Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

It was the critical instant. This last scene, this static vision in time, must now be captured on the emulsion waiting inside the camera. As always, the mental process of transfer was sharp, burning. And then it was done.

He stood up and turned on the ceiling light again. He was breathing heavily. He felt cold, but his face was dripping with sweat He pushed the bronze casting aside, rubbed at his eyes with a couple of paper towels, then pulled the film out of the camera. He studied the positive print briefly, but with approval. He rubbed the negative carefully with a hypo-stick and placed it between the carrier plates of the enlarger.

Why, of all the transcendent possibilities, did he think Helen would want this simple thing of hands? Why not the gangling young man, brooding at the grave of Ann Rutledge? Or the poignant farewell from the rear of the train just before it pulled out of Springfield? No, none of these. For Helen Nord, it had to be the hands.

For a bachelor in his fifties, thought Edmonds, I am a fool. And if Helen only knew what I have been doing here, she would certainly agree. I’m worse than Tom Sawyer, walking the picket fence to show off in front of his young lady friend.

He smiled wryly as he turned off the ceiling light once more and reached for the 8×11 bromide paper.

The secretary in the outer office looked up from her typewriter and smiled. “Good morning, Madam Nord. The Justice is expecting you. Please go right in.”

“Thank you.” Mrs. Nord returned the smile and walked through into the inner office.

Benjamin Edmonds stood up gravely and motioned her to the chair by the great oak desk.

Helen Strachey Nord of Virginia, once known only as the widow of John Nord and the mother of three sons (all now launched in professional careers) was a hand» some woman in her late forties. The tragic death of John Nord in the first Mars landings had brought her initially to the public eye, but her own remarkable abilities had kept her there. After working several years at NASA and taking her law degree at night, she had been appointed to the U.S.-Soviet Arbitration Commission to settle the Lunar Disputes of the late seventies. War had been averted. She was the obvious choice for the next appointment of a United States delegate to the U.N. And finally, when old Justice Fauquier died, President Cromway submitted her name to the Senate as the first female Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The ensuing senatorial debates and hearings made the long forgotten Cardozo and Black appointments seem exercises in benevolence. But for Cromway’s assassination, she would never have made it. As a courtesy to the late President, enough votes were collected. Just barely.

How strange, thought Edmonds, that this woman, who has known passion, and who has nourished three fine sons, can yet bring such intricate insights into bankruptcy, space law, admiralty ... the whole gamut. He said: “Glad you could drop by, Helen. I have something for you.” He opened the attaché case, took the picture out and handed it to her. “It’s only an eight by eleven, but if you like it I can make you a bigger blowup for framing.”

The woman walked over to the window and studied the picture.

Edmonds asked: “Do you know what it is?”

“Yes—that is, i know what it would be, if it were possible. The hand of Charles Leale holding the hand of the dying Lincoln in the dawn hours of April fifteenth, eighteen sixty-five.” She looked back at him, pondering. “But it can’t be, because I also know that no photographs were taken. Not on that terrible night. But no matter. It is superb.” She continued, sorting it out in her own mind. “It was the crowning, exquisite irony of the Civil War. You know the story, of course. Dr. Leale was a young army surgeon. He had come to Ford’s Theatre that night just to see Lincoln. It was the great ambition of his young life to shake the hand of the President, but he scarcely dared hope for this. And so he was the first doctor in the presidential box after Booth leaped down to the stage. Leale had the President moved across the street, and endured the last hours with him. And, it being his army experience that a dying man will sometimes regain consciousness in the moments just before the end, and wanting Lincoln to know he was among friends, he came around to his right side, and took him by the hand, with the tip of the forefinger on the fading pulse, just as you see here.” She looked back at Edmonds thoughtfully. “It is certainly pertinent, considering the case we’ll have at conference today.”

His eyes searched her face uneasily. “Poor timing, wasn’t it? I’m truly sorry. But you’ll have to learn not to let a case get to you, Helen. Not even Tyson v. New York. Especially not Tyson”

“Ben, do you think Frank Tyson shot President Cromway?”

“What I think about it personally is irrelevant. I can think about it only as a judge. And being a judge, even on this Court, is a job like any other. We get paid for interpreting laws made by other people. Our personal feelings of right and wrong are supposed to be irrelevant.” How could he explain to her that he himself had never learned how to deal with that bitterest judicial duty—to decide whether a man lives or dies—and that he was reconciled to the knowledge he would never learn how to deal with it? He had never understood the rationale of capital punishment. After a history of six thousand years, it did not deter murders that led to further capital punishment. Maybe it had reduced the number? There was no way to tell. There was no control experiment. He shrugged. “The only thing that you and I and our seven brothers will have to think about is whether New York violated Tyson’s constitutional rights in convicting him. As a Lincolnian, you must appreciate that.”

“I know. Poor Dr. Mudd—his only crime was to set the broken leg of a stranger—who later turned out to be John Wilkes Booth. For which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.”

“And Mrs. Surratt, in whose house the conspirators met.”

“Yes. Even when the hangman pulled the black bag over her head, she did not understand.”

They both looked around. Edmonds’ secretary was standing in the doorway. “Excuse me, sir. The five-minute buzzer.”

Edmonds nodded.

Helen Nord took a last puzzled look at the photograph before she put it away in her briefcase. Edmonds followed her out into the corridor.

Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts, and emotions.

—Justice Brandéis, dissenting in Olmstead v. United States (1928)

At his first Friday conference, Edmonds had thought the custom rather silly: each of the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court, the most prestigious body in the world, had to shake hands with the eight others before they could take their seats around the long table. But now, after several years on the high court, he could understand why Chief Justice Fuller had instituted the practice nearly a hundred years ago. It softened long-standing frictions and differences that might otherwise prevent nine totally divergent minds from meshing together as a court. He thought wryly of analogies from the ring: “Shake hands and come out fighting.” Thirty-six handshakes. It was possible now, at eleven o’clock in the morning. When they adjourned at six, it might not be.