The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Then, abruptly, to Bobby’s surprise, Mavens invited Bobby to come out to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Bobby hastily arranged a flight.

  •

  He found Mavens in his office, a small anonymous box, windowless and stuffy. Mavens was sitting behind his littered desk — feet propped up on a pile of file boxes, jacket off, tie loose — watching a news show on a small SoftScreen. He waved Bobby silent.

  The piece was about the extension of the scope of citizens’ truth squad activities to the murkier corners of the past, now that — in response to a powerful and immediate clamour — past-viewing WormCam facilities had at last been made available for private use.

  In the midst of poring over each other’s grubby past, in between staring at their own younger selves in awe or amazement or shame, people had been turning the WormCam’s unforgiving gaze on the rich and powerful. There had been a whole new spate of resignations from public office and prominent organizations and corporations, as various past crimes were disinterred. A whole series of old outrages were being turned over. The coals of the old scandal of the tobacco companies’ knowledge of, indeed manipulation of, the addictive and toxic effects of their products, were being raked once more. The involvement and profit-making of the world’s larger companies in Nazi Germany — many of them still operating, some of them American — had been even more extensive than imagined; the justification that de-Nazification had been left incomplete in order to assist economic recovery after the war looked, at this remove, dubious. Most computer manufacturers had indeed made inadequate provisions to shield their customers when microwave-frequency microchips had come on the market in the first decade of the century, leading to a rash of cancers.

  Bobby said, “So much for the scare predictions of how we ordinary folk wouldn’t be mature enough to handle a technology as powerful as the past viewer. All this seems pretty responsible to me.”

  Mavens grunted. “Maybe. Although we’re all using WormCams for the sleazy stuff too. At least these crusading citizen types aren’t just beating up on the government. I always thought the big corporations were a bigger threat to freedom than anything we were likely to do. In fact we in government were the ones holding them in check.”

  Bobby smiled. “We — OurWorld — were caught by the microwave row. The compensation claims are still being assessed.”

  “Everybody’s apologizing to everybody else. What a world… Bobby, I got to tell you I still don’t think we can achieve much progress on Ms. Manzoni’s case. But we can talk about it, if you like.” Mavens looked exhausted, his eyes black-rimmed, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.

  “If there’s no progress, why am I here?”

  Mavens looked unhappy, uncomfortable, somehow out of place. He had lost the brave youthful certainty Bobby remembered about him. “Because I have time on my hands, all of a sudden. I’m not suspended, in case you’re thinking that. Call it a sabbatical. One of my old cases has been under review.” He eyed Bobby. “And.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to see what your WormCam is really doing to us. Just one time, one example. You remember the Wilson murder?”

  “Wilson?”

  “New York City, a couple of years ago. A young teenager from Bangladesh — he’d been orphaned by the floods in ’33.”

  “I remember.”

  “The UN placement agency found this particular relocate, called Mian Sharif, an adoptive home in New York. A middle-aged, childless couple who’d taken one adopted kid before — a girl, Barbara — and brought her up successfully. Apparently.

  “The story looked simple. Mian is killed at home. Mutilated, before and after death, apparently raped. The father was the prime suspect.” He grimaced. “Family members always are.

  “I worked on the case. The forensics were ambiguous, and Wilson’s mind maps showed no particular propensity to violence, sexual or otherwise. But we had enough to convict the man. Philip George Wilson was executed by lethal injection on November 27, 2034.”

  “But now…”

  “Because of the demand on WormCam time for new and unresolved cases, the review of closed cases like Wilson has been a low priority. But now the public have gotten online to the WormCams, they are looking for themselves, and they are starting to agitate for some old cases to be reopened: friends, family, even the convicted themselves.”

  “And now the Wilson case.”

  “Yeah.” Mavens smiled thinly. “Maybe you can understand how I’m feeling. You see, before the WormCam, I could never be sure what the truth is in any given case. No witness is a hundred percent reliable. The perps know how to lie through forensics. I couldn’t know what happened, unless I was there.

  “Wilson was the first convicted criminal to be executed because of my work. I knew I’d done the best I could to establish the truth. But now, years after the event, I’ve been able to see Wilson’s alleged crime for the first time. And I found out the truth about the man I sent to the needle.”

  “Are you sure you ought to show me.”

  “It will be in the public domain soon enough.” Mavens twisted the SoftScreen around so Bobby could see, and began to dial up a recording.

  The ’Screen cleared to show a bedroom. There was a wide bed, a wardrobe and cupboards, animated posters of rock and sports stars and movie icons on the wall. A boy lay face down on the bed: slim, dressed in T-shirt and Jeans, he was propped up on his elbows over books and a primary-colour SoftScreen, sucking a pencil. He was dark, his hair a rich black mass.

  Bobby said, “That’s Mian?”

  “Yeah. Bright kid, lived quietly, worked hard. He’s doing his homework. Shakespeare, as it happens. Aged thirteen, though I guess he looks a little younger. Well, he won’t get any older… Tell me if you want to stop this.”

  Bobby nodded, curtly, resolved to see this through. This was a test, he thought. A test of his new humanity.

  The door opened outward, admitting a burly middle-aged man. “Here comes the father. Philip George Wilson.” Wilson was carrying a soda bottle; he opened it and set it down on a bedside table. The boy looked around and said a few words.

  Mavens said, “We know what they said. What are you working on, what time does Mom get home, blah blah. Nothing consequential; just an ordinary exchange.”

  Wilson ruffled the boy’s hair and left the room. Mian smoothed back his hair and went back to work.

  Mavens froze the image; the boy turned to a statue, his image flickering slightly.

  “Let me tell you what we thought happened next — as we reconstructed it back in ’34.

  “Wilson comes back into the room. He makes some kind of pass at the boy. The boy rebuffs him. So Wilson attacks him. Maybe the boy fights back; if so, he didn’t do Wilson any damage. Wilson has a knife — which, incidentally, we don’t find. He cuts and rips at the kid’s clothes. He mutilates him. After he kills the boy, by cutting his throat, he may have performed sex on the body, or he may have masturbated; we find flecks of Wilson’s semen on the body.

  “And then, cradling the body, covered in blood, he yells 911 at the Search Engine.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Mavens shrugged. “People act in strange ways. The facts are that there was no way in or out of the apartment save for locked windows and doors, none of which were forced. The hallway security cams showed nothing.

  “We had no suspects save for Wilson, and a lot of evidence against him. He never denied what he did. I think maybe he believed himself that he really had done it, even though he had no memory of it.

  “Our experts were split. We have psychoanalysts who say Wilson’s knowledge of his appalling act was too much for his ego to bear. So he repressed it, came out of the episode, returned to something like normal. Then we have cynics who say he’s lying, that he knew exactly what he was doing; when he realized he couldn’t get away with the crime, he feigned mental problems to secure a softer sentence. And we have neurologists who say he probably suffers from a form of epil
epsy.”

  Bobby prompted, “But now we have the truth.”

  “Yes. Now, the truth.” Mavens tapped the SoftScreen, and the recording resumed.

  There was an air-conditioning grille in the corner of the bedroom. It popped open. The boy, Mian, got to his feet quickly, looking startled, and backed into a corner.

  “He didn’t call out at this point,” Mavens said softly. “If he had…”

  Now a figure crawled out through the open grille. It was a girl, dressed in a tight-fitting spandex ski suit. She looked sixteen, might have been older. She was holding a knife.

  Mavens froze the image again Bobby frowned. “Who the hell is that?”

  “The Wilsons’ first adopted daughter. She’s called Barbara — you remember I mentioned her. Here she was eighteen years old, and she’d been living away from home a couple of years.”

  “But she still had the security code to get into the building.”

  “Yeah. She came in disguise. Then she got into the air ducts, big fat ones in a building that age. And that’s how she got into the apartment.

  “We used the ’Cam to track her back a couple of years deeper into the past. Turns out her relationship with her father was a little more complex than anyone had known.

  “They got on fine when she lived at home. After she left for college, she had a couple of bad experiences. She wanted to come home. The parents talked it over, but encouraged her to stay away, to become independent. Maybe they were wrong to do that, maybe they were right. But they meant well.

  “She came home anyway, one night when the mother was away. She crawled in bed with her sleeping father, and performed oral sex on him. She was the initiator. But he didn’t stop her. Afterwards he was full of guilt. The boy, Mian, was asleep in the next room.”

  “So they had a row.”

  “No. Wilson was distressed, ashamed, but tried to remain sensible. He sent her back to college, talking about putting this behind them, it’s a one-off. Maybe he really thought time would heal the wounds. Well, he was wrong.

  “What he didn’t understand was Barbara’s jealousy. She’d become convinced that Mian had displaced her in her parents’ affections, and that was the reason she was shut out, kept away from home.”

  “Right. So she tries to seduce the father, to find another way back…”

  “Not exactly.” Mavens hit the SoftScreen, and the little drama began to unfold once more.

  Mian, recognizing his adoptive sister, got over his shock and stepped forward.

  But with startling speed Barbara closed on him. She elbowed him in the throat, leaving him clutching his neck, gasping.

  “Smart,” said Mavens professionally. “Now he can’t call out.”

  Barbara pushed the boy onto his back and straddled him. She grabbed his hands, held them over his head and began to slash at his clothes.

  “She doesn’t look strong enough to do that,” Bobby said.

  “It isn’t strength that counts. It’s determination. Mian couldn’t believe, even now, this girl, a girl he thought of as his sister, was going to do him real harm. Would you?”

  Now the boy’s chest was bare. Barbara reached down with the knife -

  Bobby snapped, “Enough.”

  Mavens hit a button, and the SoftScreen cleared, to Bobby’s profound relief.

  Mavens said, “The rest is detail. When Mian was dead she propped him against the door, and called for her father. Wilson came running. When he opened the door his son’s warm body fell into his arms. And he called the Search Engine.”

  “But Wilson’s semen.”

  “She stored it, after that night she blew him, in a cute little cryo-flask she liberated from a medical lab. She’d been planning this, even as far back as that.” He shrugged. “It all worked out. Revenge, the destruction of the father who had spurned her, as she saw it. It all worked, at least until the WormCam came along. And so.”

  “And so the wrong man was convicted.”

  “Executed.”

  Mavens tapped the ’Screen and brought up a fresh image. It was of a woman-fortyish, blond. She was sitting in some dingy office. Her face was crumpled with grief.

  “This is Mae Wilson,” Mavens said. “Philip’s wife, mother to the two adopted children. She’d had to come to terms with the death of the boy, what she thought of as her husband’s dreadful crime. She’d even reconciled with Barbara, found comfort with her. Now — at this moment — she had to face a much more dreadful truth.”

  Bobby felt uncomfortable, confronted by this horror, this naked grief. But Mavens froze the image.

  “Right here,” he murmured. “That’s where we tore her heart in two. And it’s my responsibility.”

  “You did your best.”

  “No. I could have done better. The girl, Barbara, had an alibi. But with hindsight it’s an alibi I could have taken apart. There were other small things: discrepancies in the timing, the distribution of the blood. But I didn’t see any of that.” He looked at Bobby, his eyes bright. “I didn’t see the truth. That’s what your WormCam is. It’s a truth machine.”

  Bobby shook his head. “No. It’s a hindsight machine.”

  “It has to be right to bring the truth to light,” Mavens said. “I still believe that. Of course I do. But sometimes the truth hurts, beyond belief. Like poor Mae Wilson, here. And you know what? The truth didn’t help her. It didn’t bring Mian back, or her husband. All it did was take her daughter away too.”

  “We’re all going to go through this, one way or an other, being forced to confront every mistake we ever made.”

  “Maybe,” Mavens said softly. He smiled and ran his finger along the edge of his desk. “Here’s what the WormCam has done for me. My job isn’t an intellectual exercise any more, Sherlock Holmes puzzles. Now I sit here every day and I get to watch the determination, the savagery, the — the calculation. We’re animals, Bobby. Beasts, under these neat suits of clothing.” He shook his head, still smiling, and he ran his finger along the desk, back and forth, back and forth.

  Chapter 19

  Time

  As the availability and power of the WormCam extended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snowflakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time…

  •

  Princeton, New Jersey, USA. April 17, 1955 A.D.

  His good humour, in those last hours, struck his visitors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed to regard his approaching end as simply an expected natural phenomenon.

  And, of course, even to the end, he issued gruff orders. He was concerned not to become an object of pilgrimage, and he instructed that his office at the Institute should not be preserved as he left it, and that his home should not become a shrine, and so on.

  Doctor Dean looked in on him for the last time at eleven P.M., and found him sleeping peacefully.

  But a little after midnight his nurse — Mrs. Alberta Roszel — noticed a change in his breathing. She called for help and, with the help of another nurse, cranked up the head of the bed.

  He was muttering, and Mrs. Roszel came close to hear.

  Even as the finest mind since Newton began, at last, to unravel, final thoughts floated to the surface of his consciousness. Perhaps he regretted the great physics unification project he had left unfinished. Perhaps he wondered if his pacifism had after all been the right course — if he had been correct to encourage Roosevelt to enter the nuclear age. Perhaps, simply, he regretted how he had always put science first, even over those who loved him.

  But it was too late for all that. His life, so vivid and complex in youth and middle age, was now reducing, as all lives must, to a single thread of utter simplicity.

  Mrs. Roszel bent close to hear his soft voice. But his words were in German, the language of his youth, and she did not understand.

  …And she did not see, could not see, the swarm of spacetime flaws which, in these last moments, crowded around the trembling lips of Einstein
to hear those final words: “…Lieseri! Oh, Lieseri!”

  •

  Extracted from testimony by Prof. Maurice Patefield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chair of the “Wormseed” campaign group, to the Congressional Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, 23 September, 2037:

  As soon as it became apparent that the WormCam can reach, not just through walls, but into the past, a global obsession of the human species with its own history opened up. At first we were treated to professionally-made “factual” WormCam movies showing such great events as wars, assassinations, political scandals. Unsinkable, the multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the Titanic disaster, for example, made harrowing, compelling viewing — even though it demolished many sea-story myths propagated by uncritical storytellers, and much of the event took place in pitch North Atlantic darkness. But we soon grew impatient with the interpolation of the professionals. We wanted to see for ourselves. The hasty inspection of many notorious moments of the recent past has revealed both banality and surprise. The depressing truths surrounding Elvis Presley, O. J. Simpson and even the deaths of the Kennedys surely surprised nobody. On the other hand, the revelations about the murders of so many prominent women — from Marilyn Monroe through Mother Teresa to Diana, Princess of Wales — caused a wave of shock, even in a society becoming accustomed to too much truth. The existence of a shadowy, relentless cabal of misogynistic men whose activities against (as they saw it) too powerful women, actions carried across decades, caused much soul-searching among both sexes. But many true-story versions of historic events — the Cuba missile crisis, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the euro — while of interest to aficionados, have turned out to be muddled, confusing and complex. It is dismaying to realize that even those supposedly at the centers of power generally know little and understand less of what is going on around them. With all respect to the great traditions of this House, almost all the key incidents in human history are screw-ups, it seems, just as almost all the great passions are no more than crude and manipulative tumblings. And, worse than that, the truth generally turns out to be boring. The lack of pattern and logic in the overwhelming, almost unrecognisable true history that is now being revealed is proving so difficult and wearying for all but the most ardent scholar that fictionalized accounts are actually making a comeback: stories which provide a narrative structure simple enough to engage the viewer. We need story and meaning, not blunt fact…