Midwife

Illustration by Janet Aulisio Dannheiser

… Bantry’s time scanner, that miraculous gadget for viewing the past and whatever had happened there—that was what the cops needed in cases like this…

… The scanner—the greatest invention in human history….

… And with the greatest potential for good or evil….

… Pretty soon we’ll know which way it’s going to go…

… Good…?

… Or evil…?

These were the immediate, if rather disjointed and melodramatic, thoughts of Samuel Garraty Ferron on this August morning of 2074, as he blinked with outrage and disbelief at the page of the Washington Clarion that had just been printed by the office commcent. In repulsive color and sickening detail, it showed the bodies of a family of four visiting Norwegians who had literally been cut in half on the steps of Washington’s John Paul Jones Memorial. The police speculated that the weapon was an illegally modified industrial laser wielded from a passing van. A random, totally gratuitous act of horror.

PAIN LUSTER REVIVAL? screamed the paper’s headline. The senior senator from New Mexico stared blankly a moment longer, then crumbled the page and tossed it in the recycling bin. “Painlusters?” he muttered aloud, his thoughts still scattered and fuzzy, for it was barely five o’clock in the morning and he had just arisen from a troubled night on the office cot. “It can’t be. They’re all dead.” He took a cautious sip of steaming coffee, then a longer swallow. Hadn’t he himself witnessed the execution of the last American painluster at Leavenworth Federal Prison nearly twenty years ago, back in ’55 or ’56? The seventeenth and concluding year of the Great Sweep, that was, the worldwide rat hunt that had exterminated the hundreds of thousands of organized sadists who had so inexplicably come to infect an entire planet.

“No!” Sam slammed his hand painfully against the top of his desk. Isolated, demented, dope-driven crazies, that was what the killers of these Norwegians had to be. Painlusters were forever dead and gone, thanks to the determination of people like himself—and to interrogation by perceptualization enhancement, the relatively minor scientific miracle that allowed an infallible determination of guilt or innocence.

If first you could get your hands on someone to interrogate.

That, of course, had always been the Achilles heel of perceptualization enhancement. What could the cops do with a random drive-by killing like this one with no apparent motive and no witnesses? Get a court order to haul in every one of the three million inhabitants of Greater Washington and question them one by one under PE?

Sam snorted in angry frustration. Of course you couldn’t! But on the other hand, you couldn’t let crime and violence and organized insanity spin out of hand again like they had back in the ’20s and ’30s. And in spite of PE, some of those horrors did seem to be returning, at least in the occasional cases of unspeakable violence like that directed at this poor Norwegian family.

Could the rising tide of inexplicable hatred of these last few months have anything to do with the Federation?

Sam stared bleakly out the window of his comer office in the Capitol. The first rosy traces of the new day were brightening the top of the Washington Monument; his thoughts drifted to the Federation.

Much of American sovereignty had already been surrendered to the bureaucrats in Geneva, along with its entire nuclear arsenal; what little sovereignty remained was now the issue before the Congress: would the United States Senate finally ratify the Constitution of the Federation, thereby in effect voting itself out of business for all but the most trivial local concerns?

So far the answer had been no—but only because of the filibuster that he and other like-minded senators had mounted to prevent the decision from coming to an actual vote. For three months now the Administration had tried every tactic short of actual hostage-taking to force the ratification to a vote; for three long months forty-one senators had blocked that move by non-stop oratory. Passions were running high across the country—and violence had been threatened by supporters of each side.

Was this incident a demented response to the final, tangible closing of the mystical American Frontier, and to the centuries-long sense of freedom from the dictates and strife of the corrupt Old World? Or was this overly glib explanation nothing but equally demented sociological psychobabble?

Perhaps, perhaps not. But the number of such incidents was undeniably growing, and had to be stopped.

Along with a number of other things, some of them of far more importance than the crime rate in Washington, D.C.

Sam sighed. Was he paranoid for sometimes thinking that all the burdens of the world, as well as all the hopes of humanity, rested upon his own tired shoulders alone?

Or was the word megalomaniac?

No matter. He set down his empty coffee mug and squinted at his wristphone’s time display. He was due on the Senate floor in precisely forty-four minutes to put in his own three-hour stint of filibustering oratory. Yes, plenty of time. For there was, of course, one infallible way of stopping this latest outbreak of barbarism, a genuine technological miracle that by comparison made detection by perceptualization enhancement seem like the divination of chicken entrails.

If it could be introduced to the world without being suppressed by the Federation—and without getting its sponsors permanently axed as well.

Sam’s lips tightened. It was time to find out what his infuriating ex-son-in-law was up to—and how much closer he was to getting all of their heads chopped off by the Federation.

Roderick Bantry, his face framed in Sam’s deskphone, seemed as brisk and darkly handsome as ever in spite of the fact that it was not long before midnight Hawaii time. He ran a hand through thick, curly black hair while a slightly sour grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “The eminent senior senator from New Mexico himself. What can I do for you, Senator, at this ungodly hour?”

“Hello, Roderick.” On closer examination, Bantry’s face had thinned, and there were noticeable worry lines around the eyes of the man who had been married to Sam’s daughter for nearly four years. “Astronomers worked at night, I thought, so I took a chance that you’d still be up.”

“I don’t actually do as much around the observatories at night as the real astronomers do, but tonight you’re lucky. And you’re in Washington, are you, heroically manning the filibuster barricades?”

“I’ll be on the floor at the stroke of six A.M.”

“Will you be able to stop them?”

“I don’t know. They need 60 votes for cloture; so far they’ve only been able to scrape up 59.”

“Just one solitary senator needs to change his mind and it’s all over for the good old U.S. of A.? Them’s mighty slim margins, Senator.”

“To keep the Federation from nosing through our affairs? I agree, Roderick. And it won’t be me you see changing his mind.”

“Glad to hear it. I… well,” Bantry’s mouth twisted and he appeared to look down at something off screen. “Well, I don’t imagine you called just to talk about your filibuster.”

“No. Bruce tells me that he’s been talking to you off and on for the last couple of years, that you’ve been very helpful to him.” Bruce was Sam’s fourteen-year-old son.

“I thought that was our little secret.” Bantry’s eyes flickered and he shifted uneasily in his chair. “Are you mad at… me?”

“I suppose not. He’s old enough to make up his own mind on things like that. So you’ve been using your O-CLIP to run some of the programs he’s written?”

“He already knows a thousand times more about computers and programming than I do. I’m glad to help him. Maybe someday he’ll be helpful to me in return.”

“Maybe. If there is a someday.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“These are ominous times. The Federation really wants us to ratify this Constitution of theirs. I’ve been getting phoned death threats from people in ski masks, both deskphone and wristphone. So have all the other senators on our side of the filibuster. And so have my family. I—”

“Your family? Including… Emily?”

“Emily, too. As well as Bruce and Marianna. They’re all under FBI protection, but who knows what that means against crazies—or a worldwide government convinced that the ends justify the means.”

Once again Bantry’s gaze moved off-screen. “Sam, you know that with Emily it wasn’t how things seemed. I—”

“I know, Roderick, or at least I know what you think things were like. But all that was four years ago. Right now I want to know if there’s any evidence of the Federation, particularly the Office of Planetary Security, messing about with you and Linda the way—”

“Linda? My darling spouse who’s already spent half the Nobel money in advance?” The bitterness in Bantry’s voice was palpable. “I haven’t seen the bitch in six weeks.”

Sam briefly averted his own eyes. He had never liked the woman who had forced herself onto Roderick Bantry as his second wife, but it was painfully embarrassing to be confronted by such naked hatred.

“But she’s all right as far as you know?”

“The bills are still coming in from Europe, so she must be all right. What is this, Sam?”

Sam sighed. Just how good at eavesdropping was the OPS? Right now, with every indiscreet word they uttered they might well be putting their necks on the line. But short of flying to Hawaii, he’d have to say something to Bantry. “Bruce tells me that he thinks you’re about to go public.”

“He does, does he?” Bantry’s mouth tightened. “Is that what this call is about?”

“Yes. I think we’re running out of time, Roderick. The Federation and the OPS have already got their hands on all the weapons of mass destruction throughout the world and are busy shutting down the plants that made them. You know what their charter is: to prevent war by any means necessary. No more Khyber Holocausts, Roderick, but by the same token, no more technologies of any kind that might ever be used to disturb the peaceful sleep of Federation bureaucrats.”

“But that’s crazy, Sam! The sea—the—this is the greatest preventive of war that’s ever been invented! Give this to the OPS and no one would ever be able to prepare for war without the entire world knowing about it!”

“And no one could ever again commit a crime and get away with it. Yes, I know, Roderick. But I don’t think the Federation is going to see it that way. At least not to the point of letting every local police force in the world have one to play around with. When you think about it, no matter how fancy their new Constitution may be, at bottom the Federation is composed of nothing but thousands and thousands of bureaucrats and politicians. And you know how much any politician or bureaucrat anywhere in the world likes the idea of having every one of his private little deals and secrets being absolutely open to the public eye.”

“I know all this, Sam! Why do you think I’ve been hiding over here in Hawaii for the last four—”

Sam passed a weary hand across his face, then across the shiny scalp from which the last remaining wisps of white hair had finally disappeared. “Sorry, Roderick, I guess it’s too early in the morning for me to be thinking clearly.” Or, he groused to himself, maybe it’s just that at sixty-six I’m finally getting old.

Stop letting your mind wander like this! “What I really mean to say is this: the Federation already has its fingers stuck in most of our domestic pies. And as soon as their Constitution is ratified—and it will be, Roderick, it will be—then they’ll have their fingers in the rest of them. And that means that you personally can kiss your Nobel goodbye—you’ll never have a chance in hell of introducing it. And I just happen to think, Roderick, that the only thing that is going to keep us from turning ourselves over to a worldwide dictatorship is the sea—that thing we’ve been talking about. So it comes down to this: Just how close are you to introducing it?”

It was, Sam knew, in some ways an utterly unfair question. Bantry had been more than ready to introduce it four years ago, almost since the moment of its inadvertent discovery at Emily’s clinic on the shores of Eagle Nest Lake in northern New Mexico. There had, however, been… circumstances.

Sam still didn’t have the faintest idea how the scanner worked, or why. All he really understood was that one night Roderick Bantry had sneaked into the tightly sealed computer room of his wife’s clinic to surreptitiously—and in full defiance of federal law—use its superpowerful three-dimensional O-CLIP computer to construct a theoretical model of one of his subatomic hypotheses. Instead, he had unexpectedly created on the computer’s monitor a two-dimensional, black-and-white snapshot of a scene that was identifiable as an image of the recent past.

Bantry at the time had been designing graviton readers for the physics department of the University of New Mexico at Santa Fe. Further investigation had shown that certain types of data taken from a graviton reader had to be input into an O-CLIP computer; in some inexplicable way this was the mechanism that created what the few people who knew of it had come to call the time scanner.

But three-dimensional O-CLIP computers had been deemed by the federal authorities too powerful to be let loose on the world. By secretly using Emily’s O-CLIP to create his time scanner, Roderick had put himself and Sam’s entire family at risk of federal prosecution.

To keep themselves out of jail, Sam had been forced to work a deal with Bantry: the astrophysicist would go to live somewhere far away; and Sam would do what he could to help him find a way of introducing the scanner to the world without putting all of them at risk, from either the federal authorities, or, even more ominously, the Federation’s recently created Office of Planetary Security.

“Even the Federation isn’t all-powerful,” Sam had muttered to his wife, “at least not yet. Maybe they can suppress a college professor like Bantry, or even a United States Senator like yours truly. But they’ll think twice about going after Harvard or Oxford or the Sorbonne or Apple-IBM. If we do it right. Somehow I’ll have to fix it so that someone in that league shares the credit with Roderick—and the blame.”

So far the bargain appeared to have worked. Even before Emily and Bantry had been formally divorced, Sam, as a member of the Science Appropriations Subcomittee, had come across an interesting item concerning the SETI Corporation.

Seticorp was a semi-public company partially funded by government appropriations to search for extraterrestrial signals; for thirty years now it had leased facilities from the University of Hawaii in the observatories on Mauna Kea, the gigantic volcano that comprised the so-called Big Island of Hawaii. Now, it seemed, Seticorp had applied to the government for a license for an O-CLIP computer…

Three months later Seticorp had its new computer. It also had a new researcher on Mauna Kea, one with a solid pedigree in gravitons—and with officially approved access to the newly installed O-CLIP computer.

Now, four years later, Roderick Bantry nodded reluctantly. “Well, either Bruce is very observant, or I’m a stupid loudmouth. But he’s absolutely right. We’re going to give a demonstration at the annual astrophysicists meeting at the University of London next month. Prince Richard is a highly regarded astrophysicist, you recall, very distinguished in the field. We’ll bring him in on center stage for some major public relations work. And we’ll instantly hand out to the media several thousand complete plans for building your own handy-dandy scanner. I think our asses ought to be covered if we spread the credit around broadly enough and quickly enough. No one’s going to try to suppress a member of the Royal family. Not even the Federation.”

“You’d be safer still if you’d let Bonnie Prince Richard take all the credit for himself and you and your toothy smile discreetly faded from the picture. I say that seriously, Roderick.”

Bantry flashed a brief, wintry smile, then tossed his hand with a flash of the old arrogance that Sam remembered so well. “No, Sam. I want that Nobel. Not only want it, I need it. I told you: Linda’s already spent most of it in advance.”

“Well, I guess I can’t begrudge you that. But you’re certain you’ve arranged things so that it’s clear the discovery was made while using the O-CLIP in Hawaii? There’s nothing at all that can trace it back to… to anywhere else?”

“Nothing at all,” said Bantry with absolute certainty. He glanced over his shoulder, then leaned forward so that his face filled the entire screen. “Everyone here knows that I stumbled across it in the Keck Observatories entirely by accident. That accident and everything that follows from it has been minutely documented and recorded a million ways from Thursday. Sam, I was very, very careful.”

“Mmmm.” Sam pursed his lips. “Let us fervently hope so. Now let me change the subject a bit. You remember when I told you that if you could improve the range, we could use our… various facilities to keep an eye out to see if the Federation or anyone else was getting ready to come down our throats? Did you?”

“Did I improve the range? Yes. I still don’t know much more about how the damn thing works than I did before, but the range was no problem at all. Once I got some of the other University people involved with it, we miniaturized a bunch of graviton readers and put them in geosynchronous orbit along with some of our regular equipment.”

“What?” Sam was genuinely startled. “You’ve got this stuff up in orbit? Right now?”

Bantry grinned. “Sure, why not? The new readers only weigh a couple of pounds of apiece. Seticorp is always paying someone to put up tiny little payloads to help us with our search for little green men on the other side of the Galaxy. We just stuck some of our readers in with the other stuff. Nobody even knows about it except a handful of us here on Big Island.”

“Geosynchronous orbit: doesn’t that mean that with three or four of them you can blanket the entire world? That means that you could be sitting there on your volcano halfway around the world looking in on what I ate for breakfast this morning?”

“Or who you spent last Saturday night with in that hot-sheet motel down the river in Virginia,” said Bantry with a savage laugh.

“Um,” muttered Sam. “Well, we always knew that this was what it was going to come to. And why our throats are in imminent danger of being slit. All right, that’s one of the two did yous. What about the other one?”

“What other one?” Bantry was frankly baffled.

“Did you use this expanded range to keep tabs on the Federation, particularly the security office? To see if they’re planning any—”

“Oh.” Bantry scowled and suddenly seemed less sure of himself. “Well, I thought about it. I thought about it for a long, long time. And what I decided was this-, if I used the scanner to spy on them, and then the scanner was made public, eventually they’d use it to spy on me spying on them, if you see what I mean. Which would just give them another incentive for banning it altogether. For the same reason, I haven’t used it to watch what goes on in the bedrooms of the rich and beautiful. I just don’t want to give them incentives.” He looked at Sam as if seeking absolution and his voice was little more than a whisper. “Sam, do you think I was right?”

Sam exhaled in noisy exasperation. “I don’t know, Roderick,” he said after a while. “I’ve got to admit that some of the same thoughts passed through my own mind every time I thought about that O-CLIP sitting right there next door to us in the clinic. Sometimes it’s been awfully tempting to let Bruce loose on it to see what we could see. But—” he shrugged “—finally, I didn’t. Like you, I decided it was just a little too dangerous.” He exchanged a long, speculative look with Roderick Bantry. “I just hope we weren’t wrong.”

“Sorry, dear,” said Sam ten days later. “I still can’t tell you when I’ll be home. This damn filibuster looks like it might actually go on for another couple of months.”

“You mean nobody has changed her mind?” Marianna demanded incredulously. The sharply chiseled features of Sam’s beautiful Brazilian-born wife looked out of his deskphone. Twenty years younger than Sam, she was sunny, totally extroverted, athletic—and absolutely uninterested in politics. “Then when is it going to end?”

“Probably when one of us drops dead—literally. All of us here are pretty stubborn cusses.”

“Don’t say that! There was another one of those awful men in a ski mask on my wristphone cursing and threatening us if you didn’t change your vote. Sam, how do they activate the emergency override? I thought you could block your phone off to anyone you wanted to. And why can’t they trace where they’re calling from? And stop them! It must be against some law to threaten United States senators!”

Sam sighed. The FBI had quickly determined that somehow the calls were being surreptitiously inserted into the global communications network somewhere overseas—and absolutely nothing else. “Well—” he began.

“Oh, Sam, I don’t see why you want to be a senator in the firsf place! Why don’t you just retire and go fishing with Bruce and… and… just stop being a senator!”

Sam had to keep himself from audibly sighing a second time. How to tell Marianna—or Bruce and Emily—that the only reason he clung so tenaciously to this thankless job in Washington was that as a United States senator he could protect the three of them from the Federation and its lackeys a helluva lot more vigorously than if he were merely private citizen Sam Ferron of Eagle Nest Lake, New Mexico, population 768.

Or so he told himself. Right now he didn’t seem to be doing a terribly effective job of it.

“We’ll talk about it when I get home, dear. But I certainly do agree with you: there’s got to be a better way of making a living.”

Like finding out from Roderick Bantry how he was coming along with the public introduction of the scanner in London seventeen days from now. Sam told his commcent to call Bantry at his observatory office. A moment later he was looking at a printed message saying that Roderick Bantry was out of his office.

Sam grimaced in annoyance. It was hard enough trying to figure out when an astronomer might be at work in the first place; it was even harder when there was a six-hour time difference involved. “The hell with it,” he muttered. “Call Bantry on his wristphone. Use the private emergency number.”

To Sam’s surprise, the face of Linda Rawlings peered out of his deskphone. Her mousy-brown hair, he saw, was as straggly as he had remembered, her eyes even more bulbous. “I’m sorry,” she said, “neither Roderick nor I can answer your call at the moment, but if you leave your name and number we’ll call you back as soon as we can.” The screen went blank.

Sam sagged back in his chair, tugging fretfully at the loose flesh that seemed to be accumulating beneath his chin.

Linda Rawlings?

Rawlings was the Treasury Department snoop who had been assigned to keep the O-CLIP in Emily’s clipper room from unauthorized use. She hadn’t done her job very well. First Roderick Bantry, then ten-year-old Bruce Ferron, had managed to overcome her precautions with contemptuous ease. The bizarre upshot had been a disastrous affair between Roderick and Linda that Emily had discovered via her husband’s prototype time scanner. Emily had filed for divorce—and Roderick had been forced to marry Linda in order to keep her mouth shut about his illegal use of the O-CLIP.

The hatred and contempt that Roderick had evinced for her a few short weeks ago had been unmistakable. Was it possible that he would ever turn his wristphone over to her to program?

Something was very wrong.

“You are due on the floor in seven minutes,” reminded his commcent.

“Damn. Keep trying to get Roderick Bantry. Call every ten minutes. Call every number you have for him. When he answers, tell him I’ll call as soon as I’ve finished my damn orating.”

But four hours later Bantry still wasn’t answering any of his phones—and Linda Rawlings’s face was still turning up on his wristphone.

“Well,” said Sam to his daughter that evening over his own phone, “I suppose he could be on his way to London with the people from the observatory and this is his way of being subtle and clever.”

“Subtlety and cleverness aren’t Roderick’s strong points,” said his former wife. “And even if they were, I can’t believe he’d let that… that creature leave a message for him instead of doing it himself. Unless he was dying in a hospital somewhere.”

“I know. That’s what makes me nervous.” Sam felt his eyes closing and his body being racked by an enormous yawn. “The hell with it. I’ll keep after him all day tomorrow until I get him.”

But the next day he was no more successful. “All right,” he muttered at last, “now for the next step.” He called first Seticorp and then the Keck Observatories on Mauna Kea.

“I’m sorry, Senator Ferron,” said a puzzled receptionist ten minutes later, “but I can’t seem to locate Mr. Bantry at all. He’s supposed to be here. He was gone for the weekend, of course, but now it’s late Monday afternoon here in the Islands and he’s still not… Did you try his home?”

“I’ve been trying his wristphone for two full days. And his home too. But I’ll try again.”

Still no answer. Sam drummed his fingers rapidly on his desk for a moment, then called his staff’s legal assistance liaison, a terrifyingly competent lady whose actual job was to know everyone in Washington—and where their skeletons were closeted and their bodies buried. “Sorry to bother you so late in the afternoon, Ms. Dockerty-Dawson, but this is extremely important. I need to find a certain Roderick Bantry and/or a Linda Rawlings. Or the phone numbers where they can be reached. They’re legally married but possibly informally separated. Here are the numbers I already have for Bantry; for Rawlings I’ve got nothing. If you could come up with something within twenty-four hours I’d be extremely grateful.”

Twenty-four hours later nothing had turned up except three more hate calls to everyone in Sam’s family.

Inwardly Sam raged. Outwardly it was hard to keep from manifesting some of that rage on the people around him. Sam fought for control as he considered what Ms. Dockerty-Dawson had turned up: nothing. Seven different phone numbers for Bantry and Rawlings—none of which were ever answered.

“One checked a little further,” whinnied Ms. Dockerty-Dawson in her teeth-gritting voice. “It’s strictly prohibited, of course, but if one speaks to precisely the right person, one can find out where a working wristphone is physically located, at least within a certain broad area. Those two wristphone numbers we’re speaking of are now somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about 900 miles west of Portugal. Wristphones don’t work under more than two and a half inches of water, I am informed, so the most obvious explanation is that both phones are now on a boat in that general area.” Ms. Dockerty-Dawson sniffed loudly in contemptuous disbelief.

Or in a watertight bag floating on the ocean, thought Sam bleakly, dumped there by people who didn’t want Bantry or Rawlings found—but who didn’t want their phones to conspicuously stop working either.

Sam spent the next six hours fruitlessly calling the seven numbers he had been given. After that he called the operations director of the FBI. “Judith? Sam Ferron here. I think that the present passive surveillance is no longer enough. No, I can’t tell you why at the moment, you’ll just have to take me on trust. Can you round up my family—Marianna, Bruce, and Emily—and salt them away somewhere for a while where nobody can get at them? Even if they come after them with an army? How about that fortress of yours in the Poconos? Yes, I’ll call them this moment and tell them to be prepared to leave in the next thirty seconds. I truly thank you, Judith, I truly, truly do.”

Sam broke the connection and slumped back in his chair, his mind numb with fatigue. What next? Only one thing suggested itself. He had to talk to the Federation. But how—and to whom?

Horst Helmstreit cast an amused eye at the several thousand naked people of both sexes at play on the golden sand that stretched as far as the eye could see. A dense growth of imported palm trees provided shade along one edge. Small gray rollers from the Gulf of Mexico lapped slowly against the other. Above, a furnace-like Sun burnt down from a cloudless blue sky.

“I didn’t know you were a nudist, Sam,” observed Helmstreit mildly, his slate-gray eyes appraising Sam’s fish-belly white body and darkly tanned arms. “If you are, you’re not much of an advertisement. Although I must say that aside from your color, you look in pretty good shape. Including your foot.”

Sam glanced down at his barely discernible artificial left foot, the legacy of the encounter with painlusters nearly forty years before that had cost the lives of his first wife and her parents. He wiggled the prosthetic toes. “Yes, they get better and better every year. But I didn’t come here for the sun.”

“No? Then why?”

Sam turned around slowly, then held out his empty hands. He rubbed a hand over his gleaming scalp. “As you can see, Horst, I’m naked, there’s nothing hidden on me, no recorders, no spyalls, nothing. And you’d better be the same. Otherwise the conversation ends here.”

Horst Helmstreit nodded approvingly. “Very clever, old colleague. I see you haven’t forgotten everything from the old days.” His gray eyes swept the beach. “You have your men planted here?”

“Some of them are women, I believe. I imagine you have your own?”

“Possibly, possibly.” Helmstreit held out his own thick brown hands. “What next? You can see I’m completely clean.”

“Are you? Come over here a few steps. Good. Now lift your left foot and let me see the bottom. Quickly, Horst. Quickly!”

Helmstreit hesitated, then broke into a dour smile. “So!” he muttered, lifting his left foot to reveal a small, flesh-colored patch. “I cut my—”

“I’m sure you did, Horst. Just pull it off and throw it away over there.”

“How did you know it was there?” demanded Helmstreit as he balanced precariously on one foot and stripped the patch away.

“When I was a kid I was fascinated by an old-time magician named Harry Houdini. One day I read that Houdini used to keep his picklocks taped to the bottom of his feet when he did his celebrated jail escapes. They’d strip him naked, search him all over, and never find a thing.”

“Harry Houdini, ha! I’ll remember that.” The Austrian smiled benignly. “And now, Sam, shall we talk?”

“Yes. We’ll walk out in the water as far as we can go and bounce around in the waves. That ought to prevent anyone else from listening in.” Sam’s right hand tightened powerfully around Helmstreit’s upper biceps. “But first, Horst, let’s also take a look at the bottom of your right foot.”

Twenty-two years earlier, Sam had met Horst Helmstreit toward the end of the Great Sweep. Helmstreit was both the chief of Vienna’s painluster investigation bureau and the Austrian liaison with Sam’s painluster research center in Kansas City. Sam had spent three weeks in Austria while Helmstreit relentlessly rolled up one pain cult after the other. They had shared a few dinners together, a number of beers and coffees in sidewalk cafes. It had been nearly twenty years since they had last spoken. Now they bobbed together in the warm waves of Matagorda Island Nature Retreat, fifty miles northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas.

“Why me?” asked Helmstreit.

“Of all the people I’ve ever met who now work for the Federation you’re the most senior. And the one I have the most friendly recollections of.”

“All right, I’ll accept that for the moment. But why are we meeting?”

“You checked me out as I told you to?”

“Your political career, your family, your life? Yes, of course. There are lengthy dossiers on you scattered throughout the world.”

“Especially at the Office of Planetary Security.”

“I don’t work for the OPS, Sam, I told you that. I work for—”

“I don’t care who you pretend to work for. You know everyone in the Federation. And everything that’s going on in the world. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have gone to work for the Federation in the first place.”

Helmstreit nodded gravely. “Possibly, possibly.”

Sam looped his still muscular arm around the Austrian’s neck and pulled him closer. “The Senate filibuster on the Constitution, Horst,” he whispered in a voice that was barely audible. “I might—might!—be willing to switch my vote. But only in return for certain guarantees from the Federation.”

“Guarantees? For what?”

“The absolute safety of my immediate family, for starters. Now and for the next hundred years.”

“I don’t, of course, know what you’re talking about, Sam, but I think I could guarantee that. Yes, I really think so. We’re not tyrants, you know.”

“We’ll see. Next, I want Roderick Bantry and his wife back. Healthy, unharmed, and—this is most important, Horst—unbrainscrubbed. Do you follow me?”

“Not really, but supposing I did? Why might this couple I’ve never heard of be brainscrubbed? Assuming I even knew what that word meant.”

“That’s the other thing we’ve got to settle right here and now, Horst. Either you’re going to tell me what the Federation plans to do about the scanner or there’s no deal.”

“The scanner?”

Sam let some of his smoldering rage boil over. “Horst, this is me, Sam Ferron! Stop fooling around! If you don’t—”

Helmstreit looked at Sam with unblinking eyes. “Sam. I swear I don’t know what this scanner thing means.”

Sam considered the slab-like face skeptically. “Is it possible?” He unwrapped his arm from around Helmstreit’s neck and let himself drift away in the warm Gulf waters. “All right then, I’ll call your bluff. So go talk with someone who does know—and meet me back here in twenty-four hours.”

The following day was, if anything, even hotter. Sam and Helmstreit bobbed together in the same tepid water, this time with a thick green cabbage leaf protecting the top of Sam’s shiny skull.

“All right, Sam,” said the Austrian, “I finally found someone who appeared to know what you might be talking about. It’s the most closely guarded secret in the Federation. And from the little they told me, I can see why. This would be the most disruptive—”

“Horst, you, a former policeman, saying that? It would be the greatest thing for fighting crime that ever happened. Better than perceptualization enhancement even! It would wipe out crime and war forever! Isn’t that what your precious Federation is being set up for? It—”

“It would lead to absolute dictatorship,” declared Helmstreit flatly. “No one would ever have any privacy!”

“It would lead to absolute dictatorship if only one group of people had it—such as the Federation OPS. If everyone had it, though, then the opposite would be true—there’d be absolute freedom!”

“Freedom? Spying on—”

“Lying, stealing, crooked politicians? Not only to keep them from preparing for war, but from putting their hands in everybody’s pockets? I know that’s the Federation’s real worry, Horst, just like it’s going to be every politician’s worry all over the world. So to save their asses, the scanner’s going to have to be used under an absolutely rigidly defined legal code. There’ll be licensed genealogists and historians who’ll have access to it, laws about no peeping on living persons, regulations to—”

“Then what about policemen and wiping out crime and war, as you just said? How can they use it if—”

“Court orders, Horst, court orders. In Europe you don’t have a tradition of them like we do here in the States. But picture yourself five years from now as chief of police in Vienna. You want to use your brand new scanner to see if Heinrich Q. Glockenspiel has just used a big shiny ax on his wife over on the Prinz Eugenstrasse. First you’ll have to get a judge to issue a warrant for a scan on the basis of some concrete evidence or information, just the way you have to present a valid reason in order to get a search warrant today. Even if you personally saw him wielding the ax, you’d still have to get a court order.”

“Umph.” Horst Helmstreit sounded largely unconvinced. “In any event, Sam, that’s not the way it’s going to happen. Nothing is going to happen, do you understand, nothing! And that’s all I’ve been authorized to say.”

Sam took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. His worst fears had now been realized. “You mean you really are going to try to suppress it?”

“Suppress? That’s not quite the word—”

“Well, at least keep it for the Federation—and the OPS.”

“That I can’t comment on.”

“No, I suppose not. What about Roderick and Linda?”

“The Bantrys.” Helmstreit pursed his lips. “I’ve been told to tell you that we know nothing about them, have never even heard of them, but that we will keep an eye out for them. And that it is possible—possible, Sam—that after the next vote in the Senate, if all goes well, who knows, maybe they might be found after all.”

Sam looked at the Austrian with arctic blue eyes that were now glacially cold. “So you’re going to disappear them, are you? Them and everyone else who’s ever heard of the scanner?”

“Not you, Sam, and not your family. Not if…. ” Helmstreit shrugged eloquently.

“Everyone at the Mauna Kea observatories, Horst? Everyone at the University of Hawaii? Everyone in the United States Senate? The royal family in England? You can’t do it, Horst, not even the Federation can do all that.”

Helmstreit sighed softly. “I have nothing more that I’m allowed to say, Sam.”

“Then take this message back for me: You can’t put the genie back into the bottle. Particularly when it’s the most powerful genie since atomic energy.”

“No? Well, it certainly seems as if we’re going to try.”

Sam threw his arms around both Marianna and Bruce and squeezed tightly. Emily stood to one side and watched with an indulgent smile. “Everything’s all right?” he asked.

“It’s wonderful!” enthused Marianna, gesturing at the eighty-room stone mansion that loomed behind them in the sunny forest clearing.

“Well, it ought to be wonderful. This is where they bring Presidents to protect them when assassination threats seem really serious. I think it used to be the summer home of a Mellon or a Carnegie.”

“And they’ve got two O-CLIPs here!” marveled Bruce. “Two!”

“That’s what I heard,” said Sam softly. He lowered his voice even more. “Any chance of sneaking the use of one, even for a little while?”

Bruce shook his head. “I’ve been asking and asking.”

“So much so that now they’ve posted a real, live FBI man in front of each of them,” said Emily with a hard edge to her voice. “Ones that aren’t Linda Rawlings, either.”

Sam nodded. “And the one back at the clinic? Any chance at all of getting to it?”

Emily shook her head. “I’ve been meaning to tell you: it was physically sealed by three treasury agents with a court order about six hours ago. You’d need a crew of workmen and a truckload of power tools to get into it. I think the Administration really wants you to change your vote, Pop.”

“Damn! That’s what I’ve been afraid of: the final proof that the Administration is already in the hands of the Federation. Well…” Sam sighed heavily.

Marianna squeezed his arm. “Sam, what is this all about?”

“I’m going to have to borrow Bruce for a while. And then we’re going to have to find a functioning O-CLIP somewhere—secretly.”

“But… but why?”

“The Federation is moving fast—and ruthlessly. The FBI tells me that eleven people who were professionally connected with Roderick in Hawaii have disappeared in the last twenty-four hours, just the way he and Linda have. We’ve managed to get the rest of them under protection, but it may already be too late.”

“Then… then they really are trying to suppress—”

“Why do you want Bruce?” Emily cut in.

“I wish to hell I didn’t, but he knows a thousand times more about computers than I do and I can’t think of any other way of giving us even a fighting chance. And even that’s probably the wrong word. The chances are one in a million that we can even get it to work—and then one in a billion that we can save Roderick and the others.”

“Rod—” Emily faltered on the name of the man she had once loved.

“I don’t care about Roderick,” snapped Marianna, “I care about you and Bruce! Be careful, Sam!”

He nodded grimly. “I will,” he promised, wrapping his arm protectively around his son. “But if we can’t save Roderick…” He broke off, unwilling to finish his sentence.

… What chance have we got of saving ourselves?

Fourteen frantic hours later, Sam and Bruce stood in an instrument-laden room three miles from the French-Swiss border—and three thousand feet underground.

To no one’s astonishment, the French, of all the Europeans, had been the most adamantly opposed to the delegation of even the slightest of national prerogatives to the Federation. Two governments had fallen, one prime minister had been assassinated, and a near-revolution had paralyzed Paris for three weeks before they had finally been coerced into joining their neighbors in surrendering vital parts of their sovereignty. It was not surprising that an underground network of anti-Federationists supported by the very highest political levels had come into being.

“We managed to keep one O-CLIP hidden from the Federation when they did their inventory of the Ministry of Statistical Analysis,” said Colonel Lucienne Favre-Trognon with icy satisfaction. She was an attractive but grimly efficient military intelligence officer whom Sam had met two decades before during his pursuit of the world’s painlusters. “We cannibalized enough so-called defective parts from all over Europe and Africa to make this one working model without, we hope, leaving any paper trail.”

“Very efficient. We tried to do the same sort of thing in the States but I don’t know how well we actually succeeded. And with the present Administration, anything we did hide will probably be turned over to them anyway.”

“Politicians.” Colonel Favre-Trognon curled a disdainful lip, then turned businesslike. “That suitcase there contains everything you need?”

“Almost certainly not. We brought it more to give you a demonstration than for anything else.” Sam gestured at the four other military officers and three civilians who stood regarding him with openly skeptical expressions. “Once Bruce has shown what he can do with this four-year-old model, we hope to have bought your indulgence—as well as your expert help—in trying to link up with what Bantry says is now a global network.”

“And whether you succeed or not, you will leave us this obsolete… graviton reader did you call it?”

“Yes. That’s the bargain we agreed to. Lend us your O-CLIP, we’ll give you our reader.”

“This still sounds like the greatest of nonsense to me,” protested one of the civilians. “First you will have to demonstrate the reality of this… magical device.”

Sam nodded. “Just let Bruce sit at the controls of the computer and I’ll start feeding him data from the reader. But don’t expect too much. This is the same old reader Bantry left with us at the clinic four years ago—as I recall, its final range was only about seventy feet and forty-two hours into the past.”

But a few minutes later that was enough to elicit astonished cries from some and stunned silence from the others. “That… that really is me walking into the room yesterday morning!” Colonel Favre-Trognon stared incredulously at the jerky, black-and-white image of herself on the computer’s monitor. “Look, you can see from the headline that I’m carrying yesterday’s Figaro!”

Bruce reluctantly turned the controls over to a French computer expert, then stood behind him fidgeting impatiently while the officer slowly moved the image on the monitor out into the nearest corridor and then nearly two days into the past.

“But we’re buried here under one thousand meters of the Jura Mountains,” shouted one of the officers petulantly. “How can these… these gravitons do… penetrate… reveal… do—” He sputtered off into baffled silence.

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “And I don’t think Bantry does either. And all I know about gravitons is what I’ve had drummed into me: that they have an indefinitely long lifetime, zero electric charge, and zero rest mass. And that just as there’s no light without photons, there’s no gravity without gravitons.”

“But still it works,” marveled the man at the controls, “still it works!”

Sam allowed himself a thin smile. “It works if all you want to do is look at a hidden room somewhere under the Jura Mountains. What I hope is that you and Bruce can extend its range a trifle.”

Thirteen hours later Sam’s one chance in a million galloped triumphantly home.

The Office of Planetary Security had been less than 100 percent efficient in their sweep of Roderick Bantry and his colleagues in Hawaii. Seti-corp’s O-CLIP computer had been disabled and all of the personal or professional computers used by the dozen missing scientists destroyed or stolen. But Bantry had been a conspirator for too many years now to be so easily thwarted: it was Bruce who eventually found a Bantry-devised password guarding a file hidden in a Bank of Hawaii computer in the Big Island resort town of Kona-Kailua. After that, accessing the file from halfway around the world was nearly instantaneous.

The file contained all the information needed to link an O-CLIP computer with the six tiny graviton readers presently circling the Earth in geosynchronous orbit. It was another twenty minutes before the monitor displayed a now ultra-sharp—though still black and white—image of the general chairman of the Council of Nine having an intimate dinner in the private dining room of a Swiss auberge with a young lady who was manifestly not his wife.

“Track in on that date on the menu,” directed Colonel Favre-Trognon. “Thirteen May, 2073—fifteen months ago!” She stood rigid before the screen, then whirled and threw her arms around Sam. Before he could react, she had kissed him once on each cheek and then a second time. “Mon Senateur, you’ve done it, you’ve done it! We now have a weapon to fight the Federation! Je vous salute!”

“After that it was like shooting ducks in a barrel,” said Sam to Roderick Bantry. They were strolling slowly through the sun-dappled paths of the hardwood forest surrounding the Pocono safe house. Somewhere within the bowels of the mansion were Linda Rawlings and Bantry’s Big Island co-workers.

“You got me back, Sam,” said Bantry huskily, his eyes intent on the narrow trail. “I’ll never forget that. They were just about to start interrogating us with perceptualization enhancement, you know. I don’t know why they’d delayed it. They’d already used it on Linda three weeks ago after she’d blabbed too much to the wrong person at a fashion show in Milan, the bitch. That’s how they found out about the scanner in the first place.”

“I was wondering about that.”

“After the PE I don’t know what they were going to do with us. It takes a trained expert like Emily a lot of time to wipe out even a tiny portion of a memory using an O-CLIP. So why would they bother when there’s such a simpler way?”

Sam nodded somber agreement. “And if they’d interrogated you right away under PE you’d have told them about that backup file in Kona.”

Bantry shuddered. “And you’d never have figured out how to access the readers. And I’d be…” He gulped audibly and tapped the forest floor with the tip of his shoe.

“Maybe, maybe not. I think there was at least a fighting chance that Bruce and the other computer types might have figured it out on their own.”

“Whatever. I owe you, Sam, you and Bruce, I really owe you.” Bantry shook his head as if still marveling at the narrowness of his escape. “But how did you do it, how did you get them to just let us go?”

“It wasn’t pretty,” said Sam, stopping to lean against the trunk of a particularly imposing oak and study a patch of hazy blue sky, “and I’m not particularly proud of it. But I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. What we did was to make a list of every reputed scandal or aspersion or embarrassment that had ever been linked to any of the members of the Council of Nine, as well as a dozen or so other Federation movers and shakers, including the top four people in the OPS.”

“You mean all the dirty linen—”

“I’m afraid so. With the French intelligence service working with us it wasn’t very hard to get a list of hundreds of rumors, stories, and innuendos. After that it was just a matter of tracking some of them down.” Sam shook his head despondently. “You’d be depressed at how many of the really awful things that were alleged about some of the very best of them were actually true. The scanner does not give a pretty picture of the human race, Roderick.”

Bantry turned away to hide the flush that reddened his cheeks as he remembered his own horrible humiliation of four years before. Without the pitiless testimony of the scanner, he knew, he would still be married to the only woman he had ever loved. “Don’t rub it in,” he muttered.

“Rub it in? What do you… oh. No, I was thinking about… about other things.”

About the second-in-command of the Office of Planetary Security who had somehow managed to conceal his youthful activities as a member of an Australian pain cult.

About the Council of Nine member who had locked his first wife in a cellar dungeon for three months until she had consented to a divorce, just as rumor had always said.

About the justice of the High Tribunal who really did spend occasional weekends in the company of very young boys, the younger the better.

About the Federation’s new Minister of Environmental Coordination who really had squirreled away $7 million in a Liechtenstein bank account for his role nine years earlier in the coverup of the Paraguayan Black Death.

And most shocking of all, about Maheyna Mbluhei, the revered Executive Secretary of the Council of Nine. Thirty-seven years ago, the nagging innuendo had it, this saint-like creature who had lifted herself to the presidency of Kenya by her tireless efforts on behalf of the children of Africa, had participated in the massacre of an entire village of dissident tribesmen on the Lotagipi Swamp.

Silently grieving for the human race, Sam had watched the truth unfold on the O-CLIP’s screen. It reminded him of the painluster horrors he had once devoted his life to expunging. The truth was stark and simple. And just as the rumor had said.

“I felt slimy,” muttered Sam, “dirty, awful at having to watch the things we saw. But we had to, Roderick, we had to—if we wanted to get you back.”

“I know, Sam. And I’ll never forget—”

“Oh, it wasn’t just for you that I did it. It was for everyone else, like those poor villagers who got themselves massacred by Her Holiness. And for all the other poor people who right now are getting themselves screwed and murdered and robbed by gangsters and politicians and petty warlords all over the world, and who never get a break from anyone. They’re the ones I did it for, Roderick, they’re the ones who need the scanner to protect them, all the little people of the world.” Sam pushed himself away from the tree, his face bleak. “And by God, Roderick, I’ll see that they get it!”

Bantry stared at him wide-eyed, half-frightened by the intensity of Sam’s grimness. “And that’s what you told them, Maheyna Mbluhei, and all the rest? You just out-and-out blackmailed them? You blackmailed the entire Federation?”

“What’s worked for me before will work again. Anyway, we didn’t call it blackmail, we called it a political negotiation. We—I and everyone in that room under the Jura Mountains—will forget about everything we saw—and recorded, Roderick, recorded very, very thoroughly—and they’ll forget about trying to suppress the scanner, at least entirely. We drew up a protocol about how it’ll be allowed to be used, with certain restrictions, but right now I can’t remember all the details. You’ll be reading about it soon enough. After—”

“After what, Sam?”

“After you’ve been to London to introduce the scanner to a breathless world, Roderick. And, I imagine, particularly after you’ve been to Stockholm someday to pick up your Nobel.” Sam took a step onto the path that led back to the old stone mansion and his wife and children. “And maybe someday you’ll remember what it cost.”

“Cost? What do you mean?”

“Do you know what I was thinking, Roderick, as I watched all those horrible things on the scanner?”

“Well, I suppose that—”

“I was thinking that the very reason the Federation wanted to outlaw the scanner, Roderick, to suppress it without any consideration at all for all the good it might do, was because of the threat of the exact use to which I was putting it. Using it to spy and snoop and destroy lives and careers, Roderick. Using it for exactly the things I don’t want the Federation to use it for. But in order to keep them from doing it, I had to do it.” Sam uttered a sharp bark of what might have been laughter. “How do you like that for cost, Roderick?”

Bantry shook his head slowly. “Frankly, I don’t quite understand.”

“No? Well, you and Emily never had any children, did you? So you don’t know how bad it can be. But then, no one ever said that giving birth was easy.”

Marianna and Emily and Bruce were still in the Poconos. It seemed to Sam that until the ratification of the Constitution had finally been settled one way or the other, it was safer that way.

Until, he knew, he had delivered his own final part of the bargain.

It was the afternoon of September 29, 2074. For the fourth time since the formal debate had begun five months earlier the roll call of the senators was read as the Administration tried yet again to invoke the cloture that would make the Federation the supreme power in the world.

Sam paid little attention to the ongoing Ayes and Nays. He knew that no one had changed their minds in the nineteen days since the last vote.

“Dominguez.”

“Aye.”

“Duong.”

“Aye.”

“Edwards.”

“Nay.”

“Fairly.”

“Nay.”

“Farr.”

“Aye.”

Sam sat hunched in his seat, his eyes closed, the list of senators clear in his mind. No, no votes at all had changed. Cloture would once again be defeated by 41 nays, the filibuster carried on, the sovereignty of the United States preserved.

“Ferron.”

Samual Garraty Ferron took a deep breath and hunched his shoulders even further, as if willing himself into total invisibility. Without opening his eyes, thinking only of the brave new world of the time scanner to which he was helping give birth, he whispered, “Aye.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a sequel to “Under the Wings of Owls,” January 1994; “To Change a Memory,” March 1994; and “Pandora’s Scanner,” June 1994.