by Hank Davis
I smiled. The judge seemed to be considering my line of reasoning. After all, Arkulian had prepped her in excruciating detail about grandfather paradoxes and the like.
“Therefore, instead of attempted murder, my client is guilty, at best, of attempted suicide—for which I recommend he be remanded for therapy and treatment, not incarceration.”
“This is preposterous!” Arkulian yelled. “Even if Mr. Hendergast had accidentally erased himself, his original intention was to do the same to my client. His own death would merely have been incidental to his stated objective. The primary target of his malicious actions was still Delano Franklin.”
With a sigh of infinite patience, I looked witheringly at Arkulian, then turned back to the judge. “Again, my esteemed colleague is mistaken.”
The judge was actually listening now, fascinated by the implications. I had mapped out the strategy until it made my own head spin.
“My client is accused of attempted murder. However, based on these lab results, such an action would be temporally impossible.” I waited a beat. “If Mr. Hendergast had actually succeeded in what the prosecution alleges was his intent, then he himself would never have been born. In which case, he could never have gone back in time to prevent Mr. Franklin’s parents from meeting. How can my client be charged with attempting a crime that is fundamentally impossible to commit?”
“This is outrageous! Why not debate how many angels can dance on a pinhead?” Arkulian said.
I shrugged in the prosecutor’s direction. “It’s a standard time-travel paradox, your Honor. As Mr. Arkulian explained to the court so exhaustively.”
Lionel was still staring in wonder over at the prosecutor’s table. “Daddy?”
The judge rapped her gavel loudly. “I’m announcing a recess for at least two hours—so I can take some aspirin and give it time to work.”
* * *
When the judge finally dismissed all charges against Lionel, I was relatively sure Arkulian wouldn’t take it to appeal. The hardest part was explaining the convoluted matter to journalists afterward, so they could report it accurately; in the end, it proved too intricate for most of the wire services.
Aaron and I celebrated by going out for a fine dinner. We compared notes on cases, and he got me up to speed on his time-travel dinosaur-hunting lawsuit. I came back to the office late at night by myself—after all, that’s where I kept the best bourbon—and saw the light blinking on the answering machine. Multiple messages. Four more cases waiting, none of them simple. Some actually sounded like they would be fun. Certainly precedent-setting.
Oddly, after the fallout, Lionel actually reconciled with his biological father. Months later, when I drove past one of Franklin’s car dealerships, I saw a crew replacing the big sign with a new one: FRANKLIN & SON.
Funny how things turn out. Sometimes people just need a second chance, even when they aren’t looking for it.
•
Kevin J. Anderson has published more than 140 books, 56 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune universes, as well as unique steampunk fantasy novels Clockwork Angels and Clockwork Lives, written with legendary rock drummer Neil Peart, based on the concept album by the band Rush. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series, the Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, the Saga of Shadows trilogy, and his humorous horror series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie PI. He has edited numerous anthologies, written comics and games, and the lyrics to two rock CDs. Anderson and his wife Rebecca Moesta are the publishers of WordFire Press.
THE JIGSAW MAN
Larry Niven
In this scary yarn from early in Niven’s justly celebrated “Known Space” series, the well-known disease of bureaucratic creep (no pun intended) is eviscerated. For a real-world example of said creep (still, no pun intended, honest), your editor is old enough to have seen hectoring “public service” ads advising drivers and passengers to “buckle up,” with even the Batman TV show getting into the act, then laws were passed, and you can’t drive a car legally without a seat belt, and you’re breaking the law if you don’t buckle up. But Big Brother knows best, and it’s all for your own good. (Or, as a prominent crusader for social justice once put it, “Anything not mandatory is forbidden!”) And when “for your own good” becomes “for the good of society,” things can really get grim.
•
In A.D. 1900, Karl Landsteiner classified human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and O, according to incompatibilities. For the first time it became possible to give a shock patient a transfusion with some hope that it wouldn’t kill him.
The movement to abolish the death penalty was barely getting started, and already it was doomed.
* * *
Vh83uOAGn7 was his telephone number and his driving license number and his social security number and the number of his draft card and his medical record. Two of these had been revoked, and the others had ceased to matter, except for his medical record. His name was Warren Lewis Knowles. He was going to die.
The trial was a day away, but the verdict was no less certain for that. Lew was guilty. If anyone had doubted it, the persecution had ironclad proof. By eighteen tomorrow Lew would be condemned to death. Broxton would appeal the case on some grounds or other. The appeal would be denied.
His cell was comfortable, small, and padded. This was no slur on the prisoner’s sanity, though insanity was no longer an excuse for breaking the law. Three of the walls were mere bars. The fourth wall, the outside wall, was cement painted a restful shade of green. But the bars which separated him from the corridor, and from the morose old man on his left, and from the big, moronic-looking teenager on his right—the bars were four inches thick and eight inches apart, padded in silicone plastic. For the fourth time that day Lew took a clenched fistful of the plastic and tried to rip it away. It felt like a sponge rubber pillow, with a rigid core the thickness of a pencil, and it wouldn’t rip. When he let it go it snapped back to a perfect cylinder.
“It’s not fair,” he said.
The teenager didn’t move. For all of the ten hours Lew had been in his cell, the kid had been sitting on the edge of his bunk with his lank black hair falling in his eyes and his five o’clock shadow getting gradually darker. He moved his long, hairy arms only at mealtimes, and the rest of him not at all.
The old man looked up at the sound of Lew’s voice. He spoke with bitter sarcasm. “You framed?”
“No, I—”
“At least you’re honest. What’d you do?”
Lew told him. He couldn’t keep the hurt innocence out of his voice. The old man smiled derisively, nodding as if he’d expected just that.
“Stupidity. Stupidity’s always been a capital crime. If you had to get yourself executed, why not for something important? See the kid on the other side of you?”
“Sure,” Lew said without looking.
“He’s an organlegger.”
Lew felt the shock freezing in his face. He braced himself for another look into the next cell—and every nerve in his body jumped. The kid was looking at him. With his dull dark eyes barely visible under his mop of hair, he regarded Lew as a butcher might consider a badly aged side of beef.
Lew edged closer to the bars between his cell and the old man’s. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “How many did he kill?”
“None.”
“?”
“He was the snatch man. He’d find someone out alone at night, drug the prospect and take him home to the doc that ran the ring. It was the doc that did all the killing. If Bernie’d brought home a dead prospect, the doc would have skinned him down.”
The old man sat with Lew almost directly behind him. He had twisted himself around to talk to Lew, but now he seemed to be losing interest. His hands, hidden from Lew by his bony back, were in constant motion.
“How many did he snatch?”
“Four. Then he got caught. He’s not very bright, Bernie.”
“What did you do to get put here?”
The old man didn’t answer. He ignored Lew completely, his shoulders twitching as he moved his hands. Lew shrugged and dropped back on his bunk.
It was nineteen o’clock of a Thursday night.
* * *
The ring had included three snatch men. Bernie had not yet been tried. Another was dead; he had escaped over the edge of a pedwalk when he felt the mercy bullet enter his arm. The third was being wheeled into the hospital next door to the courthouse.
Officially he was still alive. He had been sentenced; his appeal had been denied; but he was still alive as they moved him drugged into the operating room.
The interns lifted him from the table and inserted a mouthpiece so he could breathe when they dropped him into freezing liquid. They lowered him without a splash, and as his body temperature went down they dribbled something else into his veins. About half a pint of it. His temperature dropped toward freezing, his heartbeats were further and further apart. Finally his heart stopped. But it could have been started again. Men had been reprieved at this point. Officially the organlegger was still alive.
The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them. When the organlegger’s body temperature reached a certain point, the belt started. The first machine made a series of incisions in his chest. Skillfully and mechanically, the doctor performed a cardiectomy.
The organlegger was officially dead. His heart went into storage immediately. His skin followed, most of it in one piece, all of it still living. The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital’s organ banks. Any one of these units could be packed in a travel case at a moment’s notice and flown to anywhere in the world in not much more than an hour. If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken.
Which was the whole point.
* * *
Lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling television set, Lew suddenly began to shiver. He had not had the energy to put the sound plug in his ear, and the silent motion of the cartoon figures had suddenly become horrid. He turned the set off, and that didn’t help either.
Bit by bit they would take him apart and store him away. He’d never seen an organ storage bank, but his uncle had owned a butcher shop…
“Hey!” he yelled.
The kid’s eyes came up, the only living part of him. The old man twisted round to look over his shoulder. At the end of the hall the guard looked up once, then went back to reading.
The fear was in Lew’s belly; it pounded in his throat. “How can you stand it?”
The kid’s eyes dropped to the floor. The old man said, “Stand what?”
“Don’t you know what they’re going to do to us?”
“Not to me. They won’t take me apart like a hog.”
Instantly Lew was at the bars. “Why not?”
The old man’s voice had become very low “Because there’s a bomb where my right thighbone used to be. I’m gonna blow myself up. What they find, they’ll never use.”
The hope the old man had raised washed away, leaving bitterness. “Nuts. How could you put a bomb in your leg?”
“Take the bone out, bore a hole in it, build the bomb in the hole, get all the organic material out of the bone so it won’t rot, put the bone back in. ’Course your red corpuscle count goes down afterward. What I wanted to ask you. You want to join me?”
“Join you?”
“Hunch up against the bars. This thing’ll take care of both of us.”
Lew found himself backing away. “No. No, thanks.”
“Your choice,” said the old man. “I never told you what I was here for, did I? I was the doc. Bernie made his snatches for me.”
Lew had backed up against the opposite set of bars. He felt them touch his shoulders and turned to find the kid looking dully into his eyes from two feet away. Organleggers! He was surrounded by professional killers!
“I know what it’s like,” the old man continued. “They won’t do that to me. Well. If you’re sure you don’t want a clean death, go lie down behind your bunk. It’s thick enough.”
The bunk was a mattress and a set of springs mounted into a cement block which was an integral part of the cement floor. Lew curled himself into fetal position with his hands over his eyes.
He was sure he didn’t want to die now.
Nothing happened.
After a while he opened his eyes, took his hands away and looked around.
The kid was looking at him. For the first time there was a sour grin plastered on his face. In the corridor the guard, who was always in a chair by the exit, was standing outside the bars looking down at him. He seemed concerned.
Lew felt the flush rising in his neck and nose and ears. The old man had been playing with him. He moved to get up…
And a hammer came down on the world.
* * *
The guard lay broken against the bars of the cell across the corridor. The lank-haired youngster was picking himself up from behind his bunk, shaking his head. Somebody groaned; and the groan rose to a scream. The air was full of cement dust.
Lew got up.
Blood lay like red oil on every surface that faced the explosion. Try as he might, and he didn’t try very hard, Lew could find no other trace of the old man.
Except for the hole in the wall.
He must have been standing…right…there.
The hole would be big enough to crawl through, if Lew could reach it. But it was in the old man’s cell. The silicone plastic sheathing on the bars between the cells had been ripped away, leaving only pencil-thick lengths of metal.
Lew tried to squeeze through.
The bars were humming, vibrating, though there was no sound. As Lew noticed the vibration he also found that he was becoming sleepy. He jammed his body between the bars, caught in a war between his rising panic and the sonic stunners which must have gone on automatically.
The bars wouldn’t give. But his body did; and the bars were slippery with…He was through. He poked his head through the hole in the wall and looked down.
Way down. Far enough to make him dizzy.
The Topeka County courthouse was a small skyscraper, and Lew’s cell must have been near the top. He looked down a smooth concrete slab studded with windows set flush with the sides. There would be no way to reach those windows, no way to open them, no way to break them.
The stunner was sapping his will. He would have been unconscious by now if his head had been in the cell with the rest of him. He had to force himself to turn and look up.
He was at the top. The edge of the roof was only a few feet above his eyes. He couldn’t reach that far, not without…
He began to crawl out of the hole.
Win or lose, they wouldn’t get him for the organ banks. The vehicular traffic level would smash every useful part of him. He sat on the lip of the hole, with his legs straight out inside the cell for balance, pushing his chest flat against the wall. When he had his balance he stretched his arms toward the roof. No good.
So he got one leg under him, keeping the other stiffly out, and lunged.
His hands closed over the edge as he started to fall back. He yelped with surprise, but it was too late. The top of the courthouse was moving! It had dragged him out of the hole before he could let go. He hung on, swinging slowly back and forth over empty space as the motion carried him away.
The top of the courthouse was a pedwalk.
He couldn’t climb up, not without purchase for his feet. He didn’t have the strength. The pedwalk was moving toward another building, about the same height. He could reach it if he only hung on.
And the
windows in that building were different. They weren’t made to open, not in these days of smog and air conditioning, but there were ledges. Perhaps the glass would break.
Perhaps it wouldn’t.
The pull on his arms was agony. It would be so easy to let go… No. He had committed no crime worth dying for. He refused to die.
* * *
Over the decades of the twentieth century the movement continued to gain momentum. Loosely organized, international in scope, its members had only one goal: to replace execution with imprisonment and rehabilitation in every state and nation they could reach. They argued that killing a man for his crime teaches him nothing; that it serves as no deterrent to others who might commit the same crime; that death is irreversible, whereas an innocent man might be released from prison once his innocence is belatedly proven. Killing a man serves no good purpose, they said, unless for society’s vengeance. Vengeance, they said, is unworthy of an enlightened society.
Perhaps they were right.
In 1940 Karl Landsteiner and Alexander S. Wiener made public their report on the Rh factor in human blood.
By mid-century most convicted killers were getting life imprisonment or less. Many were later returned to society, some “rehabilitated,” others not. The death penalty had been passed for kidnaping in some states, but it was hard to persuade a jury to enforce it. Similarly with murder charges. A man wanted for burglary in Canada and murder in California fought extradition to Canada; he had less chance of being convicted in California. Many states had abolished the death penalty. France had none.
Rehabilitation of criminals was a major goal of the science/art of psychology.
But—
Blood banks were world wide.
Already men and women with kidney diseases had been saved by a kidney transplanted from an identical twin. Not all kidney victims had identical twins. A doctor in Paris used transplants from close relatives, classifying up to a hundred points of incompatibility to judge in advance how successful the transplant would be.
Eye transplants were common. An eye donor could wait until he died before he saved another man’s sight.