"George Zebrowski - Brute orbits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

The first asteroid was excavated to provide a maintenance level near the outer
crust. Ship docks were fitted at the far ends. Sophisticated audio/video
devices were installed to monitor the criminal colony, and social scientists
were given access to these panoptic observation points. It was only a matter
of time before the inmates learned that they were under constant observation,
even in their most private moments, in the name of knowledge that would
advance the ideals of criminal justice. There was a rash of suicides. The
whole story got out through the guards, which led planners to conclude that
there was still too much contact
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between the inmates and the outside. Some psychologists concluded that
curiosity about the lawbreakers produced an irresistible need for
surveillance.
The first breakout from the Orbits was accomplished through a break-in to the
service level, the taking of hostages, and a crash landing of a shuttle in the
middle of Lawrence, Kansas, burning a large section of the city. Public outcry
and discussion was split between sympathy for all who died and vigilante
hatred of the surviving convicts who escaped into the state and caused even
more havoc until they were recaptured or killed.
The Lawrence disaster led directly to the planning of timed orbits for the
rocks. As one by one Earthside prisons began to fail for reasons of economy,
inadequate psychological management, and planning that seemed immune to
improvement, the increasing cost of technology in the orbits also came under
fire. There was too much technology and no end to the costs. Lunar prisons
were hotbeds of corruption and possible disasters if the inmates ever seized
the lunar mass launchers and hurled objects at the Earth or any of its
planetary or orbital colonies.
Timed orbits would need no guards, no rules to be obeyed, no trusteesтАФhence
there would be no relationships between guards and inmates to go wrong, no
points of contact with
the outside until the habitat returned. It was this infinitely permeable
interface with the societies around each prison that was most feared; too much
passed back and forth, despite immense efforts, in the form of orders for
illegal commerce, executions, and legal strategies. The prisons were schools
for new criminals, who graduated from a system of natural selection that
tested them with violence and hatred, and made them ready, not for life
outside, but for supermax incarceration.
Once a habitat was inserted into its cometary orbit, all costs and cruelties
of previous penal servitude would end for the duration.
To insert a rock into a cometary Sun orbit of any desired period required only
a specific addition to its already existing orbital velocity. And from timed
orbits it was only a small, tempting step to a miscalculation of the period,
either as an honest mistake or as a politically motivated action to rid the
world of its professional high achievers, the pitiless "Alcatraz Class
Criminals," into an open orbit, so-called, that would never bring the prison
back. Long periods or open orbits also replaced the distasteful penalty of
capital punishment. Life without even the physical possibility of parole
effectively abolished official killing.
"No more executions of the innocent!"
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