Lionel put his complete trust in me, which always sparks that uncomfortable paternal feeling. But I hadn’t been kidding when I told him the law is still murky in these sorts of cases. Nobody had any idea which way it would go, and even my “ace in the hole” was a long shot. I still hadn’t got the lab results back.
For the preliminary hearing, we were assigned an ancient female judge, the Honorable Bernadette Maddox. I was uneasy about her age. In my experience, elderly judges don’t deal well with the second- and third-order implications of rapidly changing technologies. I’d rather have had the youngest, most computer-savvy person on the bench.
I still held out some hope that Bernadette Maddox was a sweet old lady, and the sob-story aspect would work on her. Not a chance.
“Mr. Arkulian!” she roared from the bench in a battle-axe voice before he had even finished his pompous remark. “You will sit down, shut up, and let me run this show.” I looked over at my rival with a twinge of sympathy. So much for the nice old lady bit. “And you will remove that disgusting cheap jewelry in my courtroom unless you have an appointment with Time Travel Expeditions to go back to the days of disco.”
“Your Honor, my personal appearance has no bearing on—”
“You will remove the jewelry because it hurts my eyes. I can’t even see your client through the glare from all those rings.”
Cowed, Arkulian left the room. A nervous Lionel sat at the bench next to me, whispering, “Was that a good sign?”
“It wasn’t so much a sign—more like a demonstration. The judge is only showing him who’s boss. And let me warn you ahead of time, she’s going to feel she needs to even the score and scold me as well at some point. Expect it and try not to get too upset.”
“What are we going to do, Mr. Paramus?” He sounded so miserable. I felt sorry for this kid who had lost his parents, his Norman Rockwell childhood, and a lifetime of happiness, all because of Delano R. Franklin.
I had dug into Franklin’s background, perhaps even more than Lionel had. There was no question in my mind that the world would be a better place if Franklin had never been born. He had left a decades-long trail of ex-wives and shady business dealings behind him. His primary legacy was a handful of auto dealerships, but since he had no heirs and couldn’t keep employees around long enough to put them in positions of authority and responsibility, no one would take over the car lots upon his death, and they’d probably be liquidated. Even without Lionel’s time travel help, Franklin would vanish.
Since we were the defendants, we sat back and listened as a now-unadorned Arkulian outlined the civil part of the case, explaining time travel paradoxes in painstaking detail, using examples culled not from any law library but from classic science fiction stories. He was long-winded and explained too much to the judge, treating her as if she were incapable of grasping the classic grandfather paradox.
I kept checking my watch as I mentally rehearsed my opening statement. The courier should have been here by now. I would have preferred hard facts to fast-talking, but I could proceed either way. As Arkulian rambled on and on, even Franklin looked bored.
Finally, it was my turn. I hoped the judge would stall just to give me a few more minutes, but she puckered her wrinkled lips and leaned over like a hawk from the bench. “Now then, Mr. Paramus, let’s hear what you have to say. I trust you can be more succinct—or at least more interesting—than Mr. Arkulian.”
I stood up and cleared my throat. Still no sign of my delivery person, and I really wanted to know which direction to go. Either my ace in the hole was a high trump or a discard. With a sigh, I reached into my briefcase and pulled out a carefully prepared document. “Your Honor, I wish I did not have to do this, but would it be possible to request a brief continuance? I have not yet received an important piece of evidence that has a strong bearing on this case.”
Lionel looked over at me, surprised. “What evidence?”
“A continuance?” the judge said with a snort. “I’ve been sitting here all morning, Mr. Paramus! You could have said this at the very beginning. How long are you asking for?” I was about to get my scolding, and Judge Maddox was clearly primed to let loose with even more venom than she had inflicted on Arkulian.
Suddenly the large doors were flung open at the back of the courtroom. The bailiff tried to stop a man from entering, but my partner Aaron Greenblatt sidestepped him. He marched in, waving a document in his left hand. “Excuse me, your Honor. Please pardon the interruption.”
I stifled a laugh. It was a real Perry Mason moment. I suspected Aaron had always wanted to do that.
My partner’s face was stoic; I hated the way he covered his emotions. He could have at least grinned or frowned to give me an inkling of what he held in his hands.
Judge Maddox lifted her gavel, looking more inclined to hit Aaron in the head with it than to rap her bench.
I blurted, “Your Honor, I withdraw my request for a continuance—so long as my associate can hand me that paper.” I turned, not waiting for her answer as Aaron handed the lab results to me. He finally broke into a grin as I scanned the numbers and the comparison charts.
With a huge sigh of relief, I turned back to the bench. “Your Honor, in light of recent developments I request that the attempted murder charges against my client be dropped.”
Arkulian growled, “What are you playing at, Paramus?”
“I’ll ask the questions here, Mr. Arkulian,” the judge said, rapping her gavel for good measure. “Well then—what are you playing at, Mr. Paramus?”
Bernadette Maddox already knew the sordid Peyton Place story of the ruined marriage, the broken family, the miserable life Lionel Hendergast had lived because of Franklin’s actions.
“Your Honor, the prosecution’s client was not entirely forthcoming about how long his affair with my client’s mother lasted. If I might recap: when Lionel Hendergast was four years old, his father discovered Mr. Franklin and my client’s mother in flagrante delicto, which triggered the chain of events leading to the crime of which my client is accused.”
“And?” Judge Maddox said, drawing out the word.
“In fact, the affair had gone on for at least five years previous.” I fluttered the sheet of lab data. “I have here the results of DNA tests comparing the blood sample my client gave to the county jail with samples I obtained from Mr. Franklin.”
I smiled sweetly at them. Franklin appeared confused. Arkulian was outraged, realizing I had probably tested the saliva left behind on his drinking glass—an old trick.
“These results prove conclusively that the father of Lionel Hendergast is not the man he always believed, but rather Mr. Delano R. Franklin.”
Lionel’s eyes fairly popped out of their sockets. The judge sat up, suddenly much more interested. Both Arkulian and Franklin bellowed angrily as if in competition with each other until finally Arkulian stood up in a huff, reacting in the way he had seen too many lawyers react on TV shows. “I object! This has no bearing—”
“This has total bearing,” I said.
Lionel looked as if he might faint, slide off the chair, and land on the courtroom floor. I put a steadying hand on his shoulder. He looked over at the prosecutor’s table, and his two words came out in a squeak. “My father?”
I forged ahead. “The prosecution has interpreted this crime entirely wrong, your Honor. My client is accused of going back in time with the intent of preventing Mr. Franklin from ever being born. But if he had done that, then Lionel Hendergast would’ve erased himself from existence as well. He would have wiped out his own father, thereby ensuring that he himself could never be born.”
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.”
“T
his 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.
The US Air Force unofficially claims that the best fighter pilots have balls the size of grapefruits and brains the size of a pea. Some might say that the same qualities would be required to walk in Harlan Ellison’s footsteps. Harlan is always a hard act to follow, and it’s daunting even to try.
This is a sequel to Harlan’s classic Outer Limits teleplay, “Soldier.” When I first asked if he would consider letting me play in his world and create a new tale, he was very skeptical. Given the sheer number of abysmal sequels and bad spinoffs that have graced bookstore racks and theater screens, I suppose he had good reason. “I’ve never done a sequel to a single one of my stories,” he told me. “I never felt the need. If I got it right the first time, I’ve said all I needed to say.”
In the course of my writing career I have gathered a lot of rejection slips, and I never learned to give up when common sense dictated that I should. I stood my ground with Harlan and challenged him. “Look, you’ve developed this sprawling scenario of a devastating future war, where soldiers are bred and trained to do nothing but fight from birth to death. Are you telling me that there’s only ONE story to be told in that whole world?”
He thought a bit, and then he changed his mind. So, I got to play with Harlan Ellison’s toys.
“Prisoner of War” is my tap-dance on Harlan’s stage, set in the devastating world of “Soldier,” which was a huge influence on me from the first time I saw it on TV. It is a story about another set of warriors in a never-ending war, men bred for nothing but the battleground—and how they cope with the horrors of … peace.
As a final note, this story was written on the road during the most grueling book-signing tour I ever hope to do—a nationwide blitz of twenty-seven cities in twenty-eight days (during which, in the event in Hollywood, I set the Guinness World Record for “Largest Single-Author Book Signing”). I dictated “Prisoner of War” in an unknown number of hotel rooms, wandering down city sidewalks, or at whatever park happened to be closest, before the day’s work of interviews and autograph sessions began. The chance to do something creative and emotionally engaging gave me something to look forward to during the long, long month.
Prisoner of War
The first Enemy laser-lances blazed across the battlefield at an unknown time of day. No one paid attention to the hour during a firefight anyway. Neither Barto nor any of his squad-mates could see the sun or moon overhead: too much smoke and haze and blast debris filled the air, along with the smell of blood and burning.
A soldier had to be ready at any time or place. A soldier would fight until the fight was over. An endless Now filled their existence, a razor-edged flow of life-for-the-moment, and the slightest distraction or daydream could end the Now … forever.
With a clatter of dusty armor and a hum of returned weapons-fire, the defenders charged forward, Barto among them. They had no terrain maps or battle plans, only unseen commanders bellowing instructions into their helmet earpieces.
Greasy fires guttered and smoked from explosions, but as long as a soldier could draw breath, the air always smelled sweet enough. Somehow, the flames still found organic material to burn, though only a few skeletal trees remained standing. The horizon was like broken, jagged teeth. No discernible structures remained, only blistered destruction and the endless bedlam of combat.
To a man who had known no other life, Barto found the landscape familiar and comforting.
“Down!” his point man Arviq screamed loudly enough so that Barto could hear it through the armored helmet. A bolt of white-hot energy seared the ground in front of them, turning the blasted soil into glass. The ricochet stitched a broken-windshield pattern of lethal cuts across the armored chest of one comrade five meters away.
The victim was in a different part of the squad; Barto knew him only by serial number instead of a more personal, chosen name. Now the man was a casualty of war; his serial number would be displayed in fine print on the memorial lists back at the crèche—for two days. And then it would be erased forever.
Barto and Arviq both dove to the bottom of the trench as more well-aimed laser-lances embroidered the ground and the slumping walls of the ditch. As he hunched over to shield himself, the helmet’s speakers continued to pound commands: “KILL … KILL … KILL …”
The Enemy assault ended with a brief hesitation, like an indrawn breath. The soldiers around Barto paused, regrouped, then scrambled to their feet, leaving the fallen comrade behind. Later, regardless of the battle’s outcome, trained bloodhounds would retrieve the body parts and drag them back to HQ in their jaws. After the proper casualty statistics had been recorded, the KIA corpses would be efficiently incinerated.
In the middle of a firefight, Barto and Arviq could not be bothered by such things. They had been trained never to think of fallen comrades; it was beyond the purview of their mission. The voice in the helmet speakers changed, took on a different note: “RETALIATE … RETALIATE … RETALIATE …”
With a howl and a roar enhanced by adrenaline injections from inside the armor suits, Barto and his squad moved as a unit. Programmed endorphins poured into their bloodstreams at the moment of battle frenzy, and they surged out of the trench. The Enemy encampment could not be far, and they silently swore to unleash a slaughter that would outmatch anything their opponents had ever done … though this most recent attack was assuredly a response to their own previous day’s offensive.
Moving as a unit, the squad clambered over debris, a
round craters, and out into the open. They ran beyond monofilament barricades that would slice the limb off an unwary soldier, then into a sonic minefield whose layout shone on the eye-visor screen inside each helmet.
With a self-assured gait across the no-man’s-land, the soldiers moved like a pack of killer rats, laser-lances slung in their arms. They bellowed and snarled, pumping each other up. As he ran, Barto studied the sonic minefield grid in his visor, sidestepping instinctively.
From their embankment, the Enemy began to fire again. The smoky air became a lattice of deadly lines in all directions. Barto continued running. Beside him, Arviq pressed the stock of his weapon against his armored breastplate, pumping blast after blast toward the unseen Enemy.
Then a laser-lance seared close to Barto’s helmet, blistering the top layer of semi-reflective silver. Static blasted across his eye visor, and he couldn’t see. He made one false sidestep and yelled. He could no longer find the grid display, could no longer even see the actual ground.
Just as his foot came down in the wrong place, Arviq grabbed his arm and yanked him aside, using their combined momentum. The sonic mine exploded, vomiting debris and shrapnel with pounding sound waves that fractured the plates of Barto’s armor, pulverizing the bones in his leg. But he fell out of the mine’s focused kill radius and lay biting back the pain.
He propped himself up and ripped off his slagged helmet, blinking with naked eyes at the real sky. Arviq had saved his life—just as Barto would have done for his squad-mate had their situations been reversed.
Always trust your comrades. Your life is theirs. That was how it had always been.
Selected Stories: Volume 1 Page 29