on him, but we're checking with One," the first man said.
"Maybe we should have picked him up, but we've been a little cautious since we got that senator from South Africa last month. We can pull him in now, if you say so, sir."
The man behind the desk answered, "No, don't bother him unless you have to. Even if he's not a VIP, he'd probably make a squawk. Besides, it won't hurt morale to let 'em know we trust 'em a little. Good work, Balik, in spotting him."
Balik saluted and left. The other man got up and walked across the office, stopping to stare at a chart which covered one wall.
It was a detailed diagram of Moon Station Seven. To the ordinary observer, Station Seven was like all the other mining stations on the back side of the Moon. However, coming in through the Customs, one might note the large number of uniformed C'C men, and to an experienced observer, there would also be apparent a large number of men in civilian clothes, whose penetrating eyes as they watched the throng would give them away as plainclothes Criminology Corpsmen. The rest of the crowd was much the same as one would find anywhere on the Moon, a scattering of spacemen, a few businessmen, many miners, and an occasional prospector.
There was a difference, however. The successful looking man who sat next to you in a restaurant at Seven, for instance. He might have been one of the most successful embezzlers in the business not too long ago, or the prospector in his battered moonsuit, with his pack of rock samples. He might be an ex-murderer. This was the famous Tappan Project. It was set up for the purpose of rehabilitating criminals, and the majority of the inhabitants of the Station were ex-criminals with an amazing variety of crimes to their credit.
It was Tappan's project from beginning to end, and he was responsible for making it work. It was based on the idea that instead of casting the criminal out from society, you could achieve the same results by simply eliminating from their environment the elements of society that caused them to commit crimes. Tappan knew that many criminals were ordinary individuals, except for a rebellious trait in their character which kept them from seeing the wrong in obeying the rules that governed the rest of society. If they were removed to some selected environment where there would be no rules for them to break, they could lead useful, ordinary lives.
As he stared at the map he thought about the long years spent in development of the idea and getting it accepted. He had drawn up his plans, spending years among criminals, in prisons and in the underworld, gathering facts. Then he had presented them to the lawmakers. He had explained that "reform" was practically meaningless to this type of criminal, since the same state of mind that kept them from seeing
