"Hey, hold on!" the man next to Conroy shouted. "What's goin' to happen to us?"
Major Hawes smiled politely. "You'll be put to work in the jetroom of the Satellite, making sure our noble orbiting wheel stays warm and cozy. You'll be feeding radioactives to the converter. You'll be doing a lot of jobs robots could do twice as well, and after a year or so of it your bodies will start to rot and you'll fall apart and you'll get the deaths you deserve."
Hawes chuckled. "There'll be guards making sure you don't shirk. Inside, now—and your predecessors will show you what you're to do."
The chains fell away. In here, no chains were needed. Dimly, Dave Conroy rubbed his forehead and wondered what he had done to condemn himself to this living hell.
"What kind of place is this?" he asked the man at his right, as a gleaming cupralloy door irised open before them.
"Is your mind snapping, buddy? You can't have forgotten so soon."
"I—I—it's all so hazy—"
"Hazy? It's simple, friend. You and me are four-time losers, like all these other guys. We got life imprisonment—but we volunteered for satellite duty instead. It's a quick death—only a year or so instead of a lifetime behind bars. And since there ain't no execution any more, we took it."
No—no—part of Conroy's mind protested. I didn't volunteer. I never was in jail ... except that drunken jetting once, and that was just overnight. How—why—?
"That can't be right," he said. "I'm not a criminal."