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canteen.”
    “Really?” Gladys primped at her lemonly-tinted toupee. “Do you really think so?”
    “Absolutely,” said Will. “But don’t tell him that I told you.”
    “No, I won’t.”
    Will twiddled his computer rat and viewed more boring Rothko. Dull dull dull it was, and Will remained as worried.
    He worried until it was time to go home. Then he went off home, still worrying.
    And he did have good cause to worry. Crime was hardly commonplace in these days after the day after tomorrow. And the reason for this was the almost superhuman efficiency of the Department of Correctional Science.
    A one hundred per cent clean-up rate.
    In former unenlightened days there had been a “police force”, armed officers of the law who pursued and arrested malcontents. These were “brought to justice” and then housed in prisons. This had proven to be a most inefficient system. Many malcontents managed to evade capture. Others, although captured, evaded prison, through the intercession of barristers working on their behalf. Others, who had actually ended up in prison, had their sentences cut for “good behaviour” and returned once more to a life of crime.
    In the year 2050, however, a visionary appeared on the scene in the shape of a certain Mr Darius Doveston. Mr Doveston was a geneticist. In fact it was Mr Doveston who had first formulated the Retro drug. Mr Doveston’s theory was that criminality was inherited. Dishonest parents passed on their dishonesty to their offspring, who inherited it through their genes and through “learning by example”. Mr Doveston proposed a cure for crime. It would take fifty years, he said, but when the fifty years were up, there would be no more crime – because there would be no more criminals.
    Mr Doveston’s solution to the crime problem was simplicity itself. And history does record that the simple solution (dramatic as it sometimes must be) is often the most effective.
    His solution was the compulsory sterilisation of all first-time offenders. If villains couldn’t breed, reasoned Mr Doveston, then they couldn’t breed more villains.
    It was, of course, a stroke of pure genius.
    But there are always those with motives of their own who will find something to complain about, even with such a stroke of genius as this. There was a vast public outcry. Sterilisation was some kind of punishment, went this outcry, but not much of one. Those sterilised villains would inevitably continue with their villainy. In fact, embittered as they might well be by their sterilisation, they might even broaden the scope of their villainy. And having to wait fifty years for a crime-free society? That was far too long!
    Mr Doveston gave the matter some further thought.
    Perhaps he had been a trifle hasty. He reconsidered and then drew up a plan, which pleased everyone, with the possible exception of the criminal classes.
    Mandatory death penalty for first-time offenders.
    Mr Doveston submitted his proposal in the form of a Private Member’s Bill to the House of Commons. Within two weeks of it being passed and put into the statute books, the crime figures virtually halved. Within two years, crime was all but non-existent in the British Isles.
    Which is why Will had good cause to worry.
    And had Will known what was presently on the go at the Department of Correctional Science, he would have had even more cause to worry. But for quite another reason.
     
    The DOCS was housed only a short tram ride from the Tate, just across the long poisoned Thames, in a magnificent black structure of obsidian and tinted glass, rising a mere three hundred storeys, fashioned to resemble an old time policeman’s helmet. Most of its floors were now given over to recreational areas, casinos, corporate whorehouses and shopping malls. The actual DOCS occupied the three hundredth floor. It was run by a team of five men, one of whom was a token woman.
    The head of the department, the Chief, was a black man by the name of