Уильям Тенн (William Tenn)Time in Advance by William Tenn
Twenty minutes after the convict ship landed at the New York Spaceport, reporters were allowed aboard. They came boiling up the main corridor, pushing against the heavily armed guards who were conducting them, the feature-story men and byline columnists in the lead, the TV people with their portable but still heavy equipment cursing along behind.
As they went, they passed little groups of spacemen in the black-and-red uniform of the Interstellar Prison Service walking rapidly in the opposite direction, on their way to enjoy five days of planetside leave before the ship roared away once more with a new cargo of convicts.
The impatient journalists barely glanced at these drab personalities who were spending their lives in a continuous shuttle from one end of the Galaxy to the other. After all, the life and adventures of an IPS man had been done thousands of times, done to death. The big story lay ahead.
In the very belly of the ship, the guards slid apart two enormous sliding doors—and quickly stepped aside to avoid being trampled. The reporters almost flung themselves against the iron bars that ran from floor to ceiling and completely shut off the great prison chamber. Their eager, darting stares were met with at most a few curious glances from the men in coarse gray suits who lay or sat in the tiers of bunks that rose in row after sternly functional row all the way down the cargo hold. Each man clutched—and some caressed—a small package neatly wrapped in plain brown paper.
The chief guard ambled up on the other side of the bars, picking the morning’s breakfast out of his front teeth. “Hi, boys,” he said. “Who’re you looking for—as if I didn’t know?”
One of the older, more famous columnists held the palm of his hand up warningly. “Look, Anderson: no games. The ship’s been almost a half-hour late in landing and we were stalled for fifteen minutes at the gangplank. Now where the hell are they?”
Anderson watched the TV crews shoulder a place for themselves and their equipment right up to the barrier. He tugged a last bit of food out of one of his molars.
“Ghouls,” he muttered. “A bunch of grave-happy, funeral-hungry ghouls.” Then he hefted his club experimentally a couple of times and clattered it back and forth against the bars. “Crandall!” he bellowed. “Henck! Front and center!”