Flux, Page 3

  “Please,” Jerry said.

  “Buck up, my man,” said the prosecutor with a grin. “You were wonderful in the courtroom. Let’s have some of that noble resistance now.”

  Then the guards led him to the noose and put it around his neck, being careful not to dislodge the helmet. They pulled it tight and then tied his hands behind his back. The rope was rough on his neck. He waited, his neck tingling, for the sensation of being lifted in the air. He flexed his neck muscles, trying to keep them rigid, though he knew the effort would be useless. His knees grew weak, waiting for them to raise the rope.

  The room was plain. There was nothing to see, and the prosecutor had left the room. There was, however, a mirror on a wall beside him. He could barely see into it without turning his entire body. He was sure it was an observation window. They would watch, of course.

  Jerry needed to go to the bathroom.

  Remember, he told himself, I won’t really die. I’ll be awake in the other room in just a moment.

  But his body was not convinced. It didn’t matter a bit that a new Jerry Crove would be ready to get up and walk away when this was over. This Jerry Crove would die.

  “What are you waiting for?” he demanded, and as if that had been their cue the guards pulled the rope and lifted him into the air.

  From the beginning it was worse than he had thought. The rope had an agonizingly tight grip on his neck; there was no question of resisting at all. The suffocation was nothing, at first. Like being under water holding your breath. But the rope itself was painful, and his neck hurt, and he wanted to cry out with the pain; but nothing could escape his throat.

  Not at first.

  There was some fumbling with the rope, and it jumped up and down as the guards tied it to the hook on the wall. Once Jerry’s feet even touched the floor.

  By the time the rope held still, however, the effects of the strangling were taking over and the pain was forgotten. The blood was pounding inside Jerry’s head. His tongue felt thick. He could not shut his eyes. And now he wanted to breathe. He had to breathe. His body demanded a breath.

  His body was not under control. Intellectually, he knew that he could not possibly reach the floor, knew that this death would be temporary, but right now his mind was not having much influence over his body. His legs kicked and struggled to reach the ground. His hands strained at the rope behind him. And all the exertion only made his eyes bulge more with the pressure of the blood that could not get past the rope; only made him need air more desperately.

  There was no help for him, but now he tried to scream for help. The sound now escaped his throat—but at the cost of air. He felt as if his tongue were being pushed up into his nose. His kicking grew more violent, though every kick was agony. He spun on the rope; he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His face was turning purple.

  How long will it be? Surely not much longer!

  But it was much longer.

  If he had been underwater, holding his breath, he would now have given up and drowned.

  If he had a gun and a free hand, he would kill himself now to end this agony and the sheer physical terror of being unable to breathe. But he had no gun, and there was no question of inhaling, and the blood throbbed in his head and made his eyes see everything in shades of red, and finally he saw nothing at all.

  Saw nothing, except what was going through his mind, and that was a jumble, as if his consciousness were madly trying to make some arrangement that would eliminate the strangulation. He kept seeing himself in the creek behind his house, where he had fallen in when he was a child, and someone was throwing him a rope, but he couldn’t and he couldn’t and he couldn’t catch it, and then suddenly it was around his neck and dragging him under.

  Spots of black stabbed at his eyes. His body felt bloated, and then it erupted, his bowel and bladder and stomach ejecting all that they contained, except that his vomit was stopped at his throat, where it burned.

  The shaking of his body turned into convulsive jerks and spasms, and for a moment Jerry felt himself reaching the welcome state of unconsciousness. Then, suddenly, he discovered that death is not so kind.

  There is no such thing as slipping off quietly in your sleep. No such thing as being “killed immediately” or having death mercifully end the pain.

  Death woke him from his unconsciousness, for perhaps a tenth of a second. But that tenth of a second was infinite, and in it he experienced the infinite agony of impending nonexistence. His life did not flash before his eyes. The lack of life instead exploded, and in his mind he experienced far greater pain and fear than anything he had felt from the mere hanging.

  And then he died.

  For an instant he hung in limbo, feeling and seeing nothing. Then a light stabbed at his eyes and soft foam peeled away from his skin and the prosecutor stood there, watching as he gasped and retched and clutched at his throat. It seemed incredible that he could now breathe, and if he had experienced only the strangling, he might now sigh with relief and say, “I’ve been through it once, and now I’m not afraid of death.” But the strangling was nothing. The strangling was a prelude. And he was afraid of death.

  They forced him to come into the room where he had died. He saw his body hanging, black-faced, from the ceiling, the helmet still on the head, the tongue protruding.

  “Cut it down,” the prosecutor said, and for a moment Jerry waited for the guards to obey. Instead, a guard handed Jerry a knife.

  With death still heavy in his mind, Jerry swung around and lunged at the prosecutor. But a guard caught his hand in an irresistible grip, and the other guard held a pistol pointed at Jerry’s head.

  “Do you want to die again so soon?” asked the prosecutor, and Jerry whimpered and took the knife and reached up to cut himself down from the noose. In order to reach above the knot, he had to stand close enough to the corpse to touch it. The stench was incredible. And the fact of death was unavoidable. Jerry trembled so badly he could hardly control the knife, but eventually the rope parted and the corpse slumped to the ground, knocking Jerry down as it fell. An arm lay across Jerry’s legs. The face looked at Jerry eye-to-eye.

  Jerry screamed.

  “You see the camera?”

  Jerry nodded, numbly.

  “You will look at the camera and you will apologize for having done anything against the government that has brought peace to the earth.”

  Jerry nodded again, and the prosecutor said, “Roll it.”

  “Fellow Americans,” Jerry said, “I’m sorry. I made a terrible mistake. I was wrong. There’s nothing wrong with the Russians. I let an innocent man be killed. Forgive me. The government has been kinder to me than I deserve.” And so on. For an hour Jerry babbled, insisting that he was craven, that he was guilty, that he was worthless, that the government was vying with God for respectability.

  And when he was through, the prosecutor came back in, shaking his head.

  “Mr. Crove, you can do better than that.

  “Nobody in the audience believed you for one minute. Nobody in the test sample, not one person, believed that you were the least bit sincere. You still think the government ought to be deposed. And so we have to try the treatment again.”

  “Let me try to confess again.”

  “A screen test is a screen test, Mr. Crove. We have to give you a little more experience with death before we can permit you to have any involvement with life.”

  This time Jerry screamed right from the beginning. He made no attempt at all to bear it well. They hung him by the armpits over a long cylinder filled with boiling oil. They slowly lowered him. Death came when the oil was up to his chest—by then his legs had been completely cooked and the meat was falling off the bones in large chunks.

  They made him come in and, when the oil had cooled enough to touch, fish out the pieces of his own corpse.

  He wept all through his confession this time, but the test audience was completely unconvinced. “The man’s a phony,” they said. “He do
esn’t believe a word of what he’s saying.”

  “We have a problem,” said the prosecutor. “You seem so willing to cooperate after your death. But you have reservations. You aren’t speaking from the heart. We’ll have to help you again.”

  Jerry screamed and struck out at the prosecutor. When the guards had pulled him away (and the prosecutor was nursing an injured nose), Jerry shouted, “Of course I’m lying! No matter how often you kill me it won’t change the fact that this is a government of fools by vicious, lying bastards!”

  “On the contrary,” said the prosecutor, trying to maintain his good manners and cheerful demeanor despite the blood pouring out of his nose, “if we kill you enough, you’ll completely change your mind.”

  “You can’t change the truth!”

  “We’ve changed it for everyone else who’s gone through this. And you are far from being the first who had to go to a third clone. But this time, Mr. Crove, do try to forget about being a hero.”

  They skinned him alive, arms and legs first, and then, finally, they castrated him and ripped the skin off his belly and chest. He died silently when they cut his larynx out—no, not silently. Just voiceless. He found that without a voice he could still whisper a scream that rang in his ears when he awoke and was forced to go in and carry his bloody corpse to the disposal room. He confessed again, and the audience was not convinced.

  They slowly crushed him to death, and he had to scrub the blood out of the crusher when he awoke, but the audience only commented. “Who does the jerk think he’s fooling?”

  They disemboweled him and burned his guts in front of him. They infected him with rabies and let his death linger for two weeks. They crucified him and let exposure and thirst kill him. They dropped him a dozen times from the roof of a one-story building until he died.

  Yet the audience knew that Jerry Crove had not repented.

  “My God, Crove, how long do you think I can keep doing this?” asked the prosecutor. He did not seem cheerful. In fact, Jerry thought he looked almost desperate.

  “Getting a little tough on you?” Jerry asked, grateful for the conversation because it meant there would be a few minutes between deaths.

  “What kind of man do you think I am? We’ll bring him back to life in a minute anyway, I tell myself, but I didn’t get into this business in order to find new, hideous ways of killing people.”

  “You don’t like it? And yet you have such a natural talent for it.”

  The prosecutor looked sharply at Crove. “Irony? Now you can joke? Doesn’t death mean anything to you?”

  Jerry did not answer, only tried to blink back the tears that these days came unbidden every few minutes.

  “Crove, this is not cheap. Do you think it’s cheap? We’ve spent literally billions of rubles on you. And even with inflation, that’s a hell of a lot of money.”

  “In a classless society there’s no need for money.”

  “What is this, dammit! Now you’re getting rebellious? Now you’re trying to be a hero?”

  “No.”

  “No wonder we’ve had to kill you eight times! You keep thinking up clever arguments against us!”

  “I’m sorry. Heaven knows I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve asked to be released from this assignment. I obviously can’t crack you.”

  “Crack me! As if I didn’t long to be cracked.”

  “You’re costing too much. There’s a definite benefit in having criminals convincingly recant on television. But you’re getting too expensive. The cost-benefit ratio is ridiculous now. There’s a limit to how much we can spend on you.”

  “I have a way for you to save money.”

  “So do I. Convince the damned audience!”

  “Next time you kill me, don’t put a helmet on my head.”

  The prosecutor looked absolutely shocked. “That would be final. That would be capital punishment. We’re a humane government. We never kill anybody permanently.”

  They shot him in the gut and let him bleed to death. They threw him from a cliff into the sea. They let a shark eat him alive. They hung him upside down so that just his head was under water, and when he finally got too tired to hold his head out of the water he drowned.

  But through all this, Jerry had become more inured to the pain. His mind had finally learned that none of these deaths was permanent after all. And now when the moment of death came, though it was still terrible, he endured it better. He screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process, deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, “Harder,” until he couldn’t yell anymore.

  And finally when they set up a screen test, he fervently told the audience that the Russian government was the most terrifying empire the world had ever known, because this time they were efficient at keeping their power, because this time there was no outside for barbarians to come from, and because they had seduced the freest people in history into loving slavery. His speech was from the heart—he loathed the Russians and loved the memory that once there had been freedom and law and a measure of justice in America.

  And the prosecutor came into the room ashen-faced.

  “You bastard,” he said.

  “Oh. You mean the audience was live this time?”

  “A hundred loyal citizens. And you corrupted all but three of them.”

  “Corrupted?”

  “Convinced them.”

  Silence for a moment, and then the prosecutor sat down and buried his head in his hands.

  “Going to lose your job?” Jerry asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re good at it.”

  The prosecutor looked at him with loathing. “No one ever failed at this before. And I had never had to take anyone beyond a second death. You’ve died a dozen times, Crove, and you’ve got used to it.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can’t you make up a lie and believe it?”

  Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh loudly again.) “It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of disbelief.”

  The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and stood up. “Good-bye, Crove.”

  “Good-bye,” Jerry said.

  “You’re a very strong man.”

  “So,” said Jerry, “are you.” And the prosecutor left.

  The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry realized.

  “What’s it like?” he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.

  “Who knows?” the technician asked. “No one’s ever come back. Hell, no one’s ever arrived yet.”

  “After I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?”

  “In the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?”

  “But you think we’ll live?”

  “We send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren’t, so sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die.”

  “Is that all?” Jerry murmured.

  “Now lie down and let me tape your brain.”

  Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped, Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you were performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when you woke up.

  But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been sent out to colonize in priso
n worlds were not really what the Russians thought they were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some would survive.

  I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and transferred it to tape.

  Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.

  One of us, someday, will sack Rome.

  Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a welcome death, and he didn’t mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be free.

  He hummed cheerfully until he couldn’t remember how to hum, and then they put his body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.

  CLAP HANDS AND SING

  ON THE SCREEN the crippled man screamed at the lady, insisting that she must not run away. He waved a certificate. “I’m a registered rapist, damnit!” he cried. “Don’t run so fast! You have to make allowances for the handicapped!” He ran after her with an odd, left-heavy lope. His enormous prosthetic phallus swung crazily, like a clumsy propeller that couldn’t quite get started. The audience laughed madly. Must be a funny, funny scene!

  Old Charlie sat slumped in his chair, feeling as casual and permanent as glacial debris. I am here only by accident, but I’ll never move. He did not switch off the television set. The audience roared again with laughter. Canned or live? After more than eight decades of watching television, Charlie couldn’t tell anymore. Not that the canned laughter had got any more real: It was the real laughter that had gone tinny, premeditated. As if the laughs were timed to come now, no matter what, and the poor actors could strain to get off their gags in time, but always they were just this much early, that much late.