“That’s right, sir. With the pre-criminal discount for serving the sentence in advance, seven years is the most you can get for murder.”

“Bet you’re glad we’re not back in the days of capital punishment, eh? That would make the whole thing impractical, wouldn’t it? Now, Mr. Henck—or pre-criminal Henck, I guess I should still call you—suppose you tell the ladies and gentlemen of our television audience: What was the most horrifying experience you had while you were serving your sentence?”

“Well,” Otto Henck considered carefully. “About the worst of the lot, I guess, was the time on Antares VIII, the second prison camp I was in, when the big wasps started to spawn. They got a wasp on Antares VIII, see, that’s about a hundred times the size of—”

“Is that how you lost two fingers on your right hand?”

Henck brought his hand up and studied it for a moment. “No. The forefinger—I lost the forefinger on Rigel XII. We were building the first prison camp on the planet and I dug up a funny kind of red rock that had all sorts of little humps on it. I poked it, kind of—you know, just to see how hard it was or something-and the tip of my finger disappeared. Pow—just like that. Later on, the whole finger got infected and the medics had to cut it off.

“It turned out I was lucky, though; some of the men—the convicts, I mean—ran into bigger rocks than the one I found. Those guys lost arms, legs—one guy even got swallowed whole. They weren’t really rocks, see. They were alive—they were alive and hungry! Rigel XII was lousy with them. The middle finger—I lost the middle finger in a dumb kind of accident on board ship while we were being moved to—”

The announcer nodded intelligently, cleared his throat and said: `But those wasps, those giant wasps on Antares VIII—they were the worst?”

Blotto Otto blinked at him for a moment before he found the conversation again.

“Oh.