Death Quotient and Other Stories

All Our Yesterdays

Originally published in Super Science Stories, April 1949; as John Wade Farrell.

One man sat in his death cell, hoping for the miracle he knew would never come. Another watched him, owl-eyed, across the abyss of time; and neither dreamed that their lives were bound up together — that of these two, who were separated by centuries, one must die for the other!

It is more than a problem of focus. It is more than a question of intellectual curiosity. Though the tendency is for divergence to swing back to norm, it is recognized that objective interference in any case may have a long range effect sufficient to cause objective alterations in present society. Thus, the entertainment quotient of Crime-seeking is perforce limited to those tenth-level mentalities where, due to knowledge, thalamic motivations can be recognized as such, and discounted. Any attempt by a tenth-level mentality to indoctrinate any lesser mentality in Crime-seeking procedure will result in social isolation for an indefinite period. The clearest analogy of the danger of objective interference is that of the primitive man who, clinging to a limb, saws it off between his body and the trunk of the tree.

John Homrik sucked on the cigarette butt until the red ring crept close to his fingers, then with rigid nails he snapped it against the steel wall of the cell. The sparks showered, died.

“Like that,” he thought. “Just like that.” Please be seated, Mr. Homrik. We want to put this black cap over your head. You don’t mind if we strap your arms down. Of course not.

Heeney, the guard, sat on the far side of the corridor. The kitchen chair was incongruous, red and cream, chipped paint. He had thumbs under the gunbelt and a slant of sun into the deathhouse cell block picked out the enlarged pores of Heeney’s pendulous nose, the blackheads at the corners of his loose mouth.

Homrik walked over to the cell door, felt the chill of the bars in his sweating palms. He looked steadily at Heeney, was half amused to see Heeney turn away rather than meet his glance.

“Suppose it was you in here, Heeney,” he said softly.

“I didn’t kill any dames,” Heeney said sullenly.

“That’s right. Neither did I, Heeney. Suppose, knowing your own innocence, you were in here, like I am. What would you do? What would you say?”

“I wouldn’t be in there,” Heeney said.

Homrik grinned and there was no humor in it. “I’m in here, Heeney. And I didn’t kill a ‘dame’. I didn’t kill anybody.”

Heeney scowled, said, “Fella, I’m not as smart as you are. But if it was me, I wouldn’t die before I made a full confession. It would make me feel better. You ought to get it off your chest.”

John Homrik laughed. “You too, Heeney. You too.” He walked over, sat on the cot, lit another cigarette. He looked at his hands, fingers outspread. The long months of prison hadn’t faded all of the deep tan. His hands were deft and steady. They had called them the hands of a killer. And these were the hands that so soon would be forever stilled. Coffin hands. Rotting hands. Cold and dead after the convulsive twitch when the current hit.

With a quick movement he put them behind him. A sad knowledge filled him. He was innocent of murder, but no man would ever believe it. The pattern of the trial had been too clear.

“Yes, I knew that Anna had been unfaithful. But she was just a kid. Just eighteen. I forgave her. Certainly I forgave her. I tried to keep her from punishing herself over it. She wanted to kill herself. That was no good. That would solve nothing. I wanted to keep what we had. The two of us. Love and a home. No, it wasn’t gone. Yes, I forgave her. I was away for a year. He saw her loneliness. I forgave her. It didn’t matter. Only Anna mattered to me. We were together again. She wept. I comforted her. In the night I woke up. She wasn’t beside me.”

Stentorian voice, pointing finger. “And, John Homrik, you would have the jury believe that this child bride, this young girl, left your side in the darkness of the night of June eleventh, took the puppy’s leash, knotted it about her throat, stood on a chair, tied it around the stem pipe and then kicked the chair away?”

“That... that is what happened.”

Sarcasm. Irony. “And you, John Homrik, you rushed to her, cut the leash, untied it from her young throat and then called the police?”

“Yes.”

Brazen accusation, throat of iron. “Then how do you explain that your fingerprints, not hers, were on the chair, your thumbprint, not hers, on the metal buckle of the leash? How do you explain the scratches on your face, the shreds of skin, proven to be yours, under her fingernails, the bruise on her shoulder? You have told us, John Homrik, that in the evening before she was murdered, you cheered her up, that the two of you indulged in horseplay, and that is how you were scratched and she was bruised. I ask the court, would a young girl, gay and happy enough to wrestle and fight happily with her husband, turn around and hang herself? No, this was murder! Foul murder!”

He sat on the cot and thought of Anna’s smile, of the limp, dead heaviness of her body as he had cut her down, her staring eyes, thickened tongue, black-mottled face.

And though he thought there were no more tears, he sobbed once more. And in his heart he told Anna that in a very little while, in another fifteen hours, he would be with her.

Heeney belched, then began to stuff tobacco into his pipe with a blunt thumb.

John Homrik looked up at the far corner of his cell. Odd! It was as though he had detected some movement out of the corner of his eyes. But of course there could be nothing there. Of course.

Gahn, the younger, stood tense with anticipation. With hurried stride he went over to the communication screen, set the controls so that, should anyone call him, the screen would advise that Gahn, the younger, was not at home.

Mixed with his anticipation was a sense of guilt and defiance. The Law said that a tenth-level mentality should mate with a tenth-level mentality. His lips twisted in scorn as he thought of the brittle, cool women of the tenth-level.

Coldly he realized that the feeling of guilt was the result of the stratification of society, drummed into him since he was first able to take the examinations for the first level at the age of four.

Defiance was the answer. What would they have him do? Mate with Dextra? That would be like the clash of bitter crystals. No, his blood yearned for the flowing warmth of Luria of the eighth level. With mild and affectionate condescension, he realized that she would never, never progress beyond the eighth-level. He had left the eighth level when he was seventeen. And in five more years he could aspire to the eleventh-level.

But should a man mate with an intellectual equal? There was a basic fallacy in that reasoning.

He felt the anticipatory thud of his pulse. With nervous fingers he again adjusted the arrangement of the slim pastel bottles on the ancient tray. Luria liked the ancient ways. And so did he. A common yearning for the days that were gone.

Should any of his friends of the tenth level see her coming to his rooms... But none would. The acid of jealousy filled him as he thought of Powell. Luria spoke of Powell. He was eighth-level also, a hulking brute of a man. Gahn shuddered in distaste. If she should prefer Powell...

The door swung open with a suddenness that startled him. Luria, smiling, shut it softy behind her, then came quickly across to him as he advanced to meet her. Luria of the cobalt eyes, the honey flesh, the rounded warm arms and soft lips.

The golden mesh of her single garment made tiny chimes as he held her close, inhaled the heady fragrance of her.

“Darling!” she said. It was a word they had found in the ancient hooks. A word that was no longer used, except by the two of them.

They both knew that what they had was forbidden. And thus it was more sweet. There were many games. In one, he was a senator in the days of ancient Rome and she was a barbarian slave girl, and their love had to be kept from all the others.

Two hours later she was languorous beside him like a great golden cat. She ran her fingertips down his cheek, along the line of his jaw and said, “Gahn, you are a Crime-seeker. Is that not true?”

For a moment his voice took on a tenth-level mentality speaking to one of the eighth level. “We do not speak of that.”

Her eyes glittered angrily, and she pouted as she turned away. “Very well, then. We do not speak of anything.”

Though he caressed her, kissed her indifferent lips, her sulky eyes, it was many long minutes before she would respond. Then her arms held him tightly and she whispered, “Tell me about being a Crime-seeker.”

He could not risk making her angry again. He said, in an indifferent tone, “Oh, it is nothing. Just entertainment provided for us of the tenth-level. It is like a club, you know. Restricted membership.”

She pouted. “I know what you do,” she said. “You go into the past and watch the ancient ones. For us they have silly plays, made-up things. Things without blood and reality. They are stupid. I hate them. I want my entertainment from life. I am still annoyed with you, Gahn. And I will never come here again unless you show me how it is done.”

He laughed uneasily. “But that is against the rules, Luria. I could do no such thing. You have to be prepared for... for Crime-seeking.”

She looked at him coldly, stood up and fastened the clasps on the gold mesh garment. “Anything you say, Gahn. I must go now. I am to meet Powell.”

He held her wrist. “Don’t go, Luria. Please!”

“You said you loved me,” she said coolly.

“I do. I swear I do!”

“Then this silly little Crime-seeker affair should not come between us. Goodby, Gahn.”

He heard himself saying, “All right, Luria. I will show it to you. Together we will watch it.” In his mind there was fear, but the step had been taken.

She turned to him, her smile brilliant, and lifted her lips to be kissed. “Now, Gahn? Now?”

Hand in hand they went into the front room. He darkened the room, unhooded the mechanism, arranged two chairs side by side six feet from the three dimensional screen. The instrument panel swung into his lap, and he locked it in place.

“You must promise never to speak of this,” he said.

“I promise,” she said, her eyes warm.

“This, as you know, is a device for time-travel. We do not go back in time, of course, but the lens and microphone of the seeker equipment can be placed in whatever era we desire. I... I have found the crimes of the middle twentieth century most absorbing.”

“How do you decide where to start?”

“Here is a reference book. This one contains a list of all executions in the United States between 1940 and 1950. Select one.”

Luria ran a tinted finger down a page selected at random. “How about this one? A man named John Homrik, executed at Ossining, New York on the third of February, 1949, at six in the morning. It says here that he killed his wife on June 11th, 1948, in their home at two ten Main Boulevard, Kingston, New York.”

“It sounds like a routine case. Let’s try a different one.”

“No,” she said, pouting. “I like his name. And I want to see him kill the woman.”

The screen came to life, and Gahn, with practised fingers, selected century, year, month, day, hour. The geographical selector was so compensated as to allow for the movement of the planet. The Ossining quadrant was familiar to him, and he brought the lens down through the grey roof of the death house at exactly five minutes of six on the morning of the third of February, 1949. He heard Luria gasp at the three-dimensional color image on the screen.

“This is all... real,” she said in a small voice.

“Just as it happened.”

He made minute adjustments, then took his hands from the dials. There was the bitter clang of steel, and a small group of men with grave faces stood in the corridor. They were seen at an angle, from a spot three feet above their heads.

A tall man with a grave face held a small black book and, in archaic English, he was reading, “I am the resurrection and the light...”

His voice droned on as the prisoner came out of the cell. He was a tall man with a strong face and a bitter mouth. His fists were clenched, the leg of his trousers slashed.

He stood, shoulders straight, the back of his head shaven bare, walked in the center of the group of men toward a door at the end of the corridor.

Gahn heard Luria’s heavy breathing. He glanced at her, saw in the dim glow from the instrument panel that she was leaning forward, her lips parted, a wisp of her golden hair unnoticed across her forehead.

He smiled tightly in the darkness. The little group walked to the door, and he kept the lens behind them, following them. The voice droned on, and they heard the muffled tread of the shoes against the concrete floor.

The chair was waiting. With a showman’s knack, Gahn, the younger, brought the lens to within a foot of John Homrik’s face, saw the writhing lips, the livid complexion, and then it was covered by the hood.

He moved the lens back, and then the man leaped against his bonds under the surge of current — and was still.

He darkened the screen, brightened the lights in the room. “Enough?” he asked.

Her pretty, almost animal, face twisted and she said, “No, Gahn. I... I liked the way he looked. He looked strong and... like a man. In these days there are no men like that.”

“No men that stupid,” he said cuttingly.

“Gahn, I understand that you Crime-seekers try to find where justice has miscarried. I want to see that man kill his wife.”

“You have seen enough.”

“In that case, you have seen enough of me, Gahn!”

He sighed. Having given in once before, it was easy to give in this time. With flying fingers he set the dial, found the year, the day, found Kingston. It took fifteen minutes of search before he found the proper street, the proper house.

When he focused on the house from a distance of one hundred feet in the air, he saw the white vehicles parked in front, and knew that he had to set his time back just a bit. The screen blurred, cleared, and the cars were still there. Further back. It was night. Rain fell. He moved the lens down into the house, but could see nothing in the darkness. Slowly he reversed the time until suddenly he saw light.

John Homrik, a different John Homrik, a laughing John Homrik, was teasing a sturdy young girl who stood at a mirror, combing long pale hair.

Suddenly she turned, and said, “You can say it’s all right a thousand times, but that doesn’t make it all right.”

He sobered instantly. “Anna, darling, I know you as well as I know myself. You’re not a cheat. You’re not dishonest. I love you. One day I’ll meet him. I want to hurt him, but not you, Anna.”

Her eyes were not laughing. “You hate me,” she said softly.

“I love you.”

“John, I’m not worthy of you. I... I spoiled everything for us. Everything!”

Tears rolled down her face. He went to her, held her tightly. “Nothing is spoiled,” he said.

Luria whispered, “He is not going to kill her.”

Gahn shrugged. He watched the screen, saw the man and woman of a thousand years before hold each other tightly, saw the devotion and intensity of their love. The bedroom light clicked out, and in the screen they could see only the glow of the dial of the alarm clock, but they could hear the whispered endearments. Gahn reached out, took Luria’s hand, held it tightly.

“He will soon kill her,” he whispered.

Cautiously he advanced the time dial, releasing it when a dim light filled the room. The woman, Anna, stepped out of the bed, stood very still, looking down at the sleeping face of her husband. Then she moved so quickly that for a moment Gahn lost her.

He found her again in another room, and the light was on. She held a leather thong in her hand, and tears streaked down her face. She moved a chair over under a steam pipe, knotted the leather thong around her smooth throat, tied it firmly to the pipe over her head. She stood for a moment and they heard her whisper, “Good-by, my darling!”

The chair thudded over, and she hung, writhing, twisting, her face contorted, blackening, her hand flailing the smooth plaster wall, until at last she hung quietly.

He moved the lens back to the bedroom. John Homrik stirred in his sleep, and flung one arm out across the empty space beside him. The light from the room shone across him. Suddenly he sat up, knuckling his eyes.

He walked out, stood transfixed, screamed, “Anna! Anna!”

As he cut her down, lowered her dead body tenderly to the floor, Gahn darkened the screen. He turned up the lights in the room.

Luria’s face was pale, and there were tears on her smooth cheeks. “He didn’t kill her! He didn’t kill her!” she said.

Gahn smiled. “You see? You are taking it too seriously. All that happened a long, long time ago.”

“But it happened! It happened to him! Don’t you see? He didn’t kill her, he tried to save her, and for that they... put him in that chair.”

“I’ve seen many such cases,” he said calmly.

She jumped up. “How can you be so cold? Couldn’t he be... warned, or something? If you could stop it, I’d think you’d have the decency to.”

Gahn felt smoothly superior. “Of course I could stop it. It would be very simple in this case. All I would have to do would be to move the lens down until it appeared to penetrate his skull. Actually at the vision point there is a mild electrical discharge, sufficient to awaken him abruptly. And then he would catch her in time and—”

“Let’s do it!” she said, her eyes glowing.

He laughed. “My dear girl, don’t be absurd! To alter the objective past would be like kicking out the bottom block of a tower.

“We are built on that past. As you saw, Homrik appears to have been a man of intelligence and determination. If he lived and his wife lived, some of their descendants would be alive today. And who knows what alterations they would have made? That’s why this whole procedure is limited to tenth-level mentalities. We can perceive the dangerous results of doing such a foolhardy thing. It is only theory that any interference with the past would result in a divergence plus a tendency to return to the norm. For all we know, there would be no tendency to return to the norm. How do we know this is a ‘norm’?”

She looked at him for long seconds, moved over to him, pushed the control panel aside and slid onto his lap, her warm arms around his neck. She daintily bit the lobe of his ear, and then whispered, “I want to look at it all again. I want to watch her hang herself.”

He laughed. “You’re a bloodthirsty minx, Luria. Well, there’s no harm in it.”

She went and sat in her own chair close to him, and he dimmed the room lights, turned it on again. This time he had no difficulty in locating the proper place and moment.

He watched carefully, thinking that Luria had hit on a very good case. He decided to mention it to Jellery and Blanz. They would enjoy it. The motives of the woman in the case were rather obscure; interesting. Sturdy little girl. Quite young. Guilt complex, apparently.

The light clicked on in the bedroom of a thousand years before. Anna slid her firm young legs out of the bed, stood up and looked down at her sleeping husband. She turned toward the bedroom door. Gahn, the younger, smiled and reached for the dial so as to follow her.

But instead of the dial, his fingers touched the warm flesh of Luria’s plump hand. He looked at the screen, saw the head of the sleeper growing so as to fill the whole screen, and he instantly realized that Luria had merely pretended to agree, that she was trying to awaken the sleeper, that she was attempting to make an objective change in their common past, in the heritage of small events that supported the world as they knew it.

Even as he seized her hand, he knew it was too late. The lens slipped through the mastoid bone of the sleeper into moist darkness...

All space-time shifted in a grinding, shuddering wrench, that seemed to tear all atomic structure, shift it instantaneously into a new pattern. Gahn felt the scream tear his throat, felt the brink of shuddering nothingness, and screamed again.

The tears dimmed her eyes so that the steam pipe above her head was a weaving blur. Once again she tried, and then she heard the pound of feet behind her, heard John’s hoarse cry, and then he had pulled her off the chair down into his arms.

He rocked her back and forth and said thickly, “Oh my darling! My poor, silly darling! I nearly lost you.”

And suddenly she knew that only the fates had kept her from being a fool — knew that she could never leave him. Never. Tears were salt on her lips as she tried to tell him.

Goland spat into the yellow dust, showed his broken teeth in a wide grin, and began to shake his begging bowl again. Surely the Martian sun was too hot, even for a space tramp. It had given him strange visions. Even now they were fading from his mind. How absurd to think he was someone named Gahn, the younger, messing around with a screwy time-machine. Waking dreams in the hot Martian sun are weird. And all that guff about tenth-level minds. Nice babe in that dream though. Eighth-level, whatever that meant. A nice lush blonde creature named Luria. Reminded him of that waitress about ten-fifteen years ago in the NewMex terminal. He looked with disgust at the few bits of metal in the begging bowl and began to shake it vigorously, yowling in his cracked voice, “He’p an ole man git back to Earth! He’p an ole man git back to Earth!”