some ten years ago.
    Yesterday I wrote that I wanted to go home. I guess Schaumann talked me out of it, obliquely. I won’t let this planet beat me.
    28 Sept.    Back at the dormitory. Everyone is so solicitous, I feel like getting a disguise.
    The rapist is dead. By judicial order. The police traced down his address and searched his flat. They found five vials containing five scraps of dried flesh which matched the parts excised from the victims of “Jack the Raper,” ashe was called by one subliterate journal. The DNA matched the victims’. Since he had once been convicted of a sex crime, and was under indictment for attacking me, the police were able to get a court order reducing his MedicAid status to Class C. So they pulled the plug on his life support system, saving the State electricity, twice. I feel confused about it. Could he have been cured? If he were, would I want him walking free? If they had given me the plug, would I have pulled it? I suppose I would.
    Maybe it’s the State disposing of him as casually as swatting a fly. Maybe it’s just that he never knew he was being punished for hurting me.
    There were long and interesting letters from Daniel and John waiting for me. The discovery of CC material on the Moon might be one of the pivotal events in Worlds history. Mudball news never mentioned it.

15
Black gold on the Moon
    O’Hara:
    I’m sure Dan has written you about this, but maybe not in much detail. He’s probably the busiest person in the section right now, and loving it.
    You know the polar-orbiting Lunar Prospector satellite? Probably not; it hasn’t done anything new in half a century. It was built to analyze absorption spectra from the lunar surface, to draw a map of mineral deposits on the Moon. One thing we looked for, hoping against hope, was a carbonaceous-chondritic “infall”; a CC meteorite remnant that we could mine for carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen.
    We didn’t really expect to find one, because the temperature of the explosion when a meteorite hits the Moon is enough to decompose a CC rock. All of the precious stuff evaporates into space.
    Well, they decided it was time to refurbish the Prospector, since we have much more delicate sensing and analysis tools now. Technically, it belongs to Devon’s World, but since it was