Midwife
by Hayford Peirce
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?”