Hayford Peirce: Innocent Until Scanned Guilty

Illustration by Janet Aulisio Dannheiser

Washington: a somber winter day in March of 2076. An icy wind whistled around the Capitol and the corner offices of the senior senator from New Mexico, Samuel Garraty Ferron. Sam had turned sixty-eight the month before and was asking himself with increasing frequency how many more Washington winters he could stand away from Marianna and the kids. The answer seemed to be coming with more and more finality: this one, and one after. But in the election of ’78, he had all but made up his mind, the good people of the great state of New Mexico would just have to find some other sucker to peddle their goods for them.

In the meantime, though, there was one item in particular of unfinished business to attend to. Sam wrenched his attention back to the tall, angular woman who was the minority leader of the House of Representatives. “The genie is out of the bottle,” he repeated, “well and truly, and it can never be stuffed in again. That’s why it’s up to us to deal with it.”

“You’re the one who let it out,” murmured Congresswoman Kutnick accusingly from behind her cup of steaming tea.

“Wrong guy: it was my son-in-law—my ex-son-in-law—and his pals at Seticorp and the University of Hawaii who rubbed the bottle the wrong way.”

“Your son-in-law—that’s the celebrated Roderick Bantry, future Nobel laureate, et cetera, et cetera?”

“Yes. He’s a damn sight more celebrated than is good for his health.”

“So I hear. Wasn’t he shot and almost killed the other day out there where you live?”

“Yes. And his wife, his second wife, was killed.”

“And even with PE they still haven’t caught anyone?”

“They’re small-town cops whose only experience is handing out parking tickets. And PE only works if you have a suspect to use it on. They never got their hands on anyone even remotely resembling a suspect.”

“You think the Federation did it?”

Sam stared into space for a long moment before replying. “A friend of mine at the Federation who’s in a position to know—he’s very, very senior in the OPS, though he won’t admit to it—swears that it wasn’t them.” Sam shrugged. “But who can you believe, even among old friends? In any case, Roderick’s almost fully recovered.”

“A dangerous life that scientists seem to lead.” Jasmine Kutnick’s large brown eyes suddenly flashed. “And if I had my way, it’d be a helluva lot more dangerous for all of them! Scientists! All they can think about is the Nobel prize and what they can do to grab it—they’re always rubbing the bottle the wrong way! And we’re the ones who are left to pick up the pieces and try to put them back together.”

“So far we’re not going a very good job of it,” said Sam pointedly.

The congresswoman shrugged. “We’re representatives of the people, aren’t we? And the people are confused and frightened by the scanner. Why should their representatives be any different? Suppose you’d asked the Congress of two hundred years ago, back in 1876, to draw up legislation regulating every conceivable consequence and nuance of the invention of the telephone for the next two centuries? What sort of result do you think you’d have gotten—especially if you also insisted that they had to do it right now, instantly, toot sweet!”

Sam grinned in spite of himself. Even when they were on opposite sides of an issue he’d always like Jasmine Kutnick, a raw-boned, self-assured Afro-Korean from the Detroit ghetto who had muscled her way to national prominence by dint of sheer effort and steely determination. “ Touché, to continue our conversation in French. But from what I recall—I’m not quite old enough to actually have been there, but I’ve read all about it—the invention of the telephone didn’t really seem all that earthshaking at the time. In fact it was more than a hundred years before it finally merged with computers and all the other information and entertainment systems to become what it is today.” He nodded his hairless skull at the office CommCent on the far side of the room. “But the time scanner is a completely different kettle of fish: everybody knows it’s important.”

“And they’ve either got to have it for themselves, instantly —or it’s got to be suppressed, also instantly.” The congresswoman sighed and put down her teacup. “Sam, I really am of two minds about this damn thing, no, make it half a dozen minds. Some days I wake up thinking that it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened for humanity; the next day I wake up thinking that it’s obviously the most catastrophic.”

Sam nodded. “I know just how you feel. But that doesn’t relieve us of our obligation to do something about it. It’s been a year and a half since Roderick unveiled it in London, and the only thing the combined wisdom of the United States Congress has been able to come up with is to clamp a moratorium on its use until a legal structure can be erected to deal with it.” He snorted disgustedly. “Some action, some leadership!”

“Look, Sam, what can we do? On the one hand we’ve got every policeman, prosecutor, historian, genealogist, and voyeur in the country demanding they be given a full-color, working model; on the other hand we’ve got every fundamentalist bible-thumper, trial lawyer, Federationist bureaucrat, crook, semi-crook, would-be crook, cheating husband, unfaithful wife, and hand-in-your-pocket politician anywhere in the world demanding that it be thrown into the ocean, along with everyone responsible for it.” Jasmine Kutnick glared at her tea cup. “And on the third hand, we’ve got ten million jurists, lawyers, sociologists, scientists, television commentators, and every other possible kind of so-called expert loudly telling us here in Washington just exactly how they’d handle things. And you’re upset because we’ve only spent a year and a half trying to figure out how to deal with it!”

Sam nodded in tacit agreement. His own initial experiences with the time scanner had come at his daughter’s clinic and—had he ever dared reveal the details of his original covert involvement with it—could have provided ample grist for either side of the bitter on-going argument. On the one hand: a grotesque and shocking glimpse of his son-in-law, the discoverer of the scanner, making love to a woman who was manifestly not his wife; on the other hand: the utilization of its ability to scan the recent past in order to locate his ten-year-old son who lay lost in the woods with a broken ankle.

Unvarnished good or unvarnished evil: that was what most of the millions of Americans who bombarded Congress with their own views on the scanner thought would come of it. So pity the poor politician who had to find some middle ground. No wonder even someone as normally incisive as Jasmine Kutnick couldn’t make up her mind.

“Well,” said Sam, after their companionable silence had drifted on for another minute, “at least you can’t deny this: twenty thousand detailed copies of the plans for making a scanner were distributed by bonny Prince Richard and all the other astrophysicists at that meeting in London. Not even the Federation was able to bottle it up. So now we know that anyone in the world with an O-CLIP computer and a graviton reader can build himself a fully functioning time scanner.”

“O-CLIP computers have been federally regulated for some years now,” said Congresswoman Kutnick with an edge of defensiveness to her voice.