Critical Miss

[davywavy]

Rummaging around in the bottom of my hard drive* last night, I cme across a short story I wrote about 6-7 years ago. Overall, I'm not sure it's that good and the plot is quite signposted, but I thought I'd post it here and see what you lot thought of it.



“Is this seat taken?”
I looked up from my notebook and pushed my glasses further up my nose. Standing beside me, swaying slightly as the train pulled out of the station, was a tall young man. I nodded and he took the seat opposite. The journey from Washington to Albuquerque was a long one and often quite dull; a traveling companion would be most welcome, I thought.
As he sat, I took a longer look at him. He had a faintly Scandinavian look about him, with short, very fair hair, and wire-rimmed spectacles. He was dressed fairly smartly, but carried nothing more than a small holdall and a copy of that day’s Post. I smiled at him and returned to my notes for a moment.
“Traveling far?” He asked.
I looked up again. He had an unusual scar on his upper lip, which was made clearer by the sun shining onto his face as he leaned onto the table.
“Quite a way, I’m afraid. Halfway across the country, in fact. Yourself?”
He fluttered a smile at me. “The longest trip I’ve ever undertaken”, he smiled, with a trace of pride in his voice. I thought I understood the pride. A young man travelling far from home for the first time, grown up enough to be trusted away from mother and father for the first time. “I’m traveling on work,” he went on, “but I’m hoping to be headed home soon.”
“Where are you from?”
“A little place up in Montana. You’ll never have heard of it.”
“Must be nice.”
“It is, the air is clear and the water is fresh, which is more than can be said for most places these days.” The smile again.
“True,” I agreed, “but that’s progress.”
“Progress. Yep, it certainly is.”
We chatted for a few minutes, exchanging pleasantries mainly, before he leaned back and picked up his paper and began to leaf through it, and I returned to my notes. He seemed friendly enough. Polite, too, which is often a lot to hope for on these long journeys. Whilst he read, I found my glance occasionally inadvertently flicking to his scar and then looking away in the way the one does when faced with any sort of disfigurement. It wasn’t serious or pronounced, but it was the only mar on an otherwise perfect complexion. He obviously noted my gaze and looked back at me from his paper.
“I was born with a cleft lip”, he said. “The doctors managed to fix it up, but it’ll never be perfect. Apparently it runs in my family.” He said this with the air of someone expecting to be asked. It seemed that he sensed my embarrassment, because he tapped the front page of his newspaper (stories from the war in Europe) and changed the subject. “Still, it could be worse”, her said. “Those poor devils in England or Russia get it worse than me, every day.”
The cover story was of fierce fighting over England between British and German ‘planes. There were other stories; mainly scaremongering about Japanese intentions towards the Philippines and a few paragraphs about big German victories in Russia. I looked away. It wasn’t a subject that I cared to think about too much. Many of my friends were European, and as many as possible had fled years ago, leaving families and friends behind them to be caught up in the fighting – and according to some rumours I’d heard, worse.
“It kinda makes you think, doesn’t it?” He asked.
“What does?”
“If you could go back in time and shoot that Hitler before he ever started all of this, and save God knows how many lives, would you do it?”
This was nonsense, and I knew it. “You couldn’t. You can’t travel back in time; the laws of thermodynamics prevent it.”
He seized on this eagerly and leant forward, with a certain light in his eyes. “ I thought you looked an intelligent guy when I laid eyes upon you”, he said. “That’s why I asked if I could share your table. To tell the truth”, he went on, “I’ve been kinda playing about with this idea in my head, and I sort of wanted to chat to someone about it. Do you mind?”
I indicated that I didn’t, and took my glasses off. I’d taught in earlier years, and a man comes to recognize the look of a good student with a pet idea, and this young man had it now.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s say that you could travel in time.” He held up a hand, preventing me from speaking. “Now, I know what you’re going to say. You can’t. And I know a lot of the theories say the same. But let’s just say that you can. I know that Doctor Einstein has recently said that time is like a river – you can paddle to the bank and carry your boat back upstream if you like, and if you can work out how. So let’s say that his theory is right, and some of the others are wrong, okay? For sake of argument.”
I half nodded, reluctantly. I knew of that particular statement of Doctor Einstein, but I disagreed with it intensely. It went against everything I myself believed.
“So”, he continued. “You get in your time machine, and go back in time to just after Hitler was born. There he is, just a little pink baby, full of innocence. So you’re standing there, and you’ve got a gun or a knife or something. Now, knowing what he’s up to going to do, do you kill that innocent before he’s acted, knowing that you’ll save thousands- millions – later.”
I admit that I fairly recoiled from the thought, and I was shocked at the young man. The mental image of killing a baby, under any circumstances, wasn’t something that I felt comfortable with.
“Certainly not”, I replied.
“Why not?”
“”Because to kill an innocent, no matter who they might happen to grow up into, is abhorrent to any civilized man”, I replied, as firmly as I could.
“They’re doing it over there in Europe”, he waved his hand at his paper again. “There are stories of Nazis in Russia rounding up entire towns and killing them – every man, woman and child. They’re got their smart uniforms and their tanks and all the trappings of civilization. So what is the difference?”
“War is a breakdown in civilization. When we’re at war, it means that whatever goes to make us civilized has failed. You can dress up how you like, but when it comes down to it, you can’t claim to be civilized.”
“But sir, consider. Since the dawn of man, there has never been a time when, somewhere in the world, there hasn’t been a war going on. By your definition, you can’t call humanity civilized at all, because we’ve always been fighting each other. All we’ve managed to do it get better at it, adding science to our methods of killing one another.”
“I’m afraid I don’t really see your point.”
“My point is, sir, that we’re not civilized at all, not by your definition anyway. Rather than fighting a war, the best we can do is try and keep down the number of people – innocent people - who get killed.”
“And so you say that the way to do that would be to go back in time and kill Hitler?”
“If you could, would you?”
“No.”
“But why not?”
“Because I, myself, find the idea of killing a baby abhorrent.”
He paused, and moistened his lips. He obviously had thought very seriously about his moral question, and was surprised by the fact that I disagreed with him.
“Oh-kay”, he said. “So you couldn’t kill the kid. But you’ll agree that some of the things those Nazis are doing are just as bad – evil, you’d call it, I guess, and on a grand scale?”
“Yes, I’d say that.”
“And if someone could stop it, then they should.”
“I’d say yes – but not by murdering an innocent to do it. If you did that, you’d make yourself just as bad as them.”
“Fine, I can accept that. What if you could go back to when Hitler was a boy – a young man, maybe? Did you now that he fought in the last war? If you could go back and, say, divert a bullet so it caught him…would that be okay?”
I paused, and thought for a moment or two. “It’s a moral problem, isn’t it? If you’re at war with someone, your veneer of civilization has broken down, and so by shooting at an enemy soldier, you’re justified by context – he’s trying to kill you there and then, or he would be if he could, and so you could almost say you’re acting in self defense if you’re an ordinary soldier. If you’re an officer ordering bombs dropped on an enemy town, they’re still defined as an enemy in context. So you can claim to be justified. But what you’re saying is almost like having a godlike power – nipping back out of time, where you’ll never be caught yourself and shooting someone who has never harmed you, is innocent of any crime against you, is still murder, colour it how you will.”
He leaned back in his seat and looked out of the window for a moment or two. “Jeez, you’re hard, you know?” He smiled. “I’m coming from the proposition that the ends you need justify the means you use. I’d say that if you could save a million lives by ending one, you’d be justified. What’s wrong in that?”
“A matter of personal morality. By ending that one, you’d still be a murderer.”
“Yeah, I kinda see where you’re coming from. Just because they’re a murderer, it doesn’t give you any right to be one?”
“No, not necessarily. We have the death penalty, and rightly so. I think that I come from a more liberal tradition than you, perhaps.” He gave a particularly rueful smile at this. I continued. “I think the matter of it is the act of deciding to take action. The murderer who the court has sentenced to death has decided to be a murderer; if the courts went about ordering people to be put to death before they’d decided to go about killing people, why, they’d be just as much a murderer themselves.”
He appeared almost relieved at this. “So…” he said, slowly. “Lets get this straight. What you’re saying is that…if you could go back in time to the point where Hitler had decided to put his ideas into place. He’d got his army lined up on the borders, they were all primed and ready to go and slaughter at his word…if he gave the order, all that death and destruction was inevitable…under those circumstances, you’d be prepared to accept your killing him to save millions as justifiable?”
“The Christian St. Paul postulated the idea of original sin…”I said, “so I suppose on that basis you could say that someone who has decided to commit a crime is in some ways guilty.”
“Jeez, doc” he said to me. “I thought you’d never agree with me.” And with that, he took out a gun from his holdall and shot me.

I was lucky, rather than anything else. There was a couple seated at the table across the aisle, and the woman saw the gun immediately, and screamed. The man she was with threw his glass at the youth opposite me, hitting on the side of the head, throwing off his aim and resulting in the bullet digging into the woodwork around the window. By the time he’d recovered, the man had stood and pinned the hand holding the gun to the table. A short while later, it was all over. The young man was restrained by several passengers, his hands were bound with someone’s necktie and the train guard locked him into an empty sleeper compartment until the next town. The kid didn’t resist at all during this, but just looked at me with an expression of pity, like you’d look at a sick dog or cat. They checked his pockets and he wasn’t carrying any papers, or even a ticket, and so the guard wired ahead from the train, and said there’d were police waiting for us. I bought the man who’d thrown the glass a drink – he had just saved my life, after all - and tried to explain the conversation I’d been having.
“Sounds to me like you were damn lucky.”
“Mainly that you were there. I’d never seen the lad before in my life ,and he seemed pleasant and smart – a good companion for a long trip.”
“Well, Mary-Beth and I, we don’t make much of a practice of talking to strangers on trains. Never know who you’re gonna meet. Where’re you bound for, anyway?”
“New Mexico. I’ve got a job with the Air Force down there.”
“Yeah? Swell! Nice to meet you, mister…?”
“Doctor”, I replied. I handed him my business card and he read it and nodded.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Oppenheimer.”


^{* And not rummaging around in my bottom. That was a long time ago, when I was young and needed the money.}

Comments

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Ooooh...I like this. Lots.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Really? Re-reading it I thought it was obvious what was going on, but that's the peril of having written it I suppose.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I guessed what was happening part way through, but still enjoyed reading it.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Cool; I ought to write more - I never seem to get the time to do as much tese days.

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

I had an inkling, but its entertaining anyhow!

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Not all my stories are about Monty.

Just the funny ones.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I half-guessed the punchline, but still enjoyed it. Nice bit of writing.

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

wow - brilliant - I only guessed it would be something like that about three or four lines before the end.

The key part was making it a first person story. People put themselves in the story and only adjust the mechanics based on context.

For instance, until told otherwise I imagined that this is a contemporary story about yourself and that it was taking place in London.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Blimey, I thought it was obvious what was going on. But then again, that's like John putting an entirely obscure clue in as to where the adventure was going, and then saying "Will you lot stop fannying about and do the adventure?".
It's always obvious when you wrote it.

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

That reminds me, who's running next?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Thank'ee kindly.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Davids should stick together, to make the world a more daviddy place.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

I really liked it. I guessed the concept about halfway through, but was curious to see who was in the firing line so to speak, so it didn't lose any of the pleasure of reading it.

Very cool.:)