"Nine years!" said a man's stifled voice. It reached Gavin, vaguely distorted like an image through wavy glass. "My orbit, it's been nine years!"
Through the open window came a wailing chant of imported black laborers from Terra.
"But I didn't do it. You can't take me back now." The man's face was sweating and yellow-white. His fingers twitched. He spread them nervously on the desk top. "I'm proscribed. Jordon was a stockholder in Amalgamated Plastic. They'll kill me! Even in the Lunar Corrective Colony, they'll kill me."
"Sorry."
The cold unfeeling tone of his own voice shocked Gavin.
"But it's been nine years," the man persisted as if the time meant anything. Gavin had been sent out by the T.I.S. to get him. Twenty years wouldn't have made any difference.
"Even if I was guilty, I've proved I don't need corrective psychiatry. I'm not an incorrigible."
"Look," Gavin interrupted. "I've got a job. I don't know whether you're guilty or not and I don't care. I don't even blame you for killing Jordon, if you did...."
Gavin's sense of strangeness increased. This had all happened once before during his first year in the T.I.S. This man had been accused of murdering a minor official of Amalgamated Plastic and had fled. After nine years the T.I.S. had learned that he was at a remote trading post on Ganymede. Gavin had been sent to fetch him back for trial.
Only Gavin wasn't dreaming all this now. He was re-living it!