"Andy, you have to let this go," Jenny told him quietly, a week later. "The truth is, most of those men would have been dead anyway, within a year or two. Luff targeted all of the sickly, all of the old, anyone with an infectious disease, anyone with a heart condition, anyone with cancer, anyone with emphysema, anyone with a really serious blood pressure problem, anyone who was diabetic, anyone who was psychotic—anyone he thought was weak at all. You saw it. He had his office piled high with the medical records. He even had everyone on Death Row murdered, probably figuring they'd be more trouble than they were worth."
"I know that. We also found his notebook where he made the calculations. So many dead, so much food saved—and then, so help me, he filled four pages calculating whether keeping a sick man alive instead of a healthy one would be cost-effective in terms of food, figuring that a healthy man needs to eat more. And came up with the conclusion that he'd always be ahead if he thinned the herd—that's the expression he used in his notes—by working from the bottom up.
"I also know that, in his sick and twisted way and certainly not because he gave a damn about them, Luff probably saved as many lives of Indians out there as he took inside the prison. Probably a lot more. Whatever else happens, we won't be spreading AIDS and hepatitis and half a dozen other diseases in this new world. Not now."
He fell silent. In the hopes it might lighten his spirits, Jenny said: "And we won't be spreading smallpox, either. If I remember right, that was the big killer after the New World was discovered by Columbus. Not because of Luff, but because we'd pretty much eradicated it anyway. There hadn't been a case of smallpox anywhere in the world in years."
Andy shook his head. "I know all that, Jenny. And it doesn't make any difference. Not to me. My job was to be a guard commander. I might have taken a man to be executed, but I didn't pass the sentence and I didn't carry it out. And until the sentence was carried out, by lawfully appointed persons, my job was to protect society from that man and protect him as well."
He wiped his face with a big hand. He'd been doing that a lot, these past few days. "And there was one of those men on Death Row that most of us thought was probably going to be exonerated and released soon. Once the lab report on the DNA evidence came in. Leland Jefferson. Quiet, soft-spoken, spent fifteen years on Death Row waiting for one appeal after another. Never budged from his claim to be innocent—and, privately, I eventually decided he was. The truth is, we all liked him, after a while."
They'd never found Leland Jefferson's head. When Andy finally thought to inquire, the Boomers told him Jefferson was one of the men whose bodies they'd incinerated in those early days. He was just ashes, now, slowly spreading across the world of the Cretaceous.
"Andy, let it go."
A few minutes went by, as they sat together on a log just outside the prison. By now, the area around Alexander was quite safe. In the course of scouring the area for escaped convicts, Griffin and his Cherokees also reported any dangerous-looking animals they spotted. Kershner and his men would respond immediately. They carried modern rifles as backup, but they always fired the first volley with the muskets.
Hulbert was right about that. It remained to be seen how the muskets would do against something the size of a tyrannosaur or an allosaur. But those were few and far between, and none had been spotted within two miles of the prison. Against the smaller predators they did encounter, one volley of .69 caliber bullets was enough. Certainly enough to take them down. The rifles were only used to finish the kill, if needed.
Eventually, Jenny sighed. "All right. I know you well enough to know you probably won't let it go. Not ever, at least somewhere in your mind, till the day you die. But would it help any if you held me, in the meantime?"
"Sure would."
"Then do it. Start right now, and never stop so long as we're both alive."