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ESCAPE PLUS

Ben Bova

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance lo real people of incidents is purely coincidental.

ESCAPE PLUS

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

49 West 24 Street

New York, N.Y 10010

First Tor printing: December 1984

Cover art by Joe Bergeron

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ISBN; 0-812-53212-0

CAN. ED.: 0-812-53213-

This book is dedicated to my Number-One Fan and good friend, David Rosenfield.

Contents

Forecast: The Worlds Modeler

Escape!

A Slight Miscalculation

Vince's Dragon

The Last Decision

Men of Good Will

Blood of Tyrants

The Next Logical Step

The Shining Ones

Sword Play

A Long Way Back

Stars, Won't You Hide Me?

FORECAST: THE WORLDS MODELER

It is called FORECASTS. It was created for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the generals and admiral who

head the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. It has cost more than a million dollars to

develop, and will cost still more before it is fully tested and operational.

FORECASTS is a computer model of the whole world. It is a highly complex program that contains

enormous amounts of data about global political trends, natural resources, and social and economic

factors, The Joint Chiefs will use FORECASTS to help them make the predictions that go into their Joint

Long Range Strategic Appraisal, in which the JCS evaluate what the world in general, and certain nations

in particular, will look like over the next thirty years.

Science fiction writers have been making such predictions for generations now, and because the

accuracy of the forecast is only as good as the quality of the information being used, the predictions of

science fiction writers have generally been better than those of anyone else's—including the complex

computerized "world models" of the scientists who call themselves futurists.

For example, futurists such as the late Herman Kahn have consistently missed the major turning points in

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recent history. No futurist predicted the Arab oil embargo of and the resulting panic of the energy crises

which depressed the economies of the industrialized nations for a decade. The Club of Rome's

much-heralded study, The Limits to Growth , failed utterly to understand that the Earth is not the only

body in the universe from which the human race can extract energy and natural resources. The

Presidential commission which produced Report on the Year 2000 was equally medieval in its view, and

failed even to see the vigorous growth of living standards in the small industrializing nations of the Far

East, nations such as Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Science fiction's record of predicting the future is much better. Atomic power, space flight, organ

transplants, population explosions, the changes in social mores that we now call "the sexual revolution,"

genetic engineering—all these changes in human capabilities were described in science fiction stories at

least thirty years before they took place in reality. What is more important, science fiction writers also

predicted the social consequences of such changes: the Cold War stalemate that has resulted from atomic

weapons; the urban sprawl that came from increased mobility and growing population; the breakdown of

traditional family values and morality that has accompanied the new sexual freedoms.

Why is it that science fiction writers have seen farther into the future than all others—and more clearly?

Is it because they are trained in the sciences? Hardly. Although many writers of science fiction have

degrees in the physical or social sciences, very few of them are actually practicing scientists. Isaac

Asimov, for example, has not engaged in scientific research for nearly three decades, despite his

doctorate in chemistry and his title of professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine.

Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, has no scientific training at all. Yet both Asimov and Bradbury are

world-class science fiction writers, and both have graced the literature with scores of powerful and

predictive stories.

The thing that makes a science fiction writer better at predicting the future than anyone else is not

scientific knowledge, although an understanding of science is very helpful, even necessary. Nor is it a

mystical, arcane extrasensory perception of the future. No writer that I know of claims to be in contact

with the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come.

The science fiction writer's secret can be told in two words: freedom and imagination .

The professional scientists who try to predict the future with computerized accuracy always fail because

they are required to stick to the facts . No futurist is going to predict that a semi-accidental discovery will

transform the entire world. Yet the invention of the transistor did just that: without the transistor and its

microchip descendants, today's world of computers and communications satellites simply would not exist.

Yet a futurist's forecast of improvements in electronics technology, made around 1950, would have

concentrated on bigger and more complicated vacuum tubes and missed entirely the microminiaturization

that transistors have made possible. Science fiction writers, circa 1950, "predicted" marvels such as

wrist-radios and pocket-sized computers, not because they foresaw the invention of the transistor but

because they intuitively felt that some kind of improvement would come along to shrink the bulky

computers and radios of that day.

The professional futurists labor under this enormous handicap; they are not allowed to consider the "wild

cards," the crazy things that can and usually do happen. They are restricted to making more-or-less

straight-line extrapolations of the facts as we know them today. Science fiction writers have the freedom

to use more than the facts. They can use their imaginations. They can ask themselves, "What would

happen if…?" and then set out to write a story that answers the question. They can use their knowledge

of the human soul—for that is what fiction is all about—not merely to describe the marvelous invention or

the strange discovery, but to portray how real people—you or I—might react to these new things.

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That is science fiction's great advantage, the freedom to employ human imagination to its fullest. The

science fiction writer is not required to be accurate, merely entertaining. Although the writer need not

have a professional knowledge of science, he or she should understand the basics well enough to know

what is impossible—and how to move at least one step beyond that limit. The rule of thumb in good

science fiction is that you are free to invent anything you like, providing no one else can prove that it

could never be. Even though physicists are certain that nothing in the universe travels faster than the

speed of light, they cannot prove that it is utterly impossible for a starship to circumvent that speed limit;

therefore science fiction writers can create interstellar dramas, with merely a slight bow to acknowledge

that their faster-than-light starships are using principles that were unknown in the 20th century. In creating

such stories about some future times and places, the writer often creates an inner reality that eventually

comes true.

You don't need a million-dollar computer program or a team of Pentagon scientists. All you need is that

strange and elusive quality called talent, plus the fortitude to work long and lonely hours, together with the

freedom to let your imagination roam where it will.

The stories in this collection are examples of how my imagination and creative freedom has led me to

build worlds that do not exist—yet. From an electronically guarded prison that could be built today to the

farthest ultimate reaches of interstellar space, these stories present eleven different answers to eleven

different phrasings of that question, "What would happen if…?" One of these tales, The Next Logical

Step , deals with the kind of computer that the Joint Chiefs of Staff might find themselves facing soon.

Another, A Long Way Back , was my very first published short story; it dealt, in a way, with the basic

factors of both the energy crisis that erupted a dozen years after the story was published and the

aftermath of a nuclear war—a subject very much in the forefront of everyone's thinking even today, a

quarter-century after the story was written.

Two of these tales are not really science fiction. One of them is a fantasy about a dragon, and the other

is a "straight" story about my favorite sport, fencing. Both of them come directly from experiences in my

younger years in South Philadelphia, that heartland of pop singers, steak sandwiches, and Rocky Balboa.

None of these tales has "come true" as yet, but that is not important. Each of them examines a reality of

its own. Each of them places real people in strange and challenging situations. Each of them tests the

human spirit in one way or another. Each of them presents a "world model" that forecasts a future that

might come to pass.

Ben Bova

West Hartford, Connecticut

ESCAPE!

We tell ourselves a lot of lies about prisons. The biggest lie is calling it "the criminal justice system;" it is

not a system, it has nothing to do with justice, and if there is anything criminal about it, it's the fact that

jails tend to make their inmates lifelong antisocial animals.

I started my writing career on newspapers, and spent a lot of those early years covering the police beat

in an upper-middle-class suburban area outside my native Philadelphia. As an investigative reporter (we

didn't know that term back in the Fifties, we just called it legwork) I spent a summer probing into the

problem of juvenile crime. The eventual result wasEscape!, which was published originally as a short

novel .

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Two other factors went into writing this story; both involved the idea of a "perfect" jail. One was the

notion that the lure of escape was the only thing that kept most inmates alive, especially the ones with

long or indeterminate sentences. I read somewhere about a prison chaplain saying that if the inmates truly

believed that they could never possibly escape from the jail they were in, they would go insane or commit

suicide. The other factor was the kind of idea that only a science fiction writer would think of: suppose

we made a jail that is as good as we can possibly imagine, a jail that actually works the way we good

citizens say we want our jails to work, a jail that helps its inmates to become honest, upright, tax-paying

citizens.

The result was the campus-like and absolutely escape-proof prison inEscape!, with its electronic sentries

and all-seeing computer , SPECS. But to make the prison work the way I wanted it to, there had to be a

human side to it. The machines can do only so much; the jail with its electronic marvels is merely a box in

which to hold prisoners. To make the jail work in a way that would transform those prisoners into

healthy, self-reliant, honest citizens required a human mind, a human soul, a human purpose. Thus Joe

Tenny entered the equation, and became the main force in the resulting story .

Joe is modelled very closely on a man I knew and worked with for several years. The real "Joe Tenny"

was a man of enormous talents and passions, a teacher, a scientist, a man who had worked himself too

hard for his own good. He died much too early. The world is poorer for that. A pale shadow of him lives

on in this story. That's not enough, but if this story shows you how we can use what's best in us to make

the world better, then Joe's vital spark of life is not completely extinguished.

Escape!, incidentally, has generated more mail from readers than any other single story I have ever

written. I credit "Joe Tenny's" indomitable spirit for that; he was the kind of man who made people feel

good about themselves .

CHAPTER ONE

The door shut behind him.

Danny Romano stood in the middle of the small room, every nerve tight. He listened for the click of the

lock. Nothing.

Quiet as a cat, he tiptoed back to the door and tried the knob. It turned. The door was unlocked.

Danny opened the door a crack and peeked out into the hallway. Empty. The guards who had brought

him here were gone. No voices. No footsteps. Down at the far end of the hall, up near the ceiling, was

some sort of TV camera. A little red light glowed next to its lens.

He shut the door and leaned against it.

"Don't lem 'em sucker you," he said to himself. "This is a jail."

Danny looked all around the room. There was only one bed. On its bare mattress was a pile of clothes,

bed sheets, towels and stuff. A TV screen was set into the wall at the end of the bed. On the other side

of the room was a desk, an empty bookcase, and two stiff-back wooden chairs. Somebody had painted

the walls a soft blue.

"This can't be a cell… not for me, anyway. They made a mistake."

The room was about the size of the jail cells they always put four guys into. Or sometimes six.

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