Read Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 for Free Online Page A

seven o'clock to let Jimmy know he had assumed hall duty.
    To Jimmy's dismay, Cook stayed to watch the prisoner—upright in his chair, eyes shut, hands at either side.
    Cook wanted to talk. "We've got nothing to do most of the time, but we keep up our end. This can't last much longer. That's what we figure. Not even the government of the United States wants to waste this much money on one guy.... But that's why you're here, right?" Cook had trouble holding still, dancing slightly from foot to foot. Or perhaps the unnatural stillness of the prisoner made him physically anxious. "You're shuttin' this whole thing
down."
    "Am I?"
    "What, you're not? Come on, you're just drawing up some final report. Sitting here just watching, making some kind of
evaluation.
They gonna Guantanamo his ass? Or send him to Egypt or someplace, let
them
work him over? Or they gonna send him back to Afghanistan?"
    "What makes you think he's from Afghanistan?"
    Cook twisted his face, then flexed his neck as if a change of angle were necessary. "What, you think he looks American?"
    Jimmy didn't know how to answer.
    Cook righted himself. "You should check out his eyes. There's a zoom on this screen. They're kind of orange."
    "Zoom," Jimmy said. He took a step toward the multicolored control panel.
    "I mean, it doesn't matter. Dude's a terrorist, right? Probably Muslim?" Jimmy blinked slowly at Cook's twitchiness. "No offense if
you're
one, but, he's gotta be Muslim, right?"
    Resisting the urge to formulate a dismissive answer, Jimmy settled for ignoring Cook. He pictured the scene in the exercise yard. The prisoner went to his knees. He touched his head to the ground.
    "Hm," Jimmy said, his questions too many, a swelling cloud. Cook gave him a nod before leaving.
    One desk lamp shone. Bed at a right angle to the screen, using the little space available at the room's far end, Jimmy lay on his side to watch the other man. He knew blacking out his own room would make him feel as if he and Methusaleh shared a space. Later, they would share a space of his own making. Not yet.
    When lights-out came for the prisoner at ten, Jimmy continued watching. As the hall lights never went out, the yellow rectangle in the prisoner's door glowed all night. Jimmy's door had an interior shutter he had closed. Eventually, he left the bed and turned off both the audio and video. The wall went gray. He hesitated, then switched off the lamp.
    In Jimmy's dream, the prison cell was brighter than he remembered. Methusaleh sat cross-legged in the other room. Voices skittered along the walls. The voices might have been leaking in from the outer world, but in his dream, Jimmy somehow understood that minute beings occupied the room's edges. Spectral, Jimmy moved unencumbered and unnoticed through the cell: swooping close to the prisoner's face, which seemed yellow before deepening to brown like tobacco juice; rising to the ceiling to inspect whatever the prisoner might have found of interest in its speckled surface; hovering above the tidy, unvisited bed. Then he observed the prisoner from the front once more and noticed that the man was suspended several feet above the floor.
    Jimmy woke, saw the gray wall, concluded that the prisoner had floated away, and went back to sleep.
    Cook showed up again in the middle of the night, just after Jimmy had awakened and jotted his dreams in his notebook.
    "I saw you were up," Cook said from the doorway.
    Jimmy frowned at the door's small window, still sealed, and Cook pointed his weapon in a sweeping motion toward the ceiling. "Cameras."
    Jimmy hadn't thought. "Of course." Of course the people in security were watching him as well. What else was there to watch at this hour?
    Quarles knocked, though he opened the door without waiting for Jimmy to respond. Onscreen, the old man stood facing into the observation room, crookedly upright.
    "How'd crashing in here work for you?"
    It took Jimmy a moment to answer; he'd been staring back at the prisoner