Blank (Κενό)

Ποια θα ήταν η κατάλληλη τιμωρία για εγκλήματα ενώπιον Θεού και Ανθρώπου; Στο σύντομο διήγημα "Blank" ο Harlan Ellison δίνει μια πολύ πρωτότυπη απάντηση.

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Driver Hall was an impressive pastel blue building in the center of the city. Akisimov had no difficulty finding its spirally-rising towers, even though the sykops were close behind, but once within sight of the structure, he found himself lost.

How could he do it?

No Driver would intentionally help a criminal escape, yet a Driver was his only possible chance of freedom.

Akisimov's bleak, hard features sagged in fright as he sensed the tentative probes of the sykops in his mind. They had found the flower girl, and they were circling in on him, getting his thoughts pinpointed. Why had that stupid urchin wandered across his path? It had been a clean escape, till he had run out of the mouth of that alley, and stumbled into her. Why had she clung to him? He hadn't wanted to burn her down… he was only trying to get away from the sykops.

Akisimov cast about hungrily with his eyes. There had to be some way, some device to comer a Driver. Then he spotted the service entrance to the Hall. It was a dark hole in the side of the building, and he sprinted across the street, in a dead run for it. He made the comparative safety of the entrance without being openly noticed, and crouched down to wait. Wildly, he pulled the defective mesh cap tighter about his ears. It was the only thing standing between him and capture by the sykops, poor thing that it was. Had it been a standard make, not a lousy rogue cheapie model, it would have blanked him effectively, but as it was, it was the best he had.

With unfamiliar phrases he prayed to some unknown God to let the mind-blanking cap work well enough. Well enough to keep the sykops off him till he could kidnap a Driver.

Rike Akisimov had been sentenced to Io penal colony for a thousand years. The jurymech knew such a sentence bordered on the ridiculous; even with the current trends in geriatrics, no man could live past three hundred. The body tissue, the very fiber, just wouldn't stand up to it.

But in token hatred for this most vile of criminals, the placid and faceless jurymech had said: “We, the beings of the Solarite, sentence you, Rike Amadeus Akisimov, to the penal colony on 10 for a period of one thousand years.”

Then, as the jury room buzzed with wonder, the machine added, “We find in your deeds such a revulsion, such a loathing, that we feel even this sentence is too light. Rike Amadeus Akisimov, we find in you no identification with humanity, but only a resemblance to some odious beast of the jungle. You are a carrion-feeder, Akisimov; you are a jackal and a hyena and a vulture, and we pray your kind is never again discovered in the universe.

“We cannot even say, ‘God have mercy on your soul,’ for we are certain you have no soul!”

The jury room had been stunned into silence. For an implacable, emotionless jurymech to spew forth such violent feelings, was unprecedented. Everyone knew the decision-tapes were fed in by humans, but no one, absolutely no one, could have fed in those epithets.

Even a machine had been shocked by the magnitude of Akisimov’ s crimes. For they were more than crimes against society. They crimes against God and Man.

They had taken him away, preparing to lead him in the ferry-flit designed to convey prisoners from court to the spaceport, when he had struck. By some remarkable strength of his wrists--born of terror and desperation--he had snapped the elasticords, clubbed his guards and broken into the crowds clogging the strips, carrying with him a sykop blaster.

In a few minutes he was lost to the psioid lawmen, had ripped a mind-blanking mesh cap from a pedestrian's head, and was on his way to the one escape route left.

To the Hall and the psioids known as Drivers.

She came out of the building, and Akisimov recognized her at once as a senior grade Driver. She was a tall girl, tanned and beautifully-proportioned, walking with the easy, off-the-toes stride of the experienced spaceman. She wore the mind's eye and jet tube insignia of her class-psi on her left breast, and she seemed totally unconcerned as Akisimov stepped out of the service entrance, shoved the blaster in her ribs, and snarled, “I've got nothing but death behind me, sister. The name is Akisimov…” The girl turned a scrutinizing stare on him as he said his name; the Akisimov case had been publicized; madness such as his could not be kept quiet; she knew who he was, “… so you better call a flit, and do it quick.”

She smiled at him almost benignly, and raised her hand lazily in a gesture that brought a flit scurrying down from the idling level.

“The spaceport,” Akisimov whispered to her, when they were inside and rising. The girl repeated the order to the flitman.

In half an hour they were at the spaceport. The criminal softly warned the psioid about any sudden moves, and hustled the girl from the flit, making her pay the flitman. They got past the port guards by the Driver showing her I. D. bracelet.

Once inside, Akisimov dragged the girl out of sight behind a blast bunker and snapped quickly, “You have a clearance, or do I have to hijack a ship?”

The girl stared blankly at him, smiling calmly and enigmatically. He jabbed the blaster hard into her side, causing her to wince, and repeated viciously, “I said, you got a clearance? And you damned well better answer me or so help me God I'll burn away the top of your head!”

“I have a clearance,” she said, adding solemnly, “you don't want to do this.”

He laughed roughly, gripped her arm tightly. She ground her lips together as his fingers closed about the skin, and he replied, “They got me on a thousand yearer to Io, lady. So I want to do any goddam thing that'll get me out of here. Now what ship are you assigned to snap?”

She seemed to shrug her shoulders in finality, having made a token gesture, and answered, ‘. I'm snap on the Lady Knoxmaster, in pit eighty-four.”

“Then let's go,” he finished, and dragged her off across the field.

“You don't want to do this,” she said again, softly. He was deaf to her warning.

When the invership took off, straight up without clearance coordinates and at full power, the Port Central went crazy, sending up signals, demanding recognition info, demanding this, demanding the other. But the Lady Knoxmaster was already heading out toward snap-point.

Akisimov, gloating, threw in the switch and knew the telemetering cameras were on him. “Goodbye, you asses! Goodbye, from Rike Akisimov! Stupid! You thought I'd spend a thousand years on 10? There are better things for me in the universe!”

He flicked off, to let them call the sykops, so the law would know he had bested them.

“Yeah, there isn't anything worse than a life term on 10,” he murmured, watching the planet fall away in the viewplates.

“You're wrong, Akisimov,” the girl murmured, very, very softly.

Immediately the sykops and the SpaceCom sent up ships to apprehend the violator, but it was obvious the ship had enough start momentum to reach snap-out--if a Driver was on board--before they could reach it. Their single hope was that Akisimov had no Driver aboard, then they could catch him in a straight run.

On board the Lady Knoxmaster, Akisimov studied the calm-faced psioid girl in the other accelocouch.

Drivers were the most valuable, and yet the simplest-talented, of all the types of psionically equipped peoples in the field. Their one capacity was to warp a ship from normal space into that not-space that allowed interstellar travel; into inverspace.

Though the ship went through--set to snap-out by an automatic function of the Driver's psi faculty--the Driver did not. That was the reason they were always in-suit and ready for the snap. Since they did not snap when the ship did, they were left hanging in space, where they were picked up immediately after by a doggie vessel assigned to each takeoff.


But this time there was no doggie, and there was no suit, and Akisimov wanted the girl dead in any event. He might have made some slip, might have mumbled something about where “out there” he was heading. But whether he had or had not, dead witnesses were the only safe witnesses.

“Snap the ship,” he snarled at her, aiming the blaster.

“I'm unsuited,” she replied.

“Snap, damn your lousy psi hide! Snap damn you, and pray the cops on our trail will get to you before you conk out. What is it, seven seconds you can survive in space? Ten? Whatever it is, it's more of a chance than if I burn your head off!” He indicated with a sweep of his slim hand the console port where the bips that were sykop ships were narrowing up at them.

“You don't want to do this,” the girl tried again.

Akisimov blasted. The gun leaped in his palm, and the stench of burned-away flesh filled the cabin. The girl stared dumbly at the cauterized stump that had been her left arm. A scream started to her mouth, but he silenced her with the point of the blaster.

She nodded acquiescence.

She snapped. Though she could not explain what was going on in her mind, she knew what she was doing, and she concentrated to do it this time… though just a bit differently… just a bit specially. She drew down her brows and concentrated, and…

Blank…

The ship was gone; she was in space, whirling, senseless, as the bulk of a ship loomed around her, hauling her in.
She was safe. She would live. With one arm.


As the charcoal-caped sykops dragged her in, lay her in a mesh webbing, they could not contain their anxiety.

“Akisimov? Gone?”

They read her thoughts, so the girl said nothing. She nodded slowly, the pain in her stump shooting up to drive needles into the base of her brain. She moaned, then said, “He didn't get away. He thought the worst was a term on Io; he's wrong; he's being punished.”

They stared at her, as her thoughts swirled unreadably. They stared unknowingly, wondering, but damning their own inefficiency. Akisimov had gotten away.

They were wrong.

Blank…

The ship popped into inverspace.

Blank…

The ship popped out…

In the center of a white-hot dwarf star. The sun burned the ship to molten slag, and Akisimov died horribly, flamingly, charringly, agonizingly, burningly as the slag vaporized.

Just at the instant of death…

Blank…

The ship popped into inverspace.

Blank…

The ship popped out…

In the center of a white-hot dwarf star. The sun burned the ship to molten slag, and Akisimov died horribly, flamingly, charringly, agonizingly, burningly as the slag vaporized.

Just at the instant of death…

Blank…

The ship popped into inverspace. Blank…

The ship popped out…

Over and over and over again, till the ends of Time, till Eternity was a remote forgotten nothing, till death had no meaning, and life was something for humanity. The Driver had exacted her revenge. She had set the ship in a moebius whirl, in and out and in and out and in again from inverspace to out, right at that instant of blanking, right at that instant of death, so that Forever would be spent by Rike Amadeus Akisimov in one horrible way--ten billion times one thousand years. One horrible way, forever and ever and ever.

Dying, dying, dying. Over and over and over again, without end to torment, without end to horror.

Blank…

 

Απάντηση: Blank (Κενό)

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[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Visions]Dangerous Visions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]