Orbit 4 - Anthology Read online

  They had a Delphi session, with each man answering questions about the sort of mind, the kind of mentality that would work with the Phalanx. Thornton bit his pencil and slowly filled in the answers to the printed questions. Afterward they read them aloud and talked about them. The papers were gathered by the Director.

  “What do you think now of Paula Whitfield?” Feldman asked.

  “Oh, she’s a promiscuous bitch. Exciting, probably very beautiful still. She was, you know, but in a wild, unpremeditated way. Not the cover-girl look of studied loveliness.”

  Feldman nodded. “Your wife is very lovely,” he said after a moment. He was making idle talk now that the hour was almost over and Thornton had been wrung out.

  “Ethel is beautiful,” Thornton said. It surprised him. She really was. He had a letter from her in his pocket then. She would meet him and they would drive to Florida and go from there to Nassau. She was excited about the trip. She was lonesome for him.

  “Is Paula Whitfield really promiscuous?” Feldman asked curiously. “There’s no hint of that in her work.”

  “She sleeps around,” Thornton said, hearing the contempt in his voice. “She’s got a couple of illegitimate kids, you know.” He shrugged and got up. “I guess that’s unfair. I don’t really know what she’s like now. It’s been twenty years since I saw her. A genius with the morals of an alley cat. That’s what she was then.”

  He opened the door. Feldman said, “Tomorrow, five, one hour. Okay?” Thornton looked back and nodded, and Feldman added, “Why did you put her down as the one mind that could exist with the Phalanx?”

  * * * *

  He ate little dinner, and walked afterward. He hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. He visualized the sheet of questions and his answers, and he knew that his memory would reproduce it faithfully for him. He hadn’t put her name down. The questions had all led to that one, of course: Can you name anyone who you think would qualify as a psycho-modular unit?

  He had left it blank.

  He saw it again in his mind, and it was blank.

  He felt a stab of fear. What was Feldman after?

  He wouldn’t recommend Paula, even if the thought had occurred to him. When Gregory died, eighteen years ago, she had written that crazy poem about the boy who chose death rather than killing. Gregory had died under enemy fire. He had mailed her the firing pin of his rifle, then had walked upright until he was felled. Stupid act of insanity. It had made all the papers, his death, and the bitter poetry that had flowed from Paula afterward. She was practically a traitor, as Gregory certainly had been. Again he wondered what Feldman was trying to do. He returned to his desk and worked until midnight.

  He dreamed that night of the psycho-modular unit fixed in the island inside the house that was the Phalanx. It was a sealed tank that looked very much like an incubator, with rubber gloves built into it so that the operators could push their hands into them and handle the thing inside. There were six pairs of the gloves. To one side of the tank a screen, not activated now, had been placed to show electroencephalograph tracings. Thick clusters of wires led to desks close by, and on them were screens that showed chemical actions, enzymic changes, temperature of the nutrient solution and any fluctuations in its composition. Inside the tank were wires that ended in electrodes in the brain, the input and output wires, and they too were tapped so that men at desks could know exactly what was going in and out.

  * * * *

  The Phalanx had been in steady operation for seven days and nights. The lights twinkled steadily, and in the back the EEG tracings were steady. The technicians had replaced the walls about the computer so that it was a house within a room, a tank within the house, a brain within the tank. There was still work to be done, still many programs to plan and translate and feed to the Phalanx, but any good programmer could do them now. They were talking about increasing the number of bugs to an even four dozen, and no one doubted that the computer could keep them all under control.

  Thornton stood in the doorway looking at it for the last time. His work was done, his year over. Others would be interviewed now, or already had been, and they would feel the excitement coursing through them at the chance to work at the Institute for a year. He turned and left, picking up his bag at the main door. A car was outside to take him to the gate where Ethel would meet him. Feldman was on the steps waiting. He thrust a book into Thornton’s hand.

  “A goodbye present,” he said. Thornton wondered if he had seen tears in the analyst’s eyes, and decided no. It had been the wind. The wind was blowing hard. He rode to the main gate, and when he left the car and walked through, he dropped the book. He got in his own car and drew Ethel to him.

  “I was so afraid you’d be different,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t know what to expect after your year among geniuses. I thought you might not want to come out at all.” She laughed and squeezed his hand. “I am so proud of you! And you haven’t changed, not at all.”

  He laughed with her. “You too,” he said. He wondered if there had always been that emptiness behind her eyes. She pressed on the accelerator and they sped down the road away from the Institute.

  Behind them the wind riffled through the book until the guard noticed it lying in the dust and picked it up and tossed it in a trashcan.

  <>

  * * * *

  Charles L. Harness was born in 1915 in “an area of West Texas noted mostly for cactus, mesquite, and sandstorms” As a young man, while attending a theological seminary, he worked in a business establishment which happened to be located in the red-light district of Fort Worth. This stimulating double life ended, and he became a policeman in the identification bureau of the Fort Worth police department. “In this capacity I had the melancholy duty of fingerprinting many of my friends, both from the ‘District’ and from the Seminary. They were a lively lot, and did not seem to mind.“ Later, in Washington, D.C., he took a degree in chemistry, then another in law; married, and became a father.

  He started writing in 1947 to clear up the obstetrical bills that followed his daughter’s entrance into the world. He stopped, a few years later, “because she would stand in the hallway under my attic studio and cry for me to come down and play.” When she left for college in 1964, he began writing again. Now a patent attorney for a large corporation, he lives in Maryland with his wife, daughter, and 13-year-old son.

  Harness’s early stories—thirteen of them, including the novelFlight Into Yesterday and the short novel The Rose—were vanVogtian melodramas, exuberantly inventive, cracking with paranoid tension, intricately plotted. The new ones he has been producing since 1964 are more mature, more contemplative, more realistic in tone, but they are constructed in the same complex mosaic fashion. “Probable Cause” is about clairvoyance, the Constitution of the United States, thoughtography, the US. Supreme Court, feminine intuition, and the assassination of a President, among other things. Nobody but Harness could have woven all this into so symmetrical and satisfying a pattern—or made it mean so much.

  * * * *

  PROBABLE CAUSE

  By Charles L. Harness

  The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause...

  Nor shall any person be compelled to be a witness against himself...

  -- Constitution of the United States, excerpts, Fourth and Fifth Amendments

  * * * *

  Benjamin Edmonds turned the film advance knob on the self-developing camera in slow rhythmic motions of hand and wrist. When the mechanism locked, he placed the camera on its side next to the bronze casting on the wall table. He flipped off the ceiling light and turned on the faint red darkroom lamp over the developing trays. He sat for a moment, studying the casting and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the near darkness.

  The replica was a plain, almost homely thing: a hand clasping a piece of broomstick. Even afte
r a century and a quarter it still radiated the immense strength and suprahuman compassion of its greater model, and it would surely help to waken the distant sleeping shadows. Edmonds laid his own big hand over it softly; the metal seemed oddly warm.

  It was time to begin.

  He turned off the red light and let the blackness flow over him.

  The images began almost immediately. At first they flickered vaguely, seemingly trapped within the plane of his eyelids. Then they gathered clarity and stereoscopic dimension, and moved out, and away. They were real, and he was there, in the crowded theater, looking up at the flag-draped presidential box, occupied by the three smaller figures and the tall bearded man in the rocking chair. And now, from behind, a fifth. The arm surely rising. The deadly glint of metal. The shot. The man leaping out of the box to the stage below. And pandemonium. Fluttering scenes. They were carrying the tall man across the street in the wavering paschal moonlight. And finally, in that far time, Edmonds permitted the strange hours to pass, until the right moment came, and the right image came.

  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 8x11 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 handsome 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 US-Soviet Arbitration Commission to settle the Lunar Disputes of the seventies. War had been averted. She was the obvious choice for the next appointment of a United States delegate to the UN 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 Theater 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 Brandeis, 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 the 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.

  And now they took their places around the long black table, Chief Justice Shelley Pendleton at the south end, Senior Associate Justice Oliver Godwin at the north end, and the other associate justices, in order of seniority, around the sides. The great John Marshall gave them his blessing from his portrait over the ornate marble fireplace.

  The face of Chief Justice Shelley Pendleton was a paradox-- almost ugly in its craggy, masklike impassivity, yet capable of dissolving into a strangely beautiful humanity, warm, humorous, even humble. It was whispered that he had retired to his office and wept after his first affirmation of a death penalty, and that the widow was still receiving a pension from the manager of his immense personal estate. Before his appointment, he had been a well-known figure on Wall Street. Edmonds admired the man. He found it incredible that such lucid opinions could flow from such a complicated intellect. It used to bother him, until he finally concluded that the Chief Justice considered all possible angles, sifted out the major controlling aspects, weighed them against each other in a multi-dimensional balance, and accepted the answer. The Pendleton technique involved all factors of legal precedent... stare decisis... logic... the common law... social needs... and a fine prophetic grasp of the impact of a given decision on future similar cases. Marshall had been a constitutionalist, Holmes a historian, Brandeis a sociologist, Cardozo a liberal, and Warren a humanist-- but Pendleton was none of these; for he was all.