Hayford Peirce: Innocent Until Scanned Guilty

“And now that the Federation’s so kindly taken over most of the private affairs of the U.S. of A., they’ve made it even harder to get hold of one. So that gives us time to—”

“True. But according to my son, the computer guru, there are all sorts of other computers nearly as powerful as O-CLIPs just waiting to be introduced. So it’s not impossible that some day soon scanners will be able to work without O-CLIPs—and anyone in the world with a home computer will be able to peep into your bedroom with his own little time scanner.”

The congresswoman’s lips tightened. “But I thought it had to have an O-CLIP! If—”

Sam leaned forward, his face intense. “Listen, Jasmine, this is what I’ve been trying to get through to my knucklehead colleagues on my side of the Hill, without, I admit, any success whatsoever: not even Roderick Bantry knows how the scanner works. He discovered it purely by happenstance when he input some data from a graviton reader from his observatory in Hawaii into an O-CLIP computer. Since then, he and the best scientific minds in the world know exactly as much today as he did then: that it takes a graviton reader and an O-CLIP computer working in conjunction to make a time scanner.”

“But that’s what I just sa—”

“Wait! Gravitons are still an almost entirely unknown quantity. We know that just as there’s no light without photons, there’s no gravity without gravitons. We know that gravitons have indefinitely long lifetimes, zero electric charge, and zero rest mass. And that’s all we know although I believe they’re now postulating that gravitons might have a polarity in addition to their other qualities. As they sweep through space and encounter objects and events, the polarity of each graviton is changed in accordance with the last bit of mass in that particular place. The scanner, therefore, is just something that detects the polarity of each of the incoming gravitons.”

“ Just? Sounds like quite a bit to me.”

Sam shrugged. “I’m only parroting what Roderick’s told me. But it’s nothing but pure speculation trying to explain how a scanner could possibly detect an event that not only occurred ten years ago but in a place that’s now physically a couple of billion miles away.”

Jasmine Kutnick shook her head. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“The point is: We can detect them with graviton readers—that’s what my son-in-law specialized in when he discovered the scanner, building new and better readers—and that’s all we can do. We can’t do anything to alter them, or to change their behavior in any way. What we can do, though, is to build new and better computers—which historically has meant building them faster, smaller, cheaper, and more accessible to Josephine Everyguy. So—”

“So what you’re getting at,” said the congresswoman, with a rueful expression twisting her face, “is that if we can’t change gravitons, at least we can change the other crucial element. And that there’s nothing to say that some other kind of computer manipulating the data from a graviton reader might not work just as well.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. And why I’m trying to make everyone on the Hill see the urgency of dealing with this matter before it becomes a full-scale crisis.”

“ Crisis? Isn’t that a little overdram—”

“Let’s just say that tomorrow morning Apple-IBM hits the market with a million palmtop models that cost a hundred bucks apiece and have all the power of an O-CLIP—and that they just happen to work in conjunction with graviton readers. Are you, Congresswoman Jasmine Kutnick, going to ask the Federation and Office of Planetary Security to pretty please step in and do the job that you can’t do: to keep the guy upstairs from peeking into last night’s activities in your bedroom with his own little time scanner?”

“Call in the Federation? I think if I did that I’d be lynched in the streets by my loyal constituents.” Jasmine Kutnick frowned thoughtfully as she rose to her feet. “That’s a good argument you make, Sam. I’ll carry it back to my side of the Hill and see what we can do with it.”

Sam watched the congresswoman depart, then pushed himself slowly to his own feet. Why did the winters here in Washington make him feel so much creakier than those in New Mexico? It was far colder up at the elevation of Eagle Nest Lake than—

His wristphone simultaneously beeped and pulsed against his wrist. Startled, Sam pushed the accept stud. The face of his sixteen-year-old son by his second wife looked out of the tiny screen. “Dad!”

“Bruce. What’s—”

“You’re not going to believe this! They’ve arrested Emily!”

“Arrested Emily? Your sister?”

“Well, not really arrested her, I guess, but they came and got her with a court order and—”

“Wait a second! Who came and—”

“Someone from the district attorney’s office in Taos, but he had a policeman with him. They had a court order to take her off for PE and—”

“PE? Perceptualization enhancement? ” Sam’s bewilderment deepened. “But even with a court order, interrogation under PE is only ordered for criminals!”

“But that’s what they think she is! They’ve arrested Roderick, and now they think she helped him murder Linda Rawlings!”

As his plane droned west, Ferron’s thoughts were on the man who had once been his son-in-law. For the thousandth time in the last six years he cursed the very existence of Roderick Bantry, both for the trouble he was about to cause the world at large by his inadvertent discovery of the time scanner, and, more personally, for the seemingly endless string of related troubles that his discovery had brought down upon Sam’s family. The first, and most ironic, of course, was the bitter memory of Emily’s broken marriage. The scanner’s monitor had revealed her husband making love to another woman on one of the desks of her own clinic. The outcome had been a divorce and Roderick’s embittered marriage to a woman he had never loved.

A woman that now, it seemed, Emily was accused of murdering.

Sam shook his head. He had known bizarre and improbable events in his years of hunting painlusters, but nothing more outlandish and inconceivable than this.

That Linda Rawlings should be murdered, even in this day and age in which crime had almost been wiped out, was far from bizarre. For if anyone Sam had met in a long and eventful life had ever had a personality to inspire murder, it was Linda Rawlings.

And that it was her husband, Roderick, who had killed her was—given his widely known hatred for her—also far from being inconceivable.

But that his daughter, Emily, should be involved, was inconceivable—and perceptualization enhancement would prove it.

Roberto Martinez, district attorney of Taos, the nearest town to Sam’s home on Eagle Nest Lake, had been a highly successful college boxer, so much so that in his election campaigns he liked to run as “The Fighting Bobcat.” In spite of a well deserved reputation for grandstanding in the courtroom he had never lost a case or an election—and he clearly had an eye on more important offices.

And he was also, Sam noted dourly, a member of the opposition party. If Martinez was embarrassed by the necessity of interrogating the daughter of the most powerful politician in the state he hid it well. “I’m certain she has nothing to worry about, Senator, but I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t do this.”

Ferron eyed him coldly, much as decades before, just before their deaths, he had dispassionately studied the painlusters he had helped to bring to the execution sheds across the country. If you strike at a king, buddy, then you’d better make sure you kill him, he reflected grimly as he allowed the silence to build. At last, just as Martinez was beginning to fidget under the unsettling intensity of his glacial blue eyes, Sam smiled bleakly. “Of course you’d be remiss, Mr. Martinez,” he said mildly. “Just as whoever it was who interrogated Roderick Bantry under PE at the time of the killing was remiss in neglecting to discover the minor fact that he’d killed his wife. Or have I missed something?”