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that it does.
    "Good afternoon, Mr Wheems. You'll never know who I am."
    Back in the bedroom, the wall-mounted comms unit briefly sparked as an EMP erased any signal-resonance trace of the call.
    In the bathroom, the receiver-bead dropped to the floor, where it would subsequently be quite thoroughly whisked away by Mister Hand.

THREE
     
    " We are for our own people. We want to see them happy, healthy and wise, drawing strength from co-operation with the peoples of other lands, but also contributing their full share to the general well-being. Not a broken-down pauper and mendicant, but a strong, living partner in the progressive advancement of civilisation. "
    - William Gallacher
    The Case for Communism
     
    The Chief Judge hated the sleep machine with a passion. To the extent that she allowed herself special privileges of any kind as a result of her position, she had dedicated the time of any number of Tek Division techs to overhaul the unit dedicated to her private use, tweak its processes to match the particular biological processes of her body, but in the end nothing seemed to do much good.
    Sleep machines were really intended to be used by those Judges who had started out in life as engineered clones. A number of gene-sequences had been patched in at gestation and switched on in them, allowing them to mesh with the sleep machine processes more or less seamlessly.
    The units were not recommended for sustained and regular use by Judges born in the more naturally human manner. The combination of slo-time to effectively compress six hours into as many minutes, the force-ejection of glucotic nutrients and rejuve-compounds to counteract the slo-time and the stutter-slits simulating REM seemed, increasingly, to leave the Chief Judge feeling simultaneously wired, enervated and subtly wrong inside.
    Regular physicals still showed her to be in the best of health; it was all quite probably psychosomatic - but that, when you came right down to it, was the problem.
    Chief Judges of Mega-City One did not exactly have the best of track records when it came to the subject of mental stability. There was something about the job that seemed to turn what had appeared to be the very best initial choice, comprehensively, and in some cases spectacularly, nuts.
    Check out the famous case of Chief Judge Cal, who had promoted a small goldfish to the rank of Senior Judge and installed it as one of his advisors.
    The Chief Judge had the uneasy suspicion that half the Justice Department was living in fear of the day she decided to instigate a Mounted Division and started channelling the spirit of Catherine the Great.
    She clambered out of the pod and racked it shut behind her. A standby light pulsed balefully on its monitor display.
    She rolled her sleeve down over the already-healing welts that the force-injectors had left, pulled on a gauntlet and her private chambers, rubbing absently at her inner arm.
    She wished she could make time for a quick shower, but the uniform of a Judge, even the Chief Judge, was not designed to get out of and back into that easily. Fortunately, the uniform was, to a certain extent, self-cleaning.
     
    Judge Dredd was waiting for her in her Audience Chambers, alone. Almost any other Judge, even the head of the SJS - especially the head of the SJS - would have been accompanied by a guard detail, but the Chief Judge had known Dredd for years. She trusted him implicitly.
    Of course, she thought, one of the things he could be trusted on was to say and do things that she didn't necessarily agree with.
    He was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out through the big observation windows at the Mega-City spread below.
    The Hall of Justice was the tallest structure in Mega-City One, rising to the centre-point of the ion-plasma dome that, effectively, sealed the city and its inhabitants from an atmosphere contaminated in any number of ways, by any number of wars. Or even wars.
    The ionization-dome was in