by Hank Davis
“Oh.” Tom put down the knife. He released the mayor. “Sorry.”
“Quite all right,” the mayor said. “Natural error. I’ve read up on it and you haven’t, of course—no need to.” He took a deep breath. “I’d better get back. The inspector wants a list of the men he can draft.”
Tom called out, “Are you sure this murder is necessary?”
“Yes, absolutely,” the mayor said, hurrying away. “Just not me.”
Tom put the knife back in his belt.
Not me, not me. Everyone would feel that way. Yet somebody had to be murdered. Who? He couldn’t kill himself. That would be suicide, which wouldn’t count.
He began to shiver, trying not to think of the glimpse he’d had of the reality of murder. The job had to be done.
Someone else was coming!
The person came nearer. Tom hunched down, his muscles tightening for the leap.
It was Mrs. Miller, returning home with a bag of vegetables.
Tom told himself that it didn’t matter whether it was Mrs. Miller or anybody else. But he couldn’t help remembering those conversations with his mother. They left him without a motive for killing Mrs. Miller.
She passed by without seeing him.
He waited for half an hour. Another person walked through the dark alley between the houses. Tom recognized him as Max Weaver.
Tom had always liked him. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be a motive. All he could come up with, though, was that Max had a wife and five children who loved him and would miss him. Tom didn’t want Billy Painter to tell him that that was no motive. He drew deeper into the shadow and let Max go safely by.
The three Carpenter boys came along. Tom had painfully been through that already. He let them pass. Then Roger Waterman approached.
He had no real motive for killing Roger, but he had never been especially friendly with him. Besides, Roger had no children and his wife wasn’t fond of him. Would that be enough for Billy Painter to work on?
He knew it wouldn’t be…and the same was true of all the villagers. He had grown up with these people, shared food and work and fun and grief with them. How could he possibly have a motive for killing any of them?
But he had to commit a murder. His skulking permit required it. He couldn’t let the village down. But neither could he kill the people he had known all his life.
Wait, he told himself in sudden excitement. He could kill the inspector!
Motive? Why, it would be an even more heinous crime than murdering the mayor—except that the mayor was a general now, of course, and that would only be mutiny. But even if the mayor were still mayor, the inspector would be a far more important victim. Tom would be killing for glory, for fame, for notoriety. And the murder would show Earth how earthly the colony really was. They would say, “Crime is so bad on New Delaware that it’s hardly safe to land there. A criminal actually killed our inspector on the very first day! Worst criminal we’ve come across in all space.”
It would be the most spectacular crime he could commit, Tom realized, just the sort of thing a master criminal would do.
Feeling proud of himself for the first time in a long while, Tom hurried out of the alley and over to the mayor’s house. He could hear conversation going on inside.
“…sufficiently passive population,” Mr. Grent was saying, “Sheeplike, in fact.”
“Makes it rather boring,” the inspector answered. “For the soldiers especially.”
“Well, what do you expect from backward agrarians? At least we’re getting some recruits out of it.” Mr. Grent yawned audibly. “On your feet, guards. We’re going back to the ship.”
Guards! Tom had forgotten about them. He looked doubtfully at his knife. Even if he sprang at the inspector, the guards would probably stop him before the murder could be committed. They must have been trained for just that sort of thing.
But if he had one of their own weapons…
He heard the shuffling of feet inside. Tom hurried back into the village.
Near the market, he saw a soldier sitting on a doorstep, singing drunkenly to himself. Two empty bottles lay at his feet and his weapon was slung sloppily over his shoulder.
Tom crept up, drew his blackjack and took aim.
The soldier must have glimpsed his shadow. He leaped to his feet, ducking the stroke of the blackjack. In the same motion, he jabbed with his slung rifle, catching Tom in the ribs, tore the rifle from his shoulder and aimed. Tom closed his eyes and lashed out with both feet.
He caught the soldier on the knee, knocking him over. Before he could get up, Tom swung the blackjack.
Tom felt the soldier’s pulse—no sense killing the wrong man—and found it satisfactory. He took the weapon, checked to make sure he knew which button to push, and hastened after the inspector.
Halfway to the ship, he caught up with them. The inspector and Grent were walking ahead, the soldiers straggling behind.
Tom moved into the underbrush. He trotted silently along until he was opposite Grent and the inspector. He took aim and his finger tightened on the trigger…
He didn’t want to kill Grent, though. He was supposed to commit only one murder.
He ran on, past the inspector’s party, and came out on the road in front of them. His weapon was poised as the party reached him.
“What’s this?” the inspector demanded.
“Stand still,” Tom said. “The rest of you drop your weapons and move out of the way.”
The soldiers moved like men in shock. One by one they dropped their weapons and retreated to the underbrush. Grent held his ground.
“What are you doing, boy?” he asked.
“I’m the town criminal,” Tom stated proudly. “I’m going to kill the inspector. Please move out of the way.”
Grent stared at him. “Criminal? So that’s what the mayor was prattling about.”
“I know we haven’t had any murder in two hundred years,” Tom explained, “but I’m changing that right now. Move out of the way!”
Grent leaped out of the line of fire. The inspector stood alone, swaying slightly.
Tom took aim, trying to think about the spectacular nature of his crime and its social value. But he saw the inspector on the ground, eyes glaring open, limbs stiff, mouth twisted, no air going in or out the nostrils, no beat to the heart.
He tried to force his finger to close on the trigger. His mind could talk all it wished about the desirability of crime; his hand knew better.
“I can’t!” Tom shouted.
He threw down the gun and sprinted into the underbrush.
The inspector wanted to send a search party out for Tom and hang him on the spot. Mr. Grent didn’t agree. New Delaware was all forest. Ten thousand men couldn’t have caught a fugitive in the forest, if he didn’t want to be caught.
The mayor and several villagers came out, to find out about the commotion. The soldiers formed a hollow square around the inspector and Mr. Grent. They stood with weapons ready, their faces set and serious.
And the mayor explained everything. The village’s uncivilized lack of crime. The job that Tom had been given. How ashamed they were that he had been unable to handle it.
“Why did you give the assignment to that particular man?” Mr. Grent asked.
“Well,” the mayor said, “I figured if anyone could kill, Tom could. He’s a fisher, you know. Pretty gory work.”
“Then the rest of you would be equally unable to kill?”
“We wouldn’t even get as far as Tom did,” the mayor admitted sadly.
Mr. Grent and the inspector looked at each other, then at the soldiers. The soldiers were staring at the villagers with wonder and respect. They started to whisper among themselves.
“Attention!” the inspector bellowed. He turned to Grent and said in a low voice, “We’d better get away from here. Men in our armies who can’t kill…”
“The morale,” Mr. Grent said. He shuddered. “The possibility of infection. One man in a key position e
ndangering a ship—perhaps a fleet—because he can’t fire a weapon. It isn’t worth the risk.”
They ordered the soldiers back to the ship. The soldiers seemed to march more slowly than usual, and they looked back at the village. They whispered together, even though the inspector was bellowing orders.
The small ship took off in a flurry of jets. Soon it was swallowed in the large ship. And then the large ship was gone.
The edge of the enormous watery red sun was just above the horizon.
“You can come out now,” the mayor called. Tom emerged from the underbrush, where he had been hiding, watching everything.
“I bungled it,” he said miserably.
“Don’t feel bad about it,” Billy Painter told him. “It was an impossible job.”
“I’m afraid it was,” the mayor said, as they walked back to the village. “I thought that just possibly you could swing it. But you can’t be blamed. There’s not another man in the village who could have done the job even as well.”
“What’ll we do with these buildings?” Billy Painter asked, motioning at the jail, the post office, the church, and the little red schoolhouse.
The mayor thought deeply for a moment. “I know,” he said. “We’ll build a playground for the kids. Swings and slides and sandboxes and things.”
“Another playground?” Tom asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
There was no reason, of course, why not.
“I won’t be needing this anymore, I guess,” Tom said, handing the skulking permit to the mayor.
“No, I guess not,” said the mayor. They watched him sorrowfully as he tore it up. “Well, we did our best. It just wasn’t good enough.”
“I had the chance,” Tom muttered, “and I let you all down.”
Billy Painter put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Tom. It’s not the fault of any of us. It’s just what comes of not being civilized for two hundred years. Look how long it took Earth to get civilized. Thousands of years. And we were trying to do it in two weeks.”
“Well, we’ll just have to go back to being uncivilized,” the mayor said with a hollow attempt at cheerfulness.
Tom yawned, waved, went home to catch up on lost sleep. Before entering, he glanced at the sky.
Thick, swollen clouds had gathered overhead and every one of them had a black lining. The fall rains were almost here. Soon he could start fishing again.
Now why couldn’t he have thought of the inspector as a fish? He was too tired to examine that as a motive. In any case, it was too late. Earth was gone from them and civilization had fled for no one knew how many centuries more.
He slept very badly.
•
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) seemed to explode into print in the early 1950s with stories in nearly every science fiction magazine on the newsstands. Actually, the explosion was bigger than most realized, since he was simultaneously writing even more stories under a number of pseudonyms. His forte was humor, wild and unpredictable, often absurdist, much like the work of Douglas Adams three decades later. His work has been compared to the Marx Brothers by Harlan Ellison and to Voltaire by both Brian W. Aldiss and J.G. Ballard, and Neil Gaiman has called Sheckley “Probably the best short-story writer during the ’50s to the mid-1960s working in any field.”
CHECKSUM, CHECKMATE
Tony Daniel
It wasn’t really a trial, since the accused (and obviously guilty) individual wasn’t a human, wasn’t even material, was a made thing which had no rights. But when a computer program, no matter how self-aware and intelligent, commits murder, something had to be done. And what about the other copies of the same program, in particular the one present at the inquisition?
•
The air in the Theater Intake Facility was humming with geists—ghostly virtual reality representations of people, A.I.s, and even a few of the sceeve, the horseshoe-bat-nosed aliens whose species had invaded the Earth thirteen years ago. Humanity was at war with the main body of sceeve, but a small faction, the Mutualists, had proved to be valuable allies and had given Earth a chance to fight back and avoid total domination.
Ensign NOCK made his way through the entrance foyer in his entirely physically present android body, his suit, as he called it. His current model was a Burberry Eleven. He’d been suited up in the Eleven for close to a year and it had performed in an excellent, if utilitarian, fashion. The suit NOCK really wanted was one of the new Burberry Twelves—who wouldn’t?—but there was no way he was going to be able to afford an upgrade like that on an Extry ensign’s pay.
All of the virtual inhabitants in the foyer seemed overlaid, one upon another, crowded in layers in such a way that no gathering in real life could ever achieve. Definite scaling problems going on here with the chroma representational software. They appeared as drapes of discrete layers of people, and the entrance foyer had taken on what NOCK imagined might be the décor of a harem den—although visiting a girlfriend in the strip club where she worked on Ceres base was as close as he’d ever come to observing such an establishment.
That had been an interesting liaison. It had been love, at least for his part. Josey had fallen for him precisely because he was an A.I. servant in an android body and not a physical man. Of course, he hadn’t let that fact stop him when attempting to please her. Apparently he’d succeeded for, as Josey had once told him, “NOCK, I gotta say, you put the ‘t’ in simulation.”
Josey had been blown to smithereens by kinetic weapon barrage when a half-ton of sceeve throw mass had ripped into Ceres asteroid base and left a mile-wide crater.
It was a tough war.
NOCK moved forward and into the geist-filled room.
The Theater Intake Facility served as the main wing for the interrogation of alien prisoners on Walt Whitman space station, the enormous Extry facility in orbit around Earth. It was manned by a department of the Extry, the U.S. space navy. The rates and officers of the Extry Xenological Division were universally known as creeps.
NOCK was a creep. He was also no stranger to TIF. In fact, this was his operational billet and his Q-based algorithm, his real self, was backed up on the facility’s computer. The processing desk where the entrance foyer terminated was manned by a human, Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Gordon Mallon. Mallon was not a friend—NOCK wasn’t sure the humorless Mallon had any friends—but was a longstanding acquaintance of NOCK.
Mallon shook his head ruefully at the gathered crowd in the foyer, then reached out with a finger into the chroma to press a switch only he could see. The field that guarded entrance into the bowels of the TIF hummed slightly, indicating a change in the Q generator that would now permit NOCK to step past Mallon’s desk and go through the hatchway that led to the warren of cells and interrogation rooms to be found within.
“Logged and Level B provisional admittance granted, Ensign NOCK,” Mallon said in the official tone he used for entries in his desk register. “Have a better one, sir.”
“You, too, Staff Sergeant.”
Mallon only grunted in reply and NOCK, ensconced within his android body, entered the TIF proper.
There were a few geists in the hall leading to the interrogation, most of them NCOs accompanying human MILINT officers as aides and translators. NOCK recognized several iterations of the LOVE series, one of whom, CHARITY, was a friend. He poked her via the virtual feed, which, NOCK knew, felt like the equivalent of a small static electricity shock. CHARITY nodded, smiled sympathetically back at him.
You’re on CHECKSUM in Alpha, huh? she replied across the corridor to NOCK using a private virtual feed. Her transmitted voice as actuated in his android’s hearing mechanism sounded bright and a little brassy, as if she were deliberate trying to put good cheer into the undertones.
Yup, he replied.
I don’t envy you.
What, you wouldn’t like to have a traitor and murderer’s thought rolling around inside your programming?
Better than a sceeve
, Charity said to him. Then her lead interrogation officer found the room he was looking for and went inside.
Got to go, Charity said. Got a sceeve lieutenant to squeeze.
He suspended?
She. Yep, but she’s fighting it. My LIO thinks we’ll only get a couple more sessions out of her before she liquefies.
It had only become possible in the last year to prevent captured sceeve from immediately committing suicide by dissolving the portion of their nervous system known as the gid. For eight years after the invasion, not a single sceeve had been taken alive. But that had all changed with the coming of the Mutualists to Earth a year before. These were the strange new group of sceeve who claimed to be on humanity’s side, and had proved it in the eyes of many by fighting against their own kind.
NOCK’s attitude toward the Mutualists was the same as his attitude toward any news that seemed too good to be true: wait, watch and make no assumptions. Making faulty assumptions could get you wiped with no backup. He’d seen it happen to better servants than he.
Good luck with your IP, NOCK said.
You, too, good luck, CHARITY replied, and then her geist, and her algorithmic attention with it, passed into Collection and Exploitation Unit Foxtrot, following her LIO.
A few more paces down the hall and NOCK arrived at his destination, the entry hatch to C&E Unit Alpha, and stepped inside.
The Alpha C&E unit was packed. All the chairs on the floor were taken up by brass—and nothing small-time here. It looked like a shiny black clump of Extry captains, admirals and Marine colonels had collected like crystals in an asteroidal geode.
C&E Alpha was the big room, the special room. It was two floors high, and surrounding the upper tier in a semicircle was an observational galley. This too was filled with spectators leaning against the glass windows. Geists of servants and officers who’d managed to secure a pass hung in the air directly above the unit’s center. There had never been an interrogation procedure quite like today’s. NOCK, for his part, had tried to recuse himself and get out it. He’d believed he’d succeeded, too, but that Wake Call had brought word that his recusal had been rescinded. That, in itself, was curious, considering who the prisoner was to be interrogated.