When Velen took his hand from her mouth she no longer screamed. They rarely did; the appearance of the infamous Traumatic sect was calculated to inspire helpless terror. Instead she began to pray in a trembling, sobbing voice.
‘It’s no good praying to your God like that,’ Stryne said conversationally. ‘He doesn’t exist, it’s all a con. Before we’ve finished here you’ll be praying to Hulmu, the authentic god who created us by projecting us on to the screen of reality.’ He liked to engage the sacrificial victims in a dialogue, to establish a rapport with them.
Humming meditatively – a nervous habit that came over him at moments like this – he noted her carrying satchel lying on a chair. Caressingly he opened it and inspected the contents. Small personal effects, identification papers, a voucher for a bank account, money, and a few letters.
He placed the satchel on a ledge near the window.
They opened the tool-box and began taking out their equipment.
The girl ceased praying and lay gasping with fright. Stryne waved a meter near her head. Her fear index was high – nearly eighty. That was good.
‘How are you going to do it?’ she asked them. ‘Please tell me how you’re going to do it!’
‘Mmmmmm … There are so many ways. The knife, inserted slowly? The Terrible Vibrator? The Exit by Burning?’ He showed her the various instruments one by one.
Her head had raised itself off the tabletop, straining, to look. Now it sank back again. Her face collapsed into despair.
Velen set up a hologram screen and a laser projector. The screen hovered slantwise over the girl like a descending wing. Velen flicked a switch; the screen came to life. The Impossible Shape of Hulmu gyrated and twisted hypnotically against a background of shifting moiré patterns. Stryne and Velen knelt on either side of the girl, watching her face, their backs to the screen.
‘Hearken to Hulmu!’ declared Stryne.
And the first of the ceremonies began.
Inpriss went into a slight trance brought on by the holo projection. In this state the words and responses from Stryne and Velen penetrated deep into her consciousness.
‘You are to be sacrificed to Hulmu,’ Stryne told her. ‘Your soul will not return through time to your body; you will never live again, as others do. You will belong to Hulmu. He will take you with him deep into the strat.’
‘Hulmu will take you with him,’ reiterated Velen in a singsong voice.
‘You must pray to Hulmu,’ Stryne whispered in her ear. ‘You belong to him now.’
While they intoned the rituals Velen switched on more of their apparatus. Devices gave out strange buzzes and clicks that grated on the nerves; alien whines filled the air. Stryne applied a prong to the girl’s body and began delivering pain in intermittent, increasing amounts. Everything was designed so as to enhance the trauma, and Inpriss Sorce was now catalytic with terror.
She came out of the trance with a start and he let her see the Exit by Burning device ready for use in his hands. Her eyes widened and her face sagged. Her mouth opened but her voice was too paralysed to scream.
There came a knock on the outer door.
Stryne and Velen looked at each other. ‘We’d better see what it is,’ Stryne said.
They left the room, closing the door behind them, and paused. Stryne opened the door to the corridor.
The caser was there. ‘You timed it nicely,’ Stryne said to him.
They stood there, not speaking. Stryne bent his ear to the inner door. There was a scuffling from inside. Then he heard the window open.
A minute later they entered the room. Inpriss Sorce was gone. She had slipped the special knots Stryne had tied and escaped by the fire escape. With satisfaction he saw that she had shown the presence of mind to snatch up her satchel so that she would not be without resources.
‘We made a good start,’ he breathed.
The pursuit was in progress.
FOUR
For some weeks Captain Aton had been forced to wear military prison garb. Now, on the day that his court-martial was due, the guards brought him his full duty uniform. He dressed slowly and carefully, but had no mirror in which to check his appearance.
The walls of his cell were made of grey metal, which reminded him of the starkly functional interior of the destroyer class of timeship in which he had served prior to his arrest. He missed the deep vibration of the time-drive, and even more so the sense of discipline and purpose that went with active service. Instead, his solitude was broken only by the shouts and clangings that made up the daily life of the prison. It depressed him to know that he was in company with deserters and various other malefactors. Occupying cells in his block were some religious offenders – members of the Traumatic sect – and Aton would hear their calls to Hulmu echoing through the night.
The Traumatic sect. That struck a chord in Aton’s mind. A puzzled frown crossed his face as he tried to recollect why, but the answer eluded him.
He heard footsteps. The door of the cell grated open to reveal two burly guards and his defence counsel, a nervous young lieutenant.
Aton was already on his feet. At a signal from one of the guards he stepped into the passage.
‘The court is convened, Captain,’ the lieutenant said with a diffident cough. ‘Shall we?’
They walked towards the court block ahead of the guards. Despite his predicament, Aton found time to feel some sympathy for his counsel, who was embarrassed at being in the company of a doomed man.
‘We might have a chance,’ the lieutenant said. ‘The field-effect reading is in our favour. I shall argue incapacity.’
Aton nodded, but he knew that the hearing would go the same way that the earlier investigation had.
Gates swung and clanged as they were let out of the penitentiary area of the prison. An elevator took them further up the building and without further preamble they were admitted into the courtroom.
Aton was to be judged by a tribunal of three retired commanders. One glance at their seamed faces told him that they felt about the matter much as he would in their place: that there was no excuse for cowardice.
The prosecutor, an older and more practised man than Aton’s counsel, turned suavely to regard the accused before reading out the charge.
‘Captain Mond Aton, serving in His Chronotic Majesty’s Third Time Fleet under Commander Veel Ark Haight, it is laid against you that on the eleventh day of cycle four-eight-five, fleet-time, you were guilty of cowardice and gross dereliction of duty in that, the vessel under your command being crippled by enemy action, you abandoned your ship the Smasher of Enemies ahead of your men; and further that you fought with the men under your command so as to board a life raft, thus saving yourself at their expense. How do you plead?’
The young lieutenant stepped forward. ‘Sirs, I wish to tender that Captain Aton is unfit to plead, being the victim of amnesia.’
‘I plead not guilty,’ Aton contradicted firmly. ‘I do not believe I am capable of the acts described.’
A faint sneer came to the prosecutor’s lips. ‘He does not believe he is capable!’
With a despairing shrug the counsel for the defence stepped back to his place.
Inexorably the prosecution proceeded to call witnesses. And so Aton was forced to experience what he had already experienced at the preliminary hearings. First to be called was Sergeant Quelle, his chief gunnery noncom. With blank bemusement he heard him recount how he, Aton, a beamer in each hand, had killed all who stood in his way in his haste to leave the foundering Smasher of Enemies. Occasionally Quelle glanced his way with what seemed to him a spiteful, fearful look. At those moments a double image flashed into Aton’s mind: he seemed to see Quelle’s face distended and made bulbous as if seen through a magnifying glass or through the visor of a strat suit. But the picture faded as soon as it was born, and he put it down to imagination.
Seven other witnesses, all crewmen from the Smasher of Enemies, followed Quelle. All repeated his tale, pausing sometime
s to glare accusingly at their captain. They named the men and officers they had seen Aton gun down, and told how they had succeeded in disarming him only once the life raft was floating free in the strat and the Smasher of Enemies had broken up. Then, after an agonising delay, they had eventually been located and picked up by the flagship. Aton had been arrested and sent to Chronopolis.
Of all this Aton remembered practically nothing. He could recall some details of the battle with the Hegemonics, in a confused kind of way, but it all had the aspects of a dream. As for the events Quelle and the others spoke of, it was just a blank to him. The only thing he could remember was coming to and finding that life raft 3 was being hauled inboard the Lamp of Faith, Commander Haight’s flagship.
Could he really have murdered, among others, Lieutenant Krish? Could he have fallen prey to such animal panic, in the grip of some mental derangement, perhaps? If so, the derangement was still affecting him, for everything seemed still possessed of a dreamlike quality. He simply could not reconcile what was happening with his own image of himself, with his love of the Time Service, and with his loyalty to the empire.
The prosecutor conceded the floor to the defence. The young lieutenant called his one and only witness.
‘Major Batol,’ he said to the slim officer who entered, ‘what is your function in the Time Service?’
‘I am a doctor and surgeon.’
‘Do you recognise the accused?’
The major eyed Aton briefly and nodded.
‘Will you please tell us the result of your examination of Captain Aton earlier.’
Major Batol turned to the tribunal. ‘I examined the captain with a field-effect device. This is a device that responds to the “field effect”, that is to say the electrostatic nimbus that surrounds the human body and brain. By its means it is possible to ascertain a person’s mental state and even what he is thinking, since thoughts and emotions leak into the field. The technique may be likened to eavesdropping on the operation of a computer by picking up its incidental electromagnetic transmissions –’
‘Yes, you may spare us the explanations,’ the head of the tribunal said sourly. ‘Come to the point.’
‘Captain Aton has total amnesia of the period under question,’ Major Batol informed them.
‘And what would be a likely cause of such amnesia?’ asked the defence counsel.
‘It is almost certainly traumatic in origin,’ the major said. ‘Remember that the destroyer was foundering into the strat. Anyone who happened, for only a moment, to see the strat with his bare eyes would undergo trauma sufficient to account for amnesia of this type.’
‘Thank you, Major.’
The prosecutor was quick to come forward. ‘Major Batol, would you say that a man suffering from the trauma you describe would be capable of purposeful action, such as fighting his way aboard a life raft?’
‘It is highly unlikely that he would be capable of any action whatsoever, certainly not of an integrated kind.’
‘And is there any evidence to say at what point in the proceedings this experience of Captain Aton’s took place? Ten minutes before he entered the life raft? Five minutes before? Or only a moment before?’
‘None. Traumatic amnesia can obliterate the events leading up to the trauma as well as those following it.’
‘Thank you very much, Major.’
When the time came for him to sum up his case, Aton’s counsel did the best he could. He began by speaking of Aton’s excellent service record and of his three previous engagements, for one of which he had received a commendation. He stressed the fact of Aton’s amnesia, trying to suggest that this threw something of a mystery over the whole affair.
‘It is odd,’ he said, ‘that Captain Aton should be unable to make any reply to the accusations that are made against him. Finally –’ he confronted the tribunal, his face white – ‘I request that the witnesses for the prosecution should themselves undergo a field-effect test!’
The prosecutor jumped to his feet. ‘The prosecution objects to that remark! The defence is imputing perjury in my witnesses!’
The tribunal chief shifted in his seat and looked grim. ‘Use of the field-effect device is not recognised in civil law, and this tribunal takes its cue from the civil establishment where the laws of evidence are concerned,’ he said to the defending lieutenant. ‘Although we were prepared to listen to the opinion of Major Batol, in law the amnesia of your client has not itself been established. Your request is denied.’
That, Aton knew, had been the counsel’s last desperate fling. The tribunal spent little time deliberating its decision. When the commanders returned from the inner chamber, the tribunal head looked at Aton with no hint of compassion.
‘Captain Mond Aton, we find you guilty. The evidence of eight independent witnesses can hardly be gainsaid. As for the effort by the defence to suggest your actions were the result of a personality change, and thereby to mitigate your guilt, that argument cannot be accepted. Even if true, it remains that an officer named Captain Aton committed the offences, and an officer named Captain Aton stands before us now. Personality changes are not admitted in an officer of the Time Service.’
He paused before coming to his grave conclusion. ‘Your sentence is the only one that can be expected. From here you will be taken to the laboratories of the Courier Department, where you will perform your last service to the empire. And may God restore your soul.’
As he was led away, Aton passed by Sergeant Quelle who was sitting in the anteroom alongside the others who had given evidence against him. They all – Quelle especially – looked at him with glittering eyes. They could not hide their triumph.
‘Most unusual,’ murmured the technician.
He was sitting casually across from Aton in the briefing-room. ‘I think this is the first time I’ve had to deal with someone of your calibre,’ he said. ‘Mostly we get common murderers, thieves, petty traitors – scum like that.’
He eyed Aton with unveiled curiosity. His manner was relaxed and he seemed to think of his job as a mildly interesting technical exercise instead of as the bizarre method of execution which it was to be for Aton.
‘I’m supposed to teach you as much as you need to know to perform your task properly,’ the technician resumed, ‘but as a chronman yourself you hardly need to be told very much, of course.’
‘All chronmen fear the strat,’ Aton said emptily. ‘It surrounds us. We never forget that.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘Yes.’
The other nodded. ‘You’re right to be. It is fearful. This business is worse for you than it is for some criminal of low intelligence, I can see that. Still, we all have our job to do.’
He doesn’t pity me, Aton thought. He has no sympathy for me at all. He’s probably processed hundreds of men – it doesn’t mean anything to him any more.
The technician came around the table and placed a headset over Aton’s cranium. He felt electrodes prodding his scalp. The other retreated back to his chair and glanced at tracer dials, making entries on a sheet of paper.
‘Good,’ he announced. ‘Your cephalic responses are adequate – we’d expect them to be, wouldn’t we? Some of the dimmer types get out of this business by not having the alertness to be able to target themselves once we put them through. So it’s the gas chamber for them.’
‘How soon?’ grated Aton.
‘Hm?’
‘When do I go through?’
‘Oh –’ the technician glanced at his watch – ‘in about an hour.’
Aton steeled his nerves to face the coming ordeal. He had been languishing for nearly a week since his trial, waiting for his name to be called. Despite that the department dispatched a daily stream of messages to the distant time-fleets it never seemed to run short of couriers.
He reminded himself that he had been in the strat before – millions of times, in fact. Everybody had. Only nobody remembered it. When the body died, the soul, robbed of the body’s ex
istential support, found itself in the strat. That was what caused death trauma – the bedazzlement of the soul when faced by potential time. But because it had nowhere to exist apart from the body, and even though shock reduced it to a state midway between unconsciousness and a dreamlike trance, it hurried back along its time-track, experiencing its life in reverse at a tremendously speeded-up rate like a video-tape on rewind, until it reached the moment of conception. At which point it began to live again.
Thus Aton’s imminent punishment would be something like the experience of death, except that not simply his soul but his body too was to be catapulted into the strat, and except that he would be pumped full of dugs to keep him conscious even under the impact of unspeakable trauma. An unconscious courier would be no good; he would not be able to guide himself towards his destination.
While the technician continued marking his papers, Aton began to speak in a low, haunted voice.
‘Scientists have debated whether the strat really exists as an independent continuum,’ he murmured, ‘or whether it is only an apparency our own machines have created; merely the result of that crucial act of accelerating pi-mesons faster than light. In the Time Service we are accustomed to thinking of the strat as an ocean, with orthogonal time as its surface … but perhaps the strat is only the world itself, scrambled and twisted because one no longer obeys its laws.’
The other man looked up, fascinated to hear this talk from one of the couriers. It was an unusual reaction; commonly three men or more were needed to hold them down.
‘The Church has an answer to that, at any rate,’ he pointed out to Aton. ‘The strat is real, but not as real as the world of actual time.’
‘Yes … the Church has an answer for everything,’ Aton replied, only slightly cynically. ‘The strat is the Holy Ghost, connecting God with the world. In the Time Service one inclines to take a more pragmatic view. Now that I am to be exposed unprotected to what chronmen fear most, it’s not surprising if my mind dwells on what its true nature might be.’
‘Your collected state of mind is, if I may say so, admirable,’ the technician admitted. ‘In your place, however, I would not be disposed to take the teachings of the Church so lightly. A comforter will be at hand at your dispatch to offer final consolation. Need I point out that the view you have just put forward – that the strat does not exist apart from the visible world – denies the Holy Ghost and is tantamount to materialistic atheism?’
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 55