Along with progress in other spheres, criminology and remedial treatment for the socially unacceptable will undoubtedly make rapid strides in the Twenty-second and Twenty-third centuries. Purely retributive justice is not a satisfactory answer to the enlightened Welfare Officer of the Future. Psychiatry, criminology and electronic mind control could combine into an entirely new concept of reclamation. In the right hands this would be an advance into something close to Utopia - in the wrong it would be leave 1984 looking like a pleasant week-end in the country. This thoughtful new novel is a daring attempt to handle the deliucate theme of advanced criminology and the unresolved conflict of Society versus those who will not or cannot conform. Try as they will to be impersonal and humane, the psychiatrists of the future - even with electronic aids - will be as human as we are today. Their problems will be ours...
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
320
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THE first thing he was aware of was a sensation of smooth, yielding grittiness. He was lying on his side, so he discovered, with his hands partly clenched, and filled with a whitish grey sand. He sat up very slowly, aware of stiffness and pain in exhausted muscles. As he sat his eyes screwed themselves up tightly against the glare of two brilliant suns. When he could bring himself to glance skyward again, he saw through nearly closed lashes that one of the huge, celestial orbs was a kind of greenish-blue; the other one was golden. The combined effect of the mingled light gave a peculiar, theatrical quality to the sand. He squatted on his haunches for a few moments, with his back to those brilliant, broiling suns. As far as he could see in every direction there was nothing but desert. It didn’t even undulate very much. There seemed to be practically no wind. He slid back into a sitting position and locked down at himself. His clothes consisted of a loose-fitting canvas jacket and a pair of ankle-length trousers of the same material. He tasted the unpleasant saltiness of dried blood on the corner of his lip, and dabbed a hand up towards it. There was a cut in the centre of an abrasion at the side of his mouth. It was neither deep nor serious. It was the sort of cut that would result from a fairly hard blow an impact of some kind. His fingers slowly explored the rest of his face. His cheek bone above the cut appeared to be bruised, and there was a painful swelling above the eye. His hand went a little higher; just about the hairline, on the temple, he could feel a long scar. He traced it back past the top of his ear. It had been stitched by the feel of it.
Where was he? He tried desperately to recall. Memory refused to come. His only knowledge of himself or his environment, when he had sifted its sum total for several minutes, was that he was sitting on strange, grey-white sand, under the merciless glare of a binary star, that he had bruised his face, that there was a fairly recent surgical scar above his ear, and that he had no knowledge at all of his present location or his own identity. An awful empty horror, a nameless dread, seized his entire being for a few seconds. He had never felt so alone—he paused in the middle of the thought. His mind was trying to tell him that he had never felt so alone in his entire life, but he knew nothing of his previous life.
It was as though a huge cement slab had blocked off all his previous knowledge of himself. He looked down at what was obviously an adult body, with eyes that were as innocent of knowledge as the eyes of a neonate child. He had no survival data except vague, instinctive feelings that prompted him in certain directions. He paused; something deep within himself seemed to take over. He took a long breath and hauled himself slowly and awkwardly to his feet. The feeling of pain and stiffness multiplied when he tried to walk. The bruises on his face were not the only injuries. One leg felt grimly painful, and his ribs hurt as he breathed. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the glare of the binary suns. He looked around. There had to be something in the blasted desert, he told himself. Deserts didn’t last for ever.
The only punctuation in the sand was a trail of very uneven wandering footprints. He looked at them, and then looked down at his own feet. Obviously they were his own prints. He planted his own foot in the nearest mark of the meandering trail and saw that they tallied exactly. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. Without much emotion at all, except a burning curiosity, he set out to retrace his own steps. For a tired man it seemed a long walk, but he staggered on dazedly as the binary suns sank slowly towards the horizon. They moved around one another strangely, although their combined movement was a slowly descending trajectory. When they were very close to the horizon, the golden sun set first, and the whole of the desert landscape was bathed in a superb bluish-green light. The desert became a thing of entrancing, enchanting brilliance. Despite the pain and the tiredness, he could see and appreciate the colour. It made an impact on him; it had significance. It was a kind of reality. Vestigial traces of memory tried to come back, the memory of colour and beauty. Then the vast inhibition severed all memory. There was nothing but blankness and pain in his head.
The green-blue orb also began to set, and as the last of its light faded the golden orb reappeared, moving in a very low path, scarcely visible above the horizon; it was a superb sight. The verdant lustre blended into orange-hued beauty, which seemed somehow intrinsic. The binary orbs which had beaten down so mercilessly during the day were things of soft, gentle, aesthetic loveliness as evening came.
By the faint rays of the sunset, he saw ahead of him a stark, jagged silhouette of something that broke the monotony of the grey-white desert. His tired steps became revitalised. He hurried towards the object. Despite the fading light, as he drew nearer, he could see that it appeared to be the broken remains of a great silver fuselage. He got to it and touched the twisted, tangled metal. A small, brilliantly white satellite came up on the opposite side of the horizon from that behind which the suns were setting. By the light of the bright satellite he examined the conglomeration of twisted metal. Something from way back was telling him that this was a space ship. What a space ship was he wasn’t quite sure. Just the word, and with it a comforting feeling of association. It was a word that had once held meaning for him. He walked all around the tangled wreckage. As he reached the bright side of the devastation, he saw something lying just inside. Scarcely knowing why the thing should excite his curiosity, he moved through a hole in the fuselage and examined the object on which the bright white moonlight fell. It was a man, wearing a pressure suit. Elbows and wrists were jointed. A powerful helmet with a transparent visor covered the head and face. A tube, flexible and utilitarian, travelled from the side of the helmet to a canister on the chest of the pressure suit. The man wearing the equipment was very obviously dead. With a puzzled frown the traveller got hold of the dead man’s feet, encased in heavy metal-soled boots, and dragged the lifeless figure out of the ship on to the sand. In the whiteness of the moonlight he studied the features of the dead man, as though hoping for some sort of chord to sound in his memory, hoping that some kind of recognition would be fired off in his mind, but there was none. Just a vague, uneasy feeling that he had perhaps seen this man before somewhere. He felt the same about the ship. Looking at the dead man made him wonder suddenly about personality and identity. He wondered what he himself looked like.
He found a comparatively undamaged section of shining metal fuselage, and stood in front of it. He saw dark hair over a high, wide forehead; the hair was tangled and tousled, and grains of grey-white sand had dusted it thoroughly. He put up his hands and smoothed the hair back. Some of the greyish white sand fell poignantly to the desert beneath his feet. Beneath the loose canvas jacket and trousers the mirror showed evidence of a broad, acceptable physique. It was discoloured with bruising and dried blood in a number of places. His eyes went back to the reflection of his face. The brows were dark and heavy, the nose strong but not over prominent. Apart from the bruising and abrasion, the face might have been accounted acceptable, if not necessarily handsome. He turned and examined with particular consideration the recently stitched surgical scar above his right ear. Something about it worried him; he frowned, drawing his brows together in a mask of concentration. The survival data of another life, of an earlier existence, began prompting from a great depth, a primitive, fundamental, rudimentary depth. Words like hunger and thirst came into his mind, not only as words, but as feelings. He was remembering needs and the desire to satisfy them, rather than remembering words or actual occasions.
The ship would contain food and water. It was a piece of knowledge so basic that it seemed almost to be part of him, like his fingers and toes, or the scar above his ear. He went into the ship once more, and moving through the strange, arabesque shadows, he found various scattered canisters and containers. He ransacked the wreck, for all the food and drink he could find, then looked around for something in which to carry them. There was a plastic satchel among the other scattered wreckage. He picked it up and stowed his canisters into it carefully, then, well aware of the weight of his provisions, he made his way out of the damaged fuselage. He set off once more across the desert in the opposite direction to that from which he had come. He scarcely knew why he should choose that particular direction, there was a vague idea of futility in going back along the line of footprints once more. … He became increasingly aware of a dull, throbbing ache in his head. He began to put together such information as he had been able to glean from his desperately limited experience of life. He had woken up in the sand, aware of injuries which might well have been occasioned by the crash, for something deep down told him that the space ship had come by its end as a result of hitting the planetary surface too hard. So the ship had crashed; only one set of footprints had led from it, his own. Suppose that the blow on his head, coupled with whatever injury had made it necessary for a surgical scar, had sent him wandering, mindless, over the sand? Bruised and exhausted, he had obviously collapsed, slept for an indeterminate period, and recovered, possibly under the influence of the warmth of the binary suns, in more or less his right mind. He had followed the footsteps back to the crashed ship, found the dead man, whom he presumed to be the pilot, taken what provisions he could, and was now stepping out—with what purpose?.
He sat down and unfastened a canister of liquid. It had a pleasant, nourishing taste; it was a thick brown soup. It seemed to be highly concentrated, and even a little of it was surprisingly filling. He felt much better for drinking the soup. He wished the pain would go out of his head and let him think. He wished he could remember, above all he wanted to remember.
For some reason he had been aboard that ship; for some reason the ship had crashed; he had survived and the pilot had died. As a result of a blow on the head received in the impact, which possibly aggravated whatever had already been done to his head, by the author of the stitches, he had wandered off in a kind of delirium, come to, in a rational frame of mind, retraced his wandering steps, provisioned himself, and now here he was.
Not, he decided, a particularly promising beginning. Above all, he wanted an answer to the imperial questioning which continued to fill his mind. He put the stopper back on the canister of soup and set out once more, following the white satellite. It was joined by a much dimmer, rather pink-tinged companion of larger size and diffuse appearance. The two satellites followed one another across the sky in a slow but nevertheless graceful aerial ballet. Tiredness began to creep over the walker on the greyish-white sand. He unslung his plastic satchel and used it as a pillow. It was not cold; the sand was almost pleasantly warm; there was scarcely any wind. He stared up beyond the satellites at. . .
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