One knows by historical conjecture what happened to the prison and the nearby city. But even toward the close of the Twenty-First Century, the most optimistic would not claim that humankind has advanced beyond the need for prisons, and something drastic must still be done with the aristocrats of crime. Expansion across space, with more worlds to conquer and loot, more races to exploit, and new frontiers of fabulous treasure to plunder, did nothing to improve the moral tone of humanity. A new and savage breed of criminals sprang into existence to meet these exciting conditions. It was raw, blind butchery at first, then racketeers of genius brought general looting into an organized and systematic bleeding of the body economic and generalized corruption of the body politic. After much bloodshed, the end result was the new Alcatraz, a prison preserve on Penguin Planetoid, familiarly known as The Rock. The Rock is literally that. Bare rock, not even spherical, but large for an asteroid. It is a rogue asteroid, which means that its orbit is highly eccentric and comes nowhere near that of the other asteroids and rarely comes near that of any planet. It is a world to itself. It is not pushing licensed irony too far to state that its inhabitants are rogues whose orbits, from the standpoint of society, are also eccentric. Alcatraz Asteroid is a prison for the most incorrigible of lifers. Only the rarest criminals qualify for such a sentence, but once sentenced, the trap closes on him for good. There is no reprieve, no parole, no pardon, and no escape. Few men ever enter the maze of caverns that honeycomb Alcatraz' forbidding interior, but those few stay. They live and die out of sight and out of touch with the worlds of reality. The Rock is the end of the line. * * * * * Outraged authority forgets a man sent to Alcatraz. His record, and everything concerning him is destroyed. Both offense and existence are blotted out, which makes an unintentionally sporting offer, for if a convict should ever escape there is no previous count against him. Such a man could consider himself returned from the dead, or reborn. No escape from the Rock had been legally anticipated, and none had actually occurred. Such escape is a practical impossibility, even with no warden and no guards--for none are needed. Newcomers arrive in the supply ship, which never lands. Like the packaged supplies, condemned prisoners are dumped overboard through a freight airlock and left twirling in space about a giant radilume flare moving in an orbit closely paralleling that of the prison asteroid. Man and supplies may twirl indefinitely, and the man may even die unless his fellow exiles are in a good mood, or are curious enough to put out in the space-lighter provided with a severely limited store of fuel and seine in the take to the prison caverns of Alcatraz.