Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Syd turned the shell over and looked at the brass end. “This hasn’t been fired, but the hammer’s fallen on it. The firing pin missed the center.”

“It happened the last time I tried to fire the gun,” said Dar even more quietly. “The only time that weapon ever misfired.”

Syd stood holding the shell and looking at Dar for a long moment before setting it down under the windowsill. “That shell is still dangerous, you know.”

Dar raised his eyebrows.

“I know from your file that you were in the Marines…in Vietnam. You must have been very young.”

“Not so young,” said Dar. “I’d already graduated from college by the time I enlisted and was sent over there in 1974. Besides, there wasn’t much for us to do that last year except listen to bits of the Watergate hearings on armed forces radio and go around the countryside picking up the M-16s and other weapons that the ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, our team—were dropping as they ran away from the North Vietnamese regulars.”

“You graduated from college when you were eighteen,” said Syd. “What were you…a prodigy?”

“An overachiever,” said Dar.

“Why the Marines?” asked Syd.

“Would you believe it was out of sentiment?” asked Dar. “Because my father had been a Marine in the real war…World War II?”

“I believe that he was a Marine,” said Syd, “but I don’t believe that’s the reason you enlisted in that service.”

Correct, thought Dar. Aloud he said, “Actually, it was partially to get my service out of the way and get back to the States for graduate school, and partially out of sheer perversity.”

“How so?” said Syd. She had finished her Scotch. Dar poured her another two fingers.

Dar hesitated and then realized that he was going to tell her the truth…sort of. “As a kid, I was obsessed with the Greeks,” said Dar. “The obsession lasted through college, even while I was pursuing a degree in physics. All of the liberal arts majors were studying ancient Athens—you know, sculpture, democracy, Socrates—while I was always obsessed with Sparta.”

Syd looked quizzical. “War?”

Dar shook his head. “Not war, although that’s all the Spartans are remembered for. The Spartans were the only society I knew of that made a science out of the study of fear—they called it phobologia . Their training—which began at a young age—was all geared at recognizing fear, phobos, and defeating it. They even taught of parts of the body that were phobosynakteres —places where fear accumulated—and trained their young men, their warriors, to be able to put their minds and bodies in a state of aphobia .”

“Fearlessness,” translated Syd.

Dar frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “There are different forms of fearlessness. A berserker warrior or a Japanese samurai caught up in mindless rage, or, for that matter, a Palestinian terrorist on a bus with a bomb, they’re all fearless —that is, they don’t fear their own deaths. But the Spartans wanted something more.”

“What could be better for a warrior than fearlessness?” asked Syd.

“The Greeks, the Spartans, called such fearlessness brought on by rage or anger katalepsis, ” said Dar. “Literally, being possessed by a daemon—a loss of control by the mind. They spurned that completely. Their hoped-for aphobia was a completely…well, controlled, minded thing—a refusal to become absorbed and possessed, even in the midst of battle.”

“And did you learn aphobia in the Marines…in Vietnam?” said Syd.

“Nope. I was scared shitless every second I was in Vietnam.”

“Did you see much action there?” asked Syd, her eyes intent. “Your Marine Corps files are still classified. That must mean something.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he lied. “For example, if I was a clerk typist and typed a lot of classified material, you wouldn’t be able to get access to my files.”

“Were you a clerk typist?”

Dar held his Scotch glass in both hands. “Not all of the time.”

“So you saw combat?”

“Enough to know that I never wanted to see any again,” said Dar truthfully.

“But you’re comfortable around weapons,” said Syd, getting to the point.

Dar made a face and sipped his whiskey.

“What kind of weapon were you issued in the Marines?” asked Syd.

“Some sort of rifle,” said Dar. He did not enjoy discussing firearms.

“Then an M-sixteen,” said Syd.

“Which all have a tendency to jam if not kept perfectly clean,” said Dar, a bit disingenuously. He had not been issued an M-16. His spotter had carried an accurized M-14—an older weapon, but one that shared the same 7.62 millimeter ammunition as the bolt-action Remington 700 M40 that Dar had trained with. And train he had—120 rounds a day, six days a week, until he was able to hit a man-sized moving target at five hundred yards and a stationary one at one thousand.

He finished his Scotch. “If you’re trying to palm a handgun off on me, forget it, Chief Investigator. I hate the goddamn things.”

“Even when the Russian mafia’s trying to kill you?”

“They tried to kill me,” corrected Dar. “And I still think it may have been a case of mistaken identity.”

Syd nodded. “But you’ve handled weapons,” she persisted. “You were taught what to do if a shell misfired…”

Dar looked up at her. “Aim your weapon at a safe, neutral target and wait. It may still fire without warning.”

Syd pointed to the. 410 shell. “Should we throw that away?”

“No,” said Dar.

They each had a final glass of Scotch and watched the fire. The bit of smoke that stayed in the room was aromatic, mixing with the smoky peat taste of the whiskey.

The tension of the earlier conversation had almost disappeared. They were talking shop.

“Did you hear about the directive from the last political appointee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency?” asked Syd.

Dar chuckled. “Absolutely. The word accident is never to be used in any official reports, correspondence, and/or memos.”

“Doesn’t that seem a little odd?”

“Not at all,” said Dar. A log broke and crumbled into embers and he glanced at it for a second before looking back at his guest. Syd’s face appeared younger and softer in the firelight, her eyes as alive and intelligent as always. “You have to follow their chain of logic,” he said. “All accidents are avoidable. Therefore they shouldn’t happen. Therefore the agency can’t use the word accident—they don’t exist. They have to circumlocute and say crash or incident or whatever.”

“Do you agree that all accidents are avoidable?” asked Syd.

Dar laughed heartily. “Anyone who’s ever investigated an accident…whether it’s the space shuttle or some poor schmuck who runs a yellow light and gets broadsided…knows that they’re not only not avoidable, they’re inevitable.”

“How so?” said Syd.

Dar looked at her. “They happened . The probability of the series of events that led up to the accident may each be a thousand to one, or a million to one, but once those events occur in the right sequence, the accident is one hundred percent inevitable.”

Syd nodded but did not look convinced.

“All right,” said Dar, “take the Challenger accident. NASA had become the careless driver who runs yellow lights. You get away with it once—five times—twenty times—and pretty soon you assume it’s a natural and safe behavior. But if you keep driving, the odds of being hit by some other sonofabitch with the same intersection philosophy become almost one hundred percent.”