The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

“How’s Sheehan?” asked Paul.

  “They took the bullet out. He’ll be bandaged up by now—he’ll sleep through the whole thing.”

  The door opened again, to let in a tall man with an abundance of black hair. He was wearing some kind of uniform—the uniform of a prisoner. He looked briefly at Marcangelo, then faced Paul and extended his hand.

  “I’m Paul Scapelhorn,” he said. “Your new host.”

  Paul stood and took his hand. For a moment, he couldn’t think of anything to say, so he remained silent.

  Scapelhorn wheeled to face Marcangelo, and said: “I’m not sure whether to throw you in a cell or not. Whose side are you on now?”

  Marcangelo laughed, dryly. “Is there more than one?” he asked.

  “I’d rather Marcangelo stayed,” said Paul. “It seems to me that he has the best interests of us all at heart. What are your plans now, if any?”

  “I thought that we’d try to get you to Adam Wishart, now the siege has lifted,” Scapelhorn replied.

  “There’s no point,” said Marcangelo, quickly. “Wishart has his hands full. If we go south of the river we’ll be heading into one big riot. We’d probably never get through. If I were you, I’d stay put and be very quiet. Inside these walls could well be the only reservoir of sanity in the state—maybe in the country.”

  Scapelhorn looked at Paul. “What do you think?” he said.

  “It makes sense to me,” replied Paul. “If this is to be the last night of the old world...or even the last night of the whole world...this seems to be as good a place as any to spend it. But I’d like a room with windows. I’ve been confined to this particular cell for too long.”

  Scapelhorn grinned. “You should come and dine with me in the visitors’ quarters,” he said. “They’re somewhat better appointed than the hospital wing. You too, of course.” The last sentence was addressed to Rebecca. Scapelhorn paused for a moment’s thought before glancing at Marcangelo and adding: “And you.” The final invitation seemed lacking in both warmth and courtesy, but Marcangelo’s nod of acceptance was accompanied by an honest smile.

  The party went along winding corridors and down stairways, crossed an open courtyard, and finally arrived in a part of the prison that was, if not exactly luxurious, at least less arid and more comfortable than the parts which Paul had so far seen. On the way they saw only three other people—all men wearing the same uniform as Scapelhorn.

  “The prison dining-rooms are already catering for the bulk of the surplus population,” explained Scapelhorn, his voice laden with irony. “Even our food, I fear, will be sent up from the kitchens in the usual way. It is one of the few egalitarian principles of prison life in the twenty-second century.”

  “Were you one of the Movement members arrested on the night of my return?” asked Paul.

  “No. I’ve been here for some time. That’s why I was entrusted with the job of arranging matters within the prison. I’m serving a ten year sentence for armed robbery, but I might well be pardoned by the new regime—because it was the old regime I robbed, I now acquire the status of hero of the revolution. I wasn’t always a criminal, of course—before I jumped from the early twenty-first century I was a man of some means. I tried to assure that I’d be well provided for when I arrived, but all such plans were fouled up by the government. Instead of a modest sum grown large thanks to compound interest, I found nothing. It had all been confiscated—reabsorbed into the economy.”

  “Is that why you jumped?” Paul asked. “In order to get richer by accumulating interest on your estate?”

  Scapelhorn laughed. “Not entirely. Indeed, I wasn’t particularly surprised when I found no fortune waiting for me, and in its stead a rather hostile bureaucracy that wanted to use me as a feudal overlord is entitled to use his serfs. Disappointed, of course, but not surprised. I jumped to escape the war—as, indeed, many of us did. So many, in fact, that it’s a marvel we weren’t soundly beaten, instead of fighting to a stalemate with all major installations on both sides out of commission. If the war had been fought by people instead of machines, I think we would have lost. The other side can’t have had a tenth the jumpers we did. They must have had a lot more survivors—active survivors, that is—but they didn’t have the facilities left to cope with the plagues, whereas we did. I suppose, in that sense, you could say that we won, in the long term. Pity about Europe, though.”

  By the time he came to the end of this speech Scapelhorn was ushering them into a dining-room where a large table was set for eight. There were others already waiting, and Scapelhorn introduced them as his lieutenants. Paul didn’t bother to commit their names to memory.

  Scapelhorn dominated the meal by taking a virtual monopoly of the conversation, indulging his sense of irony at great length. No one was disposed to compete, so he told the story of his capture of the prison, step by step, in a style that made it seem like a parody of a Ruritanian romance. Paul decided that the man was clever, but that he was not really likeable. Underneath the light and mocking irony that dressed his conversation was a harder and more aggressive cynicism, which he did not try hard to conceal. When the meal was done, however, Scapelhorn became a little quieter. He took his guests—excluding the lieutenants—to another room, and served them drinks from a well-stocked cabinet.

  “You can’t get stuff like this unless you’re in government,” he said, as he distributed the glasses. “But then, I am in government now. We all are. The builders of the new order.”

  “What kind of new order is that, exactly?” asked Marcangelo.

  Paul expected Scapelhorn to answer at length, just as he had answered every other question at length, but the tall man turned instead to him. “What kind of world do you think we can build?”

  “I suppose that it depends on what’s left of it when tomorrow’s sun rises,” answered Paul, in much the same tone that the other habitually used.

  “No,” said Marcangelo. “Let’s stop trading clever repartee, and let’s not pass the buck to Paul just yet. I want to hear the official Paulist doctrine—the gospel according to the Paulist Movement. Paulist as in Paul Scapelhorn.”

  “If we’re giving up repartee,” replied Scapelhorn, calmly, “let’s not make too much out of a coincidence of names.” Marcangelo shrugged. “All right. Tell us, then, how your new world will differ from the one I’ve helped to build. How will it differ from the world where a dwindling population, suffering disease and pain and hardship, works to keep some kind of industry alive, and to secure power supplies, and to organize agricultural effort, and which is failing because romantics and escapists and fanatics and people who are plainly and simply frightened are obsessed with the idea of escape into a future that simply can’t exist unless most of them fail? How, exactly, are you going to change all that?”

  Scapelhorn poured himself a large drink. Something in the way that he picked up his glass reminded Paul of Joseph Herdman. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, evenly. “It’s not a doctrine, and it’s not the program of my party, but it’s what I believe and it’s the way I think we should all reorder our priorities. I think this world is lost—the world that this great city of ours and the myth of Australia represent.

  “We can’t save civilization in the way you want to save it, and your way has been hopeless ever since the last plague. You can’t see that, or won’t, because you hate and fear the jumpers so much that you’re thrown back on an exaggerated idea of their betrayal of all that you hold dear, instead of recognizing them for what they really are—the only genuine hope the human race has left.

  “This world is dying, Marcangelo. Literally dying. No bombs fell here, and the ground isn’t saturated with radioactives, nor did any of our manufactured plagues depopulate the city, because our immunization program was effective enough to stop any reservoir of infection building up. To you, that means we’ve escaped. It means that, like the Australians, we’re free of the blight which our fathers cast over the face of the world. But we’re not. The radi
oactives aren’t going to stay where the bombs fell, nor are the chemical poisons and the seeds of the plagues. They’re moving slowly, but they are moving, in the wind and in the rain.

  “You probably know better than I how many people fall ill year by year with radiation poisoning, how many babies die, what’s happening to the crops in the fields and the livestock on the farms. You know it, and you aren’t blind, but your only reaction is one of fear. The only way you know to fight is to dig in your heels, shut your eyes to the long-term implications and concentrate on what you imagine to be the problems of the moment. Like all politicians your vision extends only as far as the horizons of your own personal power. You worry about tomorrow and next year, but you can’t see that whatever you squeeze out of tomorrow and next year won’t matter at all in the long run, because insofar as tomorrow and next year are stepping stones to the next century or the next millennium it doesn’t matter a damn how much coal we produce, or how many cars we can keep on the road. Eventually, we’re all going to die, from slow exposure to radiation and to all the other evils we launched upon this world during the last century.

  “A hundred years ago, we opened Pandora’s box, and there’s no way that we can do what you want to do and put all the vicious things we let loose away again, or pretend that because they’re out of sight they’re no threat to us. All we’ve got left, believe me, is the one fluttering hope that’s still here in the box. That hope is a road to the future. Because we can move through time, we can escape the radiation. It’s a temporary problem—radioactives decay, and although the half-lives of some of the things we’ve made run into the thousands of years, the really dangerous ones are the ones that decay quickly. If we have to live out our lives in the presence of fallout at the levels that now afflict the Earth, we’re finished—as a nation, and as a species. We have to outrun the fallout.

  “The Earth itself will renew its life. The ecosystem might be badly injured, but it will recover. Eventually, the land will be reborn. It’s to the time of that rebirth that we really ought to look. It’s to that world that we must go for any conceivable future the human race has—and we can’t go as the natural tide of time would take us, because we’d never get there. We have to jump and skip through time.”

  “Isn’t that already happening?” asked Marcangelo. “If that’s all you want, then go—and leave the world to the ones who want to save it.”

  “No!” said Scapelhorn, angrily. “It’s not what’s already happening. What’s happening now is that the people who are trying to run the world the old way are doing everything in their power to discourage the jumpers. They make no provision for them at all—quite the reverse. When a jumper wakes up, if the Movement can’t reach him and nurse him through his period of disorientation, he’s grabbed by the police, treated like a criminal, told that he no longer has any property or any rights, told that he’s a traitor to the race and that his only chance to redeem himself is to become a slave to the social order. All possible moral and psychological pressure is brought to bear to force him into a slot carved out for him by the likes of you.

  “What we ought to do is organize the jumpers, encourage healthy people to jump, set up special stations from which they can jump and into which they can be received. The jumpers ought to be treated as they deserve—as the pioneers that might, in the fullness of time, become the parents of a new human race and the progenitors of a new human world.

  “This dying world should do what it can, now and tomorrow and even as it dies, to prepare the way for the jumpers, and to make sure that when the time comes that they jump into a world devoid of non-jumpers they can still fend for themselves, and keep going until they reach a world that has made itself once again a clean and healthy world, where they can start again. They won’t have cities or cars or factories but they’ll have human knowledge, and they’ll have humanity itself. Maybe they’ll just go on to repeat the whole sad story over again, but even that’s better than this stupid, desperate attempt to pad the old story out, and the refusal to admit that the cancer we’ve introduced into our world is terminal.

  “That’s what I believe. That’s the way I want to save the world. That’s why I stayed in your world when I jumped into it, instead of leaving as quickly as I could. That’s why I’m here right now. I’m too old to reach the future that we have to go to, but I’m not too old to prepare the way for the people who can—for Paul and for Rebecca. They’re young enough to see the world renewed and reborn, if only they avoid fools like you, who are determined to imprison them in this putrefying present that you’re trying to secure against inevitable corruption.”

  When Scapelhorn finally stopped speaking, there was a long pause. Marcangelo was browbeaten into silence, and for the moment he simply could not find the fuel for a reply. There was no way that he could match the embittered passion of the other man’s tirade.

  Finally, it was Scapelhorn himself who broke the silence. “Well,” he said to Paul, “what do you think of my Paulist doctrine?”

  “I’m not in a position to judge,” he said. “I’ve heard both sides of the issue, now, but I still haven’t seen anything at all of the world whose problems are being debated. The only one who can really judge is Rebecca.”

  Rebecca looked up, and said: “You asked me before what kind of thing I expected you to say. I couldn’t answer. But I think that if you’d said what Scapelhorn has said, it would have seemed right, to me. It’s a message I could accept.”

  “That’s not fair, Paul,” said Marcangelo. “Rebecca started with a bias in favor of all that—or at least a bias against me. She’s already a Movement sympathizer and a rebel against our cause. She’s not in a position to arbitrate. In a way, you’re in a better position than she is, because you come fresh into the situation.”

  “That’s not so,” replied Paul. “What’s at stake here isn’t a matter of political opinion but a judgment of fact. You believe that the world can be redeemed. Scapelhorn doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “No,” said Marcangelo. “I can’t accept that it’s that simple. The world can be saved if only we are prepared to put all our efforts into saving it. It’s only doomed if people think the way he does. You can’t ignore those ifs.”

  “If we let the ifs remain,” said Scapelhorn, “then it still remains a simple matter of facts. And the fact is that people do think the way I do. Not all of them, but enough. Would you dare to fight an election laying down your platform against mine?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t,” Marcangelo retorted. “Of course people resent what we’ve tried to do, and the ways we’ve been forced to use in doing it. Of course people will vote for pie in the sky and miracles if you offer it to them. They’ll vote for a crazy optimistic hope every time. But what you’re suggesting is absurd. Don’t you see that, without a viable society preserved to look after your temporal pilgrims, they couldn’t possibly survive? You talk about them fending for themselves if some kind of provision is made—how? You have a building full of jumpers, and every time one of them wakes up he just picks up the spade and goes into the field to dig up turnips? Or a bow and arrow to go and shoot a rabbit? Is that what you envisage? It’s stupid. And this stirring phrase about a world reborn—what does it actually mean? One of your waking jumpers goes out to dig his turnips and says—“My, my, the world’s reborn at last.” What does he do then? Sit down and wait for all the rest to wake up? He grows old and dies, waiting to pass on his good news to the next man, who grows old and dies...what you’re offering is nothing but dreams. It’s empty of any kind of sense. Can’t you see that? Paul, can’t you see that? This is one of your beloved metascientific speculations, designed to make people feel more comfortable in their existential predicaments. It isn’t real...it’s just a fantasy.”

  “I don’t pretend that it will be easy,” said Scapelhorn. “It’s probably a gamble at very long odds. But it’s the only hope we have. The only alternative—and that includes your program—is the extinction of the
species. And if your way prevails, perhaps that wouldn’t altogether be a bad thing.”

  Paul realized that both Scapelhorn and Marcangelo had turned once again to him, and that they seemed to be waiting for some kind of arbitration. At present, he did not feel capable of offering one. “I think,” he said, “that we have to get through the night first.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Wishart looked out over the city from the window of the Movement’s official headquarters. He was no longer in hiding. The window was on the tenth floor, and the people moving in the streets looked like ants panicked by the disruption of their hive. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their movements. Across the street the stores had been looted. Fires had been started in two of the smaller buildings, and were being fought—inadequately—by chains of men and buckets of water.

  Wishart did not feel unduly disturbed by the spectacle. Indeed, he felt supremely calm. For the time being, he was a spectator. Max Gray was out on the streets, trying to organize emergency services to supplement the overworked forces of the old system, in a panic-stricken attempt to save as much as possible for the Movement to inherit. Wishart didn’t see any necessity to get involved.

  He turned to the robot with the damaged legs, and said: “What’s your part in all this? What do you stand to gain?”

  “The world,” replied the machine. “In a sense.”

  “What good is it to you—to a machine?”

  “I am more than a machine. I am a mind—a personality. I have spent many years in deep space, utterly alone. In order to survive that, I have to suspend many of my faculties—the faculties you would think of as the higher faculties. Only in contact with other minds is there any meaning to my own mind. Only in association with other beings—living beings—can I be what I have the potential to be. It is a matter of self-actualization.”

  “You’re lonely—is that what you mean?”

  “Put crudely, yes.”