The Evidence

LEE HARDING

The degree to which a human being is responsible for his actions is a key factor in modern philosophical thinking, and it is this question which Lee Harding examines in this story. His analysis is, however, neither specific nor glib. The reader is encouraged to discover for himself who the central character is, and in what his relevance to the situation lies. Lee Harding’s considerable reputation in overseas science fiction circles stems directly from his ability, rare in the field, to deal with complex philosophical and metaphysical distinctions with clarity and directness, and to generalize about them without melodrama or sermonizing.

A professional photographer in his late twenties, Lee Harding is probably Australia’s best-known writer of science fiction, though his reputation rests on only a handful of stories and novelettes. He hopes, however, to complete his first novel some time in the next year. As well as writing sf, Harding contributes to Australian Science Fiction Review, which he was instrumental in establishing.

This story has not previously been published in this form.

He is the One Who Watches.

I have seen him many times. Standing idly upon a street corner unconcerned with the flow of pedestrians about him, or insidious within a darkened doorway, a vague figure like crumpled newspapers. And at night I have seen him below my window, barely visible in the half-light beyond the street lamp, merging mysteriously with the monotonous monochrome of night. Everywhere I go I feel the cold appraisal of his dispassionate eyes and I have often wondered if they see through this clumsy subterfuge of human flesh and study the corruptible region of the soul.

Why does he haunt my days when his form belongs to the comfortable ambiguity of nightmare?

It is difficult to recall a time when my movements have not been subjected to his silent scrutiny. He may have been there all my life, unobserved until now when the intensity of his watchfulness has intruded upon my thoughts, content to have been but a hazy shadow hovering around the fringes of my world.

But surely there must have been a first time, a moment from out of the wreckage of my past when I first noticed his intrusion into my life? But it is useless to try to remember. Fear has soaked up what remains of my sanity like a ragged piece of blotting paper, and it has become increasingly difficult to recall even the most prosaic details of my day-to-day existence.

One cannot ignore him. God knows I’ve tried! If only he would move, or say something, perhaps even smile. Then I would know that he is a fellow traveller in this confused continuum. But never once has an expression passed between us, no thought has ever disturbed the smooth pattern of his vigil. More and more I am forced to think of him as one … apart.

If only he would cease this maddening silence and walk up to me, address me as an equal! Do anything other than this wordless surveillance. But it is useless to expect miracles. He is much too concerned with his task to scatter some crumb of human kindness.

Consider this: your life passes from day to day in a pattern of ordered chaos you manage to make sense out of. Minor details vary but the routine is essentially the same from one day to the next. And then you realize that you are being watched.

At first you are not really terrified—that comes later. You have learned to live with Security and while you may feel uneasy you know that there is no cause for alarm. Your File is clean. But on the other hand …

One never can be really sure of what is going on at any given time. Yesterday’s good deed so easily becomes tomorrow’s crime. Such is the climate of our world.

So you begin to worry. You pay more attention to your Watcher. Details become important. A picture begins to take shape:

Of a small, dark-complexioned man in a long, grey overcoat and a sallow, expressionless face with very bright eyes, staring like an over-fast lens on a Japanese press camera. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this man. His face has been sculpted from the same general anonymity as those around him. It is the nature of his work that puts him apart: he watches. Only me. Never anyone else, that I can see.

Oh, but it is all so wretched!

Can it be Security? It hardly seems so—they would never be so obvious. This character looks like somebody dredged out of one of those old B-movies. Except for his eyes. Except for … his eyes.

In restaurants, he is always at a corner table, discreetly taking notes.

In the mornings he may be glimpsed at any intersection. He may be the pedestrian I invariably and narrowly miss knocking over when I am hurrying home in the evening.

I have even seen him lurking amongst the floodlit gardens when I have looked down from the towering Presidential chambers in the long hours of the night.

He manages to be everywhere I am, and this in itself is puzzling, for there cannot be many people with a Clearance allowing such freedom. Not even the President himself moves half so freely.

If not from Security then, from where!

There seems to be no logical explanation. And so I am under siege to an emotionless statue, a mindless automaton who never moves or speaks or smiles or utters my name or waves a hand in friendship.

I discard the thought of Analysis. My position is difficult. Word of my consultation might eventually creep through to the President or one of his aides, and I fear for the pressure that would be brought to bear upon those already weary shoulders.

But there was a choice: if I could not discover the reason for this stranger’s thoughtless vigil then I must accept him. Or rather, ignore him. Go about my life as if he did not exist. Pay no attention to his observation, pretend that he was only a figment of an overworked and overburdened mind, a phantasm thrown up from out of the dross of consciousness by the great and unseen tides sweeping across the face of the earth.

Either accept him, and ignore him, or go mad. There did not seem to be any alternative, and with this decision a great load seemed to lift from my mind.

I no longer worried at the true nature of his surveillance. I went about my work and tried to pretend that he was not there, that my life was safe from his burning eyes and that what I did was no concern of his and that somewhere there was a reason for all this and, most important of all, that my File was clean. There was no smirch to be found.

And for a while all was well again. But have you ever tried to ignore someone who seems to know you more intimately than you have ever known yourself?

Why do I feel myself drowning in a mirror whenever I look at him? And why should I fear something without a voice?

Wild grew my fancies. I imagined myself the victim of an elaborate and subtle attempt to discredit me in the eyes of the President and the Unoccupied World. A deliberate illusion was being foisted upon my mind for the purpose of reducing me to a gibbering lunatic.

Oh, devious and cruel are the ways of the Enemy!

A sop, then, to my tormented psyche. A week, perhaps two, of relative calm, of cocking a mental snook at my Watcher, of thinking again of the future.

A reprieve, but not, alas, a remedy. The seeds of madness have been sown, and I find that rational thinking becomes difficult. Perhaps not the Enemy at all. Some insidious rivalry within the Party?

Ah, the difficulty of living under the Games. Each day it becomes more difficult to define one’s adversaries.

Gradually my world darkened. It became a succession of nights and days devoid of character, numb exteriors while my mind wrestled with figures too proud to be ploughed under. Whatever my infernal Watcher thinks my work must go on because I … I am important because of my work and only because of that. It is the measure of an Age. And I will not.,. I would not… be distracted from my purpose. The President waited upon my report. The Conference would take place—

When?

Thursday the tenth. In two days time. My report would have to be ready. Oh God, give me time … time …

On the morning of the conference, I saw him again.

The occasion was as unspectacular as always. I have stopped at a pavement cafe for some hot chocolate before going on to the Presidential centre. The air is quite chill and I have need of a bracing drink before I go on.

I find him standing a little farther down the counter. For once his eyes are averted. They are focused upon a little black notebook on the counter where one white hand writes industriously.

My hand shakes as I accept the warm carton of chocolate and I continue watching him from out of the corner of my eye, feeling the cold beads of sweat bring painful stigmata to my flesh and my breath quicken.

I take a warm mouthful of the liquid. It is warm but … tasteless. He does not look up. I wonder to what task he now so studiously applies himself. With his cold eyes averted he does not seem half so fearful, and this makes my curiosity impetuous: I must know what it is he writes!

Only then does he look up. And into my own astonished eyes. And an icy wind scours my mind. The chocolate spills from my hand and there comes a sound from a million miles away as the plastic container bounces upon the sidewalk. Everything is swept away to another corner of the universe and we are locked together, this stranger and I, in our own private hell.

And still he does not speak. But stares. And says nothing.

We stare at each other, realities locked together. The universe has screamed to a stop and the fate of all time seems to hang upon those terse notes of his.

What are they?

He does not answer. He does not seem to care. Like a mindless machine programmed only to stare. And to record.

My fear became fury and I stepped forward and I reached out a hand and I tore that notebook from him.

The pages were covered with ridiculous shorthand or the inane scribblings of an idiot.

Incomprehensible.

Damn you!

I threw the book away, made a gift of it to the howling wind. All of my wrath, all of my indignation, all of my despair I turned upon my Watcher.

Only to find him no longer there. Only a void where he had been. No sign of him anywhere along the awakened street.

I searched frantically for the discarded notebook.

Unsuccessfully.

The Conference was underground, deep in the Party’s stronghold. The press galleries were bare. This secrecy would not be faulted. Great deeds might be done this day, but none would know save those who had need to know, and that, too, was the measure of an Age.

With the bare walls’ mute witness some semblance of sanity returned to my life. I pushed the earlier confrontation aside and tried to concentrate on my report. It was the nature of my work to be lucid and concise. No shilly-shallying. No siree.

But the hours dragged by and I sat there with my briefcase full of death and waited for my turn. The faces of the learned men around me were devoted and intense, and it would be some time before they left this Chamber of Horrors.

Strange, that I had never before considered it so.

So I sat there, trying to hang onto some vestige of sanity while my mind wandered fitfully in the half-light of nightmare. During a short break in the proceedings the President remarked, casually, that I looked rather pale. I made an excuse of migraine and fell to studying papers.

When I was finally called upon to table my report it was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to stand up and arrange my thoughts in some sort of order. The papers in my hands seemed suddenly meaningless, and I did not know why this should be so.

The room swam dizzily out of focus a number of times, but I doggedly pressed on. Each sentence seemed to weigh several tons, drawn from my lips by the greatest effort I had ever known.

Slowly the figures tumbled down upon the ears of those present.

The destructive potential of the anti-matter bombs. Our narrow margin of development. The rapid deterioration of the African Federation and the Russian Free States. The growing insolvency of Latin America. Despair. Trade barriers. The decision. The caves, deep, deep in the mountains—for the Few. Percentages of survival. Estimated loss in mega-millions. Cultural loss: incalculable. Best to forget that. Wisest course.

Yes, said the President, nodding. We must begin anew. Start Afresh.

Concurring. Concurring. Concurring. A great undercurrent of genocide sweeping the silent room.

There was more to come, but there was nothing more to be said, for in that blighted moment I saw him.

Overhead, in the distance, in the long empty arcs of the press gallery, a solitary figure was industriously taking notes.

My Watcher.

An exclamation escaped before I could prevent it, and I stood there open-mouthed like a fish gasping at the air. My legs collapsed and I fell back into my seat. The chamber reeled around me, and for a moment I could not see.

They were soon around me, soothing, consoling, some even concerned.

It is nothing, I said. Nothing at all. Just… migraine.

I did not care if they believed. I allowed the Vice-President to help me to my feet and leaned heavily upon his shoulder as he helped me out of the room and down to the Dispensary.

At the doorway I looked around but saw no sign of my Watcher. He had vanished to whatever secluded portion of the world contained his idle moments, and of late it had seemed there were precious few of those.

He had become my constant companion.

I collapsed on the way down the corridor and they had to carry me the rest of the way to the Dispensary, where they pumped me full of sedatives and called for a chauffeur to take me home to rest for a few hours.

Where I could only wait.

There was nothing more to be done. My paper was finished and had been presented. Other minds than mine must now apply themselves to the decisions to be made.

A great peace descended over me. For the first time in many long months— or had it been years?—I knew what it was like to rest and to lie in bed and watch the daylight fade from the bald sky and feel the cool of the evening presage change. And see the lights come on one by one and know that there was peace at last in the comfort of the night.

They came for me in the early hours of the morning, as I had always known they would. Came like officious public servants but without any insolence. It seemed, then, that I had been expecting them all my life, and I greeted them with relief.

There were three of them and they were kind and considerate as they helped me out of bed and into my uniform. They had remembered my rank if not my calling, and they stood around patiently while I made my toilet and shaved and brushed my hair.

Three young men in grey dustcoats with an air of urgency, well-tempered by politeness.

I nodded that I was ready, and the senior of the group motioned me out of the room. The other two fell into step behind us.

It did not seem out of place to step out into a great long corridor nor to walk in silence for many, many miles before we came to another door. We walked in silence with the walls bare and bright and uncommitted.

The senior attendant opened the door and helped me through. The room on the other side was bare except for a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet. And a door on the other side.

I was led over to the desk where an equally officious young woman asked me my name.

I told her.

Without hesitation.

Occupation?

Tactical Advisor.

In what capacity?

The application of Games Theory to thermo-nuclear and allied warfare.

She looked up. Only the suggestion of an emotion sparked her dispassionate eyes.

Oh. We’ve been waiting for you.

She pressed a rubber stamp down against a slotted card that bore my name and dropped it into a chute. There was an air of finality in the movement.

She nodded, and waved me towards the other door.

My escorts had disappeared, but even as I temporized the door opened and another grey-coated official motioned me forward.

Into a vast auditorium. So huge that my mind reeled at the distances involved. The galleries disappeared into a blur of light beyond which nothing further could be seen.

This way.

The official led me to a narrow gateway in a shoulder-high railing and motioned me through and closed it again behind me. I took up my position calmly, feeling no sense of crush, being part of the great crowd of people arranged together in this vast dock.

Towards the centre of the auditorium three figures sat before a long, low table.

Only for a moment did I allow my attention to wander to the people close by, all staring steadily ahead without purpose, as though the awkward engines of their lives had been stilled for some great occasion.

I saw many familiar faces and that made sense. We were all of us here today, or whatever time existed in this strange place, and were all arraigned here for the same purpose.

I looked back to the centre of the room in time to see a familiar figure in a long grey coat deposit a small black notebook down upon the long table. It took up a position with an incalculable number of identical black tomes, and the three faces nodded, carefully, and a hushed air descended upon the auditorium.

As my Watcher walked to take up his position among the long rows of similarly clad officials, all with the same dispassionate eyes and uncommitted stares, I leaned forward through the railing and grabbed his arm.

He swung around to face me. And for the first time I seemed to detect some powerful emotion quivering in his eyes. But I did not recognize it.

What’s in it? I asked. What’s in the book?

Why, he answered, the evidence, of course.

And turned aside to join his fellows.

I turned around and faced the three figures at the table and the great golden light that had suddenly grown up around them.

Only then did I understand the nature of the court now in session, and who were the accused.

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